Synopses & Reviews
When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that, in the wake of the decade of the brain and the bestselling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.
Review
"This is surely a new paradigm for the study of history that will be regarded as revolutionary but which is also well justified. To my knowledge, no other book integrates the study of human history with principles of biological and cultural evolution on such an ambitious scale." David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Toward Reunion in History
1. The Grip of Sacred History
2. Resistance
3. Between Darwin and Lamarck
4. The New Neurohistory
5. Civilization and Psychotropy
Epilogue: Looking Ahead
Notes
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index