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Humans have always been interested in their origins, but historians have been reluctant to write about the long stretches of time before the invention of writing. In fact, the deep past was left out of most historical writing almost as soon as it was discovered. This breakthrough book, as important for readers interested in the present as in the past,brings science into history to offer a dazzling new vision of humanity across time. Team-written by leading experts in a variety of fields, it maps events, cultures, and eras across millions of years to present a new scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and more. Combining cutting-edge social and evolutionary theory with the latest discoveries about human genes, brains, and material culture, Deep History invites scholars and general readers alike to explore the dynamic of connectedness that spans all of human history.
List of Figures
Preface
A Note on Dates
PART ONE. PROBLEMS AND ORIENTATIONS
1. Introduction
Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail
2. Imagining the Human in Deep Time
Andrew Shryock, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Clive Gamble
PART TWO. FRAMES FOR HISTORY IN DEEP TIME
3. Body
Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shryock
4. Energy and Ecosystems
Mary C. Stiner and Gillian Feeley-Harnik
5. Language
April McMahon, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Andrew Shryock
PART THREE. SHARED SUBSTANCE
6. Food
Felipe Fernández-Armesto with Daniel Lord Smail
7. Deep Kinship
Thomas R. Trautmann, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, and John C. Mitani
PART FOUR. HUMAN EXPANSION
8. Migration
Timothy Earle and Clive Gamble with Hendrik Poinar
9. Goods
Daniel Lord Smail, Mary C. Stiner, and Timothy Earle
10. Scale
Mary C. Stiner, Timothy Earle, Daniel Lord Smail, and Andrew Shryock
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Andrew Shryock is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (UC Press) winner of the Middle Eastern Studies Association's Albert Hourani Award, among other books.
Daniel Lord Smail is Professor of History at Harvard University. Among his books is On Deep History and the Brain (UC Press) a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology.
"The goal of this project is to question old narrative elements of human evolution and discuss new ones [...] In practice, this means the book is about some of the cleverest people in the field having fun with ideas."
– John Robb, Current Anthropology
"A different kind of historical writing [...] it offers general readers a thought-provoking approach to language, the brain, genes, exchange and other human faculties."
– Wendy Iraheta, San Francisco Book Review
"The chapters are perceptive [...] in their arguments [...] Something that is long overdue."
– Journal Of Interdisciplinary History
"Recommended."
– L. L. Johnson, Choice
"Deep History is a volume of great significance, bringing fresh insight, focus, and shape to our understanding of the dynamic connectedness that spans the entirety of human history [...] . The calibre of contributors is exceptional and Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail should be congratulated for assembling the line-up whilst also fostering the volume's collaborative character."
– JRAI
"It is impossible in a short review to give more than a hint of the riches to be found in this groundbreaking book. In battering down the walls between history and prehistory, it invites scientists and humanists to join in a common endeavor. By envisioning nothing less than a complete account of the human experience, it stakes out a new frontier for historical consciousness that is as welcome as it is timely."
– American Historical Review
"An impressive – at times dazzling – array of data, summaries of literature, and conceptual elements, clearly pooling the specialized knowledges of the various contributors [...] This is a rich tour of a vast terrain."
– Science & Society
"Ranging across the disciplines, this truly collaborative team cuts through the constraints of our previous notions of historical understanding and points towards a fundamental new way of thinking about history."
– Lynn Hunt, author of Measuring Time, Making History
"In recent decades, history as a discipline has increasingly portrayed humans as an exception in the story of life, as though all other life-forms were part of nature but humans somehow were not, or not quite. This book issues a profound and timely challenge to that implicit assumption and argues for an integration of deep and recorded human pasts. The challenge is profound, because it is at once methodological and philosophical, and it is timely in the way it resonates with concerns about our growing ecological footprint on the planet. This collaborative enterprise will appeal to students of human pasts in a variety of disciplines."
– Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
"Leading scholars in deep history have been brought together from a variety of disciplines in this ambitious project. The result is constantly exciting. I read barely a page that didn't cause me to reconsider how we might tell the human story."
– Martin Jones, University of Cambridge
"In Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, a multi-disciplinary team of historians, archeologists, paleontologists, primatologists, and anthropologists takes up the challenge of incorporating the past six million or so years into the record of human history. Combining open minds with scholarly rigor, the authors use linguistics and genetics, trails of bones, shells and crafted objects, dietary traditions, and kinship rules to follow our footloose species out of Africa and around the globe, along the way dismantling barriers between disciplines that have outlived their usefulness."
– Sarah B. Hrdy, author of Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection
