Remember, the story of Christianity’s rise takes a long time, from Jesus’s lifetime to the emperor Constantine’s conversion, three centuries. The traditional way to think about it is to imagine fervent Christians adding to their number, each generation larger than the last, carrying a pristine Christian message to the world. On that model, when the last Roman citizen was baptized, everyone had become what the earliest Christians had been. The world doesn’t work that way. Whatever core ideas Christianity sought to transmit, every baptism brought someone unshaped by Christianity into the fold, mixing their ideas and expectations with what they found. The pristine essence of Christianity acquired a lot of old-fashioned baggage along the way. When Christians talked about their pure and unique gift of illumination for a dark world, who really needed to be persuaded?
The storytelling is itself important. For us, religion comes with history, and history matters. No classical Greek or Roman writer ever thought to address the history of religion, because religion was woven seamlessly into everyday life, the kind of life that has no history to speak of. Our modern historians can make history for everything, to be sure,5 but when they reconstruct a story for Greco-Roman religion, they tell a story the ancients didn’t themselves know. And when they do so, they are in cahoots with the story-making Christians of the fourth century. (Pg.4) “Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity” by James J. O’Donnell.
It is not self-evident that humanity has a past, known or unknown. —PAUL VEYNE,
DID THE GREEKS BELIEVE IN THEIR MYTHS? (Pg.1)
When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, Neanderthals were hulking creatures, evolutionary failures, savage beasts just a step above the gorilla. Illustrations in books showed that their dark skin was rough, like a hide covered in scraggly hair; their foreheads were aggressive, their eyes not so bright. Our teachers walked us through typical Neanderthal scenes: the terrible cold of the glaciers, the hunched efforts to hunt, the fires they must have built, their manifest inferiority compared to the Homo sapiens arriving in Europe. The stories all converged at an evolutionary dead end. Neanderthals were harsh, disappointing. Few—certainly not me—recognized that this imagery was really a set of claims about how to think about intelligence, beauty, and race.
Today, just thirty years later, the Neanderthal has changed. In newer life-size reconstructions, Neanderthal families figure as pensive-looking redheads and even blonds, blue-eyed, light-skinned, often with tools in hand and dressed in hides. We say less about the jutting forehead and more about the Neanderthal’s brain cavity being larger than that of Homo sapiens. Their dull gaze is gone. A few scientists even consider them the creators of the earliest paleolithic art.
This seems to represent progress, at least in historical and genetic accuracy. Once more, the current image is declared true. But the new, more optimistic account of Neanderthals leads to hard questions. Are Neanderthals now smart because they are no longer depicted as dark-skinned? Or, conversely, have they become blond and white because they are now believed to have been smart, able, quintessentially human? Don’t they resemble just a bit too closely those who study their fossils at sites in Europe? One theory about their extinction around 40,000 years ago proposes that the two species mated and sapiens “genetically swamped” Neanderthals. Another, that sapiens conveyed diseases to which Neanderthals had no resistance. Yet another, that the (African) sapiens swept in and raped and slaughtered the (European) Neanderthals. This last notion finds adherents on the political Far Right today, for whom Neanderthals sometimes figure in grotesque “white genocide” and “great replacement” claims. In such schemes, Neanderthals are the original white Europeans, who suffered after stupidly welcoming African migrants.
The Neanderthals themselves say nothing. We arrange them into whatever position we need them to take. (Pg.2)
Human origins are not mere abstractions. Nor are they simple prompts for thought experiments and pure scientific inquiry. Promises and violence have regularly been unleashed in their name. Theories of our past have shaped history and the world we live in today. That, at least, is the contention of this book. (Pg.2)
The story of human origins tells us who we are, how we came to dominate this planet and each other, how we invented religion and then discarded it in favor of the gods of progress and technology. (Pg.3)
The newer theories are sometimes as wild as ones from decades, even centuries, ago. Some popular ideas speak of caveman strength and paleo diets: you too can be Neander-Thin! (Pg.5)
Behind all of these questions, though, looms another that we ponder much less frequently: Why do we need to understand human origins? The answer is that the story of human origins has never really been about the past. It has never really been concerned with an exact, precise depiction of humanity’s emergence out of nature. Prehistory is about the present day; it always has been. Over the 250 or so years that human origins have been pursued, studied, and taught, the countless stories and theories proposed have said a lot more about the current moment than the distant past. That past does not exist independently, suspended in amber, waiting for us. It doesn’t simply get sharper, like an image coming slowly into focus. Rather, every natural philosopher and, later, scientist who has sought to “breathe life into the past” exhales with their own lungs.3 Every time we find old bones, we dream up a primal scene and flesh it out with details from our own time.
Now, much the same could be said about any historical claims. But the deep past so exceeds our grasp, and at the same time it matters so much to “who we are,” that the normal protections historians employ against “presentism”—like the rejection of the notion that presentism is a bad thing, or that it is avoidable—just aren’t germane. Unlike, say, the history of the First World War, prehistory is often more a narcissistic fantasy than a field of inquiry. Its study is always contemporary at the same time that it is pre-modern, even pre-antique. After all, religion offered the first origin stories. (Pg.16) “The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins” by Stefanos Geroulanos.
“Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity” by James J. O’Donnell. https://a.co/8JW92gg
“The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins” by Stefanos Geroulanos. https://a.co/8fJZgMM
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc.
Travel in Life 