Deep history
Deep history is a term for the distant past of the human species, "stretching back 50,000, 500,000, even 2.6 million years to the earliest humans."[1] Proponents of deep history generally do not acknowledge the traditional barrier between conventional history, generally based on written documentation such as ancient scrolls or hieroglyphs on pyramids, and unwritten prehistory in the human past.[2] As an intellectual discipline, Deep history encourages scholars in anthropology, archaeology, primatology, genetics and linguistics to work together to write a common narrative about the beginnings of humans.[1]
Description
Proponents[3] of deep history argue for a definition of history that rests not upon the invention of writing, but upon the evolution of anatomically modern humans. The concept of prehistory is thus recast as an arbitrary boundary that limits the longue durée perspective of historians, and which rests upon outmoded assumptions that history follows a teleological path beginning with the origins of civilization in Ancient Mesopotamia.[4] For example, Smail suggests that advances in disciplines such as neurobiology and neurophysiology and genetics mean that there are more possibilities for understanding the distant past, and offer opportunities to explain how events such as biological evolution, global environmental change, and patterns of the spread of disease have affected humanity today.[5]
See also
Further reading
- Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. By Nicholas Wade.
- On Deep History and the Brain. By Daniel Lord Smail.
- Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Edited by Andrew Shryock, Daniel Lord Smail.
- Deep History: A Study of Social Evolution And Human Potential. By David Laibma.
- The Family:A World History. By Mary Jo Maynes, Ann Waltner.
- The Planet in a Pebble:A journey into Earth's deep history. By Jan Zalasiewicz.
- A Common Human Ground: Universality and Particularity in a Multicultural World. By Claes G. Ryn.
References
- 1 2 PATRICIA COHEN, September 26, 2011, The New York Times, History That’s Written in Beads as Well as in Words, Accessed January 16, 2016
- ↑ Guldi, Armitage, Jo, David (2014). The History Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 86. ISBN 978-1-107-43243-7.
- ↑ Harvard history professor Daniel Lord Smail is perhaps the most prominent advocate of deep history.
- ↑ Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008
- ↑ Stephen T Casper (reviewer); Med Hist. 2009 Apr; 53(2): 318–319; PMCID: PMC2668893; Book Reviews -- On deep history and the brain; Review of book by: Daniel Lord Smail, On deep history and the brain published by Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 2008, pp. xiv, 271, 978-0-520-25289-9, Accessed January 16, 2016