What We Talk About When We Talk About Prehistory

Since 2011, the at-home DNA testing company 23andMe has invited its users to “celebrate your ancient DNA” with its Neanderthal report, which tells users whether their prehistoric genes predispose them to certain behaviors, like hoarding or not getting hangry. In the 1880s, Neanderthals were not being celebrated at all—they were depicted as little more than troglodytes with tools—and the 1980s weren’t much better: rough hair, swarthy skin, dull eyes, jutting foreheads … an evolutionary dead end. Today, armed with recently decoded Neanderthal DNA, researchers are reconstructing these archaic people as lighter-skinned, blue-eyed, and blond. For historian Stefanos Geroulanos, however, this new account raises difficult 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?” Questions like these form the heart of his book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, which has just won Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award. Geroulanos contends that our claims about the deep past—whether made in 1726 or 2026—tell us more about the moment we propose them than anything else.

Go beyond the episode:

• Stefanous Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
• Listen to Geroulanos in conversation at the Phi Beta Kappa 2025 Book Awards
• Reconstructed ancient languages like Proto-Indo-European have been similarly weaponized for political ends, as Laura Spinney describes on an earlier episode
• And our understanding of the more recent past—like Viking history, similarly prone—has been challenged by recent archaeological discoveries too, as Eleanor Barraclough explains in Embers of the Hands

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