
The Invention of Prehistory
Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
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Narrated by:
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Elizabeth Wiley
About this listen
Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.
The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the "state of nature" and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires.
©2024 Stefanos Geroulanos (P)2024 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: what does it mean to be human? What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.
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Excellent science tale
- By Neuron on 01-19-15
By: Svante Pääbo
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The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World
- By: Robert Garland, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Robert Garland
- Length: 24 hrs and 28 mins
- Original Recording
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Look beyond the abstract dates and figures, kings and queens, and battles and wars that make up so many historical accounts. Over the course of 48 richly detailed lectures, Professor Garland covers the breadth and depth of human history from the perspective of the so-called ordinary people, from its earliest beginnings through the Middle Ages.
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Tantalizing time trip
- By Mark on 08-21-13
By: Robert Garland, and others
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Proto
- How One Ancient Language Went Global
- By: Laura Spinney
- Narrated by: Emma Spurgin-Hussey
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Daughter. Duhitár-. Dustr. Dukte. Listen to these English, Sanskrit, Armenian and Lithuanian words, all meaning the same thing, and you hear echoes of one of history’s most unlikely journeys. All four languages—along with hundreds of others, from French and Gaelic, to Persian and Polish—trace their origins to an ancient tongue spoken as the last ice age receded. This language, which we call Proto-Indo-European, was born between Europe and Asia and exploded out of its cradle, fragmenting as it spread east and west.
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Brilliant research and narration
- By Dr. Krishnendu Ray on 05-16-25
By: Laura Spinney
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An Emancipation of the Mind
- Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America
- By: Matthew Stewart
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders' oligarchy in the Civil War.
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“The arc of the moral universe is long…”
- By Susan on 03-07-25
By: Matthew Stewart
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The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .
- Essays
- By: David Graeber, Nika Dubrovsky - editor
- Narrated by: Jacques Servin, Savitri D
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes.
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An important read
- By zoia krioukova on 01-28-25
By: David Graeber, and others
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Weavers, Scribes, and Kings
- A New History of the Ancient Near East
- By: Amanda H. Podany
- Narrated by: Amanda H. Podany
- Length: 18 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes listeners on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived.
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word of advice
- By Jim Davis on 08-04-23
By: Amanda H. Podany
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Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood
- The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade
- By: Anthony Kaldellis
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. Yet this imperial project came to a crashing collapse fifty years later, when political disunity, fiscal mismanagement, and defeat at the hands of the Seljuks and the Normans brought an end to Byzantine hegemony. By 1081, Byzantium's very existence was threatened.
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Very Detailed but Tedious
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-24
Since the scholars and advocates of these theories hold them dear, I see Geroulanos’s work as an act of courage. He must have experienced significant push back and perhaps ostracism for delving into this unquestioned quagmire. But I say bravo - I thoroughly enjoyed and grew from reading this great work of scholarship.
A brave, insightful work
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The book makes many excellent points, and should be ready by paleoanthropologists and archaeologists alike. At times the critique becomes facile and/or tenuous. And at times the author surely overstates the influence of human origins stories. But these shortcomings don't overshadow the importance of the overall critique.
The author's writing has what feels like a very sanctimonious tone to it, which is unfortunately made much worse by the audio narration.
An important critique
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Very poor narration
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Too much judgement
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