The Early History of Humanity: we have never been stupid (until now?)
Contributor(s): Professor David Wengrow | Reflecting on the practices of ancient societies, European or non-European, the Victorian anthropologist Sir James Frazer invited us to suppose that "evidence of superstitious belief and custom" among them should suffice to "disabuse" the modern reader of the notion that they were anything "like us". Today, any consideration of the considerable differences between "their" ways of life and "ours" has to reckon with the scientific consensus that, for at least the last 200,000 years, there has been no major evolutionary development in human capacities: physiologically and neurologically "they" are "us". How, then, should we understand the transition of the human between then and now? How did it all begin, and what does this tell us about our time? In conversation with Simon Glendinning, David Wengrow will explore these questions, and his new book.