On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail - Essay Example

?Muhammad Naeem 28 April, On Deep History and the Brain The focus of this work by Daniel Lord Smail is his argument that history should begin from its very beginning i.e. the Paleolithic Age as he states at the very beginning of this book, ‘I have written this book for people who are interested in origins and believe that history should begin at the beginning.’ (1) Secondly, he argues how and why historians have long ignored Paleolithic and Neolithic era and only squeezed their accounts of history to only Postlithic Era. This era only constitutes a minor portion of history. The ‘accusations’ he made can be summarized in three points: 1.) Historians framed history according to Sacred History, 2.) Historians’ resistance to go beyond the general ‘documents-dependent’ accounts of history and 3.) Historians believe that there is a rupture between Paleolithic and Postlithic Histories. So they don’t think there’s any way to extract information regarding this period Now I will mostly be interested in stating Smail’s ideas and supporting them with the excerpts from his book called ‘On Deep History and the Brain’. Before actually explaining the above mentioned points, one thing that must be clarified is that Smail is against the typical psychological treatment to the history. In fact, he prescribes a rather neurophysiological treatment to this case. The reason to support this sort of view is that such an approach will bring interdisciplinarity to the study of history which in turn will help in exploring history from different perspectives. Moreover, this will also tackle the presentism brought in by psychological treatment of the subject. In his words, ‘What do we gain from a deep history centered on the neurophysiological legacy of our deep past? Well, one bene?t is a new kind of interdisciplinarity that joins the humanities and social sciences with the physical and life sciences. This is, I hope, something we would all like to aim for. This kind of interdisciplinarity, in turn, provides an opportunity for escaping the sterile presentism that grips the historical community.’ (Smail 1) According to Smail, the first and the most important of the facts that kept historians from including the prehistory to history is their dependence on the Sacred Scripts for the point of origin and the different marks of the history. Historians believed that the history started from the Garden of Eden. This point of view can be for any reason including religious, racial or political. This is how historians neglected the Paleolithic Era and in doing so they alienated a large number of audiences who were keen to know the happenings of this remote past. Smail pinpointed this loss in these words: ‘Historians risk alienating this audience if they continue to ignore that part of our history which consists of the deep past.’ (1) Smail suggests that in order to peek at the remotest past we have to move from ‘Sacred’ to ‘Human’ – our history must be centered on brain and biology rather than religion. Although Sacred History plays a major role in giving a historical account of the events that were of religious importance but it must not be the base on which the history building is to be erected. The most important reason is that it has only three major marks to go back to the past viz. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the Universal Deluge and the Destruction of the Tower of Babel. So it does not offer much. Latin and Greek historians generally worked in this genre as their emperors were influenced by Christianity. For those historians who were influenced by this Judeo-Christian style of history writing, history began at Eden or from Genesis. So they don’t know what happened before Expulsion from Eden. Secondly, their scope is limited to religious treatment of the events so all they were available with for help were religious scripts or scholars who molded every aspect of history to religious mold. Not only this religious treatment but also any other treatment whether it is philosophical or any other type, which is centered on a group of people is prescribed to be avoided. Because the problem it brings is that it limits the scope of the history and squeezes a vast account to a mere synopsis. History written in this way is only an invented thing which is influenced by the personal likings of the historians or a group of people. Smail warns us about this in this way: ‘units of measurement should not be dependent on the whims of particular regions but should conform instead to universal or natural truths, an idea that eventually resulted in the meter, the gram, and the liter.’ (1) The problem of origin of the history is so overwhelming that Smail gave it a fair chunk of his work and is of the opinion that history must not be so short. It must begin from Africa where our forefathers lived in Paleolithic Era. Although they were not that civilized but they deserve a place in our history and any racial reason should not prevail our thinking while we are writing history. If such attempt is made to curtail history to just a Postlithic Era then history would only be a contrivance as Smail states, ‘But my purpose is served if we can acknowledge that the short chronology is indeed a contrivance, that history need not be so limited in its span, and that something we can and should call “history” begins a long time ago in Africa.’ (1) Until the end of 19th Century, historians did not even bother to touch the topic of prehistory. But 20th was the century of change and awakening. Historians realized how important these chunks of Paleolithic and Neolithic History are. So they started writing about these Eras in some detail and in latter half of the 20th century historians realized how the importance of interdisciplinarity reveals the hidden information about the prehistory. Archeology, biology, philology, etc. were merged together to come up with a perfect tool to analyze the traces of history. To boot historians understood the importance of prehistory: ‘Of the so-called “prehistoric” period we, of course, know as yet very little indeed, but the bare fact that there was such a period constitutes in itself the most momentous of historical discoveries.’ (Toynbee 2) Moreover, it was important to eradicate the factors that were keeping us from including prehistory in history. Through thorough analysis, it was inferred that our believes and imaginations were holding us from including prehistory in our history: ‘the problem of incorporating prehistory into the narrative was not only one of belief. It was also one of imagination.’ (Smail 1) The second most important issue that was identified and mentioned at the very beginning of this work is the resistance of the historians to search for traces other than written documents to explore the remotest past. They were not willing to contemplate the Dark Ages. Today this reluctance has been partially overcome and historians are willing to include prehistory in their works but still the due they pay is very little. To exclude or include prehistory there must be some intellectual reasoning. Only this way we can dismantle the Ghost Theories held pertaining to Dark Ages. Those historians who are unwilling to write about prehistory argue that prehistory is a ‘Speechless Past’ and they have no documents available to refer to. Palgrave writes, ‘We must give it up, that speechless past.’ (3) But today with the advance in science and technology we can merge different fields together. This introduces the concept of professional scientific historian. Secondly, definitions of documents are different for different historians. Some people include only hand written objects as documents while for modern historians it takes a different meaning. Today’s historian deems every little trace a document. From fossils to tablets everything is a document. Although Smail supports this treatment to the dilemma but does not deny the importance of written documents so he writes, ‘It is fair to admit that written documents add richness to history.’ (1) Like any other subject history has to borrow metaphors to make narratives look imaginable. For most of the part, history has to look upto biology for metaphors although architecture has its own claim. Two important divisions offered by biology where historians have to choose one are phylogeny and ontogeny. Ontogeny is controlled through a blueprint while phylogeny needs no blueprint. Deep history is something that can be related to phylogeny because ontogeny needs a point of germination or a starting point. Smail summarizes this choice of deep history as, ‘It is here, in the potential confusion between ontogeny and phylogeny, that a deep history has to take a stand in favor of phylogeny. An ontogeny necessarily begins at a point of conception or germination: in the narrative of sacred history, the Garden of Eden. In contrast, the deep history of humanity has no particular beginning and is certainly driving toward no particular end.’ (1) History is all about ideas that have to undergo selection [Darwin’s Idea]. The more ideas we have at hand, the more refined is the history and the more options we have to mold the history. Smail writes, ‘The dozens, the hundreds, the thousands of good ideas out there all have to undergo some sort of selection process. That process is what history is all about, whether it is a history of political successes or a history of failures, a history of the technologies that transform or a history of the technologies that fall with a thud.’ (1) Some historians from the past believed that history started when humans ceased to be animals i.e. they had had cultures. But to Smail’s mind culture has never been a deciding factor to include an era in history: ‘Culture alone would not do, since the existence of tools and cave paintings showed that Paleolithic humans had culture. But what they did not have was a culture that accelerates.’ (1) For generations to survive in historical accounts, they must have accelerating cultures. Darwinian Evolution accelerates at a very slow pace so it does not influence our history a great deal. Cultural Evolution is as swift as the Lamarckian Evolution. ‘This crux in the earth’s history has been reached because Lamarckian processes have finally been unleashed upon it. Human cultural evolution, in strong opposition to our biological history, is Lamarckian in character. What we learn in one generation, we transmit directly by teaching and writing’, writes Stephen Jay Gould eloquently. (Gould 4) To understand deep history we have to step forward and include neurobiology (branch of life sciences that deals with nervous system), behavioral study and genetics in our set of tools to explore it. As Smail mentions in his work, ‘A deep history demands that we acknowledge a genetic and behavioral legacy from the past.’ (1) Although Smail’s work can not be summarized here but in short his idea is to merge the history, sciences and other studies together to explore Paleolithic and Neolithic Eras specifically and history on the whole generally. This is obvious from the statement he made at the very beginning, which reads, ‘The archeologists, anthropologists, molecular biologists, and neuroscientists who study the deep past are also historians, regardless of the archives they consult.’ (1) Works Cited Smail, Daniel. On Deep History and the Brain. California: University of California Press, 2008. Print. Toynbee, Arnold. Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Print. Lubbock, John. Pre-Historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. New York: Adamant Media Corporation, 1872. Print. Gould, Stephen. The Panda’s Thumb: More Re?ections in Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982. Print. Read More