Deep History

How do we write history about a human past so distant that it preceded the invention of writing, itself? What forms of evidence and historiographical methods do we employ to reconstruct this past and what choices—literary, philosophical, political and others—do we make when we try to represent it? How does history differ from paleoanthropology, archeology, genomics, and other modes of reconstructing the deep past? How did human evolution and environmental factors impact the emergence of important cultural developments? The course explores these questions through a careful, comparative analysis of several highly influential attempts to write “deep history.”