The origin of humanity has occupied us almost obsessively for about three hundred years. In this book, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos shows how our claims about the first humans not only shaped the intellectual culture of the West, but also the modern world.

The idea that there was a human past before recorded history appears with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers begin to reject faith-based religious conceptions and adopt more empirical, in theory, views about humanity and history. From the "state of nature" and the romantic notions of noble Germanic barbarians to the theories about Neanderthals and a matriarchal paradise ruled by women, Geroulanos presents the variety and strangeness of the claims that inspired many of the great thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries, among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx.

These views, as Geroulanos shows, became for the most part the ideological foundations of oppressive regimes and global empires. Labeling other peoples as savages allowed the guilt-free exercise of violence against them. The conceptions of the "Killer Apes" who were our evolutionary ancestors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science accelerated the imperialism of the West.

The Nazis’ obsession with race had its roots in archaeological claims about prehistoric Indo-Germans. The idea that Westerners could bomb the peoples of the colonies "back to the Stone Age" became possible not only because of military technology, but also because of the anthropological view that civilization developed in stages.

The Origin of Man offers a necessary, timely, and revelatory analysis of how the effort to understand the origin of humanity ended up serving wars and empires, providing a perspective that will forever change how we think about the distant past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Award 2025