num_pages: 286
description: When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing civilization or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon once and for all the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.
language: English
title: On Deep History and the Brain
publisher: University of California Press