The imagination and its ability to simulate facts and events are fired when it comes to filling remote times where the evidence of hominid action is scarce if not non-existent.
It’s always been difficult to resist the temptation to speculate about stories that might have happened. There were times in human history when all life was a tooth or a carved stone tool. Because of this, composing the scene and plot from these insights is the closest thing to recomposing a movie from a single frame.
For this reason, Professors David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that when scientists assume they know more than they really do, their explanations conform to biblical narratives rather than the scientific method. Graeber and Wengrow explain it at the beginning of their monumental work The Dawn of Everything (Ariel, 2022), a recent essay in Spanish; An anthropological study full of archaeological references that wants to dismantle the fundamental story rooted in our subconscious since the Enlightenment, the same story that claims that the more complex the social relations, the less freedom and less equality.
More information
Both Rousseau and Hobbes are dismantled in this book, and with it everything concerning the hypotheses that have developed in any direction, be it that of the noble savage or that of man as a wolf to his fellow men.
All in all, the work presented by Graeber and Wengrow goes beyond the limits of the social sciences and takes us back to the time of dinosaurs, long before the dinosaur became the quintessential modernist animal, according to the famous American art professor WJT Mitchell, who recalled that there were too Shakespeare’s times gave no news of its existence.
The Meteorite Museum in Yucatán (Mexico), in 2022Martín Zetina (Cuartoscuro)
Because prehistory began in 1858 with geologist William Pengelly and the discovery of flint axes along with bones of extinct species in Brixham Cave in Devon, England. The find showed that man is an ancient animal, although not as old as the world. The almost simultaneous publication of The Origin of Species strengthened the scientific development of the study of prehistory and consolidated its specialization.
Aside from this relatively modern discovery, our imaginations have been stunned by discoveries such as that of mitochondrial Eve in the late 1980s, which opened up the possibility of imagining that she was the first woman of our species to live in a scenario similar to the biblical story with her Garden of Eden. But nothing more, as claimed by the authors of The Dawn of Everything, who dismantle the fact that the mentioned mitochondrial Eve was the only living female at the time of her existence and therefore the only female to have had offspring.
According to her book, humans had no common ancestors, and while it’s true that our origins were in Africa, early populations were more diverse than we can imagine. Our biological ancestors were spread across the entire African continent, from Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope.
From here we can close our eyes and open the imagination to its ability to create new realities spanning more than three million years. The book signed by Graeber and Wengrow is the appropriate tool.
you can follow MATTER on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.