The Early History of Humanity: we have never been stupid (until now?)

Reflecting on the practices of ancient societies, European or non-European, the Victorian anthropologist Sir James Frazer invited us to suppose that "evidence of superstitious belief and custom" among them should suffice to "disabuse" the modern reader of the notion that they were anything "like us". Today, any consideration of the considerable differences between "their" ways of life and "ours" has to reckon with the scientific consensus that, for at least the last 200,000 years, there has been no major evolutionary development in human capacities: physiologically and neurologically "they" are "us". How, then, should we understand the transition of the human between then and now? How did it all begin, and what does this tell us about our time? 

Meet our speaker and chair

David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at UCL, and author of What Makes Civilisation? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the World.

Simon Glendinning (@lonanglo) is Head of the LSE European Institute and Professor in European Philosophy.

More about this event

The LSE European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe. In the most recent national Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector.

You can order the book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

This event is part of the LSE European Institute Series: Beyond Eurocentrism. This event series aims to explore how the shape and shaping of Europe – its political-economy, its political policy making, or its political culture – needs to be rethought in a time of the exhaustion of Eurocentris