In one of Seinfeld’s infamous stand-up sequences, Jerry jokes that men flip channels on the TV while women find this behaviour annoying because “women nest, and men hunt!” Absurd as this instance is, the idea of a prehistoric gendered division of labour is broadly accepted, as are a million others: noble savages, brutish barbarians, ruthless males, gentle matriarchs.
Where do we get these ideas of the prehistoric past, which is, by definition, too distant to easily recapture? As Stefanos Geroulanos, professor of history at New York University, explains in The Invention of Prehistory, our conception of prehistory is closely intertwined with present-day politics. Geroulanos’s title evokes Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983), which showed how symbols that we consider vestiges of ancient traditions – such as Scottish tartan – are in fact recent creations in the service of contemporary power struggles. Geroulanos does something similar for the even deeper past.
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