PREHISTORIC AND
MYTHIC MAGIC

History ain’t what it used to be. We used to think of it as the whole story, but now it is more narrowly defined as the study of the past as documented in written records. Prehistory is established by what the archaeological record reveals, but over recent years a new field of history has emerged, known as deep history, which explores the roots of human existence using the findings of such distinct fields as anthropology, genetics, linguistics, and neuroscience.

Anatomically modern humans are now known to have been around for at least 300,000 years. Since our brain capacity has not grown since then we must assume that our earliest human ancestors were no less intelligent than we are today. We are not so much evolving as adapting to the different circumstances that we have created for ourselves. Although human consciousness may have been different, emphasizing the use of different parts of the brain, there is no reason to imagine that we were less sophisticated; our interaction with nature was far more sophisticated on an individual level than that of the average “Westerner” today. It appears, moreover, that our capacity for conceptual and abstract thought was already well-developed at a much earlier stage than hitherto imagined.