History That’s Written in Beads as Well as in Words

Distressed by most historians’ overwhelming preoccupation with the modern world, an unusual coalition of scholars is trying to stage an intellectual coup, urging their colleagues to look up from the relatively recent swirl of bloody conflicts, global financial exchanges and technological wonders and gaze further back, toward humanity’s origins.

The up-close and personal accounts that have won professional praise and rewards in recent years are worthy, said Daniel Lord Smail, a medieval historian at Harvard, but he says the “microhistory” trend has stunted the ambition to think big.

“In the last two or three decades, historians have found it hard to think across large time spans,” he contends; gone are the sweeping narratives of humanity’s advance. The antidote to this “shallow history,” he said, is “deep history,” stretching back 50,000, 500,000, even 2.6 million years to the earliest humans. Recent advances in archaeological analysis, gene mapping and evolutionary ecology have led to an astonishing expansion in our knowledge of the distant past, despite the lack of written records, the historian’s traditional sidearm....