This book consists of two parts. Chapters 1 to 4 comprise the first part, which treats the present, examining how the historical context in which we live today predisposes us to adopt certain views of prehistory. The second part, comprising Chapters 5, 6 and 7, tells the tale of our shared prehistorical past, but ends with two historical flourishes, illustrating two of the multitudinous transition zones where prehistory melts into recorded history.
The first part of the book addresses the historical accident of our individual national or ethnic identities and illustrates how such modern frameworks can distort our understanding of the past. Similarly, the fictitious modern construct of ‘race’ is observed to afflict both the thinking of those who practise racism and, more often than not, also those who oppose racism. Finally, we are cautioned to avoid anachronisms in our thinking, a perennial pitfall.
The second part of the book provides a compact but holistic account of our ethnolinguistic prehistory. This up-to-date perspective on the peopling of the world presents a reconstruction based on language, genes and material culture. The phylogeny of language families, the chronology of branching of linguistic family trees and the historical and modern geographical distribution of language communities inform us about the spread of linguistic phyla, languages and their speakers.
The global distribution and chronology of spread of Y-chromosomal haplogroups appear to correlate with the spread of language families. Yet the father tongue correlation, though ubiquitous, is far from universal. Findings based on the entire genome will in future better inform us. New findings on ancient dna have already begun to enhance our understanding of the prehistory and provenance of our biological ancestors. The archaeological study of past material cultures provides yet a third independent window onto the complex prehistory of our species.
George van Driem
Bern, Christmas Eve 2020