Clark Grahame. Aspects of prehistory

University of California Press, 1970. — xiv, 161 p. — ISBN: 0-520-01584-3.The worldwide application of prehistoric research has made it possible for the first time to visualize the antecedents and emergence both of preliterate societies and of all the various civilizations of men. No one can survey so vast a panorama without meditating both on its meaning for ourselves and on the processes by which prehistory has unfolded. One effect of the new picture of the past that has recently come into view has been to narrow down and even in some respects eliminate the gap between the universal concepts of science and technology and the parochial limitations of histories based on the written records of particular civilizations. In world prehistory all men whatever their recent cultural status— and large parts of the world remained prehistoric down to the nineteenth century—share a common past documented by millions of tangible fossils. But prehistory does more than provide a common area of historical awareness among men; it also removes the barrier once thought to separate men from other animals—or at least it helps us to understand more fully in what respects we are animals of a unique kind. Man himself, his material apparatus of technology, and his self-awareness manifest in such fields as art, ethics, religion, and philosophy can be viewed as outcomes of the same evolutionary process by which we have long learned to account for other forms of life and indeed for the universe as a whole. There is no longer any valid ground for conflict between the notion that man is at one and the same time an animal and yet potentially divine. Indeed, the record of prehistory shows that societies of human character have been selected for survival precisely through the development of the attributes that stem from increasing self-awareness, attributes shared by no other animal and which men have everywhere recognised as of god-like character.
The present book, which treats only a few of the central themes opened up by this new field of knowledge, is the outcome of reflection following on the writing of World Prehistory: An Outline, originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1961 and recently revised and largely rewritten as World Prehistory: A New Outline, published by the same press in 1969. Although some of the ideas incorporated in it were adumbrated in lectures delivered as William Evans Visiting Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 1964, and as Lewis Fry Memorial Lecturer at the University of Bristol in 1967, the stimulus to develop them further came from the invitation to serve as Visiting Professor on the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Foundation on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1969. The three chapters of this book represent the substance of the three lectures delivered at Berkeley.