On his recent trip to Washington, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant warned Hezbollah that it had the capacity to send Lebanon “back to the Stone Age.” His threat has a long pedigree. Back in the sixties, General Curtis LeMay wondered aloud if the United States should not bomb the Vietnamese “back to the Stone Age!” The cultural historian Stefanos Geroulanos, who takes LeMay’s outburst as a chapter title in The Invention of Prehistory, believes there is more to this rhetoric than vicious bluster: it expresses the conviction that technologically advanced states are allowed not just to dominate nations they regard as inferior but also to send them violently backward, returning them to the savagery from which Homo sapiens so slowly emerged.

The Invention of Prehistory is a generally bleak survey of the Western obsession with human origins from the eighteenth century to the present, suggesting that imperialists, warmongers, and racists have often appropriated and even steered the scientific investigation of the first people. In his best-selling Sapiens, Gallant’s countryman Yuval Noah Harari celebrated humanity’s development from the Rift Valley to Silicon Valley. Geroulanos has written an anti-Sapiens, which concludes that such neolithic just-so stories have been so closely tied to Western superiority that it would be safer to renounce our interest in cavemen altogether.

By opening a new flank in the decolonization of intellectual history, The Invention of Prehistory will delight Verso Man. It boasts rapturous blurbs from Samuel Moyn, Amia Srinivasan, Pankaj Mishra, Andreas Malm, and Merve Emre. These endorsements are overblown. This is an omnivorous but also a hasty book. It exaggerates the scale of the modern evils that the study of prehistory has ostensibly caused, the better to deliver us from them. In the way of much recent cultural history, it is not content to cast its author’s preoccupations as merely interesting: rather they must have been ubiquitous. Cavemen lurk behind every rock.