Daniel Smail begins his analysis of how to think about history by stating: "Like any author engaged in the task of building a plot, the historian must grapple with the question of where to begin the story" (p. 12). For a general history rather than an account of a particular period or event, this is the first question. For Smail it is the question, and one that has been inadequately answered in the past. Smail has a very different story to tell about the origins of the human race, about the "dawn of history", and about the nature of homo sapiens sapiens. The evidence is not as far away as you would think. On Deep History and the Brain begins with an examination of accepted models of history before turning to the brain to consider how history can be differently conceptualized and differently written. In the introduction Smail describes the book as an essay, and it does have the features of a careful exposition of ideas, consideration of different points of view, and a measured, but very confident conclusion.

Smail begins with a compelling first chapter The Grip of Sacred History. This chapter is worth reading in itself for its systematic exploration of the enduring role played by early religious beliefs in western understandings of history. Smail's central point in this chapter is that jettisoning the sacred as an explanation of human history is not simply a matter of abandoning belief in God. Smail examines how "the sacred" serves as a trope for secular models, captured in the observation that the Garden of Eden became the irrigated fields of Mesopotamia. In both cases we have beginning point that marks a decisive rupture with the past. A more contemporary version, attributed to Giambattista Vico (1668–1774), sees history beginning after the Middle Ages, humankind having descended to such a level of barbarism that it was necessary to begin again. Woven into the search for a starting point is an examination of historical method. A common justification for excluding early human existence from the purview of history is the lack of language, or the lack of written records. The chapter concludes with Smail's observation that "The problem lies in the grip of the narrative itself, whose rhythms and patterns were left essentially unchanged as the sacred was translated into the secular" (p. 35).

Driving the recognition of "deep history" was the evidence from the mid nineteenth century that the earth was very much older than historians had believed. Geological studies put the age of the earth and hundreds of thousands of years, not the 6000 imagined by biblical scholars. Although not universally accepted (you can still find creationists who believe that the fossil record was created along with the rest of the earth about 4000 years ago) the recognition of deep time challenged historians to come up with an account of human beings that took their long existence into account. Resistance to such an idea is expressed in the words of Francis Palgrave (1788–1861): "We must give it up, that speechless past." Another strand of resistance was the insistence that history only begins when societies begin to record and examine themselves. In other words, you have to think of history to have a history.

Smail draws on his own research into medieval marriage records to show that history can be "written" unintentionally in documents with quite different purposes. In the case of marriage records, the recorded addresses of partners show the changing economy of Marseille in the 14^th century. The point for the wider study of history is that a range of documents, using the term to mean any form of record, linguistic or otherwise, will reveal something about the past. With this observation the "speechless past" gains a voice. Smail concludes the second chapter with the claim that humans, as the writers of history, create the illusion that they are also authors of the changes they write about, a point that he revisits later in the book with an even more fundamental conclusion. Before leaving "providential history" behind Smail firstly responds to theories (such as Lamarck's) of guided evolution, the idea that inheritance of acquired attributes lends a sort of human intentionality to evolution. It is possible, Smail concedes, for humans to intentionally influence their own development, and to some extent that of the species, but more often than not this is not how things go. We are misled, Smail believes, by the appearance of design, to the belief in a designer.

This leads to the more radical aspect of the book, about the role of the brain in history. Smail has already signaled that the arbitrary disciplinary boundaries of the academy will not suffice in the face of new evidence from the biological sciences. Although this seems revolutionary there is an obvious comparison with the impact of geology on western theology in the nineteenth century, not to mention the impact of Darwin's "dangerous idea" on just about everything. Perhaps each generation must discover for itself the limits of its own conceptual schemes, and thus the limits of conceptual schemes themselves.

Smail declares that he is not invoking a "crude genetic determinism" (p. 114) and I earnestly wish that a lot of people read this book for his analysis of genetic determinism. I have in mind newspaper editors who run stories about how scientists have "discovered the anger/love/addiction gene", although "treatment" is (thankfully) some way off. Smail doesn't claim expertise as a neuroscientist, but does a pretty fair job for a historian. He unpacks the argument that having a genetic predisposition does not mean that behavior is caused by those genes. He explores he emergence of sociobiology, and its corruption into a mechanistic dogma. He discusses adaptionist philosophy, drawing on Lewontin and Gould to challenge the belief that change is necessarily adaptive. This leads to a critique of evolutionary psychology, a discipline Smail considers, to put it mildly, primitive. Instead of fossilized changes in the brain the limitations of which become apparent only by chance, Smail argues for an understanding of humans as partly adapting to environmental challenges, and partly shaped, without their knowledge or intervention, by external circumstances. All of this makes way, Smail believes, for a new historical narrative, a cultural history informed by the deep past rather than only by the present.

To achieve this objective, Smail proposes the concept of "psychotropy" By this he means that humans have consistently sought ways to stimulate themselves and thus to experience pleasure. Obvious historical examples are tobacco, alcohol and coffee; less obviously the development of agrarian societies can be understood as deriving from the same impulse. Smail has a lot more examples than that, and they include social practices as well as substances. Psychotropic practices have themselves undergone transformation from "teletropic" to "autotropic". By the former Smail means things such as a priest's reciting the Kyrie Eleison; by the latter things like drug taking and pornography. If it wasn't complex already it certainly is by this point. Smail concludes that "From the perspective of neurohistory, the progress of civilization is an illusion of psychotropy." (p. 187). Given the meticulous development of his arguments to this point I was prepared to agree that there might be something in this. It's a hypothesis, though, not a theory, and there is some water to go under the bridge before its full implications are understood.

On Deep History and the Brain is a highly engaging read. For a book covering such a range of ideas I found it something of a page-turner. Pitched at both academic and lay audiences it is accessible and stimulating. It's perhaps not a complete development of the position Smail is aiming at, but Smail seems aware of this, and his proposal seems designed to wake those historians whose vision remains limited by the idea of rupture, by commitment to a teleological idea of "progress", and at some deep level by an enduring sense of providence. Anthropology departments still teach "prehistory"; the study of Paleolithic and Neolithic man is defined as "archaeology" and even those reference works that recognize a continuity with the deep past often consign the early periods to a few pages as a backdrop to the beginning of history. Smail's book challenges not only this model of history but the disciplinary boundaries that sustain it. While he acknowledges that, like others, his conclusions contain an element of speculation, Smail is convinced, and convincing, in his argument that history does not begin with some more or less arbitrary event, real or imagined, and that teleological theories of history are every bit as alive and well within modern secular thought as they were in the sacred histories of the past.

© 2008 Tony O'Brien

Tony O'Brien RN, MPhil, Senior Lecturer, Mental Health Nursing, University of Auckland, New Zealand. a.obrien@auckland.ac.nz

Keywords: history, brain science, review