As much as we strive collectively to avoid anachronism and ahistorical thinking, reconstructions of past events ultimately bear the mark of the historian's present. Past attempts to historicize, then, provide the historian with privileged access to the mores and sensibilities of bygone times. Especially rich fruit is promised when the object that past thinkers were attempting to historicize was humankind itself.

This collection of essays begins to deliver on the promise of insight into nineteenth-century understandings of history and humanity, by examining past attempts to piece together the story of our species (or, as it was for many of those discussed in this volume, the stories of the various human species). The so-called polygenism-versus-monogenism debate – concerning whether humankind represents one unified species with a single origin, or a multitude of closely related species, capable of interbreeding but arising from multiple pre-human progenitors – pervades Historicizing Humans. Few chapters fail to mention this social, political, religious, scientific spat as at least key background, whilst in several contributions the controversy occupies centre stage. Charles Darwin's staunch monogenist commitment, buoyed by his familial abhorrence of slavery, provides Greg Radick (Chapter 6) with the key to understanding Darwin's strangely un-Darwinian account of the development of emotional expression, in which natural selection was ruled out as a cause by its own author. Darwin, Radick shows, set great store in showing that emotional expressions were non-adaptive but nonetheless universal across the various races, a state of affairs which in turn pointed to their being commonly inherited from a single ancestor. The human story is thus a monogenist one, meaning that slavers could not cite separate origins to uphold their barbarous and dehumanizing treatment of other races.

Radick's account sheds new light on an aspect of Darwin's oeuvre that has long puzzled historians. Helen Kingstone (Chapter 7) continues the fresh approaches to ‘great men’ in her exploration of the comparative historical methodologies of Thomas Carlyle – himself so influential in formulating the ‘great-man theory of history’ – Walter Scott and Darwin's notorious polymath cousin Francis Galton. But as well as providing new perspectives on leading figures in the nineteenth-century historicization of humans, this volume serves also to broaden the cast of characters. Nanna Kaalund (Chapter 2), for instance, introduces us to the respected Canadian geologist John William Dawson, whose 1860 popular work Archaia attempted to reconcile biblical and geological narratives of earth and human history. In their piece on ‘The history of the “Red Man”’ (Chapter 4), Maurizio Esposito and Abigail Nieves Delgado focus on the little-studied British naturalist–explorer William Boellart, a committed polygenist whose studies of American aboriginals interlaced with Britain's attempts to gain an imperial foothold in the New World. The move away from the metropole continues in Thomas Simpson's study of human origin controversies in colonial India. These contributions are notable for transporting us to less-explored places, as well as diversifying the ensemble of historical actors (though women, both as historicizers and as object of historicization, are notably absent). Chris Manias's generously illustrated essay (Chapter 1) even extends the historian's attention beyond persons of relative obscurity, to the extinct and awe-inspiring non-human creatures whose existence was increasingly evidenced through discoveries of their fossilized remains and ancient artistic depictions.

In keeping with the reflexive nature of the volume's subject matter, the book already contains a synthetic and reflective self-review, of sorts, in the form of Theodore Koditschek's thoughtful historiographical afterword. Herein, the historical scholarship on human historicization presented in the preceding chapters is itself placed within a historical narrative. Koditschek dubs the output of this young guard of historians ‘Historiography of Historicizing Human Origins 2.0’, distinguishing it from the ‘1.0’ version hashed out by influential historians of science in the latter half of last century. Among the hallmarks of this second wave of literature, he highlights a step up in specificity and specialization, and a diversification both of our historiographical perspectives and of the places and people at the centre of our stories. The shape of the present volume – coherent and integrated, yet diverse and sprawling in its coverage – also attests to an emerging self-awareness and collective purpose among historians of human historicization, who can now see themselves as participating in a common project. This kind of cohesiveness is arguably something they share with the varied actors whose activities are documented in Historicizing Humans: a volume which charts the advent of a considered discourse of historicization which traversed and reinforced the boundaries of nascent scientific disciplines, and religious and political spheres. In the context of debate over human origins, historicization was rarely, if ever, a neutral pursuit of ‘truth’. As this volume continually highlights, it was a pursuit that was firmly and actively embedded in political, social and religious – as well as scientific – controversies, and one which was consciously mobilized to subordinate or liberate, undermine or empower. Ian Hesketh's chapter on ‘The future evolution of “Man”’ (Chapter 8) hammers home the point that the writing of history both draws upon and shapes understandings of the present, and our hopes for the future. Historians of Historicizing Human Origins 2.0 will do well to reflect on this, and particularly on their hopes for how their excavations of past historical understandings of humans should inform the practices of those in our field, and beyond.