Four new books look critically, even subversively, at historiography. At first glance, they have little else in common, except their brilliant execution and startling effects. Three are revisionist essays. Daniel Smail calls for historians to incorporate the Paleolithic era into their discipline. Clive Gamble demands that paleoanthropologists abandon the search for “origins” and the lexicon of “revolutions.” Jack Goody attacks the Eurocentrism of most Western historical writing. The fourth book, by Anthony Grafton, does not explicitly try to make us change the way we write history, but tells us how early modern European historians did it—in particular, practitioners of what they called the ars historica, and its critics.

But even if no obvious single category embraces all the books, they do have overlapping agendas. All emphatically recommend interdisciplinarity and display its virtues. All assail traditional metahistories or grand narratives, though unlike postmodernist critics they do not opt for a random or chaotic past but advocate or approach alternative metahistories of their own. All the books are about the relationship of the West to the rest of the world—even Gamble's, which situates the beginnings of the historiography of the Neolithic Revolution in the context of a debate about whether Western civilization was dependent on input from the East, and Grafton's, which reveals how big a part Asia played in the work of historians in the early modern West. All are part of the global history movement. Grafton, whose focus is on a single genre in one corner of the world, never explicitly takes on global responsibilities, but early modern historians, he tells us, did think globally, or at least recommend global thinking, and part of the reason for the collapse of the ars historica was the multiplication of travel books, scientific reports, and exotic specimens from newly contacted parts of the world.

All four books, finally and most conspicuously, are about the origins of a defining aspect of the world we inhabit: how we have come to see the past as we do. Even Gamble, who disavows the quest, is part of the effort to trace the story of the emergence of a familiar kind of modernity, produced by progressive, unilinear, and even teleological schematizations of the past. He assails two “revolutions” in particular: the “Neolithic Revolution” named by V. Gordon Childe, but posited since Aristotle, which makes the inauguration of agriculture or at least of sedentarism the point of departure from which all subsequent history flowed. This is a fairly easy target. Few specialists still believe in the substance of the Neolithic Revolution—which now looks neither Neolithic nor revolutionary. The term survives, tenuously, as a meaningless designation without any descriptive value. By dismissing it, Gamble disposes us to believe that all revolutions are open to revision and sets up his real target: the “Human Revolution” that some current paleoanthropology postulates, and which, as a term, is particularly associated with R. G. Klein. In some ways, it is a newish name for a long-vaunted phenomenon, noticed by Helmholz, associating the emergence of Homo sapiens with enduring and enormously influential cognitive and cultural changes, compared with earlier hominids and other, non-human primates. Evolutionary psychology has given a new lease of life to the notion that human evolution is a trap from which history cannot escape, or that everything we have done since Homo sapiens emerged is conditioned or even determined by the circumstances of the emergence of the species.

Implicitly, by arguing that sapiens did not sever longer continuities, Gamble revises some of his own earlier thinking. Previously he emphasized the chasm of culture, which, according to his earlier work, separated Neanderthals from our ancestors. So one would expect him to be generally sympathetic to the notion of the distinctiveness of Homo sapiens. In his new book, however, Neanderthals get a relatively strong billing as creatures with strong moral consciousness, a sense of transcendence, and even aesthetic sensibilities.

The conclusion—in favor of vast continuities and incremental changes which makes the human past more than the story of a single species or even a single lineage—is surely right. In dealing with the detailed evidence, Gamble is highly impressive. His pages on stone-knapping technology leave arguments in favor of progressive and revolutionary changes shattered and in fragments, like shards on the floor of a Magdalenian flint factory. He also disposes effectively of the notion of a “container revolution” coincidental with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Though he devotes most space to technology, he does a good job of tracing other aspects of the culture we associate with Homo sapiens back into the remoter hominid past. Religion and art are of untraceable antiquity. For good measure, the beginnings of hunting and of the domestication of fire—though these have rarely been misattributed to Homo sapiens—get pushed back earlier than is commonly supposed.

Gamble might have been content with an empirical rebuttal of the Human Revolution. Instead, he devotes the bulk of the book to two theoretical arguments, which are much less satisfactory. The first, though extremely complex, boils down to a memorable aphorism: early human tool makers “were more interested in reproducing the body through material metaphors than making fancy fish spears” (p. 255). Gamble suggests that symbolic thinking began deep in the hominid past; that it does not depend on or necessarily produce language, which it preceded; and that the only prerequisite for its emergence is the existence of creatures capable of seeing analogies between parts of their own bodies and other objects, appropriated or fashioned as “proxies” for bodies or body parts—a kind of metaphorical imaginary that makes it possible to turn the gifts of nature into instruments and containers as surely as Duchamp turned objets trouvés into art. Since many tool-using creatures exhibit this feature of mind—or so the author infers rather riskily, from the fact that they use tools—we must have inherited it from a distant common ancestor, many millions of years ago.

The reasoning is attractive, but not decisive. There is no evidence to link tools with symbolism, only analogies in the minds of some anthropologists, who may not share much of their mind-set with non-human tool users and eons-old hominids. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the tool maker's own body inspired any known early tool. Tools—if the analogy with bodies really does inspire manufacturers—are at least as likely to be the result of attempts to imitate non-human creatures and to supply humans with “proxies” for bodily features we lack. Knapped flints call to mind the teeth and claws of superior predators, missiles their speed and aerial agility. The stomachs of animals did not just inspire early containers—they were early containers, appropriated by hominids for carrying and perhaps cooking. Some of Gamble's most engaging pages argue that many early products of weaving and potting were ritual objects before they acquired practical applications, which again raises the presumption that awesome natural objects may have been the source-material of the minds that made them. Body-paint, which Gamble classes as a container, is commonly used, in anthropologically attested instances, to imitate the skin of significant creatures. Would it make sense to call scarification a container?

Gamble's second argument is more powerful and more dangerous. There can have been no Human Revolution because there is no single human identity. Homo sapiens is not sufficiently different from many of the hominids that preceded us, or even many hominids located along other branches of the evolutionary tree, to justify classification apart. This is reasonable—even, I think, unanswerable: humankind is an elastic category, which minds constructed and which different cultures have understood in different ways. It has a history, and will go on changing in future. But this factually and logically unobjectionable insight enmeshes the author in disturbing conclusions and uncomfortable paradoxes. Because no species is discrete, it invites us to abandon all “speciesism”—as animal rights campaigners call it—and embrace in a single moral community apes, capuchin monkeys, oysters, “oranges, crystals, and mud,” each successive category merging with the next by virtue of marginal similarities.

By the end of the book, Gamble seems to attempt to escape by reinstating a concept suspiciously like that of the Human Revolution, but dating it a long way back: at least about 2.6 million years, when hominids practiced the kind of mimesis that led to tool making (273). This jars with Gamble's conviction of the irrefragability of evolutionary continuities. It also contradicts the case he makes out earlier in the book that capuchin monkey tool use “strongly suggests that tool-making and tool-using is an ancestral hominid trait of some antiquity” (164). Since the lines that produced capuchin monkeys and humans diverged about 30 million years ago, a mere 2.6 million years of ‘mimesis’ makes hominids look strangely un-precocious. Perhaps also because of his uneasiness at undermining the concept of human uniqueness, Gamble questions whether chimpanzee tool making is best described as cultural, on the grounds that chimp tools are all explicable as serviceable (167). This seems unfair to chimpanzees. If human tools are “material metaphors,” why not those of other animals?

Although it is refreshing to see Gamble return to tool making as a focus of enquiry into the nature of humankind, it is hard to resist the impression that most other scholars have abandoned it for good reason. It would be wonderful to see Gamble bring his immense knowledge, acute sense of evidence, and mastery of a wide range of disciplines to the contemplation of some relatively unexplored aspects of human distinctiveness, such as the peculiar range and volatility of human cultures, the apparently exceptional power of human imaginations, and the prevalence among humans of an uniquely vivid sense of transcendence.

On the face of it, Smail and Gamble have conflicting projects. Disarmingly, after Gamble's incineration of origins seeking as a distorting form of presentism, Smail begins his book by offering it to “people who are interested in origins and believe that history should begin at the beginning” (1). But like Gamble he wants to project that beginning deeper into the past. Like Gamble, Smail discards the notion of a Neolithic Revolution, though he speaks of a “Neolithic transformation” that in the end is perhaps not all that different. Both Smail and Gamble see the historiography they criticize as a product of a fleeting historical moment. For Smail, historians' self-imprisonment in a tiny cell within the documented past is the result of “the grip of sacred history”—the failure of textually obsessed scholars in the nineteenth century to see the vast perspectives opened by the discovery of geological time and evolutionary change. The bedrock of his project is the same as Gamble's in that both writers recognize that cultural and evolutionary change are processes of different kinds, but that culture starts with the bodily equipment evolution has given to cultural creatures: bodies, with their containers and instruments in Gamble's case, or, for Smail, brains with (in humans at least) “relatively plastic or manipulable neural states and brain-body chemistries” (117). Both writers draw us toward the same radical conception of history as a vast interdisciplinary project embracing millions of years and many species.

Smail takes the common project much further than Gamble. He announces, in effect, the most radical program on record for coupling cultural and biological change in the same framework of reference (and does it in beautifully poised and polished language). He demolishes biological determinism with a few deft cuts and thrusts, leaving meme theory and sociobiology as corpses in the arena. In the most brilliant, most inviting, but least convincing passages of the book he argues for the mutual permeability of culture and evolution. Predispositions encoded in the brain influence culture, and culture “can have profound neurophysiological consequences” (117). “The new science of the brain cannot make sense without history” (202). The Neolithic Revolution claws its way back into the argument, “like nothing seen in the Paleolithic era” (199), but Smail's Neolithic is different from everybody else's—a world in which “civilizations found new devices for exaggerating existing neurochemical states” (200). In detail, these devices seem disappointing—“psychotropic” practices and substances, some of the most powerful of which, like dance, music, drugs, art, and mass rituals started in the Paleolithic. Some critics will think Smail does not go far enough. Compared with exponents of “Big History,” he advocates incorporating only a small slice of the past in historians' remit: most of the first thirteen billion years remain, in his scheme, irrelevant. But, like Gamble's, his arguments make what animal rights activists call “speciesism” seem utterly unacceptable as a basis for selecting historians' material. Both use excursions into primatological literature for purposes of analogy, but seem to jib at the obvious conclusion: we should be studying all cultural organisms. Unless and until we do, we shall never understand the ways in which human history diverges from the stories of change we can construct for other species.

By comparison with Smail's and Gamble's clamor for historians to embrace every period, Jack Goody's call for due attention to every human culture seems modest. He is not particularly concerned with history's frontier with biology, but rather—as the doyen of living anthropologists and the most historically sensitive of the crew—with historians' need to get serious about anthropology. His task looks easy. Polemics by Wolf (1982) and Said (1995) have made every educated person familiar with some of the deficiencies of Westerners' appreciation of the histories of non-Western people. Goody's indictment of historical narrow-mindedness follows, he points out, a number of attempts to write history on a genuinely global scale, acknowledging the West's indebtedness to people who live further east. Goody's own book, The East in the West (1997), was a landmark in the globalization of historical writing, and he pays especially warm tribute to the efforts of Hobson (2004), Pomeranz (2000), Frank (1998), and myself (1995). The global history movement now champions the fastest-growing sub-discipline in the curriculum, and few universities are so benighted as to leave China, Japan, and Islam out of their history programs.

Goody is right, however, to sense that there is still a battle to be fought. “Westocentrism,” if there were such a word, would be a slogan among the many resisters of the need to see the West in global context. Some revanchistes of the uniqueness of the West, including Landes (1999), Hanson (2001), and Bobbitt (2002), have achieved stunning impact and huge sales. The roles of indigenous African and American peoples in shaping the rest of the world remain undervalued or mired in controversy. And though almost all historians profess to revere anthropological insights, the lessons of anthropology still seem to pass many by. For any historian wary of embracing the vast programs of Gamble or Smail, Goody points out the availability of anthropological analogies, which are “to be preferred to the generalized assumption” (61), and which Gamble and Smail use to good effect. Coming from a scholar who, in addition to his other attainments, is the world's leading authority on oral literature, the advice commands respect.

Goody's relentlessness can be disturbing. It is distressing to find Joseph Needham—to me a heroic figure that first interested me in non-Western history and the revaluation of Eurocentrism—characterized, convincingly, as ethnocentric. Goody's other two main targets, Fernand Braudel and Norbert Elias, are easier to challenge but equally daring to dethrone. In all of these cases, Goody's real bugbear is every form of universalism, which, he argues, usually boils down to the undiscriminating extension of Western models and patterns to the world. His distaste for unjustified assertions of universalism is uncompromising, leading him to question the coherence of the concept of human rights—which, implicitly, Gamble's and Smail's embrace of non-human species also calls into question. Nor is Goody afraid to take on electoral democracy as just “one among a number of alternative modes of representation” (249). If anything, he sees it as more cogent to claim that hypocrisy is a distinctly Western value. He ransoms these hostages to fortune by making out an unanswerable case for what he calls “theft” by Western historians, who have represented civilization, democracy, science, capitalism, love, the nuclear family, and many other values and institutions, all of which some other cultures can properly claim to have invented or shared, as Western in origin. Goody's critique of Weber, Marx, and Braudel in connection with capitalism is particularly devastating, though the positive side of Goody's argument—showing that non-Western cultures can properly be called capitalist—is less well developed, and the evidence of Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu capitalists stays out of the account.

There are many productive or provocative insights along the way. We learn, for instance, that love rarely figures in oral poetry, because love is an emotion kindled by absence and writing is a medium for bridging absence. (But surely much of the verse of the troubadours, which Goody classes as written, or of the authors of medieval jarchas must originally have been orally transmitted.) On the other hand, Goody shows that oral cultures can nourish skepticism and even religious agnosticism, albeit perhaps not as effectively as those which rely on writing. Although Goody finds Bernal's Black Athena thesis unpersuasive, he manages a good word for him as one of the re-discoverers of the East Face of Helicon. Less surprisingly, Western hygiene gets a rather poor assessment in Goody's ruthless anatomization of Western assumptions about the prime location of the civilizing process. He leaves untouched the problem of why Western models have become so popular in other cultures in recent times, but will convince anyone hitherto unconvinced that Eurocentrism is useless as an organizing principle for a history of the world.

The challenges of Gamble and Smail seem fresh, new, and radical; those of Goody, though less unfamiliar, take the critique of Eurocentrism further than before. But historians are rarely willing to believe that there is anything new under the sun, and Anthony Grafton's adaptation of his Trevelyan Lectures on “historical thought before historicism” (254) reads like a treasure trove of contemporary historical concerns, anticipated by predecessors of three to five centuries ago. The historical writing of the era—most scholars of the time acknowledged—was both art and science, both critical and creative, constructed rather than captured unchanged from the sources. As resolutely as any advocate of “deep history,” practitioners of the ars historica debated the relative merits of textual and material evidence. “Antiquaries from Petrarch to Poggio and beyond paced the dark, filthy streets of Rome, hemmed in by medieval arches that projected from the house fronts and stumbling over animal carcasses, as they tried to establish the identity of monuments and buildings in the teeth of would-be helpful locals who assured them that every one was a bath” (83). Tomasso Campanella—outlandish in so many ways—was representative in his call for what we would now call “global” history, “weaving the traditions of all nations, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Tartars, and the inhabitants of the New World, into a single universal history of man” (29). François Baudouin anticipated current historians' cosmopolitanism, charging that “our own history” is “unintelligible without that of the so-called barbarians” and that “we dare not be ignorant of Saracen and Turkish history. We must not immediately classify as barbarous or condemn as unknown everything that is alien from our customs…” (117). Some historians in the seventeenth century tried to loosen Smail's “grip of sacred history,” pointing out that China and Egypt had long histories stretching back before the Flood.

Grafton reconstructs the story of the ars historica through fascinatingly detailed examinations of the work of key figures. As always with his writings, the sprezzatura of his delightful style makes the meticulous scholarship, strenuous analysis, and rigor of thought seem easy. The main problem he identifies is that of whether the practitioners of the ars were rhetoricians “within traditional boundaries” (28). He finds rather that they created a new, critical discipline, alert to the unique value of primary sources and ranging “across space and time” (33). The school collapsed, partly because of the dynamics of academia, which thrives on the rejection of tradition, partly because of contextual changes, and partly because the practitioners never resolved the dilemma of combining moral lessons with objective historiography—spanning, as Grafton puts it, “practical application and pure historicism.” The new departures in historical tradition that Gamble, Goody, and Smail recommend suggest that the dilemma of the ars historica is still with us. All three writers have convincing programs for enhancing our sense of what the past was like; all also have a moral agenda: the enlargement of our moral community to embrace the whole of the present and the past and to include, on an equal footing, all human cultures—and even, if we press Smail's and Gamble's cases to their logical conclusion, the cultures of some non-human or para-human creatures. How will the “global history” and “deep history” movements escape from the trammels in which the ars historica got trapped?