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Who are you calling a Neanderthal? Theories of pre-history are a mirror on their times What humans’ perspective on the past says about them The Invention of Pre-history. By Stefanos Geroulanos. Liveright; 512 pages; $29.99 and £22.99 There is no doubt that the past can shape the future in profound ways: consider climate change, for instance. It is also true that imagined pasts can influence real-world events. Vladimir Putin invokes history to justify his invasion of Ukraine, picturing it as a child that was snatched from Mother Russia and should be returned. Ukrainians see things differently. This clash of visions underpins the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945. Imagined histories can shape the present in subtler ways, too. Take pre-history, the 3m or so years of human evolution before the invention of writing (thought to be in the fourth millennium bc). A new book by Stefanos Geroulanos, a professor of European intellectual history at New York University, offers a sweeping explora
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