The division and discord of prehistoric chronologies

How ought we to do History outside of or adjacent to history? Since its recent origins—only some 150 to 200 years ago—prehistoric studies has been buffeted between several antehistorical or parahistorical narrative forms. Tightly linked to paleontology and geology, from which it in part sprung, its discourse naturally borrows from these disciplines a far-reaching evolutionary perspective, a Natural History of Man, as it were. But by claiming a place among the social sciences and by attempting to demonstrate that the History of Man did not begin with the invention of writing—but rather that those peoples without writing have a past that can be recounted—it strives to produce a narration of historical hue. And then, through its proximity to social anthropology, prehistoric studies also attempts to enter into the intimacy of these remote peoples’ practices and values and to express the resulting interpretations in the form of a veritable ethnology of prehistoric times. To what degree do these different narrative forms harmonize to provide a coherent vision of the progression of Man and his societies from the depths of our Paleolithic roots up to the gates of history? Conversely, to what degree are these differing aspirations opposed? Tracking from Mortillet through Breuil to Leroi-Gourhan, from the first presentations of prehistoric times up through more recent interpretations, this contribution demonstrates how far these different orientations have gone toward producing radically different accounts of nature, whose use ultimately influences our understanding of prehistoric chronologies. To provide an account of a continuous and seemingly homogeneous unwinding of time—from the oldest part of the Paleolithic to the Neolithic and from Homo ergaster’s slow expansion over the globe several millions of years ago up to the first farmers’ Neolithic “revolution” a few millennia before our era—cannot mask the inconstancy of the underlying narrative in its principles and even its sources. These fluctuations delineate the question of the invention of the arts, a subject that effectively illuminates some of these contradictions with regard to notions of transformation