The New History Association has published a book titled The Origins of the Human Genus, Society, and Modern Humans in Finnish. It is the first part of a planned book series A Proposal for a New History of Humankind. The author, Pertti Koskela, is a researcher, writer, and translator. The English translation of the book is in progress.
Pertti Koskela:
Ihmissuvun, yhteiskunnan ja ihmisen synty
(link to the Kindle edition on Amazon)
Read more about the topics of Koskela’s coming book series:
What is a human being? What are the causes of the self-destructiveness of the human species? These questions are before us more pressing than ever.
The empirical disciplines that study the difference between humans and animals and prehistory have achieved path-breaking new results since the 1950s. Besides, in recent years and decades, several significant works have been published, in which the latest knowledge on prehistory is combined with an overall view of the history of humankind.
Do these studies and works unravel the mystery of humans? If not – why?
To unravel the mystery of humans, we need philosophy-led interdisciplinarity, a philosophy of history. Yet, so far, such has been largely absent from the debate on the subject.
In the coming book series, the entire human journey up to the present day and the future will be gone through in the light of the philosophy of history of the Finnish philosopher Matti Puolakka (1947-2018).
The first part covers the origin and development of the Homo genus up to the birth of society and modern humans about 60,000 years ago. Koskela takes an extensive look at the results of prehistoric research from the 1950s to the very recent years. He also comments on well-known scholars and authors, including Frans de Waal, Richard Leakey, Glynn Isaac, Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Yuval Noah Harari and, most recently, David Graeber and David Wengrow.
The book also includes an essay on the difference between humans and animals and an introduction to the life and work of Matti Puolakka. The theoretical foundations of Puolakka’s philosophy of history are presented in an article by Heli Santavuori.
The launch of the Finnish edition of Graeber and Wengrow’s book Dawn of Everything – A New History of Humanity will take place on 9 September 2022. The book has attracted great attention around the world. We have a lot of respect for these authors, but we also have criticisms of their book. Criticisms are briefly presented in the recent book of Pertti Koskela. In fact, Koskela’s book is, as such, a critique of Graeber and Wengrow as they claim that “for the most part, we don’t have the slightest idea” about the 2.5 million years of human prehistory. The Dawn of Everything starts from the prehistoric period to which the Part 1 of Koskela’s book series ends. The New History Association intends to participate actively in the debate on the book both in Finland and internationally.
