On the Beginning of Human History

On the Beginning of Human History is a book published posthumously in an abridged version. With this book, Porshnev, an early Soviet admirer of Foucault and at the time already enjoying international recognition as a historian of seventeenth-century France, ventured into an area which he termed "paleopsychology". Designed as the middle part of a large three-part work to be titled "A Critique of Human History", the book was intended to address the question of anthropogenesis, thus establishing (in fact, shortening radically) the true duration of human history and using this new premise to address the law of acceleration that Porshnev believed to be at work, as well as its implications for Marxism and for communist society. Although often questionable in its anthropological hypotheses, Porshnev's book - indeed his entire unfinished project - displayed a major forte: in marrying history and paleopsychology, Porshnev was committed to historicising the very foundation of history - the human species that had so far been taken as an immutable substance.