Jean-Jacques Hublin (ed.)
Prehistory : between utopia and reality
A book that invites us to come face-to-face with our most distant ancestors, at the crossroads of science and the imaginary.
The discovery of prehistory aroused an extraordinary fascination : from the XIXthcentury onwards, scientists and artists alike were enthusiastic about a mysterious era that they helped to define as much as to invent. A scientific object, prehistory also became a fertile continent of the imagination, a lost world that scientists, writers, painters and sculptors filled with their hypotheses and reveries, often unusual or spectacular, sometimes contradictory.
So what was prehistory : the Stone Age synonymous with the Age of Plenty, the Golden Age of Mankind, or a war of fire by all against all ? While research is making immense progress, it is also being constructed in a game of mirrors in which each generation projects its aspirations and fantasies, constantly producing new images of our origins.
The present book confronts this dreamed, imagined, even utopian Prehistory with the facts and data of the most recent science.
Contributions by Juan Luis Arsuaga, Bruno Boulestin, Claudine Cohen, Vincent Corpet, Noël Coye, Christophe Darmangeat, Élisabeth Daynès, Carole Fritz, Marc Guillaumie, Grégoire Hallé, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Arnaud Hurel, Hugo Meijer, Sélim Natahi, Sandrine Prat, Nohemi Sala, Pierre Schoentjes, Catherine Schwab, Gilles Tosello and Clément Zanolli.
Hublin J.-J. (dir.), Préhistoire : entre utopie et réalité, Paris, Collège de France, coll. " Catalogues d'exposition ", 2026, 248 p.
ISBN : 978-2-7226-0882-5
Price : 32 €
Publication : 16 April 2026
