Afterword

Summary

This volume opened with a some comments on how the understandings of the past have operated in the present: and it may be said that an agenda for the present is implicit in any assessment of the past – all history is in some degree, contemporary history. This would not be a false assessment of the present work. While I have endeavoured to be scrupulous in my procedures and exact in my citations, I could not have, and have not tried, to put Husserlian brackets around the world I live in whilst reading the traces of that world's past. Reverberations of current controversies are therefore to be found in many places throughout the text, and it is therefore appropriate that I should conclude by specifying what the implications of this narrative are, and are not, for the present. I may begin with the polemic that opened this work, which was directed against the notion that present-day social and ethnic divisions track ancient genetic distinctions. This is not a claim that extant social groups may not have measurable differences, phenotypic or genotypic. It does deny that their contemporary social situation is causally linked to those differences, and indeed that their current situation is necessarily an ancestral one.