Deep Animal Prehistory: Gathering Feral Voices from Vanished Pleistocene Worlds

The deep past harbours exceptionally rich and diverse communities of non-human animals and iconic species such as mammoth and reindeer are in the focus of popular and academic narratives on early human evolution. Yet paradoxically, the large majority of research on this critical timeframe continues to reinforce human-centred understandings of deep history and tends to overlook or even dismiss the role of animals as active agents and potent history-makers. This paper first identifies three influential intellectual orientations which have contributed to this marginalization of past animal agencies and legacies: Anthropocentrism, environmental determinism and radical relationism. It then motivates and frames the project of ‘Deep Animal Prehistory’ (DAP) in an attempt to overcome some of the limitations tied to these orientations and to make space for the self-sufficient analysis of animals’ varied yet significant contributions to the remote past. This proposal discloses a suite of new arguments for the importance and necessity of studying animal agency in the deep past, illustrating some of the advantages of adopting, developing and pursing a zoocentric research perspective. I integrate key ideas and insights from human-animal studies and animal history with theories, taxonomies and perspectives from ecology, evolution, animal ethology and comparative behaviour studies, providing a preliminary inventory of valuable concepts to trace, discuss and compare how non-human animals have influenced and shaped shared planetary pasts. In concluding, the paper situates DAP within a broader, life-oriented approach to historical processes. It formulates a first critique on persistent anthropocentric tropes and categorisations in current palaeoarchaeological research and catalogues emerging opportunities of empirical investigation and theory-building with the promise to counterbalance human-centred readings of the past, re-instating other animals to the heart of deep-historical accounts, narratives and debates