On the Beginning of Human History

On the Beginning of Human History (Problems of Paleopsychology) is a philosophical and natural-scientific treatise by Soviet historian Boris Fyodorovich Porshnev, dedicated to the problems of anthropogenesis. The initial concept for a book on human prehistory dates back to 1924, although Porshnev directly addressed the topic of the emergence of Homo sapiens in the 1950s in connection with his interest in troglodytidae and the issue of the "snowman". After 1968, the researcher's work was entirely devoted to writing and publishing On the Beginning of Human History, which he considered the main research work of his life.

The book presents a complex interdisciplinary study at the intersection of physical anthropology, evolutionary psychology, sociology, philosophy of history, and other disciplines. The "beginning" highlighted in the title was, in the author's view, is a key to the entire complex of sciences about human society and the individual within society, creating a research program. For Porshnev, there was a fundamental distinction between humans and all other animals (an "evolutionary gap"), rooted in creativity, which is absent in any animal, even in rudimentary form.

B. F. Porshnev's theory of anthropogenesis centers on the “individual-to-individual” model of interaction rather than the “individual-to-environment” approach. He traced the emergence of human communication, consciousness, and creativity from physiological mechanisms of animal interaction, arguing that human labor originated among Tertiary-period troglodytids—corpse-eating scavengers who accidentally mastered fire while processing bones. Their evolving behavior led to intra-species hunting and eventually to the ecological divergence that produced Homo neanderthalensis. Porshnev's monograph, completed in 1972, was initially censored for revising Marxist interpretations of human evolution and published in abridged form in 1974; restored editions appeared from the 1990s onward.