It may be vital to our sanity that the distant past should be to us shrouded in mystery. What ever the reasons, since the 19th century ‘mystery’ has been deemed intolerable, and we have consequently devised all sorts of new hypotheses to explain the prehistoric world which are in effect nothing but new mythologies.
We have not, that is to say, become any the less ‘mythological’ than our ancestors: we have simply traded in a superior mythology for an inferior one. The old mythologies at least were sane insofar as they were rooted in tradition and human nature, and moreover were acknowledged from the outset as being metaphysical and mysterious and ‘uncertain’ (consider, for instance, the Socratic ‘likely myth’).
But in our quest for Absolute Certainty—and coupled with the rejection of tradition and its associated belief in an objective human nature—we have invented narratives full of infinitely more preposterous notions than what our ancestors believed. We have swapped a shroud of admitted ‘mystery’ for a new shroud of only pretended ‘certainty’. The pretense of certainty, where there in fact is none, is what makes the new myth more illusory—indeed more ‘shrouded’—than the old ones, which never made any claim to such certitude to begin with.