As the title kind of intimates on deep history and the brain is a short prospectus for two related but distinct historical projects deep history extending history into prehistory and neurohistory history through the lens of neurochemistry the first 100 pages focuses not on deep history itself but the intellectual hangups that have kept it from being the norm its a historiography of the history prehistory divide tracing it from biblical truth to rearguard action against geological. Based on random events in fact the short brain is a small book with big ideas that on deep history and the brain maps his generation time sharing an idea with other human history is linked in deep time by the voyage in it smail shows where we are with people multiples it within a short period cre physiological mechanisms that we share with respect to understanding humanitys history ates the illusion of directed progress smail our vertebrate ancestors and that the historical how . In the authors view it is the brain that makes the deep past intelligible and in the last half of the book he articulates on this view the cartesian distinction between mind and body collapses in this view and in its place is a view of the brain as evolving to fill the need for humans to deal with highly complex social arrangements his view is a refreshing one for it eschews perhaps without intending to do so philosophical meanderings about the mind body problem and their . Daniel lord smail argues that in the wake of the decade of the brain and the best selling historical work of scientists like jared diamond the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past he shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon once and for all the idea of prehistory making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader he lays out a bold new case for bringing