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The crucial defamiliarization of 19th‐century French science set up via the Alexandrian Schools in Part Two allows Hilarion to return as intermediary/antagonist once more, this time as commentator‐double of Étienne Geoffroy Saint‐Hilaire as Starr has argued. This chapter however fills crucial gaps in Starr's arguments by elucidating previously unacknowledged 19th‐century intertexts and their importance for tableau five. Its parades of Nature gods (from India to the more familiar Rome and Gaul) turn myth language into 19th‐century scientific ‘story‐telling’ in deep time—geology and palaeontology—to describe creation. Saint‐Hilaire's growing discord with Cuvier is set in place for tableau seven and provides a solution for the knotty problem of Hilarion's departure and the arrival of the Devil (incredibly as Science) at the end of the tableau.

This chapter focuses on visions of Patagonia as the origin of the world in the work of the renowned Argentine scientist Florentino Ameghino (1854–1911), and particularly on his recourse to indigenous myth in the development of his (later discredited) theories of biological evolution. In the fin-de-siècle ‘bone rush’ in Patagonia, fossils became monuments of national wealth and a staging-ground for the battles of evolution between fossilized tribes. This scientific re-reading of the landscape questioned dominant narratives of prehistory, placing Patagonia not at the end of the world but at its origin. Ameghino’s fossils, often bigger and more complete than those of North America or Europe, provide the foundation for a strategic inversion of such narratives, constructing Patagonia as the site of the monumental ruins of a glorious past of biological supremacy. His theories of racial evolution were later disproved, but his work demonstrates the power of the paleontological imagination in constructing discourses on race in South America and beyond. Moreover, Ameghino’s hybrid brand of naturalism, which combines indigenous mythologies with Western knowledge, represents a fascinating example of how histories of local geographical and archaeological discourses developed at the dawn of the twentieth century.

The human origins story (palaeoanthropology) is often set in the African Palaeotropics, yet the Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR) plays an internationally prominent role that surpasses its small size. Some of the earliest evidence for the complex behaviours associated with fully modern humans is found here, with prehistoric stone age hunter-gatherers adapting to a unique and changing environment from about 1 million years ago to near-present. The GCFR has an astonishing variety of vegetation types, an unparalleled diversity and abundance of geophytic plants, and a resource-rich coastline. These features had a dominating influence on the adaptations and demography of past hunter-gatherer societies. The GCFR had a relatively stable palaeoclimate through the Pleistocene, but the landscape changed dramatically as the now-submerged Palaeo-Agulhas Plain expanded and contracted. The palaeontology of the region shows it provided grasslands supporting the large ungulates that dominate the Pleistocene faunal assemblages, and a habitat to hunter-gatherers that is absent through the Holocene. Late in the Pleistocene early modern humans figured out how to exploit coastal resources, and shortly after this there is a florescence in complexity in material culture. But the rapidly changing sea levels of the Pleistocene may have held in check the tendency of coastal hunter-gatherer economies to rise in population and complexity. With the Holocene, world climate enters a peculiar phase of stability, and like many areas of the world, populations rise and coastal adaptations ratchet up in complexity, only to be overcome by a militarily superior pastoral economy around 1,800 years ago.

History is bunk—or so Henry Ford is reputed to have said. Folk memory, though, simplifies recorded statements. What Henry Ford actually told the Chicago Tribune was ‘History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only tradition that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.’ So folk memory, in this case, did pretty well reflect the kernel of his views. Henry Ford also said that ‘Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it; if you are sick, you shouldn’t take it.’ Henry Ford was a very powerful, very rich man of strongly expressed views. And he was quite wrong on both counts. Not having known Henry Ford, interplanetary explorers may have their own view of history. As, perhaps, an indispensable means of understanding the present and of predicting the future. As a way of deducing how the various phenomena—physical, chemical, and biological—on any planet operate. And as a means of avoiding the kind of mistake—such as resource exhaustion or intra-species war—that could terminate the ambitions of any promising and newly emerged intelligent life-form. On Earth, and everywhere else, things are as they are because they have developed that way. The history of that development must be worked out from tangible evidence: chiefly the objects and traces of past events and processes preserved on this planet itself. The surface of the Earth is no place to preserve deep history. This is in spite of—and in large part because of—the many events that have taken place on it. The surface of the future Earth, one hundred million years from now, will not have preserved evidence of contemporary human activity. One can be quite categorical about this. Whatever arrangement of oceans and continents, or whatever state of cool or warmth will exist then, the Earth’s surface will have been wiped clean of human traces. For the Earth is active. It is not just an inert mass of rock, an enormous sphere of silicates and metals to be mined by its freight of organisms, much as caterpillars chew through leaves.