My mother zipped up my yellow polyester jacket and told me we were headed off to the park. The instant we arrived, I sprinted to the slide and eagerly climbed its stairs. As I neared the top, my mother’s shout startled me. “Be careful or you’ll fall and break your neck!”

This was one of many moments when my mother, always on the lookout for danger, swiftly reeled me in. By the time I was five, I had learned to tuck away my excitement and replace it with caution and vigilance.

What happened to me next? Did my childhood repression of excitement doom me to a future without it? Or did a dormant excitement awaken in adolescence and blossom in adulthood?

Psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and archeologists are pondering a very similar question about humanity. They are examining scattered pieces of our prehistory and asking: What can our shared past tell us about our collective future?

We hold two misconceptions about our early history that limit our beliefs about our future. The first originates with Thomas Hobbes and the second with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In the influential 1651 publication, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes imagines prehistoric humans living in a terrifying world characterized by brutality, anarchy, and the code of “kill or be killed.” Humanity’s rescue only arrives sometime around the 1500s in the form of a government system enforcing inflexible laws and reining in our violent natures. Humanity’s future, per Hobbes, must be either survival under harsh rule or a return to kill-or-be-killed.

In his widely distributed 1754 publication, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagines an entirely different........

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