Prehistory is all about taking the long view. But living in this maelstrom that perspective is difficult.

The pandemic affects all archaeologists; from the closure of heritage sites, to furloughing staff, the added workload of rapidly devising online teaching, cancelling exhibitions, the disruption to research students because museum collections, libraries, and laboratories are closed, and fieldwork postponed. And that’s before we get to the challenges of home-schooling, isolation, and worrying about keeping everyone at arms-length.

But the long view remains important, and not just because we know Covid-19 will, someday, be recent history. Prehistory makes sense of how we came to be in a situation where we are easy prey for a colonizing virus. Deep history records how we settled the earth but kept numbers small. The best guess for global population at the end of the ice age is 7 million; equivalent to one large city today in a population that has passed 7 billion. And between these two figures there was the experience of settling down in communities based on farming. Only prehistory covers both histories at a world scale and over many millennia. Both histories show what was needed. To settle the earth, we needed to live apart, yet somehow stay in touch. Living together in larger communities needed ways to regulate how we made daily contact. Absence and presence, pulling apart and pushing together, prehistorians have documented and explained how people acted creatively to shape social life long before writing and digital communication added its veneer.

The direction of deep history, like Darwin’s evolution, is blind. The virus, an unintended consequence of population explosion in the last 300 years, reminds us of this.

Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society is published annually by Cambridge

Clive Gamble is President of the Prehistoric Society. His book Settling the Earth: the archaeology of deep human history was published by Cambridge in 2013.