Several of the natural sciences – geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, and archaeology – purport to give us knowledge of prehistory. By “prehistory” I just mean everything that happened before the invention of writing made it possible for people to leave written testimony for later investigators. This book is about those sciences, though it deals mainly with the quintessentially historical sciences of paleontology and geology. There are limitations and obstructions to our knowledge of prehistory that do not similarly constrain our knowledge of the present microphysical world. Putting it very roughly for now, this means that there is a sense in which we can know more about the tiny than we can know about the past. This is an example of an epistemic asymmetry, or lopsidedness in our scientific knowledge. In this opening chapter, I present and explain the sources of this asymmetry. I then go on to indicate why I think this asymmetry is so important, and why philosophers, scientists, and indeed anyone with an interest in the scientific study of the past, ought to care about it.

I begin by attempting to convince you that this epistemic asymmetry between the past and the tiny is real, and that it is something we must contend with. Next, I will show how we might go about explaining this epistemic asymmetry in terms of two deeper asymmetries, which I will call the asymmetry of manipulability, and the role asymmetry of background theories.