In 1928, naturalist Henry Beston famously wrote that our fellow animals are “gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings,” he added. ”They are other nations.”

Beston employed this turn of phrase to make a fundamental point: humankind is not the standard by which other species should be judged. 

That worldview would have come as a surprise to the leading thinkers from the Age of Discovery. Even as Columbus was sailing the ocean blue, many of the world's top scientists and writers were still extolling the virtues of an ancient ranking system known as the Great Chain of Being. On the top rung of that hierarchy was, of course, God. Below Him were angels, followed by all of humankind, from kings and queens to commoners and thieves.

Who could possibly be lower than the lowly thieves? This, the Great Chain said, was the domain inhabited by nonhuman animals.

An evolving definition

This supremacist mindset was evident in the introduction of the term civilization, which was created to distinguish between what Europeans deemed refined and advanced societies from supposedly primitive or savage ones. Suffice it to say that the criteria used to make such an assessment was plainly self-serving and based on a narrow set of European norms. 

The Inca, for instance, earned enormous respect from the Spaniards for their great works of architecture, but were nonetheless deemed a “backward” society due to their lack of a written alphabet and non-Christian belief system. 

Nomads like Bedouins and Kazakhs, whose traditional oral storytelling was too often mistaken for myth, were viewed as living artifacts who were inherently less civilized. 

“Nomads have no history,” the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze later wrote. “They only have geography.” Prejudices also prevented European colonists from acknowledging the impressive stone wall and tower constructions built in the........

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