ABSTRACT
The authors focus on what they might call reverse hauntings: the signals, messages and warnings of phantasms that come to them from the future rather than from the past. The cultural evolution of the human species since the paintings of the Chauvet Cave has been accompanied with what they might call spectral evolution. The terrifying landscapes of human vermin and the seascapes of vast sea-creatures are descriptions of a Europe which Lautreamont was visualising. The evolution of human and spectral cultures witness moments of catastrophe that might be averted if the ghost from the future is heeded. The ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene, itself emerging not just in the 'Great Acceleration' of industrialisation but in the early Neolithic interventions into agriculture and the domination of nature, threatens the very future 'evolution of biological entities'. If humans disappear so may their ghosts and those ghosts offer them a warning about that future.
