Lost Worlds: Maybe we can learn

Find Michele at bookclues.com

The world you take for granted is younger than you think and it was never guaranteed. We sit down with Patrick Wyman, creator of Tides of History and Past Lives and author of Lost Worlds; How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World to trace the volatile 10,000-year span after the last Ice Age when farming, herding, villages, social hierarchies, and writing begin to reshape human life. Along the way, we confront a simple driver behind almost everything: the hunt for calories and the constant fear of starvation that organized societies for millennia.

Patrick explains why the Neolithic period isn’t a clean “before and after” moment, but a messy overlap of experiments, migration, and collapse. Ancient DNA technology, isotope analysis, and paleoenvironmental research now let historians see population replacement, unexpected ancestry, and the ways demography responds to perceived scarcity. We talk about the Anzick child in Montana and what one 13,000-year-old burial reveals about the deep roots of Indigenous history across North America.

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Find Patrick at  instagram.com/wyman_patrick/

Transcript

Welcome To Crossword

Michele McAloon 0:02

Hey folks, you're listening to Crossword where Cultural Clues Lead to the Truth of the Word. And my name is Michele McAloon, your host. You can find out more about me at bookclues.com. And in a season of just great nonfiction historical narratives, we've got another winner of a book by a man named Patrick Wyman. Patrick Wyman may be familiar to you through his podcasts of I believe on Rome, of Tides of History and Past Lives. They are fantastically recorded, really interesting. Make sure you'll listen to it after you listen to mine. Like and subscribe. And all I can say is buy some of these books. They and great Father's Day gift. This would be a great Father's Day gift, too. Just some great books coming out. Happy reading. God bless. All right, folks. We have a star on the show today. He is a podcasting star. And it's none other than Patrick Wyman, who is coming to us from California. He's one of the most popular history podcasters in the world. And his shows fall of Rome and Tides of History. After my podcast, this is the second one you need to listen to. It is fabulous. It's been downloaded more than 60 million times. He's the author of The Verge Reformation, Renaissance and 40 Years That Shook the World. And he has written a book that we're going to talk about today. His essays on history and culture have appeared in Atlantic, Slate, and Mother Jones. He received a PhD in history from the University of SoCal, Southern California. And in a past life, he recover he covered the sport of mixed martial arts for Gleacher Report, Deadspin, and The Washington Post. Have you ever been on Joe Rogan?

Patrick Wyman 1:54

I have not been on Joe Rogan, but our paths crossed when I was covering the sport. Again, in what feels like a very long ago time before Joe Rogan was maybe had maybe the biggest media platform in the country when he was still just talking about fights and had a show on Ustream. Like that was again it it feels like a very long time ago now. Looking back on it, I'm never not convinced that there's been some sort of rupture in the space-time continuum in the intervening years.

The Big Timeline Shift

Michele McAloon 2:21

Oh my goodness. Well, you know what? He needs to have you on. You would be a great conversation. Okay. Patrick Wyman has written a buster of a book. And it's called Lost Worlds: How Humans Who Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World in is from an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. And it is a great book. And it is basically about ancient man. So, Patrick, let's start with a timeline to begin with. We're not talking prehistoric. We are talking prehistoric man, but we're not talking what we think. Define where we are in time because that is really informational in your book and pivotal in your book.

Patrick Wyman 3:02

Yeah, so there's human history extends back a really, really, really long time, right? The earliest anatomically modern human remains that have been found at this point are more than 300,000 years old. They're from Jabalikud in Morocco. We have more anatomically modern human remains that are 200,000 years old from East Africa. We have hundreds of thousands of years of history as a species. But at the end of the last ice age, around 13,000 years ago, things seem to change. They change pretty dramatically and they change pretty fast. And almost everything that we think of as being the roots of human civilization as we have it today comes about in the 10,000 years after the end of the ice age. So we get the invention of farming, we get the domestication of animals, we get the like dogs had already been domesticated by that point, but we get the domestication of cattle, goats, sheep, all of these other things that fill our lives. We get people settling down into villages, towns, and then cities. We get the development of states, of social hierarchies with kings at the top. We get the introduction of writing. All of this stuff happens in this 10,000-year period. It doesn't happen before that. We're not entirely sure why, given these hundreds of thousands of years of existence. But we've got this 10,000-year chunk. It goes from the end of the Ice Age to the end of the Bronze Age. And at the start of that, you would never predict a world like the one we have today. At the end of it, that world is, if not like looming over the horizon, it is at least thinkable. We have cities, we have rulers, we have the vague outlines of a world that resembles our own.

Michele McAloon 4:39

Okay, so we're basically talking 10,000 to 11,000 years ago up to one up to 1,000 BC, right?

Patrick Wyman 4:48

Yeah, up to 13,000 years ago to about 3,000 years ago.

What The Neolithic Really Means

Michele McAloon 4:52

Okay. So and this is, and it's called the Neolithic period versus the Paleolithic versus the Mesolithic. Why is it called the Neolithic period?

Patrick Wyman 5:01

So in this period, the very, very, very beginning of it falls into the end of the Paleolithic, the Upper Paleolithic. Then we have the Mesolithic, which takes up a chunk of this time, but the vast bulk of it is taken up by the Neolithic, and that is the period that's the new Stone Age, Neolithic, and that is the period in which farming spreads across the globe. So we have multiple different centers of domestication where plants are domesticated, where people learn to farm. In the Fertile Crescent in West Asia, we have wheat and barley, goats, sheep, cattle, things like that. In New Guinea, we have sugarcane, bananas, taro. In the Yellow River Valley of China, we have millet. In the Yangtze, we have rice. We have tons of these different centers of domestication around the planet, but all of them pop into existence after the end of the last ice age. And all of this belongs in the period that we call the Holocene, which is the current geological epoch that we're living in.

Michele McAloon 5:57

Okay. This is going to sound kind of like a probably a silly question, but I'm known for silly questions. So I'm going to ask anyway. If I met on the street someone 10,000 years ago from the the very end of the ice age, what does he look like or what does she look like? Do we look familiar? Do we I mean we're we're upright? We're Oh yeah. Yeah.

Ancient DNA Changes Everything

Patrick Wyman 6:22

They are these people are are like us in every way that matters. And for that matter, you could take a Neanderthal, especially a kind of a later Neanderthal from, say, 40,000 years ago. You could take someone an a member of an archaic human species, dress them in a suit and walk them down the street, and you may not be able to recognize them. The picture that we have of especially archaic humans as being so unlike us and covered in hair and misshapen and lump into our eyes. There's some truth to that. There would be some aspects of the visual appearance of a different human species that would be jarring. Brow ridges, for example, though I don't know, some of the places I've been, I've seen plenty of people with brow ridges. I've seen some knuckle dragging too. Yeah, I mean, I like like they would fall very slightly outside the range of normal human diversity today. But somebody 10,000 years ago is is an anatomically modern human. Their features might look unlike populations that we're familiar with today. So, for example, Mesolithic people, so this is the group of people that inhabited Western Europe after the end of the ice age. For about 5,000 years, these people were around. But they had a physical profile that was unlike any living group today. They tended to have really striking blue eyes, dark hair, and dark skin. And there is not a group like that on the planet today. In the basic sense, yeah, they're completely like us. They have language, they are capable of everything we're capable of, same emotional range. In every way that matters, they are effectively indistinguishable from us.

Michele McAloon 7:53

Okay, one of the things that your book really brings out and does really well is that there's no cut and dry period of starting. That the that it is continuously, it is about decline, building, overlapping. And actually, our look in the past has been erroneous, that we have kind of seen it as a linear development where it really hasn't been. DNA technology has really helped us understand that. Uh explain a little bit about that because that's a really interesting point.

The Anzick Child In Montana

Patrick Wyman 8:25

Yeah. So one of the really cool things about trying to understand this period now in a way that we couldn't have even 20 years ago, much less 30 or 40 years ago, we have all of these new techniques that can shed light on the distant past. And I think the poster child for this, and there are dozens of new techniques, they range from paleoenvironmental analysis to tell us what was happening in ancient environments to isotope analysis of human remains. So we can tell what people were eating. We can tell the kind of mixture of foods that people were consuming. But the real poster child for this is ancient DNA technology. So we can extract surviving DNA from human bone or animal bone for that matter, but it's generally applied to humans. And from that, we can get a snapshot of every individual's ancestry. We can literally look at their genes. We can see was this person lactose tolerant? We can see how tall were they likely to be. We can see were they prone to heart disease? We can see what were their hair and eye color. But the biggest thing that we can tell is their ancestry because we inherit our DNA from our parents. When we start going back in time, the number of ancestors every individual has piles up really, really, really quickly. You know, you have two parents, but by the time we start going back in time, the numbers pile up really, really fast. And so by the time we're 10 generations back, we're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of ancestors. So every individual's genome is a snapshot not just of their own ancestry, but of the ancestry of all of those other people going back in time. And when we start to accumulate multiple samples of ancient human DNA, we can compare them to each other. We can see the relationships between groups of people in the past. And one of the things that we find when we see this, to your point, is a massive amount of discontinuity in the population record. So it's not like people move in someplace and then that group of people stays there forever. That group of people might find enormous success and grow from a tiny, tiny little group of a few hundred people to one with millions and millions of descendants. Or you might have a group that comes in, exists for a while, and then for whatever reason, they disappear. They don't have enough babies, disease, the environmental conditions get too hard. Another group comes in and wipes them out. All of these things happen in the historical and archaeological record. And what we can see now is those things happening because we have access to these forms of evidence. So we can see, for example, in the ice age, in this time immemorial of humans chasing big grazers like woolly mammoth or reindeer or woolly rhinoceros across the frozen tundra. In Europe, for example, it is not one group that does this. It is a succession of different unrelated groups. They have no genetic relationship to each other that come in over the course of tens of thousands of years. So we see a pattern of repeated colonization, failure, and then recolonization. And this is something that we see throughout human history is the people who were living there 5,000 years ago may not have been the same people who were living there 4,000 years ago, who were living there 3,000 years ago, and so on.

Michele McAloon 11:35

Okay. Yeah, it's really that's really interesting because you talk about Anzac, I think, or Anzac, the baby in Montana, and how they were able to trace that these people basically peopled South America and North America.

Patrick Wyman 11:50

13,000 years ago, there was a baby buried in Montana. We call this the Anzic site, and there are two sets of remains that were that were recovered from there. The one that they were able to extract DNA from both of them, the older one is Anzic one. This was an infant. It was probably about a year old when he died, about 13,000 years ago. And this is the only set of human remains that has ever been discovered in association with the earliest widespread artifacts in the Americas. These belong to a group called the Clovis culture. What researchers found when they analyzed the DNA of this child, who is the, again, the only person, the only physical human being we know associated with these with these archaeological artifacts, they found that his group, not him specifically, because he died when he was a year old, but his the group to which he belonged was ancestral to all later indigenous people in North America. This was a very small group of people, maybe a few dozen, a couple hundred at most. And everybody, all of the millions upon millions upon millions of people who have lived in the Americas since then, from 13,000 years ago onward, have uh are descended at least in part, if not entirety, from that group.

Hunger, Demography, And Survival

Michele McAloon 12:58

Okay. One thing that you really really impressive in your book, all this movement of people, all this development of people really came down to about three things the environment, demography, migration. But the thing behind all of it all, they were chasing a good meal. They were looking for food, right? And that was really the motivation behind, I mean, for at least 10,000 years was how you're going to feed yourself, right?

Patrick Wyman 13:23

Yeah. I mean, I think until very recently, like, I don't think we understand quite how recent this shift is. I mean, this happened within within the living memory of our great grandparents, I would say, is the time when this transition really took place, to where not everybody on the planet had to be worried first and foremost about getting about where their next meal was going to come from. That for the almost the entirety of human existence, fear of starvation has been our motivating factor for doing almost everything that we do. That is the most basic need that we can account for. And basically every human society has been organized at a basic level. The most fundamental thing you got to take care of is your subsistence. It is, how do you get enough calories to keep your body moving? And there's an almost infinite number of ways to do that, depending on where you live, depending on what kinds of technologies you have access to, what ideas you have about what kinds of foods you're supposed to eat. All of this matters, but until the 19th century, basically, every almost everyone alive was, first and foremost, producing food for consumption. Even when we're talking about the Middle Ages, 80, 90% of people are farmers. Food production or food collection is the single most important thing we can do. This is at the root of everything else. If you've got caloric surpluses, people can have babies. If you've got caloric deficits, people are much less likely to have babies. That people respond to their perception of the availability of resources. And so, like, I mean, this is a big topic right now in across the world is why aren't people having more babies? Well, it's not so much an objective lack of resources as it is the perception of resource scarcity, that there's just not enough to go around or that life is going to be harder than it needs to be. And people make decisions about how many children they're going to have, how many children they can support. Not just do the babies that are born survive. Like people exercise agency over their reproduction, have the number of children basically that they think they can afford to support. This is the demography aspect that plays into subsistence. Environments set the parameters within which people operate, and environments are constantly changing. They're changing at every scale, from the global to the micro-local. You cannot count on the conditions that existed 200 years ago continuing to exist. There are droughts, there are shifts in patterns of atmospheric circulation, there are changes in the amount of sunlight reaching the planet's surface. All of these things matter. We cannot always figure out exactly how they matter or exactly how they impact the choices that people were making, but they were impacting the choices that people made. And we can see that relationship often enough that we know it is foundational to why things happened the way they did.

Climate Sets Limits, Not Fate

Michele McAloon 16:09

Oh, absolutely. And you're a historian. And if you read enough history in time, you understand how much the environment does play a factor into our human existence and how much it has changed. It's not pinpointed. Get off a little side here, but you know, our modern-day man, we want to pinpoint it at right there. This is what it is, this is what it's supposed to be. Like, no, folks, it's always been changing. And we just how we relate to that change, you know, do we need to be good stewards? Yes, all of that good stuff. But there's some inevitability about the environment that we really don't have a lot of control of over.

Patrick Wyman 16:46

Yeah, we do not control the circumstances with which the environment provides us, by and large. I mean, that's uh anthropogenic climate change is a slightly different question, but but at the same time, like most people are not actively contributing to global scale planetary changes. They are responding to those changes. There's some human agency involved in creating the shifts, but for the most part, we are we are prisoners of that. The way in which we're not prisoners is how we individually and how we as societies make choices about how to respond to those things. And societies do make choices. Even not making a choice is a choice. Even just deciding we're gonna keep going, doing, we're we're gonna ride this tiger and see where it goes is a choice. This is one of the things I found really interesting when researching the book is there wasn't a direct correlation between kind of the perceived difficulty of a climatic challenge and people's ability to weather it. So there are incidents in the climatic record that don't look all that serious, like a drought that lasts for four or five years in Mycenaean Greece. This is at the very end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC. There's what looks to be what looks to my eyes like a fairly minor drought. And yet it correlates precisely with the time in which this whole society of palaces, the society that inspired Homer's Iliad, all of the ships going over to Troy, these come from Mycenaean Greece. The society that produced that absolutely collapsed. And about at least half, if not three quarters, of the population of Greece was gone within a century. All of the palaces were gone. You have what looks like a complete collapse of the social order in this time and place. And it's correlated, maybe not caused by, but correlated with what seems to me to be not an especially difficult drought. Conversely, in the Indus Valley civilization of South Asia, which is look at in the Indus Valley region of what's now Pakistan and India, they were faced with decades-long, absolutely apocalyptic droughts. And they weathered them for about 200 years before that society finally fell apart. So in dealing with what were objectively much more difficult climatic events, that society nevertheless managed to deal with them for centuries. Or you look at the Andean coastline of South America, which is one of the harshest places on the planet you can live, this thin strip of coastal desert between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, with almost no running water going through it, almost no rainfall. There, climate change is a way of life. You have enormous El Nino events that strike with real frequency. This is a fact of life. Shorelines are going to erode. There are going to be storms. People came to terms with it. And the way they went about their lives involved this constant process of rebuilding and adaptation to their circumstances. So climate is not destiny. It does set the parameters, but we have to make choices within that. And we make choices at individual levels and we make choices at societal levels.

Doggerland And A Drowning World

Michele McAloon 19:41

I tell you, one of the things that you really bring out, and ultimately your book is about hope. It really is, is that as human beings, we are survivors. We will survive. We have agency. It is that life force in us. We will figure it out until we don't, right? Societies fail, people fail. But our instinct is basically to survive. You bring up a really interesting society that I don't think a lot of people have heard about, and that's Doggerland. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that.

Patrick Wyman 20:15

That's what is fascinating to me. So this is Doggerland is one of my absolute favorite examples of just how much the world has changed in this period of time, because we don't think about this that often, but for us, the shapes of continents are kind of set. We look at a map and we understand the way the world looks. But at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower, the planet looked a lot different. There, instead of having, you know, shorelines where they are now, these huge stretches of continental shelf that extend for some in some places hundreds of miles out into the ocean, were dry land. So Southeast Asia was not a collection of islands. It was two land masses, Sundaland and Sahul. Britain was part of the European landmass. And what's now the English Channel and much of the North Sea was a coastal plain called Doggerland, where all of the main rivers of Western Europe, so the Thames, the Rhine, and the Seine, all drained into this lovely marshland, forest, hilly, rolling country that is now the floor of the North Sea. And this is a true lost world. People lived in this place for thousands upon thousands of years. And as sea levels rose and temperatures improved at the end of the last ice age, slowly but surely Doggerland starts to sink beneath the waves. And this happens over the course of many millennia. People are living there the whole time. They're noticing this happen and they're kind of pulling their campsites back from the shore. But they have, again, to come back to the previous point, they have adapted to this way of life. They know that the sea levels are rising. They know that they're going to need to survive in an aquatic environment. Even despite that, they still manage to survive a completely unproductive. Unpredictable out of nowhere mega tsunami caused by the collapse of continental shelf off the coast of Norway. This is the largest tsunami that has ever been recorded in the North Sea. Walls of water 50, 60 feet high in some places. It tears up coastal valleys. There are places where it might go, you know, dozens of miles inland, this wall of water being channeled by these coastal valleys. And this just kind of tears the heart out of the Mesolithic society that existed around the shores of Doggerland. But even so, these people stick around. They're still there for another 2,000 years. Even when Doggerland is completely gone beneath the waves, the descendants of these Mesolithic people are still living around its shoreline. And it's just this incredible story of survival in like dealing with circumstances that we can barely wrap our heads around.

Why Farming Takes Over

Michele McAloon 22:51

It is. It's interesting. And you know, Brexit's got nothing on Doggerland. So right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Why did people go from foraging to farming? And it almost seems like it was a world swell that did this. And not everybody did it at once, but there was definitely a trend towards it. What was in our human maturity and our human understanding to actually, you know what, start planting a piece of corn or a piece of wheat?

Patrick Wyman 23:23

This is one of the great big questions of human history. And I wish I had a definitive answer. I there are a number of possibilities. And I tend to think that these all matter and they matter, but they matter kind of as a bundle of things together, not any one cause, but a series of causes that all kind of interacted with each other. And so the big thing is at the global level, climates get better as the last ice age comes to a close. It gets warmer, it gets wetter. And when it's warmer and wetter on a planetary scale, seasonality is more pronounced. Like the difference between spring and summer and fall and winter is much more pronounced. So growing seasons for plants become much more pronounced. And if you're a clever forager who's observing your environment, you're going to notice that. But you're not necessarily going to notice it over the course of one person's lifetime. It's when we start talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of years of people watching the plants grow, of people experimenting and saying, hmm, I wonder what happens if I take the seeds from this wild wheat that I collected and I dump them all over here. Well, okay, next year now there's a stand of wheat growing there. And I like the way that wheat looked because it was the wheat that I picked that had the nice, really big kernels. And now all the seeds on the wheat that I planted are much bigger than they are on the wild wheat. So there you get selection for desirable traits. You get the idea of intentional planting, you get the development of kind of little garden plots, right? Where people are maybe they start by dumping their garbage, by dumping the seeds or the unused seeds, but over time they notice that things start growing there. Same deal with domesticating animals. You observe the animals closely, you note the seasonality of when they're born, when they breed, you notice that and you cull them at particular times of the year. And over time, cooling becomes intentional management. Now suddenly you're driving them into pastures or pens. And over very, very long periods of time, like nobody wakes up one morning and decides, you know what, I'm going to be a farmer today.

Speaker 1 25:27

Right, right.

Patrick Wyman 25:28

I think there's this kind of assumption that farming has a beginning. And really what you see is that it bleeds into a way of life that we call broad spectrum foraging. And this, much more so than farming, is the characteristic development that we see after the ice age. So instead of hyperfocusing on one source of food, like mammoth or reindeer, instead, people are kind of settling down into more restricted areas. They're still moving around, but they're settled down a bit more. And when you settle down a bit more, you start to notice things about your environment. You start to notice things about the plants growing around you, you start to notice things about animal behavior that maybe you hadn't picked up on before. So I think it's some combination of people settling down a little bit, getting to know their environments better, those environments maybe being more stable, the weather being better. And somewhere in all of that, in this changing relationship between people and the environment, the environmental conditions being objectively better, more people being able to survive, which means you've got to feed more people. So you have a combination of need, opportunity, and favorable conditions for all of that. And somewhere in there, we can find the reason why all across the planet, in at least six and probably more different places, people independently came up with the idea of food production, of growing their own food or domesticating animals.

Michele McAloon 26:51

At what point did people become concerned with their spirituality? I mean, you had Anzac or Anzac, and they put fools in his grave. So apparently that meant something. But people at some point began building monuments. And one thing you handle very, very sensitively in your book is that the these civilizations that did not have monuments does not mean they were any less human or any less society or any less complex or any less cultivated. It was just a different way. But at what point do they really kind of go in and say, okay, you know what? I'm here and I want everybody else to know that I was here.

Patrick Wyman 27:29

So we see the first signs of permanent stone monuments. So like uh stone-built monuments. We start to see these developing around 11,000 years ago in the Near East, maybe a little bit older than that. And there's a site called Gubekli Tepe that is that has become very famous for these carved limestone pillars with incredible artwork on them. So we see vultures, foxes, leopards. There's a real emphasis on the vultures carrying away the heads of the dead. What is obviously a really complex belief system that we can kind of catch glimpses of through these monuments. And we don't know exactly what changes around this time, but my sense is that people are doing well enough that they can afford to spend time on other things. If we look at that specific region, it's one of the best places. This is kind of southern Turkey, northern Syria, the edge of Iraq, what we call the Fertile Crescent. This is a great place to live if you're a forager 11,000 years ago. There's wild-growing wheat and barley all over the place. It was actually a much nicer place to live then than it is now in terms of the climate. That there was a lot more water than there is today. There were a lot more trees. There are nice fish in the rivers. There are just an almost uncountable number of gazelles roaming around. So these people are able to settle down a little bit. These are some of the first people in the world to build permanent villages in that region. And they get to know their environment real well. And when they do that, suddenly they've got enough food that and they can store food for extended periods of time. That means that you can have seasons where you can do something other than hunt and gather. You can maybe go up to this hilltop, cut out a bunch of limestone pillars and put them up. You can spend some more time on that. The specifics of why that starts to happen then and there are hard for us to figure out. But my guess is that those were probably elaborations of wooden monuments that had already existed. So there are a few places where we can see the preserved remains of wooden structures. It's difficult, but there's a thing called the Shigir Idol, which was found in Russia. It was discovered in the last century, but it's this tall post, a carved wooden post. It's kind of like a totem pole. And it was dropped into a bog. And because it was dropped into a bog, the wood survived. Normally, wood doesn't survive for more than a couple of centuries. It just rots away. But in this case, we have a thousands upon thousands upon thousands year-old carved wooden post that clearly meant something to these people. The way it's decorated leaves you in no doubt that this was this was a thing they spent some time on. We have no idea what it meant. But when I think about this world that didn't have stone monuments, I still think there were probably organic reminders like that around. They just haven't survived. That there's all of these lost worlds out there where the material that made up their life doesn't survive centuries. So we're left with these scatters of stone flakes, a little bit of bone to try to reconstruct what happened. And then every once in a while we get one of these sites. There's a place called Star Car in Yorkshire that's a Mesolithic site, uh about 11,000 years old. It's a lakeshore site, and there the moisture preserved all of this wood, and it preserved these deer masks.

Michele McAloon 30:46

Yeah, what was that? That's interesting. Yeah.

Patrick Wyman 30:48

So so these people were these Mesolithic people were obsessed with deer and they were surrounded by deer. They hunted deer, but they also seem to have thought of themselves as deer people in some way. And so they made these, which logically enough, I and and there are really interesting parallels for this in the ethnographic tradition, records of other human societies in more recent periods, and there are parallels with shamanism, with the kind of blurring of the lines between the animal and the human realms. And these people would make antler, deer antler headdresses. We don't know why they wore them. Their uh explanations range from, well, these are hunting disguises or costumes, or they're used in some sort of ritual or ceremony. I think there's probably a ritual use for them, but what's really notable is that they intentionally deposited them in this place. So they would make them, they would use them for whatever purpose, and then they would come to this place and they would put them in the mud. We don't know why they did that, but clearly this mattered to them. And so my takeaway from that is even if we can't tell what they were doing, the fact that they were doing something matters. And it tells us that they were thinking and that they had spirituality, they had beliefs, they had an understanding of how the world was supposed to work that was fully fleshed out. And most important of all, that it made sense to them. They weren't like stumbling through the dark. They were people who had who thought they knew how the world worked.

Catalhoyuk And Early Urban Living

Michele McAloon 32:15

Right. You are what you do, right? To clearly show is the intentionality of these people. This they weren't fools, they weren't running around crazy. They actually had some intentionality. One other society on which you talk about, and I can't even pronounce it, starts with the C, a cat, and it's a really mysterious one where really people started living together, but it wasn't a city.

Patrick Wyman 32:35

Yeah. So this is this is a place called Chatelhuyuk. Right now, if you look at it, it is just a big old mound in southern Turkey. Chatelhuyuk was one of the first what we could call urban sites in the world. And this is a place that was occupied for century after century after century. For more than a thousand years, people were living there. The reason why it's a mound is because they built their first layer of houses at ground level, then they filled in those houses and built on top of them, and then they filled in those houses and built on top of them. And over more than a thousand years, you end up with a settlement mound that rises high up. And this is a really characteristic way of living in the Neolithic. These people are some of the very early farmers. They're growing their own crops, they're tending cattle, they're tending goats and sheep. They are farmers. This is one of humanity's first experiments and living together in substantial numbers. And they made it work for a long time. But what we can see at this place is not just how they lived. I mean, we can see the demography of the site. We can see the periods of time in the site's history when people were struggling health-wise, when, when too many babies were dying young, when there was too much maternal mortality. We know this site so well that we can even track the demography of the population over time. We can see how that was changing. But another thing that we can see is the complexity of their spiritual life. Because the site is so well preserved, because we have layer after layer after layer of occupation, and because their houses meant so much to them, we can see how the different areas of the house were used. These people would bury their dead under the floors of their houses. And the dead for them were not really gone from the community of the living. They would dig up parts of the body. They might take out the skull of an honored ancestor and kind of return it to circulation, like this person who's been dead for a couple hundred years is still part of our community, still matters to us. But we, but there are all sorts of other ways in which this was like no society that we know today. It wasn't based on biological kinship ties. Like the reasons why people would be buried with each other are hard for us to understand, but it wasn't because this was this person's sister or brother. There are other kinds of connections that mattered to them. And we don't know exactly what those were. We have some ideas, but it's this extraordinarily complex worldview. I what I find most striking is that that existed everywhere in the distant past. It's only so rarely that we can actually catch a real glimpse of it and try to sys understand it systematically.

Violence Without Innocence

Michele McAloon 35:07

That to me is an amazing story. And then they genetically spread across Europe, right? I could talk to you for I love this stuff, man. And you know what I really don't like is that that spaceman come came down to, you know what? No, we are we're brilliant. We we can solve problems if we want to solve them. We can manipulate our environment. We're not innocent. And one of the things that your book shows too is that violence has been a part of us. Darkness runs across the heart of every man, it runs in the heart of every man. And you really show that these there was no innocent people here. They had their own problems, their own issues. They had mother-in-laws too, right?

Patrick Wyman 35:42

I mean, they had complex. This is something I I try to highlight throughout the book is that these people are us in every way. That includes the good ways and that includes the bad ways. And and there are ways in which these people were doing things that were unimaginably violent to our eyes. There, there are all sorts of cases of extreme violence in the archaeological record. In in the Neolithic in particular, there are all sorts of massacres of family groups, massacres of entire villages that we can see in the archaeological record. We can find mass graves that contain the remains of entire families or entire communities. And that reckoning with that, I thought it was important to do that. I don't think you should sweep under the rug or like go with some prelapsarian view of human nature as like, oh, everything was good until the state or until cities or until farming. Like hunter-gatherers are perfectly capable of murdering each other and cutting each other's heads off and taking them as trophies. Happened all the time. Happened in the Mesolithic. But there are when we get to the Neolithic and there are more people and people are living closer together. One of the things that happens, and I argue this in the book, is that the scale of human conflict, the potential scale of human conflict had never been greater. And there had never before been as much surface area for conflict between individuals and groups. That when everybody's a forager and mobility is part of your life, you can move. If you want to avoid a conflict, you don't have to fight over this one particular valley where the deer like to come. You can go to the next valley. If there are people coming in with their cattle and, you know, they've got bows and arrows and you don't, you can go somewhere else. That it may be unfortunate. The new place may not be as good, but you can go. Now, if you're a farmer and you're tied to your fields and you're tied to your house, like think about the people we just talked about who were who are so dedicated to generationally living in the same spot that they're going to build up over and over again for thousands of years. Now suddenly mobility isn't as much of an option for solving your social problems. You've got to figure out how do we live together? How who's going to make decisions for us? Like, how do we divide up resources?

Michele McAloon 37:59

Social complexity, right? Yeah. Yeah. Social complexity. Yeah.

Why Wyman Wrote Lost Worlds

Patrick Wyman 38:05

Something I try to avoid in Lost Worlds is the idea that those developments were inevitable. Because one option when you're faced with that is you reach that point and you're just like, well, this isn't working. Let's let's go back to foraging. And that does seem to happen in some times and places where people come together, they try a way of life, they gather for a while, and they're like, this is just not working out, guys. We're going to pop back over here just for fun, but but we're out. And that does happen all the time. I mean, like, I think Cahokia in North America is a great example of this, where people came together, they tried it, lasted for a while, and then they were like, you know what, this don't like it. Inequality, we're not gonna, we're not gonna roll with that. So it's never inevitable. But the circumstances that make it possible for you to develop durable hierarchies and leadership and some people telling others what to do, and some people having more than others, that those circumstances were more likely to come around in farming communities than they had been before. This goes a long way toward explaining it. And this doesn't make it a linear thing. It doesn't make it, it certainly doesn't make it what we would call progress. I hate that term in this context. Right. But but we can see the development, we can see the process, and we can see the contributing factors, even if we know things didn't have to turn out that way.

Michele McAloon 39:22

Why did you write this book? Why now? I mean, you're a historian. This really isn't kind of your area of history. You've done a lot of the Rome. You I mean, you've done a lot of you're doing past lives. Now, why this now? What caught your interest to write about this period?

Patrick Wyman 39:37

I'm oh goodness, that's a good question. Uh, a few things. I mean, I've been really interested in prehistory for a very long time. And I kind of was able to kind of get in on the ground floor of understanding ancient DNA stuff because, you know, 15 or so years ago, the a little bit of a tangent, I was in graduate school and I was kind of lost. And I was just searching around for anything that I found interesting that was not the Middle Ages. And uh and I found ancient DNA studies, and I found them right at the time when the Neanderthal genome had been sequenced. And this was like a bolt of lightning from the heavens for me that was just like, oh, wow, our possibilities for understanding the the past are so much greater than I ever thought. And so I got really into trying to understand these scientific techniques. I designed and taught a course at USC when I was in grad school on doing history with the natural sciences. So I always had this interest in the back of my head. And after a while of making tides of history, I just kind of got bored with uh more with later periods. I was like, I've done things that I can do on this. And I thought I'll take a swing and I'll try pre-history and I'll see what I can do with this. Am I even capable of it? And it turned out people really liked it. People were interested. And and most important, I was interested. I was engaged. Like I wanted to wake up the next morning and follow the research and see where it took me. And what I learned from grad school more than anything else is that if you're gonna do a big thing, you better dang well be interested in it. And I I was very interested in this. It wasn't a chore to do the research. I always wanted to know what was in the next footnote, what was around the next corner. I always wanted to know what the next archaeologist had to say. And it took me about five years to research and write this book. It was, it was a long struggle. And I think you can see that in just about every footnote. Like there's a lot more footnotes than the editor would have preferred. I'll tell you that much.

What Deep History Teaches Us

Michele McAloon 41:36

But it is it's wonderfully documented, and your notes are good. It really it's it is a cluster of a book. Okay, here's the million-dollar question. What do they teach us?

Patrick Wyman 41:45

Well, what they teach us is that our capacities are so much greater than we ever could have thought. That that what I see when I look back at the the fullness of the human past is that we don't use enough of it. We don't think with enough of it, that we we are so restricted to a few examples that we think we know well, and we use those as stand-ins for the entirety of the human past, like whether that's Greece or Rome or the rise of fascism in the 20th century or ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt was surrounded by other societies that were nothing like ancient Egypt. Ancient Mesopotamia was an extreme outlier in practically every way. The Roman Empire, because it lasted for so long, is not typical of empires. You know what I mean? So the tools that we're using, the examples that we're using to try to understand the broad course of human history are not representative and they don't go back far enough. So that was my big takeaway from all of this is we're just we the past is so much bigger than we think it is, and so much more complex. And that if we can start to use a little bit more of it, we're gonna get a lot better perspective on who we are, where we came from, and where we're going.

AI And Archaeology From Space

Michele McAloon 43:00

So we Yeah, and we have the tools. Like you said, we have the tools, we've got the DNA. We've got, I cannot help but believe the cataloging of information with AI won't will not be a huge multiplier in these fields, right? So, I mean, we have that access. Again, it always comes down to human beings of intent and will, doesn't it?

Patrick Wyman 43:21

Yeah. Well, I mean, just to give you a sense for some of the possibilities of things that people are doing. These are the and this is just a tiny little sample. I have a buddy, an archaeologist buddy named Gino Caspari, who works in Central Asia and South Siberia. And Gino has used AI tools to look at old satellite photos to identify archaeological sites. This is something that Sarah Parchak, who wrote a book called Archaeology from Space, has also done. There are tens of thousands of Cold War era spy photos that are now basically in the public domain. And if you can write a tool that allows you to scan through all of those images, you know, like we know what Scythian royal burial mounds look like. Like from the from the Iron Age. If you can train a model to look through those thousands and thousands of images, you can find sites that have never been explored before. We can it you can use lidar to strip away vegetation from a from a landscape to reveal the contours of ancient monuments as being done with the Maya right now.

Michele McAloon 44:18

Oh, I just heard I just read about that. That's interesting. Yeah, they never, there's this one civilization they never even realized was there till about 10 years ago because they were using uh drones. Yeah.

Patrick Wyman 44:28

Yeah, there's there's they're finding evidence of large-scale settlement in Amazonia by using light uh by using LIDAR and what looks to be pristine rainforest. So what we're finding when we start applying these tools is that the societies we think we know well, the ones we think matter, the fact that we think they matter is mostly an accident of discovery and transmission, not an objective marker of how important this society was to the total development of humankind. And when we start to incorporate these other examples, these other times and places, when we look at 10,000 years instead of a hundred years or 500 years, then our perspective becomes a lot more valuable. There's there's a historian I absolutely love, and I've I've been following his work for decades, named Walter Scheidel, he's at Stanford. He wrote a book called What is Ancient History? This came out last year, I believe. And he has this line where he says, our heritage is an extraordinary resource. The past is nothing more or less than the common heritage of all of humanity. And we would be remiss if we didn't try to make use of that to better guide ourselves in moving forward.

Otzi The Iceman Mystery

Michele McAloon 45:35

And if we don't, it's out of our sheer arrogance that we, I mean, that we are we're the end of the story. Yeah you know, we're not the end of the story. As a matter of fact, we are the beginning of the story. We may be the midway of the story. We don't know. And our arrogance and and and our inability to look past our own selves says a lot about some of who we are right now, right?

Patrick Wyman 45:56

It says a lot more about us than it does about humanity as a whole.

Michele McAloon 46:00

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Patrick, I cannot believe this. Has been an amazing conversation. Folks, you have to go get this book. It is, it's really a good book. It reads really well, it reads very fast. You wouldn't believe how excited you get about, oh, we didn't even talk about Iceman.

Patrick Wyman 46:18

You know, we didn't know we didn't even get to Utsy and the fact that we know that this 5,000-year-old guy was was now we now know he was riddled with human papillomavirus.

Michele McAloon 46:28

He was an Olympic lover.

Patrick Wyman 46:31

Oh my this is the kind of stuff that we can now learn about the distant past that we that we never could have hoped to before. I we know that they were getting after it, apparently.

Michele McAloon 46:41

Okay. You've got on past lives, you've got that episode. That's a recent episode, isn't it?

Patrick Wyman 46:47

I yeah, I just did, I just did another Utsy episode. He's one of my absolute favorite people from all of human history. So I cover Utsie in the book. I also cover him on my new show, Past Lives, where every episode is about the life of a real ancient person. So yeah, I mean, Utsie is Utsie's my guy. I I would love to know what happened to him. That is a 5,000-year-old murder mystery I would love to one day solve.

Michele McAloon 47:11

Give a real short synopsis because now it's been, I guess people understand who Utsy is.

Patrick Wyman 47:15

So Utsie is Utsie lived around 3,300 BC. So he lived around 5,300 years ago. He was shot in the back with an arrow 10,000 feet up in the Utztal Alps, and there his body remained for the next 5,000 years, kind of frozen into a glacier until he was found in 1991. Utzi's remains are extraordinarily well preserved. We know that he had 61 tattoos on his body. We know that he was balding. We know that his arteries were hardering, were hardening. We know that he had whipworm. Yeah, the parasite whipworm. We know that he had human papillomavirus. We know that his hips hurt. We know all of these things about a person who lived more than 5,000 years ago. And you know what? I just think that's neat. I think that's cool as heck.

Michele McAloon 47:59

That is. We've got, you know what? He's an ancient MMA fighter. That's what he wanted to say.

Patrick Wyman 48:03

I he'd he had taken a beating or two in his time. I think it's he knew his way around a beating. Yeah.

Where To Find Patrick

Michele McAloon 48:08

Oh, geez. All right. Patrick, where can people find you?

Patrick Wyman 48:10

They can find you on Past Lives Now and you have a website or you can find me on Instagram at Wyman underscore Patrick on Instagram. You can find me at on Blue Sky at Patrick Wyman. Hit me up, check out the book, check out Past Lives. I promise Past Lives is good. I promise.

Michele McAloon 48:27

It is good, folks. I just listened to it, but anything that Patrick podcasts or produces is brilliant and really, really great for listening to. You know what? I'm gonna recommend it to my boys. It's a great thing, I think, for teenage boys, men, I think they would love this podcast and very curious histor history girls. So I think it is good. Patrick, thank you very much.

Patrick Wyman 48:49

Thank you so much for having me for a wonderful conversation and for the kind words. It really, really means a lot to me. Thank you.

Michele McAloon 48:54

Okay, we're looking for another book from you. Okay, there you go.