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- [00:00]
A
Knock knock.
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B
Ooh, who's there?
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A
A boost Mobile expert here to deliver and set up your all new iPhone 17 Pro, designed to be the most powerful iPhone ever.
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B
You called that a knock knock joke?
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A
This isn't a joke. Boost mobile really sends experts to deliver and set up your phone at home or work.
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C
Okay.
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B
It's just that when people say knock knock, there's usually a joke to go with it.
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A
Like I said, this isn't a joke.
- [00:19]
B
So the knock knock was just you knocking?
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A
Yeah, that's how doors work.
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B
Get the new iPhone 17 Pro delivered and set up by an expert wherever you are. Delivery available for select devices purchased@boostmobile.com terms apply.
- [00:33]
C
Well, Happy New Year Afwa. Here we go. 2026.
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D
Peter, are you a New Year's resolution person?
- [00:40]
C
I start with so many good intentions, I rarely make it through 24 hours, if I'm honest. How about you? Are you a new year new you? What have we got to look forward to for 2026 for, for AFWA?
- [00:51]
D
Actually, last year one of the changes I implemented in my Life was the 12 week year. So I don't do New Year's resolutions anymore. I do a new year every 12 weeks, which I found is a much more manageable time frame to keep a resolution.
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C
Okay, what about one week? You think about 12 works to get to God? Preach to me, Alfred. I want to learn. I want to be a new me this year.
- [01:13]
D
Well, you know, Peter, I'm a big advocate that if you want to do something, you need to know the history of the idea. So I think this series might really help you because I think the thing about wellness and resolutions and personal development and self improvement is there are some really legitimate ideas mixed up in a load of really problematic baggage. And I think it's going to be really fun to explore where some of that baggage has come from and how we can maybe separate the gems from the trash.
- [01:44]
C
Well, I just spent a bit of time over Christmas, afwain between short walks and overindulging, wondering why it is that, you know, in Lent you give things up. And I sort of understand what the purpose of that is, but why it is when you get to the turn of the year, why January is that time when you, you concentrate on yourself and you try to turn over a new leaf. It's kind of curious about why that's the case. So like, like you said, I think, I think it's very interesting to see where these ideas all come from. And when we talked about doing a, a, a, a mega series on Wellness and well being, you know, you know, I suppose it's not surprising we've gone back 30,000 years rather than going back to the beginning of the kind of modern age. But you know, there you go. That's why you listen to Legacy, I guess.
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D
I love how that happens with you, Peter. I'm like, let's explore the history of something. Thinking about the Victorians and you're like, yes, well, 30,000 years ago is the perfect place to start.
- [02:35]
C
Well, I think it would be really interesting to think about the role of gender, the role of the body, how people have thought about the mind, and also to kind of always with these things to realize that although we think that, you know, wellness gurus on Instagram are new, you know, people have been talking about similar kinds of things not just for hundreds of years, but in fact for thousands of years. So I think it's going to be fascinating to, to go through a whole multi episode series on are we calling it wellness? Is that what that's, that, that's what this is about?
- [03:05]
D
Afwa, I think it's had different names, different periods, Peter. I mean, at one point they might have called it holiness, another point health, and another point healing. We're looking at all the holistic things that go into an idea of what it is to be well. And it's definitely the zeitgeist right now to call it wellness. And I hope we'll get into where some of these modern ideas come from and what the legacy of ancient ones has been for the kind of things you, if you're listening, might be thinking about this January.
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C
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Frankenbern.
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D
I'm Afwa Hirsch.
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C
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputations that they truly deserve.
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D
This is episode one in our history of wellness and well being. The early years.
- [04:15]
C
Okay, afwa, so I promised we were going to go back 30,000 years, but I think that's quite a long way. So let's start maybe 10,000 years ago with hunter gatherers. And I've got a sort of pet peeve actually about how we think about these ancient worlds because there's sometimes an idea that hunter gatherers are simple and not really sophisticated. And even today's world, you know, there's hunter gatherer societies that they experience terrible levels of discrimination. But there's something slightly counterintuitive about it, about where you sort of live from hand to mouth actually These ancient communities, modern communities, are much healthier than people who live in towns and cities. I wonder whether that takes you by surprise.
- [04:58]
D
Well, it kind of doesn't actually, because one of the big gym trends in recent years, maybe it's slightly fallen out fashion now has been paleo and also keto and a lot of these kind of gym oriented how to lose weight and build muscle and achieve longevity trends claim to be harking back to our hunter gatherer past. And I think there's this idea that the modern diet has just become so detached from the evolution of our body that there's wisdom to be harnessed by looking back to what our ancient ancestors do. So I suspect for many people that's the lens through which they might have gleaned that actually these ancestors did get something right when it came to the way they lived.
- [05:42]
C
The distinction between agriculture and pre agriculture is a completely fuzzy and vague one. I mean, in fact, these transitions, they sometimes get written about like there's a kind of moment where somebody works out how to grow crops and then everything changes. It takes a lot of time and very different in different regions of places. And in fact often it's not a clean break anyway. There's no sort of distinction. But what's interesting I think is the idea that, you know, unsophisticated hand to mouth existence is somehow, you know, risky and difficult. But actually the diets that people ate and eat from hunter gathering societies are much more varied, they're more protein rich, they're more seasonally adaptive than sedentary diets. So for example, there's lots of amazing new work in something called bioarchaeology. So people working on the history of diets and of the ways in which life forms existed in the past and they find that when you start to get the evolution of cultivating of crops, you start to find funny things like high levels of dental illness, you get more vertebral stress, you get iron deficiency, anaemia, and those increase quite sharply as people start to cultivate cereals. And it affects the shape of the body too.
- [06:57]
D
At sites in Syria where some of the best documented transitions from foraging to farming have been found, bioarchaeologists have detected an actual drop in height among the average adult in the early Neolithic period. So they've lost 7-12cm in height compared to previous populations. And hunter gatherers were actually very healthy. They had robust skeletons and that is linked to these very broad diets. We know that diversity in diet is one of the most important things. They were eating fish Fish, wild game, berries, and they had fewer signs of chronic stress, which modern medicine has revealed really has a serious impact on all health metrics. It's also the fact that life expectancy was low, but that's an oversimplification of some more complicated phenomenon among these hunter gatherer populations. So survival after injury actually had really impressive rates. People were able to recover from crushed legs, severe arm trauma, likely blindness. Which also points to the fact that these were communities that were able to care for people with quite serious disabilities, to keep them in the community and bring them along with them.
- [08:10]
C
And you've got these amazing early sites from about 10,000 years ago which echo these patterns, where you see skeletons that show that individuals have, have had arrow wounds that have healed. So that suggests there's medical treatment or at least there's some form of sustained care. Or you get heel fractures or joint injuries for years after they've happened from things like, I guess, falling down cliffs or things like that, or, you know, being crushed by rocks or acts of violence. And also you find burials showing cradle injuries and broken ribs that haven't caused that, the death event. So you see caring within communities, you find group survival strategies. And so these early sort of healthcare systems, I guess you could call them, are based on, well, one assumes empathy and on kinship, you know, looking after people within your group, and on practical necessity. I think it's really interesting the idea that the community plays such an important role in early societies too, particularly around injuries and how you look after and treat the body.
- [09:14]
D
The physical body is such a fascinating historical record of the ways people lived, of their movement, their labor, and their ability to adapt. Ten thousand years ago, the human body was constantly in motion. And I'm so conscious of this sitting here, Peter, long hours of podcasting because our lives are so sedentary by comparison to these ancient ancestors. They were constantly lifting, digging, climbing, carrying forms of whole body exercise that we rarely replicate, although we try. I don't know if you've seen, Peter, some of these gym trends where people try to walk on all fours, they try to develop the kinds of movement climbing, or all these whole body exercises that are designed to imitate what our ancestors would have done, because it's now been proven that those are the most healthy and sustainable ways of developing whole body strength that will see you into old age.
- [10:08]
C
My exercise regime, afwa, is most similar to a dog, which is I like to chase a ball that gets thrown or gets kicked. So I'm not a great gym frequenter. But I mean, it is, I Think interesting, these ideas of understanding the body in ways that shows these deep roots to the ways in which people used to live, you know, thousands of years ago. You know, you find human bones showing the kind of stresses that we can identify how people live. So Catalhoyuk in Turkey, which one of the most important early sites, you can see things like upper limb stress from repeated grinding out of stones. Or in places like Denmark in the Ertabole culture, you find knee and hip joints that show how fishermen are doing long distance walking and paddling and frequently lifting heavy nets. You see this all over the world. In fact, you see, you can identify how people are using their bodies and what kind of injuries they get as a result through heavy use. So they're not the kind of trauma of falls or breakages or violence. They're to do with everyday use of the body. And then, of course, it's not surprising that you find early healers trying to work out how you can remedy some of these kinds of things, you know, and the use of plants and understanding the biological world around humans is such a fundamental part of early societies, too.
- [11:26]
D
I mean, arguably, the history of medicine is the history of understanding plants and their healing properties. And in ancient times, a lot of the evidence points to the fact that women were very dominant in that role of exploring, understanding, and mastering the art of using plants for healing. We might come onto that, Peter, in future.
- [11:43]
C
I have a sneaky feeling we might. Yeah.
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D
But it's so interesting. I'm fascinated by plants. And now, again, this is another modern trend, this idea of reverting to plant herbalism, homeopathy, natural remedies. People pay a premium for these things. But of course, for most of history, this is just what medicine was. And the kind of things these ancient ancestors would have been using are willow bark, which is a source of salicylic acid, found in residues that had been ground in stones across the Near East. Bitumen and resin, both antimicrobial. These were used in mortuary and medicinal contexts in places like Jericho, Ugarit and Mesopotamian sites. And then you've got China, where pottery shows residues of herbal infusions from really early medicinal treatment. And of course, everybody is familiar with Chinese medicine. It's become part of mainstream society all over the world. But I don't know if people realize how far back the history of these practices goes. Well before the kind of modern Chinese techniques that are now quite well known. And these are not primitive healers. These ancients really understood analgesics, disinfectants and the basics of surgical intervention, I think it's easy to underestimate how much knowledge and expertise they had.
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C
Yeah. And you find trepidation everywhere. You find examples in Morocco, in what's now Ukraine, in France, and you show high survival rates, so people know what they're doing. So, I mean, it also doesn't just talk about interactions with the botanical worlds, but it also shows experimentation. It's all very well, finding willow bark has specific benefits. In this case, like you mentioned, salicylic acid. But you've then got to remember all those things that don't have any medicinal value that someone's been trying to boil down or work out what you could do with it. But also shows the spread of information. So when you find things that work, how do you communicate those? How do you teach those to people as well? How do you learn from what's. What hasn't gone so well, for example, with trepone, which is interventions in the cranium. So I think that idea about trying to think about how people have tried to cure each other and try to think about how health works, how the body works, are really interesting, particularly when it comes to things like working out, therefore, how to avoid illnesses and how to avoid the spread of diseases and parasites. What about that, Aphra, about the importance of understanding your environment around you?
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D
Yeah, you could argue that, you know, in previous times, where people didn't have the luxury of modern industrial medical facilities, they were more in tune with preventative care because they couldn't afford to expose themselves needlessly to illness. So they thought very carefully about where they lived, where they drank their water sources and the cleanliness of them, where they buried their dead and how to avoid cross contamination from dead bodies and from decay. So burials were kept outside habitation zones, probably for that reason, to reduce contamination. Large rubbish dumps kept refuse and polluted materials at the outskirts of settlements. And there was this seasonal mobility. I mean, so many of our ancient communities were nomadic or moved frequently. And part of the reason for that was to reduce exposure to parasites and food scarcity. And this isn't just in the Sahara, where I think we think of the Tuareg and Bedouin groups who were constantly moving, but across the Levant, the Danube Basin, the Siberian Holocene sites, these were populations that used mobility as a way of preserving health and sustainability. And there's amazing new research from Turkey, in Israel and Brazil that shows lower intestinal parasite loads compared with early farming communities. So the gut biome, which again now is the prized area of wellness and preserving Health reflects that they had an advanced understanding of how to protect their whole system from unnecessary bacterias and illness.
- [15:40]
C
I mean, this stuff on things like parasites, it's so incredibly exciting. So there's so much research going on in this field now because for things like parasites, they replicate, they reproduce very quickly, and so you can track mutations, you can track change, because the costs of doing lots of bioarcheology have fallen not completely to nothing, but it's cheaper and easier to do this sort of research. And it's telling us so much more about how people are moving, what are they eating, how are they dying, how are they learning? And you get this explosion of the ways in which the sciences are transforming the humanities too. But what I think is also interesting is that wellness and ecology are so closely connected. People are aware of seasons, they are aware of how to avoid stagnant water. All the kinds of things that I think we sort of take for granted. These are sort of problems that are unlocked and understood so much earlier than perhaps we might think. We think that sanitation is a kind of post Victorian. This is something in the modern world, but people have always been aware that contamination from rubbish, from disease, from dead bodies, you know, that you've got to be careful because infectious disease in particular can kill everybody. So how you stay away from problems and how you keep yourself healthy and clean is such an important part of all the other bits of keeping your body and mind in good shape.
- [17:08]
D
And talking of body and mind, Peter, I mean, one of the things that I'm most interested in is the way that spiritual and emotional wellbeing was regarded as completely inseparable from physical health. Again, this is an idea that I think many western consumers of modern medicine are now trying to get back to. You know, now there's so much research about how mental health can impact physical health, about the gut, brain access, and how what's going on in your gut can influence your brain and vice versa. But again, these ancient communities understood this intrinsically. There was no difference between, between spiritual well being, rites of passage and practices and the idea of physical health. You know, they link them so intrinsically, and that's visible in approaches to rites of passage like death and birth, of a kind of relics that were used for health events, but also for healing. All these early shamans, healers were people who could cure physical illness, but could also cure spiritual and mental distress. And often these were interpreted as the cause of each other. You know, an illness would be interpreted as some kind of spiritual imbalance, maybe a demon possession or something. Having gone awry in the supernatural world. And it's so fascinating to me that now we have so much modern science at our disposal, we are reverting to many of those ideas, and again, we'll come back to that. But people are, I think, increasingly looking to astrology, tarot, dream interpretation, trauma, ptsd, all different kinds of psychological and spiritual explanations for some of the physical maladies they're experiencing.
- [18:51]
C
And some of that, I think reminds me of chat groups today. You know, it's one thing to have an idea about these things, but it's, it's. You need to find other people who share it too. So one of the things I'm really interested is about how identities start to form in pre modern societies, you know, going back long way in the past, but also more recently too, about what, what creates communities? How do you find common experiences and the roles that things like ritual and ceremonies and common experiences. So I want to do an episode or maybe two afwa about the role that alcohol plays in building of states and about the ways in which people find. I guess I go to the pub on a Saturday night. If you're there with your friends, that's your group, that's your gang. You know, if you go out to yoga retreats, wherever it might be, or whether you go on bus tours to whichever archaeological site you want to visit or to go to the butterfly museums, the fact that groups find each other and find common cause, it's an important part of that. And I think that the wellness element, or the thinking through about how do you have common experiences that allow you to think and feel like you're part of a group, is really important in binding societies together. And I think the medical experiences and health experiences are really core part of that. So, for example, at Gobelekitepe, which is again like Chatel Hoyuk, one of the kind of key foundational sites for understanding ancient societies going back something like 12,000 years, 10,000 or so BCE, that we can see evidence of ceremonies being hosted. They're creating some form of psychological cohesion and collective identities. They sort of function, I guess, as early psychology. They're there to regulate anxiety, to strengthen bonds, to mitigate stress, and to provide that kind of common experience. So that, that way in which people are seeing their connectivity with each other through common experiences and through their bodies, I think it's a really interesting one.
- [20:40]
D
It's such a shame, Peter, talking about alcohol, which we should definitely do that we're not doing that in January because we could really be trolling people as they do their dry January by talking about the fundamental role of alcohol in community and state building. But anyway, Maybe it's only 31 days.
- [20:54]
C
They were to February, the 1st of February we hit with that one.
- [20:58]
D
We'll be back right after this break.
- [21:14]
C
Okay, so let's pick back up at something that's often referred to as the Neolithic revolution and the rise of agriculture. That sort of scene by anthropologists and archaeologists and historians is one of the most transformative moments in human history. The shift from a world of roaming hunter gatherers to one in which people settled and farmed and shaped the landscape. I mean, it's a little bit fuzzy, as I mentioned, and it's not without its problems. But broadly speaking, about 12,000 years ago, as we come out of the last Ice Age communities in places like the Fertile Crescent, the Yangtze and Yellow river basins, the Indus Valley, as America, et cetera, people start to domesticate plants and animals. And it's like I said, it's not a single event or a sudden discovery, and it's not something that some communities do and others don't. It's a long and very uneven process, but over that time of shifting diets, having higher levels of ability to store foods, it changes people's diets. And the irony is that although there's more food, greater food security, I should say, it leads to worse health. So that kind of standard image I guess you might think about with the arrival of agriculture, of fields with golden heads of grain, progress and civilization. It's not what the evidence shows, Afra.
- [22:33]
D
And there's really interesting archaeological evidence about this. Abu Herrera in Syria, which has one of the best documented transitions from foraging to farming during this period you're describing, Peter. There is really clear evidence of a total deterioration in health once agriculture takes off. So there are more dental cavities, more signs of iron deficiency, anemia in the skull, more spinal and joint damage from repetitive tasks. And I think it's like a minor version of what modern populations experience, moving from a more active lifestyle to a more sedentary lifestyle. The reality is, in this agricultural lifestyle, you are doing repetitive work. You're not out using your whole body, using all of your muscles in different ways. And your food supplies may be abundant, which gives you stability, but it's not as varied because you're eating what you're cultivating and what you're able to store.
- [23:29]
C
So I did a lot on this when I wrote a book called the Earth Transformed a couple years ago that sort of thinks about the engagement with the Natural world. And it was very striking. I think that the arrival of agriculture is the kind of. I mean, I didn't describe it like that in the book, but it's a kind of wellness shock, I guess, that your calorie intake goes up, but your resilience goes down because the body remembers all these kinds of shocks. I mean, you mentioned dental cavities, for example. You know, lots of sites that we find in the Levant and Anatolia, the level of tooth decay goes up by 20, 30% in some cases. And it's partly because fine grinding of flour makes flour soft, but it sticks to your teeth and it feeds oral bacteria in place. Like China, the dependence on millet, which is the classic Chinese crop, showing up in isotopes, it's connected to childhood stunting. I mean, Afro, you mentioned that people's heights go down by 7 to 12 centimeters. I mean, it's enormous. But it also, you can see from skeletons, thinner bones compared to mobile hunter gatherers, because diets, you become able to have monocultures, you're able to eat the same thing all the time. And that obviously produces some benefits, but it creates other problems. So suddenly, relying on millet or wheat and barley and on cereals has a direct impact on people's nutritional inputs.
- [24:50]
D
I mean, when we did the series on potatoes, Peter, I love potatoes. We looked at the transformative power of potatoes because they offer such calorie density from, you know, a relatively small amount of land, which was transformative for populations being able to grow and urbanize, and.
- [25:09]
C
Vitamins and nutrients too. That's the thing, you know, that. That's what the pot. That's why it's such a magical crop. Yeah, sorry, I. I know you don't like the potatoes. I know.
- [25:16]
D
I do remember potatoes. People are still trolling me for that online. Thank you, everyone. You know, I think in this context, when you think about how hunter gatherers were living where they were hunting, relying more on protein and constantly consuming diverse crops, you know, the idea of harvesting and relying on potatoes, while they are a kind of superfood that have so many nutrients, it's not the same as the lifestyle that was so connected to activity and diversity. And so I think we tend to simplify this era and think, you know, these kind of idealized, romanticized days where people live by the land, but. And also that humanity has just been on the straight path of progress from the prehistoric times. You know, we've all seen those diagrams where you just get taller and stronger, more upright, and Homo sapiens becomes this kind of superior species, but actually there are dips and troughs in that. And it's funny to think that this period of becoming more organized and sophisticated in social forms actually caused this health deterioration.
- [26:21]
C
Well, one of the key things, if you can grow crops, then you can have reliable calorie availability, and if you can store them, then you can eat over the winter, you can live in bigger numbers. You know, you don't have to have everybody going up to go and find food on a regular daily basis or weekly basis. You're able to live in a very different kind of way. And it's very interesting, I think that at the moment there's been lots in the press, rightly for the last two or three years, about ultra processed foods and you know, how important it is that what kind of calories you take on and that if you are eating the wrong kinds of things, you can have very significant health negative outcomes as well. And so it's a bit like with the arrival of domestication of crops and cereals too. It's that you get a different kind of malnutrition. But also, you know, again, something we've talked about is that where people live closer together, thanks to being able to grow crops and have higher food security, there are other kinds of outcomes that are negative too.
- [27:15]
D
So if you look at Jericho and other early Neolithic settlements where high density housing is appearing for the first time, and sometimes you get floors and buildings reused for generations. That again is something I think we romanticize in terms of the social aspect of community and intergenerational living. But it's also ideal for parasites and bacteria who are now able to breed with a new intensity and cause unparalleled problems for the humans living in those environments. And if you look at coprolite, which is basically the study of fossilized poo, you can see how that affected these ancient farming communities. So new levels of intestinal parasitic eggs that are now existing in greater abundance than in nearby groups who are still living a hunter gatherer lifestyle. So you can really see that parasites were taking hold inside people's guts. And those have the potential to cause all kinds of short and long term health problems. And then on top of that, you're domesticating animals, sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and living in close proximity to them, which creates opportunities for zoonotic disease. Those are infections that cross from animals to humans. Now anyone who covered Covid, for example, and the whole question of whether that originated in bats and then transferred into humans, knows that those potentials for animal diseases to cross into humans can be completely Catastrophic. So living with animals is actually pretty disastrous for human health.
- [28:48]
C
You find all those jumps a lot. I mean, and you find things like bubonic plague spreading in Eurasia, across, you know, again Ukraine, into Western Europe. So you find epidemics and pandemics happening as a direct outcome of the way in which people are living closer to animals and to parasites, but also to each other, because those transmissions happen too. Then there are other outcomes of the Neolithic revolution and the arrival of agriculture does is it starts to change gender ideas. Because farming doesn't just free people from hard work, but it reorganizes, it intensifies, it makes it more repetitive. You start to see the ways in which the body starts to change. So again, at Chantal Hoyuk, for example, women's skeletons show extreme wear and tear in their shoulders, in their elbows, in their wrists, which are consistent with hours spent each day grinding grain and which is also unbelievably boring. But you know, the fact that you find these changes of the body, you find, I mean, again, that I put. I had a. Earth transforms. Really this incredible research that the upper body strength of women 10,000 years ago was comparable to modern day Olympic athletes because of the amount of work that they do. They're not that strong because they're doing sport and competing at the highest level. It's because they're carrying water or they're grinding or they're carrying heavy loads. So the ways in which people start to live together starts to impact how their bodies react and how they feel about their bodies too.
- [30:18]
D
I think a lot about this, Peter. I am a critic of many aspects of our modern life. I think that in many ways, you know, we're unhappier and more isolated and, and actually less healthy than many of our ancestors. But there is this one thing I do as a woman where sometimes I lie in bed at night and I can hear my dishwasher running, my washing machine running. I know I've got like a food delivery arriving in the morning and I could kind of lie there and feel like I'm communing with all my women ancestors and how happy they would be at the amount of that labor that is now happening effortlessly while I sleep. I can almost feel it because each of those tasks are things that women would have done. You know, washing the clothes by hand, having to forage and clean and prepare the food. It's endless and draining. And so now I have all that done for me, and then I get to go to the gym and, and aspire to modern Olympic athlete upper body strength by lifting weights. But, you know, I really feel the luxury of the fact that those tasks are done for me, where once that was literally backbreaking, never ending work for women. I mean, until very recently and in some parts of the world, it's still the reality for many women. So I think it's a really important aspect of understanding the shift that this transition in human behavior, in the way society was organized, did not allocate labor equally across gender. You know, certain tasks fell disproportionately on women. And it's connected to the emerging ideas about gender roles because the ways in which women became responsible for the domestic realm and the amount of endless backbreaking work that involved had really long term implications for how we think about gender and power.
- [32:02]
C
And for men too. You know, the ploughing, the herding, the building, the digging irrigation channels. Again, that obviously does happen in cities, you know, where things have been built and dug up all the time. But by and large, city life, particularly people who write about it in the past and in the present, tend to be people who are sitting behind desks rather than out in the fields or out in the streets doing manual labor. But all of that work produces things like osteoarthritis and degenerative joints and especially problems in the backs and the knees. So trying to think about who's benefiting from these new systems of living is of course important. It is obviously not surprising that along with city living comes inequality as well as wellness. Who gets to eat what you can store surplus, but it doesn't mean that everybody gets to do the same thing the same way. So as you start to get communities living in greater proximities, in towns, villages and cities, you start to find social hierarchies. And you can see that through, obviously through the appearance of aristocracies and of kings and rulers, but also in things like graves. So, you know, places like Bulgaria and Varna were a place I know well. You know, you find burials with lavish gold ornaments and rich grave goods, but not everybody gets those. I can promise you that that's, that's the one or two people in the community, whereas most people are chucked in a ditch. Because those inequalities start to go with the hierarchy of who has the best available proximities, who has the biggest houses, who's closest to water. Those disparities in wealth, I think, are important in who gets to eat protein, for example, rather than cereal. And how do you categorize those ecosystems around it? But I think it's the moment that farming arrives. You get these ideas about gender, about socioeconomic, and also you get rising ideas about how you can use violence to screw each other over.
- [33:49]
D
Okay, yeah, let's talk about violence, Peter. Because it is an inevitable byproduct of these changes in social patterns and the way society is organized. And it's quite uncomfortable to confront that. The history of humanity is a history that means where there are opportunities for violence, violence seems to inevitably ensue. So on the one hand, now you have more stability, you have settled patterns, you have abundance and the accumulation of food. It also means now we start to see organized warfare, mass atrocities being committed that, unlike previous eras, are not tied to spiritual rituals or are not tied to preventative health. You know, the need to cull populations to prevent the spread of disease, which is also abhorrent to us with our modern ideas about human rights. But you know, at least in the ancient rationale, they had some kind of purpose for the greater good. Now we're starting to see violence that is simply competition and exploitation of superior strength or weaponry.
- [34:48]
C
Basically, well, it's systematized, so it's not that doesn't happen before. It's just if you've got communities that live close together, then your competition for the best resources suddenly intensifies. And of course that, as you mentioned, that falls into, you know, who directs, who leads, who benefits and who gets the kudos. But you can see defensive architecture, ditches and walls, et cetera, start to go up to try to protect those resources that keep communities happy and healthy. So being in the best location suddenly matters much more than anything else. So you get a kind of, I think, a full suite of different challenges that start to emerge. And one of those then turns into the question of how do you treat and cure people, how do you make your population healthy? So, for example, when you get this large scale violence, you find, for example, it's famous, the Talheim death pit in what's now Germany from about 6,7000 years ago, 7,000 years ago, where you have men, women, children killed and dumped together more or less in a ditch, where they've been killed by the blunt trauma of arrow wounds and suggest a massacre, not ritual killing or an epidemic disease. And you know, again, similar sites in places like Austria. And you find people who've been bound together, their skulls have been crushed, they've been cut open. And I think those ideas about control of the best sites starts to build up into some of those familiar things we think of in the modern world about why states compete with each other? Why do they fight? And so the world becomes more violent because it becomes more joined up, more connected, and the tools developed because technology and innovation favor those who are able to harness them. And again, that has a obvious moral today, too. So all these ideas, I think, afwa, about how people's bodies change over time because of the way in which people are changing, how they live and where they live, what they're competing over. You know, there are lots of different ways I think you could think about how that changes the way in which people think about their bodies. And, you know, you've written about this and you know about this so well. I mean, how does it, how do you connect the ideas about the ways in which people live, about hierarchies, about the sort of concepts of the mind and the body and the soul?
- [37:01]
D
Well, what I find so interesting is that many of the ideas, rituals, practices and techniques that our ancestors developed were driven very much by need. They weren't just kind of sitting dreaming up, like what would be a nice rite of passage to have or what would be a good ceremony. They were inventing what they needed to survive, to heal, to keep the community functioning. And one of the things about this period which is so pivotal in human history, when we've transitioned to these more settled agricultural societies, as we've seen in this episode, there's been a decline in health. And one of the fascinating things about that is it drives this need for better healing, innovation, because the more people's health is in peril, the more they're also facing violence in these communities, the more they are experiencing the challenges of a slightly more sedentary lifestyle with less diversity, more parasites and disease, the more they are going to have to come up with ingenious ways of using the natural world around them to solve their problems. And that is exactly what they do. And in the next episode, we are going to find out how.
- [38:06]
C
Thanks for listening to Legacy.
- [38:07]
D
Don't forget to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast player. You can also watch all our episodes on YouTube, so. So make sure you're subscribed there too.
- [38:15]
C
And of course, we're on all the socials, all the links in the show notes for this episode or just search Legacy podcast. I'm Peter Frankenbern.
- [38:23]
D
I'm AFWA Hirsch.
- [38:24]
C
And we'll see you on the next episode of Legacy.
- [38:46]
B
Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [38:55]
A
A.
- [38:55]
E
Random influencer, a friend who read something somewhere, your doctor. It can be hard to know where to get trusted health information. TED Health is a podcast that will help you focus on the stuff that you actually need to know to live your healthiest life. I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter, a practicing internist, and I share weekly TED talks from certified health experts that break down the questions you're always getting different answers to get the science backed ideas for a healthier you with TEDhealth wherever you get.
- [39:28]
B
Your podcasts, ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acest. Com.