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- [00:00]
A
Hi, this is Jonathan Fields from Good Life Project. If you're not using Ironclad for contracts, you could be leaving millions on the table without knowing it. Every contract holds renewal dates, pricing terms, and obligations you can't afford to miss. But good luck finding them when it matters. Ironclad's AI instantly surfaces what matters so you can act before opportunities slip away. That's why they're trusted by OpenAI, L' Oreal and Salesforce. Find the savings hiding in your contracts@ironcladapp.com podcast. That's ironcladapp.com podcast.
- [00:36]
B
Aphra, since we last spoke, tell me how's your January purging and cleansing and healing going?
- [00:42]
C
Okay, so I'm actually not an amazing role model for wellness right now, Peter. As you might be able to hear, I've slightly lost my voice. And it's quite apt that my approach to treating this malady, which I often get when I get sick. I get a kind of flu and a cold and then I lose my voice and this time it's turned into a chesty cough. Sorry, everybody, you're getting way too much information about my health challenges. But I have never found a cough medicine that works for me. I don't know if you have, but I just always end up drinking these, like, really sugary, disgusting, sticky liquids that do nothing. So this time my Japanese friend told me about her family's traditional technique, which is to get red onion, soak it in honey, leave it in a jar for like eight hours, and then inhale the vapor. And if you need to even, like, drink a spoonful, it creates a kind of like onion honey. It sounds disgusting. But listen, my cough is gone in one night, so I'm feeling very, very motivated to talk talk about, as we're going to in this episode, food and ancient healing techniques and what their legacy might be today.
- [01:55]
B
I think that's great. I'm thinking that that's basically the story of how Red Bull worked was, you know, somebody heard about some drink in Thailand that sort of made people better. The next thing you know, you've got a Formula one racing team. So maybe you and I, off air, we should get some red onion, some honey, and see if we're going to set up a stall in Borrow Market, see if we can get people to come by and, you know, make us rich. We could, we could pay people to the podcast.
- [02:19]
C
I don't want to get conspiracy theorist about it, but I suspect this is why nobody is really pumping a lot of money into advertising these natural remedies because no one has a monopoly over them. Any red onion farmer will benefit from you trying the recipe that I've just told you. And so instead we get marketed these products that, you know, somebody is incentivized to try and sell us. And I'm not anti modern products or modern medicine. I'm just saying sometimes very cheaply, readily available natural remedies that you can make at home might be just as good, if not better.
- [02:52]
B
I could tell you after when I was at school, whatever your illness was, whether you know, you broken a leg, felt ill, you know, had a headache, whatever it was, was a disparate gargle. And basically by the time you came back on the third day for another one, you know, time would have healed you or you'd be, or you'd be dead. So.
- [03:06]
C
So that what they're giving you, those dissolvable aspirin making you gargle, I can still feel.
- [03:10]
B
I mean, I haven't had one of those for about 40 years. I never thought I be talking about that in a episode on wellness. But it's great to be back to think about ancient ideas about the body, the soul and the mind and to think about what wellness has meant over time. And we're going to, we're still back in the ancient world, but we're going to come forward over the course of this series to come up to date as well.
- [03:31]
C
Maybe even get to my very, very contemporary sore throat.
- [03:43]
B
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Frankenpern.
- [03:48]
C
I'm AFWA Hirsch.
- [03:49]
B
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.
- [04:05]
C
This is episode two in our history of wellness and well being, the first treatments and cures.
- [04:16]
B
So I'm really interested. Afro you mentioned red onions, honey and traditional treatments. Last episode we talked about traditional Chinese medicine and kind of natural ways of healing. But food is such an important part of not just eating and diets, which we also talked about, but about medicinal treatments and improving your body.
- [04:34]
C
And there is such a history to the human discovery of the incredible power of plants in all kinds of ways that were crucial to human wellness and survival. Across the Fertile Crescent from Syria and Iraq and Egypt, pollen from yarrow, mallows, cornflower and great hyacinth was found clustered around burials. These plants have analgesic, anti inflammatory and soothing properties. And while the interpretation of exactly how people were using them in ancient times is debated, it's undeniable. That they do have medicinal qualities.
- [05:10]
B
And you find things like nigella sativa or black cumin at Catalhoyuk. And you find those much later in the Islamic world too, as a digestive and also as an immune strengthening plant. And the grinding stones that you find all across northern Anatolia. Elsewhere you find chemical traces of things like sage and of mint and of salvia. And also those are antimicrobial and have. They're very helpful for you for your respiratory issues at the moment. But the ways in which we talked again last time about experimentation and transmission of these kinds of informations, but you see in all these different parts of the world that are not connected at this time, like in China 8,000 years ago, you find plant remains with wild angelica and ephedra that are so important in Chinese pharmacopoeia. But you find lots of people are experimenting, trying to work out how they can engage with the natural world to soothe and to heal and to numb and to. And to cure, because life is short in these days. So trying to find ways to prolong and to survive is really important. Now, those connections with the bio experimentation are really interesting, I think.
- [06:14]
C
Isn't it interesting how we kind of regard science as something over which modern society has a monopoly? But actually these ancient ancestors were complete empiricists. They were trialing, experimenting, using their curiosity to test things under, you know, what in their contemporary context would have been clinical circumstances to really work, work out what works. And I think it's one of the ways that we've devalued the knowledge that we've inherited from that era by kind of separating it from ideas about what science is. But there isn't really anything more scientific than taking plants and testing them and trying them and then developing the ones that have curative properties into medicinal forms that actually work.
- [06:55]
B
So it's not surprising, I guess, that as soon as you start to get writing systems, about 5,000 years or so, give or take, you start to find medical information being written down. So, for example, you got the Ebers papyrus from Egypt about three and a half thousand years ago. It's nearly a meter long. It lists 700 remedies. More than half of them include edible ingredients. So things like honey for infected to treat infections, or figs for digestive issues, that definitely works. Onions, there you go for your respiratory congestion. So you're onto something. Or beer being mixed with herbs to cure fevers. So people are writing these down for a reason. They're doing it to memorialize knowledge and to allow it to be more available so you don't have to go back and try things all over again. So the transmission of information and knowledge is a key part of early writing too.
- [07:45]
C
Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets from around the second millennium BCE include treatments using garlic to clean the blood, dates mashed in beer for gastrointestinal problems. That sounds a lot tastier than some of the disparate gut digestive remedies that I have seen in boots. Milk and butter for soothing inflamed skin and licorice roots for coughs. Oh, that's another one I haven't tried for coughs. I might add that to my honey and red onion ritual.
- [08:15]
B
But I just think it's interesting that there's no difference in these ancient worlds between the kitchen, the pharmacy and the temple, you know, so finding ways that you could eat, experiment, and try to work out what was wrong with you is kind of important. But, you know, one of the early global superfoods is honey. I mean, it appears as a medical marvel in different parts of the world at roughly the same time. Not just as a soother, which we know as, you know, I think of it as, or as a natural sweetener, but as an antiseptic, as an anti, inflammatory, as a preservative. And of course, it's nutritionally extremely dense as well.
- [08:50]
C
Egyptian papyri call honey the noble sweet and use it in wound dressings, poultices and eye sals. And in Neolithic Georgia, from 4000 BCE, pottery analyses show honey in fermented beverages and possibly medicinal mixtures. In the Indus Valley, honey jars appear in Harappan homes. Residues suggest youth both in foods but also in, in rites linked to purification. And in ancient Greek healing cults, honey forms the base of ointments given out at temples by priests. If modern wellness culture has a favorite superfood, so did the Neolithic, and it was honey. And now, Peter, of course, we're again going back to some of those ancient ideas about honey. I don't know if you ever buy Manuka, Manuka, I don't know if you ever buy manuka, but I literally just paid £35 for a pot of Manuka honey because it has, I think, 500 plus in whatever that metric of how high its antioxidant properties are. And I don't know if it works, but it really makes sense to me as an idea that, you know, this really potent form of honey is, got incredible medicinal power.
- [10:00]
B
And it's not just honey. I mean, that's, that's the kind of key superfood it's also other things that spices, aromatics and those are driving early global trade too. You find long distance spice movements unbelievably early. I mean, that's something that talks to early ideas about globalization or high levels of regionalization, I guess about working out what's desirable, what's needed and what comes from where. So you find to tell Cambria what's now Israel, you find from chemical analysis of cinnamon and Storax and Spikenard imported over thousands of kilometers. Those are all used for antimicrobial or for sedative effects. You find turmeric and ginger residues in the Indus Valley, but also later in Mesopotamia, which is quite a long way away, showing early diffusion. The Egyptians are using frankincense and myrrh, which are very Christmassy obviously. But when you hear the story of the Three Kings bringing those to Jesus in Bethlehem, you're not quite sure why they're important, but they've got antiseptic qualities. And so those are brought by the Red Sea via Somali trade route. So you find all these different herbs and aromatics being moved around. And a lot of them have health benefits too, and long before the classical age too.
- [11:18]
C
And a lot of them are popping up now in quite high end modern day cosmetics. So frankincense and myrrh are favored by a lot of natural skincare brands for keeping your complexion clear with their natural kind of antiseptic properties. Turmeric. Have you ever had a turmeric latte?
- [11:36]
B
I have, yes, I have, yes.
- [11:37]
C
It's such an ancient idea. Turmeric has now been through modern science proven to have all these anti inflammatory properties. But of course, people in 2600 BCE Mesopotamia already knew that they just didn't need it packaged in a kind of coffee shop latte form to know for.
- [11:55]
B
20 quid along with a Manuka honey. Yeah, but these ideas I think about what treats what and in what doses are really interesting. So the experimentation, it's a kind of form of, I guess early biochemistry. You have lots of things like fermented foods, again, things like kimchi is kind of all the range. Now the medicinal qualities, these go back and me. So these go back thousands of years. You know, you find fermented barley drinks being used in ancient Egypt, not just to cure stomach ailments and fever, but even things like what look like depression, like symptoms, you know, how to lift the mind as well as the body too. And you know, you find in the Shijing or the Book of Odes, one of the early Chinese ritual texts, talking about how fermented millet drinks can be used to harmonize the body and bring it back into all of its order. So lots of these ideas have got their roots in deep experimentation, but like you mentioned, afraid it's a kind of lost knowledge that also it all feels like it's terribly 21st century. But these things go back a very long way into the past.
- [12:58]
C
Every single early civilization has food at the foundation of its health theory and technology. So by 1300 BCE, three major medical philosophical systems emerge in the world and all center food as the source of preventative medicine. So these are Greece with the Hippocratic corpus linking health to diet, climate and lifestyle. India, where early Ayurvedic texts classify foods as hot or cold, heavy, light, oily or dry. And China, where the Hyang di Neijing compiled before the first century CE treats diet as the first defense against illness. And Persia, Peter, which you're about to tell us about because you just deleted it.
- [13:42]
B
I also. Well, because I can't count. I'd written three, but there are four. So I thought if. I thought if I could head you off at the boss.
- [13:49]
C
You can't leave out Persia. Oh, yeah, I said three. But there's actually a fourth Peter as well, isn't there?
- [13:56]
B
I'm so sorry. That's my own research that I can't add up properly. Yeah, you get Achmayonid and later Sasanian texts that are describing food as a divine tool for maintaining body equilibrium. And I think all these cultures that you mentioned, Afwa, they all are thinking about this balance right? Between the environment, between the body, between the soul, between breath. You know, again, things that sound incredibly modern, but they're trying to think about when things go wrong or you're ill, it's because things are out of sequence. And how do you correct those with, you know, different foods or with turmeric or with rice or with ginger or cinnamon bark. How do you find a way of getting things back into the natural way? And another important part of that is not just through food, but it's through water and purification rituals too.
- [14:45]
C
I also want to just add, because this happens a lot, Africa gets left off the imagined ancient world civilizational approach to innovation. But a lot of the ideas that would inform ancient Greece's ideas came from ancient Egypt, which then came from other parts of the African continent. So there's this huge continuity from African ideas into Egypt and into Greece. And we're going to see in future episodes as well that these ideas evolved in different ways in different parts of the world. But what I find so interesting is how much continuity there is, how much our ancient ancestors had kind of universal ideas about approaches to healing. The idea of it being holistic is such a misnomer because there was no healing and wellness that wasn't holistic. There was no attempt to separate the mind, the body and the spirit. And they all link this with food and lifestyle at the root of your health outcomes.
- [15:51]
A
Hi, this is Jonathan Fields from Good Life Project. If you're not using ironclad for contracts, you could be leaving millions on the table without knowing it. Every contract holds renewal dates, pricing terms and obligations you can't afford to miss.
- [16:04]
B
But.
- [16:04]
A
But good luck finding them when it matters. Ironclad's AI instantly surfaces what matters so you can act before opportunities slip away. That's why they're trusted by OpenAI, L' Oreal and Salesforce. Find the savings hiding in your contracts@ironcladapp.com podcast. That's ironcladapp.com podcast.
- [16:25]
D
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- [17:05]
B
Yeah, I mentioned that. I wanted to talk about water and its role in purification, but also cleanliness and the ways in which humans are manipulating water for hygiene and cooling and sanitation. So I mean, you find Neolithic bathing platforms in the near east, in the Fertile Crescent, which suggest that people are thinking about how they wash together and they're washing themselves, they're washing their bodies, they're washing tools. You find in. In the Jomon culture in Japan, people using hot springs and finding ways to show the ritual cleansing to do with water and food preparation and death rites. I mean, it's very interesting about how concerned people are about the dangers of polluted water and the dangers of bad personal physical hygiene. The connection with disease in particular is a kind of big part of it. So water's not just for drinking. It becomes part of behavioral ecology. So for finding ways to make sure that your society is well regulated and well ordered, well structured, I sometimes feel.
- [18:06]
C
Like we're in danger of forgetting this ancient wisdom because it was so. It also seems like common sense, like if your water supply isn't clean and reliable. You can't have a well sanitized, hygienic and healthy population.
- [18:19]
B
But paging Thames water, if you're here in the uk, you know, there's a sewage that's been pumped into our rivers, into our beaches. It's a kind of no brainer that of course if you're, you're going to find all sorts of health outcomes that are going to be catastrophic and not just for humans, you're going to pollute everything. So again, the simplicity of how you need to invest in your sanitation systems. You can see the sophistication thousands of years before perhaps most people realize or think that these good ideas were put into practice.
- [18:45]
C
It's also interesting thinking about medieval and Elizabethan Europe. I mean, in England, for example, where people thought water was bad for you and so would only drink beer and Alex, it's such a backward regression from what ancient societies understood about the importance of hydration, water and bathing. And, you know, it's again another reminder that these ideas aren't linear, that there were large periods where humanity went backwards from things that were very deeply understood for thousands of years before. Maybe that's where Thames water is getting its inspiration from.
- [19:17]
B
Well, they could be getting their inspiration from the Indus Valley. So you have sites like Harappa and Herjo Daro which have sophisticated. I mean, sophisticated is probably not enough. I mean they are absolutely up to 19th century European city standards, where you've got brick lined drains running underneath streets, you've got individual households with their own bathing rooms, you've got vertical terracotta pipes for waste, you've got soak pits and inspection holes. This is one, one and a half thousand years before you find them in the Mediterranean. And when you do find them in places like Knossos and Phaistos in Crete, you know, you can see how people are thinking about the importance of getting stuff that's dangerous out of the way. You know, the people have always understood the problems of dirty water and many cultures are doing this a long time before, you know, urban civilization or big cities and sophistication get moving. And even in, even in Skara Brae in the Orkneys, I don't know if you ever been up to the Orkneys. This unbelievable site, about 5,000 years old, has a drainage system running underneath houses that show thought about, about planning as well.
- [20:25]
C
Ritual purity dominates the earliest religions with water at its center. So if you look at ancient Mesopotamia, for example, the word apsu refers to the cosmic waters beneath the earth which were regarded to be Pure life giving and ritually powerful. And priests would use water drawn at dawn for purification rites before entering temples.
- [20:48]
B
You have that in Egypt too. You know, priests are expected to bathe four times a day in sacred lakes. You know, the Nile's annual flood that sort of brings up all these incredible alluvial deposits that made Egypt the breadbasket of the Mediterranean and of North Africa was understood that water had these magical properties symbolizing rebirth and cleanliness and purification. And likewise, we mentioned Mohenjo Dhara and the Indus Valley. You know, you've got monumental structures that are dedicated towards ritual cleaning. So lots of different cultures in all the different continents, the ideas of how water is central to making sure that communities are safe and are able to endure. And you know, again, today we, I suppose the modern version of that is that mineral water gets sold, you know, three, four, five pounds a bottle because, you know, what you drink, what you know, how pure it is, is the kind of marker towards the ability to have good health. And of course that's highly stratified. If you could afford to buy a bottle of Eviol for whatever it now costs, you're able to drink better than if you're drinking from a tap. Although I quite was quite amused when you see how tap water sometimes beats mineral water and bottled water for its.
- [21:56]
C
Purity levels, except now it's full of ozempic. I've got a story about a modern water purification ritual because I live in Wimbledon and one of the things people don't know about Wimbledon Common is that there was a Roman camp on Wimbledon Common. It's called Caesar's Camp, although I think the evidence that Caesar was personally there is slightly tenuous. But there was this Roman camp on Wimbledon Common and there was reported to have been a spring in the ground there that had really powerful healing properties. And I went for a walk on Wimbledon Common the other day and bumped into what I can only describe as a kind of pilgrimage. They were, I don't know if you would describe them as druids or kind of new age kind of seekers, but this group of people were basically like roaming all over Wimble and Common trying to find this mythical spring. And they asked me where it was. And I have heard rumors of this thing, but I didn't really realize people were taking it so seriously. But they traveled a really long way to find it. And I asked them what they were planning to do and they said they wanted to bathe in its curative waters and carry out a kind of purification rituals. So you never know on a park or common near you. There might be people conducting one of these ancient rituals as we speak, Peter.
- [23:13]
B
But, you know, that happens a lot in Buddhist cultures, for example, in Bali and in Southeast Asia. The importance of water as a purgative and as a process, a part of your pilgrimage. When you go to the temple to go and make offerings to hope for long life and good health, Part of the exercise is also getting into running water and making an offering while bowing your head, et cetera, et cetera. So the idea of water being part of a wider holistic cosmology that connects to the divine, connects to your own health. Maybe your druids in Wimbledon are onto something because they're sitting in a long line that stretches back deep into the past. The idea of how you should be bathing communally, and, you know, it's also part to do with the idea of how you can manipulate water to do what humans want it to do. So, you know, that, that, that includes water temperature, too, by the way.
- [24:05]
C
One of my favorite stories is about the springs in the Caribbean. Many Caribbean islands have these incredible natural springs and waterfalls and how during enslavement, enslaved people who led rebellions would go and bathe in the waters and, you know, had these belief systems that connected them to their ancestors, to the power of the earth, and they would use that to build the strength and the courage to go into what was an incredibly dangerous and often fatal battle against their systems of oppression. So, you know, it is found out with all of these stories of struggle and strength and the supernatural and yes, on how to use water temperature. At my gym, they've now started offering contrast therapy classes.
- [24:45]
B
What is that? Never heard of contrast.
- [24:46]
C
As far as I can work out, is that you get guided by an instructor in. Into the plunge pool, which is at around minus 6 degrees Celsius. That's.
- [24:55]
B
That's tasty.
- [24:56]
C
Unbearably cold.
- [24:58]
B
Yeah.
- [24:58]
C
And then you go into the sauna and the steam room and you alternate. And there's this theory that I think has some basis in science that it's good for you to experience those contrasting temperatures and that the water kind of makes it something that doesn't shock your body into some state of high nervous dysregulation, but actually is good for healing. Although I've always hated being cold, and I'm really happy that now there's new evidence from a study I read that it's bad for women because the cortisol spike that we experience from the shock of being cold can outweigh the benefits of the contrast Therapy. So now I have a really good reason as to why I'm not doing that, because getting into a cold plunge pool is my personal hell. Having said that, I respect that there are many ancient traditions of using cold and hot water as a way of curing problems. And I'm sure there is a lot of reason to that.
- [25:54]
B
Well, you know, in lots of other dating systems, you know, the start of the year is 1st of March or beginning of March or September. You know, January is kind of the worst time when it's freezing cold, at least in the northern hemisphere outside, to be rebooting, you know, getting it to minus six when it's cold outside and you're going to, after your gym session, head back out into the winds and blizzards of South London can be terrible. But it is true that in these other traditions, the idea of experimenting with hot waters, you know, for example, the Hittites or the Hurrian rituals, again, in the sort of part of the Fertile Crescent, they have what are described as sweat huts, which are sort of bit like saunas. And they're used not just for people to warm up and have a chat about the day and what they're up to, but that does use specifically to be driving out toxins. And you find that detoxification process. And again, lots of other different cultures and societies from China, where you have heated stones in enclosed spaces that are doing the same thing as making heat rooms that are there to improve your physical health and to get rid of things and to purge you. You get that in the alternative that you mentioned, contrast. Was it called contrast?
- [26:59]
C
Beijing Contrast therapy.
- [27:00]
B
Contrast therapy. I'm afraid that it wasn't your gym in Wimbledon that got older. That first. That was the Minoans and the Mycenaeans.
- [27:06]
C
Well, now you say that and the thing you've just described, they describe my gym as sauna breathwork. What I think is sad, though, listening to what you're saying, is that in ancient societies, these were communal activities that were part of ritual and group ideas about healing. So it's not just you being well, it's wellness in the community. It's everyone being well together. Now you have to pay. I'm not disclosing how much my gym costs, but every single month I question whether it's affordable or worth it. An exorbitant amount to have access to these facilities. And there's no spiritual or communal dimension. It's just something you do for yourself. It's a kind of individualistic pursuit of wellbeing. And I think that's maybe where we've gone wrong. In societies like the uk, the idea that you can pursue wellness as individual consumption. Actually, I think the lesson from what I learned about ancient societies doing this work is that you can't be well unless the community is well. And you can't separate wellness from these more social ritual ideas about healing. And no matter how many plunge pools you get into, you will be missing a trick if you don't understand that.
- [28:12]
B
So I wonder, you know, you talked about your gym. I friend, the one thing you mentioned just now about whether it's worth it, Right. So in today's world, it's very much that, that kind of level of health, whether it's contrast therapy or go to the gym, or whether it's running around on all fours or climbing walls, it's something that is connected towards disposable incomes and wealth and ideas about the body. Right. It's partly about keeping yourself healthy, but it's also about looking good, I guess. But it's also something that has a socioeconomic perspective to it. I mean, is this idea about how you look after yourself, has it always been connected towards wealth and the ability to afford to protect yourself and think holistically? No.
- [28:49]
C
And it's a very modern idea that access to good food, exercise, and natural remedies with light and water are a luxury that the rich can afford. And I think that is one of the most perverted things about modern society, that we've separated food from nature and we've separated work from activity, and we've all become separated from community. So now it is something that you seek to. To pay for on your own. And I do pay for my gym, because living in that kind of world and not having access to exercise and contrast therapy is worse than living in this world and having access to it. But I don't think either of those things are ideal, Peter and that really is the takeaway from ancient societies, isn't it? Much as they've kind of ebbed and flowed in their achievement of healthy lifestyles, that for most of human history, it wasn't something that was delineated by social class or access to resources.
- [29:47]
B
But has it been turned on its head? I mean, if you think about the 18th, 19th century, both in plantation complexes and enslaved peoples, or to people working in fields or in factories, you know, the physical backbreaking work was a mark of the people who were going to be the healthiest and strongest would have been the people who were the poorest in societies, whereas the wealthy were drinking port and lashings of red wine every night for dinner. And the idea of exercise meant going for a decent long walk every now and again after reading a Jane Austen novel. Is there a change now in the way in which the people who go to the gym at 4 o' clock in the morning and are bench pressing and really look after themselves? That there's an inversion of how society looked, at least in the European model over the last couple of hundred years.
- [30:29]
C
It is related to inequality, isn't it? Because if you look at lots of societies around the world, there is a much smaller gap between the elites and the population in terms of their lifestyle. Like if you go to my part of Ghana, even the king is helping out with the farming and the work in the community. And so, you know, it's not something that has been separated by a class, an underclass of laborers, and therefore everyone participates and has a more similar physical experience. But if you look at very unequal societies, you have people who are so disconnected from labor and from the elements and a premium gets put on that. And you see that today, don't you? In cultures where to be pale is still regarded as a sign of affluence because it shows that you're able to stay out of the sun because you no longer have to work. And many urban African cultures that have also been separated from that tradition, you know, elites still wear obesity as a sign of pride because it shows that they have access to a surplus of food. And there's still a premium attached to that because they're countries where people still suffer food insecurity. So I think it goes along with inequality. And it's one of many ways you can measure how inequality has been bad for everyone. Because ironically, those elites probably have less health well being and lower life expectancy in some ways than people who have a more active lifestyle and still live in a way that's. That's more natural.
- [31:53]
B
So interesting. I would love to do an episode, Afra, about cities and towns in sub Saharan West Africa. Because in that kind of the history going back three or four thousand years, as towns and cities start to take shape, which we talked about on this episode and the episode before, for whatever reason, sub Saharan West Africa has a completely different model to every other part of the world where cities and towns start to develop the idea that those social inequalities like you mentioned are lower, you know, I don't know enough about that in the modern world. But it resonates with the fact that for whatever reason, there's a model that looks slightly different and whether that's to do with geography or society or ecologies would be great to really think about because that's such an important part of the world that I haven't spent enough time learning about. But it does look and behaves and structures look very, very different. But it would be great to talk about that too on another episode. But when we come back for our next episode, please do listen to that one too. We're going to think about the role that sleep plays in wellness, the birth of exercise in the ancient world, the ways in which pain remedies are dealt with, and also the ideas of personal fitness. Not of the Internet guru who you might be following to get your tips, but from thousands of years ago. Thanks for listening to Legacy.
- [33:10]
C
Don't forget to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast player. You can also watch all our episodes on YouTube, so make sure you're subscribed there too.
- [33:18]
B
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 Frankenban. I'm Afwa Hersh and we'll see you on the next episode of Legacy.
- [33:48]
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