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Patrick Wyman, "Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World" (HarperCollins, 2026)
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A
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B
hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Patrick Wyman about his latest book, published by HarperCollins in 2026, titled Lost How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded and Built Our World, which tells the story of quite a large span of history. We're going to be going to one all sorts of different places and times to maybe poke at the myth that is often told in textbooks about the sort of prehistory period that makes the progression from sort of hunter gatherer to farming to villages and cities sound like it took a long time, but that it was kind of a relatively even progressive sort of evolution. This book, as the subtitle suggests, talks about some of the outcomes of those processes, but also the tried and failed bit too. Right. What didn't quite work worked, but only for a little bit. The history is much more nuanced and interesting than perhaps we usually get to hear and read about. So, Patrick, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.
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A
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
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B
Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and then tell us why you decided to write this book?
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A
Sure. So I'm Patrick Wyman and I finished a PhD in history in 2016 at the University of Southern California, and since then I have essentially worked in popular history as a popular history communicator. Most of my work has been in podcasts, so I did a show called the Fall of Rome. And then after that, after doing that for about a year, I made a show called Tides of History, which just finished its nine year run. It was so much fun to make this show for so long. I mean, I got to make a great living out of, you know, translating academic history and archeology for popular audiences. And that's really What I specialize in is. Is act of translation of being able to communicate what is happening in these specialist fields to interested and engaged laypeople. Lost Worlds is my second book. Oh, also I have a new podcast now that Tides of History is finished up. It's called Past Lives. Almost every episode is about the life of a real ordinary person who lived at some point in the distant past. So first season is all about slaves. Second season is all about people whom we know through their human remains. So mummies, people that we know through their skeletons and the like. Next season will be about ordinary villains. So just kind of the bad people who make the world worse. Lost Worlds is my second book. It is the product of many, many years of research. I spent about five and a half years on this one and I was able to use the research that I was doing, four Tides of History episodes as a good base to expose myself to this vast field that is global prehistoric archeology and a little bit of history. Once we get toward the end, when we, toward the very end of the book, we into the written word just a little bit. But this is obviously a pretty huge not field, but series of fields. And so I really tried my hardest to treat it just like I would, as if I were doing another PhD. I read absolutely every paper I could get my hands on. I talked to dozens of archeologists working across every continent except Antarctica. And yeah, I mean, I think I put in the work on this to try to give a cutting edge view of where the study of global prehistory is at right now. How our portrait of it has changed over the last 20 years as there's just been an absolute revolution in archeological science. And I thought the time had come for us to take stock of just how much different our picture of the distant past looks now than it did when most of us were learning this stuff in school.
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B
Yeah, this field definitely has a lot of cool things happening and recently have happened, which definitely comes through in the book.
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A
Right.
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B
If there had only been one or two finds, this would have been more article length rather than book length. But there's clearly plenty that you've been able to put together and obviously way more than we're going to be able to cover in this conversation. But hopefully we can give people a sense of some of the places and people and sort of, I suppose, experiments in human evolution that you cover. And I know that I emphasized in my introduction the tried and failed bit of the subtitle and we will get to that. But I do want to start with at least one success story that is intriguing. Both, I think, or at least I found for its success, but also what it reveals, perhaps about, like, how tricky it was to have a successful society in this long span of prehistory. So can we start off by talking about the Clovis people and what made them able to be successful?
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Oh, absolutely. I could talk about the Clovis people for as much time as you got here. So the Clovis people are one of the first widespread archeological cultures in the Americas, specifically in North America. And for a very long time, archaeologists of the early Americas believed that the Clovis people were the first inhabitants of the Americas. That is now substantially less certain. I would say. In fact, we can probably put that to bed. There were people in the Americas before the Clovis people, almost certainly. We don't know how long. We don't know where they lived. We don't exactly know what their lives were like. We can't really put the pre Clovis evidence into any sort of coherent narrative about what people were doing in the Americas before about 13,000 years ago. But once the Clovis people show up, all of the sudden we have a vast new technological complex that covers all of North America very quickly, or most of North America very quickly, extends down into Mesoamerica and even the northern reaches of South America. This all happens within about 300 years. But who these people were had previously been pretty mysterious until the discovery of a single set of infant human remains in what's now Montana. These remains were discovered back in the 1960s, but they were. They were tested for ancient DNA about 10 years ago. And what we found from this is that the Clovis people are directly ancestral to almost all later indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. That there were subsequent waves of migration, the picture gets a little more complicated. But at a basic level, the. The bulk of the ancestry that indigenous peoples in the Americas have had for the last 13,000 years comes from this one group. And their lifestyle, so far as we can tell, was based on big game hunting. They made these beautiful fluted bifaces. These, these in. They're instantly recognizable. They're about 4 inches long. These stone projectile points, they have a groove running down the middle. They really are beautiful pieces of technology, but they're extraordinarily well suited for big game hunting. They are for hunting mammoth, bison, the Pleistocene camels that inhabited the Americas, equids, the, the. The vast array of prey animals that were available in North America as the Ice Age was giving way to the Holocene and the Clovis people really seem to have hit this at a sweet spot. So there were not a lot of other people around for competition. There were huge numbers of prey animals with little experience of human predation. Those animals were abundant enough that a very small group of people could multiply many, many, many times over. The. The genetic. The genomics gives us estimates as to what the effective population size of this initial Clovis group was. And it was maybe a few dozen or at most, a couple hundred people. And from this very small group stems millions upon millions upon millions of later indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. So what is it about that particular time and place that allows the Clovis people to do this? What is it about their lifestyle that allows them to be so successful? These are some of the questions that we can now start to approach, given the data that we have at our disposal. Now that we know why the Clovis people mattered. They're still enigmatic. You know, we don't have a lot of sets of human remains. We don't have settlement. We don't have more than a couple of campsites. Most of what we have are kill sites and caches of artifacts. But what we can see when we put these tiny, tiny, tiny little pieces of evidence together is just how extraordinarily important this group was to everything that's happened in the Americas over the last 13,000 years.
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B
That is very intriguing indeed, to have all of this new data at our fingertips. Is there anything further you want to tell us now about kind of what putting that together, the picture that. That tells us in terms of success?
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Yeah, I mean, it really tells us that that kind of success is not solely a function of the technological package that you have. It's not solely a function of entering a kind of a bountiful new environment. It's the combination of all of those different factors that, you know, if. If you're looking at the Clovis people, it's not that they're the only people in the world who know how to hunt big game. It's not that they're the only group that. That is capable of doing that, but they happen to be in the right place at the right time, and we're still living with the consequences of that today. And, I mean, we can talk about. There's a thousand other things that go along with the Clovis people. So, for example, were they responsible for the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna in North America? There's some reason to think that those populations of megafauna were Already declining. But I think if you've got a group that's big game hunting as a way of life, that shows up and very shortly afterward the megafauna go extinct. I mean, I think you're probably fairly justified in drawing a causal correlation between those two things. So there's a lot that we can know about the Clovis people in a way that we couldn't about earlier inhabitants of the Americas. And they're just so important to understanding how and why everything subsequent happens.
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B
And of course, there's lots of reasons that things change after that. And throughout the book, you point to environmental factors as being obviously a massive part of why people are trying certain things. They're trying to adapt. In some cases they're succeeding, some cases they're, well, succeeding less so, let's say, to cover the range of things that you discuss in the book. But if we sort of focus on the early Holocene period, what's changing at that moment in ways that impact, for example, what you've just been describing.
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So generally speaking, as the, as the Younger Dryas, kind of the last cold snap of the Ice age, gives way to the Holocene, the world gets warmer and wetter. Now, the patterns of that, of that warming and moistening, so to speak, those, those patterns are going to vary depending on where on the planet we're talking about. The, the climate is changing around the world at every scale, both temporal and geographic, all the time. Sometimes those are extremely slow processes have changed, like insulation, the amount of sunlight that's reaching the Earth, the Earth's surface, those patterns tend to change very slowly. Atmospheric circulation, ocean circulation, those things are changing a little faster, but still fairly slowly. Then you have other forms of climate change that are happening. You know, there's ocean, sea level rise, there's all sorts of stuff that's happening at any given moment. What's happening in one microclimate might be very different than what's happening in the microclimate in the next valley over. But by and large, what's happening is it's getting warmer and warmer, wetter. These, this, this has a bunch of effects on climate, and then it has a bunch of effects on the human societies that are trying to exist through that. So it makes seasonality a lot more noticeable. The, the difference between summer and winter, and thus the, what we would consider growing seasons for plant foods, those become a lot more apparent with greater seasonality. Same with, same with animal behaviors. Animal behaviors become easier to understand with the more, the, the more, more seasonal you get because you can see, well, you know, they're, they're mating in this season. The babies are born in this season. And those correlate with changes in the weather that people are experiencing. As it gets warmer and wetter, you get a greater density of resources in any given place around the world. So you can make a choice at that point. If you're a group of humans that's experiencing this, you can say, well, we can keep living the way we always have, which invol which tends to involve a lot more movement moving from point A to point B and a lot more specialization. So the Clovis people were specialists, they were big game hunters. So far as we can tell, they moved long distances in pursuit of their preferred food resource. What happens in the Holocene all across the planet, this isn't just in the Fertile Crescent, though that's probably the best known example of it, is that people start moving around less because the weather, the weather is better because there are more resources available in more restricted areas, people don't have to move around as much. They can start to build permanent homes or a sequence of seasonal homes instead of having to travel hundreds of miles every year. And when you settle down in an area, you start to become more intimately familiar with the plant and animal life in that area. And so you start to notice these plants are really good for this. These animals come to this place at this time of the year. And it's those conditions, it's that greater familiarity, greater seasonality, and kind of, you know, just a gentler climate to live in that allows people to start experimenting with what will eventually become the domestication of plants and animals. This process takes a really long time, though. I think there's a kind of a common misconception at just about every level that once we start farming, we are farmers. And that's not really what happens. A better way to understand it is that people started experimenting with plants, with wild plants and wild animals. And very, very slowly, over the course of many thousands of years, people figured out things like how to select for specific characteristics. I mean, they figured out that if we put fertilizer on top of, if we put manure on top of the places where we've, where we've planted seeds, that the plants are going to grow better. They figured out that these kinds of plants grow well in these conditions but not in others. Those things which we kind of take for granted as basic parts of an agricultural package. It took thousands upon thousands of years for people to figure those things out. So rather than this immediate transition to well, we're all farmers now. It's this long process of adoption and experimentation that looks very different depending on where exactly we are on the planet. Looks different in Mesoamerica than it does in the Andes. It looks different in the Andes than it does in the Fertile Crescent. Looks different in the Yellow River Valley of China, as opposed to the Yangtze River Valley of China. There are at least six and probably more independent centers of plant domestication around the globe. So you get people responding to these global climate changes in idiosyncratic ways that vary depending on where you are.
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B
This is exactly what I was hoping we'd talk about at this point in our conversation. The idea that sort of it's all about the Fertile Crescent and we started farming and that was it. Like, this is really, I think, where the kind of trying of the book comes in, of the documenting all these different kinds of experimenting in, as you've mentioned, so many different places. Could we spend a moment then giving some more specific examples of kind of what people are trying in the different places? Like you mentioned, a few things there, or figuring out manure. But are there any other sort of particular experiments we want to discuss?
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Oh, my gosh. So many different experiments. Because what we get when we take the Fertile Crescent as our kind of Ur case of farming is we. It gets treated as if it's a checklist of characteristics, and you have to meet that checklist of characteristics or you're doing it wrong. You haven't. You haven't hit all of the things that you need to hit. And so instead of it just being experimentation with food or with plant foods or with the domestication of animals, it's like, well, you've also got to be sedentary. You've also got to eventually get to the point where you have pottery. You've got to. You've got to develop social institutions, social and cultural institutions that allow you. That allow you to live together. And so once you have this package, then this Fertile Crescent package, then farming can go anywhere. And that's just not what happens. So what happens in the Fertile Crescent makes sense in the context of what was happening in the Fertile Crescent before this. So people living in the Fertile Crescent, especially a culture that we call the Natufians, had been experimenting with sedentism for several thousand years before the. Even the earliest signs of the intentional cultivation of plants. They could do this because where they were living in the Fertile Crescent was a really nice place to live between about 16,000 and 11,000 years ago. Fantastic place to live there Was a wide variety of plant foods. There was a wide variety of animal life. There was a high density of resources in local areas, so people didn't have to move. They started experimenting with sedentism Long before they started experimenting with intentional cultivation. Now, elsewhere in the world, we see the opposite. We. We see people experimenting with cultivation without ever settling down. So one of my favorite sites is in the balsas river valley in southern Mexico. It's a place called zihuatochtla Rock shelter. And Zihuatochla has the earliest evidence that we currently have for domesticated maize. And today, maize is a crop that feeds billions of people. But the process of domestication for maize Looks very different than it does for wheat. The domesticated wheat is not that different from its wild ancestor. Basically, there's just some. There's just been processes of selection for desirable traits. Maize looks nothing like its wild ancestor. Teosinte is the wild ancestor of maize. It's these tiny little. It's these tiny little cobs with just a few kernels that don't really. There's not. There's nothing there that's worth the squeeze of effort. But the. These early inhabitants of Mesoamerica Experimented with teosinte for so, so, so long, for. For millennia that they were able to turn it into a usable food crop. But what they did with that, they didn't turn it into a staple. They weren't immediately reliant on maize. They didn't build villages. They did what's called flood retreat farming. So they would go down to the edge of a lake shore, and at the. At the beginning of the dry season, they would plant. They would plant right next to the edge of the lake. And when the waters fell away, they would get a little bit more land. They could plant their waters, come back up, it's nice and wet. You don't have to do anything to prepare that. And so for them, these people who effectively developed the domesticated variety of maize, it was just a supplement to their diets. They were still hunter gatherers. They were still wandering around from place to place. They were basically doing slash and burn agriculture. And this was just a part of their subsistence package. It wasn't particularly important to them. It takes thousands of years more for maize to become a staple crop. But it's really easy for us to write out those thousands of years and just say, well, there were some people who were experimenting with teosinte. And then 5,000 years later, 8,000 years later, however long, however long it is, People end up using maize as a staple crop to build complex societies in the Americas is if you strip out the mini millennia of experimentation and. And productive use of this crop, you're telling a pretty misleading story about how it got there and why people used it and what they found valuable about it. You're reinforcing the idea that there is a Fertile Crescent kind of catalog of characteristics that you have to meet. Now, what happens in the Americas doesn't look anything like what happens in the. What happens in Mesoamerica doesn't look anything like what happens in the Andes, where the most important domesticated plant is not a food, but cotton, which allows you to. Which allows you to scale up fishing enterprises. So instead of having to use natural fibers to make fishing nets, you can use cotton fibers to make fishing nets. So the reason why the domestication of plants matters along the Indian coast of South America is because it allows you to fish more, not because it allows you to grow more plant foods. So everywhere we go around the world, we find a specific set of local characteristics that develop in the. In a way that makes sense. There in the highlands of New guinea, which is an extraordinarily important center of plant domestication, they're all vegetative rather than. They're all vegetative rather than flowering plants, they have to be vegetatively reproduced. You have to take cuttings or shoots and replant them. There's no seeds. So you get taro, sugarcane, banana. That whole complex of plants works much differently than the grasses that we see in East Asia or the Fertile Crescent. So everywhere we go, something is different, whether it's the social context, whether it's the environmental context, whether it's the selection of plant foods, it's how people using them. Everywhere we go, something important is different.
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B
And those are some very good examples of. Of exactly how stark those differences are. Right. Like, you don't have to be a super specialist that can read DNA analysis to be like, oh, wait, hang on a second. Right. Maize, cotton, wheat. Those are some very different things that have different implications for kind of how societies are interested in them and kind of pursue them and develop around them. So that's definitely helpful to get a picture kind of at that moment in the time span that you cover. But of course, we have more time to cover. So many. Moving along a bit, perhaps we can talk about what you discuss as the, quote, great conundrum of the long Neolithic.
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Yes. Yeah. So I think it's really important to draw a distinction between this long period of experimentation and then the Neolithic proper Or what I call in this book the Long Neolithic, which is the period in which all of those developments came together into packages. So where you had the marriage of the idea of living in a village plus an agricultural lifestyle, it's really that combination of things, much more so than it is either A, villages or B, or B agriculture that allows people to expand and transform the entire planet. So what happens over the course of the Neolithic is this is our first great period of global environmental engineering as a species, that everything that happens after this, the Industrial Revolution, the Information Age, is downstream of this first extraordinary period of transformation that by the time we get to the Bronze age, you know, 3,000, 4,000 years ago, people have already completely transformed the plant and animal life on this planet, on. On every continent, except for maybe Australia. And that's questionable. Everywhere you go, people have already replaced native flora and fauna with domesticated species. We have dramatically changed the ground cover of the planet by that time. And the Long Neolithic is when this process happens, I would say starting around 5500, 6000 B.C. extending somewhere up until around 2500 or 2000 B.C. again, depending on where you're talking about on the planet. But this is the time when village societies emerge and they spread over much of the planet. They spread over all of Asia, spread over all of Europe. And the combination of the social unit of the village with the subsistence method of farming ends up having enormous environmental and demographic impacts, because farming societies are extraordinarily successful demographically. It turns out if we're trying to understand how and why farming spread across the planet, this is a question archaeologists have been trying to answer basically since we discovered the Neolithic. You know, more than a century, people have been trying to figure this out. And there are two basic camps. One one is that foragers, when they encountered farming technologies, adopted it and became farmers, or the farmer. These pioneering farmers themselves had so many children that they demographically swamped existing forager populations. And now, thanks to ancient DNA and a variety of other archaeoscientific tools, we can answer this pretty definitively. It's that in almost every case, the farmers are simply demographically more successful. They just out reproduce their foraging competition. There are places where this doesn't happen. I get into a number of them in the book. There are places where indigenous foragers adopt some pieces of the farming package. Foragers seem to have a much easier time wrapping their heads around the idea of domesticated animals. And so a lot of the time, what you see is foragers go straight from Being hunter gatherers to being pastoralists. So this happens on the Eurasian steppe, for example. It probably happens in places in sub Saharan Africa. It happens. There's a really odd case of it happening in Xinjiang, in, in the Tarim Basin in western China. So we can see this happening sometimes, but by and large, as farming expands, it's because there are more farmers than there used to be. Now, on the one hand, this creates the basic outlines of a world that we know. It creates the preconditions that allow us to, to eventually have states, hierarchies, you know, kind of what we think of as the, the, the definition of civilization. But the downside to this is population booms are not great for everybody. And when populations rise, a lot of the time, what that means is fewer resources or poorer quality resources for everyone else. And so Neolithic societies, as they expand, they experience enormous growing pains. They are, they struggle to manage this new scale. How do you manage social relations between not just one or two villages, but a whole cluster of villages? How do you handle ambitious people who want to be in charge of things? How do you handle discontent with the existing social order? How do you handle violence? How do you handle food shortages? These are all questions that have to be answered over the course of the long Neolithic. And everywhere you go, people come up with slightly different answers to these questions, but their answers don't always work. And what we see when we look at the long record of Neolithic societies is collapse over and over and over again. You get societies that absolutely flourish for a few hundred years, maybe even a thousand years, and then eventually something goes wrong. The canonical example of this is a group that, an early Neolithic group that lived across most of Europe. They lived everywhere from Normandy to the eastern slopes of the Carpathians, called the lbk, the Linear Band Keramik or Linear Pottery culture. And this is a really kind of weird, idiosyncratic little group. They start off right in the borderlands between what are now Hungary and Austria, kind of the upper Danube. It's at the, at the beginning, it's just a few hundred people living on the fringes of a much more sophisticated Neolithic society that spans most of the Danube valley and the northern Balkans. These people develop a really unique way of life, living kind of isolated on the fringes of Neolithic society. They live in huge timber longhouses. They strip down the subsistence package so that instead of having a variety of things, they literally just have cattle and wheat. Pretty much that's basically all they're doing, is cattle and wheat. They only want to live on these really specific kinds of soil that are easy for them to work, like loose soil. So kind of windblown aeolian sediments that are laid down at the end of the last ice age, really suitable for immediate plowing and farming. The land that they do utilize, they utilize very intensively. So they manure it. And they're, they are strongly organized along the male lineage. So what you get is the, the eldest son moves to a new patch of land, sets up shop, builds up, builds a giant longhouse, then has a bunch of children. And when there are too many people to, to survive on this existing patch of loose soil, they go and they find the next patch of loose soil. Now if you fast forward a few hundred years, this initial group of a few hundred people has become many, many thousands spread out over all of Europe. And, and they are culturally homogenous, they're genetically homogeneous. I would guess that they all spoke the same language or variations of the same language there. There are almost no identifiable regional differences in material culture. And yet within another few centuries, by around 5000 BC, this society has torn itself apart. Across the length and breadth of Europe, their populations have, have absolutely bottomed out. They've dropped by half or three quarters or even more. Across most of that range, we see copious evidence for extreme violence. So massacres of entire village communities, cannibalism, possibly ritual sacrifice. I mean, there's some pretty horrifying stuff that happens here. Like finding even one prehistoric mass grave is a pretty rare occurrence. Finding a whole bunch from one society in the course of about a century means that something went very wrong here. And that's not the only time and place that this happens. We see these booms and busts over and over and over again. And instead of thinking that those are kind of rare tragedies, I think we need to reintegrate them into our understanding of how cultures and societies develop over very long periods of time. That if you build a society based on this really specific subsistence pattern and this really specific social pattern, eventually you're going to end up hitting the limits of what that can do. You're going to hit the limits to where you can expand geographically. You're going to hit the limits to what your system can absorb in terms of managing conflict and the kind of the day to day stuff that comes up when you've got people living in proximity to each other. And so the LBK is this really striking example, a really violent example of what happens when you hit the limits of expansion and suddenly you're forced to live with each other. Suddenly you're forced to figure out, how can we deal with one another? And they didn't have an answer. The answer was disastrous for tens or hundreds of thousands of people who died or there, or they weren't able to have children because conditions were simply too difficult. So rather than thinking of that as some kind of exception to the rule, I think we should treat that as something much more like the norm that societies have an expiration date. Subsistence patterns have an expiration date. As things change, you're not always going to be able to solve the next problem that comes along. And that is just a thing that happens to human societies. We can often figure out why, but not always. It often has something to do with climate, but it's not necessarily a direct correlation or a direct causal relationship. It's more like there's a melange of stuff happening at any given time. Some of them are exogenous factors, some of them are endogenous. But at the end of the day, what we often end up seeing in the archaeological record is that this previously flourishing society disappears or tears itself apart or is forced to transform itself so dramatically that it doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to whatever it was before.
- [31:58]
B
Yeah, there's lots of attempts at problem solving going on in this period, as you discuss in the book, many of which don't work for that long or work, and then really, as you've described, catastrophically, don't. But even with these societies kind of no longer continuing, the fact that there are groups of humans that have to figure out how to adapt and survive and solve problems continues. And so after the long Neolithic, you discuss sort of these problem solving ideas in, I suppose, two groups, right? Intensification and extensification. So what are these two groups? Can you give us some examples of what might fit into them?
- [32:36]
A
Yeah, so we, we are much more familiar with intensification as a strategy. And this is basically what I would call the river valley path to civilization. So the Mesopotamia is a great example of this. The Nile Valley in Egypt is another. You could probably say much the same about the Yellow and the, the Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers in China, that what you have here are the conditions that allow you to squeeze ever more people into restricted geographic areas and you develop the social, cultural and political tools to effectively control those people. So this is where agrarian empires come from. This is where the earliest states that we're aware of come from is these, these increasingly packed river valleys where people can start to exercise some kind of authority over their fellows. And, and we have been given to understand in this kind of basic story of progress that we've been given, that this is where the action is happening, that this is where the important stuff happens, that this is where states are born. This is where a world that is understandable to us is given life. But what I want to contrast that with and what I try to do in the book is contrast that with extensification. So instead of more intensively populating an individual area and exerting and having powerful people exert tighter control over that area, instead what you see are the developments of technologies that allow people to spread out and utilize parts of the planet that had not previously been utilized on a large scale by people. So the two examples of this that I use in this chapter are the proto Indo Europeans, so representatives of the Yamnaya Horizon representative which comes about in the Step north of the Black and Caspian seas around 3000 B.C. it's fully developed. And these, these people are almost certainly the ancestral speakers of the proto Indo European language, which gives rise to basically everything that's spoken across huge swaths of Eurasia today. There are about 2 billion Indo European speakers today, if memory serves me correctly. So pretty important. The other most widespread language family prior to, you know, the global expansion of English in the, in, in the colonial period or European language in the colonial period is the Austronesian languages. These originate in Taiwan. By the, by the time I'm talking about, they're spread everywhere from Madagascar to Easter Island. This is an incredibly geographically dispersed language family. But it happens to expand at roughly the same time that proto Indo European speakers are expanding across the steppe. So the proto Indo European speakers are expanding across the Step. Proto Austronesian speakers are expanding across islands, Southeast Asia and Oceania. And there's, there's something there. And I think what's there is that on the steppe you have the development of the horse and the wheel. Among the proto Austronesians you have the development of improved sailing technology and navigational knowledge. So both of these groups at roughly the same time figured out that rather than trying to more intensively exploit a, a pretty rough spot to live, the Step is not always friendly. The kind of island fringes of, of south of East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania are not necessarily the easiest place to live. And if you try to exploit those areas more intensively, you just can't like these. There's just not that much you can do with the available resources there. But what you can do if you have the right technology is pop to the next spot. That is nice. You can go across the open grassland to the next river valley. You can go down the coast to the next nice cove that has lots of shellfish and available fishing territory and a little bit of land where you can grow some rice and keep some pigs. And both of these groups, using one's, on one's terrestrial, one's maritime, both of them figure out that you could. That with a few tweaks, you can take this lifestyle and basically set up franchises over an enormous, enormous geographic space, a previously unimaginable geographic range. You know, the proto Austronesians are taking journeys that are further than anybody has ever done at sea. You know, they're going all the way to the Mariana Islands. They are crossing huge amounts of open ocean to get to these places. So whether it's the basic sailing technology or their confidence in their ability to get from point A to point B, something changes there. The proto Indo Europeans, by contrast, I mean, I was talking to an archaeologist named David Anthony who's done a lot of the pioneering work on, on the proto Indo Europeans more recently, and he was telling me about a case where they have two people who are related. They're cousins. One of them is buried in Hungary and the other is buried in southern Siberia. There they shared a grandfather. They were separated by thousands of miles. And those are the kinds of possibilities of geographic expansion that those cultures developed at this particular point in time. So this is much different than what we see in the river valleys. It's much different than intensification. But what I wanted to suggest here is that it is equally successful that these people left just as indelible a mark on the world to come, maybe even more so. There are a heck of a lot more people speaking Indo European languages than Sumerian right now. There's a heck of a lot more people speaking Austronesian than ancient Egyptian. So there. And there are a heck of a lot of people who have a genetic contribution from one of those two groups, if not both of them, spread across the planet. So really, if we're talking about success, if we're talking about what matters in the grand scheme of human history, is it the places that we've always been taught matter, the ones where states and writing and quote, unquote, civilization is born? Or is it these vast open spaces where some really inventive people figured out how to spread from place to place, and they've left us their genes, they've left us their languages? Which of those matters more? I wanted to bring the extensive societies into that mainstream conversation about who really matters at this point in the distant past.
- [38:45]
B
So I love this point about who really matters, because I think that we can apply it obviously to what you've just said, but even further than that to some other things that you discuss in the book. So I want to talk about Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid because in some senses they definitely still matter, right? Really iconic, huge tourist dollars taught to children all over the world. But we have only one of each of them. So if you can only do something once, is that success, like, why is it that we only have one? And why maybe can we be a little bit more nuanced and critical about the stories I think lots of us get as children?
- [39:22]
A
Well, so one of the wonderful things about the all of these developments in archaeology over the last couple of decades is not just that we're exposed to all of these new sites, is that we can read sites that we think we know really well through an entirely new lens. And Stonehenge has been. The environs of Stonehenge have been extraordinarily well excavated and are extremely well understood now in a way that they weren't even a couple of decades ago. We now have a much better understanding of how the Great Pyramid was built, the exact chronology of its building. And what we see is that these were not like eternal expressions of the ancient mind, that they're like, well, what do we do when we've got some stone? Well, we build a pyramid or we, we build a henge monument like Stonehenge. No, they were built. What we can now tell, because we have this extraordinarily good archeology, is that both of those monuments were built at a specific time for specific reasons. We know what those times were because we have the dating evidence. We can reconstruct the context around them because we have much better access to those things now. So what we learn is that the Great Pyramid, rather than being like an eternal expression of Egyptian ness, actually comes into being only a couple of hundred years after the very first pyramids were built. Like, the Egyptians went from building mud brick mastabas, which are kind of these like single story mud brick tomb covering kind of things. They're flat to building full blown pyramids within a few generations. It's not like there's this long, gentle ramp up process. It's that they kind of go from 0 to 60 in the rough equivalent of a heartbeat, especially on ancient Egyptian terms. And then these gigantic pyramids are only built for about three, four centuries and then they stop completely. They build other pyramids later, but they're nowhere near as Durable. They're not as sophisticated, they're not as big. The pyramid fits, form comes into being, hits its peak, and then it. And then, I mean, like, it sticks around as an idea, but nobody's ever building those again. Stonehenge belongs to a class of monuments that. That get built fairly regularly, but that specific one, as big as it is, with the specific kinds of stone that it included, it's built not at a time when things are going well, but at a time when things are not going well. Stonehenge seems to have been built as a way of bringing people together from all over the British Isles. This kind of disappearing population of. Of farmers and pastoralists who. There were about maybe half as many of them as there had been a thousand years before. Within another 500 years, they essentially disappear completely. The. They're. They're absorbed, either absorbed or wiped out by the people who come to Britain during the. During the early Bronze Age, called the Beaker People. There's very little sign of these Neolithic inhabitants after that, but Stonehenge itself sticks around. These new people who arrive make Stonehenge into a kind of a part of their mental landscape. They bury their debt around it. They build their own monuments around it. It kind of slots into their understanding of the world as this thing that's always been there. But we know that Stonehenge was built by these people at specific times for. For specific reasons. We know that the Great Pyramid could not have been built a few hundred years before, and it couldn't have been built a few hundred years afterward because the pharaohs didn't have the resources to bend toward projects that were that overpoweringly huge. So rather than these things being these kind of timeless expressions of a particular culture or particular way of life or a particular kind of human genius, what they become is a. Is a monument that's built at specific times for specific reasons. And so in that sense, the distant past starts to look much more like the rest of history than this kind of undifferentiated mass of just stuff that happened that we can all say, well, it's all leading here. It introduces the concept of historical time to prehistory. And I think that's really important to know that, like, even going that far back, there are things you can do at some times that you can't do it others. There. There are reasons why people do the things that they do. That's not just like, well, nice stone. Got to make a henge out of it. They were doing things that were meaningful to them that made sense in very specific cultural, social and political contexts and economic contexts as well. Like, the reason why the Great Pyramid could be built is because there was never a time before or after when the pharaoh had as much control over all of the resources of Egypt, whether that's labor or raw materials or, you know, whatever it is. Never again would the pharaoh have that much control. They could. The Great Pyramid could only have been built, then Stonehenge. It only makes sense to build it at a time when you need to bring people together from all over Britain, a monument on that scale that serves the specific functions that it does. So what I wanted to do was make it so that we understand these monuments as unique things, rather than just being like, oh, yeah, well, of course, ancient people built giant stone things. That's what ancient people do.
- [44:33]
B
Yeah. And, I mean, it definitely speaks to our understanding of history and kind of, what is history doing? How do we think about this as a way of thinking in a way? And, of course, that's something you're doing sort of throughout the book. We've touched on it already a few times, and you keep going. Right. As the book does. So I wonder if we can turn the same perspective to not necessarily the Bronze Age collapse itself, but the sort of analysis of what caused the Bronze Age collapse, which has been an area of much debate for quite a long time. And it's, in fact, the fact it's of debate that is interesting to you, right?
- [45:06]
A
Yes, absolutely. Because I think the Bronze Age collapse is a fascinating case because it is the best documented case of collapse that we can find. Find from the distant past. Right. So it is. It's. It's distant, but it's close enough to us in time that we have things like written sources that we can use to understand it. We have an immense amount of archaeology that we can use to understand this. And what. And to your point, what I was fascinated by as I was trying to make sense of this and as I was talking to the archaeologists who popularize the concepts of the Bronze Age, of the Bronze Age collapse, and as I was talking to people who work on the environmental data and the chronology of these things, was that there was a lot of stuff happening. And I don't. And I think that right in there is the key to understanding how and why these big collapses happen in general. And this is building off the work of Eric Klein, who wrote 1177 B.C. the, you know, kind of the classic work on the Bronze Age collapse is that we have to understand these ancient societies as complex systems where what happens in one place has ripple effects elsewhere and not necessarily in straightforward ways that you would expect that when you pin together different societies over a huge geographic range, you can't be exactly sure how pressing a button in one place is going to affect something that happens 500 miles away. And so I lay out in, in lost worlds what seems to me to be the, a potential causal chain that eventually gets us from, from, to the Bronze Age collapse. But I think what actually matters is the fact that there were 17,000 different things happening and that the world was that connected and that what happened in one place could affect what happened somewhere else. That when you understand those dynamics, I think it makes a lot less sense to focus on one proximate cause and a lot more to say, well, how do these factors interact with, with each other? In what ways do climate change and political collapse go hand in hand? What happens when massive drought strikes? How do states respond to that? How do, how do rulers respond to that? What happens to a deeply interconnected elite economy when it's no longer, when pieces of that exchange system disappear or fall apart? Those are the kinds of questions that looking at the Bronze Age collapse inspires. And I wanted to focus a lot more on the questions than the answers, because we don't know what the answers are. This happened more than 3,000 years ago. Our data is deeply imperfect. There, there are whole regions where we would dearly like to know more than we do. The evidence that we do have doesn't fit neatly into any sort of coherent causal framework where A leads to B leads to C. And so I thought, rather than trying to suss out one story, that focusing on the messiness is going to get us a lot closer to understanding how things actually happen in reality, that crises are multifaceted. You don't know when a drought hits whether the person who's in charge in a specific area is going to be hyper competent or a fail. Son, you know, you don't know whether the, whether there's going to be, whether the people who are living in an area that's stricken by drought really value food storage or whether they don't. There are all sorts of these things that you don't know where these little local circumstances or regional circumstances can have a dramatic impact on really important processes that are happening far away. It's, I mean, it's literally the butterfly effect. And so you can lay out a sequence of events that fully explains the evidence that we have for the Bronze Age collapse, where a minor, a potentially minor climatic event in Mycenaean Greece produces a cascading effect of warrior migrations that eventually lead to the collapse of complex states further to the east of that. Is that what happened? I can't say that for sure, but it's plausible and it speaks to the. It speaks to the interconnected nature of the late Bronze Age world system. So I despise monocausality as a thing. I think. I think it's 99% of the time a monocausal answer is, is a priori wrong? Because that's not how things work. It's never just the one thing. It's the intersection of many different causal factors in unexpected ways that produces massive results.
- [49:34]
B
You took the words right out of my mouth there, right? This is one of the reasons I find the book interesting, given that I'm not a specialist on prehistory at all. And yet this idea that, of course, things happen for lots of different reasons combined is something we come back to over and over and over again with the historians I interview across every possible time period and place. And so, of course, that makes sense that that's also how humans worked so long ago, even if that's not always the more nuanced story that we hear. So I think that's a great place to conclude our discussion about the book, but maybe to conclude our discussion overall. Anything you want to tell us about that you're working on now? Reminder of your new podcast or, I don't know, sneak preview of the next book?
- [50:16]
A
Oh, my gosh. Well, if you. If any of this sounds interesting to you, please do check out my new podcast, Past Lives, because right now I am talking about mummies, sets of human remains, all of the extraordinary things that we can learn about people in the distant past from their remains. Like, this is a. This is a rapidly developing field, and I would like to think I've got my listeners kind of right on the cutting edge of it. I've got a couple of additional projects in the works. I'm writing a new book. I'm currently working on a new book that's going to be about the rise of Rome and warfare and slavery in the classical Mediterranean. I am also working on developing a history podcast for kids, because I don't know if you spend a lot of time around kids asking history questions. They got a lot of them. And I feel like there is an interested audience of precocious youngsters who would be very interested to hear more about history. So those are the things that I'm working on right now. But I'm. I can't thank you enough for this conversation and for your wonderful questions that you really did a fantastic job. Thank you.
- [51:21]
B
Well, thank you for joining us and answering those questions. And of course there's even more questions you've answered in the book. So for people who want more, it's titled Lost How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded and Built Our world, published by HarperCollins in 2026. Patrick, thank you so much for joining me.
- [51:37]
A
Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate your time.
- [51:40]
B
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