Below, Patrick Wyman shares five key insights from his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World.
One of the most popular history podcasters in the world, Patrick is the host of Past Lives, Tides of History, and Fall of Rome, and the author of The Verge: Renaissance, Reformation, and Forty Years That Shook the World and Lost Worlds. He received a PhD in history from the University of Southern California and has written for The Atlantic, Slate, and Mother Jones.
What’s the big idea?
Human history is far broader—with a greater range of informative examples—than we tend to realize. Studying a more holistic picture of the deep past helps us better understand humanity’s resilience and the risks facing societies today.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Patrick himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. We need to think bigger about our past as a species.
Far too often, our sense of what constitutes history is limited to a few well-trodden examples, most of them relatively recent: the Roman Empire, Europe in the 20th century, maybe England under the Tudors, or the American West. Even history buffs who spend much of their free time reading, watching, and listening to media about the past are still wildly underestimating just how many different times and places make up our shared history.
For every well-known example like the Roman Empire, which is undeniably important, there are a half-dozen other gigantic territorial states with just as much to teach us about what’s possible. Our collective past is a shared resource that tells us about everything from climate change and social organization to cultural development and the kinds of threats that have ended past societies. When we ignore 99 percent of it, we’re both underselling the reality of the past and neglecting knowledge that can help us.
The correct frame of reference for making sense of humanity’s deep past isn’t years or decades, but centuries and millennia. Only when we think in those terms can we understand where we’ve been and where we’re going.
2. Humanity is durable and inventive.
Our species has survived extraordinarily tough times over the many hundreds of thousands of years of our existence on this planet: rising sea levels, encroaching glaciers, mega-tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, droughts lasting decades or centuries, and not least, the actions of our fellow human beings. Despite catastrophes of all kinds, ranging from environmental disasters to plagues to warfare on previously unknown scales, people survive. They make the best of their conditions, so far as they’re able, and pass on their traditions, ideas about how to live and what matters, and their genes to their descendants.
Not everybody survives these disasters. Whole societies fall apart with disturbing regularity. But humanity? Humanity’s tough, and at least some of us find ways to keep getting up in the morning, finding food, raising our children, and trying to make a better world.
3. Progress isn’t a straight line.
At the end of the last Ice Age, about 13,000 years ago, everyone on the planet was some variety of hunter-gatherer: Maybe they chased big grazers like mammoth or reindeer across the frozen tundra in northern Eurasia, maybe they collected wild wheat and hunted gazelle in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East, but everybody was relying on wild resources for food.
Ten thousand years later, at the end of the Bronze Age, millions of people around the world had built societies and economies based on farming. There were cities, states ruled by kings, domesticated animals, writing, social hierarchies, and most of the foundational developments that underlie the world we make sense of. When we zoom all the way out, that sequence looks pretty orderly; when we zoom in, we realize that there was no grand plan.
“When we zoom in, we see trial and error and failure.”
Nobody sat down one day and decided to become a farmer; it took millennia of experimentation for people to learn about intentional cultivation, selection for desirable traits, the nutritional possibilities of domesticated grasses and animals, and how to live in close proximity with lots of other people. That wasn’t destined to happen, and time and again, we can see failures: communities that didn’t last, ways of working the land and growing food that didn’t prove viable over the long term, and entire populations that simply disappeared from the genetic and archaeological record.
The hunters who wandered across Europe during the last Ice Age were actually a succession of unrelated groups who moved in from outside, not their descendants. The first farmers of Britain disappeared almost completely, displaced by later arrivals in the Bronze Age. When we zoom in, we see trial and error and failure, and the fading away of entire peoples on civilizational scales.
4. The collapse of entire complex societies isn’t particularly rare.
Civilization collapse is more of a general rule than an exception. The historical and archaeological records are littered with lost cities, fallen kingdoms, worldviews that lost their appeal, and long-lasting ways of organizing societies that died out with barely a whimper.
The reasons for their falls are numerous and varied: changing climate usually has something to do with it, but people make choices about how to respond to the pressures the world places on them. Sometimes a major climatic shock passes with only minor problems, while in other cases, temporary droughts can rip the legitimacy and power away from a ruling dynasty or trigger rebellions that destroy an established order.
Invasions from outside go along with these externally imposed stresses, as predatory neighbors try to find opportunities amid the chaos. In a few cases, the causes of collapse are completely internal: Societies rip themselves apart when a critical mass of people come to believe that there aren’t enough resources to go around, or the ambitions of the powerful can’t be met under the existing order. When these social collapses happen, they are very bad for the people who experience them: massacres, destruction, enslavement, and the mass migration of refugees. There is a tremendous amount of tragedy in these stories, and they are a sobering reminder of what people are capable of.
5. Studying the distant past has come a long way.
We have access to so many more tools, concepts, and bodies of evidence than we did even 20 years ago; miraculous advances in technology and science have shed light on aspects of ancient lives and societies that we could barely have imagined in the 20th century.
We can extract ancient DNA from the bones of people who died thousands of years ago. This allows us to track the evolution of key traits, determine what people looked like, and even reconstruct the relationships among individuals, groups, and entire populations. Thanks to ancient DNA, we know how the speakers of Proto-Indo-European (the language ancestral to Russian, Latin, and its descendants, including English and Hindi, and most other tongues spoken today across Eurasia) expanded from their homeland more than 5,000 years ago.
“Miraculous advances in technology and science have shed light on aspects of ancient lives and societies that we could barely have imagined in the 20th century.”
We know that the people who brought farming to Europe 8,000 years ago were descended from groups that lived in Anatolia, and that the hunter-gatherers living in Europe at the time wanted little to do with this newfangled way of growing food. We know that the people who were massacred and then buried in a mass grave in Poland around 5,000 years ago were all members of a single extended family, turning a tragic incident into a targeted act of familicide.
And ancient DNA is just one technique of many. We have isotope analysis, which tells us where in a landscape people grew up, whether they moved over the course of their lives, and what kinds of foods they liked to eat. We have paleoenvironmental studies to tell us about rainfall and temperatures in the distant past. We have pollen samples to tell us what kinds of plants grew.
We can know details of ancient lives and ancient worlds that we’ve barely begun to appreciate, much less put into a new story of the human past. This is an incredibly exciting time to care about the full scope of human history.
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