Why History Keeps Happening: Patrick Wyman on Human Failure and Success in Building Civilizations,

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Wednesday, 05/06/2026. We're having a rather historical week, not hysterical, but historical. Yesterday, we interviewed Ian Shapiro, a very distinguished historian at Yale University. He has a new book out, The History of the Last forty Years, 1989 through to today. After the fall, and history is often about falling. I tend to think that many histories are nostalgic. They tend to idealize previous worlds. My guest today is another historian, not an academic one, but a very popular podcasting historian, Patrick Wyman. He's been on the show before. Patrick, is associated with his incredibly popular and successful Tides of History podcast, and he has a new book out. It's called Lost Worlds, How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World. The book came out yesterday, and Patrick is joining us, as always, from Phoenix, Arizona. Patrick, lovely to see you again. You were on the show, I think, back in 2021 talking about your previous book, The Verge.

00:01:41 Patrick Wyman: Well, thank you so much for having me on again. I really appreciate it.

00:01:45 Andrew Keen: Patrick, is this a book about the fall? The Bible, of course, is a kind of text of a fall, more than a text. Its narrative is built on a fall. Do historians tend to always imagine the past as somehow being better and that history is a kind of lost paradise?

00:02:05 Patrick Wyman: I think that there can be a tendency sometimes to view the past as this kind of prelapsarian, wonderful time when everybody had enough. And I think you can really see that in the last decade or so as people have talked about, how much better things were when we were all hunter gatherers as opposed to when we became farmers. And, you know, the food got worse and the conditions of life got worse, and we were all crammed together. It's like, yeah. On the one hand, there are some metrics by which that is true, like farming populations, especially early ones, often not in particularly great health. But also, there were a lot more farmers. There were a lot more—we could support much greater population densities. It expanded the possibilities for how we could live our lives in ways that we never could have as foragers. So I think there are ways in which sometimes it's easy to look back at the past and not see it in the fullness of what it was. But that says a lot more about the critique of the present than it does about the past, than it does about the actual realities of past lives.

00:03:17 Andrew Keen: And, of course, histories are always about paths taken and not taken. Your last book, The Verge, was about the origins of modernity. This new book is, in a way, much more ambitious. It's a book about, luck in a way, isn't it? You're challenging, historians of inevitability, structural historians, historians who suggested that the story had to turn out a certain way.

00:03:45 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. That was really my goal with this book is that we have a particular story of how we all ended up here, of how civilization came into being and how we ended up living in industrial, information age society in the twenty first century where we all live in cities and we all live in states that have defined political structures. We have a story about how we went from being kind of freeborn, roaming, hunter gatherers to getting there. And what I discovered as I was starting to dig into the incredible new archaeological research that has come out in the past twenty or so years is how misleading that story is and how much it leaves out of our understanding of the human past. And so what I was trying to do in this book is take a long chunk of time. I was trying to go ten thousand years. So from about 13,000 years ago until about 3,000 years ago. And it would be—

00:04:38 Andrew Keen: From the Ice Age to the Bronze Age. Is that—

00:04:42 Patrick Wyman: Yes. That's correct. Yeah. So the reason I chose that starting and that ending point is because thirteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the world looks very much kind of like that prelapsarian state of innocence. It is foragers. There are no farming societies around the world. There are no societies in which people are permanently living in the same place all the time. There are some people who are experimenting with village life and building permanent structures, but, really, it's a pretty dang uncommon phenomenon. But then if we're looking three thousand years ago at the end of the Bronze Age, there are cities. There is agriculture on practically every continent. There are village societies all over the world. Populations have risen many, many, many times over. And most importantly, we have started to change the face of the planet through our actions. By adopting farming, we are essentially replacing native flora and fauna with species of our choice. And the first real transformations of the planet that are human generated don't belong to the industrial revolution or much less our time. They belong to the Neolithic. They belong to the world in which people learned to farm and in which they learned that some animals and plants that they controlled were better off for them than the native flora and fauna of a region. So basically, by about three thousand years ago, you can kinda see the world that we live in coming. You can kinda see the broad outline of urbanized societies, of states, of kings, of a world in which there is writing, in which people have to do what other people tell them to do. This is the world that exists three thousand years ago. And so my question is, how did we get there? And by and large, what I found is that even if you draw a best fit line between your starting point and your ending point, and you wanna say, on the broadest possible scale, line go up, progress happens, things change in this period of time. What I realized is that when you zoom in on any thousand year chunk, five hundred year chunk, hundred year chunk of that ten thousand years, the story immediately starts to look a lot more complicated, and it starts to look more like the historical periods that we know. It's just that now all of a sudden because we have these tools, we have access to the complexities of that past in a way that we didn't.

00:07:08 Andrew Keen: Is it, a golden age for popular historians like yourself? I mean, in contrast to somebody like, Shapiro, you didn't teach at a university. You have a much larger audience for your various podcasts. Is this a great period for popular historians like yourself because of the availability of archaeological materials that we didn't know before?

00:07:33 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. I think there has never been a better time to be a popular historian or a communicator about the past. I mean, whether you wanna call yourself a historian or not. I mean, I think I had a real benefit in that I was in academia and I did do my PhD. And so I learned how to function in that world. And most importantly, what I learned was how to do the research in a rigorous and defensible way. I learned how to talk to scholars. So when I was going about writing this book, even though I wasn't a specialist in prehistory, I knew how to read scholarship. I knew how to find what was important. I knew how to identify the scholars that I needed to talk to in order to fully understand this field. So by the time I was done, I had talked to dozens and dozens of archaeologists working on the very cutting edge of these fields. I'd read thousands of scientific papers. And by the end of it, I felt like I had the commands to be able to say this stuff. So I think that on the one hand, there's never been a better time because the information is out there if you're willing to chase it. But on the other—I mean, you face kind of the same problem that we always do subsisting on the Internet, which is how do you evaluate information? How do you say this is the source that's worth listening to and this is the one that isn't? And by being able to use the scholarship and hopefully translate that very technical specific language for a popular audience, I hope I've been able to show how exciting the work that's being done really is, and just how deep we can get into the lives of people we never thought we'd be able to approach before.

00:09:14 Andrew Keen: Yeah. People like, a character called Ötzi the Iceman. I know he's one of the stars in the book. What are the—Patrick, what are the ideological issues in this period for historians, particularly academic ones, but even popular ones like yourself? What are the great disputes over this period between the Ice Age and the Bronze Age in terms of the narrative of our species?

00:09:45 Patrick Wyman: Well, right now, we're at this very odd point where we are stuck with this old idea of kind of inevitable progress that leads us from on the one hand, foraging and wandering freely over the world and chasing down woolly mammoths and reindeer, to, you know, a world that looks very much like our own with people living in cities. And the question is how you get there and what that says. And when you only have access to the kinds of materials that scholars did, a hundred or so years ago, like the works of V. Gordon Childe, very famously mentioned in, Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones is teaching in that classroom. It's the kind of work that posits this orderly sequence, this sense of inevitability to get us to a world that looks like our own, I mean, that made sense given the materials that were available. When we didn't have absolute dating from radiocarbon, when we didn't have ancient DNA, when we didn't have isotopic analysis, when we couldn't drill down to these really discrete periods of time in prehistory, that made more sense. But now that with all of the evidence that has come to light, with all of the new societies that we've learned about that don't fit particularly neatly into that narrative of progress, the story has to change, but it just hasn't yet. Because nobody has really gone to do the work of synthesizing all of this new archaeology into something like a story. So that's on the one hand. The other is that to the extent that there have been challenges to this idea of a progress narrative, I think those alternatives leave too little sense for how we ended up here. I think these other narratives that we're seeing now. And there's a great book that came out a few years ago called The Dawn of Everything by, David Graeber.

00:11:45 Andrew Keen: Yeah. David Graeber. That's obviously a classic in the field.

00:11:49 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. And, I mean, I gotta be clear. I love this book. I've interviewed David Wengrow. I really enjoyed much of David Graeber's work over the years.

00:11:56 Andrew Keen: Who, unfortunately, is no longer around then.

00:11:58 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. Unfortunately, I would have loved to talk to him about this, but I know some of his former students. And so, like, I loved this book. And the real emphasis of Dawn of Everything is how much choice humans have in the ways that we set up our social relationships and the ways that we organize societies—that we have a lot of choices in these things. And the choices that people make often don't lead us in the direction of a more hierarchical, urbanized world that looks like civilization. But the question that I had after reading that book, a book I really enjoyed and found incredibly fruitful to think with. This isn't so much a critique as it's not exactly what they were doing. I found myself a little dissatisfied because I'm like, if we have all of these choices, why did we still end up here? If there are manifestly bad ways of doing things and ways that lead to less human flourishing for a lot of people, why do we do that? And what I wanted to get at in this book is it's not even a response. It's more just like, wow, that really made me think—if we do have those choices and people did make those choices about organizing themselves in ways that were not hierarchical, in ways that were freer, and perhaps better for a lot of people, why didn't we just do that all the time? And the answers are, well, climate plays a huge role. Demography plays a huge role. Like, migration plays a massive role in how groups move around. And also people being bad, quite frankly, people doing things that harm others. And I think that my view of human nature is maybe a little less rosy than Graeber and Wengrow's, but I don't think that means that the story of humanity needs to be any less optimistic. So I was trying to satisfy my own dissatisfaction with a book that I loved. I think that was a really big part of why I did this, because I felt like there were gaps. I felt like there were—

00:13:57 Andrew Keen: I had to say that The Dawn of Everything book, it was a bestseller, the Graeber-Wengrow book. In terms of what you call the progress narrative, it fits the zeitgeist, and it challenges the standard progress narrative of modernity much closer, I think, to Rousseau's notion of history. He wasn't a historian, of course, but, of course, his vision of history is that we were born free and then our whole history is one, in which we're in one kind of chain or another through property. It's the opposite of Hobbes' version of history. Is your new book more in the Rousseau than the Hobbes camp in terms of how we got from the Ice Age to the beginnings of civilization, Patrick?

00:14:47 Patrick Wyman: Well, I think that one of the things that Hobbes was right about is that life was often nasty, brutish, and short. And there is, in my way of thinking about it, no way around that reality for the vast majority of people who lived in premodern times, that life expectancies were shorter. Life was harder. When you look at the physical remains of people from these periods, they often have horrible injuries or they show signs of malnutrition. They show signs of stunted growth. Like, the life is hard. And there is no era of human history that we look back at where we can say, like, oh, yeah. People were good, and then this bad thing happened. Whether it's environments creating challenges that people have to figure out how to live with. I mean, if there's a drought, you don't get to just decide, well, you know, we're not gonna deal with the drought. We're gonna go ahead and pass that by and

00:15:45 Andrew Keen: and go to the movies instead.

00:15:47 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. You don't get to make that choice. And the world presents challenges that people need to overcome. And a lot of the time, people simply don't survive those challenges. You've got a group of people and you're faced with a drought. A lot of the time, what happens when we look at the record is half the people die or more or groups disappear completely. So there is no happy story for everyone that's lurking out there, that we just have yet to uncover. There's no one point where we can say, oh, yes. We, you know, we were all good before that, and then after that, things went downhill. What you can see in the record is a mixture of both. You can see sometimes in places where people really had figured out an incredible way of doing things, a way that worked really well that didn't place, excess stresses on the environment that was sustainable over long periods of time. We can see that in the record, and then we can also see places where people were pushing so hard that they destroyed their local environments, that they ripped their own societies apart. We can see all of that. That's how big the past is, is that trying to go into it with a skeleton key notion of if we have this one idea, we can just unlock everything there is to unlock. Like, people are complicated. Societies are complicated.

00:17:04 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Let me revise the question then. In the critique of the progress narrative, it's certainly central, I think, in some ways in The Dawn of Everything book, is the idea that in modern man, particularly modern American man, is highly individualized. It accounts for our anxiety, our loneliness, our selfishness, blah blah. And that traditional society—and this, I think, also explains more and more interest in the native societies of North America and elsewhere—that traditional society was somehow more collective, that the idea of the individual didn't really exist. What do you say about this debate in the new book? Is it one that even makes sense?

00:17:51 Patrick Wyman: So I can think of a dozen different occasions in human history when scholars looking back at it have said that's when the individual was born. And, I mean, you can make a case for the Renaissance. You can make a case for the [unclear] century. You can make a case for the twenty first century. Yeah.

00:18:11 Andrew Keen: We always used to be bad. It was always—I mean, historically, it was good that we have the birth of individualism. These days, it's always bad. Yeah. That's when we lost our sense of community. That's when everything went wrong.

00:18:24 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. And look. Like, I think what you can find when we look at the record of past societies. I mean, I think one of the really basic things I try to get at in this book is how much bigger the human past is than we usually give it credit for. And in that enormous database of possibilities, there are ancient societies that are highly individualistic, and there are ancient societies that are highly collective. So I can think of a lot of examples of ancient societies. Take burials, for example, where you bury your dead collectively, you build a big tomb, every member of every generation goes into the tomb, and you're there as a social group. And so the idea there, if you're interpreting it, is we look at this and what we see is not an individual. What we see is the social memory of a community. Right? But that coexists at quite literally the exact same time, a couple thousand miles away with chieftains on the Eurasian Steppe in what's now Ukraine and Russia building enormous burial monuments to themselves where they would sacrifice dozens of cattle and sheep, where everybody would have to come from far away to sing songs about how great they were.

00:19:34 Andrew Keen: That's something, Patrick. Some things never change. Right?

00:19:37 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. And so the question is, is it a matter of individual past societies being more individualistic or more collectivist than today's societies? I think we can find examples of both. I think what we can see a lot of are societies in which the people who were able to fight their way to the very top could be treated as individuals. Now is that a good thing? Is that better? I don't know. And in these collective societies, sometimes one of the issues you see is they're extremely resistant to change and don't survive massive episodes of climatic upheaval. Maybe there's something to the idea that highly individualistic societies or societies in which individualism plays a larger role might be better suited to, you know, thriving in chaotic environments. If everything depends on having one guy who's willing to just go and say, yeah. You know, we're gonna go over here, and we're gonna see if we can't make a new life there. Those societies can work. They can work really well. Collective societies offer other benefits. You know, there's a lot of redundancy built into that. The idea that you can rely on your neighbors, that you can rely on your extended kin group for resources. There's benefits and drawbacks to setting it up both ways, but I would say that I'm wary of positing any fundamental, like, breaks or turning points or the idea that there's a time at which we become individuals. Like, I'm leery of that for a variety of reasons.

00:21:09 Andrew Keen: So in this period between the Ice Age and, the Bronze Age, this ten thousand year period you cover, you've mentioned the environment a number of times. It's obviously a incredibly important passionate political issue these days and as well as a technological one. At what point did we change from hunter gatherers to settling on the land? Is that the key transition? Many political thinkers, Rousseau as well, of course, famously talks about private property. Was there a moment in this period that you look at in Lost Worlds, Patrick, when we stopped wandering around and began to think of the land as our own, settling it, farming it?

00:21:59 Patrick Wyman: Well, this is another one of these really fascinating things is now as our knowledge of this period has gotten better and as we've been able to look at more of the planet and bring in more examples and look at different areas where things function a little bit differently, what we see is a tremendous diversity of paths that led groups around the world to farming. The one thing that all of these paths share in common is that there was no single eureka moment in which farming became a thing. What we see are these extraordinarily long gradual processes by which people learned to use the plants and animals around them and control them. So people would start by gathering the wild ancestors of future crops. So they would gather wild wheat or wild sugarcane or, wild taro, or the wild ancestor of maize. They would gather these things and they would use them. What they figured out after that was, well, if we dump all the leftover seeds in one place, well, they'll grow when we've got a little bit of a garden. And then what they figure out is, well, if I drop some of these seeds, the ones for the biggest seeds in there, the plants that grow are going to produce bigger seeds. All of this takes many thousands of years to figure out. Like, the early farmers, even for a couple of millennia after they reach this point, fit much more neatly with kind of diverse hunter gatherers, with groups that hunt a lot, that are gonna gather a wide variety of different plants. They're going to exploit the wild resources around them. And for most of these groups, what we call farming, food production, filled a niche. Maybe it was because they really liked having wheat because they liked to make fermented beverages. Maybe they only grew millet, for example, in Northern China because it was kind of a backstop food that if the things that they really wanted to eat weren't available, then they would use millet for that. And the transition to what we think of as farming societies tends to happen a long time after that. And usually, it strikes me, this is more of a response to, resource scarcity that people wouldn't choose to live like that if they had an option. Usually, they're forced to more intensively exploit these domesticated resources because it's either that or starve. And from that kind of crunch, much more so than it is the initial bursts of activity that lead us down the road to farming, it's that crunch, I think, that makes societies into farming societies. And farming societies have a lot going for them. The idea of a village where you just have, like, a kind of a self contained group of people who all live together and they farm fields around, like, the village is incredibly durable. And when you marry that to having an array of domesticated plants and animals that you control, like, you've got a blueprint for a really it's basically like setting up McDonald's franchises that when one village gets too big, you just move to the next plot of land with the excess populace that you've managed to create through farming, and you set up a franchise. And then you set up another franchise down the road fifty years later, and then you set up another franchise.

00:25:23 Andrew Keen: Yeah, you're giving the McDonald's marketing people some ideas, Patrick. And if you're trying to sell Big Macs, they'll say, well, our ancient relatives did the same thing. This book is called Lost Worlds. Of course, it's less loss for you than for the rest of us. You did the hard work. You did the digging, the crunching. What most surprised you? I mean, you're a very popular podcaster. You, in fact, have a new series called Past Lives, which focuses on the lives of ordinary people. What most surprised you in the research and writing of the book? What did you change your mind about?

00:26:00 Patrick Wyman: So I think I went into this thinking that I was going to spend a lot of time talking about falls, about society's falling. And this comes back to something you mentioned at the very beginning. Right.

00:26:11 Andrew Keen: Are you gonna become Ian then? After the Fall, like the book? Yeah.

00:26:15 Patrick Wyman: I mean, I think my sense going into this was that I was gonna write about a sequence of failures, and that there would be something really interesting in looking at those dead end paths. And I still talk a lot in this book about the dead end paths, but I think what I realized as I was talking about these recurring cycles of growth and collapse is that the growth is more important. And every single time we've gotten knocked down as a species or individual civilizations, there are people there who get back up to their feet. They try the next thing. And maybe that works or maybe it doesn't. But we're resilient.

00:26:56 Andrew Keen: In other words, the R word. We're resilient. We're capable of trying and trying again even if we fail.

00:27:03 Patrick Wyman: Yes. Exactly. My eventual conclusion that I came to was that I am short any particular way of organizing a human society. I'm short on post-industrial information age society. I'm short fossil fuels. I am short, agrarian empires, if you wanna go back a couple thousand years. I'm short all of those. I am long humanity. I really think that our species, even if my definition of optimism maybe looks a little bit pessimistic to other people where I'm like, well, if a quarter of humanity survives, that's pretty good. That's not great. You don't wanna live in a world where three quarters of humanity is dead. But on the other hand, that's still a quarter. That's not bad.

00:27:46 Andrew Keen: It's bad. Yeah. Better than, a lot of baseball players. They don't hit above .250. Patrick, is your keenness for humanity then rooted less in its morality or our morality and more in this resilience? That you're less concerned with us being good and more concerned with us getting stuff done?

00:28:10 Patrick Wyman: Basically, yeah. I am much more interested in what people do than what they think, to be completely honest with you. Not that I'm uninterested in thought processes and ideologies and, you know, social imaginaries and all of the various more and less complex ways you can talk about that, but I'm interested in what people do with their hands. I'm interested in where they walk. I'm interested in what they eat, what they grow. I'm interested in how they feel physically. And from that perspective, I'm not sure like, there are definitely times and places in the past where you can be like, well, that was bad. They should not have done that. But for the most part, I try to step back from that and appreciate the struggle and appreciate the effort that people have put in and how hard they've had to work just to get us to where we are. That, like, we are talking about the ancestors of everybody who is currently alive on this planet, that their ancestors had to do these things. They had to work through them. My ancestors, yours, everybody else. For us to be here, this stuff had to happen. They had to survive these things. And I think we can learn a lot from that. Not in a, like, you know, those who forget the lessons of the past or are doomed to repeat those mistakes, not so much in that sense, but, like, we should be inspired. We should feel really good about our future as a species and about our capacity for solving problems on the basis of what we've done this far. Like, the fact that we have managed to make it through all the things we have and the fact that we've managed to do what we've done, like, wow. Like, that's pretty cool.

00:29:46 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So it's like a Raiders of the Lost Ark, movie, and we're still in the middle of it. You're talking to me from, Phoenix, Arizona. Patrick, you know better than I do that all historians bring their own cultural political baggage. Mhmm. How did it make you think in terms of this endless debate about European colonialization and native peoples, particularly in places like Arizona? Did that give you new insight into your earliest ancestors perhaps who had lived on the land in New Mexico? It wasn't, of course, called New Mexico. Then it wasn't even called Mexico.

00:30:24 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I found and, like, it's fascinating. There's a site that I talk about in one of the early chapters that is a site in Arizona, not very far from where I live. That is a mammoth kill site. Wait, wait. One of the things that you find is that the past is, like, I've said this before, but the past is just so much bigger than you think it is. And where you think you're gonna find the keys that unlock the stories of millions and millions of people can be really, really unexpected. So, for example, to try to understand, you know, the peopling of The Americas and where the indigenous inhabitants of The Americas come from, we know that practically every later indigenous person was descended from a very small group that lived around 13,000 years ago. We only have one set of human remains that's ever been discovered that is associated with this group. It belongs to a one-year-old infant who's buried in Montana. But from this one infant's DNA, we are able to reconstruct the entire population history of The Americas afterwards. So all of the millions upon millions of later indigenous inhabitants of The Americas were descended from the same group that gave us the remains of this one-year-old who died thirteen thousand years ago.

00:31:38 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's an incredible story. The past is bigger than you think it is. It brings to mind the past as being like a Montana sky.

00:31:46 Patrick Wyman: Very much so. Yeah. And I find it awesome.

00:31:50 Andrew Keen: In other words, it created a sense which is very attractive, I think, in the way you're describing it. And you're a very passionate historian, someone who is anything but academic. It brings out a sense of awe then, it seems, Patrick.

00:32:07 Patrick Wyman: I think so, and I certainly hope so. I certainly hope that comes through. That, like, I care about people as people. And I think the single most important thing we can remember when we're talking about the human past is that they were every bit as three-dimensional flesh and blood human beings as we are. And that includes the good parts about us. That includes our capacity for love and care and for future planning and doing really, really clever things. It also includes our absolute worst impulses. It includes the impulses that lead to, you know, an entire family being massacred five thousand years ago or entire village communities being destroyed seven thousand years ago or the Shang Dynasty in China doing human sacrifices of more than 10,000 people. There are all sorts of nasty things in the human past, but for every one of those nasty things, you can still find something good. You can find a person with a disability who was clearly cared for throughout their entire life by their community. We can see that as far back as the Neanderthals. So there are aspects to the human past that are always going to be nasty. But at the same time, I think that's part of being human is understanding our capacity for both sides of that. And then but there's also humor. There's moments where I try to imagine the first guy to get on a horse. Right? What was that thought process? Like, I have a hard time imagining that there was no fermented mare's milk involved in that. I have a really hard time thinking that was somebody was getting on that horse's back thinking, I'm going to use this animal to conquer the world and ride across the vast grasslands. No. That guy was probably drunk and wanted to see what would happen. And he probably—

00:34:01 Andrew Keen: didn't last very long on that first

00:34:03 Patrick Wyman: No. I'm sure the guy fell off. And I think that image right there, if people can take anything away from this book, it's that nobody knew in that moment when that, probably an idiot, was jumping up on the back of that horse that where that was gonna lead. And I think that's not a bad way to think about human history in general is that we don't know where these paths are gonna lead. The people who were messing around with plants in the Fertile Crescent twelve thousand, thirteen thousand years ago didn't know that they were inventing farming. The first people to put a bunch of houses together didn't know that they were building a model for village societies. People don't know where these paths are gonna lead, and we have to retain that sense of not knowing, that sense of contingency in how we—

00:34:51 Andrew Keen: As Marx so famously said, we make our own history, but not quite in the ways we think we do. You mentioned horses, the great critic of modernity. Nietzsche had an obsession with horses. I think he saw them symbolically somehow as capturing something that modernity had destroyed, and I think he went crazy, embraced a horse. What does Lost Worlds tell us about our relations with nonhuman species, with animals? Can one make any generalizations? Of course, many environmentalists seem to suggest that maybe premodern man was a little more sympathetic to the birds and the bees. Is that fair?

00:35:34 Patrick Wyman: I mean, I think there's a lot to that. We can see these hints at times and places of a much closer spiritual, almost symbiotic relationship between people and animals. So there's one extraordinary site from The UK in Yorkshire, a place called Star Carr, where it dates to the Mesolithic about 11,000 years ago. And one of the kinds of artifacts that archaeologists have found at this site, which preserves organic remains. It preserves, like, wood, bone, things like that normally disintegrate in the ground very quickly. They found, like, deer skull masks with the antlers still attached. And there are all sorts of ways to understand this, but they were intentionally deposited there along this lakeshore. Like, this clearly meant something to people. There are a bunch of them. They did this more than once. And ideas for why they did this range from well, these are hunting costumes. They're going out to hunt deer in these forests, and they're wearing, you know, deer costumes, basically, to they're being used in some kind of shamanic ritual to bring people closer to the deer. And of those two, when we look at that society, I think the latter is probably closer. I think that these people in some way, shape, or form thought of themselves as deer people and that the boundaries between the animal world and the human world were a little thinner than we're used to thinking of them. But at the same time, that didn't stop them from going out and killing the deer. And when we look at these very ancient societies, their relationship to their prey animals is not necessarily one of custodianship. People have hunted animal species to extinction. To me, the evidence for that in The Americas, like, yes, the populations of woolly mammoth and the like were probably decreasing before a lot of people started to show up at the end of the last ice age, but there's no real question to me that humans delivered the finishing blow to woolly mammoths, that it was people hunting them and human predation that caused the extinction of megafauna in North America. Like, it's not a coincidence that right after large numbers of people start being archaeologically visible, the animals stop.

00:37:42 Andrew Keen: So when in this period did we collectively, we humans, begin domesticating animals?

00:37:50 Patrick Wyman: So that starts different times in different places around the world, but around twelve thousand years ago, eleven thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent. And different areas produced different complexes of domesticates. So in the Near East, we get cattle, goats, and sheep. Dogs had been domesticated before that. Dogs were our first domesticate, that we kept around. And the evidence for dogs keeps getting pushed further and further back in time. But by and large, it belongs to this period after around 12,000, 11,000, ten thousand years ago. Pigs in China come a little bit later. Chickens are later still. Cats are still later, though there's some debate. But all around the world, people figured out that they could control these animals and that they could selectively breed for characteristics that were beneficial, breed for less aggression, larger size, more meat, less stringent requirements for feed or for water. People figured all of these things out. And, ironically, one of the things we see in the archaeological record, hunter gatherer societies, when they were confronted with farming, usually did not adopt farming. They did not wanna settle down. They did not wanna build villages. They did not wanna spend their time growing crops, but they were quite fond of domesticated animals. So a lot of the time, what we see is these foragers who are living in close proximity to farmers, sometimes for hundreds or thousands of years. They want nothing to do with the wheat. They want nothing to do with the millet, but they'll take the animals. They'll take the cattle. And this is kind of the origin of pastoralist societies, of groups that wander long distances with their cattle or their sheep. A lot of the time, pastoralist societies have hunter gatherer origins, not farming origins.

00:39:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's another excuse for the McDonald's marketing people.

00:39:38 Patrick Wyman: I mean, honestly, of all of the protein sources that I discussed in this book, I think meat comes out looking pretty good. Like, people like meat. There's a strong correlation between having access to meat and pretty good population health. Like, I like meat, so maybe there's some overlap there.

00:39:57 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wonder so we've done shows on fake meat, the technology of fake meat. I wonder what our ancient ancestors would think of us inventing fake meat. Did, did you solve any of the big questions in this period? The Stonehenge, for example, or Easter Island? I was in Easter Island a few years ago with my daughter, and it's an astonishing monument to human ingenuity. Did you try and solve some of these great question marks? Did they fit into your period?

00:40:26 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. Absolutely. So some of them some of the really famous sites I dealt with were Göbekli Tepe in Southern Turkey, which is one of the oldest, kind of stone monumental structures on the face of the planet, if not the oldest. I talked about Newgrange in Ireland. I talked about Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid together in a single chapter and used them as kind of reflections of one another because

00:40:51 Andrew Keen: The Great Pyramid in Egypt, that is.

00:40:53 Patrick Wyman: Yes. The Great Pyramid in Egypt. Because the stage of Stonehenge that we mostly see now—Stonehenge is much older than the final stage. It was built in stages. The final arrangements of standing stones were added substantially later. But that final phase of construction at Stonehenge, the really important one, is almost happening at the same time as the construction of the Great Pyramid. Now why not before? Why not after? What was it around that period of time? It was about forty five hundred years ago. Why did two societies separated by that amount of time and space build durable monuments that have lasted to the present? Why were these only built once? Why are there not great pyramids all over Egypt? Why are there not Stonehenges all over Britain? And despite the fact that those are two of the most iconic monuments in the world, they were built for extraordinarily different purposes at these really specific moments in the development of both of the cultures that constructed them. The reason why there aren't great pyramids all over Egypt is because the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the dynasty that built those, lacked the resources to do so after a particular period of time. The burst of pyramid construction that we see all happened in a few hundred years. They went from building kind of single-floor mud-brick tombs to building the Great Pyramid in, like, three generations. So this happened very quickly. The construction of Stonehenge happened at a time when British Neolithic society was absolutely struggling, when there were fewer and fewer people every year. And we know that people came to Stonehenge from all over, from all over Britain. They came from hundreds of miles away to come to that site. It was a party for them to come and build Stonehenge.

00:42:38 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I wonder whether that message is reflected in how you describe your experience of writing the book. You said the past is bigger than you think it is. Clearly, people came to Stonehenge to see that. I don't know if you've been to Easter Island.

00:42:53 Patrick Wyman: I have not. But it's

00:42:55 Andrew Keen: a remarkable experience. Everyone should go if they can—although it's obviously a hard place to get to. But you get the sense from just looking at these remarkable objects that the past is bigger than you think it is. So we've always, as a species, we've always had that appetite for the past even if we haven't told everyone, not everyone can be Patrick Wyman with their own history podcast.

00:43:21 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. One of the things I find so fascinating about Stonehenge and there's been absolutely stunning archaeological work done on that site in the last twenty years. And the big thing that people have learned about Stonehenge is that the most likely explanation for it is that stone was for the dead, that the people who built that society understood that stone as a building material was for the dead. But that there was a living wood built twin of Stonehenge, which is where all the people came when they were working on Stonehenge. They would come there for parties around the winter and summer solstice. We know this because the site of the living, a place called Durrington Walls, which is really close, just a couple miles away, is absolutely full of pig bones. And from these pig bones, we know that they were killed twice a year. They were killed at the summer solstice and at the winter solstice. By looking at the chemical composition of the isotopes and the bones of those pigs, we can track where exactly in Britain the pigs were raised, where the pigs came from. And from this, we know that the there must have been people to bring the pigs there. The people who brought the pigs to Stonehenge were coming from all over the place. They were coming with tiny little pieces of the dead. Like, their honored dead, whoever they were, they were going to bring a tiny little piece of them to Stonehenge to deposit there. That this was a place not just for some local group of dead, but it was a place for all of the British Neolithic to come together to say, like, this is who we are.

00:44:51 Andrew Keen: This is who we are. It's like a summer pop concert.

00:44:56 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. That this was a big deal to them. But that's an incredibly different reasoning than a king's tomb, which is what the Great Pyramid is. So imagine how different those two societies must have been at exactly the same time to produce monuments that even though they are both for the dead, even though they're both built in stone, have such radically different kind of ideological underpinnings for why people would build them and what they meant to them.

00:45:22 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's fascinating. I don't know if you have ever been to the Orkney Islands, but I was up there a few years ago as well, and you saw different tombs for the dead. It's a wonderful conversation, Patrick. I don't wanna go over everything because we want people to read the book, but about a couple more quick questions. This idea of tombs for the dead or celebrations or respect for the dead, is this the period where humans discovered or at least memorialized their own mortality? Do you date that, or is that again a many stranded thing?

00:45:55 Patrick Wyman: So it's a many stranded thing, but I do think that, generally, there's something important that we can say that happens in this period. And you can generally divide societies into two categories, ghost societies and ancestor societies. And the question is, are the dead to be feared? Are there the spirits or whatever is left of them after they die? Is that something to be feared, or are these helpful people who can be beneficial to you in the present? And by and large, foraging societies, hunter gatherer societies usually treat the dead as if they are some kind of threat. This isn't 100%, but if you're talking about—

00:46:32 Andrew Keen: What do you mean a threat? You mean they might come back and seize us or something?

00:46:36 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. The dead can be potentially harmful to you, that an unquiet spirit can ruin your life or that they can, if there are problems happening around you, it might be the spirits of the dead that you blame for that.

00:46:48 Andrew Keen: Ghosts, in other words.

00:46:49 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. Exactly. That and that in this period of time, as people start to settle down more and as you get the development of, like, inherited status, right, then your ancestors start to matter a lot more because your ancestors are the reason why you have a claim to this particular bit of land. They're a reason why you in the present have a claim to this particular position in society. So I think in this time, it's not a direct A-causes-B thing, but by and large, you're gonna see a lot more ancestor societies that are based in farming, that are urban based. Like, you can still have a society that reveres its ancestors that's afraid of ghosts. You can still have a society that's afraid of ghosts that reveres some select group of ancestors. But by and large, the closer we get to the present, the more people care about who their ancestors are, the more they care about taking care of them, about making their burials visible because they, in the present, are deriving something. Something beneficial comes to them in the present from having ancestors who matter.

00:47:51 Andrew Keen: In other words, that's where we get religion from.

00:47:54 Patrick Wyman: Yeah. I mean, religion can be tough to pin down. We can see tiny little hints of people's spirituality, of their beliefs about, you know, worlds beyond our own. We can see these little hints of it. That's actually my favorite interpretation of, like, Ice Age cave art in Europe is that this is a kind of sympathetic magic designed to bring what we're seeing into being. And so I think there are good arguments to be made on that front. But do we—will we think of that as religion or is that kind of beliefs about the supernatural? The idea of having kind of defined deities with set roles. Even when we're talking about the Greeks and the Romans, that doesn't map particularly neatly onto a modern conception of kind of monotheistic religion. I think we definitely see developments in this period. We definitely see an elaboration and a sophistication all around the world. People's beliefs about the supernatural become much more systematized, and we can see them a lot better because we have better evidence for it.

00:49:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I was just in Northern Australia going to see some of that Ice Age cave art, around Darwin. It's fascinating. Two more quick questions, Patrick. You mentioned Rome. You're, of course, also the, the host of another very popular podcast, The Fall of Rome. Did writing this book or should writing this book or indeed reading this book, should it encourage us to rethink antiquity? Often people think of antiquity as the beginning of the West in some ways. Are you pushing it back a little bit or is that the wrong way to think about this book and our memories or our conception of antiquity of Rome and Greece?

00:49:46 Patrick Wyman: I would say, because I spent a long time thinking about the end of the Roman Empire. I spent probably about fifteen years of my life thinking about the fall of the Roman Empire. And what— Do you

00:49:55 Andrew Keen: regret that? Was it fifteen years worth it?

00:49:58 Patrick Wyman: No. It was absolutely worth it because but I think I'm looking at it with new eyes after writing this book. I view the end of a political unit, even the end of kind of a way of organizing a society. I'm a lot more sanguine about it now. Like, I think I viewed that in the past as a real tragedy that something had really been lost. And now I view that as much more of a natural part of kind of the rhythms, the waves that kind of pulse through human societies over very long periods of time. There's an old saying about Rome, which is that the remarkable thing is not that it fell, it's that it lasted for as long as it did. And I think that more than anything else is what I take back to Rome now is less of a fascination with how those threads unraveled and more of a, like, wow. And one of the really remarkable things about Rome when we're comparing it to basically every other empire is how big it was and how long it lasted, not that it did fall. Like, all empires fall. All societies are eventually going to reach the limits of what they can do, the limits of their way of life, the limits of how they can exploit the environments around them, the limits of their technologies. There are limits built into every single way of setting things up, and it's remarkable that it took the Romans as long as they did to hit theirs. I think that's my big takeaway now.

00:51:23 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, the fall of Rome has particular sensitivity in America. Often, many books have been written about America being the new Rome. Finally, when it comes to sensitivities about history, these days we seem—well, there are a number of us who fear that AI could wipe out humanity. Your book is anything but about AI. But what wisdom does Lost Worlds bring to those of us who fear, and I'm not actually—when I say those of us, it wouldn't include myself—who believe that AI is our final invention, and we're now on the last chapter or the end of our last chapter in our history as a

00:52:01 Patrick Wyman: species. I think that's pretty hubristic. That would be my take. I think everybody at every point thinks that they're living at something like the end. And my message for everyone is instead of thinking about us today as the end of something, that everything that's had to happen that's happened before this has had to lead up to us. I would say, let's think about us as the middle, or let's think about us as the beginning of something else. Because every single point in the past that we look at, every archaeological site that I examine, every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, that brought them and their ancestors there, and was the midpoint of some other process and was the beginning of something else entirely. And I would encourage all of us today to think of ourselves as the middle and the beginning and not just the end. There will be a tomorrow. There will be something that happens fifty years from now. So stop thinking in terms of the next quarter. Stop thinking in terms of next week, and start thinking about yourself as part of something that's much, much bigger than yourself that's gonna extend well into the future long after your name has been forgotten.

00:53:13 Andrew Keen: Great wisdom. There will be a tomorrow. Wisdom of a popular historian. Patrick Wyman's new book came out yesterday. No excuse not to get it. It's as exuberant, I think, as Patrick himself. Lost Worlds, How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World. Wonderful conversation, Patrick. Keep doing, your important work. The book has already got lots of rave reviews, and I'm sure it's gonna be a best seller. We'll have to get you back on the show to bring your wisdom, to, a world where often, we don't have enough historical knowledge. Thank you so much.

00:53:51 Patrick Wyman: Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for a wonderful interview.