What can we learn about the deep human past by studying present-day hunter-gatherers? I asked that question to Professor Robert Kelly of the University of Wyoming, who's both one of the world's experts on hunter-gatherers and an accomplished archaeologist. Today's hunter-gatherers aren't living fossils who provide a direct window onto the distant past, but their lifeways do offer fascinating insights into that past.

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In July 2018, 12 youth soccer players and their coach found themselves trapped 6 miles deep in a cave with no food or water and depleting oxygen. The rock formed maze became almost completely submerged as the water rose to levels nearly impossible for survival. There was no light and no way to communicate with the outside world. The first season of Wondery?s new original series Against the Odds takes you into the incredible events of when an adventurous group of teens found themselves fighting to save their lives, and the brave heroes that gave them their only chance at survival. With step by step recounts, experience for yourself what it was like to be in their shoes, and how they survived against the odds. Listen to Against the Odds at wondery.fm/ATO.

More than 5,000 years ago, the city of Uruk in what's now Iraq was the heart of a new civilization. Cities, kings, armies, monumental temples, and writing were all new developments. But why here? Why then? And who suffered so that civilization could rise?

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Pyramids, mummies, and pharaohs define our understanding of ancient Egypt, a timeless and eternal land. But the Nile wasn't always ruled by god-like kings, and long before they emerged, Egypt was home to other peoples and other ways of life. As Egyptian civilization emerged, these older traditions didn't disappear, but remained, shaping thousands of years of subsequent history.

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I wrote a book! It's called The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World. The book comes out in July, but you can pre-order it here.

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Boxing has a long past, one deeply connected to race, labor, and broader developments in American history. Professor Louis Moore joins me to talk about those topics and about his outstanding book, I Fight For a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915.

Find Professor Moore's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Living-Manhood-1880-1915-Society/dp/0252082877.

This episode originally aired on August 8, 2019.

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Civilization first emerged in the fertile floodplains of Mesopotamia - present-day Iraq - with priest-kings and cities full of temples and ziggurats, pictographs and cuneiform writing. But what were the conditions and processes that led up to this complex of developments? How and why did it happen, and why there?

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I'm not just talking about the wonderful Sid Meier game series, which I've spent far too many hours playing; how do we define "civilization," how does it come into being, and why does it matter?

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Stanford University's Professor Li Liu is one of the world's leading experts on prehistoric East Asia and one of the world's primary inventions of farming. I ask her about that, the deep continuities of Chinese civilization, and her recent research on the origins of brewing and alcohol.

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Agriculture was invented in no fewer than three, and probably four, places in the Americas. It went along with sedentary living and complex societies, but in complicated ways: fishing villages along the Andean coast grew into the cities of Norte Chico, but hunter-gatherers produced the first great mound complexes of the American southeast. How did farming change, and not change, the diverse societies of the Americas?

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The initial migrations to the Americas get most of the attention, but people didn't stop living there in the aftermath of those first movements of peoples; they spread out over the Great Plains and the forests of the eastern United States, south into the deserts and jungles of Mesoamerica, and into every corner of South America. In the process, they invented agriculture no fewer than three different times.

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If you'd like to see some visuals of the topics covered in today's episode, check out the accompanying Substack post, and subscribe to get updates in your email inbox.

The relationship between agriculture, migration, and the distribution of today's most prominent language families is direct but complex. Professor Peter Bellwood, one of the world's leading experts on prehistory, explains how farming led to population growth and movements of people that still shape our world today.

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Plague, war, and a worsening climate drastically changed Europe in the years and decades after 1350. This new state of affairs laid the groundwork for the explosion around 1500 that gave rise to the modern world.

This episode originally aired on June 28, 2018.

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East Asia was one of the world's primary centers of agricultural innovation. Farming was invented there, rice and millet domesticated, and the people who did so grew in numbers and sophistication. Some of the world's most-spoken language families grew out of Neolithic China, and so did the roots of Chinese civilization.

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Hominins have lived in East Asia - what's now China, Korea, and Japan - for millions of years, at least as far back as Homo erectus if not further. And as the glaciers began to recede for the last time after 20,000 years ago, people in this part of the world developed humanity's first pottery, rice-farming, and complex societies of incredible diversity and resilience.

If you'd like to see visuals of some of what we've discussed here, check out the accompanying Substack post.

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Professor Stephen Shennan is one of the world's leading experts on the early farmers of the Fertile Crescent and Europe. In this interview, I pick his brain about why early farmers were so, uh, fertile, and produced so many descendants; how those farmers spread outward from their regions of origin; and how we can understand their Neolithic world. Professor Shennan also one of the world's most accomplished archaeological theorists, and he answers my questions about archaeology in the age of Big Data, statistics, and new ways of understanding the past.

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Peasants and common folk were oppressed by their social superiors, but they didn't accept that as a natural state of affairs: They resisted in small, everyday ways, and they rebelled, sometimes spectacularly.

This episode originally aired on September 20, 2018.

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What were Neanderthals really like? Our closest relatives shared an incredible amount in common with us, argues Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of the wonderful new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art. But we shouldn't pigeonhole them; Neanderthals persisted for hundreds of thousands of years across time and space, living diverse and varied lives everywhere from mountains to deserts to icy tundra.

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Five thousand years ago, a man died more than 10,000 feet high in the Alps of northern Italy. He had been shot in the back with an arrow, the corpse left behind, where he was frozen into a glacier along with all of his belongings. He stayed there until two hikers found him - still half covered in ice - in 1991. What was Ötzi's life like? And what can we learn about his final days and hours? Thanks to incredible scientific studies, we know more about Ötzi than almost anybody who's ever lived.

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Today, everywhere from Bengal to British Columbia, some 3.2 billion people speak an Indo-European language. All of these diverse languages are descended from a common ancestor spoken long before the advent of writing. But where and when was that, and who were the speakers of Proto-Indo-European? Follow us more than 5,000 years back in time to a story about livestock herding, horseback riding, chieftains, burial mounds, and powerful new gods.

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The first farmers of Europe and their descendants persisted for thousands of years. In the Neolithic heartland of eastern Europe, along the Danube River and through the northern Balkan Mountains, they built a unique civilization: Old Europe, with its artificial mounds, gorgeous pottery, and for the first time, the use of metal. The first cities in the world grew out of this long-lived Neolithic just before it disappeared forever.

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When we think of the medieval world, our minds usually turn to knights, royalty, and clergy. But the backbone of the medieval economic and social order was the humble peasant. In this rebroadcast from 2018, we explore the world and lives of the vast bulk of the people who actually lived in the Middle Ages, and why they matter.

How do we know what we know about the deep past? What languages did people speak in prehistory? And why, if the life of an early farmer seemed to be so miserable, did farmers have so many children? I answer all of these questions and more in our first prehistory mailbag episode.

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It didn't take long for the first pioneering farmers of Europe to establish mature and stable societies. The monuments of these societies are still with us today: enormous earthen tombs and standing stones, silent reminders of a lost civilization.

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Farming came into existence in the Fertile Crescent, but it didn't stay there. By 5000 BC, agriculture had spread east and west, reaching both Central Asia and the Atlantic Ocean. But how did this happen? Did indigenous hunter-gatherers adopt farming, or did the farmers themselves move and bring their way of life with them?

If you'd like to see some visuals of the things we talk about in this episode, check out the accompanying post on Substack.

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The domestication of animals has transformed the way that people eat, clothe themselves, and live over the past 10,000 or so years, but what in the world does "domestication" even mean? How did this happen, and why did people start doing this? I talk with Professor Greger Larson of Oxford University about the genetics of animal domestication and how cutting-edge science is helping us answer these age-old questions.

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The domestication of plants and animals has remade the way that people feed themselves, organize their societies, and interact with the landscapes around them. But for most of the human past, this isn't how people subsisted. When, where, and how did people start farming? And most importantly, why?

If you'd like to see some visuals of the things we talk about in this episode, check out the accompanying post on Substack.

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For most of Homo sapiens' time out of Africa, we lived in a world defined by ice. But by around 20,000 years ago, the ice had begun to melt, the glaciers retreating back toward the poles and mountain ranges. This left behind a new world, a whole different series of environments, opportunities, and perils for the people who had made it through the Ice Age.

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Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the world's best communicators on the deep human past and paleoanthropology, joins me to talk about archaic humans, genomics, and whether the concept of different human species even makes sense these days. Check out his blog, which is an amazing resource, and follow him on Twitter.

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Our understanding of the past is constantly in flux, and there's no field where that's clearer than with the early settlement of the Americas. I'm joined by Professor Jennifer Raff of the University of Kansas, an anthropological geneticist, to discuss the game-changing (or not?) recent work pushing back the date of first settlement to 30,000 years ago or more.

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The Americas were the last continents Homo sapiens reached. Why did it take so long for people to enter this vast and promising expanse of land? Who were they, and where had they come from? In today's episode, we explore the latest - just days old! - science of the First Americans, and discover the descendants they've left behind even today.

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Twenty thousand years ago, the world was locked in ice. The glaciers advanced from the poles and mountain ranges, swallowing huge portions of the planet's surface and making the rest colder and drier, a more difficult place to live. Yet people nevertheless thrived, spreading out across the continents and creating some of the most incredible art in human history.

Ancient DNA is the key that's unlocking the deep history of humanity, allowing us to answer questions about our collective past that we never dreamed of addressing even 20 years ago. Eske Willerslev is a pioneer in the field of extracting, sequencing, and analyzing the preserved DNA of people who lived thousands upon thousands of years ago; on top of that, he's a fascinating person with unique perspectives on how to understand the human past.

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Until very recently, Homo sapiens - our species - was only one of several varieties of humans on this planet. As our ancestors spread outward from Africa in their great migration, they encountered those other species. The results of those encounters left us a genetic legacy that is still with us today.

If you'd like to see some visuals of the things in this episode, check out this post on my Substack blog.

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Welcome to a new season of Tides of History! Over the next year, we'll be traveling from the very origins of our species through the peopling of the planet, the Ice Age, and then to the beginnings of agriculture, cities, metalworking, and states. Today, we cover our deepest past, from the divergence from our closest ape relatives to the first appearance of anatomically modern humans.

To see visuals of our earliest ancestors, and how-to videos for making ancient stone tools, check out Patrick's website.

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How do we tell when one period ends and another begins? What are the fundamental characteristics of the early modern period? My dear friend (and friend of the show!) Keith Pluymers, assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, returns to chat with me about periodization, the Great Divergence, and riots in the early modern period.

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Around the year 1000, merchants, explorers, and missionaries linked the world together from Newfoundland to China. Trade goods, people, and above all ideas flowed across a rich assortment of routes, connecting previously distant places into a single unit. This was the first instance of what we can call globalization, according to Professor Valerie Hansen of Yale, who wrote a compelling new book on the topic: The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began.

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Alaric was one of the most famous barbarians of antiquity, and yet we know little about him - or at least, we knew very little, until Douglas Boin's excellent new book came out. It's entitled Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's History of the Fall of Rome. In today's episode, I chat with Professor Boin about the book, the Goths, and how we should understand this period of Roman - and Gothic - history.

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John Maynard Keynes was one of the most important figures of the 20th century, creating the economic structures and ideas that defined the Second World War and its aftermath. I spoke with Zach Carter, author of the wonderful new Keynes biography The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, about Keynes's wild life and enduring legacies.

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We reach the epic conclusion of our series on the early modern period with the Great Siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto.

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For much of the 16th century, the Habsburgs of Spain and the Ottoman Empire waged an epic conflict for control over the Mediterranean. Follow along with two composite characters, a Barbary corsair and a Hospitaller knight, as they raid, pillage, and fight a holy war for decades on end.

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Charles V controlled more of Europe than any ruler in centuries, with resources other monarchs could only dream of. But that was never enough to give the Holy Roman Emperor more than a momentary victory; there was always a new enemy, some unforeseen calamity, waiting around the corner.

DISCLAIMER: If you do not think that this pandemic is a big deal; if you do not want to hear our personal political views; if you don?t care about present-day politics; if you think that this will somehow offend you; then please don't listen to this episode.

Author and history podcaster extraordinaire Mike Duncan joins me to talk about pandemics, social instability, and present-day politics.

Charles V was the most powerful European ruler since Charlemagne: king of Spain and Naples, Holy Roman Emperor, and ruler of a whole bunch else besides. How did all of these vast territories, and the central political role that went along with them, come into his possession? The answer wasn't ability or merit; it was inheritance.

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All of us are dealing with the ongoing pandemic in different ways, and I decided to wedge myself into my closet to record an informal talk with you all about pandemics throughout history and what, if anything, they might help us understand about what we're dealing with today. Economic effects, political upheavals, and disease all play together, so let's try to figure out the connections.

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Genetics has radically transformed our understanding of prehistory over the past two decades, revealing everything from the existence of brand-new, unknown species to interbreeding between Neanderthals and our human ancestors. I talked to geneticists Spencer Wells and Razib Khan, two of the world's most knowledgable communicators on genetics and prehistory, to get a sense for how things have changed.

In light of current events, we are re-posting one of my favorite episodes (from December, 2017) on natural disasters and the fall of the Roman Empire.

Justinian was the last great Roman emperor, but his reign was plagued by disasters beyond his control: volcanic eruptions, a changing climate, and a plague of epic proportions. Those disasters created a turning point that we can, with good reason, call the end of the Roman Empire.

Few books have influenced my view of American history and politics more than Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. We've been divided since the beginning, Woodard argues, and this has influenced every aspect of American history, not to mention its future. He has a new book coming out in May, Union, which expands this thesis further.

Get American Nations here.

And get Colin's new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, here.

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In light of current events, we are re-posting one of my favorite episodes (from June, 2018) on the Black Death.

Between 1346 and 1351, the Black Death killed tens of millions of people - at least half the population - in Europe and the Middle East. This great mortality, one of the worst disasters of any era, fundamentally reshaped European society and set the stage for the world that followed.

The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent was the high point of the Ottoman Empire, but for centuries, it has also been pegged as the beginning of the empire's long, slow decline into irrelevance. Is this true? Was Suleiman's reign simultaneously the best of times and the beginning of the end?

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Suleiman the Magnificent ruled the Ottoman Empire for forty-six years. During that time, his armies fought everywhere from Iran to Vienna. His navies touched Indonesia and the Straits of Gibraltar. Under his reign, the Ottoman Empire reached its glorious peak.

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