LOST WORLDS

Way back when.

Journalist and podcaster Wyman, author of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World (2021), rejects the traditional narrative of ancient Homo sapiens moving smoothly from foraging to farming to cities to nations to the Industrial Revolution to the modern world. He adds that, despite the absence of writing, evidence for prehistory continues to appear. No longer dependent on stones, ruins, and graves, archeologists employ “isotopic analysis, paleoenvironmental studies…chemical analyses of metal and ceramic material, satellite imaging, and the various other emerging methods that fall under the heading of archaeoscience tend to receive less public attention than ancient DNA.” Wyman begins at the end of the Paleolithic era, 20,000 years ago, when glaciers reached their maximum. The image of wandering hunters following herds of woolly mammoths across the tundra was reality. Except for a millennium of cooling 12,900 years ago, the Earth warmed steadily, and from 11,700 to 8,000 years ago, our ancestors broadened their approaches to subsistence, leading to agriculture and cities. It was a bumpy process. Readers will share the author’s fascination with Göbekli Tepe, a massive quasi-city in Turkey constructed over 11,000 years ago whose remains reveal no sign of domesticated plants, animals, or food production. He moves on to the “Long Neolithic,” 8,000 to 5,000 years ago, which altered the globe for good, emphasizing agricultural societies in China, Italy, and Pakistan, whose remains have been well-preserved. It’s a disturbing picture, as increasing food production led to a rising population that did not have equal access to resources. The greatest threat to Neolithic societies came from the societies themselves. They grew, flourished, and then fell apart, often violently. It’s no secret that civilization emerged, first in the Middle East, then around the world. As regularly as their Neolithic predecessors, they rose and then collapsed.

An illuminating history of prehistory.