Lost Worlds: Maybe we can learn
from Cross Word Books Hosted by Michele McAloon
Send us Fan Mail Find Michele at bookclues.com The world you take for granted is younger than you think and it was never guaranteed. We sit down with Patrick Wyman, creator of Tides of History and Past Lives and author of Lost Worlds; How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World to trace the volatile 10,000-year span after the last Ice Age when farming, herding, villages, social hierarchies, and writing begin to reshape human life. Along the way, we confront a simple driver behind almost everything: the hunt for calories and the constant fear of starvation that organized societies for millennia. Patrick explains why the Neolithic period isn’t a clean “before and after” moment, but a messy overlap of experiments, migration, and collapse. Ancient DNA technology, isotope analysis, and paleoenvironmental research now let historians see population replacement, unexpected ancestry, and the ways demography responds to perceived scarcity. We talk about the Anzick child in Montana and what one 13,000-year-old burial reveals about the deep roots of Indigenous history across North America. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a history-loving friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show. Find Patrick at instagram.com/wyman_patrick/
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What this episode covers
Send us Fan Mail Find Michele at bookclues.com The world you take for granted is younger than you think and it was never guaranteed. We sit down with Patrick Wyman, creator of Tides of History and Past Lives and author of Lost Worlds; How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World to trace the volatile 10,000-year span after the last Ice Age when farming, herding, villages, social hierarchies, and writing begin to reshape human life. Along the way, we confront a simple driver b...
Chapters
- 0:00 Welcome To Crossword
- 0:58 Meet Patrick Wyman
- 2:26 The Big Timeline Shift
- 4:53 What The Neolithic Really Means
- 5:57 Would They Look Like Us
- 7:53 Ancient DNA Changes Everything
- 11:35 The Anzick Child In Montana
- 12:58 Hunger, Demography, And Survival
- 16:10 Climate Sets Limits, Not Fate
- 20:12 Doggerland And A Drowning World
- 23:03 Why Farming Takes Over
- 26:51 Monuments, Memory, And Belief
- 30:46 Deer Masks And Ritual Life
- 32:22 Catalhoyuk And Early Urban Living
- 35:20 Violence Without Innocence
- 38:58 Why Wyman Wrote Lost Worlds
- 41:42 What Deep History Teaches Us
- 43:10 AI And Archaeology From Space
- 45:55 Otzi The Iceman Mystery
- 48:09 Where To Find Patrick
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