The Last Mailbag!

Introduction

0:00Hello, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Weinman. Thanks so much for being here today. As we get ready to wind things down on tides before our final episodes in April, I wanted to give folks a chance to get their thoughts and queries out there. So I got some really fantastic questions on social media, and I am really excited to answer them today for this mailbag episode. So without further ado, let's dive in. First question up is from Kelly

0:34MB. If you could give any historical figure a Twitter account, who would it be and why? This is a really fantastic question. And over the years, I've been asked many, many times who I think would be the best poster out of the historical figures that we know, love, and hate from the past several thousand years. And I always come back to a couple of go-to answers. I think my actual answer here is Martin Luther, because Martin Luther was just a poster

1:05born and bred. Like one of the really interesting things about Martin Luther's thought is that it was always oppositional. So he very rarely made positive statements of what he believed or why he thought something was wrong. What he did was he defined his own thought in opposition to things that were being said to or about him. It's what made him such an incredible pamphleteer. Like if you think back to the episodes that I did on Martin Luther, which were now a long time ago, I realized this, but the episodes I did on Martin Luther really focused on him as a media personality

1:39and on his mastery of the medium of the pamphlet, which was kind of a new genre in publishing in the early 16th century. But basically the reason that he was so successful and why his thoughts spread so fast so far was because he really mastered this whole, like, okay, people say a thing, I'm going to write something back to them. And then because the printers all need stuff to print, because printing is a pretty money losing business. If you're not constantly producing things that

2:09people are buying in this period, like your overhead costs are really high. It's very expensive to produce actual books. Pamphlets, however, are like the bread and butter of the printing industry in early 16th century Europe. And one of the reasons why Martin Luther became so well-known was because he mastered the format, because he understood what people wanted to read in a pamphlet. He mastered the medium in which he was working. And I think Luther also would have mastered the kind of back and forth of a social media platform in real time. I think he would have absolutely thrived

2:41on that. Also, Luther really was a hater. I can't overstate this, that he was a guy who really liked to sit there and take pot shots. And again, that's something that present day social media really, really rewards, right? So like, that's the kind of skill set that would play very well with the incentive structures that are built into the social media platforms we have. So I think Luther would be the best at it. Is he the person that I would actually like to see the most? That's a slightly different question. I mean, I think my answer to that one is probably

3:13Benjamin Franklin. Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with the more esoteric or perhaps below board aspects of Benjamin Franklin's personality, he was a famous horndog. I don't know how else to put that, but that dude really loved women. And so like if Ben Franklin was on social media, he would basically just be following an infinite number of OnlyFans models. And I think

3:45that that would be a very amusing thing to witness would be like founding father, you know, incredible polymath can do absolutely everything. So on the one hand, he's having truly fascinating conversations with the other luminaries of the age via the social media platform. And on the other, he's just spamming messages to OnlyFans models. I personally think that that would be the person that I would want to see the most. I don't think he would be the best poster, a very good one, but not the best.

4:15I think the best poster would be Martin Luther. I think the one I would just love to, you know, watch do it for love of the game would be Benjamin Franklin. You know that moment when you order food and suddenly everyone around you gets very interested in your dinner? Yeah, that's what Grubhub does. Gives you deals so good, you'll have to guard them. Gold Days of Grubhub Plus is here. Four weeks of Grubhub's best offers all month long in May, only for Grubhub Plus members. And if you're not a member, you can sign up now for just 99 cents a

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Insane Historical Figures

5:53Okay. Second question up. This is from Dymphna. Who is the most insane historical figure that was somehow taken seriously that you've come across? That is a fantastic question. There are many insane historical figures who were somehow taken seriously that I've come across in my years of doing history. I think my favorites are usually pretenders, where it's pretty obvious that this guy is not actually

6:28the long lost son of the last dynasty, but where people just kind of collectively agree that we're going to treat this random person who's popped up as if they were the legitimate heir to the throne, because we all really need him to be the legitimate heir to the throne, because we're all unhappy with what the king's doing. And we think we've been left out of the spoils of this particular settlement. So we want a pretender. We're going to make that guy king. But really, we all agree that the pretender is just kind of a cipher for our discontent with what's happening among the king

7:00and his advisors at this point. So I think I would say, yeah, probably one of the late medieval pretenders would be my go-to answer for that. A guy like Lambert Simnel, who was one of the pretenders to Henry VII's throne. After Henry VII, Henry Tudor became king of England and founded the Tudor dynasty. There were a couple of these guys. Perkin Warbeck was the other. I think the idea of the most formerly some of the most powerful people in England looking at these people who are very clearly not royalty and saying like, eh, close enough. Okay, we'll go for it. I find that

7:37to be very funny and very insane in a way that only really makes sense if you're looking at the late 15th, early 16th centuries. So I think that's probably my answer to that one, but we have a lot of choices. I think insane historical figure that wasn't taken as seriously as they should have been, Diogenes the Cynic. There's a reason why Alexander the Great really only wanted to go visit Diogenes. Alexander was not going around seeking out a lot of intellectuals and philosophers and people like that, but he really wanted to go see Diogenes. Now that's an interesting thinker right there.

8:07I think probably more societies could use a guy in a barrel just hanging out telling you what's wrong with everything, but that may just be me. Okay, next question up. This is from Mr. Old Lady. I have to say, my favorite thing about doing these episodes is reading y'all's handles on whatever social media platform. That brings me a lot of joy, so thank you. Okay, so from Mr. Old Lady,

Slavery and Economics

8:30I'm interested in hearing more about this thread you've been developing across various platforms and episodes about how slavery plays a critical role in the development of complex economic thinking, specifically the understanding of labor as having a monetary value. Okay, so this is something I've talked about it here on Tides in the episodes that I've done on slavery in the past few months. I've talked about it a lot over on my other show, Past Lives, which if you are not checking out, you absolutely should be because the episodes are good, folks. We're working real hard on them. We're putting out new scripted episodes every week. We are just now finishing up our first season

9:02on enslaved people throughout history. So if this is a topic you're interested in, come on over, check out Past Lives, download a few episodes, and see if it appeals to you. I think if you like Tides, I think you will also like Past Lives. So yeah, specifically with regard to this question of slavery playing a role in the development of complex economic thinking. So it is not necessarily straightforward or easy to think of labor as a monetizable commodity that can be bought and sold. And you would be surprised at how many sophisticated economies do not really

9:36necessarily operate on that principle all the time. That when we are looking before the modern era, the connection between labor output, how much your labor is worth in terms of the value of what you're putting into it, that those kinds of calculations are often unclear, especially for free people. Now, I say especially for free people, because one of the things about being free in much of the pre-modern world, this is not true everywhere, every single time, but it is by and large true,

10:08is that when you're free, that also means being free in an economic sense, that somebody is not telling you what to do. And so that means that, you know, to kind of turn it into Marxist terms here real quick, like you own the means of your own production, right? So to be free is to own your own land. It's to, you know, own your own workshop. It's that you are not working for someone else if you are free. And if you are working for someone else, then you're not actually free. That means that when it comes to thinking in these terms of like, okay, I need to hire a person to do the cobblestones

10:43for a day. That's what I need. And I need to know how much money that is worth. Hiring a free laborer to do that while not impossible, it's not as easy to translate that from the sale value of an entire person to the value of a single day's work, which can be sliced up and kind of bought and sold in unit form. It's just a much easier conceptual jump to make from, I am a free person who has full control of my faculties and labor. It's harder to get from that to what is a day's work worth than it is from, I am an enslaved person. It costs this much to purchase me. Therefore, my work on a daily

11:18basis is worth this much. It's just a much more difficult conceptual leap, especially if you are running large scale enterprises, which is kind of where you're going to first start to see this whole idea of wage labor coming out. That makes a lot more sense if you're running something with a few hundred workers than it does if you have one guy where he comes by and you're like, okay, I need you to harvest this stuff. We'll give you a couple of bushels here. Wage labor emerges a whole bunch of different times and places. But when wage labor emerges,

11:49I don't think it's a coincidence that it is essentially always emerging in parallel with slavery, that you need to have the idea of enslaved labor and the monetary value of that labor to be able to apply it to free people as well. And that's why free wage laborers are always the segment of society that is most sensitive to being compared to slaves and where there is the most kind of slippage between those statuses. If you actually own your own land or own your workshop,

12:20like that's a much harder barrier to cross between there and slavery than being a wage laborer. So one of the things that's confusing about slavery in the later Roman empire, for example, is that there is a lot of slippage between those various statuses where it doesn't map straightforwardly onto an enslaved free distinction where there are varieties of freedom and varieties of unfreedom that are tied to your economic status. So it's not just you're free or slave, it's you can be freer or less free depending on how much control you have over your labor.

12:54So that's a short answer to that question. I think there is a lot more that I can do with it, and I will do with it systematically. I am planning on writing another book after Lost Worlds comes out on May 5th. I've got all the prep work done. I just need to sit down and write the book proposal, but it's going to be all about war, slavery, and the rise of Rome. And a big part of that story, as we've discussed here on Tides, is the kind of increasing sophistication of Roman economic thinking and the increasing sophistication of the Romans as economic actors, which is directly tied

13:27into the massive expansion of slavery and slave holding that we see in the Middle Republic. So I think there's a lot more room for me to dive into that. It's a fairly well-studied topic with regard to early modernity and the slave trade there, especially the transatlantic slave trade, the connections between slavery, economy, economic thought, theories of value. All of that is very clear and has been explored a very great deal in scholarship, quite controversially so. And I think we can ask similar questions and get really illuminating answers for the ancient world in

14:00ways that haven't fully been tried yet. We're getting there, but I'm hoping that I will be able to do that soon. Okay. Next question up from Charlie Kaufman. He says,

Retrospective Judgment

14:11you can't undo any of what they did, but you can put one of them in an oubliette full of stinging insects forever. Who do you got? Hernán Cortés, Charles the Bat of Navarre, or Columbus, or someone else? Okay. Great question. Love talking about passing retrospective judgment on historical figures. I personally think that it is perfectly acceptable to pass retrospective moral judgment on historical figures, as long as you're judging them by the standard of their time. And there were plenty of people, like I can't overstate this, who really did think that Hernán Cortés did bad things and

14:45Columbus did bad things in their day. I'm going to focus on those two because I think they're much better known. The Charles the Bat poll is fantastic. Thank you for that, Charlie. But I'm going to focus on Cortés and Columbus because I think their crimes are better known. Lots of people thought that Columbus first got in trouble, not from the wokes, you know, 500 years in the future. It was literally people at the time. It was his sailors, first and foremost, who were like, this guy is not right. Things are not going well here. Columbus was sent back to Spain in chains. He was stripped of most of

15:15his honors and wealth that he'd accumulated by the Spanish crown, not because they were being unfair to him, but because he had done things that they explicitly didn't like. You know, people like Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote, you know, one of the first kind of protest texts about the way the indigenous people were being treated in the Americas. That was not just him. That was a strain of thought that existed throughout the early 16th century that like we have responsibilities to these people and we are not holding up our end of the bargain, even in the most vague sense. So it's not

15:48like everybody was totally on board with doing the worst possible things to the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas from the get-go. That's the anachronistic thing, not the idea of holding these people to some sort of moral account. I cannot emphasize that enough, that there really were objections. And also, this is something I've been thinking about as I've been writing episodes on the slave trade for past lives. A lot of the people who were involved in this stuff were just straight up bad people, regardless of the standards of the age that they were living in. I wrote an episode

16:21about the Clotilde, which was the last slave ship to arrive in the United States before the Civil War. And the conspirators, I wrote about it. It's a spectacularly well understood case. There's been a tremendous amount of research on it. The remains of the ship itself, which was burned after the voyage to destroy evidence of illegal slave trading, is still there in Mobile Bay. The accounts of the survivors were collected over the course of decades. So it's one of the few cases where we know who the people involved were on both sides of it. We know who the conspirators were who planned the voyage. We know

16:52who the captives were. We know what their experiences were of all of this stuff. But just digging into the conspirators a little bit, one of them had recently been stabbed by his steamboat clerk. And so he just had a gigantic scar along his arm from where he'd been stabbed. Another one stiffed the sailors that he was supposed to be paying. These were just kind of generically bad people who also happened to be involved in, you know, the most horrifying enterprises of all time. And I think a lot of that also applies to the conquistadors. Like the kind of people who were willing to go do that stuff

17:26in Mexico with Hernan Cortes were not like the good guys of early modern Spain. You were pulling from a pretty, I would call them, I would say they over-indexed on psychopathy is the way I would put that out there. So I think I'm going to say Cortes, just because the sheer scale of what Cortes and his associates did in Mexico was really, really, like the scale of that is pretty shocking considering how few of them there were. I mean, I think my actual answer would be Pizarro. I think Pizarro was, if anything, worse

17:58than Cortes. But it would definitely be one of those guys. Like the sheer damage to number of people ratio that those guys inflicted, I mean, close to the worst in all of human history. So I'm going to say Cortes, Pizarro, someone along those lines. They were just straight up bad guys on top of everything else. Okay. So this question, next one coming up from R.E. Lawyer. Now this is in reference to something I

Historical Film Idea

18:27mentioned in our last mailbag episode, which is how I think that, you know, the historical film I want to see is about the first people to ride a horse. I want to see a slapstick comedy about that. Now, so who should star in a movie about the first people to ride a horse? I know my answer. It is Chris Hemsworth. I think Chris Hemsworth is a wildly underrated kind of physical comedic actor. And I think he is exactly the vibe we're looking for, for the first guy to try and fail to ride a horse. I also think it would just be funny to see Chris Hemsworth act in a scenario where what he's being

19:00asked to do is fall off a horse. I think that would be great. So yeah, my answer to that is Chris Hemsworth. Also Charlie Day as the sidekick. I think that would be, that would be my go-to Chris Hemsworth and Charlie Day. You have my answer. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic-y series. Become your friend group's sci-fi expert

19:33on the latest blockbuster book-to-screen adaptation. Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app with plans now starting at £5.99. You'll get access to over 900,000 audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any

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Bow and Arrow Origins

21:21Switching gears entirely from Zenili25, is there evidence of what inspired the bow and arrow? Now, club, arm but longer and harder. Sword, sharp club hurt more. Spear, throw sword from safer distance, but I can't figure out how we came up with that contraption. Okay, so a couple of mild massagings of the question here. So sword is actually a much more recent invention. The sword only really comes into being, as we understand it, after the invention of metal. And it's not even one

21:53of the first things to be made once metalworking has been invented. It takes quite a while before people start making swords. Whereas a club, absolutely pretty straightforward. Spears, spears have been around for a real long time. Whether we're talking about just sharpened wooden sticks, which we see going back 400,000 years in the archaeological record, or spears as a composite tool. Composite tool meaning that it's made out of both wood and stone, right? So you are strapping a piece of stone to the end. Now, as far as where the bow and arrow comes from,

22:27I think it probably comes from spear thrower technology. So we think of the spear as being one thing, but it's not. The atlatl, so like a spear throw, it's kind of like the contraption you use to throw a tennis ball really far for a particularly energetic dog, which extends the arm and allows you to throw a spear a lot farther. I think that's the kind of technology that you need to have before you can start thinking of the idea of shooting a projectile on its own. So I would guess that what immediately comes before the bow and arrow is probably the atlatl.

23:00But the bow and arrow is a much, much, much newer technology. I mean, the bow and arrow doesn't really start to spread until after the younger Dryas. So we see kind of scattered examples of bow and arrow technology in the Paleolithic, but I would say it's much more of a defining technology for the Mesolithic, the Neolithic, for kind of after we enter the Holocene, I would say is when it is really the heyday of the bow and arrow. So I think it probably comes from the inspiration of the atlatl, the idea that there is something we can add to make the projectile go further and

23:35faster. And, you know, the kinds of projectiles you throw with an atlatl are a little different. They are closer, I think, to arrows. They're more like darts than they are kind of big, heavy thrusting spears. So already you're having to change what you think of as a projectile. And so I would guess bow and arrow comes kind of out of that same line of thinking. But you get periods where it's not like once the bow and arrow arrives, everybody just uses that forever. I can think of a couple of times in places in prehistoric Europe where there are groups that have bows and arrows that are replaced by groups that don't seem to have them,

24:07that are then replaced again by groups that do seem to have bows and arrows. So it's not as essential a technology as you think it is. It is really, really, really useful, especially for certain kinds of hunting. And I think you could make the argument that for hunting really, really big game on the step on like the tundra step on the mammoth step, a bow and arrow is not the most useful thing for you. You need something that hits harder. You need a larger projectile. And so in that case, it actually makes more sense to use like atlatls and throwing

24:38spears or even thrusting spears. Just if what you're trying to kill is a mammoth, where by the time the arrowhead has penetrated layers of hair, fur, skin, fat, and muscle, like you've got to go pretty far down before you're actually hitting anything vital with an arrow. So I don't think it's as obvious a technology as we might necessarily think. What bows and arrows are really, really useful for is interpersonal violence, violence between human beings. And so I don't think it's a coincidence

25:09that bows and arrows really pick up in use as population densities increase, getting into the Mesolithic and the Neolithic, and then the ages beyond. I think it has a lot more utility as a weapon for killing other people than it necessarily, or obviously does as a thing for hunting animals. Okay. Next one up from Alexander Laird slash Frog Farm. Are there any big updates in prehistory or

Prehistory Updates

25:33early Bronze Age since you did your season or couldn't fit into your new book on the topic through new discoveries with ancient DNA, archaeology, et cetera, et cetera? I think the big ones are things that I've talked about fairly recently, like the stuff I went over with Professor Shane Miller when he came back on, another one of our returning guests on Tides. Shout out to Shane. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in the early Americas. This is just hot off the presses. This paper literally just came out, but they found organic man-made remains basically from the Clovis period.

26:08So from 12,000, 13,000 years old, organic materials, like objects that people made that normally don't preserve. They found them, they were looking mostly kind of in the Great Basin of Nevada, where you get pretty good preservation of things like that. I think stuff like that, looking in places like the Great Basin for well-preserved remains, I think that is a field that's just going to explode in the next few years because a little bit more ancient DNA, a few more artifacts. I mean, that's even without getting into things like the White Sands footprints that are supposed to date from the

26:42last glacial max from about 23,000 years old. Those are areas where there is so much happening and there are so few sites that we're relying on that even adding a couple of new pieces of information can really dramatically change what we think we know about it. So I think that there is, with regard to the Americas right now, just to kind of hone in on that one, there's kind of an emerging consensus that the ancestors of indigenous Americans were all living in Beringia around 16,000 years ago, and that at

27:13various points, different groups kind of split off and moved south, some along the seacoast, probably some through the ice-free corridor. But figuring out what their relationship was to any potential pre-existing groups of people pre-Clovis living south of the ice sheets is really, really, really difficult. We have only really faint and hard to interpret genetic traces, really, really, really scattered pieces of material evidence that we can't really put into any sort of coherent narrative.

27:44So I think that's one to be on the lookout for, where it's just not going to take that many new things to kind of radically upend our understanding of that period. So keep an eye on those organic artifacts that were found in the Great Basin. Keep an eye out for new DNA studies. That's one where there's a lot of stuff happening. I know that because I'm on the Paleo Americas list serve, where scholars talk to each other about this stuff. So that's one where I'm just keeping up with it as it happens. And I'm like, wow, there's interesting things going on there. Okay. Shifting gears a

Staying Up to Date

28:16little bit from ChromaticMN. How did the collection of correspondence work? As in, did everyone keep copies of letters they sent to others? Did they gather up correspondence when people died? Did folks just keep better diaries of correspondence? You touched on it a bit in The Verge. I did touch on this a bit. So this is a topic that I am particularly passionate about, which I realize sounds kind of insane since we're talking about very old letters. But basically how it worked is you would usually send a copy and then you would keep a copy and you would kind of keep a file. I'm talking here about,

28:50this is kind of broadly true, but like, let's say you're a Roman aristocrat living around 500 AD. You would have probably a slave or a servant who is actually physically writing things for you. You have a scribe. So you're dictating to them. You have a scribe who writes that. They're probably going to copy down your dictation and then they're going to make a cleaner copy, which is going to be what they send. They might make another clean copy to put into your file, or they might just keep the original dictated copy, but then they're going to send the nice one. That's what's going to be

29:21actually sent as a letter. Now, every once in a while, it's really interesting. You can actually see remnants of the filing system in the manuscript copies, because what we have are not the actual letters that people wrote. What we have are copies. People would copy them down on parchment, bind them into manuscripts. We don't have the original letters that people sent, almost never. Like we have only a couple of examples. When we do, they're usually from the East and they're almost always papyrus, or they are like the wooden letters from Vindolanda. So letters that were

29:52written on birch bark or little pieces of wood that were saved because they fell into an anaerobic environment so that we managed to get them preserved. But generally speaking, what we have are just copies that somebody found at some point and copied into a manuscript. And every once in a while, you can actually see evidence of the filing system and how they were copied into the manuscript. So one of my particular favorite letter writers is a guy named Rurikius of Limoges, who lived around 500 AD. And Rurikius, he basically didn't want to talk about all of the big things that were

30:26happening in Gaul around 500. So people don't really read his letters for information on the big political events involving Visigoths and Franks and church drama. Rurikius had no interest in that, but he was a prolific correspondent and he wrote to a lot of really important people, just not about stuff that we would kind of want to know. But in Rurikius's letters, the way they were copied into the manuscript, you can still see the filing system. So the first book of his letters is really well organized. The second was literally this book,

30:57what's called book two, was literally just a stack of random letters that weren't in any particular order that someone then copied. So the first ones, the first book had all been like kind of collated and organized, organized by recipient, organized by date. The second batch was literally just a stack of papers that got copied into the manuscript. So usually when letters would be prepared for publication, the authors would themselves go back through and give it some sort of structure, some sort of order. So you can see this like the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris in

31:28the fifth century, very important guy, very important historical source for us for understanding fifth century Gaul and the end of the Roman Empire. But like Sidonius was very careful about going back and rewriting, reorganizing, kind of putting things together in a way that made sense. That's true of many other letter collections, like Cassiodorus, who worked for the Ostrogothic kings of Italy. Cassiodorus's letters are really well organized. There was clearly a system for categorizing,

31:59storing, and archiving them. And then when it was time to edit the collections, as they eventually did, they went through, gave it another once over, edited the texts themselves. In Cassiodorus's case, he often removed names and specific things because the idea was that you were going to use this letter collection as a model for how to write letters like this, not because you wanted to know what was actually in the letters. And that's how a lot of letter collections come down to us, is that they were model collections. It's like you are in a library, you need to write a letter to

32:31someone, you go get the big letter collection and see how did this respected authority on letter writing, write this kind of letter. So that's what those letter collections were for. That's not how we use them as historians, but that is what the texts, as they survive today, that's generally what they were recorded for. Okay, next one up from New York City. Great handle, by the way. When we talk about instances of interbreeding and prehistory, do we have a sense of whether that actually included modern humans living side by side and interacting with other hominids?

33:02We don't know. We absolutely do not know. This is kind of a limitation of the kind of evidence we have that is telling us about these interbreeding events. Ancient DNA, and modern DNA for that matter, is a record of reproduction. It is the embodiment of what we would call euphemistically mating networks. Ancient DNA does not tell us anything about the scenario in which that mating network became a real thing. It doesn't tell us about power dynamics. It doesn't

33:37tell us about gender relations. It doesn't tell us about agency choice. And that's one of its downfalls, I would say, as a thing. I talked about this a little bit in our episode on Ancient DNA, but just because two people had children together, that doesn't tell us anything about the nature of their relationship. And I really think that there are cases where you can see kind of sexual assaults, sexual exploitation, concubinage, sex slavery, where I think you can

34:08see these things happening at scale in the genetic record. I use the Indo-Europeans as a good case of this, where it just seems really clear to me that these guys were going out killing the men and sexually exploiting the women they found across this range. I think that's the best explanation for what we see in the genetic record. But when we go further back, all we have are these tiny little snapshots of life. We don't have a lot of sites from the Paleolithic where we have long-term use and where we can see over time kind of social contexts, where we can see kind of social activities,

34:42where we can see what is the underlying social context in which these relationships are happening. We have no idea. My sense is that, no, they probably weren't living alongside each other. And the interbreeding events we see were quite plausibly the result of kidnappings, of non-consensual interactions. I think that possibility has not been adequately discussed when it comes to understanding what we're calling interbreeding events, that there is a lot of room there for

35:13violence and coercion. And we know so little about how these groups interacted with each other. I think it would be really foolish for us to assume that this was all like a big kumbaya thing. Groups of anatomically modern humans have found plenty of reasons to fight and kill each other over the last hundred and some odd thousand years or even longer. I don't think there's any reason to believe that interactions between archaic human and anatomically modern human groups would have necessarily been any happier or nicer. I think there is a lot of potential for conflict. And the fact

35:47that we don't see more explicit evidence of conflict between those groups has more to do with low population densities and a lack of overlap than any sort of inherently good-natured interactions between those two groups. Okay. This one is from SWEST20. With you covering so many different topics on

Interbreeding in Prehistory

36:08tides and past lives, like late medieval, early modern Europe, prehistory, classical antiquity, slavery, et cetera. What's your approach for staying up to date with the historiography of a topic? Okay. Great, great, great question. And I think one where you can probably take something for yourself from this. The way I do it is whenever I am digging into a new topic, I try to find the most recent, fully up-to-date scholarly examination of that topic. So that's usually going to be something like an Oxford handbook or a Cambridge handbook or, you know, like one of the big kind of encyclopedic

36:45types or big collections of articles that like Blackwell or Rootledge do. I love those. And those are always my starting point because usually what you get out of them are subject matter specialists writing chapters for more general audiences. Not for like lay people, but for if you are a archaeologist who specializes in the 18th century Great Plains and you're being asked to teach a class on Roman archaeology, these are the kinds of books that you would read where you have field

37:17expertise, but you don't have subject matter expertise. So these chapters tend to be written such that people who are knowledgeable about the subject matter in general, but not the specifics can make sense of them fairly quickly. Like if you've got to prepare a lecture, these are kind of your go-to things. So I always try to find the most recent ones of those, whatever those are for the field. So like the Oxford handbook of the Punic and Phoenician Mediterranean was my go-to when I was writing episodes about the Phoenicians and Carthage, right? These are chapters written by specialists.

37:51So the chapter that's written about, let's say, domestic architecture in Punic, North Africa is written by an archaeologist who has excavated sites that have Punic domestic architecture. That's what you want. You want something that has the specialists being forced to write for an audience that is not purely other specialists. Those are always my starting point. And then once I figure out, and usually you can find something there that's been done in the last 10 years, last 10, last 15 years at the very most. Usually I'm finding that overview book will have been written post 2010. If there's a kind

38:26of a monograph covering the topic, like a good recent narrative history written by a specialist, by a proper historian or classicist or archaeologist, then I'll usually read that first and then go to the big kind of handbook type book, just to give me kind of a sense for how do we string these things together. So the one I read about Alexander the Great and the Wars of the Successors was called By the Spear. Great book. And usually Oxford and Cambridge University presses have overview monograph

39:02series. Like they have series where the intention is, oh, you're a professor who has to teach a course on this, or you need to do a lecture on this, or you need this for background for your own work, but it needs to be at a level that says that I understand the scholarly debates that are happening in this area. Those kinds of books are my go-to. They give you a pretty rapid sense for the kind of the scholarly state of a field. And they usually tell you, here are a couple of interesting bits and pieces that you can go with. Then usually what I do is I take those texts and I

39:34plug them into Google Scholar and I see who is citing them. So that tells you, okay, these are the standard works on this topic right now. What is the really, really recent cutting edge work that's citing them? And I find that usually gets you to a pretty up-to-date understanding of the field pretty quickly. Like you're not going to get everything that way, but I think you are going to get 90% of the really important stuff that you need. I'm Leon Nafok, best known as the host and co-creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think

40:08Twice, Michael Jackson. I'm here to tell you about my show, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions, and vicious onstage fights. But before The Jerry Springer Show became a symbol of cultural decline, its namesake was a popular Midwestern politician and a serious-minded idealist with lofty ambitions. Through dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew Springer best, I examined Springer's lifelong struggle to reconcile his TV persona with his political dreams and aspirations. Named one of

40:41the best podcasts of the year by The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer is a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves, and how we transcend them, or don't. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or binge the whole series ad-free right now on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app.

Mining in History

41:05Next question up. This is from cesspoolboy. How come we never hear anything about mining? Who was mining? Who owned the mines? Where were they? Well, buddy, I got something for you. I did a whole episode on silver mining in classical Athens on Past Lives. I did this about one of the most expensive slaves sold in classical Athens, a guy named Sosius, who was a Thracian mining overseer. So if you would like to know about that specific context of mining, I talked about it at very great length. The mines

41:36were all over the place. They were not as big in classical Greece as they became under the Roman Empire. The Romans really mastered mining at scale, and they mastered how to physically change landscapes. If you go to the former Roman gold mining areas of Spain, they wash away entire mountains and hillsides. It looks like when they talk about blowing the top off a mountain in Appalachia to get at the coal, the Romans were doing that to get at gold. They were perfectly capable of doing that with ancient

42:07technology as long as you were willing to expend lives, human lives, in a systematic fashion and then replace them with available labor. I haven't talked about the mines all that much because, frankly, the mines are really depressing. Especially in the ancient world, the mines are the most depressing place you can go. I also think they're the place where you can see the Roman economic system taken to its logical conclusion. The idea of human lives as being fully expendable, really sophisticated

42:39thinking about capital, investment, return on investment, the value of labor, profit margins. This stuff is clearest when it comes to these really, really large-scale industrial operations, and there is no better example of a large-scale industrial operation in the Roman Empire than mining. To give you a sense for the scale of Roman mining activities, it was enough to cause spikes in pollution levels that we can see in Greenland ice cores. The Romans literally did some climate change because they were mining so hard. Yeah, we could go a lot deeper than that. It's a big topic,

43:14and it's a really important topic, primarily in an economic sense because it speaks directly to money supply. If you want to understand things like inflation, how money is being used, what quantities of money are available, which are important things to understand for the operation of an economy, you have to deal with mining. But I think it's also important to deal with as an aspect of social history that this is really as bad as Roman society gets. If you were looking for all of the really bad stuff about the Roman Empire, you would find it in those industrialized mines in Spain.

43:46Part of the reason I haven't talked about it that much is because it's depressing. It sucks. It's really unfortunate. Those poor people were treated awfully. And it's a stain on the soul of the Roman Empire that they did that for as long as they did. Next question up from Aaron Mehta. Would you ever consider going back and updating slash redoing the Fall of Rome episodes? It would be interesting to hear them now with your podcast experience and various new topical focuses. So, well, thank you for that. I am going back to do some Fall of Rome stuff. If you're subscribed to Past Lives, you will see my

44:20Wolfala episodes. We're going to bundle them together and release all three of them on Past Lives. I think we'll probably do a little audio remastering just to clean up some of my now 10-year-old done on an absolutely free audio editor just to clean that up a little bit. But yeah, so they'll be coming back out. I'll probably be talking about them a little more. I'm going to try to release the whole run of Fall of Rome episodes on the Past Lives platform moving forward. I would love to do more with them. I'm interested to go back and kind of see what was I doing and what was I thinking then. I think that'd

44:53be really cool. Okay. We are starting to wind down here, but I think I have time for one or two more questions. Here's a question from Instagram from Mark Ballo Smith. How has the podcast shaped or changed your areas of interest or focus over the years? I'm a firm believer that you don't know what you're going to think is interesting until you're actually kind of hip deep in it. And one of the things that I truly appreciate about Tides is that it gave me the opportunity to explore so many different times and places that I didn't know were going to be fascinating until I got into them.

45:28I was not really looking forward. For example, this is just the most recent and salient one in my mind, so forgive me for going with this. I really did not think I was going to find the age of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Republic to be as interesting as I did. I am fascinated by that period of time, and I was dreading covering it. I really did not want to cover kind of the classical Hellenistic and kind of late up into the late Republic. I really did not want to cover those periods for Tides. I ended up doing it because it made sense given what else I was working on. It made

46:02sense given where the show was going. I think people kind of expected some narrative episodes on these really big, famous, well-known events. I'm happy to provide them. I was not expecting to enjoy those as much as I did. I wasn't expecting to find myself faced with really compelling questions that I think are going to occupy the next couple of years of my life. And that has happened so many times as I was doing this show. That's the whole reason why The Verge exists, why I was able to write that book and why I felt compelled to write that book is because it was researching for the podcast and

46:35realizing that I had questions. My areas of interest are always going to be tied to what I'm reading, what I'm looking at, and the questions that come up from those. And because I do this, I have the opportunity to explore areas that stimulate my interest. And I would rather do some research that I don't find all that compelling, write a few episodes, move on to the next topic, just to have the opportunity to stumble on something that I didn't know I was going to find fascinating.

47:05I had no idea I was going to find prehistory as fascinating as I did. I think that's true of just about everything that I may have a sense that like, oh, that's pretty cool. I'd like to know more about that. But I never realized I'm going to go as deep down the rabbit hole as I do by the time I get there. Okay. I have two more questions. We're going to get through them real quick. This one is from Rekizela. Indo-European language branches. What's the best scholarship say now about how these branches relate to one another and when slash where they diverged?

47:36Fascinating question. I think there are some that are pretty well established where there's a concordance between an archaeological culture that we can see materially and a genetic profile and a linguistic profile where it's just not that hard to see it. I think specifically the Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages, so the Iranian branch of Indo-Iranian, I think that one is just really, really clear. It's associated with the Andronovo culture of Southern Siberia

48:07around about 1000 BC, 1500 BC in that range. I think that one is just absolutely certain, as certain as you can possibly be. Right place, right time, right genes, right material artifacts, seems to speak to the kind of society that we get from reconstructed Proto-Iranian. Really, everything kind of hits. But then there are others where it's really hard to see. Celtic is kind of a mystery. Did Celtic move into Central Europe from the fringes? Did it move out to

48:42the fringes of Europe from Central Europe? What kind of weird processes of back and forth movement are we seeing there? We can't really pin that down now. How do we explain the close connections between Celtic and Italic? I think it's mostly aerial features that the speakers of those two diverging varieties were just in close proximity to one another. It's not that there's a genetic relationship between the two of them, but we don't really know about that. Germanic, still not necessarily easy to figure out the dynamics behind the spread of Germanic, though I would say that we're getting

49:13closer to that. I would say the mechanics of how Italic dispersed throughout Italy are pretty unclear. Where did Greek come from? There's still a lot of stuff that we don't know about the various Indo-European branches. And I think that has much more to do with the dynamics of language spread and change than it does with shortcomings in the archaeological or genetic or any other kind of record. It's mostly just that languages can kind of explode very quickly, and it can be very hard

49:44to see where they came from in the sense that if you have a small group of people who are wielding a lot of social power, who become the authorities in an area, they can impose their language or spread their language starting from a very small group of people to a much larger group very quickly. And we might not necessarily see the signs of the migration of that group or where they had come from previously. It can be hard to see that. It can be hard to... So there isn't necessarily an obvious genetic or material sign linking that points us to language movement. Sometimes we do see that,

50:20and when we do see it, it's awesome. But I mean, to kind of answer the question about the best scholarship, I think the best scholarship right now is having to come to terms with the fact that there is no hard and fast general rule about tracking language through the archaeological and genetic records. I think that's the thing that scholars are going to have to come to terms with and figure out and just realize like, oh man, this is a case-by-case thing. I talked about this a little bit in the ancient DNA episode. Okay. So by way of conclusion, this question comes from Don Gibson on Instagram.

50:51I just think I really wanted to answer this one last because it speaks to my very specific interests. What is your favorite type of guy you see repeated over and over in history? Now, I'm a big fan of types of guy. I mean that in a gender neutral sense. You could be a woman and be a capital G guy in the sense that I'm using the term here. I think type of guy analysis is basically sociological storytelling in the sense that you are working from the collective to the

51:25individual rather than from the individual to the collective. And I think in that way, it's a really powerful storytelling tool to be able to locate someone in their social cultural context, their economic context, to be able to say like, what are the markers of identity that seem to define this person? You can do that when you're walking down the street and you look at a person. We do that all day, every day. We just don't do it systematically. And so type of guy analysis is my way of turning people watching into something that's analytically rigorous. And I do this for the past and the

51:58present. If you see me out, just know I am looking at you and I am mentally placing you in various types of guy. Sorry if that's weird, but I do that. That's kind of how my brain works. Favorite type of guy I see repeated over and over in history is this is a matter of, I would say, cultural affiliation, meatheads. I love the meathead type of guy. You can find them absolutely anywhere. I think medieval knights are best understood as meatheads. I think that you can

52:30see a lot of military types throughout history who fall into the category of meathead. You can find plenty of meathead women if you look hard enough in the historical record. I think an emphasis on physical prowess and being seen performing physically, that's a type of guy that shows up again and again and again. You find them in the Middle Ages. You find them in the ancient world. You can find them on Minoan wall art. You can find them bare knuckle boxing around the turn of the 20th century in the United States. You can find them pulling trucks for the world's strongest man now. I love

53:05that. I love physical culture. I love activity. I love lifting heavy things. And so for me, I just love knowing that my specific type of guy, a type of guy for which I have a great deal of fondness has always been there and perhaps always will be. That's the kind of historical thinking that I'm actually doing here. If you're ever wondering what's rattling around my brain as I'm making these episodes, yes, it is one part analytically rigorous history and the other is like, would I be friends with that guy? I don't know. Okay. And that is the note on which we'll end. Thank you so much

53:38for being here with me today. I appreciate you all. You're wonderful. And I look forward to talking with you more in the future. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to Past Lives. We're making good stuff over there. I promise you, you'll like it. We have a Patreon, which has tons of bonus content. It's only seven bucks a month. Check it out. Thanks for being here today. And I look forward to sharing the last few episodes of Tides of History with you. Talk with you soon. Bye.

54:08Tides of History From Wondery, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louie.

54:42Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Wondery, this has been Tides of History.

54:52Follow Tides of History on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free by joining Audible.