Lost Worlds Audiobook Chapter: "The World As It Was"

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible ad. Hi, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. As always, I am Patrick Wyman. Thank you so much for being here with me today. So I've got something special and different for you here. It is Chapter 1 of my new book, Lost Worlds, How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World, which comes out May 5th.

I recorded the audiobook in February at one of the coolest recording studios in the world, The Village in Los Angeles, and I think this is some of the best audio work that I have ever done. I am so excited to share it with you all. Chapter 1 is entitled The World As It Was, and it's all about the waning days of the Ice Age across the planet. What the world was like, the various bands of foragers who inhabited it, and where their various paths would lead over the coming millennia.

We'll talk a little bit more about the Clovis culture, but we will also go to Europe and the Near East to meet other people who survived in this incredibly harsh time. Pre-orders are absolutely the most important factor driving the success of a book launch, so if you like this sample chapter, I would be eternally grateful if you bought the book before or right at launch. That is the biggest thing anybody can do to help. I'm really proud of this book that I wrote.

I think it's the best thing I've ever done in all of my years of writing and research, and I am so proud to share it with you all. So, I hope you enjoy Chapter 1 of Lost Worlds, The World As It Was. The World As It Was Sign up now on the app or at grubhub.com slash plus slash gold. Don't miss it. Being a serious business owner takes hard work, patience, and a drive to keep moving forward. So, it's important to find a serious business card that goes the extra mile.

With the VentureX Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with big purchasing power, you can spend more and earn more. This is your sign to take your business to the next level. The Capital One VentureX Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. Chapter 1. The World As It Was Montana, 12,900 years ago. The wind blew down out of the mountains, swaying the stalks of grass that covered the rolling valleys.

Stark white against a deep blue sky, the sawtoothed peaks jutted upward in the distance, the snow and ice at the higher elevations looming over the creek bottoms and smaller hillsides. The freezing edge of the gusts served as a reminder that the lethal cold was never far away. Sheltered by an overhanging ledge on the edge of a low bluff, a small band, no more than two dozen people, assembled around the freshly dug grave. Their clothing, neatly stitched hides still covered in the coarse hair of a mammoth, mastodon, camel, or bison, kept out the worst of the elements. It had to.

Otherwise, the group would have frozen long ago. Far more than the lions, saber-toothed cats, and wolves that stalked the vast expanses of North America, winter was their greatest foe. Winter and the cruel randomness of fate. The child, a little more than a year old, had seemed healthy until shortly before he died. His mother's tears fell freely, staining the soil of the pit as she lowered her motionless bundle into its final resting place. She laid a hand on his forehead. Maybe, just maybe, they had been wrong. For a moment, she had held on to a shred of hope, but her son was cold and lifeless.

With the same hand, she wiped her tears away, stood, and stepped back from the grave. An older woman took her place next to the infant. She squatted down, her knees cracking, and removed a handful of red powder from a leather pouch. She scattered the powder over the child, one handful and then another, until he was covered in a thick layer of reddish pigment. A helping hand pulled her to her feet, and an elderly man took her place.

One by one, flexing a right arm stiff and arthritic from decades of spear-throwing, he deposited pieces of stone, sprinkling them with red ochre before placing another layer of stone on top. When he was done, the other men and women in their band did the same, placing their own stone tools in the grave. The tools varied in size and form. Some were large and only slightly worked, with a few flakes struck off to make a single sharp cutting edge, while others had been carefully shaped by hundreds of small movements into beautiful blades and small projectile points.

By the time they were finished, dozens of tools formed a tightly packed stack next to the infant, all of them blanketed in that same reddish pigment. The child had everything he would need on his next journey, wherever that might take him. His mother and her people had beliefs about these things, ideas that had accompanied them on the long trek that had brought them to this place. It was a beautiful spot, nestled in these valleys among the ridges and mountains, backed by a sandstone cliff and flanked by a burbling creek.

The band had come this way a few times before, one occasional stop on their endless peregrination following the game on which they relied for food. A few miles every several days, dozens every month, and hundreds every year. That was the rhythm of their life. Now they were moving on again, walking down the hillside toward the rushing water, hefting their spear throwers in packs full of half-finished tools and dried meat. A few carried portable shelters, cured hides that could be lashed over a wooden frame. They rarely stayed more than a few days in a single place.

Only in the winter, when the cold battered them, would they settle down in a hospitable spot to wait out the snow. The herds were their life. Their meat, skin, and bones were all essential. A single mammoth would feed the whole band for weeks, a few bison for just as long. But their prey did not stay in one place. Seeking grass, water, and safety from predators, the mammoths, mastodons, camels, and bison wandered. So too did the band. They were never sure where their path might take them. One of the group had spotted bison tracks leading southwest, toward the big river nearby, just a few days old.

They would follow. The band could not afford to wait, not even for a mother's grief. Following that herd, their travels would take them far away from this place. Perhaps this would be the last time the mother was so close to her child. But perhaps they would pass this way again in the future. Maybe, tracking a mammoth or a herd of camels, they might once again follow the creek to the rock shelter. She would stop and offer a few words to her dear little one, who had once been so full of life.

He would never learn to hurl one of those distinctive, razor-sharp stone projectile points at a mammoth, or how to skin a camel, or the intricate technique for napping their gorgeous, double-faced stone blades. He would never see the great snow-capped peaks of the mountains to the south and north of here far higher than these local peaks as the band trudged up and down the passes. His journey had reached its end long before its proper time. The infant's people, however, were taking their first steps on a path that eventually led throughout the Americas.

Within just a few centuries, their wanderings would take them south across the Great Plains, east toward the Atlantic Ocean, and south again through Mesoamerica into the northern reaches of the Amazon. As they did so, the world changed around them. The mammoths and mastodons disappeared. The climate grew warmer and the world more welcoming for larger numbers of people, but only if they adapted. Some of these descendants stopped moving altogether, settling down in a single place to exploit rich sources of game, shellfish, or plants. In this changing world, succeeding generations survived, flourished, and spread out for many thousands of years.

The Clovis people, as this group is known, were just one of the many societies of foragers populating the planet during the icy days at the end of the Pleistocene. Some pursued the last of the ancient megafauna to the point of extinction. Others specialized in hunting reindeer across the icy, treeless tundra of northern Europe, or gathering wild grasses in the warm and welcoming hills of the Fertile Crescent. All of them would have to adapt to survive or die as the world changed around them. The baby's remains and the dozens of artifacts accompanying him survived the collapse of the overhanging sandstone ledge.

They would stay there for the next 13,000 years under conditions so favorable to preservation that the tiny bones retained traces of the baby's DNA until local Montana residents discovered them entirely by accident in the 1960s. When analyzed with a variety of statistical tests and models, researchers were able to place the infant in the context of both his people's past and their future. This tiny, unfortunate child, who died before he could experience a full life, nevertheless unlocked the secrets of his group's long journey through his genes.

Anzic One, as the infant is known, belonged to a group known as the Clovis People, so named for the small New Mexico town where their distinctive artifacts were first excavated and recognized. His are the only set of human remains ever found that can be associated with these widespread stone artifacts. These tools are especially well-known for two reasons. First, for their beautiful and characteristic projectile points, known as Clovis points, which are often found in association with the bones of now-extinct animals. And second, because thanks to Anzic One's DNA, we now know precisely how the Clovis People were related to later indigenous Americans.

They were directly ancestral to every other later group of indigenous people living everywhere from Canada to Chile. A great many discussions of the Clovis People focus on whether they were or were not the first humans to inhabit the Americas. The vast majority of scholars now believe others had preceded them, among them those who left their footprints at a dried-up lake bed in New Mexico's White Sands National Park as much as 23,000 years ago. Others reached the site of Monteverde in distant southern Chile several thousand years before the Anzic One burial.

Perhaps they came down the western coastline of the Americas, following a highway of underwater kelp forests from British Columbia to Chile and occasionally exploring inland via the abundant rivers. Human feces found at Paisley Caves in Oregon have been dated to several centuries before the earliest Clovis occupation. Yet the focus on who came first is a red herring. The pre-Clovis evidence scattered across the Americas is currently impossible to assemble into a coherent narrative of life in the distant past.

We have no idea what the relationships of the groups that left traces at White Sands or Paisley Caves to the later indigenous peoples of the Americas might have been. Perhaps they died out completely. There were many failed attempts at human colonization across the planet in the Upper Paleolithic that we can now see thanks to ancient DNA, such as the sequential, basically unrelated groups that populated Europe during this period. Alternatively, these earliest inhabitants of the Americas might have been absorbed into later arriving groups that then disappeared. We simply do not know, and perhaps we never will.

By contrast, we do know a great deal about the Clovis people. They spread out through the interior of North America, went south into Mesoamerica, and entered the northern reaches of South America with incredible speed, covering thousands of miles in just a few centuries. Their toolkits were distinctive and ingenious, perfectly suited to the target-rich environment in which they found themselves. We know, thanks to ANZIC-1's preserved genetic material, that the vast majority of the ancestry of later indigenous Americans derived from the small initial group of which ANZIC-1 was a part.

In the centuries before they hunted mammoth, camel, and bison in the vast expanses of late Pleistocene North America, ANZIC-1's ancestors had lived a long distance to the north, on the other side of the vast ice sheets that still covered most of what is today Canada. Many thousands of years before, they migrated across the now inundated floor of the Bering Sea. This is commonly called the Bering Land Bridge, the corridor connecting what are now Siberia and Alaska, but this is a misnomer. At its greatest extent, the geographic center of this lost world was 500 miles away from the nearest coast.

A better name for this region is Beringia, which was less a temporary causeway connecting two continents than a distinct, long-lasting, biogeographical region stretching from Siberia to the Yukon. Even during the frigid days of the last glacial maximum, Beringia had been a reasonably pleasant place to live. Cold and dry, yes, but home to herds of grazing animals like mammoth, saiga, and muskox that fed on the lush grass. Along the coast, where the northern Pacific was surprisingly warm, fish and shellfish abounded. Beringia provided a variety of welcoming environments for its inhabitants, including ANZIC-1's direct ancestors.

Rather than serving as a temporary road between continents, Beringia was instead a viable home for the groups ancestral to indigenous Americans, ANZIC-1's forebears included, for a period of time before they moved further south. Precisely how long this period lasted is unclear. Genetic evidence points toward a long period of separation between the ancestors of later indigenous Americans and other groups in East Asia, but that does not imply that the whole period of separation was spent in Beringia.

In fact, given Beringia's size, it's likely that there were multiple groups residing there who were quite different from one another, even if they were all ultimately descended from the same source population that had traveled through northeast Asia toward the Arctic. This is what geneticists call population structure, and the ancient Beringians' long period of isolation directly shaped the future genetic portrait of indigenous Americans. It's difficult to tell precisely how all of this happened. Whether the period of residence in Beringia was short or long, how much population structure and diversity there was, or even where in Beringia these people resided.

What happened after this standstill, however, is clearer. Following the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago, some of these groups, almost certainly more than one, began to move southward. The timing of these movements is hard to pinpoint, so was the question of whether there were already people living in the Americas when they began their journey. Two paths could have brought people south from Beringia, past the still-present ice sheets, and into the open landscapes of the Americas. The first was the coastal route, which would have involved short jumps from one viable spot to the next along the coasts of Alaska and British Colombia.

Given the watercraft technology available in other places around the northern rim of the Pacific at the time, this would have been perfectly feasible. People living in Japan were exploiting coastal resources extensively, presumably using hide-covered boats or dugout canoes. From the west coast, the profusion of major rivers leading inland, the Fraser, Colombia, and Sacramento foremost among them, could have quickly granted entry to the continent's interior. If there were indeed people who moved south prior to Anzac-1's Clovis culture, they likely took the coastal route. The other potential route, via the interior of the continent, did not become viable until shortly before Anzac-1 was buried in Montana.

It was simply impossible to traverse the mile-thick ice sheets covering most of what is now Canada. Around 15,000 years ago, however, the glaciers began to melt more quickly. A gap appeared at the seam between the Cordilleran ice sheet to the west and the Laurentide ice sheet to the east, a thousand-mile-long corridor stretching from Alaska to Alberta. Within a few centuries, first plants and then animals colonized the formerly desolate stretch. People, including the direct ancestors of the Clovis folk, could simply have walked south into their new land.

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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. The site of Swan Point in present-day Alaska's Tonana Valley is the oldest absolutely unequivocal archaeological evidence of human occupation in the Americas. It's presumably not a coincidence that this site, with evidence of hearths, mammoth tusk, and stone tools that speak to connections to Siberian groups, sit quite near what would have been the opening of this ice-free corridor. The earliest layer of occupation at Swan Point around 14,500 years ago took place at roughly the time the corridor began to open.

As mammoths, bison, and other prey began to explore the ice-free corridor, people followed the animals, eventually arriving in what is now southern Alberta and Montana. The ice-free corridor and coastal routes are not mutually exclusive. It's even possible that a group of migrants who had arrived via the coast explored the ice-free corridor in a northward direction, eventually linking up with people living in eastern Beringia as they came south. The genetic data suggests at least three different southward migrations at various points in time.

One group, which we know of through DNA extracted from the remains of two infants found at the Upward Sun river site in Alaska, stayed behind in Beringia. Geneticists call them the ancient Beringians, and these people continued to interact with other groups living farther to the east in present-day Siberia. Another group split off from the ancient Beringians around this time, but they didn't head south for several thousand years afterward. Two others did leave immediately, and it's plausible that their distinct genetic signatures, closely related to one another in the recent past but separate sense, represent different migratory routes. They came into contact again only much later.

One of those groups included the ancestors of Anzic 1 and his close relatives. Every piece of evidence we have about Anzic 1's forebears, from the distribution of their stone tools over the landscape to their genes, suggests that these early southward migrants moved with extreme speed. The initial group may have been quite small, just a few dozen people, but they found a world that suited them perfectly. The open grasslands of the Great Plains, far more extensive than they are now, extending south from Canada to northern Mexico and east toward the Atlantic.

Prey animals were plentiful, and not just any prey, but large grazers, the last of the Pleistocene megafauna. Even as the giant-sized animals that had once been common across the planet disappeared elsewhere, the mammoths, mastodons, bison, horses, camels, and the predators that stalked them still abounded in the Americas. Megafauna occupy a special place at the pinnacle of human food sources. Hunting them is dangerous and difficult. Nobody wants to be gored by a bison, trampled by an elephant, or drowned by a hippopotamus, but the potential payoff is worth the risk. The larger the animal, the more meat it carries.

The more meat, the more energy it provides to those who are able to kill and eat it. On top of that, the animal's bones are an essential component for toolmaking, while hides can be turned into clothing, shelter, and containers. A Colombian mammoth weighed 22,000 pounds. The average male white-tailed deer today weighs around 150 pounds. Observations of hunter-gatherers in more recent periods suggest that if they are available nearby, people usually choose to hunt larger animals whenever possible. The rate of return on energy expended is simply much higher.

As they entered the interior of North America and encountered the megafauna, who presumably had little or no experience dealing with human predation, ANZIC-1's ancestors found themselves in a series of ecological zones that offered great promise. Lots of prey, little reason to fear intergroup conflict or competition for resources, and a warming climate. If they were to fully take advantage of the possibilities, however, they would need the right sets of tools, skills, and practices. We can understand that combination of characteristics and capabilities as a cultural package, a repository of knowledge about effective ways of using what we see around us.

A group might encounter a river teeming with fish, but if that group has no tradition of making fishing spears or nets and no generational tradition of fishing, then they will not automatically benefit from that rich resource base. Grasses have a great deal of potential as a food source, but not without sickles for cutting the stalks and grindstones for processing the seeds. A single whale might feed dozens of people for weeks, but without specialized watercraft and weaponry, live whales are off the menu. Megafauna might be the highest-ranked prey given the return on energy expenditure. People might pursue them preferentially if they're available.

Actually subsisting by hunting them, however, was not a given. Imagine trying to hunt an elephant with a fishing spear or a stone-bladed sickle. The success of the Clovis people in building a way of life based around megafauna predation was not foreordained. Instead, they developed a specific technological and cultural package that proved to be wildly successful in the conditions they encountered around 13,000 years ago. Far from being throwbacks to a timeless Paleolithic, the last representatives of an ancient predilection for hunting the biggest possible game, the Clovis people seem to have built an entirely new and exceptionally viable way of life.

They found mammoths, bison, camels, horses, elk, mastodons, and other megafauna in abundance. But they had to make the right weapons to hunt them and the right tools to butcher them, then build their migration patterns around finding that prey at the right times of the year. Perhaps the earlier inhabitants of the Americas, the people who left enigmatic footprints at white sands, simply did not hit upon that same fortuitous combination of technology and circumstance. We don't know exactly when or where this package emerged. Theories abound in Beringia, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, on the Great Plains, or the American Southwest, perhaps in the Southeast.

But hard, conclusive evidence is sorely lacking. Earlier radiocarbon dates seem to appear in the southern Great Plains more than elsewhere, but there simply aren't many dates from which to work, and the archaeological record is far from complete. Wherever it first appeared, the precise location is less important than the fact that a group of people living somewhere south of the ice sheets eventually created the characteristic piece of Clovis technology. The fluted biface, a large, beautifully shaped stone projectile point with a distinctive groove, or fluting, running down the middle. This is the Clovis point, the razor-sharp stone signature of Anzik I and his people.

Once you've seen one, the Clovis point is instantly recognizable. A lanceolate, like a sharpened teardrop, shape, flaked on both sides with impeccable skill, wider in the middle than at the base, and tapering to a fine point over its considerable length. A flute or groove runs down the middle, an extremely difficult feat for any stone napper to accomplish without breaking the nearly finished point. A brand-new Clovis point, made of extremely high-quality flint or obsidian, would be somewhere around four inches in length, and even larger examples are occasionally found.

As it acquired chips and brakes over the course of its use, the point would be repeatedly resharpened and reduced in size until it broke completely or became too small to be useful. When affixed to a shaft and hurled with the aid of an atlatl or spear-thrower, like the plastic contraption one might use to throw a tennis ball for a particularly energetic dog, the Clovis point was a fearsome weapon. A group of experienced hunters could hurl them with tremendous force one after the other in the direction of their prey.

A lone mastodon caught against a rock wall, for example, or a herd of bison trapped in a gully. The unfortunate animals would be peppered with razor-sharp projectiles thrown with enough velocity to punch through even the tough hide of a mammoth or the layers of fat protecting the internal organs of a giant short-faced bear. Recent experimental tests of Clovis points penetrated between five and nine inches of flesh equivalent on average, more than sufficient to reach the vitals of large megafauna.

The Naco mammoth, a slain animal found in the sleepy locale of Naco, Arizona, had no fewer than eight Clovis points embedded in its flesh at the time of death. The distinctive and technically demanding fluting, the grooves running along both faces of the projectile point, served as short-faced shock absorbers to prevent breakage and allow for reuse of the valuable tool. The Clovis point was a brilliant technological adaptation that helped to produce a wildly successful way of life. Armed with projectiles of this design, the Clovis people were well-equipped to hunt the megafauna that wandered the grasslands of North America.

The points themselves, with their shock-absorbing design and reusability, were perfectly suited to highly mobile groups that might travel hundreds of miles in pursuit of their prey. Clovis points were not the only item in the Clovis toolkit. Projectile points were not especially useful for anything other than hunting and killing large prey. For butchering carcasses, Clovis people needed sharp flakes to serve as cutting edges. To prepare hides, they needed scrapers. Cylindrical, beveled bone rods may have served as foreshafts for projectile points or, alternatively, as specialized tools for flaking the points. All of these are less recognizable, diagnostic in archaeological terms, than the distinctive Clovis points.

This toolkit, so far as we can tell, was intended to service a highly mobile lifestyle predicated on hunting large game. Large, durable, reusable projectile points were an exceptional asset for that kind of lifestyle. That wasn't necessarily the only activity in which the Clovis people engaged. No forager would turn down a patch of berries or bird's eggs, for example, or refrain from snacking on ready-to-eat nuts. But anything more than occasionally grabbing these alternative food sources, so unlike their usual diet, would require a much different toolkit. There is no evidence that Clovis people had a toolkit suitable for anything other than big game hunting.

Unlike later technological and cultural traditions in the Americas and worldwide, which tend to be restricted to specific regions, Clovis points are found over an exceptionally wide geographic area. From the Pacific Northwest to the Ice-Free Corridor in Canada, all the way to present-day Alaska, throughout the eastern United States from northern Florida to Maine, to the Midwest, across the Great Plains in American Southwest, and down into northern Mexico. Fluted projectile points related to, but slightly different than those of the Clovis tradition, occur as far south as Venezuela. They probably evolved from the older originals of the kind we see at the Anzac I burial.

Even more striking than the geographic range is the limited chronological window. Every known date for a Clovis site falls within a quite limited period, just 300 years, from about 13,050 to 12,750 years ago. Clovis technology appeared, spread over an enormous area, and then fell out of use in the relative blink of an eye. Clovis points didn't have a life of their own. People sourced the appropriate raw material, napped them into existence, carried them from place to place, used them, and finally cached, discarded, or lost them. Those people presumably did so because Clovis points were useful and appropriate for their needs across vast geographic spaces.

But shared technological packages, like making Clovis points, can only be sustained over time if their uses remain constant and different groups using that technology remain in contact with one another. Otherwise, people tend to adapt their toolkits and develop new styles and technologies. Cultures drift over time and space even if they share a common origin. The distribution and eventual evolution of Clovis points into successor forms speaks to a classic case of common origin, rapid dispersal, and then divergence in the subsequent centuries and millennia as environments and available resources changed. Something about that time, around 13,000 years ago, was special.

Clovis technology was one of three roughly contemporary technological complexes that spread widely over the Americas at that point. Western stemmed points in the western United States, Clovis points throughout North America and beyond, and fishtail points in South America. Wherever their forebears had been, Beringia, living in plain sight south of the ice sheets or on now inundated shorelines, and whatever they had been doing before then, all of these tools and their users exploded in distribution and presumably numbers. Who these people were is still ambiguous, particularly the makers of the western stemmed and fishtail points.

Thanks to their broad geographic distribution and decades of interest, the Clovis people are somewhat less mysterious, but much about their toolkits' geographic origins and even basic facets of their movement across the landscape and way of life remain hazy and indistinct. We know very little about the campsites they chose, how far they traveled in the course of a year, the clothing they wore, and, because of the total lack of adult skeletal remains, even the precise composition of their diet. We know they hunted megafauna and that they excelled at it, but were the giant beasts their main source of food or an occasional snack?

All of that is unclear. Stones, bones, and genomes already tell us things we couldn't know before, but huge gaps remain, waiting for new evidence and techniques of analysis to fill in the unknown. Their impact on the world they found south of the ice is no less uncertain. Most of the megafauna soon disappeared, never to return. That much is obvious. Of the diverse groups of large grazers that had wandered the grassy plains and arid expanses of North America and Mesoamerica, only the hardy bison thrived in the coming millennia.

With far less available grassland on which to graze, even these iconic bovines shrank to their current size, which is considerably smaller than that of their Ice Age predecessors, bison and Tychus. The mammoths, mastodons, camels, and horses died out, as did a way of life predicated on hunting them over vast distances. If the Clovis people had indeed been big game hunters par excellence, as their toolkit and the regular appearance of megafauna kill sites suggests, they didn't hold that status for very long. The world was changing.

The descendants of Anzic One's relatives, his cousins, and more distant relations wouldn't spend their lives trapping 10-ton mammoths against rock walls and pelting them with spears or corralling herds of American horses in a gully. Why? Were the Clovis people and the other contemporary groups spreading out through the Americas responsible for the demise of the megafauna? Or was another culprit, namely the rapidly shifting climate, to blame? I'm Raza Jaffrey and in the new season of The Spy Who, we tell the story of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran.

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You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran early and at free on Audible. 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 on 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 audiobook every month plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at £5.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating. The world was warming.

The climate of the last ice age and the last glacial maximum had produced a specific kind of environment known as the Mammoth Steppe, a colder and drier but amazingly productive version of the savannah grasslands populated by elephants, zebra, wildebeests, and Cape Buffalo in Africa. The Mammoth Steppe had been the world's most common biome, stretching across Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific and across Beringia. Similar grasslands covered much of North America south of the ice sheets. In South America, large portions of Amazonia were more savannah than tropical forest.

The recently discovered rock art at La Serenilla La Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon, eight miles of it stretching along a series of cliffs and ledges, seems to date from only a few centuries after Anzik I died. This art depicts in intricate and realistic fashion a variety of extinct megafauna, including mastodons, camelids, horses, giant sloths, and three-toed ungulates, all of them far more at home in savannas and grasslands than the jungle that now occupies the region. Soon after painting these striking images, the grasslands and the animals that once lived in them disappeared, never to return. We have no idea what happened to the painters.

Worldwide, driven by the warmer and wetter climate, these grasslands were disappearing. Some, like Beringia in the vast plains of Sundaland in Southeast Asia, sank under the waves as sea levels rose. Others were replaced by a series of forests, less hospitable than open mammoth steppe or savannas to large grazers. The climatic shock of the Younger Dryas, a 1,200-year period of rapid but globally variable cooling and climatic instability between 12,900 and 11,700 years ago, further disrupted the environments in which these creatures lived. Shrinking habitats and the disappearance of customary food sources surely played a role in the demise of the megafauna.

Only the most adaptable creatures could weather climatic shocks of this rapidity and magnitude. If their numbers were already reduced, their chances of doing so were slim. A change in climate wasn't the only factor, particularly in the Americas. Clovis points appeared suddenly across North America, extending south into the northern reaches of South America, between 13,050 and 12,750 years ago. Within mere centuries of their first appearance, the megafauna had died out. It is extremely difficult to avoid the conclusion that a way of life seemingly oriented around big-game hunting played a role in the demise of these large creatures.

Hunter-gatherers and the more recent ethnographic record are not perfect custodians of their plant and animal resources. They do think about the future, but the needs of the moment tend to outweigh those hypothetical concerns. If you and your children are hungry and a mammoth is within striking distance, present-day parallels suggest that foragers would choose to kill the mammoth rather than keep it alive out of concern for extinction. As a result, overkill and overuse are always a possibility.

If the megafauna were already on their way out, their numbers drastically lessened by the loss of their habitats and a warming climate, humans may still have dealt the final blow. Whether it was because of their overkill, the shifting environment, or some combination, the Clovis people were among the last groups for whom this was a viable way of life. Neanderthals had hunted mammoth, along with woolly rhinoceros and the other large mammals of Eurasia, for 200,000 years. The massive creatures appear as subjects of cave art over a period spanning tens of thousands of years.

At the peak of the last glacial maximum, Homo sapiens had killed or scavenged enough of the giant proboscideans to build enormous structures from their bones at places like Kostanky in Russia. Yet both Homo sapiens and our archaic relatives had always enjoyed more varied diets than that carnivorous stereotype. Berries, nuts, small game, and even grasses were all welcome food sources when they were available. They're simply much harder to see in the archaeological record than the obviously butchered remains of large game, particularly the further back we go in time.

But now that so many of the Pleistocene megafauna were permanently off the menu, lifeways would have to change as well. The ancestors of Anzik I's group had faced choices like this, and their descendants would face them as well. Do you move increasingly long distances to follow familiar prey, or stay put in a familiar place, adapting your lifestyle to what is now available in your preferred territory? Both options carried serious risks. Perhaps no prey and no viable resources would be available in your new home, and you and your group would simply die or fail to have enough children to produce future generations.

Perhaps you would fail to adapt to altered conditions in your current area, and again, your group would come to an end in the present or near future. Spread out over a massive geographic space, constantly on the move, and vulnerable to shortcomings in the food supply, it wouldn't have been surprising if the Clovis people, like groups before and after them, had simply disappeared from the archaeological record. Yet the Clovis people, and perhaps those other groups already present in or making their way south to the Americas, seem to have hit upon one of the true sweet spots in human history.

Abundant megafaunal prey and little competition that enabled massive and rapid population expansion, but favorable enough climatic conditions and resources that their descendants could thrive once their initial prey had been exhausted. We know this thanks to little Anzic One, dead these past 12,900 years, who still has more to tell us about his people and their future. The analysis of his DNA found that the group to which he belonged, the Clovis people, was directly related to present-day indigenous Americans. Whether or not others had come to the Americas before them, the genes of Anzic One's relatives survived in millions of descendants scattered everywhere from Patagonia to Alaska.

As they spread out, following their prey across North America and then south into Mesoamerica, across the Isthmus of Panama, and into South America, they established themselves for millennia to come. Subsequent groups of indigenous Americans were directly descended from the Clovis people and derived the great bulk of their ancestry from Anzic One's relations. But the story is more complicated than one of straightforward continuity over so many thousands of years.

The infant buried in Montana was actually more closely related to later groups living in Central and South America than he was to later people living in North America, even those in the precise vicinity of his burial place. The descendants of his family, the people who placed him under the sandstone ledge, migrated far to the south. The later residents of Montana came from different stock, and nobody would have suspected that Anzic One's closest relatives could be found not on the Great Plains, but in the jungles of Mesoamerica and the mountains of the Andes.

In later centuries and millennia, other groups of people with slightly different ancestries came to live in the present-day United States and Canada. The Inuit are relatively recent arrivals in the Arctic, newcomers who arrived in the past thousand or so years. The Athabascan languages, which are widespread throughout the continental United States, Canada, and Alaska, are distantly related to the Yanisian languages of Central Siberia. A faint but discernible genetic signal accompanies this long-past additional migration from Asia to North America.

Yet another piece of recently discovered genetic evidence points to contact between groups living in Polynesia and the Americas prior to the settlement of Easter Island, probably within the past thousand years. Time did not stand still once the Clovis people arrived. Populations grew, shrank, moved, flourished, mixed with one another, and sometimes disappeared entirely. Anzac One's successors, those people closely related to him and his group, found almost unimaginable success in their variety of new homes. Even as the climate changed, grasslands turned into boreal and tropical forest and sea levels rose, they put down roots and left their mark on two continents.

The Americas were only one theater of human activity. The world was full of other groups struggling to find their place in a changing world. They faced similar challenges and decisions. To stay or seek out new homes and opportunities. To turn their backs on centuries or millennia of tradition in search of a new way of life or retain their practices and hope that better times might come. Northern Germany 12,000 years ago One day in late autumn around 12,000 years ago a group of hunters gathered near the shoreline of a long narrow lake.

They had spent months preparing for this moment napping hundreds of razor sharp projectile points from flint and shaping others from bone and antler carving long pieces of wood probably elm into lethal bows and shorter pieces of pine into the shafts of arrows and choosing their site for this ambush. Now they waited for the opportunity that defined their year. The herd of reindeer was approaching traveling through the narrow confines of the valley and skirting the edges of the lake. When the moment came the hunters would rise from cover perhaps hidden in a copse of trees or even purpose-built blinds and carefully sight down their bows.

They aimed at the vulnerable area behind the animal's shoulder blades where a good shot would slice through fur, hide, and flesh to cut an artery or embed itself in the heart or lungs. The desperate reindeer tried to escape but trapped against the shoreline there was nowhere to go. The hunters had them. Hundreds of arrows whistled through the air some smacking into flesh and others slapping into the surface of the water. Animal after animal fell. Dozens of them. Some were young juveniles some elderly cows other mature bulls all of them taken indiscriminately in the frenzy of the hunting drive.

Then as the slaughter died down the real work began. It required every member of the hunters community. Some retrieved the valuable arrowheads and shafts the products of many hours of work leaving only those that were too broken for reuse or that were invisible in the muddy waters of the lake's edge. Others butchered the carcasses for meat, hides, sinew, antler, and bone. They were selective about what they took utilizing only the best cuts of meat and the most useful parts of the reindeer. With so many carcasses lying near the lake scavengers lurking nearby and decomposition soon to set in they had to move quickly.

There was no time to waste on the toughest and stringiest meat the minuscule amounts of marrow and thin bones or the underdeveloped antlers of juvenile animals. They simply had to hope that there would be enough meat to see them through the long dark and cold winters of northern Europe. The hunters reaped a bonanza by the shore of that lake. Excavators working at what is now known as the Stelmore site found more than 18,000 fragments of bone hundreds of flint tools and more than a hundred arrow shafts all of which speak to the scale of the efforts and success of these ancient people.

Far from being an isolated event the slaughter at the Stelmore site was entirely representative of their usual practices. These hunters were experts at their craft heirs of traditions of meticulous preparation and execution that stretched back millennia into the past. Homo sapiens had hunted reindeer across the icy windswept wide open grasslands of northern Europe for tens of thousands of years. These people were simply the newest of them. Yet their lifestyle would soon pass from this tunnel valley in northern Germany. Within a few centuries the warming climate drove the reindeer herds north to what is now Scandinavia.

Forests began to replace the open grassland and different animals made their homes amid the trees feeding on a changed array of plant foods. There was no place left for the reindeer hunters. But as with the Clovis people it would be a mistake to assume that the hunters at the Stelmore site representatives of an archaeological tradition known as the Ehrensberg culture were timeless examples of a past and dying age. The bitterly cold landscape of northern Europe in which they lived had only come into being in the past millennium thanks to a sudden climatic downturn.

Beginning around 12,900 years ago the younger dryest snapped the general warming trend that had prevailed since the last glacial maximum. The Ehrensberg culture's environment had more in common with the depths of the last ice age than that of their immediate predecessors in the region. The Hamburgian culture whose people lived near Stelmore just a couple of thousand years before the slaughter at the lakeshore had also hunted reindeer but they used spears rather than bows and arrows and they took individual animals rather than whole herds during their annual migration.

In a warmer and more wooded environment they had not engaged in mass kills of reindeer since the opportunity to do so simply did not exist. Herds didn't move en masse easily tracked and anticipated through dense forests. And neither the Hamburgian nor the Ehrensbergian were directly descended in either a genetic or a cultural sense from the upper Paleolithic foragers who had painted masterworks on the walls of European caves 20,000 years before some of whom had likewise hunted reindeer. Following the last glacial maximum the ancestors of the Ehrensberg people expanded northward from small refuges in southern Europe as the ice moved north. They were relative newcomers.

The perpetual advances and retreats of the glaciers had changed the climate and landscape, made different parts of the continent more or less habitable, altered the distribution of plants and animals, and brought different groups of people in and out of existence. The fact that some of those groups, not all of them, hunted reindeer for subsistence did not make them all alike. Change was the only constant. The reindeer hunters of the Ehrensberg culture could not have known that they would be the last to live this way.

The Younger Dryas cold snap during which these people thrived was the last time the reindeer herds would range so far south. The glaciers retreated one last time, and forest replaced the icy tundra. The reindeer followed the ice north toward the Arctic, and rather than trying to make their way in unfamiliar surroundings, the descendants of the Ehrensberg culture seemed to have followed their customary prey. Unlike the Clovis people, who left millions of descendants, the Ehrensberg culture had no such legacy. Even their very surroundings disappeared. The mammoth steppe, once so widespread, shrank and shrank until only a few tiny patches remained in what is now Siberia.

The reindeer hunters who slaughtered the herds so efficiently at the Stelmore site were forced to adapt or face extinction. So, too, were Anzic I's mammoth stalking Clovis relatives. They placed beautiful fluted points, so perfectly designed for hunting megafauna in his grave. These fell out of use within only a few centuries, replaced by more appropriate tools. The razor-sharp flakes accompanying the infant in death, some still bearing traces of the proteins of extinct camels that they had been used to butcher, were put to use on deer and smaller game instead.

Anzic I's way of life, albeit cut so tragically short, was not a microcosm of an eternal, never-changing past of big-game hunting and free-wandering around an empty landscape. Instead, it was a product of a brief and contingent set of circumstances that existed for only a few centuries. The mass killing of reindeer in the Ahrensburg Valley, rather than a throwback to a scene that belonged in a millennia-old cave painting, was a recent innovation made possible by the newly-developed technology of the bow and arrow, and the pressures of a rapidly changing climate. The world was changing, and people changed with it.

Follow 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. You've been listening to Tides of History and Audible Original. The show is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. Sound engineered by Sergio Enriquez. Produced by Morgan Jaffe. The executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lower-Beckman. The head of creative development at Audible is Kate Naven. The head of Audible Originals North America is Marshall Louis. The chief content officer is Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Thanks again for listening.

Until next time, from Audible Originals, this has been Tides of History.