Apocalypse then: how cataclysms shaped human societies

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1:02Hi listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to episode 13 of Nature Hits the Books. In this episode, I'm joined by science journalist Lizzie Wade, whose first book, Apocalypse, How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, was published earlier this year. As its name suggests, this book looks at some of the cataclysmic events that humans around the world have faced throughout history, exploring what modern archaeology has revealed about them and the role these events have played in shaping societies. Just a few of the things we talk about in this podcast. Lizzie Wade, thank you so much for joining me.

1:44Thank you for having me. So your book then is entitled Apocalypse. And I think many folk, myself included, would think of an apocalypse as a catastrophic, cataclysmic event, an end to everything. But your book suggests that humans have experienced, have endured many of these. So how are you defining an apocalypse? I think I say in the book, it's a rapid collective loss that fundamentally transforms the society's way of life and sense of identity. And what is lost can be very literal in terms of people who die in a plague, or it can be kind of more abstract in terms of like a state that falls apart as society collapses.

2:25But for me, even more key than the loss is the transformation part. So these are the moments that societies really have to change. Like they're, in some senses, the best chance societies ever get to make really radical transformations. And that doesn't always have to be a transformation for what we would consider the better. I don't really like, you know, using the words better or worse, especially for past societies, I think it's reductive, you know, and encourages us to do the opposite of what I try to do, which is to see people as fully human, just as creative as we are, just as emotional, just as irrational, just as unpredictable.

3:01But you know, these are times when people look around and say, okay, this isn't working anymore. What are we going to do next? And I'll say it's quite a light topic to take on, Lizzie. I mean, I had a copy of my book on the table near the front door and some friends come around and went, wow, okay, that's a cheery subject. Why was this something that you wanted to write about? I started working on this book around 2018. So this was before the pandemic. I wrote most of it during the pandemic, actually. And I think part of what I was feeling about my own life and the world that I live in, we live in, was the sense of being alone in it in terms of human experience and human history.

3:40And I just wanted to know what other people in the past had done in these moments and not even what they'd done, like what they had felt. And what I realized researching the book was like these feelings that I'm having, that many of us are having, are feelings that humans have had probably the entire existence of our species. And that made me feel a lot better actually about confronting what's going next. Yeah, I think the quote that sprang to my mind as I was reading is one of those ones attributed to Mark Twain. History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. Exactly. So you've looked at a bunch of these transformative events then.

4:19Before we get into some of them, did you find there was any commonality between them, do you think? I think one commonality really was climate change. I think it's far too simplistic to say that climate change is the sole cause of a societal transformation. But I was sort of surprised how often it came up in the past. And another thing that really unites the events that I write about is a sense of community, you know, and that community really is how people have always survived these events. And those communities can be smaller or bigger. Sometimes the apocalypse makes communities bigger, sometimes it makes them smaller.

4:55But you know, everything happens together. And I think that that's lost in our post-apocalyptic narratives that we tend to tell. I think they really don't capture at all how collective and communal and creative these events are. Let's talk about some of the examples in your book then. And you do go through chronologically. More or less. One of them that kind of stood out to me, I have to say, in the UK, there's a thing called the shipping forecast, which is this wonderful radio program which is designed for ships, crews, to know what the word is like. And one of the places they talk about is dogger.

5:28Now, I have heard this word many times for a lot of my life and never knew what it was. Reading your book, I now know about the origin of what was Doggerland, which is now a submerged sandbank somewhere off the coast of the east of England. Yeah, so Doggerland existed during the last Ice Age and a little after, and was probably the size of a typical European country today, maybe a little smaller. And it sat in the kind of southern part of the North Sea, so it connected what is now England to France and then over to Germany, a little bit of Denmark. And basically the sea level rise as the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age slowly submerged it over the course of 2000 years or so, although there were moments in that process where it went really quickly and moments where it didn't go so quickly.

6:16But it does seem that lots of people live there, like there's tons of artifacts that have been dredged up by accident or now increasingly on purpose from the bottom of the North Sea. And it seems to be a really inhabitable and inhabited place. And I think for me, that really changed how I thought about apocalypses in general, actually, like this sense that once you know the end of the story, you project backwards and think, oh, well, it was always doomed. Why would anybody stay there? Why would anybody live there? Why didn't they get out at the first sign of trouble? But actually, it was that sea level rise that made Doggerland such an amazing place to live, especially if you were a hunter-gatherer, because you can really take advantage of those dynamic environments.

6:59You know how to move with the resources. You know how to take advantage of different kinds of water sources. and the sea level rise was clearly a loss as I was saying like environments were changing they weren't coming back land was shrinking over the course of decades centuries millennia but that didn't make human life there tragic or inert or full of fear and I think there is echo to that on the other side of the world in Peru where folk there knew that things were changing certainly on the coast, in this case, due to El Nino, and archaeological evidence suggests that this really did make a difference to society.

7:39Yeah. You know, we're all familiar with El Nino. Today, it happens once or twice a decade, more or less. But archaeological evidence that I go into my book basically shows that El Nino was born around 5 ,800 years ago. And the north coast of Peru, El Nino is absolutely devastating to me. This is one of the driest deserts in the world that suddenly gets torrential rain for months at a time that the environment is not really equipped to handle. And things change really quickly. There are huge landslides, flash floods, all the fish die. Like even today, it's extremely destructive. And so thinking about how people would have reacted to that change in the past, where they would have known these landscapes very deeply, and in a fundamental way would have shaped their identities and what happens when that environment turns on them and turns inside out or upside down, which I think is something that many of us today can relate to.

8:37And I think in our post-apocalyptic narratives, as I was saying, our intuition about such a dramatic change would be that it would drive people apart, people would abandon this landscape. But really what you see is people coming together in ways that they never had before. So these small communities, probably because people had to move around a lot because maybe they couldn't continue living where they had been. The communities were meeting each other. They were exploring new environments. El Nino itself was creating new environments like wetlands with like lots of mud, lots of birds, lots of fish.

9:11These could be really abundant and resource rich places, even though they were born of catastrophe. And you can sort of see people starting to come together in these places and they start to build monuments, which is like one of the ways that archaeologists kind of see societies becoming bigger. And for me, that was really intriguing that people would react by coming together instead of splitting apart. And these monuments, it has to be said, Lizzie, in some cases are absolutely enormous as well. Yeah, they're huge. You know, they would have taken centuries to build and maintain and remodel And they extended over whole landscapes.

9:45You'd build like a pyramid and then all these geoglyphs in the desert. And what were people doing there? Like, you know, it's really, really hard to get at specifics of rituals, even harder to get at people's religious beliefs in the past. But something that struck me was that, you know, this one monument, Los Morteros, which is in a valley in the north coast of Peru, is extremely old, over 5000 years old, and it's built out of the mud that El Nino would have left behind. And so I think it's certainly speculative to say that this was a monument to El Nino in some sense. Like, I don't think that I can make that claim, but I do think it was a manifestation of the way that El Nino had brought enough people together to be able to do that collective work, to be motivated to do that collective work.

10:31And, you know, to do that kind of work, you need an excess of resources that workers need to be able to eat while they're doing this. And so, you know, they're not just like hard scrabble, scraping out like a meager existence off this landscape. They're able to really imagine themselves as a new community and their world as a new place and themselves having a new place in it. And I think that that got to one of the themes of the book was that these apocalypses are not only endings of something. there are also beginnings and that what gets begun really depends on the people doing that work. And that beginning can have quite long endings.

11:09I mean, still in the UK, if I may, it's the Black Death, of course, and the fact that really this apocalypse that practically wiped out a huge amount of the population in Europe and other parts of the world too, it has to be said, kind of flipped the social structure of the UK or England, I suppose, particularly on its head. And then efforts were put in place post-apocalyptically to try and reverse that. Exactly. So there's a sense among the people who lived through the Black Death, we know in their writings, was that it was a completely indiscriminate killer, totally random, unpreventable, unpredictable.

11:40But actually, when you look at the people who died during the Black Death, especially in England, where these studies have been done, you can see that people who had already suffered kind of a lifetime of malnutrition and hardship and physiological stress, those were the people who were more likely to die. And these were mass graves. They're not buried with names or grave goods in a way that we could determine social class, but who's most likely to have suffered malnutrition throughout their life? Poor people, right? Like today, and especially in Europe at that time, which was a feudal society and really depended on extreme, extreme inequality.

12:15And so all these workers die in a way that we would understand them today, essential workers, essentially. Now there's suddenly a lot fewer are people who know how to keep this society running, like how to take care of the animals, how to plant the crops, how to harvest. And they suddenly have a lot more negotiating power. And this really freaks out the wealthy, who are, of course, the ones writing down what their experience is. And there's a lot of talk about how, yeah, the world's turned on its head. And the upper class society of England, the government, the king, parliament, all reacted with this tremendous backlash against that rising worker power.

12:55And up until I think 40 years after the Black Death had ended, like this was at least a generation after they were still passing laws trying to get people to accept the wages they had before the pandemic. And I found that to be both extremely depressing to be reading about this while we were sort of going through our own elite backlash after COVID, for example, but also just the fact that it went on for so long, really, actually, I found a lot of hope and optimism in that the after effects of these events last for a long time. And it takes a lot of work to sort of put the possibilities that are unleashed by them back into the bottle, if you ever can.

13:39And one thing that rather intrigued me as part of your book is, well, I think you mentioned it there that you were, in some cases, trying to give voices to the voiceless, these people who maybe weren't able to write things down for whatever reason. And you do quite a lot of historical fiction, Lizzie, in this book as well, which I'm sure isn't necessarily your main wheelhouse. Obviously, you're a science reporter like me. How is it to put yourself in that mindset? Something in archaeology that is a challenge in reporting it, and sometimes a fun challenge, is that archaeological timescales are quite long, right?

14:10So archaeologists tend to talk about societies on decades or centuries is kind of like all, it's all kind of the same. And even something like the classic Maya collapse, it took 300 years. But it's like, okay, well, assuming a person, an average person would live maybe 40 or 50 years at that time. What was it like during those 40 years? What was it like during that week, like that day, that hour? And that's something archaeology reaches towards, but it has a really hard time getting at. But again, getting back to like, wanting to know what people were feeling, I found that I really needed to shrink the time scales in my own imagination.

14:46And I actually started writing these more speculative vignettes from the point of view of someone living through one of these moments or a specific part of one of these moments as exercises for myself to be like, okay, what was that decade like? What was that week like? And they just turned out to be so fun, alive and really brought a lot of the historical research to life for me. And I hope for readers that I decided to put them in the book and to really make them kind of the center of the book in some ways, because I do think that we tend to see past people as very distant, unrelatable, like their actions are predetermined in some way.

15:23And I wanted to bring back that kind of unpredictability and contingency that people have always lived with. But they're not flights of fancy. These are grounded in historical records or archaeological findings, that sort of thing. I think one that kind of stood out to me was a story of someone in Egypt who left an agrarian life to move to the city and then apocalypse begins slowly and then accelerates. Yeah. So in the Egypt example, I talk about someone who pre-apocalypse had been hired or not hired, but conscripted or required to do his labor constructing the pyramids, which brought people together from all over the country and all over really the region, some less enthusiastically than others.

16:04It was basically attacks like you're a young man in this time in Egypt, you go for a season to do your pyramid labor. And I had this person coming from the north of Egypt, like the delta, the Nile River, leading into the Mediterranean Sea, which is very swampy, not so good for farming, very different than what you see in the Egyptian art, like these big wheat fields and these pyramids. But what it is really good for is raising animals, especially cows and sheep and goats and pigs. And an archaeologist named Richard Redding had done some fascinating work on looking at how these animals were being raised, where they were being eaten.

16:43So like in the Delta, they would eat a lot of pigs because pigs are hard to move around. But they raised mostly cattle. And most of those cattle were going to Giza to feed the pyramid workers and the pyramid towns, which was probably like the most meat they ever got to eat in their lives. Like they were well taken care of and well fed while they were doing this very hard physical labor. And just thinking about, okay, this person who has spent his entire life, yeah, like raising cattle, like in the economy of the pyramids, like finally getting to go to the place where all of his life's work is directed towards, what would that feel like?

17:20What would that be like? And, you know, I drew on this kind of zooarchaeological research about animals to add texture to this life that I was imagining. And I couldn't always predict what was going to be the useful scientific paper or where these lives were going to go as I was writing them, which I also found quite exciting. But yeah, I could just feel like everything I had read kind of coming together and emerging in this different form. And it was quite thrilling, actually. It's got to be tough, though. I mean, I've covered many archaeology stories, and I know that next week a single tooth or a single fleck of something could completely upend what archaeologists or anthropologists think happened at a particular time.

18:04Oh yeah. Was that in your mind when you were pulling this stuff together at all, do you think? Definitely. And actually, ironically, in something like the Neanderthal chapter, which is the oldest history in the book, is just like constantly, constantly getting repitten by, you know, incredible discoveries. And kind of my approach was like, as opposed to what I'm doing when I'm reporting a story for science or another outlet where you want the newest discovery, the new idea, the new. I kind of looked for things in the book that had stood the test of time a little bit. They had enough evidence behind them that one single tooth was not going to change the story next week.

18:43Although that does happen and will, I'm sure, happen for almost every story in this book. So this is a moment in time in archaeology for sure. So read it quickly then today, get it done. Yeah, read it now. And how has modern archaeological techniques transformed researchers' understanding of events like these? I mean, what do you think this book would have looked like if you tried to write it 20 years ago? I think the tools of archaeology, like genetics, I think isotopes are another really exciting one where you can sort of see where people are from, where they've moved to over the course of their life, how their diet has changed.

19:20All of that information is just staggering. And genetics too, it's like, you don't have to be reliant on the people who left, well, first of all, writing, but whether that's cultures that have writing that's been deciphered or writing at all, as we would understand it, or the classes of people who tend to leave written records, especially in the past, were, you know, the upper classes, beyond upper class, it's like the ruling class. It's incredible wealth of information, but it's also very focused on what a certain segment of the population thought was important and wanted to communicate really to each other, you know, not even to people outside of themselves.

19:57And I think these new techniques have come along and fed into a new philosophy in archaeology, which is really about like, what was this event like for normal people? You know, Because also, beyond writing, if you have a royal tomb that's been sealed for centuries with magnificent art and offerings and even food sometimes, those things are very well preserved. They're designed to be preserved. And so techniques for getting information out of material that really is not treasure in any sense of the word as archaeology used to focus on and its origins. I think it's really expanded the field's ability to conceive of kind of looking at events as it ripples through a whole society.

20:42And archaeology can get at that diversity much more than it could a few decades ago. And the first part of the book really contains a lot of environmental related stories. We've talked about a few and their impact on societies. But then you shift to look more globally, I think, at stories that have a colonial aspect. And I wanted to focus on one in particular, namely the fate of the Aztec civilization, and particularly the city which is very dear to your heart, which ultimately became Mexico cities. We know it today, which is where you are based. And how the apocalypse that you described that happened during the Aztec civilization has really, again, stretched out through history affecting people living today.

21:26So this was, in some sense, the inspiration for the book, living in Mexico City and feeling history so close to the surface, and especially this colonial history, which really, you know, of course, wasn't that long ago, only 500 years, that this horrible thing could have happened in Mexico City, and in some sense, be the beginning of the city that I just completely fell in love with the instant I came here, basically, and have now lived here for 15 years. And I also think that colonialism, it's sort of been metabolized by a lot of American and European society as tragic, but inevitable, and kind of the path towards this progress that we're kind of now at the pinnacle of and have nowhere to go but down.

22:07And I think that that's just such a simplistic, and, you know, honestly, completely wrong understanding of what actually happened on the ground. And again, trying to get to people's lived experience day by day, week by week, year by year. It's just so much more textured. I mean, it's not any less tragic. It's in some senses more tragic seeing everyone in this story, Aztec emperor, Aztec commoner, Spanish conquistador, Spanish king, Spanish farmer. They all have different roles to play in this story. And I think the indigenous piece of this story has been totally flattened for us. And at the worst, these are kind of like barbaric civilizations that were destined to be taken down by these righteous conquerors, which is a less common belief today, but was certainly extremely dominant up until a few decades ago, especially in the case of the Aztecs.

22:59And I wonder then if you could sketch out what this apocalypse looked like for the folk living there at the time. Well, there was many years of negotiation and uneasy coexistence culminating in a very devastating war. And Mexico City was basically razed to the ground or Tenochtitlan as it was at the time. And for me, a really important factor to understand was that Tenochtitlan was built on a lake. So the center of it was an island in the middle of the lake. And there were a lot of artificial islands with farmland. The Aztecs had really learned to live with water and built their city to accommodate it and take advantage of it.

23:39There wasn't entirely an easy coexistence, but it was pretty successful for several centuries. And, you know, speaking of the environmental stories in the book, you know, before I think in terms of Egypt, something like a drought happens, the Nile floods go down at kind of a politically weak moment for the central government and things kind of start to break apart. And it sort of happens in reverse in Mexico City, like this totally human driven decision of war and colonialism happens. And that is the thing that changes the environment. And those after effects of that environmental destruction are really what is leading to our apocalypses today, like both kind of the philosophy, like endless resource extraction, and also like very specifically in Mexico City, like we're still suffering.

24:29There's not enough water to drink, but we have these horrible floods because now there's no lake to like absorb the rainy season water. The ground that the city is built on is literally a pile of mud. So that's what makes earthquakes so bad. You can trace all these present catastrophes that seem like natural disasters to this colonial moment and these really oppressive and horrible colonial decisions. In your book, you look at a lot of these events through the lens of accumulated knowledge, be it written or be it newly discovered pieces of tools or whatever it may be. But of course, the latter chapters of your book really look at us as humans now and the events that we have seen.

25:09Of course, COVID-19, which you've alluded to a few times there, fits in with your themes. There were triumphs almost, I suppose, in terms of things like vaccines, but also countless tragedies for people as well. So were there any echoes from the things that you wrote about that you're seeing now in terms of how society is adapting or has responded? As what we talked about with the Black Death in terms of this backlash into trying to forget the pandemic ever happened and just force people back into not knowing things that we all now know is a theme that certainly happened with Black Death. I've wondered if that's something specific to pandemics because of their speed and the way they kind of come out of nowhere.

25:51And so part of what was actually encouraging to me about kind of trying to take an archaeological perspective on the pandemic as I was living through it, which is, of course, impossible. Neither of us will live long enough to ever have that kind of perspective on the COVID pandemic. But I think trying to think about it in kind of an archaeological timescale really made me feel like, okay, this story is so far from being over. It's going to reverberate for decades and generations in ways that we really can't predict. And, you know, climate change is obviously another form of apocalypse that is intersecting with COVID-19.

26:26And I thought a lot about like, will archaeologists see these as two different apocalypses? Will they kind of see them as one apocalypse? Like trying to take a very long view on the events we're living through was a really interesting exercise. And actually, I mean, it made me feel like my story was small in the grand sweep of human history, as of course it is. But it also made me feel like, okay, this is all still being written. And we have a lot of agency over where we go next. It seems trite, but yes, the adaptability of homo sapiens really shines through that regardless of what gets thrown at us or what we throw at ourselves, that we can dust ourselves off and off we go again kind of thing.

27:05Yeah, and I think we can always change. It might be too late to prevent certain kinds of apocalypses or certain outcomes, especially in climate change. We know a certain extent of that is already baked in, but it's never too late to rethink how we're living in the world, rethink who we want to be in our communities as ancestors, thinking about the future. Seeing ourselves as one link in this chain of human creativity and survival and resilience, you know, made me feel a lot less alone in what we're facing now and made me feel like the decisions I make about my life and how I participate in my community during this, these transformations that we're living through, they really do matter.

27:43And that made me think about the future really differently. Well, let's leave it there. Lizzie Wade, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This was delightful.

27:54Lizzie Wade there. Her book, Apocalypse, How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, is out now. And that's it for episode 13 of Nature Hits the Books. If you have any feedback on the show, why not ping us an email to podcast at nature.com with the subject Nature Hits the Books. Otherwise, look out for the next episode soon. The music used in this episode is called Cloud Jumping by SPD via Getty Images and Triple Scoop Music. I'm Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening.

28:42My name is Peridot. I'm a transparent green gemstone. I was discovered by chance in the center of Patagonia. While most stones are born in the Earth's crust, my origin is rather different. I am extraterrestrial. Listen now to Voice of Jewels, a podcast by Le Col School of Jewelry Arts, supported by Van Cleef and Arpels.

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