(This is an old introductory scene from a Tides of History episode - Season 5, Episode 13, “The Roots of Archaic Greece.” These scenes are fun as a kind of sociological storytelling, an attempt to humanize a major trend or summarize a moment from a human perspective. In this case, it’s the massive demographic growth in 8th-century BC Greece, the beginning of the Archaic period. Hope you all like it.)
Her breath came in gasps as she made her way up the path that wound its way up the hillside. She paused, took a swig of water from her skin, and put her hand on an outcropping of gray-white limestone. It was still cool, not yet warmed by the sun rising over the hills to the east. Before moving on, she reached down into the leather bag she carried slung over her shoulder. Her hand closed around the clay figurines, just to be sure they were still there. The other went, reflexively, to her swollen abdomen, and on cue, she felt the baby kick.
Slowly, her breath coming back, the woman continued her climb. Not much further now to the top, she thought, her hand still resting on her stomach. The baby kicked again. Not much further till that, either, she thought, and she should know. This was her sixth pregnancy, and each time, she had delivered a healthy, living child without complications.
That made her a rarity, and she knew precisely how lucky she was. Too many of the girls she’d known in her childhood, and women she’d known down in the cluster of villages, hadn’t survived. She had seen it herself: the pain, the blood, the fevers afterward, a gauntlet of trials and risks that had claimed so many lives. There was a tree on this hilltop that her mother had told her was sacred to the goddess Artemis, and before each birth, the woman had trekked upward to make her offering. It had worked thus far, just as it had worked for her mother, who waited down in their home with her children.
There was the tree, a tall cypress, and a flat stone underneath it, covered with offerings. She took the clay figurines, one of Artemis and the other of Zeus and Hera’s daughter Eileithyia, who watched over women in childbirth, out of her leather bag. Placing them carefully on the stone, she whispered her request: to keep her and her baby safe during childbirth, and if it wasn’t too much to ask, to see them safely through the months and years afterward as well.
The task done, she turned and walked back down the hill, pausing every once in a while to catch her breath and sip from the waterskin. The sounds and smells of the villages, growing closer to one another every year, wafted up toward her: fragrant smoke from the kilns, the tinkling of shattered pottery, mooing and baaing from the animals, laughter and shouts from the villagers. She should tell her eldest daughter, herself only a few years from marriage and childbirth, about the tree - just in case she didn’t make it through this time.
There are two people I think about from time to time. Thanks to the machinations of history, we only know one of their names: Nanaya-ila’i. That wasn’t the name she had been given, and probably wasn’t the name she preferred, but one that was foisted upon her later in life. We have no idea what the second woman, Nanaya-ila’i’s daughter, was called, either by her mother or by the slavers who ripped the two from their place of birth in the territory of Elam and took them to captivity in Assyria. The two women lived and died more than 2,600 years ago in the fading days of the Assyrian Empire, collateral damage in a campaign that saw the utter destruction of Elam, located in today’s southwestern Iran. Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were torn from their homes and marched hundreds of miles to a life of slavery in the city of Aššur, the spiritual heart and namesake of the Assyrian Empire. We only know of their existence, and Nanaya-ila’i’s name, because the two appear in a cuneiform document recording their sale to a merchant some time between 646 and 620 BC. This man, Mannu-kī-Aššūr, paid the price of one mina of silver, about 500 grams for the adult woman and her daughter.1
This is the only time Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter appear in the historical record. We have no idea what happened to them, but it’s likely that they remained in the city of Aššur until its sack at the hands of the invading Medes, part of a coalition of enemies that eventually toppled the mighty Assyrian Empire. If that was the case, then Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter experienced not one but two brutal campaigns of mass violence in their lives. The first had seen them captured and enslaved in a foreign land, with no hope of ever seeing their home in Elam again; the second involved the brutal sack of the city in which they had lived for decades, with all the horror - massacres, mass sexual violence, and destruction - that went along with it. If they survived, then the two women were almost certain to have been enslaved again, perhaps to be sold east, to Media, or south, to Babylonia.
Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were just two of the thousands upon thousands of victims of the Assyrian Empire, most of whose names have been lost over the centuries. The Assyrian Empire was just one of the many aggressive polities that has produced victims by the thousands over the past several millennia: The Romans did no better in Gaul or Dacia. Alexander the Great razed Thebes on his way to far more expansive conquests. The crusaders who took Jerusalem in 1099 waded ankle-deep in blood, Timur Lenk left behind towers of skulls marking his conquests. Pizarro slaughtered the Inca by the score. The Nazis left behind millions of corpses. As long as grasping rulers and would-be warlords have sought to expand their power, common people have suffered the consequences, just like Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter.
But those ambitious politicians and conquerors didn’t do the dirty work themselves. They had underlings, generals and officers and common soldiers and bureaucrats, to enforce their will. Those underlings participated in acts that, by any reasonable standard of moral behavior, range from the merely distasteful to completely abhorrent. It would be comforting to think that those who murdered children, burned houses with the residents inside, committed acts of sexual violence, and enslaved the survivors were uniquely evil. It would be easier to believe that these participants had somehow forfeited their humanity somewhere along their path to organized violence. We would prefer to fool ourselves into thinking they formed a special class of malefactors separate from the farmers and shopkeepers and laborers who made up their societies as a whole. These ideas would be wrong. The agents of empire and conquest were not a marked group of sadists; they fit quite comfortably within the mainstream of the societies that produced them and benefited from their actions.
There are exceptions, of course, in varying degrees. Soldiers serving at the sharp end of campaigns of conquest might be drawn from specific ethnic or social groups outside the mainstream, such as Ottoman Janissaries or the semi-barbarian professionals of the later Roman Empire. They might have become habituated to violence through long periods of service, thinking little of heinous acts that would shock and horrify civilians. But by and large, those soldiers - even if they were disproportionately likely to perform military service - were drawn from the normal strata of their societies. The Romans who destroyed Carthage in 146 BC were citizen-soldiers, even if that often meant many years of experience in the later years of the Middle Republic. Themercenaries who sacked Rome in 1527 and committed a variety of atrocities, ranging from the rape of nuns and murder of civilians to the desecration of holy relics, had gone unpaid for years; for many of them, war was their chosen profession, but far more saw it as an occasional side-business for a season or two between monotonous stints in workshops or fields.
The group of ten men who profited from the sale of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter in the city of Aššur were entirely ordinary. That group included a baker, a weaver, a cook, a shepherd, an ironsmith, and a goldsmith, some of whom worked for a local temple. The most likely explanation for how they came into the possession of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter is that these ten men formed a kisru, or “knot,” the standard unit in which Assyrians performed their required services to the king. These ten ordinary men were thus part-time soldiers, called up for the campaign to Elam, and Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were their payment for their service on that campaign. When they got back to Aššur, the ten-man kisru couldn’t easily divide up two captives, so they sold her and split the profits: about 50 grams of silver per man, which they then took back to their homes, families, and occupations as iron- and goldsmiths, bakers, and cooks. The two Elamite women were enslaved, and the ten Assyrian men benefited directly from their participation in that campaign.
Did the weaver and cook talk about it, we might wonder? Did they tell their wives and children about what they had seen during the vicious sack of the Elamite capital of Susa, the fire and the ransacked royal tombs and desecrated temples that the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal bragged about in his account of these events, the wanton killing and sexual assault, the enslaved who died on the march back to Aššur? Were they proud of what they’d done, did they feel shame, or did they even think about those events? Did they seem like the actions of other people in other lives, unconnected to the workaday existence of an ironmonger and a baker going about their lives in the spiritual home of the Assyrian Empire?
We simply don’t know the answers to those questions, and we never will. The source material that would allow us to formulate an answer doesn’t exist. The members of that Assyrian kisru who profited from the sale of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter left behind no narratives of their inner lives and thoughts that might allow us to construct a ground-up view of Assyrian imperialism: no journals, no inscriptions, nothing of that sort. They appeared in the historical record for that one fleeting moment, just as Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter did, but as the beneficiaries rather than the victims of an organized campaign of conquest and terror. The 50 grams of silver each received would have gone toward food, shelter, a set of fine pottery, investment in a trading enterprise, better tools for the ironworker or goldsmith, or perhaps even the purchase of another enslaved person. They materially benefited from the suffering of the Elamites in general and Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter in particular. Why should the members of that kisru, or the thousands of other Assyrians who participated in the campaign, have felt bad about it? Why should their wives and children and dependents? That was how the world worked. Within decades, of course, the same fate would be visited upon them by the Medes.
The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who led the expedition to Elam, certainly didn’t feel bad about it; he celebrated his accomplishments, the deeds his soldiers carried out on his behalf. Here’s how he describes his actions: “I had the sanctuaries of the land Elam utterly destroyed and I counted its gods and its goddesses as ghosts… I destroyed and devastated the tombs of their earlier and later kings… I took their bones to Assyria. I prevented their ghosts from sleeping and deprived them of funerary-offerings and libations… On a march of one month and twenty-five days, I devastated the districts of the land Elam and scattered salt and cress over them.”
Ashurbanipal in his garden, with the head of the Elamite king on the left side.
The image above depicts Ashurbanipal relaxing in his garden while being attended to by a coterie of servants. The decapitated head of the Elamite king hangs from a tree on the left side of the image. Ashurbanipal didn’t cut that head off himself; other people, men no different than the goldsmith and weaver and cook, did the deed at his command. Perhaps they felt they had no choice. Perhaps they felt disgusted and had nightmares about it for the rest of their days. Perhaps they celebrated their participation, and told the story to rapt audiences in taverns and wine-shops: It wasn’t every day one got to decapitate a king, after all.
Assyrian kings were particularly vociferous about the gory details of their conquests, but they differed from other conquerors of that age and others only in their commitment to recording flayings, decapitations, and salting the earth. Their Neo-Babylonian successors, who famously destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC and thus began the Babylonian Exile, were if anything worse; they just bragged about it less. The list of conquerors goes on and on: Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Umayyads, Mongols, all the way up to the empires of the recent past. While we may know the names of the rulers who so desperately wanted to be remembered, we shouldn’t forget about the people on the business end of those conquests, those who held the swords and the torches. We shouldn’t let them off the hook, just as we shouldn’t forget their victims, people like Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter, whose names so rarely enter the historical record.
It’s only in much more recent times that we have access to the detailed workings of a campaign of mass violence, including the thoughts and actions of those who participated directly. The best documented and most thoroughly explored is, of course, the Holocaust. In my opinion, the most illuminating book on the topic is the historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution. Browning’s research focuses on a unit of reservists, Police Battalion 101, who were drawn from the utterly average population of the city of Hamburg.
Hamburg was considered to be, if not anti-Nazi, then at least not particularly Nazi-fied. They weren’t dedicated Nazis, and only about 25 percent even belonged to the Nazi Party. They weren’t heavily indoctrinated shock troops. They weren’t recruited from a particularly violent and antisocial segment of German society. These were utterly ordinary men, dock-workers and truck drivers and waiters, hence the title of the book. Most were middle-aged family men, fathers and husbands, drawn from the working and lower middle classes. Few of the formation sent to Poland in 1942 had served in the earlier stages of the war, and only the very oldest reservists had fought in World War I.
But what these men did during their time in Poland was extraordinary in its scale and brutality. Over the course of less than a year, in the second half of 1942 and the first half of 1943, the several hundred members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shot and killed 38,000 Jews. Many of those killings happened as mass executions with hundreds or thousands of victims; others took place as patrols swept the countryside for individuals or small groups. Using rifles, submachine guns, and pistols at point-blank range, they murdered men, women, and children, tossing them into hastily dug pits or leaving the bodies in the open. They walked away covered in the blood and viscera of their victims and went back to their barracks. Then, a few days or weeks later, they did it again.
Ordinary men with a few of their victims.
Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the battalion refused to participate in these killings, despite a complete lack of formal consequences for those who wouldn’t shoot. This means that 80 to 90 percent of these entirely ordinary men became mass murderers without explicit coercion over the course of just a few months. Some relished their role in the killings, and volunteered for any opportunity to do more, but they were a minority compared to the willing but not especially enthusiastic participants. Most simply followed their orders, even when those orders meant murdering defenseless people of all ages. Browning’s thesis, in a nutshell, is this: “Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time. The grass-roots perpetrators became “professional killers.”2
Historians have spent a great deal of time arguing about Ordinary Men and whether this holds true for the entire Holocaust. One forceful and oft-repeated counterargument states that the German populace as a whole was so steeped in a particular kind of virulent anti-Semitism that these men were ready and waiting to become mass murderers of Jews.3 As soon as they had their orders, that deep-rooted hatred kicked in, and the killings happened. Without denying the rampant anti-Semitism of the age, it doesn’t satisfactorily explain the leap to mass murder. Browning has engaged with that line of argument in great detail, as have the generation of historians to come afterward. I find his perspective - one focused on social pressure - much more convincing than the alternative, that Germans of the 1940s were uniquely qualified to become perpetrators of genocide.
Why? Because of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter, and the ten-man kisru that profited from their sale in the city of Aššur more than 2600 years ago. These perfectly ordinary perpetrators can be found all over history, from Aššur to post-war Hamburg, where the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 returned to their perfectly ordinary lives. They seamlessly re-integrated back into society, at least until they were thoroughly investigated for war crimes 20 years later. None became pariahs, just as the Assyrian baker and goldsmith did not become social outcasts. The Romans who destroyed Carthage in 146 BC went back to their farms after their years on campaign. Some of the people who committed mass murder in the Killing Fields in Cambodia are still smoking cigarettes outside Phnom Penh bars. The landsknechts and other mercenaries who sacked Rome in 1527 returned to their workshops and fields. Ordinary people did horrific things, and then went right back to being ordinary people, whatever nightmares they might have seen when they closed their eyes at night.
The destruction of Elam was not the Holocaust, just as the Rwandan Genocide wasn’t the Holocaust or the Cambodian Genocide. The destruction of Elam wasn’t the Rwandan Genocide. The destruction of Elam wasn’t even the Assyrian destruction of Israel a century or so beforehand. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the anti-Huguenot pogrom that killed between 5,000 and 20,000 people in France in 1572, differed meaningfully from the many anti-Jewish pogroms in the later Russian Empire. The Holocaust wasn’t the same as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide, the mass murder of indigenous people in what is now Namibia by the German Empire between 1904 and 1907, despite the fact that both were carried out by German authorities just a generation apart.
Each of those incidents and campaigns of mass violence stands on its own. Their logic was different. They proceeded in different ways, with death tolls ranging from the dozens to the millions. Some were straightforward land grabs in which killing was incidental. Others were ideologically motivated campaigns of murder for which the groundwork had been laid for decades or centuries. Still others were the result of sudden explosions of ethnic or religious hatred against a background of oppression or conflict. But what ties them together, aside from the mass violence, is the fact that utterly ordinary people participated in all of them. It doesn’t take all that much for a baker from Aššur or a truck-driver from Hamburg to turn into a willing enslaver and killer, even a mass murderer who pulled a lethal trigger hundreds of times, under the right circumstances. If those in positions of authority tell them that it’s acceptable or even admirable, if they’re given the tools and the opportunity to do so, then even the most average people can commit horrifying acts.
We would all like to believe that when faced with the choice, as the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were before their first mass killing, we would at the very least refuse to participate. In the more flattering version, we would throw down our weapons, give a rousing speech about how wrong it all is, convince our weaker-willed comrades to do the same, and prevent this great tragedy from happening. We know that mass murder is wrong, that it’s wrong to drag somebody hundreds of miles away from home into slavery, to burn down their homes and do all the other horrible things that accompany war; how could anybody just go along with it, let alone embrace it?
The deeply uncomfortable answer is that the vast majority of us are just as ordinary as the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101. We’re not as different from the ten-man kisru that went to Elam and returned home with a pair of enslaved women to sell as we would like to believe. Americans of the 20th century, victors against those same Nazis - as close to canonical Good Guys as recent history might produce - still committed horrific war crimes.4 The 21st century, with all its aspirations toward and lofty rhetoric about peace and fairness and the rules-based international order, is still populated by people. Being able to recite a line from one of Martin Luther King’s speeches, or quote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, isn’t a vaccine against wanton cruelty. Social pressure, cultural norms, groupthink, whatever we might want to call it: we’re all susceptible, far more so than the comforting narratives we tell ourselves about free will, human rights, and the respect for our fellow people.
War, and even more mundane forms of ongoing conflict, can far too easily make monsters of us all. Once the horrors begin, they suck in even those who consider themselves good, solid, moral people. Under the right circumstances, we might all do terrible things.
On Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter, see Betina Feist, “An Elamite Deportee,” in Homeland and Exile, Brill, 2010. 59-69; and the relevant section of Karen Radner, Assyria: A Very Short Introduction. which has a wonderful discussion of the case.
Studs Terkel’s oral history of World War II, The Good War, is full of anecdotes from American participants about terrible things they did, and wished they hadn’t in the context of a conflict they felt was fully justified.
For reasons that aren’t altogether difficult to figure out for anyone who experienced this last brutal summer, climate change is a major topic of discussion at the moment. 2023 is now officially the hottest year on record, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The question of whether we can limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the internationally agreed target to prevent catastrophic climate change, is up in the air. It’s not looking good: The UN’s Climate Change Conference, COP28, is nearing its end after two weeks of negotiations and firm pushback from OPEC on the issue of phasing out fossil fuels. As hot as this past year has been, it might be the coolest year we experience moving forward, or at least on the cooler side of normal if we look ahead to the next half century.
Climate change isn’t an issue unique to the 21st century. The climate is constantly in flux, on every time scale from years to millennia, every geographic scale from the local to the global. Changes in the amount of sunlight reaching the planet, ocean currents, and atmospheric circulation and precipitation alter the entire Earth: In the past 20,000 years, for example, the Sahara Desert has been an arid region even larger than its current extent, then a green expanse of lakes and savannahs, and now an expanding desert once again. Sea levels rise and fall and rise. Biomes spanning whole continents, such as the Mammoth Steppe (or steppe-tundra) that characterized much of the planet during the last Ice Age, can and do disappear. On the other end of the temporal and geographic scale, volcanic eruptions can destroy a locality or blot out the sun across a hemisphere for a year or two. A single hurricane can ravage a coastline, or warmer and wetter temperatures might render a whole sea far less welcoming to people.
Mammoth steppe: almost nonexistent now, once the most common biome across Eurasia and North America.
We also know that people have been altering their environments for as long as the archaeological record provides us with the right kind of evidence to see it, such as the traces of charcoal left over from burning vegetation. People cut down forests for fuel and building materials. They replace native vegetation with domesticated species. Hunting and habitat destruction drive wild animals to extinction. Intensive agriculture drains the soil of nutrients, and the voluminous waste produced by dense settlements renders whole areas uninhabitable. Like natural processes of climate change, human environmental alteration takes place on a variety of different time scales: immediate, as when we clear-cut a forest; medium-term, as the silting of a river thanks to upstream deforestation resulting in erosion; and long-term, for example, by fundamentally altering the plant and animal species present in an area. Thanks to fossil fuels and the explosion of human populations over the past couple of centuries, our ability to change the whole planet’s climate - anthropogenic climate change - has increased many times over; but the basic idea, that we humans are living in an unstable world that we can and do alter in profound ways, remains much the same.
For what it’s worth, one recent paper argues that the real turning point in our ability to change the planet arrived not with the Industrial Revolution but with the global spread of farming in the Neolithic. By introducing whole suites of domesticated plants and animals, the “Neolithic Multispecies Resettlement Camps” in the words of the anthropologist James Scott, we dramatically increased our scale and impact on the environment. Even a single Neolithic village could profoundly change the local area around it; creating a whole landscape of Neolithic villages altered those environments on a massive scale.
Although these two things - human alteration of our environments and “natural” processes of climate change - might seem to be quite different, they’re united by the fact that we still have to deal with them. The cause of those changes, anthropogenic or natural, isn’t as important as the necessity of figuring out how to respond to them. Human societies deal with both through the same mechanisms, and we’ve been dealing with them for our entire existence.
On one hand, this line of long-term thinking can lead to complacency. If people have been dealing with a changing climate since the very beginning, and we’ve been changing our environments for much if not all of that time, then why bother worrying about it? We’ll get by as we always have before. On the other hand, this reasoning can also lead to a species of doomerism. We’ve changed our environments before, but never on this scale, a scale that can only lead to our destruction of Earth as a habitable planet. Either we get out, becoming multi-planetary, or we’re going down with the ship.
Those are the extreme ends of the spectrum, with a huge variety of viewpoints and possibilities in between. But no matter where one might fall on that spectrum, from apathy to panic, supporting massive intervention to change the trajectory or advocating a completely hands-off approach, it’s worth thinking about how millions of years of our ancestors have dealt with changing climates. Whether we see them as models to emulate or cautionary tales to avoid - and we can find plenty of examples of both in the archaeological and historical records - we ought to see what they have to teach us.
With that in mind, here are a few guiding principles - gleaned from my reading through scholarship covering the past several hundred thousand years of human-environment interactions - that we can usefully apply to thinking about the present.
Humans aren’t simply prisoners of their environments.
People aren’t leaves on the wind, buffeted by environmental forces beyond their comprehension, prisoners of forces we can neither understand nor control. Our species is supremely adaptable - in fact, that’s our most outstanding trait - and we’re smart enough, and resilient enough, to deal with changes as they come up. When short-term or localized changes render an area unusable, we move away to areas that are usable. When long-term changes render a whole way of life (subsistence, patterns of settlement, etc.) unviable, we change that way of life to something that better fits the climatic context. When our habitats are unstable over the short and medium term, we build that instability into our way of life, making it flexible enough to deal with things like extreme El Nino events or rapid shifts in sea level.
It’s never a matter of, well, the climate’s changing, so we’re screwed; instead, we have choices. There was a strong tendency in what I call the first wave of climate scholarship (both historical and archaeological) to look for changes in the past climate record, and to directly correlate those changes with downturns in human societies. If the climate was going bad, the reasoning went, getting colder and drier, then people were obviously going to be in trouble. If you see a volcanic eruption in the climate record in Iceland, then you’re going to see a famine that year or the next in the annals of a northern European abbey. If you’ve got a long drought at the same time as the abandonment of cities, then the drought caused the collapse of that urban society. As it turns out, however, the relationship between changing climate and the fate of human societies doesn’t match lines on a graph. It’s not straightforwardly causal, with shifts in climate causing the downfall of a dynasty or the end of an urban civilization. Causality is a much more complicated thing to figure out.
I’ll focus on one particular example. There was a major aridification event across much of Eurasia and North Africa around 2200 BC, known as the 4.2ka event. Right around that time, Egypt’s Old Kingdom - the age of the pyramid-building pharaohs - came to an end. So did the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the fruits of Sargon of Akkad and his descendants. The documentary and archaeological record tell us that this was an unstable time across that whole region. People abandoned long-occupied settlements, went on the move, and adopted new lifestyles (more pastoralism, e.g.) in response to these shifts. Established political orders struggled to adapt, and many simply failed.
Yet in South Asia, by contrast, the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) weathered these climatic shifts just fine, surviving several centuries more before the eventual abandonment of its cities. So far as we know, the climate in South Asia suffered no less than nearby Mesopotamia, but the IVC did not fall apart. The 4.2ka event may have led to more rainfall, not less, in the Alps of Europe. A series of sophisticated late Neolithic societies collapsed in China around that time, the events ranging in time from 2300 BC to 1800 BC, but can we lump all of those processes together into a single climatic event? Even when we zoom in more closely on affected areas, such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, some localities and regions seem to manage just fine without major changes, while others suffered.
The Indus Valley Civilization weathered the 4.2ka event just fine.
Clearly, whatever was happening with a major, well-documented climatic event was more complicated than “when climates change, societies fall apart.” There was a correlation, but the climatic shift interfaced with existing ways of life, modes of thought, and every other process that was happening at the time. That applies across the historical and archaeological record.
Ideas, institutions, and politics shape our responses to climate change.
This follows from the first point. Our options for dealing with changing climates are not endless. The choices we make are conditioned by our understanding of what’s possible and desirable; the mechanisms we have for enacting change; the contingencies of the particular moment, such as who’s in charge and whether or not they’re competent; and how we even understand what’s happening, to name just a few of the almost infinite list of possibilities.
Here’s a thought experiment. You live in a fertile river valley with regular rains and mild floods that replenish the soil and water your crops. That’s been the case for as long as anyone can remember. But then the rains don’t come for two years in a row, and the floods stop, too. Your crops fail, then fail again the following year. You might turn to fishing - after all, there’s a river right there - but how successful are you going to be at fishing if you don’t have an established tradition of catching fish or the technological toolkit to do it well? What if you define your society by farming, by the ownership of particular plots of land and your relationship to the forces of fertility and nature? What if you’re ruled by a clique of shaman-chiefs whose legitimacy derives from their claim to produce good harvests? That climatic shift, the two years of missed harvests, would be far more damaging to the farming society than to a nearby group of foragers who could simply move, or focus their activities on a different food source. One year, they might eat a lot of nuts; in another, hunt a lot of deer; in another, fish the river, gather berries, or go to the coast and look for shellfish.
In this scenario, that hypothetical group of foragers would be more resilient to climatic change than that hypothetical farming society. Rather than being tied to the land and to a limited group of domesticated crops, they could range more broadly and exploit a wider range of resources. Institutionally, their structures of leadership would not be bound up with the harvest, thus rendering decision-making easier and less fraught with conflict in a crisis. In other circumstances, perhaps the farming society would be more resilient, with communal stores of grain and a larger population to weather the band times and absorb losses due to famine and disease. Resilience is a major theme in climate studies, and it can come from a variety of different sources, ranging from methods of subsistence to political institutions to religious beliefs that accommodate and explain natural disasters.
Simply put, it’s hard to predict precisely how a given society will deal with either a short-term environmental disaster or a long-term shift in the climate. Societies that seem remarkably stable and long-lived might fall apart with a feather-light touch of rising sea levels or drought. Simple folk living at the edge of subsistence might starve. Alternatively, sophisticated and stable societies might have the resilience to ride out those initial waves of disaster, collapsing centuries later without an obvious connection to that past climatic event. Simple folk might have the flexibility to alter their way of life and even thrive under the new conditions.
People can be winners, losers, or something in between, but they’re always affected.
Not everybody is going to lose when climatic conditions shift and human environments are destroyed. Hunter-gatherers suffer when their prey animals - mammoths, for example - are driven to extinction, but that creates openings for pastoralists to utilize the landscape for herds of domesticated animals. Pastoralists relying on domesticates suffer when aridification reduces to desert the marginal pasture-land on which they rely, but the lack of grazing animals might allow for large-scale mineral exploration. Rising sea levels might drown coastal plains, but they can also create new wetland environments full of exploitable resources.
Large grazers, such as elephants, suffer disproportionately when people hunt them (because their gestation periods are so tortuously long) and destroy their habitats; but smaller ones, such as deer and boar, thrive in the mosaic environments of intermixed grassland and forest that human intervention tends to create. Societies built on hunting those large grazers would fail, while those oriented around hunting deer and boar would thrive. That’s essentially the story of the transition from the late Pleistocene to the early Holocene, for example, around 12,000 years ago. The same principles apply more broadly. One region might suffer disastrous consequences over the long term because of changes in precipitation and temperature, becoming uninhabitable for its residents. Those same shifts in precipitation and temperature can make another region, the beneficiary of warmer conditions and increased rainfall, dramatically more welcoming and viable.
We can see this clearly in the archaeological record: Patterns of habitation in the landscape vary from era to era, and shifts in local environmental conditions play a significant role in where people decide to live. A region that’s densely populated in one era - the aforementioned Indus Valley of South Asia around 2000 BC, for example - might be nearly deserted 1,000 years later. Conversely, a much less populated area - the Ganges Plain around 2000 BC - might be much thicker with human settlement 1,000 years later.
One region’s, or society’s, or group’s, loss can be another’s gain. Precisely who wins and loses is a function of geography and the patterns of climate change, of course, but it’s also about who the ability to exploit changing circumstances. Ability might mean flexibility in subsistence modes and resilience thanks to kinship networks that distribute help from one family to another. It might also mean having the weapons and the military infrastructure to simply take a more appealing area from its current inhabitants. Even if far more people end up worse off thanks to a climatic shift or environmental destruction - populations drop by half or two thirds and the overall level of social complexity and technological acumen falls - there might still be winners in that scenario: a small group that finds a new ecological niche and expands in numbers, or a new elite that exploits the chaos to establish themselves as rulers.
Should you feel better or worse about climate change and environmental alteration?
I can’t answer that for you. Maybe I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, or can’t figure out on your own. On the whole, thinking about this issue over the very long term makes me feel more optimistic about the overall survival of humanity as a species. We might kill off 95 percent of us over the course of a couple of centuries of terrible climatic upheaval, and while that would very obviously be a bad thing in any number of ways, we wouldn’t be extinct. That’s a breed of optimism, I suppose, if you stare at it hard enough. At the same time, however, I feel far more pessimistic about the survival of a postmodern, post-industrial way of life, our specific mode of civilization, patterns of urbanism, and everything that goes along with it. Whether we make conscious choices to adapt an unsustainable way of doing things to something more sustainable, or we’re forced to do so by a series of localized disasters and global processes, the historical and archaeological records suggest that we’ll have to make major alterations as conditions change.
That, I suppose, is the major takeaway here: We have some agency - not all the agency, but some - to decide how bad it gets, who suffers and who benefits, whether those changes are preemptive or a reaction to an ongoing catastrophe. The most vulnerable people don’t have to lose everything so that others maintain or improve their standard of living. Life will go on one way or another, because human life goes on no matter what’s happening around us, but it can be better or worse depending on what we collectively decide to do.
Hello, friends. It’s been a while since I’ve been writing regularly on this Substack: a couple of years, in fact, for a variety of better and worse reasons. It’s mostly that I’ve been busy. I published my first book, The Verge; I sold a second book, which I’m working on right now, entitled Lost Worlds: The Rise and Fall of Human Societies from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age, that I’ll be finishing in 2024 for Harper Collins; and I made 12 episodes of an interview show about Dad Culture, The Pursuit of Dadliness, which was an enormous amount of fun to put together. I’ve still been producing regular episodes of my main show, Tides of History. Tides is now in its fifth season, covering the Iron Age across Eurasia, everything from the rise of the Assyrian Empire and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the origins of Rome and the dawn of history in China. All of that has left me without a lot of time for this Substack.
Shang Dynasty chariot burial, China, 1300-1050 BC. This is where my head has been for part of the past couple years.
That’s been alright, though, because I haven’t felt like I’ve had all that much to say, and particularly not about ongoing events. Sure, I could fire off some Takes and make half-assed historical comparisons between the past and present. If I were willing to talk about topics with which I’m not familiar, but could pretend to be, then the opportunities would be effectively endless. Those Takes might even have gotten some attention and readership. But I don’t think there’s a lot of value in that for either you, the readers, or for myself, personally or professionally. I’m not a Takesman (shout-out to Charles Barkley and Stephen A. Smith, the best to ever do it), I’m not a blogger, and I’m not a cable-news pundit. Other people can do that stuff if they want to; it’s not my business to judge their professional choices or the incentives that make them viable. I’m a historian, I guess, and an observer of what’s happening in the world, and if I’m going sit down to write a thing then it’s going to be worth my and your time.
So, with my explanation-cum-self-righteous screed out of the way, here’s what I’m planning on doing with this Substack over the next weeks and months.
Occasional lengthy essays. The first will be on how to think about the long-term relationship between people and their environments - how climate changes over time, how people adapt to changing conditions, how we ourselves change our environments, and what we can learn from this constant of human existence. I also went through a big phase of reading about insurgencies throughout history last year, and I might share some of what I learned about that in another essay.
Historical People. I’ll pick a person, from anywhere or anyplace in the past couple of hundred thousand years, and try to locate them in their place and time on the basis of the available evidence: textual, archaeological, whatever, let’s just try to get to know a person who lived a long time ago. They were more like us than we can imagine.
Coverage of interesting stuff happening in history, archaeology, and palaeoanthropology. This is still a really exciting time to be interested in these topics, especially archaeology, because a) there’s so much new work being done, and b) the techniques and methods are so much different, and more advanced, than simply digging up artifacts. You’ve probably heard of ancient DNA, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Books and other media that are worth your time. I read a lot, some for work and some for fun, and if you fine folks are interested then I’ll be happy to share that with you.
Discussion threads. Exactly what they sound like. Hit me up and ask some questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.
If there’s enough interest in these topics, then I’ll do more of them, adding a tier for subscribers. Depending on what happens with Tides of History in the coming year, maybe this place will be the home for a new podcast as well.
So, let me know what you think. I’m stoked to be writing more, and can’t wait to share some of what I’ve learned during my time away. We’ll chat more soon.
Hello there, friends! It’s been a while. The past couple of years have been a little bit crazy, leaving me without much in the way of free time to work on this Substack. I sold a book proposal to Harper Collins, entitled Lost Worlds: The Rise and Fall of Human Societies from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age, which I’ve been working on for the past couple of years. Tides of History wrapped up a nearly three-year-long series on prehistory, leading into the current season on the Iron Age and the birth of the Classical world across Eurasia, from Rome to China.
But over the past couple of months, I’ve been working on something near and dear to my heart: a podcast about Dad Culture, everything from tall wooden ships to comfortable sneakers to sandwiches to history. It’s called The Pursuit of Dadliness, and it launches today with two episodes. You can listen to the trailer right here:
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Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts - just search “Pursuit of Dadliness” and hammer that follow button.
Let me tell you a little bit about the Pursuit of Dadliness and what you can expect from it. First of all, you absolutely do not have to be a father, in the technical sense, to listen to or enjoy this show. Dadliness is not defined by the mere fact of having fathered children. Dadliness, to me, is all about embracing the freedom to explore our passions without the fear of seeming somehow uncool, or trying to impress anybody. This is a show for folks who want to enjoy their passions and their hobbies, whatever those might be, and genuinely strive to get better at doing stuff and more knowledgeable about the world around them. That, to me, is the essence of Dadliness. For that reason, we welcome cultural but non-practicing dads of all stripes, no matter your gender, orientation, or relationship to biological children.
I love talking to people about things they care about, so for now, every episode will revolve around an interview with somebody I’ve been dying to talk to. The first guest, Spencer Hall, is one of my favorite sportswriters out there, a keen observer of the strange and wonderful world of college football in particular and a Dad to boot. We chat about the definition of “hoss,” football and its place in American society, and the joy of painting Warhammer 40,000 miniatures, a Dad-coded hobby if ever there was one. The second, Ben Fowlkes, is another one of my favorite writers, a longtime scribe covering the world of mixed martial arts and a capital-W Writer. We discuss the benefits of having a home gym, what happened to Conor McGregor and why combat sports always eat their own, and of course, Master and Commander.
In future interviews, I talk with historian and fitness enthusiast Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, Defector flannel expert David Roth, the exceptional audio journalist and commentator Sam Sanders, and novelist Chad Dundas. These are all fascinating folks with a lot to say about the world, and though I’m biased, I think the conversations are pretty dang good.
So check out The Pursuit of Dadliness now. Open your favorite podcast app, search for the show, and subscribe - you won’t regret it, I promise.
