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The world you take for granted is younger than you think and it was never guaranteed. We sit down with Patrick Wyman, creator of Tides of History and Past Lives and author of Lost Worlds; How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World to trace the volatile 10,000-year span after the last Ice Age when farming, herding, villages, social hierarchies, and writing begin to reshape human life. Along the way, we confront a simple driver behind almost everything: the hunt for calories and the constant fear of starvation that organized societies for millennia.

Patrick explains why the Neolithic period isn’t a clean “before and after” moment, but a messy overlap of experiments, migration, and collapse. Ancient DNA technology, isotope analysis, and paleoenvironmental research now let historians see population replacement, unexpected ancestry, and the ways demography responds to perceived scarcity. We talk about the Anzick child in Montana and what one 13,000-year-old burial reveals about the deep roots of Indigenous history across North America.

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Find Patrick at  instagram.com/wyman_patrick/