Tides of History

By Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Society & Culture History

What's Tides of History about?

Everywhere around us are echoes of the past. Those echoes define the boundaries of states and countries, how we pray and how we fight. They determine what money we spend and how we earn it at work, what language we speak and how we raise our children. From Wondery, host Patrick Wyman, PhD (“Fall Of Rome”) helps us understand our world and how it got to be the way it is.

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The Indus Valley Civilization

05.06.2021

Egypt and Mesopotamia are the most famous civilizations of the ancient world, but at the same time in South Asia - today's Pakistan and India - an even larger and more populous society came into being: the Indus Valley Civilization, ...

Tides of History episodes:

05.06.2021 The Indus Valley Civilization Egypt and Mesopotamia are the most famous civilizations of the ancient world, but at the same time in South Asia - today's Pakistan and India - an even larger and more populous society came into being: the Indus Valley Civilization, ...
04.29.2021 Ancient South Asia South Asia - encompassing Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan - is one of the cradles of human civilization, and today it's home to one in every four people in the world. But who were the early inhabitants of South Asia, where ...
04.22.2021 Bananas, Civilization, and Ancient Farming in New Guinea: Interview with Professor Tim Denham Professor Tim Denham is one of the world's leading experts on Kuk Swamp, the most important archaeological site for understanding the origins of agriculture in New Guinea. He explains how we can use cutting-edge techniques in the study of ancient ...
04.15.2021 The Invention of Agriculture in New Guinea The Highlands of New Guinea are one of the most remote places on the planet, a maze of crosscutting valleys and enormous mountains that weren't reached by outsiders until the 1930s. Yet they're also one of the world's original centers ...
04.08.2021 Ancient Egypt in Context: Interview with Professor David Wengrow Professor David Wengrow is one of the world's leading experts on Egypt before the pharaohs. He's also one of the most creative and wide-ranging archaeologists working right now, and he has fascinating insights into the primordial emergence of inequality, hierarchies, ...
04.01.2021 Ancient Tattooing: Interview with Aaron Deter-Wolf Tattoos, and other forms of body decoration, are as old as humanity itself. But what can we know about the skin of long-past people that no longer exists? I talk to Aaron Deter-Wolf, Prehistoric Archaeologist for the State of Tennessee’s ...
03.25.2021 North America After the Ice Age: Interview with Professor Shane Miller Understanding the first migrants to the Americas more than 13,000 years ago is a big task. So is figuring out how the ancestors of indigenous peoples transformed themselves from hunters of mammoth and mastodon to farmers to the builders of ...
03.18.2021 Languages of the World in 3000 BC Language is one of the foundational pieces of being human, but in the absence of writing, what can we know about it in the deep past? Historical linguistics and the comparative method shed valuable light on these long-lost languages, and ...
03.11.2021 Understanding Prehistory Through Ethnography There are still people living now who make their living by foraging, and understanding them is an essential component of grasping the breadth of human experience. Today's hunter-gatherers aren't living fossils from a bygone age, but studying them can give ...
03.04.2021 Egypt and the Rise of the Pharaohs Kings are practically synonymous with ancient Egypt, and it's not just because their monuments - like the pyramids - still tower above the desert and the Nile. Egyptian society was organized around the pharaohs in many different ways, but how ...
02.25.2021 Hunter-Gatherers, Archaeology, and Prehistory: Interview with Professor Robert Kelly What can we learn about the deep human past by studying present-day hunter-gatherers? I asked that question to Professor Robert Kelly of the University of Wyoming, who's both one of the world's experts on hunter-gatherers and an accomplished archaeologist. Today's ...
02.18.2021 Uruk and the Rise of Civilization More than 5,000 years ago, the city of Uruk in what's now Iraq was the heart of a new civilization. Cities, kings, armies, monumental temples, and writing were all new developments. But why here? Why then? And who suffered so ...
02.11.2021 Egypt Before the Pharaohs Pyramids, mummies, and pharaohs define our understanding of ancient Egypt, a timeless and eternal land. But the Nile wasn't always ruled by god-like kings, and long before they emerged, Egypt was home to other peoples and other ways of life. ...
02.09.2021 Classic Tides \| Boxing, Race, and the Gilded Age: An Interview with Professor Louis Moore Boxing has a long past, one deeply connected to race, labor, and broader developments in American history. Professor Louis Moore joins me to talk about those topics and about his outstanding book, I Fight For a Living: Boxing and the ...
02.04.2021 Mesopotamia at the Dawn of History Civilization first emerged in the fertile floodplains of Mesopotamia - present-day Iraq - with priest-kings and cities full of temples and ziggurats, pictographs and cuneiform writing. But what were the conditions and processes that led up to this complex of ...
01.28.2021 What is Civilization? I'm not just talking about the wonderful Sid Meier game series, which I've spent far too many hours playing; how do we define "civilization," how does it come into being, and why does it matter? Listen to new episodes 1 ...
01.21.2021 Alcohol and Agriculture in Prehistoric East Asia: Interview with Professor Li Liu Stanford University's Professor Li Liu is one of the world's leading experts on prehistoric East Asia and one of the world's primary inventions of farming. I ask her about that, the deep continuities of Chinese civilization, and her recent research ...
01.14.2021 Agriculture and Complex Societies in the Americas, 4000-1500 BC Agriculture was invented in no fewer than three, and probably four, places in the Americas. It went along with sedentary living and complex societies, but in complicated ways: fishing villages along the Andean coast grew into the cities of Norte ...
01.07.2021 The Americas from Foraging to Agriculture, 10,000 BC-4000 BC The initial migrations to the Americas get most of the attention, but people didn't stop living there in the aftermath of those first movements of peoples; they spread out over the Great Plains and the forests of the eastern United ...
12.31.2020 Agriculture, Migration, and the Births of Language Families: Interview with Professor Peter Bellwood The relationship between agriculture, migration, and the distribution of today's most prominent language families is direct but complex. Professor Peter Bellwood, one of the world's leading experts on prehistory, explains how farming led to population growth and movements of people ...
12.24.2020 Classic Tides \| Europe After the Black Death Plague, war, and a worsening climate drastically changed Europe in the years and decades after 1350. This new state of affairs laid the groundwork for the explosion around 1500 that gave rise to the modern world. This episode originally aired ...
12.17.2020 Neolithic China and Jomon Japan East Asia was one of the world's primary centers of agricultural innovation. Farming was invented there, rice and millet domesticated, and the people who did so grew in numbers and sophistication. Some of the world's most-spoken language families grew out ...
12.10.2020 East Asia in Prehistory Hominins have lived in East Asia - what's now China, Korea, and Japan - for millions of years, at least as far back as Homo erectus if not further. And as the glaciers began to recede for the last time ...
12.03.2020 Why Were There So Many Neolithic Farmers? And What Can Big Data Do For Archaeology? Interview with Professor Stephen Shennan Professor Stephen Shennan is one of the world's leading experts on the early farmers of the Fertile Crescent and Europe. In this interview, I pick his brain about why early farmers were so, uh, fertile, and produced so many descendants; ...
11.26.2020 Classic Tides \| Peasants' Rebellions and Resistance Peasants and common folk were oppressed by their social superiors, but they didn't accept that as a natural state of affairs: They resisted in small, everyday ways, and they rebelled, sometimes spectacularly. This episode originally aired on September 20, 2018. ...
11.19.2020 Neanderthals, Our Closest Kin: Interview with Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes What were Neanderthals really like? Our closest relatives shared an incredible amount in common with us, argues Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of the wonderful new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art. But we shouldn't pigeonhole them; Neanderthals ...
11.12.2020 Ötzi the Iceman: The Neolithic Ice Mummy Five thousand years ago, a man died more than 10,000 feet high in the Alps of northern Italy. He had been shot in the back with an arrow, the corpse left behind, where he was frozen into a glacier along ...
11.05.2020 Who Were the Proto-Indo-Europeans? Today, everywhere from Bengal to British Columbia, some 3.2 billion people speak an Indo-European language. All of these diverse languages are descended from a common ancestor spoken long before the advent of writing. But where and when was that, and ...
10.29.2020 The Lost Civilization of Old Europe: The Copper Age and the First Cities The first farmers of Europe and their descendants persisted for thousands of years. In the Neolithic heartland of eastern Europe, along the Danube River and through the northern Balkan Mountains, they built a unique civilization: Old Europe, with its artificial ...
10.22.2020 Classic Tides \| Peasants and the Medieval Countryside When we think of the medieval world, our minds usually turn to knights, royalty, and clergy. But the backbone of the medieval economic and social order was the humble peasant. In this rebroadcast from 2018, we explore the world and ...
10.15.2020 Prehistory Mailbag! Archaeology, Language, and the Advantages of Farming How do we know what we know about the deep past? What languages did people speak in prehistory? And why, if the life of an early farmer seemed to be so miserable, did farmers have so many children? I answer ...
10.08.2020 Megalithic Europe It didn't take long for the first pioneering farmers of Europe to establish mature and stable societies. The monuments of these societies are still with us today: enormous earthen tombs and standing stones, silent reminders of a lost civilization. If ...
10.01.2020 The Neolithic Revolution: Europe's First Farmers Farming came into existence in the Fertile Crescent, but it didn't stay there. By 5000 BC, agriculture had spread east and west, reaching both Central Asia and the Atlantic Ocean. But how did this happen? Did indigenous hunter-gatherers adopt farming, ...
09.17.2020 How Did People Domesticate Animals? An Interview with Professor Greger Larson The domestication of animals has transformed the way that people eat, clothe themselves, and live over the past 10,000 or so years, but what in the world does "domestication" even mean? How did this happen, and why did people start ...
09.10.2020 The First Farmers The domestication of plants and animals has remade the way that people feed themselves, organize their societies, and interact with the landscapes around them. But for most of the human past, this isn't how people subsisted. When, where, and how ...
09.03.2020 After the Ice: The Younger Dryas, the Mesolithic, and the Birth of a New World For most of Homo sapiens' time out of Africa, we lived in a world defined by ice. But by around 20,000 years ago, the ice had begun to melt, the glaciers retreating back toward the poles and mountain ranges. This ...
08.27.2020 How Should We Understand the Deep Human Past? Interview with Professor John Hawks Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the world's best communicators on the deep human past and paleoanthropology, joins me to talk about archaic humans, genomics, and whether the concept of different human species even makes sense ...
08.13.2020 New Insights on the First Americans: Interview with Professor Jennifer Raff Our understanding of the past is constantly in flux, and there's no field where that's clearer than with the early settlement of the Americas. I'm joined by Professor Jennifer Raff of the University of Kansas, an anthropological geneticist, to discuss ...
08.06.2020 Who Were the First Americans? The Americas were the last continents Homo sapiens reached. Why did it take so long for people to enter this vast and promising expanse of land? Who were they, and where had they come from? In today's episode, we explore ...
07.30.2020 Trapped in Ice: The Paleolithic World Twenty thousand years ago, the world was locked in ice. The glaciers advanced from the poles and mountain ranges, swallowing huge portions of the planet's surface and making the rest colder and drier, a more difficult place to live. Yet ...
07.16.2020 Ancient DNA and the Human Story: Interview with Geneticist Eske Willerslev Ancient DNA is the key that's unlocking the deep history of humanity, allowing us to answer questions about our collective past that we never dreamed of addressing even 20 years ago. Eske Willerslev is a pioneer in the field of ...
07.09.2020 The Ghosts of Archaic Humans Until very recently, Homo sapiens - our species - was only one of several varieties of humans on this planet. As our ancestors spread outward from Africa in their great migration, they encountered those other species. The results of those ...
07.02.2020 Bone, Stone, and Genome: Understanding Humanity's Deep Past Welcome to a new season of Tides of History! Over the next year, we'll be traveling from the very origins of our species through the peopling of the planet, the Ice Age, and then to the beginnings of agriculture, cities, ...
06.18.2020 Did I End My Early Modern Series in the Right Place? Interview with Keith Pluymers How do we tell when one period ends and another begins? What are the fundamental characteristics of the early modern period? My dear friend (and friend of the show!) Keith Pluymers, assistant professor of history at Illinois State University, returns ...
06.11.2020 The Globalization of the Year 1000: Interview with Professor Valerie Hansen Around the year 1000, merchants, explorers, and missionaries linked the world together from Newfoundland to China. Trade goods, people, and above all ideas flowed across a rich assortment of routes, connecting previously distant places into a single unit. This was ...
06.04.2020 Alaric, the Goths, and the Sack of Rome: Interview with Professor Douglas Boin Alaric was one of the most famous barbarians of antiquity, and yet we know little about him - or at least, we knew very little, until Douglas Boin's excellent new book came out. It's entitled Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's ...
05.28.2020 John Maynard Keynes and His Legacies: Interview with Author and Journalist Zach Carter John Maynard Keynes was one of the most important figures of the 20th century, creating the economic structures and ideas that defined the Second World War and its aftermath. I spoke with Zach Carter, author of the wonderful new Keynes ...
05.14.2020 Malta, Lepanto, and the End of an Era We reach the epic conclusion of our series on the early modern period with the Great Siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto. Listen ad-free on Wondery+ here Support us by supporting our sponsors! The Great Courses Plus - ...
05.07.2020 The Battle for the Mediterranean For much of the 16th century, the Habsburgs of Spain and the Ottoman Empire waged an epic conflict for control over the Mediterranean. Follow along with two composite characters, a Barbary corsair and a Hospitaller knight, as they raid, pillage, ...
04.30.2020 Charles V and the Failure of Empire Charles V controlled more of Europe than any ruler in centuries, with resources other monarchs could only dream of. But that was never enough to give the Holy Roman Emperor more than a momentary victory; there was always a new ...

Older episodes

Tides of History

What's Tides of History about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Tides of History episodes:

The Indus Valley Civilization

Ancient South Asia

Bananas, Civilization, and Ancient Farming in New Guinea: Interview with Professor Tim Denham

The Invention of Agriculture in New Guinea

Ancient Egypt in Context: Interview with Professor David Wengrow

Ancient Tattooing: Interview with Aaron Deter-Wolf

North America After the Ice Age: Interview with Professor Shane Miller

Languages of the World in 3000 BC

Understanding Prehistory Through Ethnography

Egypt and the Rise of the Pharaohs

Hunter-Gatherers, Archaeology, and Prehistory: Interview with Professor Robert Kelly

Uruk and the Rise of Civilization

Egypt Before the Pharaohs

Classic Tides | Boxing, Race, and the Gilded Age: An Interview with Professor Louis Moore

Mesopotamia at the Dawn of History

What is Civilization?

Alcohol and Agriculture in Prehistoric East Asia: Interview with Professor Li Liu

Agriculture and Complex Societies in the Americas, 4000-1500 BC

The Americas from Foraging to Agriculture, 10,000 BC-4000 BC

Agriculture, Migration, and the Births of Language Families: Interview with Professor Peter Bellwood

Classic Tides | Europe After the Black Death

Neolithic China and Jomon Japan

East Asia in Prehistory

Why Were There So Many Neolithic Farmers? And What Can Big Data Do For Archaeology? Interview with Professor Stephen Shennan

Classic Tides | Peasants' Rebellions and Resistance

Neanderthals, Our Closest Kin: Interview with Dr. Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Ötzi the Iceman: The Neolithic Ice Mummy

Who Were the Proto-Indo-Europeans?

The Lost Civilization of Old Europe: The Copper Age and the First Cities

Classic Tides | Peasants and the Medieval Countryside

Prehistory Mailbag! Archaeology, Language, and the Advantages of Farming

Megalithic Europe

The Neolithic Revolution: Europe's First Farmers

How Did People Domesticate Animals? An Interview with Professor Greger Larson

The First Farmers

After the Ice: The Younger Dryas, the Mesolithic, and the Birth of a New World

How Should We Understand the Deep Human Past? Interview with Professor John Hawks

New Insights on the First Americans: Interview with Professor Jennifer Raff

Who Were the First Americans?

Trapped in Ice: The Paleolithic World

Ancient DNA and the Human Story: Interview with Geneticist Eske Willerslev

The Ghosts of Archaic Humans

Bone, Stone, and Genome: Understanding Humanity's Deep Past

Did I End My Early Modern Series in the Right Place? Interview with Keith Pluymers

The Globalization of the Year 1000: Interview with Professor Valerie Hansen

Alaric, the Goths, and the Sack of Rome: Interview with Professor Douglas Boin

John Maynard Keynes and His Legacies: Interview with Author and Journalist Zach Carter

Malta, Lepanto, and the End of an Era

The Battle for the Mediterranean

Charles V and the Failure of Empire

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