Mm-hmm.

And the idea of organizing for defense and having somebody who says, "I'm not gonna let the bad guys come and take your stuff," that that is a powerful reason to give somebody a portion of your, uh, of your crop.

And not just to think about that in purely physical safety, but also kind of spiritual safety, your understanding of the world to say that, like, "Okay, we've got a shaman who says he can make the rain fall, and we live in an agricultural society where absolutely everything depends on that.

And in our understanding of the world, it is perfectly consistent to have a person who wields some sort of supernatural authority.

You know what? Let's, let's give him some millet.

That's okay.

We're gonna give that guy some millet." And I think those dynamics are, they can take many different forms depending on where in the world we are, but those dynamics are pretty consistent.

Mm-hmm

And I think here you write really brilliantly about the difference between the narratives that we see in the written accounts of that war versus the on the ground experience for the people participating in it.

So I'm going to read this quotation where I'm talking about this from the book.

The artists who carved the depictions of the battle had no illusions about it.

Their images show arrows piercing men, hacking melees of sword and axe, drowning fugitives fleeing from the battle, and horses and chariots trampling those unfortunate enough to fall to the ground.

The nature of this evidence makes it far too easy to focus on Ramesses, which is precisely what his written and pictorial accounts were designed to do.

The point of the battle was not to secure the strategic situation in Egypt's Levantine Empire.

The glory of the king was what mattered, and that entire apparatus of the Egyptian state, the lives of thousands of people, existed to serve that glory.

And just be like, hey, it's OK. You're going to clean it off with your spit, which is what makes Renner's character such a great warrior in this movie's estimation is that he is able to keep his head when all about him are losing theirs.

What are the forces pushing humans towards hierarchy and inequality and are there lessons from this, this, this past, you know, ancient human history for those of us trying to fight against those tendencies today?

Yeah.

So this is this is kind of the crux of the matter is do things have to be the way that they are now? Do we have to end up in a place where people are living in states are ruled by kings are slotted into some sort of hierarchy where there are other people making decisions for you and extracting some portion of your produce in return for that favor? Do we have to live in that world? And, you know, there was a really great book that came out a few years ago called The Dawn of Everything written by the late David Graeber and an archaeologist named David Wengro.

I am a huge fan of David Wengro.

I've interviewed him.

I really, really enjoy his work, even pre Dawn of Everything.

And Graeber and Wengro in this book.

That's exactly

Where does it appear and what does that say? Is that this is something that is intuitive or what do we make of that?

So this is one of the big questions is why, given tens of thousands of years of human existence on this planet prior to the Holocene, why did people not invent agriculture before? We know people were exploiting plants.

We know that people were using technologies like grindstones, the kinds of things you need to process plant foods.

We know people were using things like that before.

Like, we have evidence from the Levant 23,000 years ago of people using grindstones to process the same kinds of plants the Natufians would be doing 10,000 years later.

So why didn't these earlier groups develop agriculture? There are all sorts of explanations.

They mostly revolve around climate that the after the last glacial period ends and the planet starts to get warmer and wetter, conditions are better for plant growth, generally speaking.

What was going on there?

Yeah.

It's one of my favorite cases because you can see all of these dynamics playing out where we know from ancient DNA evidence that the initial founding group of the Clovis people was maybe a few hundred at the very most and probably more like a few dozen people.

And so from this very small group, millions upon millions upon millions of descendants, right? And I think that's because they hit the Americas at this real demographic sweet spot.

where there's very little competition.

They have a way of life that is extraordinarily well-suited to the initial conditions that they find.

And by the time their way of life kind of runs out of steam because the megafauna have been hunted to extinction and the combination of that and a change in climate has reduced their numbers to the point where that is no longer a viable way of life, there are enough Clovis people living in enough different places that it's like, okay, we're going to run 17 different models of how you can adapt to a changing climate.

And a whole bunch of them worked.

And it feels like that's, you know, it discounts a lot of, as you've talked about, experiences that don't, you know, fit that package.

it's like don't really have any reason to be scared of people it's just there's no competitors it's just a wonderful environment but the climate changes the grasslands go away and the megafauna starts to go away and yet these people who are totally uh as far as we know associated with big game hunting find a way to adjust and become basically the ancestors of indigenous americans uh up and down the you know the western hemisphere It's one of

my favorite cases because you can see all of these dynamics playing out where we know from ancient DNA evidence that the initial founding group of the Clovis people was maybe a few hundred at the very most and probably more like a few dozen people.

And so from this very small group, millions upon millions upon millions of descendants, right? And I think that's because they hit the Americas at this real demographic sweet spot, right? where there's very little competition.

They have a way of life that is extraordinarily well-suited to the initial conditions that they find.

And by the time their way of life kind of runs out of steam because the megafauna have been hunted to extinction and the combination of that and a change in climate has reduced their numbers to the point where that is no longer a viable way of life, there are enough Clovis people living in enough different places that it's like, okay, we're going to run 17 different models of how you can adapt to a changing climate.

And a whole bunch of them worked.

That's the part that I find really fascinating is that the descendants of the Clovis people didn't find one solution.

That must be what civilization is, and we read that back into the entire history of this period, and it feels like it discounts a lot of, as you've talked about, experiences that don't fit that package.

Now, on the one hand,

this creates the basic outlines of a world that we know.

It creates the preconditions that allow us to eventually have states, hierarchies, kind of what we think of as the definition of civilization.

But the downside to this is population booms are not great for everybody.

And when populations rise, a lot of the time what that means is fewer resources or poor quality resources for everyone else.

And so Neolithic societies, as they expand, they experience enormous growing pains.

They are they struggle to manage this new scale.

So what are these two groups? Can you give us some examples of what might fit into them?

And so this guy had some chops.

And, and, like, if you're, if you're wrestling in the kinds of environments that Abraham Lincoln was wrestling in, like, the culture of, like, folk-style wrestling in the 19th century was, was vicious.

I mean, it, there's a lot of crossover between that and the kind of like no-holds-barred scene that you would get if you were gonna get into a fight in a tavern where, like, there's eye gouging, fish hooking, hair pulling.

There, there are stories about guys who would grow out, who would just grow out one fingernail and use that as a, as an eye-gouging implement.

So, like, this is the environment in which Abraham Lincoln is learning to tussle, so he's, he's very close to the top of my list.

I think in terms of pure killer instinct, Theodore Roosevelt might've been our m- our, our most bloodthirsty president.

Like, that motherfucker loved killing.

So w- where did you get the idea to, to sort of focus on slavery as, like, the opening approach to, to this new look you're using to, you know, spread history to people?

How do we get this back to Ramesses? [laughs]

I don't know.

But yeah, I, I think the main thing that I wanna get across about Ramesses, and the reason why he sucks through the lens of this show, is not because Ramesses was a bad king.

In fact, by the standards of ancient Egyptian kingship, he was a great king, maybe the very best king.

But the reason why Ramesses sucks, and why it's important to understand him through that lens, is as a symbol of Egyptian kingship and what was bad and unfair and exploitative about the institution to start with, and also that Ramesses serves as kind of an avatar for this whole era of history, what we call the Late Bronze Age.

It, it's, it's this w- often seen as a glittering peak of human civilization, where you have not just new kingdom Egypt, which Ramesses rules, but also the Hittites in Anatolia, the Mycenaeans in Greece, the Kassites in Babylonia.

It's the first flowering of the Assyrians.

Mm-hmm