Instant Genius - How catastrophes have shaped the world as we know it

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

The history of the Earth is littered with dramatic events that have shaped the planet itself and the lives of the human beings who live on it in profound ways. Be it floods, famine or disease pandemics. Human beings have so far survived. But what in modern times can we learn from these past catastrophes? In this episode, we speak to author Lizzie Wade about her latest book Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. She tells us how even though Neanderthals died out many years ago they still live on in human DNA, how ancient civilisations that once thrived fell but their culture persists to this day and how the story of the human race is far from finished. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to Insent Genius, a Bitesize Masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday you'll hear world leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. The history of the Earth is littered with dramatic events that have shaped the planet itself and the lives of the human beings who live on it in profound ways, be it floods, famine, or disease pandemics. But human beings have survived so far. So what in modern times can we learn from these past catastrophes? In this episode, we speak to author Lizzie Wade about her latest book,

Apocalypse, how catastrophe transformed our world and can forge new futures. She tells us how even though Neanderthals died out many years ago, they still live on in human DNA, how ancient civilizations that once thrived fell, but their culture still persists to this day, and how the story of the human race is far from finished. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So today we're talking about your new book, Apocalypse, how catastrophe transformed our world and can forge new futures. So I think the best place to start, really, is what do you mean by an apocalypse? Great question, because it's had so many different meanings and definitions over millennia, really.

So what I'm talking about in the book, I define apocalypse as a rapid collective loss that fundamentally transforms a society's way of, of life and sense of identity. So that's to say, you know, I think when many of us think about apocalypse, we might think about discrete disasters like the volcanic eruption in Pompeii. For me, that, you know, wouldn't really count in my definition of apocalypse because while it was extremely disruptive for the people who lived there, obviously, many of whom died and many more of whom had to leave and start new lives elsewhere, it didn't really take down the Roman Empire, for example, which was what was, you know, the society was a part of. But, you know, a series of volcanic eruptions, you know, if Vesuvius had kept going and going and going, or, you know, the situation

where we're in now where climate change is causing, you know, disasters of increasing intensity and frequency all over the world with the potential to be disruptive on a collective scale and on, you know, beyond the time period of just one single disaster that can really make you, you know, make a society need to rethink how it's approaching the natural world. It's economy, it's politics, its subsistence strategies, all of that. So for me, it has to be, an apocalypse has to be felt by an entire society and with, you know, relatively quickly. Like, I think something that surprised me researching the book is sometimes how long these processes

can take. But the people who are living through them, you know, for me, to account as an apocalypse in my definition, they have to be aware that big changes are going on. You know, like it might not finish during a single person's lifetime, but, you know, that that single person would have to be like, oh, something really serious is happening here. So let's have a look at some of these that you talk about in the book then. So the first one, which is really interesting, is the demise of Neanderthals. So firstly, you know, what are Neanderthals? What were Neanderthals? Neanderthals were. Well, you know, some scientists debate whether it's they want to call them another human species apart from us or not.

That's sort of part of the book. But the, you know, let's say they were another human species that evolved, you know, human ancestors made their way out of Africa. You know, many like before Neanderthals evolved even before Homo sapiens well before. The ancestors of Neanderthals were living in Eurasia. We mostly know them from Western Europe, although not entirely. So they were another human species that were living in the Middle East, Eurasia, Siberia, like, you know, for much of what we sort of consider, quote unquote, the old world, when homo sapiens then came out of Africa ourselves.

And so they were one of the other human species that homo sapiens met as we started our migrations. So over the last few decades, we've learned an awful lot more about Neanderthals. So one thing that I think is still a sort of, of common misconception, is that there were sort of these clumsy, slow-witted brutes. But now we know that wasn't the case at all. So how do we know that? Yeah, it's really, you know, I think a lot of the misconceptions really started from the 19th century. Scientists thinking about how they thought of human differences. You know, a lot of these scientists, you know, it was before different kinds of sciences really like split off and professionalized.

So a lot of them were kind of geologists. We would think of today, some of them were early paleoanthropologists, and they sort of thought about how they thought about human difference, which was really informed by colonialism and scientific racism. And, you know, when they saw a different kind of human, they thought the most important thing that they could do was try to put this human in a hierarchy with us and with all the other humans that existed at that time. And so they, you know, based on differences in Neanderthal's skulls in particular, which is, you know, like one of the first, that was how they were first identified was the skulls. The thinking was that their brains were less developed.

And then, you know, 50 years or so later came along, this more complete Neanderthal skeleton that was, you know, quite famous paleoanthropologists, reconstructed it and sort of said, oh, this Neanderthals were like hunched over. And as you said, clumsy and just like not this kind of like standing up. straight, like, highly mobile, highly intelligent species that we consider ourselves to be. And, you know, I think it was in 1950s. That was, that particular skeleton was finally identified as actually a very old Neanderthal man with arthritis. And that's why the skeleton, you know, this particular, you know, man at this point of his life probably was sort of clumsy and it was

hard to move around. But, you know, it was because he had a medical condition and had actually lived for quite a long time, which speaks to, you know, Neanderthal communities, the way that they were able to take care of each other. The tools are quite advanced. And, you know, they've transported stone for stone tools over very long distances, for example. They probably followed migrations of different kinds of animals because they were quite dedicated hunters. I mean, that in and of itself implies a level of cooperation and, you know, memory and cultural stories that, you know, you need to remember not only one year to the next, but decades to the next. And there's even been some discoveries of Nandertal art. These are a little more controversial, but, you know,

some cave paintings in Europe have been dated with, like, sort of the chemical residue that's, was kind of dripped from the cave and sealed them off. So you can see how old that chemical residue is. and the paintings have to be older than that because they're underneath the chemical residue. And those dates, like, you know, predate their arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe by thousands of years and, you know, leaving the implication that the artists were probably Neanderthals. So it sounds like they were thriving, really, at one point. But these days, we don't walk down the high streets and see, you know, in Neanderthal, driving a car or something or going shopping.

So what happened to them? Yeah, I mean, it's the great question, right? And, you know, I think the early scientists who discovered them and who, you know, for them, it was almost immediately before any real evidence was assumed that homo sapiens had arrived and quickly wiped them out, whether we out competed them for resources, we actually killed them in some kind of, you know, violent action or war. conquering territories was like top of mind for these 19th century European and American scientists. And so that's sort of the lens that they saw it through.

I think today, you know, we don't completely know what happened to the Andertals. And but, you know, we do know that at the time that they, when extinct, it was a period of increasing climate instability. So one vision of this is like the climate would, you know, when it was hospitable, Neanderthals lived, were able to live in more places, follow more different kinds of animals. And then when things got cold, again, they would retreat to these refuge in places that they could survive. But every time that happened, the population got smaller and less connected to each other. And there were fewer and fewer Neanderthals to survive.

And then Homo sapiens come in, you know, maybe with slightly different technology. maybe with more long-distance connections across groups, and something happened there that Homo sapiens survived and Neanderthals didn't. But, of course, a very important part of the story is that Neanderthals are, in some sense, still among us because most people in the world carry a small but significant portion of Neanderthal DNA, which means that, you know, not only did Homo sapiens and Neanderthals meet, they had babies together, those babies went on to have their own babies, Like, there are many ways we can imagine this interaction, some more pleasant than others.

But I think, you know, it was clear that it happened over long periods of time and over long distances. And, you know, I think we deserve ourselves. We owe it to the Neanderthals to try to imagine this as something more than a hierarchy or an inevitably violent meeting of two cultures and something more like collaboration and community to survive a really challenging. time, what would have been a really challenging time for everyone, not only the Neanderthals. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology,

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by name.com for more information. So let's move on to another thing that you discuss then, which is I think if you say catastrophe or apocalypse to a lot of people, their minds will immediately go to nature. One of the things he discussed is the effect of El Nino in Peru. So could you talk us through that? Yes, of course. So the north coast of Peru, you know, I think we all know what El Nino is at this point. It's sort of this inversion of ocean temperatures in the Pacific that affects climate all over the world.

So, you know, El Nino would affect climate today for us in places far beyond Peru, and it would have then in the past as well. But Peru, and especially the north coast of Peru, where it's a very, very dry desert with a series of river valleys running down from the Andes Mountains. this is where El Nino has like immediate and really catastrophic effects. So a place that doesn't get much rain outside of El Nino years. There are these like huge flash floods, mudslides down from the mountains. I mean, it's a very narrow ecosystem. And so like any change will just be very extreme, very immediately felt. Rain, floods, storms.

And not only those things, but it's like the opposite of what the environment is normally like. It's truly like an inversion of what people would have learned to suspect and adapt to. And archaeologists have discovered that, like, El Nino has not always happened. Like, we don't exactly know, we don't even know why it happens today, really. Like, we know what causes it, but we don't know what causes the ocean temperatures to invert. And, like, we don't know the root cause, really. But it seems like El Nino appeared in the relevant piece of the human story, for my book, it started happening around 5,800 years ago. And so you can see in the archaeological record people encountering these natural disasters for the first time, and not just natural disasters,

but like repeated, you know, every, at that point it would have been like every decade, every generation, you know, just knowing that these disruptions were going to come and sort of losing faith in the environment that you thought you knew, and archaeologists can sort of see how people may have reacted to that change. So let's have a look at that, because one of the sort of central premises of the book, as I understand it, is how these sorts of events alter or shape the human societies. So let's stick with this example then. What happened there? What do we know about that? Yeah, so I think for a lot of us, when we think about apocalypses and, you know, repeated. Like this was a very, I think a very similar emotional experience to the kind of climate

change we're dealing with now that you just felt like you would never be safe again or you could never trust the environment that you thought that you knew. And I think for a lot of us today, we would expect those kind of changes, that kind of constant disruption, that kind of fear to tear our societies apart. and to make it hard to cooperate, hard to collaborate, hard to live together, you know, kind of every family on their own, like every man for himself kind of thing. That's, of course, our stereotype, like, from, you know, post-apocalyptic stories, you know, throughout at least the 20th century, if not beyond. And, but, you know, when you look at what happened with El Nino, actually the birth of when El Nino was sort of

was born or reborn, you know, it might have happened like, you know, thousands and thousands of years before this. But when it arrives to the human societies that we're interested in looking at, these people are, you know, hunter-gatherers, mostly fishers, probably like the sea, the Peruvian Sea today. I mean, it's like incredibly, incredibly productive, huge, huge fisheries. And actually, that's partly things still need you on the cold water. But, you know, the people living there at the time did not live in this kinds of big complex societies that we live in. They were more, you know, mobile bands, hunter-gatherers, and we would perhaps expect the arrival of El Nino

to make it impossible for them to build anything larger and more complex than that that would require cooperation, planning ahead, you know, like things that these repeated disasters would make really hard. But that is, in fact, exactly what we see, like, after El Nino, you know, within a few centuries, it seems like people start building monuments. The earliest one of the, you know, one of the earliest monuments in Peru at all, and certainly one of the earliest monuments of this kind is actually built from the mud that El Nino left behind in this kind of bay in where the sea comes a little closer to the land, that El Nino

would have really transformed into a very productive wetland, like amidst all the destruction of the actual valleys. And it seemed like people came there and took the mud from the mud slides, turned it into Adobe, which was like they might have even been inventing this technology in some sense. This was well before anyone was using pottery in their daily lives at the time. And slowly, you know, it didn't happen right away. And there were probably, you know, to be fair, many other contributing factors to these shifts. But, you know, people were working together like literally in the rubble left.

behind by El Nino to build something new to, and these seem to be, you know, one of the seeds of complex society in the region, which of course went on to be some of the biggest and most complex societies in the ancient world. And so, you know, not only did El Nino not prevent people from coming together and cooperating and creating something new, it might have actually given them the materials to do it in some very literal way and also kind of cultural or psychological or spiritual way. Yeah, so sort of sticking with that then, I think if a lot of people think of, you know, ancient Peru, if you can call it that, they think of these temple pyramids. So what do we know about those, the purpose they served and that sort of thing?

Yeah, the temple pyramids that came a little later. So these were appearing around like 3,600 years ago. So, you know, I mean you had been happening on the schedule of like once or twice a generation for a few thousand years at that point. And these temple pyramids are built like if you were to do kind of a hazard risk assessment like in modern engineering, they were absolutely the worst place you could build them. So they were kind of at the crux of the, you know, where these rivers would flow down from the Andes Mountains, you know, hugely agriculturally productive areas that the people who built them had, you know,

were using irrigation canals, farming very intensively. At this point, they had, you know, they were no longer hunter-gatherers. And they do seem to be living in some kind of society with at least the beginnings of leadership class, like priests probably, who may have not lived, that different, you know, their lives may not have been that different than the rest of the people in their communities, but there do seem to be people with more responsibilities. And these temple

pyramids, you know, were probably, they were in great places outside of El Nino years, but when El Nino came, which was inevitably it would, and all the people living there at that time knew that it was bound to happen over and over again, the flash floods that could come with El Nino would like slam directly into the pyramid. And they were, made of, you know, organic materials and it would sort of dissolve the pyramids. There are, you know, signs of houses just being like completely washed away and covered in, you know, and gravel, like carried by these floods. And so we don't know exactly what kind of belief system, the people who lived around and built these temple pyramids had. But, you know, there's a lot of water

imagery in the surviving artwork. There are locations. is very suggestive of, you know, something about this, like, really important crux point in the environment of rivers and irrigation and mountains and desert. And they certainly were not trying to avoid the hazard of El Nino, which seems like, you know, it would be an obvious thing to try to do if you understood this environmental system. So let's shift gears again, then, to perhaps the most famous pyramids in the world, those of ancient Egypt. So, I mean, we all know they had a very well-evolved, complicated society.

But even this society collapsed at some point. So what do we know about the cause of that? Yeah, so ancient Egypt, as we conceive of it, lasted for many millennia and went through actually quite a few collapses. But the one that I focus on in the book is the first one. So, you know, ancient Egypt was unified in the first dynasty. and for 800 years, this is like the upper part, the northern part of Egypt, as we know it today, like the Nile Delta, and then this long agricultural breadbasket of running along the Nile South. And so those two environments kind of balanced each other out.

Tremendously productive agriculture became possible, and it became possible to produce such surpluses that the state, you know, it made sense for a state to be collecting them and redistributing them. Maybe perhaps not in every year, but, you know, the state would be responsible for holding on to grain and, you know, using it for to support people working on being projects. For example, the construction of the pyramids that we know, the pyramids of Giza, that would draw people from all over Egypt and maybe beyond and you needed to feed them. And also likely the surpluses would have helped the state distribute research.

sources during years when the harvest wasn't as good and sort of help everyone get through to the next harvest. But you know that there's always good years and bad years, but they never last that long. I mean, the Nile floods were just a huge boon to a really big population, a very organized population. And about 4,200 years ago, there was a big drought, basically, and that seems to have extended through actually many parts of the world at the time. And in Egypt, it resulted in extremely, extremely low Nile floods.

And for the agriculture to work, you need the Nile to flood and irrigate the fields every year. And that stopped happening. It does seem that it may have not been a super abrupt transition like the Nile may have been falling and falling and falling over the course of a few generations. But by the time the floods were at their worst, the Egyptian government, were also at its weakest, really, like most fragmented, you know, people, like the unity of Egypt was really like the thing that held everything together. It was like the basis of the religion, the sort of divine king that was sort of at the head of everything. Everything was in balance to support him and his journey to the afterlife and therefore, like his ability to, you know, help maintain Egypt into the future. and that was all kind of fragmenting, like power was shifting more towards local leaders.

There was this one king that was on the throne for many, many decades since he was a child, and he apparently did quite a bad job, sort of the worst time possible when the drought was really intensifying. And, you know, those things together led to basically the Egyptian state fracturing into its little independent pieces and a period, potentially of something of what you could call civil war and at the very least political collapse. So let's have a look at something more current then. So I think it's kind of a sort of deep irony that when you were writing this book, the COVID pandemic hit.

So, you know, how did that inform or guide you if it did at all? I mean, I assume it did. Yes, it definitely did. You know, I had been working on this book for a few years before the COVID pandemic happened. And, you know, it suddenly felt like, you know, history sped up and, you know, the things I was researching and writing about had also come for me, you know. And I think the, you know, I was writing about, for example, the black death and the epidemics experienced it by indigenous populations in the Americas and other parts of the world that were colonized. And I think that experiencing a plague and just how up for grabs everything seemed, especially at the beginning, when all these things that we thought had been sure things and just the background of our lives, like what kinds of products are on store shelves, like being able to travel, being able to leave my neighborhood at the very least, you know, like things that we had sort of. that had seemed so natural and we had taken for granted for so long just, I mean, literally

overnight disappeared. And I think that both the fear and the sense of possibility in that really made me think about how, what it might have felt like for people in the past to experience similar things. And I think it helped me appreciate that it's not to say that Apocalypse isn't all bad, but, you know, one of the original meaning, or actually the original meaning of apocalypse in ancient Greek is like the revealing or the unveiling where, you know, the lies fall away and the truth is able to be seen. And I felt that very cutely at the beginning of the pandemic. And I think, you know, those moments of truth are ones that can really lead to huge transformations in societies and often did, you know, for example, the, you know, we were

talking about ancient Egypt and, you know, this collapse and drought were absolutely horrible for many people to live through, but the people who seemed to have suffered most and who really wrote the story of, like, wrote history that we read today, were people at the top of the social hierarchy. They were really the elites, and they felt they were terrified to have everything taken away from them, terrified that society might not need them anymore. and really the in kind of what had been lower levels of ancient Egyptian society like farmers and artisans, more local villages. There was like this real sense of liberation that happened with the collapse, like all these

different craft styles, started spreading these new religious beliefs that are slightly more egalitarian. It just seems that there was like this surge of creativity among people who, especially people who didn't, maybe weren't allowed to have that kind of time and creativity before. And I think that that sense, yeah, that sense that anything is possible and not really in a good way, but in a really fundamentally true and transformative way, I felt that, yeah, I really felt that at the beginning of the pandemic. And of course, you know, you could say, oh, well, we've all gone back to normal and that those promises didn't come to pass, but also studying these

apoclipses, even something like the Black Death where we have, you know, very accessible historical records, you know, the changes, the political and economic changes brought by the pandemic took decades and decades and decades to unfold. Like, laws were still being passed in England directly reacting to the Black Death and the kind of surge in worker power that came along after because there were so few workers left. And so the ones that were still alive could demand more flexibility, more money. You know, they could more value for their work. And the powers that be were still passing laws trying to rein that back in, you know, 40 years after the last person had died in the Black Death, you know.

And so I just think whatever COVID has done to us, I just, I don't think it's over. And I don't think we're going to be able to know the end of this story, probably even within our own lifetime. So having said that then, as sort of one closing point, unfortunately, we've just talked about the pandemic. We're facing issues with climate change, sea level rise, wars, food availability, etc. You know, all very frightening things, really. But are we going to come out the other side okay? Can we even say that? You know, I used to think that human extinction, like beyond what even happened to the Neanderthals was like on the table. But, you know, in our current apocalypse, that climate change really might transform the world into something

completely unrecognizable and perhaps even unsurvivable for humans who are, you know, homo sapiens. We're adapted to a certain kind of climate, a certain kind of, you know, many of us have come to, you know, we were hunter-gatherers for most of our species' existence, but, you know, we really do depend on agriculture and complex societies and complex economies. a globalized world. And, you know, those are precisely the things that are being threatened. And, you know, I used to think that what we should be talking about is like an extinction level event. And actually researching this book as scary and, yeah, harrowing as some of these stories can be,

it really made me think that, no, like, we're going to be, if not, like, it's perhaps an overstatement to say we're going to be okay, but I do think that we're going to survive. And especially on any kind of time scale that is relevant to our own decision making today. You know, like we will experience that we are experiencing climate change as on the scale of a human life, which lasts decades and not the centuries that it would take to transform the planet into something like truly uninhabitable, which, you know, to be fair, could happen if we don't to take action now. But I do think, you know, even if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, like we've still locked in several, I believe, centuries of climate change. And so we just have to figure out a way

to deal with that and to live not trying to deny the apocalypse or escape it, but we really have to look straight at it and say, like, this is what is happening. This is what we have to deal with. This is going to be the rest of our lives. And I think that that once. we, you know, ironically, like, that's what's really scary and we don't want to admit that our societies and our desires and our possibilities could really change in the next decades and centuries. But the less willing we are to face that truth, actually, the more likely it is that these changes are actually going to be devastating. Like, at some point, you don't get a choice anymore, you know? Like, at some point, it comes for you. And, you know, the more realistic

vision we can have both of the horrors of these events, but also the opportunities they can present. These are the moments when societies can look around and say, this isn't working. Like, we really have to try something new. And what that new thing is, you know, sometimes it's better than what became before. Sometimes it's worse. Sometimes it depends on who you are, you know, in the society before, how the apocalypse affects you and what your life is like after. but I think, you know, we have to really face this truth that this is happening. Like this apocalypse has begun. We are in it and it's going to be the rest of our lives.

And we're going to survive. So like what do we want? How do we want to harness this energy? What do we want to transform into? Because we're going to have to change. And the more kind of proactive choice we have in that matter, the better the potential outcomes will be. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius,

brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Lizzie Wade. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, Apocalypse. How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius

on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please also check out our YouTube channel at ScienceFocus. The current issue of BBC ScienceFocus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you while your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple news or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth.

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