Stuff You Should Know - What Caused the Late Bronze Age Collapse?

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Humans’ first attempt at civilization went pretty well for the first thousand years. Important stuff like the wheel, writing, math, art, and diplomacy came out of it. But then, in the blink of an historical eye, it all mysteriously failed. What happened?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. A good old history edition, if you ask me, by goodness. History of the World, part two. I don't think I saw that since I was maybe eight, and at the time I was like, I have no idea what's going on or why people think this is funny.

Yeah, well, that was part one. Part two is out now. Oh, really? Yeah. We're not getting paid for this, but I'll plug the heck out of it. It's on Hulu, and they waited, you know, it's like a 40-year in the making sequel that they did as a TV show with Mel Brooks, executive producing and narrating, but it's like some of the great minds and comedy out there doing, you know, history sketches.

Is Michael Fosbender in it? I don't think so. Is he one of the great comedy minds? I think so. It's really funny, though, like genuinely laugh out loud funny. Yeah, I got to check it out because those things are rare and few and far between. Yeah, it's good stuff. You know, sketch, so not everything is perfect, but it's, I found myself laughing quite a

bit so far. I've seen three of them, I think. Okay, it's on Hulu. It's on Hulu. And what happens if you don't have Hulu? Did you just go subscribe? I don't know how you can watch it. I think you just go subscribe to Hulu is what I'm trying to say.

Oh, sure. But this sounds like an ad for Hulu. I don't know about TV shows, you can just go out and buy a show, right? Sure. You can buy whatever you want. It's the 21st century. Should we talk about the Bronze Age? Yeah, let's go back a few centuries, a few millennia, actually, to the Bronze Age.

Great age. It was a great age. It was actually the first great age. I think most people are familiar with the term Bronze Age, but they might not know just how amazing an age it really was, like just eye-poppingly amazing, frankly, if you think of it. Yeah. It was specifically wedged between the Stone Age, which stones work great for millions

of years for a lot of things. Bronze came along and then was followed by the Iron Age, where we were plunged into the Dark Ages. But we're talking, what, 3300 BCE to about 1200 BCE? A little over a thousand years. Yeah, and it had a lot to do with the Bronze, which we'll talk about, but also just advances in almost everything you can think of. Yeah, art, architecture, politics, diplomacy, technology, religion, warfare.

Their version of science. Yeah, the early sciences, early astronomy and math, writing, all of this stuff was born during this thousand year stretch of the Bronze Age. And again, like you might say, well, a thousand years, of course you could have been all that in a thousand years. But think about it, we were around for tens of thousands of years as modern humans and millions of years as hominids of some sort or another up to that point. And then all of a sudden, boom, civilization just develops out of nowhere.

And it was in large part because of Bronze itself. Not just that Bronze tools are way better than Stone tools. They're more easily sharpened. You can fashion them more easily. You can recycle them. So when they get busted up, you can re-smelt them and make it brand new again. That's a huge advance in technology. Because the actual Bronze itself in a really roundabout but also pretty direct way, wove

people together in ways that they never had been before that led to civilization. Yeah. It's really cool how the discovery of metallurgy just changed so much in a very, you know, if you look at the big picture, a very short amount of time. Yeah. So there were, if you want to make Bronze, you take copper and you take a little bit of tin, it's usually the alloy that makes Bronze. And you just smash them together with your hands.

Over the course of 15 years and then bam, you have Bronze. So you, well, no, you melt them. You smelt them and you smelt it, dealt it, right? That's right. And you have Bronze and you can fashion it into tools. But to get copper and tin together, you have to go to all sorts of different places in the Mediterranean. You have plenty of copper, say on Cyprus, that was a copper mining center.

But then if you wanted tin, you had to go a couple thousand miles, few thousand kilometers to the east, if I'm not mistaken, to the east, to Afghanistan, which was a tin center. And to get that tin and that copper together, you had to create really extensive trade networks. You had to go through one land to another so you had to make friends or make enemies with those people. Yeah. And you had to create new relationships developed just to get the components to make Bronze together and that formed the basis of all the stuff that seemed to follow.

Yeah. And we'll talk about the warring. There was certainly that. But there was also a lot of cooperation because everyone wanted to get their hands on that sweet Bronze. And they're like, hey, if you want to play with the big fellas, then maybe become part of this trade route, allow us to go through your area with the tin or whatever, or maybe you have something that we need other than just being on the way.

But there's a lot of cooperation involved too. As far as the Bronze, what that led to ultimately was better, and this is the sort of the cascading effect that a simple, not simple, but a discovery like this can have is or make is better farming techniques. And you might think, well, great. So you could farm better, but that means you could farm bigger and that means you could support more people and that means you could get a civilization going. And because you had before you previously had a situation where like, hey, listen, everyone's

got to hunt and gather and then later later on, everyone's got to farm because we just can't support ourselves unless everyone's kind of in on this. Now they had more sophisticated techniques. So fewer people had to farm to support more people even, and that freed up people who were good at other stuff to do other stuff. So that's the cascading effect that you were sort of alluding to where like, this one thing led to farming, better farming, but that better farming led to division of labor where it's like, hey, I'm really good at science.

Hey, I'm really good. I'm a really good writer, but everyone always said, don't waste your time writing because we need you farming. Right. It's brand new. And stick around, it could just be a fad, this writing thing might just go away. So yeah, and with that division of labor, the writers can write the math people can figure out math.

The farmers can farm and feed everybody. And then one of the other big pillars of support for this division of labor that allowed it to blossom was centralized governments that said, farmers, we're in charge of you make X amount of grain and bring it to this central place. Everybody else come to this central place and get your grain. We're taking care of you. We're feeding you so you guys can go off and concentrate on this other stuff and help civilization flourish.

So government is a huge sweeping bureaucratic hierarchical entity really got established in the Bronze Age as well just because there were so many people being strung together again in the service of creating bronze. Yeah. And hey, while you're at it in slave people, why don't you build huge statues of me and big monuments of myself as the leader of you? So that's kind of what happened, you know, the establishment of government from the very beginning sort of gave us and took it away, gave us in that all the things you were saying,

which was great about organizing large groups of people, but took it away because every civilization was built on the backs of enslaved people. And if not enslaved at the very least, they established a real kind of like never before a real hierarchy of hi, I'm in charge and you're not so you don't matter as much. Yeah. That was definitely new. I mean, you always had things like, you know, shaman or some sort of like probably group leader or elders or something like that for hunter gatherer bands, but nothing like this

where you just you didn't even come close to talking to or knowing personally the person who was your, your ultimate leader, like that was brand new. And what's interesting, Chuck, as you said, you know, kind of for better for worse about the government emerging, you can really see how you feel about today's world by how you interpret what was born and what happened during the Bronze Age. It's like looking in a highly polished bronze mirror, basically. It's really interesting what reflects back and it's not always cut and dried. Like I have certain feelings about, you know, topics like government or whatever.

But I also in looking back a few thousand years, it's also easy to see the other side's opinion because they're not all up in my face. They're several thousand years old. And I can kind of now understand contemporary people's feelings about say government or something as well. Yeah. That's fascinating. And that's ultimately why history is so important because you really do learn lessons from it.

You can like humans are not, we like to think we're super advanced compared to, you know, the people of a few thousand years ago, but we're still basically the same humans that we were back during the Bronze Age. And so there is a lot to learn. I agree. You know, we mentioned that there was warring, obviously, when you're going to get bigger groups of people together and governments ruling those people and they're in close proximity to one another, you know, neighbor right up to each other, there's going to be people

that don't get along and there is obviously going to be warring. But like we mentioned, there was also a lot of diplomacy. And there was a very sort of golden age of this golden age kind of square in the middle where things were cruising along really, really nicely. I think this sort of looking back at it, it seems like the beginnings of a big grand transition like this, things can be rough. And as we'll see at the end, given that it basically collapsed, it's obviously rough. But there was a time in the middle there where things were going pretty great.

Yeah. Yeah, it's true. It's that middle Bronze Age prosperity and actually kind of underscores the idea that when you bring a lot of people together, you can do amazing momentous things. But if you bring a lot of diverse people together, you've got a lot of different attributes, different contributions from different groups. And opinions. Yeah, and opinions and affluence and prosperity can really follow when people of diverse backgrounds

interact with one another on large scales. Amen. That's pretty cool. Should we take a break? Sure. It's kind of an early break, but it feels like a good stopping point. And maybe when we come back, we'll talk about the big eight. It feels like making smart money decisions has only become more difficult in the current

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Listen to the Manowoc Caves now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Everything that has happened to you can also be a strength builder for you if you allow it. Kevin Hart. It's not about us as a generation at this point, it's about us trying our best to create change. Lewis Hamilton. That's for me been taking that moment for yourself each day, being kind to yourself, because I think for a long time I wasn't kind to myself. And many, many more. If you're attached to knowing, you don't have a capacity to learn.

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Egyptians, not bad actually, hit and as we'll see the Egyptians, they didn't completely go away. They got punched in the face during the Bronze Age collapse, but they stuck around. Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians, and rounding out the top eight. Everyone's favorite, the Babylonians. And this is like not all of these groups were dominant at one time at the same time. Yeah, some were dominant at one time or another. Like the Minoans were the civilization that predated the Mycenaeans, right? So by quite several hundred years, if not longer, but each one dominated.

They both controlled Crete while they were in charge. And if you look at these groups too, a lot of them are, I mean, I guess you'd call them famous. Like the Babylonians, pretty famous. The Minoans famous, the Egyptians super duper famous. Yeah, way famous. And these were the groups that created the beginning of history. Like this was the time when the pyramids at Giza were built or when the epic of Gilgamesh was written and the code of Hammurabi was encoded. This is when Pharaoh's Tutankhamen and Ramesses II ruled.

Like this was big deal, capital H history that was being produced at this time. And it seems to have all kind of started with the Sumerians. They seem to be the ones who like kicked the whole thing off. Yeah, and we should mention too that all of those groups that we name had subgroups, a lot of aites. You want to tell them some aites? Pivites, Amorites, Gyrgishites. That's my favorite. And these were all subgroups and they even had subgroups, you know, under these umbrella terms like Canaanites.

But Sumerians, like you said, came first. They said, hey, you like irrigation? What do you think about this canal? What do you think about this ziggurat? What do you think about writing things down? And now we can keep track of inventories and things like that and log books and money. Or like you mentioned, the epic of Gilgamesh, Great Read, known as the first work of literature. But what you also had because of this invention of writing was other cultures writing.

And in a way, that sort of helps corroborate what's going on when you have different cultures writing about things that track or check one another. Then you sort of get a better picture of what's happening. Well, plus also when you have these diverse cultures that have different systems of writing and language. When they communicate with one another, they're often writing in two different languages. So later historians, once you crack one language, you can use that to crack. Like, let's say you cracked hieroglyphics. You can use hieroglyphics to now crack linear B, which was, I think, out of Crete, if I'm not mistaken. And if you crack linear B, well, wait a minute, they used linear B to write this cuneiform or cuneiform.

So we can crack that now too. So like almost all tablets written during this time were in multiple languages. So each one's like a Rosetta stone. Yeah. It's really neat. That is super cool. So everything's going great. People are trading, people are thriving, people are farming like never before.

And all these advances are happening. And then boom, almost for the most part, everything stopped. Most of that development and almost all of those major civilizations kind of just went away. And like we said, the Iron Age came along. Looking now, my friend, I think this would have been the best place for a break. Sure. But I screwed that up. So we'll just dive right into what might have happened.

The date of the collapse is generally given as 1167 BCE, but it's obviously not the kind of thing that happens overnight. I think they generally now agree that it happened over the course of what, 30 or 40 years? Yeah, I think from about 1200 to 1150, which, I mean, if you're living through that, it's 50 years at the time. It's a lifetime. Probably a lifetime, but looking back historically, it's like the blink of an eye. Yeah, and in a blink of an eye, things like when we talk about collapse, it was a pretty stark collapse. Like there's evidence of lots of disturbance, lots of upset in that region. And we'll get into everything that happened.

I mean, we talked about the warring. People really started warring. And when certain civilizations might have fallen out of power, that created a vacuum there where a new civilization would come in. And all of these civilizations kind of going away. I believe it was like Sparta and Athens were the next to come along to really kind of kick off the next golden age, right? Yeah, several hundred years later. And in between, there was what you would call a dark age, the Iron Age, which iron is preferable to bronze in some ways, and that it can be harder, I believe, but bronze doesn't rust.

So people typically look at the Iron Age, the transition from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age as a step backward, a dark age. And it came from this collapse, what's called the late Bronze Age collapse, where you said that they really started warring and cities were sacked and burned. Cities have been sacked before and burned before, but they were rebuilt during this age of prosperity. This time, after the late Bronze Age collapse from 1200 to 1150, they weren't rebuilt. They were left in ruins and rubble because the civilizations that would have rebuilt them were gone. Their languages were gone, their writing was gone. In very short time, people couldn't decipher things that had been written 50 or 100 years before. It was just one civilization after another fell like dominoes all around the Mediterranean, and this part of the world that gave the world essentially civilization for the very first time fell into this dark age.

And it was such a stark, massive, all-encompassing collapse of the first attempt at civilization that it just piqued historians and archaeologists' curiosity from the first time they detected it. And they've been seeking to explain exactly what happened ever since. Yeah, and in a sec we'll go over some of the causes, but after the cause, and there's a lot of debate over what those were, we have a civilization or a group of civilizations that we've talked about being very interconnected and dependent on one another. So you said they fell like dominoes. That's going to happen if you have a lot of civilizations trading with one another, depending on one another, sharing resources with one another. When one goes down, then it becomes unstable for all of them. And, you know, if a civilization collapses, those people, it's not like everyone literally is destroyed, like those people are going to go to the next closest place probably, and that overstresses them. And then it's just, like you said, it's just one after the other, this domino effect happens, and it just kind of happened one after the other over this very short time period.

Yeah, because remember, this is the first time when people followed a centralized government, and this is where you got your food, right? So when that centralized government collapsed, you no longer had access to food, and you're like, I'm a mathematician, I have no idea how to grow grain. I'm going to starve to death if somebody doesn't do something. You told me to do mass. Of course, you're going to run to the next civilization that still has a central government with grain that they could possibly have, but then put the strain on the grain, and people start to fight when there's a strain on the grain. That's just how it goes, right? That's a t-shirt waiting to happen. So for one of the first people, or one of the first theories that came along was posed by an Egyptologist, a French Egyptologist who coined the term the sea people.

I like that. The sea people have long been, yeah, sound ominous in this sense, don't they? Yeah, when you capitalize the sea people, they're probably not bringing fruit baskets, you know? No, unfortunately not. They were bringing death and destruction and mayhem, and much the same way that we today think of like the Vikings would have, to the UK and the Western Europe. This is a very similar thing where a bunch of raiding pirates made land and just sacked all these civilizations. And so they're almost hypothetical that we have a pretty good idea that they did exist in some form or another. They're written about in Egyptian stelae.

Stela, can't remember how to say that, but inscriptions, let's just say, and they show up in art too. So we know that they happen, but we don't know who these people are and what extent they sacked the major great city-states. And if they managed to topple all these civilizations, then holy cow, they were amazing. But a lot of people are like, I'm not sure they actually were the trigger. They might have been a symptom. Yeah, and we don't, like you said, we don't even know for sure who they are. I believe Egyptians did identify some groups of them at the time as like the Asha Washa or the Luka or the Sheklesh. But that means nothing to us these days because their contemporary names were lost to history.

So what we call a lot of civilizations today were named by people who discovered their ruins years later, and that wasn't what they called themselves. For instance, Minoans were named after the Greek king Minos by an archaeologist named Arthur Evans, or Arthur Evans. In some cases, we do know what they called themselves. In other cases, we don't. I think the Samarians we know called themselves Ungsanggiga, which is black-headed people, but they were named Samarians by Akkadians who followed after them. So we have trouble with identifying people because the names were lost. We have trouble identifying people like to see people because there's a very murky picture of who was where and when they were there. Right.

So there's a lot of different stories where you think like one group of people maybe came in and overpowered another and drove them into oblivion. Where it's like, no, now we believe that they were there sort of all along and they just filled that power vacuum or maybe those actually were those people. Right. Right. Like for a good example is the Canaanites. For a very long time, the Philistines were blamed, and I mean a really long time, the Philistines were blamed for toppling the Canaanite Empire. But more recent scholarship says, actually, I think the Canaanites became the Philistines after the collapse. They kind of broke up as a group and then reformed.

I'm trying to think of a band. The only one I can think of is my high school band who broke up and reformed without me. What's that? So let's just say that. It was like my high school band. Oh, that story just breaks my heart every time I hear it. Breaks my heart too. But anyway, that's what they think happened.

So a lot of the scholarship that we relied on for centuries, like the Canaanites were toppled by the Philistines, it was incorrect. And we have to figure it out by deducing, well, wait a minute, this group was here at this time and this group was here at that time. The contemporary reports don't actually help us that much because we might be totally familiar with the Shekles. But we call them the Mycenaeans. Right. But is it the Mycenaeans? Well, let's go and look. The Mycenaeans were toppled by the Sea People, so probably not the Mycenaeans.

So you have to use this historical deduction to try to figure out who these people were. But the upshot of it is that now today, and yes, I said upshot by God, I'll say it again. The upshot of it is that today we think the Sea People were basically like pirates of the days of Yor or more recent days of Yor. They weren't from one particular country. They were a loose confederation of people. Exactly. Which, I mean, I buy that. That makes sense.

Yeah. It makes a lot more sense than some group we are totally unfamiliar with or know by a different name, but haven't detected, went and like just completely toppled every single culture and civilization in the Mediterranean at the time. Yeah, I agree. Another thing that makes sense, and I'll go and spoil it and say I think all these make sense. So I've subscribed to the, that was probably a little bit of everything. But overextension is a big one. If you are, I mean, this was their first foray into this kind of mass agriculturalism and massive government and these big, big groups of people.

And they, you know, it was just, it was their first try, humanity's first try at this stuff. So obviously it's going to not go perfectly. And if you're managing that many people like any government has a limit on how many people even today that they can probably manage successfully. Any business does any friend group does. So the fact that they just overextended themselves is probably a pretty good factor. Yeah, that's entirely possible. So that's another theory just by itself over extension. And once those governments are like, Oh God, I can't support everybody. There's like maybe a revolt or at the very least political instability and yada, yada, yada.

Right. And then dominoes. One of the problems with that theory though is that we have letters from one group to another from like the Hittite Empress to the like Ramses the second in Egypt saying like, Hey, help, which really shows the diplomacy and the interdependence. But they would say things like, Hey, help, we're running out of grain. I need some food. Can you please send my people some grain? So that makes it seem like it wasn't just overextension. Although it could have been overextension that led to it now that I kind of sussed it out. Look at that. Yeah, we might just go edit that whole part out because it turned out to be totally unnecessary.

Well, two natural sort of disasters came together that that are obviously going to have a deleterious effect on civilizations. Very nice. Drought and earthquakes. We do know that there's a lot of evidence that there was a drought, a seemingly really long one. I think they've asked, you know, have actual proof of fossilized pollen from the bottom of the Sea of Galilee that said there was at least 150 year drought. Right. And other people say, No, it was probably more like 300 years. And, you know, that's that's going to cause destabilization like nobody's business. If your whole like sort of new societies are built on mass agriculture, people are going to start fighting.

They're going to start warring with one another. I do think it's interesting that along with this theory, they say that the Sea people might have been climate refugees from another part of the world. Very interesting. And, you know, back to what we said, like the great thing about this mass farming is all of a sudden it freed up people to do other things with the division of labor. But then when that was stressed, they had to pull people. Like you said, I was I was told I could do math. Not that there would be no math, quite the opposite. And they were pulled back from those jobs.

So all of a sudden you had an end to other advances because you had to go. You were trying to save your society. Yeah, and that the 2013 study, the one that determined the drought was 150 years long also said that the end of the drought seems to coincide with the end of that dark age period in the rebuilding again of civilization. The earthquake thing makes a lot of sense to you remember, of course, the horrific earthquakes that Turkey suffered in February. There was a 7.5 followed nine hours later by a 7.8 and that is just mind boggling. It killed 46,000 people. The thing is that area, this area of the Mediterranean and then the Aegean as well, there's no less than four major plates that come together in this area. The Arabian, the African, the Anatolian and the Eurasian plates all kind of converge around here. And so it's known for its earthquakes and also quake storms, which is what Turkey suffered recently.

It's like earthquake after earthquake after earthquake and a lot of them are really, really big. This area is kind of plagued with it and has been for a very long time and there's plenty of evidence of earthquake damage. Lots of poor souls being found trapped under their houses and foundations like just completely disrupted and walls at weird angles. So that definitely happened around this time. But then there's also other cities that were destroyed where you find like arrowheads embedded into the walls and like people with their heads cut off and stuff like that where it's like an earthquake didn't do that. Some other group of people who attacked the city did that. So this kind of leads us to the one you subscribe to, which is everything, everywhere, all at once, theory, which is that there was basically a multiplier effect where one disaster happened that triggered other disasters and it just made those disasters worse and worse and worse and that there was just a cascade of system failures that created this massive collapse.

Yeah. And again, going back to what I was saying earlier, it's like this was the first try at this kind of thing. And well, we'll get to maybe after the break, we'll talk about lessons we've learned. But you know, on a first attempt at this, this is a long time ago, there wasn't anything they could lean on in any of their histories to try and right the ship. So it just sort of went the way it went, you know, there was kind of almost no stopping it, I think. So I'll give you another anecdote of mine that kind of exemplifies this. When you and I moved into our first place that we ever bought together, I was installing something or other in the hot water pipe. Yeah, the little condo, little tiny place. Yep.

And I broke the hot water pipe at the water supply under the sink behind the valve. So there was no way to turn it off. And my response to that was to get up and literally run in a circle going, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And Yumi had to run in and figure out what was going on and then run out and find the water main and turn it off. Right. That's what I imagine like some of these rulers did, like after the first disaster or two, because they had no frame of reference. I had no idea what to do right then. I didn't think like water main, they didn't even know there was a water main at the time. So they had no Yumi? No, exactly. That's kind of the response I imagine them doing.

That's pretty funny. Then there's one other one, Chuck. So you know how the Bronze Age led to the Iron Age? Yeah. And the division between the two is basically right there. After the late Bronze Age collapse, you've got the Iron Age almost immediately after it. And there is an idea that in Bronze Age Ireland, which suffered its own collapse later on, that it was the availability of iron that led to the collapse of the Bronze Age because anybody could go find and work iron into something. You didn't need to have tin from over here and copper your massive trade networks and people at the top commanding everybody else. You could go out and find it yourself. And this theory that in Ireland at least, and it's possible it applies to the Mediterranean too, that it democratized it so much that it led to political instability and hence that same destabilization where one civilization was toppled, that led to another and another and another.

Boy, this is the side of history I love more than any other, I think, which are these just sort of things like this is how the earth was. And because you could find something here, it led to this, or you couldn't find something there, it led to this. Right. It's really fascinating to me. Yeah. And also they think that the reason why we're able to find metals relatively close to the earth's surface enough so that we can mine them. And therefore, basically all technology is because the, I think, a small planetoid crashed into earth, and that's where they think the moon came from, and that when it smashed into earth, it pushed a lot of that molten metal to the surface where it cooled, informed and settled, allowing us to come billions of years later and dig it up and create civilization from it. It really just makes you think it's all just a crap shoot and we have no control over anything. Sure. That or we're living in a really amazing simulation.

Yeah, that's right. They're both right. They both could be right. Is it blue pill or red pill? I can never remember. Why not take both? Yeah. All right, man. I'm hip to that. I don't know if I should tell the story. If it's pill based and maybe not. Probably not. All right, so we'll take that break and we'll come back and talk, like I mentioned earlier, a little bit about the lessons we hopefully have learned from the late Bronze Age collapse. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, occult murder.

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Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we're talking about lessons for today that you can take from the late Bronze Age collapse. And the most obvious one is, don't globalize. It's a bad move when you become super interconnected and interdependent on one another. A problem or a failure in one part of the system leads to just failures throughout the system because everyone's so dependent on one another. And if you kind of peel back the curtain a little bit or scratch the, that lotto ticket covering off, you see that the most people who are saying that are probably nativists or anti-globalists to begin with. And that's what I was talking about before, where like, you can see us reflected back when we're looking and interpreting what happened back then or the lessons from it.

It really kind of reflects on what our thoughts and attitudes are today. Yeah, and this isn't, you know, a big pro-globalist rant or anything, but we do have to kind of look around it. A pretty great recent example of a worldwide test put on all of our civilizations, which is the COVID pandemic that happened. Right. You know, this happened all over the world. Everyone was punched in the face. All, you know, societies were punched in the face. And there was no collapse.

I mean, everyone got bruised up pretty bad. And I think the whole world suffered economically as we're still seeing the fallout from that stuff today all over the world. Right. But no one collapsed. It's not like, you know, the UK is now, you know, just a warring society and everyone's like, you can't go there anymore because they collapsed because of COVID. Right. It was a really big test of our globalized world. And there are some very smart people who say, like, listen, you can't point to the Bronze Age collapse and say, like, that could happen again in modern times because there's this one economist that you found Zachary Yoast, who is basically like, listen, we're way more wealthy than we were back then.

We have capital goods like we never had before. And there's a big cushion that affords us mistakes these days that they didn't have those mistakes. That's why, like I said, it was their first foray into this kind of thing. So they had a very narrow edge they were walking to begin with. Right. So they couldn't afford mistakes. We can afford mistakes these days and still be able to take a punch in the face and get back up and continue. He also pointed out that, yeah, they had a division of labor, but our division of labor is global and that, you know, we have a lot of redundancy in our systems too.

So, yeah, he's saying, yes, you can make comparisons, but it's definitely not apples to apples because of how far we've come. And from the lessons that we learned from the times where civilization has collapsed and rebuilt and collapsed and rebuilt. The other way to look at it, there's a guy named Eric Klein, who's a professor of ancient Near East studies who also wrote a book called 1167, The Year Civilization Collapsed. So he's a bit of an authority on this. His whole thing is actually, though, we're probably more susceptible to collapse than the Bronze Age was because we're even more interconnected than we were before. And there's a systems dynamics term, I believe, called hypercoherence, where the system is so homogenous. All the different parts are so homogenous that when one part is also interconnected, that when one part breaks down, it just spreads really quickly and the whole system breaks down. And you can really kind of look around at the complexity of our world today, like just look at international banking.

That's just one system in the larger complex globalized system. So when you take these complex systems and put them together with other systems like trade, stock markets, healthcare, and then realize that all those systems make up a truly global, ultimately complex system, then you're like, actually, yeah, we're possibly even more susceptible to breaking down than the Bronze Age was. Yeah, which is scary to think about, but as far as anti-globalists saying we need to undo this, that ship is sailed, don't you think? I mean, things are so interconnected and we have such a globalist world that you can't unwind that clock, I don't think, at this point. No, and if you could, you can, but it would be a really rough, unpopular transition. But then what? You're the odd man out and the rest of the world is working together and what happens if you need help from the rest of the world? How easy is it for you to get that help?

There's downsides to both globalism and nativism, right? Neither one is just shown to be the right way to go, and also this is a really good point too, Chuck. We don't know that collapse is inevitable from complexity. We also don't know that you can reach a point of complexity where it's so complex that it actually becomes more stable. We haven't figured this stuff out yet, but either one's not inevitable, collapse or success. So the best thing we can do is just invest in ways to be resilient. Yeah, I mean, I think you can even narrow that down to like secessionists these days where it's like, good luck with that, man. Have you really thought this through or do you just like the idea of giving the finger to the rest of the country?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's a great question. I'd love to hear it answered too. Yeah, and like a really thought out way, like here's how that would work exactly. Everybody's going to wear the same kind of flannel shirt. It's going to be awesome. Seattle? I was thinking more Kansas, the legit flannel shirts. So what else was another lesson too, right? Yeah, I mean, I think a more hopeful lesson is that like you kind of touched on earlier at the beginning, when you have diverse groups of people interacting like what usually has followed is affluence and peace.

And that's what happened here for a long time as well. Right. Even more than just the late Bronze Age, after that collapse, I think the Phoenicians really kind of rose to power and they were a seafaring people. And one of the first things they did was start peddling their purple dyes that they were famous for around the Mediterranean. And they ended up establishing new trade networks with other groups that had survived the collapse and started to rise to power. So the whole thing began again. It's so funny to think about. Everyone's like, what is that? And they're like, it's purple. Right. People are going to go wild for this stuff and new civilizations will be built because people are so wild about this color.

Yeah. And it's true. I mean, that was a huge driver of it. Purple dye. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? It is. But the upshot is, sorry everybody. Oh boy. It almost seems like it's just going to happen whether we like it or not. The more we kind of grow as a people and grow technologically and in intelligence, we seek out other people to interact with and trade with and become more prosperous with. And if we do it peacefully, then prosperity follows. That seems to be a huge part of not just the Bronze Age, but also what emerged from the Dark Age that followed after the late Bronze Age collapse.

Yeah. It's like a big cycle. But if it is a big cycle, then it makes you nervous because then that means we're due for a collapse at some point. Yeah. Unless we've become so resilient and redundant in our system that we are going to avoid a collapse from now on. I don't think that's right. I don't think we've reached that yet, but I think it's possible to reach that. Did you touch on any of this in the end of the world with Josh Clark? I don't think so. No, not really. Thank you for that plug, though. Sure. You know, I listened to about half of those. It was too smart for me.

B.S. It really was. I can't listen to this guy's voice. No, it's not that. What about, there's one more Chuck that we have to touch on. It's climate change. It's a big deal. It's a big enough deal that it's possible it drove the collapse of our first attempts at civilization. So there's not necessarily a lesson of what to do in there, but at the very least it's like a, hey, pay attention to what's going on. Yeah. And we've seen, you know, when natural disasters happen, large groups of people moving to another place en masse. I mean, those are sort of more micro examples of the bigger picture that happened back then, but that's what happens.

Yeah. Pretty cool. And sometimes people stay. Yeah. Some people make it the people who like it really hot and wet. Yeah. Not me. No. You like it cold, don't you? Like, genuinely. I love the cold weather, but I don't like, you know, six month winters. It's not like I'm having any desire to move to Minnesota and endure that stuff, but I do love cold weather. It suits me.

That's great. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, since Chuck was talking about how cold weather suits him, that triggers the collapse of this episode into the dark age of a listener male. All right. I'm going to call this, oh boy, crossword puzzle follow up. This is a very dark age. This is the episode where people don't like us even having the most minor disagreements. I know. I mean, I had people writing in there like, you need to get rid of Chuck.

That's smug SOB. It's crazy. I was like, geez, I hope I'm not on that stand of ice. No, you're not. Of course not. Some people just have opinions that are out playing additional. So here's a couple of things here from two people. Hey guys, love the show is excited to hear you talk about crosswords. Josh talked about how all crosswords are symmetrical and Chuck said today's was not.

I thought it was cool because I distinctly remembered the New York Times February 16th, 2023 was not symmetrical. What? After Chuck and Josh took a second look, Chuck saw he was mistaken and the crossword did have symmetry. So the episode was probably recorded on some other day. All of this to say asymmetric crosswords are very rarely published, but if they are, they likely have some trick or rebus in order to solve it. We didn't talk about rebuses in the show. No, but you wanted to, right? Did you want to mention that what that is? Yeah, a rebus is something I didn't know about when I started out, which is put you at a very distinct disadvantage.

Yeah. Because it's when you include multiple letters in a single square. And John Hodgman told me about it and I was like, well, how are you supposed to know? He said, well, once you know it's a thing, you might be on the lookout. If you're like, for sure, you know a clue, but it's not fitting. And I was like, well, how do you even do that on a phone? And there's a little rebus button. Oh, yeah. I never knew. Well, it's on like the second keyboard, like the one you go to for numbers and symbols and things.

Yeah, what does it look like? It says rebus. Oh, really? I've never noticed that before. Well, it's only when you're doing the crossword. Oh, okay. It just pops up. I got you. So anyway, that was from Alec.

And then this is from David. And we got a bunch of other people that explained why I was getting tripped up, because what you were describing was radial symmetry. Okay. Yeah, right. Which is rotational symmetry. If you rotate an empty crossword 180 degrees and it looks the same, I was looking at, I think there are four types of symmetry. I was looking at whatever the one is called, maybe it is called mirror symmetry. You don't remember?

Mm-hmm. Where it's the exact same on the left and right. And that's why I was like, no, it's not. I'm looking at it. So you were describing radial symmetry. And David from Snowy Montreal wrote that along with a bunch of other people. Yeah. And that helped me feel better that I wasn't crazy.

And now I know there are four types of symmetry. Yeah, the one that includes all four types is very pleasing. That's why they call it super symmetry. Is that really? No. Oh, okay. I think super symmetry has to do with string theory. And I'm not sure.

We should do an episode on string theory once. Would you be willing to give it a shot with me? Right after I retire, you can do that one. Deal. Well, thanks a lot to Smart Alec and Smart David for writing in to let us know what the deal was and why we were miscommunicating. And everybody, calm down. Chuck and I love each other. Don't worry about that.

Jerry, so calm down. Agreed. If you want to send us a listener mail, you can send it via email to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The Manowal Caves. I say the Lord works in mysterious ways.

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