Patrick Wyman – författare

"Lost Worlds convinces us of the value of slowing down to recognize the tremendous diversity of the human past. But he presses hard against the conclusion that there was any direction or pattern behind its complexity." —The Wall Street Journal“A spellbinding tour de force!” —Walter Scheidel, author of What Is Ancient History?“This is non-fiction storytelling at its finest.” —Eric H. Cline, author of 1177 B.C.The creator of the hit podcast Tides of History offers a new look at humanity’s deep past, showing us how our world was built not by inevitability, but by trial and error on a global scale.There’s a familiar story about us humans: we went from hunting and gathering to farming, wandering bands to villages and cities, clans and chieftains to states and kings. But Lost Worlds offers a new narrative of humanity’s deep history. Here beloved podcast host Patrick Wyman focuses on the 10,000-year span between the end of the Ice Age and the decline of the Bronze Age—the period when civilization as we understand it emerged, introducing social hierarchies, urbanism, complex political organizations, and the written word.In this nuanced retelling, human progress is no longer a straight march from caves to cities: Farming didn’t always replace foraging, villages didn’t automatically spark agriculture, and cities didn’t necessitate rigid hierarchies. For thousands of years, humans merely improvised. By the end of the Bronze Age, the world had become unrecognizable: mammoths and giant sloths replaced by cattle and sheep, scattered nomadic bands replaced by millions living in cities, and farming on nearly every continent. Wyman argues that the rise of states and steady food production wasn’t inevitable, but rather, the outcome of countless choices that reshaped the planet and made us who we are today.Combining cutting-edge science with gripping storytelling, Lost Worlds explores:A Sweeping New History of the Ancient World: Discover how early societies rose, adapted, and collapsed across thousands of years of human history.The Archaeology Revolution: Ancient DNA, climate science, and new excavation methods are revealing how prehistoric people lived, migrated, and fought.From Ice Age Hunters to Early Civilizations: Follow the dramatic transformation that led from nomadic foragers to farming, cities, and powerful states.Why Societies Rise—and Fall: Learn how climate change, migration, population growth, and conflict shaped the fate of early civilizations.

In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, THE VERGE tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short-term.As told through the lives of ten real people -- from famous figures like Christopher Columbus and wealthy banker Jakob Fugger to a ruthless small-time merchant and a one-armed mercenary captain -- THE VERGE illustrates how their lives, and the times in which they lived, set the stage for an unprecedented globalized future.Over an intense forty-year period, the seeds for the so-called "Great Divergence" between Western Europe and the rest of the globe would be planted. From Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic to Martin Luther's sparking the Protestant Reformation, the foundations of our own, recognizably modern world came into being.For the past 500 years, historians, economists, and the policy-oriented have argued which of these individual developments best explains the West's rise from backwater periphery to global dominance. As THE VERGE presents it, however, the answer is far more nuanced.