History Is in Your Nature--And Vice-Versa, Part 1

Take a walk on the wild side with your historian host as we unearth some of the big-picture insights of environmental history. Forage in the wilderness, stroll around a giant pie, and hear about what ancient folks did for a living. You’ll also find out why you can’t build enormous pyramid-like buildings without things like beer, bread, kings, priestesses, and pants. And you’ll discover how an ancient, fantastical story about magical beasties and a man who lives like a gazelle can still help us to understand some genuine things about the real past. Most important, learn why you need history in order to really understand humanity’s connections to the natural environment.

You can find the sources for this episode along with lots of other good stuff at findyourselfinhistory.com .

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | S2: Ep4 | Doug Sofer

History Is in Your Nature—and Vice-Versa, Part 1

[Cold Open]

Hello and welcome to another 100% all-natural episode of that podcast about how history helps everybody better understand the strangeness of now.

Man, what a long day! It’s almost like having a full-time job and doing a podcast all by yourself while trying to have something vaguely resembling a life can wear you out.

Who’d’ve guessed?

So folks, after a long, busy day at work—just historicizing and historimuhcating all day long—I could really use a break.

Luckily, Maryville College where I work has a special little forest I go to sometimes to clear my head.

It’s called “The College Woods.”

Sure that name’s a little on the nose, but it’s fine.

Hey Listener-Person! Why don’t you join me on my little hike today?

[Footsteps]

[Narrating more quietly, slower—quieting down to a whisper:]

Okay so we’re walking now over to one of my favorite sittin’ spots on the little creek that runs through the College Woods.

Aaaand here we are.

[long sigh & long pause]

Ahh. Wilderness.

[15-20 seconds of forest, woodpecker & blue jay sounds. Wild noises continue with narration]

Man, I love getting out into the woods—hanging out in natural places.

And  College Woods is 140-acres of protected forest—which is pretty big, isn’t it?

[contemplatively]

Wow. 140 acres.

Isn’t it?

Wait. Is it?

You know, I’m not really sure.

Now that you mention it, how would we even know if that’s a lot of acres of protected woods? And how would we be certain if we’ve done a good job protecting it?

Let’s think about that.

Is the forest the same size as other forests around?

Is it as big as it used to be, or is it shrinking?

Are these the same kinds of trees that were here a century ago? Are there more or fewer woodpeckers? How did all that kudzu, Chinese privet and other Asian plant life get here? And just as important, when did it get here?

You know what? I think the answer—once again—comes down to history.

[Aside] What a strange coincidence that it’s always about history.

Sure, it’s great to live in the moment and to enjoy a hike in the woods. But in some ways you can’t really understand the current state of the natural world unless you have some kind of knowledge of the past.

Understanding change over time is critical to really understanding the significance of these woods—or really any other bit of what we might call a ‘natural’ place.

So let’s do an episode about that—part of exploring what’s known as environmental history.

Today we’re doing the first part of a two-part episode called “History Is in Your Nature—and Vice-Versa.”

Along the way, we’ll talk about hunting. And gathering. And Mesopotamian ziggurats.

And a giant pie.

All the while, we’ll think about how history keeps us from losing the forest for the trees when it comes to understanding natural spaces.

And yeah, I would totally understand it if spending all this time in the woods made you feel kind of squirrelly.

But don’t scurry away. As a professional historian, I’m trained to help you branch out into new terrain.

My name is Doug Sofer. And it’s in my nature to be a weirdo. Just. Like. You.

[Theme song]

If you enjoy this podcast and have got a couple of spare bucks to chuck, become a Patron of Past Peculiarity and get gnarly swag. Go to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors for more deets.

Presenting Paleolithic Pie People

There’s a whole sub-field called environmental history.  

Environmental historians investigate historical evidence—mostly stuff people wrote down—to better understand how past peoples connected to the natural world.

The intro to historian Dan Allosso’s open-source textbook American Environmental History describes it even more succinctly:

“[QE]Environmental History is about looking at the past as if the environment matters.[/QE]”

Some environmental historians explore how different peoples in different specific regions, communities or countries, interacted with their environments, in different ways, over different spans of time.

But there are others who examine the whole globe and try to understand humans’ relationship with nature in the big picture, over the long haul.

And what those world-environmental historians have taught us is this:

If the human species had its own social media account and we had to describe our recent relationship with nature, we’d have to check off that box that says “it’s complicated.”

One of the points I want to make today is that You Are A Weirdo [divebomb]

—is not only the name of this podcast, but it’s also a really good way to describe how human beings live in the natural world today, when compared to how we lived in the distant past.

And I mean the really distant past.

In fact, let’s explore an age when even an ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat would have seemed like a new, futuristic technology.

Because as we’re about to see—it kind-of is new.

Here I’ll show you. Join me on another hike—this time on top of a giant pie.

[crunching footstep sounds—excerpted from FootstepsOnSnowshoes_0Lic—452021__kyles__footsteps-snowshoes-old-wood1-forest-melty-crusty-deep-snow-slow-speed-good-crust-crunch-detail1.flac @ freesound.org]

[Wooshing wind blowing in background too]

[QUOTATION FROM TRAILER] “…naturally at this point savvy listeners will probably be wondering: why on earth are we walking on a pie crust. The answer has to do with that ziggurat we were just talking about. And with the industrial revolution.”

All right; I’ve got some graham cracker crumbs in my socks, but it looks like we’ve made it.

Welcome to what is to the best of my knowledge the world’s first-ever audio-only pie chart!

Here’s how it’s going to work. The different parts of the pie we’re walking on will represent the different ways that humans have interacted with nature over time—especially in terms of how people got the stuff they needed to survive—like food, shelter, clothing, energy, and so forth.

Each different way of getting those necessities from the environment—is going to be represented by a different sound—it’s the equivalent of having different colors on a visual pie chart.

The first way of life we’ll track on our pie chart is called hunting-and-gathering. It’ll be represented by this sound:

[Play two measures of HG sound]

Next is intensive agriculture. It sounds like this: [play two measures of agriculture sound]

And last is industrial production. [play two measures of industry sound]

So which one of these ways of getting stuff from nature lasts the longest? 

We’ll walk around on the pie crust and play the corresponding sounds. 

Each second of walking represents ten thousand years of time.

Here we go. We start with hunter-gatherers as we walk around our giant pie.

[Play HG sound for 19 seconds.]

That was 19 seconds—representing very roughly some 190,000 years of the human past as hunter gatherers—from about 200,000 years ago to about 10,000ish BCE.

Next came intensive agriculturalists—including the folks who built ziggurats who we’ll talk about soon.

[Play 1 second] Yeah, that was only about a second—roughly the next 12,000 years or so.

And finally comes the time on earth when human beings made life-sustaining things in factories—that is, since the Industrial Revolution: [play for .02 seconds].

Did you even hear that? Let’s play that sound again. [repeat]

Yeah, so that was just two one-hundredths of a second—just the very most recent 200 years of human history.

Wow, that’s pretty short.

In fact, the environmental historian J.R. McNeill claims in his book called Something New Under the Sun that since the industrial revolution really got going, we human beings have

[QE]“…undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the earth”[/QE].

In other words, in the big picture of history, the way we interact with nature today—by mass producing things in modern factories—is a new and radical change from how things worked before; we’ve fundamentally changed how we connect to the earth.

The normal way of doing things is hunting-and-gathering.

Meanwhile, surviving through intensive agriculture—growing enough crops to build cities—is pretty new.

But it’s industrial manufacturing that’s the real novelty.

It’s so brand-spanking-new—and weird—that we’re barely able to understand its long term consequences.

Let’s take a look at all three of these ways of life in the next part of the episode.

[separator music]

Three ways of being human: Normal, new & super-weird

Let’s start by talking hunter-gatherers.

Most of what we know about hunter-gatherers comes from the very small populations who still live this way.

We’ve learned, for instance, that they don’t only hunt and gather for a living.

Many also fish, or catch mollusks and other slower-moving invertebrates, or trap various kinds of animals—large and small.

And they also forage for wild or semi-wild plants and funguses.

You get a semi-wild plant when you sow wild seeds; guaranteeing new yummy vegetation in the future.

The main point is that hunter-gatherers are far more sophisticated than is commonly believed.

They maintain very sophisticated relationships with their environments, enabling healthy diets & lifestyles.

They also don’t even seem to work harder or for longer hours in a typical day than, say, farmers, or steel workers, or corporate lawyers do.

And as any outdoorspeeps will tell you, hunting, fishing and trapping take a lot of skill. These are skilled hunters, able to pull off highly impressive, intellectually challenging, and athletic feats—all with home-made equipment.

As for gathering, these folks are all more or less what we today would call naturalists—able to identify a staggering variety of plants & other resources.

You have to know for example which kind of reddish berry will keep you and your family alive and healthy; which kind might act as medicine; and which kind can kill you.

For instance, pretty much all of the luscious berries of the various shrubs in the genus Daphne contain toxins that will blow out your intestines; swell up your face, throat and tongue; and basically irritate you until you’re in a coma and/or die like a bloated pig.

Mother nature can be a mean mother if you snack on her fruits without knowing what you’re doing.

Hunter-gatherers know what they’re doing.

All right, so we know from our useful pie chart that this was the main way that people lived for almost all of human existence. So what changed? Why aren’t we all still hunting and gathering?

The answer is that while hunter-gatherers can do many things, they cannot sustain large populations.

This lifestyle requires carefully rationing & protecting resources in multiple locations, all while staying on the move before you consume too much than the natural environment can provide.

It’s simply harder to raise multiple babies when everyone has to be moving; so hunter-gatherers have to have fewer kids—or everybody dies.

All of which means that while these folks have a very well-thought out and sophisticated relationship to their surroundings, they were and are not able to produce massively populous societies.

That ability came only after something like 200,000 years of modern human existence, when our species figured out how to engage in intensive agriculture.

This slow transformation began around the 10,000s through the 8,000s BCE—give or take a millennium or two—in places like Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Persia.

Over later centuries, intensive agriculture would catch on too in Greece, Nubia in today’s Sudan, Central Mexico, the Andes in South America—along with a few other major centers around the globe.

Actually, archaeologists are continuing to find evidence of new intensive agricultural populations in surprising places—like the Amazon rainforest. There’s a recent episode of the PBS show Nova called “Ancient Builders of the Amazon” that documents these extraordinary discoveries.

The point is that we still have a lot to unearth about how people transformed from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists.

Regardless of where it happened, these folks who stopped moving with their resources—who are sedentary—fed themselves with large networks of farms and became experts at sustaining larger populations: That’s where the intensive part of intensive agriculture comes in.

For each person cultivating food, you could feed more than just one person.

For example, there were ancient civilizations in which each farmer could produce enough food for one-and-one-tenth people. That meant that for every ten farmers, you could have one person who didn’t have to be involved directly in food-making at all.

What could those non-farming-folks do? They could specialize in many of the kinds of things folks do today:

They could become political leaders—like kings

Or they could become religious specialists—like priests.

Or they might become professional military leaders—like generals.

Or professional potters. Or textile-manufacturers. Or mathematicians. Or beer-brewers. Or civil engineers. Or—best of all—historians.

Because some of those gigs were more prestigious than others, this occupational specialization led to societies organized like that lasagna I mentioned in an earlier episode this season about democracies & republics—with many layers. Prestigious leaders were at the top, slaves and other forced laborers were on the bottom, and there were lots of people in between, too.

Archaeologists and historians know a lot more about intensive agriculturalists than we do about hunter-gatherers. That’s because compared to hunter-gatherers, farming civilizations could produce and leave behind a lot more stuff that doesn’t decompose.

Those artifacts include massive buildings like pyramids—and ziggurats.

If you got your knowledge of history in alphabetical order and have so far only gotten through the letter ‘Y’ (and are therefore 25 26ths done) I need to explain what a ziggurat is.

It’s basically a big pyramid-like structure from Mesopotamia—the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—more or less the modern day borders of Iraq.

By the way, every once in a while, you’ll find Internet people who tell you that every place on earth that built pyramid-like structures must have had Egyptian architects working with them—even when there’s no evidence whatsoever that ancient Egyptians ever visited, for example, the early Maya.

But let’s think about that claim for just a sec: If you’re going to start building large structures, it seems to me that going with pointy-at-the-top-and-gigantic-at-the-bottom is the logical way to go. It’s just a whole lot easier to build than pointy-at-the-bottom-and-enormous-at-the-top.

It’s a reasonable first-enormous-building-shape for any civilization to figure out how to build—without the magic Egyptian space-man construction company teleporting in to assist.

Ancient Mesopotamians lived a whole lot closer to Egypt than did the Maya. But unlike the most famous of the Egyptian pyramids which are more or less built as a single, giant triangular solid—ziggurats are built up in steps—like a staircase.

I’ll throw a photo of one at findyourselfinhistory.com if you’d like to see one.

When you do that, you’ll see that ziggurats are impressive. But not just because they’re big or cleverly built—though they’re definitely both.

They’re also impressive because most people who lived on earth prior to the Mesopotamians did not have a relationship to nature that would have made it possible to build one of these things.

Intensive agriculturalists just did things in entirely new ways.

Looking at a photo of a ziggurat, you can see a lot of environmental impact—not only what’s in that picture, but also what’s not there.

It’s made out of over a million bricks, but you can’t see the pits or mines where the clay and mud were dug up from.

And you can’t see the transportation networks required to move those bricks, and scaffolding, dirt, and other materials from elsewhere that got moved to the ziggurat site.

And you can’t see the domesticated animals, or the wagons, that moved those materials. Or the massive pasture lands that those animals grazed on, or the huge acreage of farmland required to feed all the laborers over many, many years of building. Or to feed the people who directed those projects.

You can’t see how waterways got rerouted through all kinds of sophisticated water engineering techniques to irrigate those farms. 

Or the hundreds of other ways that the Mesopotamian landscape was altered to support the building of these enormous political-slash-religious structures.

All in all, these newer intensive agricultural civilizations left a lot more behind than had their predecessors over the previous hundreds of thousands of years.

And that’s only what we know about these folks from thinking about the buildings they left us.

It’s archaeologists—not historians—who specialize in analyzing these kinds of physical things like ziggurats and pottery shards and fire pits and garbage dumps, among many other kinds of fun stuff.

We historians on the other hand interpret the past mostly based on writings.

Sure, some historians also analyze artwork, and some physical artifacts too.

And historians might also use oral testimonies of eyewitnesses to more recent times—or other spoken accounts passed down through multiple generations.

But most of us mostly read things.

Meaning we historians still owe our careers to the intensive agriculturalists because they’re the ones who seem to have first started writing things down.

We’re even more thankful to the Mesopotamians because they smooshed their writings into clay tablets—or carved them into stone—which allowed their thoughts to survive into the present-day.

[Aside] I talk about the history of writing in an earlier episode this season called “You Repeat Yourself You Repeat Yourself.”

One very important Mesopotamian writing is also one of the first-known stories ever to be written down: The Epic of Gilgamesh.

It comes from the city of Uruk in the ancient Mesopotamian region known as Sumer.

As a straight-up piece of fiction, it’s got a lot going for it:

There’s Gilgamesh himself learning how to become a better person and a better king.

There are gods and goddesses; giant butt-kicking animal-monsters; an epic flood; dreams predicting the future; and lots of other exciting elements that make for a great story.

And yet when you really do history you learn how to read even a piece of fiction for its historical content.

That does NOT mean we take the stories about, say, fighting with a giant, semi-divine bull from Heaven at face value.

But stories contain assumptions and details about daily life that reveal a tremendous amount about the people who wrote them and the places and times they’re from.

For example, the epic mentions Gilgamesh’s friend, Enkidu—who first shows up as a kind of naked, shaggy animal-man from the wilderness who eats and drinks by grazing and sipping water alongside a herd of gazelles.

He eventually becomes a complete, civilized man.

Part of that process involves getting seduced by a priestess of temple of the goddess Ishtar.

Speaking of occupational specialization: The job of temple priestess was apparently an honored profession but seems to have at least occasionally included some prostitution duties.

After a weeklong sex romp, Enkidu drinks some beer, eats some bread, and puts on some clothes for the first time in his life. And that point, he becomes a man.

It’s a reasonable guess that early Mesopotamians understood Enkidu’s actions as the kinds of things that modern, civilized human beings would do.

All of the actions he undertook in this story to become a full-fledged person, distinguish Enkidu from someone with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Hunter gatherers do eat wild grains, but they don’t have time or the specialized, permanent facilities to grind out fine bread flour.

They also can’t really make beer—at least not in significant quantities.

They don’t spend enough time in one place to engage in the complicated process of growing, sprouting and roasting barley—a process called malting—and they can’t really carry around the enormous clay fermenter pots that the Mesopotamians and other urbanites used for ancient brewskies.

And though most modern hunter gatherers wear clothing, there isn’t time to make elaborate textiles. So Enkidu’s putting on clothing too is a sign of Mesopotamian civilization—of using natural resources the way that only intensive agriculturalists could.

In short, Mesopotamians saw bread, beer, clothing, and even becoming special friends with a temple priestess as signs of being a civilized, complete person.

We could go on; the Epic of Gilgamesh mentions many other ways that people interacted with their environment too. 

They chop down cedar trees in the spooky cedar forest in order to make buildings; there is abundant mention of lions and wolves as if they’re commonplace; It talks about many temples and shrines; and many different professions, each with different connections to the environment.

And it makes multiple references to the wilderness as something outside of civilized life. As something that these urbane Uruk-ians had broken away from and saw as exotic—and strange.

In a sense, then, many aspects of this story—and many, many other writings and other evidence from this region and time—demonstrate just how much people had changed their relationship to the natural world.

Let’s reflect on what all that means as we wrap up this episode.

Conclusion

Let’s go all the way back to our first question.

How can we know how healthy a natural place—like the College Woods— really is? How do we know when it’s in its normal state? Or when it’s become different—and weird?

The answers to those kinds of questions require an understanding of [echo effect] change over time [/echo]—which is what you start to grasp when you really do history.

When you look at—or take a walk on—a chart about how humans have lived, you learn that today—that is, the past two hundred years or so—is truly a strange time for our species and for pretty much every other species that we come in contact with.

We interact with nature in ways that are entirely unprecedented in most of our past. We’re using natural resources, and mixing up the globe in new, exciting, and terrifying ways.

As hunter-gatherers, we lived in relative harmony with nature. 

Then this thing called the agricultural revolution—also known as the neolithic revolution—fundamentally and irrevocably changed that relationship and allowed for new, large, populations—concentrated in cities—to exist and thrive on the earth, thanks to intensive agriculture.

In so doing, it changed our relation to nature.

But nature hadn’t seen anything yet.

For next time, we’re going to examine how the industrial revolution made the past 200 years exceptionally bizarre—even when compared to those new-fangled, ziggurat-building, city-building, immortal-epic-story-authoring people in Mesopotamia.

And we’ll do all of that while examining the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of a jolly, red-nosed fellow. Something related to what we’ll call for now “S. Clause.”

[theme fading in] Hang tight for Part Two.

Outro & credits

Got questions? Want to connect in conversation about how we connect to nature?

Add your piece of the pie by leaving a comment on the blog page connected to this episode over at findyourselfinhistory.com . Or just send me an email at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com . I hope to hear from you!

You may find the references to the historical sources, sound files, and other information used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

Want to support this program and also get certified as an official historical weirdo? Head over to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to find out how to become a Patron of Past Peculiarity.

Special thanks to professor of religion Phillip Sherman for help finding out about the most recent translations of Gilgamesh.

Since he and I both work at the same college, it just seems natural to make yet another unsolicited plug for my full-time gig Maryville College.

That’s Maryville College. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu

[Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast represent my are mine alone and do not necessarily represent anybody else’s opinions at Maryville College—or anywhere else on God’s green earth.

This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, narrated, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2024 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. Learn more about Matt at trimboli.com .

And hey! You’re still here! Well did you happen to hear those roaring sounds at the end of the College Woods sequence during the intro?

The first person to send an email to doug@findyourselfinhistory.com who can correctly identify who or what made that noise will win a free “Certified Historical Weirdo” plastic medallion!

Thanks for listening all the way to the end.