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Civilizational History
21mins
Archaeologist Eric Cline has spent his career forensically reconstructing why the Bronze Age collapsed, and the answer is far stranger and more unsettling than a single catastrophic event.
22mins
Historian Eric Cline illuminates the 400-year period following ancient collapse that shaped the modern world.
No civilization, no matter how successful, can last forever. What does the non-detection of intelligent aliens mean for our own longevity?
In this excerpt from The Breath of the Gods, Simon Winchester explores how the Sumerians first named the wind and shaped our early understanding of the natural world.
The latest season of the "Revolutions" podcast blends history with science fiction to tell the story of the Red Planet's rise.
19 rooms. 1,636 square feet. 1,800 years of history.
9 minutes of cruel history may cure the anti-progress delusion.
Although human beings arrived on Earth just ~300,000 years ago, we've transformed the entire planet completely. Here's how we did it.
During the industrial era the cost of artificial light fell off a cliff — and the road to illumination was paved with ingenuity and slaughter.
A small Ohio town tried to escape America’s addiction to rectangular grids. It didn’t last long.
With the invention of the leap year, the Julian calendar was used worldwide for over 1500 years. Over time, it led only to catastrophe.
A basement renovation project led to the archaeological discovery of a lifetime: the Derinkuyu Underground City, which housed 20,000 people.
Decades ago, a disaster left three million acres of land uninhabitable and killed between 85,600 and 240,000 people. Chernobyl? No. Banqiao dam in China.
12mins
There are a few theories as to why we’ve never found other intelligent life in our Universe. Physicist Brian Cox walks us through them.
Today, many Maya sites are polluted with toxic levels of mercury. The contamination likely originated from cinnabar paints and art.
Wealth concentration among elites was common in ancient nations, but the scale on which it took place in Egypt’s 18th Dynasty was unprecedented.
Seneca thought the use of ice was a "true fever of the most malignant kind."
Advances in ancient DNA analysis gave researchers a new way to trace the movements of peoples across Eurasia.
The architecture and infrastructure found may well have required the greatest amount of skilled labor of any construction from the same time period in the entire continent.
The ancient Maya enjoyed filling their teeth with gemstones. A new study reveals how the procedure was done and how it didn't kill them.
Experimental archaeology is the practice of recreating past events using knowledge and tools available at the time. Sometimes, it involves elephants.
OmnesViae is a modern route planner based on the roads of the Roman Empire.
Most cities reeked of death, defecation, and industrial waste. Still, focusing only on stench means turning a blind eye (or nose) to the many other smells that helped shape human history.
In the shadow of the Shard, the mosaics help paint a picture of Roman London.
Although saying the wrong thing could often get you killed in ancient civilizations, history shows that the ideal of free speech has deep roots.
We are generally taught that there is an arc of history — an inevitable path of progress that leads to modern society. Maybe it isn't true.