January 13, 2026 • 64 mins
It's 2026. Fellow Conspiracy Realists, stuff is getting weird. This inspires Ben, Matt and Noel to return to a Classic episode about the last time a civilization fell: Sometime between between c. 1250 - c. 1150 BCE, civilization as we knew it simply... collapsed. Once-thriving empires fell one after another. Trade routes disintegrated. Literacy plummeted. Mysterious raiders from the sea pillaged city after city. In less than a century, the known world became a distant dream. So what exactly happened? Perhaps more disturbingly, what can the Bronze Age collapse tell us about the modern day?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So civilization comes and goes right, Empires rise and fall.
For the most part, we know what happened, and we
know approximately win with the benefit of retrospect. However, back
in twenty twenty, we started digging into a very strange,
unsolved historical mystery, not just the death of one person,
(00:24):
but the death of an entire series of civilizations.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
The whole century lost to time. Time.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
That's right, the Bronze Age.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
The mystery of the.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Bronze Age collapse. What exactly happened, and perhaps more disturbingly,
what can the Bronze Age collapse teach us about this
our modern day.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Let's roll the.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Tape from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History
is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now
or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
A production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control decade. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. I've always thought from
a very young age that the world is ending for
someone somewhere every day, and it's a thought that becomes increasingly,
(01:41):
as we say, top of mind in these the days
of our modern era. And it has a lot to
do with what we're investigating today. Today we are attempting
to solve a mystery, perhaps with your help, fellow conspiracy realist.
It is an old one. It is the very definition
of a cold case. You see about three one thousand,
two hundred years ago ballpark, the world of human civilization
(02:05):
as we know it collapsed, It imploded, and even now
in twenty twenty, the full causes of this collapse remain unsolved.
We have to wonder what would civilization be like today
if the civilization of the past hadn't been crippled all
those millennia go, And what does this collapse mean for
(02:29):
our present day? Maybe the best place for us to
start is what exactly is the Bronze Age? So here
are the facts.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yeah, the Bronze Age refers to a period that's generally
described as the third phase of development of material culture
among ancient civilizations in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
So you have the Stone Age which preceded the Bronze Age,
the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods collectively known as the Stone
Age and then the New Stone Age. And it was
(02:59):
a massive information because before the Bronze Age, civilization was
essentially a bunch of tiny city states that were ruled
by a heavy handed, oppressive politico religious priest or casts
of priests, kind of like a ruling class. And this
really shifted when the Bronze Age came into being.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah. Yeah, food was at a premium in a lot
of these pre Bronze Age societies, and it limited the
growth of both technology and population. It made us play
on hard mode in the Game of Civilization. Don't sue us, Sidmire.
We're big fans.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
We really are if you've ever played a lot of
those games. For me, it was Age of Empires that
really got me to understand the difference between some of
those early ages of civilization and now you know we
sit in Is this the Silicon Age? What do we
call this age? I don't know.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Has it been coined yet?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I guess I haven't really seen it.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Maybe it's up for debate. Maybe there's like someone we
can submit ideas to, like like millennials and xenials and
all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I haven't really seen it. Thrown around.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, I don't know. There are a plethora, meaning too many.
There are a plethora of proposed names for this age.
The anthrops scene would be one we could throw around.
But in the world of material culture, through that lens,
perhaps there is one. Perhaps silicon is a good one.
Perhaps that information age is another thing, because information is
(04:33):
a substance of its own.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Perhaps the new Dark Ages. No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Technology is obviously great, but that's the thing too, Ben
to your point, I mean technology and development of new ideas.
That's a huge impetus for cultures developing and pushing forward
because material is essentially a technology. When you start thinking
outside the box or outside the rocks, I just pulled
(04:58):
that off the top of my head, you get these
new ideas that are very important to actually make new
things that help you hunt and that help you keep
order in your civilization without depending on superstition as much.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Right. Yeah, So there's there's a there's already what could
be called kind of a catch twenty two for civilizations.
So to for a civilization to grow, to innovate, and
to expand, it needs to have some sort of leisure
time with necessity compelling the focused use of that free time.
(05:38):
But to to arrive at that free time, we have
to have the tools that allow that to exist. And
my tools also mean socio political things. So what we
see with the Bronze Age is we see something. If
I'm always using cliches like catch twenty two, it'd be
good to use a cliche like chicken in the egg.
Did fortuitous weather lead to more leisure time, which then
(06:01):
led to farming innovations, which led to an agricultural revolution,
creating a surplus of food that led to the existence
of specialized, specialized jobs and careers, which led to innovations
and technology, innovations in religion and government and so on.
Or did someone just figure out a better way to
(06:22):
farm themselves. It's tricky to extract these things, but we
know regardless of the order in which those things occurred,
we know those occurred and created what we define as
the Bronze Age. It was a brand new world, a
golden dawn for humanity in what's called you know, sometimes
the Near East, the Mediterranean, North Africa, Egypt, and so on.
(06:46):
And this was primarily due to the stability of these empires,
which can to be was primarily due to the surplus
of food at the beginning. It allowed for the creation
of big, bustling, multi cultrual cities instead of walled off,
isolated city states. And then it allowed these states to
(07:06):
institute treaties, to institute rule of law that went beyond
the stone walls of a citadel. So for the first
time in human history, as far as we know, as
far as we know, for the first time in human history,
we had international trade occurring on a regular, sustainable basis.
It was no longer quite as much of a pipe
(07:28):
dream to say, hey, let me get some hippopotamus ivory
from this place people are calling Egypt or whatever, and
just kind of pray it shows up in six months. No,
they were able to do this. Things were flourishing. This
is also, you know, it's called the Bronze Age because
it's the first period in which metal was used in
(07:51):
very widespread ways. Like as you said, Nol, Before then,
we were really really good with stone and a lot
of stone Age stuff. We built a ton, but comparatively
a lot of Stone Age stuff we built. It was
pretty durable. You can see some of it today if
you travel out to a museum or if you travel
to where some of these monuments might still stand. But
(08:13):
the Bronze Age itself, I don't know tough. It's tough
to say when it began for which people like in
China and Greece, for instance, If we define it just
by that use of metal, we're talking three thousand BCE,
and that's so long ago, it's more than five thousand
years ago. But if we're talking about a place like
(08:35):
what we call Britain today, it didn't start till nineteen
hundred BCE. The technology is disruptive, but it's not ubiquitous automatically.
It has to spread. So anyway, with all that, all
those caveats at astis Bronze Age thirty three hundred BC,
let's say three thousand, thirty three hundred BC to twelve
hundred BCE. Twelve hundred BCE is pretty much regarded as
(08:59):
the cutoff, and we'll see why. There's a reason we
have like a more definitive grasp of that for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
And you know we're talking about international trade and how
important that was for the Bronze Age. It seems very
elementary right now, so very normal just to have countries
and cities across the world gathering the things that are
near that city or close enough to that city or
place of civilization, and then sending some of that stuff
(09:29):
elsewhere so that we can so that they can then
receive something from somewhere else. Right. But as Ben was saying,
this was such a new thing. One of the one
of the big occurrences here is that there was one
particular place where you could find this stuff that was
called ten And we're going to tell you a little
(09:50):
bit more about that in the future there, but there's
one particular place where you could get it, at least
a good supply of it that then had to be
loaded onto donkey and then scent wherever it was going
to go to be traded with some other place. Right.
And tin is important because it creates bronze, right, or
(10:11):
it's really interesting you combine tin and copper, I believe
is that is that correct, guys, Tin and copper become bronze.
These are the two metals that you need to create
this durable thing that becomes the cornerstone of civilization and
everything from uh stuff to eat out of, to tools
to fix other things, to the weapons. And that's the
(10:34):
really the big thing here. The weapons were made of
this substance I have.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
There's one theory about this that is woefully unproven and
probably never prove it. But it's a cool story if
we want to put ourselves back in that time period.
How did people figure out bronze? It's a big question,
like did how how on earth did someone say, ah, tin,
you like it, you love it, you want some more
of it, and you it will copper. It's amazing, guys,
(11:02):
let's start a war. It's kind of like the story
about the discovery of cheese. The discovery of cheese story
is that someone was hauling milk in a saddle bag
and the continual churning and chafing of that made cheese
during their journey. No way to prove it.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, it's the same story with a lot of firsts, right,
like the first person to eat an oyster or a mushroom.
It seems like a really outlandish proposition when you think
of what is actually going into this act, and it
obviously required a lot of trial and error. Maybe gave
men eating poisonous mushrooms and dying off, and then people noticing, oh,
maybe don't eat that mushroom, eat the one that's delicious
(11:39):
and tasty, or maybe makes you hallucinate, because that's fun too,
But with this thing, it's such a process in and
of itself. The idea of smelting, like when you melt
this stuff down and to either maybe something spilled in
and they realized it made it a cool color, or
like it made it stronger. I'm wondering what point along
the maybe it was a whoopsie kind of moment, did
(12:01):
they realize, oh, this is actually a really solid idea.
Or maybe someone saw the person doing it and then
did it themselves and did it better again. It's interesting
to think about.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah, So that's what That's what I was getting to
is the is that there is a myth like that
with UH, or a theory we can call it if
we want to put a tie on it, about the
discovery of bronze, and the idea is that this, like
I was originally saying, let's picture ourselves were at a campfire, right,
we have copper, and we're hanging out. We're playing with
(12:31):
our copper or something, and we don't know that the
rocks lining our campfire are naturally rich in tin. So
how amazing is it to see the UH? To see
the rocks and the and the copper upon them start
to melt and mold together. While you're just sitting by
(12:51):
the fire, you know something's up, you know something's happening.
That is like the cinematic origin story of bronze. And
with this, I mean it's probably Again even if that's true,
we can't prove it, but we know people were always
experimenting with stuff as soon as they had that very
valuable free time. Again, right, So what we did see is,
(13:15):
even if there wasn't this aha revelatory moment of watching
this reaction occur accidentally, we know people immediately started experimenting
with it. We have to remember that before this point,
the most common tool in the world and as far
(13:35):
as we know in the universe was the stone axe,
which is better than your hand. I guess would be
the tagline for it. But now that they're able to
cast bronze, they're seeing that it has numerous qualities that
make it superior to either copper or tin. And like
you said, Matt, it becomes a game changer when people
(13:59):
realize it can be used as a weapon far superior
to stone. So there's still they don't perfect bronze in
a day, just like Rome wasn't built in a day.
We know the use of copper was already well known
throughout the area, and it was beginning to infiltrate the
cultures of Europe, which were still running a little behind.
They were still in what we would call the Stone
(14:22):
Acte days. During the second millennium BCE, the use of
bronze and the casting and the smelting, the creation of
it was increasingly improved. We see the emergence of what
is called true bronze. People are making bronze weapons, and
we know this because we can do a little bit
(14:42):
of forensic work, even in places you might not expect,
like Cornwall, England.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, not only the place known for you know, having
lego pieces wash up on the beach. It in fact
is also what you were indicating at the top of
the show, Matt. It has massive deposits of ten. It
gave them this kind of stronghold in terms of you know, civilization,
in terms of material evolution. I guess uh to be
kind of a source for that, because it was so
(15:10):
rich just in them hills that there was ten.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Oh for sure. And again a lot of the tin
carrying from the deposits there was by donkey for a
long time, but you have to remember it right around
this time. Guess what's invented the real game changer. The
wheel gets invented around this around this age.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
And I want to jump in here before anybody uh
reaches out, reaches out too me or to us with
a with a question about Incoan civilizations and why there
was quote unquote not a wheel invented in those civilizations.
The invention of the wheel is uh is a novelty
for many ancient cultures, unless they have domesticated livestock to
(15:58):
pull it. Also, the giography of a lot of those
mountainous cultures in South America did not lend itself to
a person hauling a wheelbarrow. So these people are not
somehow cognitively superior. They were just able to make a
tool that worked with the geography and the biology of
(16:20):
the creatures they had already conquered.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, because they had oxen, and you could they've figured
out how to attach a plow to the back of
a car with an oxen. So I mean, you've got wheels,
a large animal that can pull a lot of weight,
and there you go. Now you've got plenty of food
because you can plant way more.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Farm in revolution. Take that Norman borlog.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, yeah, that's right, wheat, get out of here, wheat.
So we then we know around one thousand BCE there's
a new thing that surfaced, and we kind of talked
about it a little bit, but that's the ability to
forge a different metal iron. That's you know, when you
(17:05):
get the Iron age, and when iron comes around, it's like, hey,
you know, Bronze was cool and everything. We appreciate you.
You did a lot for us, but I'm here now,
so bye. It really was the beginning of something completely
different when the forging of iron came around.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
However, there's more to this story. It's not as clean
cut as a brand new form of metal coming out
like a brand new iPhone, right, you see, for some reason,
instead of transitioning peacefully over a gradient, over a spectrum
over time to the Iron Age, multiple Bronze Age civilizations
(17:49):
and cultures just imploded. And what are we talking about.
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor, and
we're back. The Bronze Age did not end with a whimper,
(18:09):
as the old quotation goes. It ended with a bank.
It popped sort of abruptly, with the near simultaneous collapse
of multiple Bronze Age civilizations, the biggest empires in the world.
Modern day Egypt is like a survivor of this enormous
(18:29):
human catastrophe. Imagine now, for example, in the modern day,
imagine if China, the US, Canada, India, and Russia all
fell within less than a century, within fifty years of
each other, they became dreams of bygone empires. That's a
(18:49):
modern day version of exactly what happened during the Bronze Age.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Yeah, so major Bronze Age civilizations like Mycenaean Greece, the
Hittitere in Turkey, and ancient Egypt fell within a comparatively
short period of time. These ancient cities were abandoned. The
trade routes that we talked about they were so important
were abandoned as well, were lost, and literacy even declined
(19:15):
throughout that region. So more than just a little over
thirty two hundred years ago, they all went from being
huge power players in the world economy of the time,
world class civilizations, to essentially we refer to today as failed
states or more so even non existent states. And you
(19:36):
can today find crushed skeletons and scattered remnants and debris
from you know, artifacts of the time that remain. But
that's about all there is left of these once incredibly
influential and powerful cities.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, you can see, you know, where there was something
once and archaeologists, like like you said, have have found well,
I don't want to spoil anything here, Ben, but archaeologists
have found on a specific layer of soil of ground
essentially all in the same layer where all of these
(20:11):
various cities all went seemed to be with fire, some
kind of great battle or great terrible thing that occurred
in all of these cities within a very short time span.
It's very odd, very very odd.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, within as little as the span of a century,
which is just like a fingersnap. It's the span of
his century is like a micrometer in the timeline. But
we know that other civilizations have disappeared in the past,
maybe not at this level, but very large populated places. Kahokio.
(20:50):
We did an episode on that. Ancient cultures in Southeast Asia,
like modern day Cambodia, South America as well. Some of
those things remain at least part the unexplained. But in
most of those cases, what we're seeing is a single
community or a single culture, a single civilization being affected.
(21:10):
We still have serious questions about what could have made
so many massive, successful cultures self destruct all at once,
especially when we know that they had a vested interest
in maintaining a status quo to a degree, supporting one
another to enable the whole to rise. And we're struggling
(21:33):
to figure out what happened. Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Oh oh jeez.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
So over the centuries, people have been guessing. Multiple scholars
have put forward multiple arguments of varying credibility to explain
this disturbing historical mystery.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
You know, well, yeah, the first one we you know,
I mentioned they're kind of as a spoiler or a precursor
to this, that there is a layer of ash in
a lot of these citadels, in what we would call
cities back in the day that existed around the same time.
And one of the theories that's been put forth is
that some kind of natural disaster caused these, you know,
(22:16):
various cities and civilizations to collapse simultaneously, and one of
those would be like a massive volcanic eruption or perhaps
an earthquake or series of those two things occurring. You know,
agent people didn't have any way to communicate, at least
through technology. That is, a disaster was coming from some
(22:37):
far flowing part of the world. But it doesn't mean
that the disasters couldn't impact them all simultaneously, right, And
there are few There are some Egyptologists that have dated
back the Hecla volcano. It's Hecla three volcanic eruption that
was in Iceland. It occurred in eleven fifty nine BCE.
They're saying that possibly it caused this these civilizations to collapse,
(23:00):
but not because of the eruption itself, because the volcanic
eruption may have caused a famine that affected this large
swath of area.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Yeah, we have some you know, we have evidence from
Egyptian sources. We know under Ramsey's three, during the wider
overall Bronze Age collapse, it's called the Late Bronze Age collapse.
We know that the rulers of the time were addressing
civil unrest and crime and it was tied into famine, right,
(23:34):
It was tied into migration to people becoming refugees. And
I love what you said, man, Just because they didn't
see an eruption in Iceland doesn't mean it didn't screw
up the connected weather systems equally less food. And remember,
part of the reason people were so successful in the
(23:54):
Bronze Age and this part of the world was entirely
because of that surplus of food and the positive domino effect,
the positive feedback loop that creates. Now we're seeing the
opposite its evil twin. We know an eruption of that
size could definitely impact agriculture, but I mean, scholars still
(24:15):
of course argue back and forth about the degree to
which that's affected it. Right, You'll hear a lot of
people say, well, that one eruption couldn't spell the end
of multiple empires. It just didn't have the size for that.
And even if there is this butterfly ripple effect, it
wouldn't have lasted long enough to destroy those empires by itself.
(24:39):
But we have to keep in mind. Volcanic eruptions can
also be linked to earthquakes, and earthquakes can also do
a massive amount of damage in a short amount of time.
They can also maybe be linked to tsunamis, so flooding
or saying as you can get a combo meal for
natural disaster, it doesn't always have to be ordered a
(24:59):
la carte.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, two meets two sides, one bread exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
I mean, can't some of those eruptions produce so much
ash and nastiness that it literally blocks out the sun
like for a while.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
That's what we're talking about. You could essentially disrupt the
weather systems in a large area, if not the entire planet.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
Or it's also you know, the ability for crops to
get you know, the nutrients they need from from sunlight
and all of that.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
That's a really good point. Yeah, because imagine you're you're
a farmer, and you know the religions of this time,
the ones that are authorized by the ruling class. When
it comes to the lower class, they're entirely meant to
keep you farming and feel like you're vaguely in trouble
and struggling. Right, it's cultur rules again. And and so
(25:51):
what do you do when this sky goes black? Someone
has messed something up. You're not a volcanologist. Volcanologists don't exist.
You're trying to grow food, and as politicians are so
fond of saying, today, feed your family. And then just
like you said, no, the sky goes black, No one
knows why. Perhaps, and then the rain disappears, right.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Or then the ground starts shaking.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Yep, and the crops are fallow.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
You just can't grow like you used to. There's a
geophysicist named Amos Nerve from Stanford, and he argues that
a string of massive earthquakes could have knocked down one
of these city states after another. You can pull up
I think there's a really cool Google Maps layer you
can pull up that will show you the Bronze Age
(26:45):
empires and you can see how his argument. You can
see how his argument proceeds that these cities fell one
by one to earthquakes. They didn't have FEMA, they didn't
have the communication or infrastructure resources available in the modern day,
so this could have brought those empires to a premature end.
(27:06):
He also and I thought this would be interesting to
historical scholars of the Bible in the audience. He also
argues that earthquake activity maybe the real life inspiration for
the biblical prophecy of Armageddon, that's the site of the
final conflict between good and evil. He says, you know,
(27:27):
the repeated destruction of the city Meguido probably ast and
this is almost nervous opinion. He says it inspired the
author of Revelation to write his prediction of the apocalypse,
like this guy saw an earthquake, experienced it, live through it,
said this is going to happen again, And now you
(27:49):
know he is a co author of one of the
most famous books of all time. But that's a cold comfort,
you know, it doesn't get you out of an earthquake.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah. Yeah, So we're telling you where talking about these
various things we've you know, we've gone through volcanoes and earthquakes. Well,
what if for one reason or another, it wasn't those things,
and it was just a lack of consistent rain water
for the crops that were so important at the time.
What if there was a massive drought that ended up
(28:20):
causing chaos essentially within the civilizations themselves. And you know,
is that even a possibility? Well guess what we have
good news for you. Intelligent people have been studying it.
Mm hmm, that's right.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
There was an article in the Journal of the Institute
of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University where researchers led by
a palaeonologist, Dafna Langett, put forth this very theory.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, yeah, exactly Langa argues that drought led to the
collapse of at least the ancient Southern levant and that
cascaded out to the rest of the known world like
this is we were talking about the known world at
this time. Uh. Palenologist is sort of a word for
(29:10):
the word of the day for us. I don't know
about you, guys, I didn't know this was a job.
It's someone who studies ancient pollens. So gtfo with your
modern pollms.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Oh man, it reminds keeps. Oh that's so specialized. I
love it that someone goes, I grow up. I want
to study ancient pollens.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
All right, I'm sorry, what do you want? What ancient pollens? Yes? Okay, No, No,
you can't do it.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Please, I really feel passionately about it.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Dad, there's no way. How are you going to even
find it? Get out of here?
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Well, you know you dig it up.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
I guess right. No, that's a good question, dad, Ben.
How do you find ancient pollen samples?
Speaker 1 (29:48):
I'm so glad you asked buddying a polynologists. Uh. You know,
a lot of people are going to tell you it's
a weird dream. And I've come to your career day
to let you know that all dreams are kind of weird,
and there's no reason that you should knock this one
out of the running. Look at all the pollen around today.
It had to come from somewhere. Start digging, Start reading,
(30:10):
start digging.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
If you.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Take you know, I don't want to get I don't
want to get lost in the weeds here kids on
how you actually find these things. But you can. If
you dig through the layers of soil in places that
had pollen producing plants right on a regular basis, then
you can take samples of those the same way you
take samples of a tree right at different chronicles in
(30:38):
its own dendo chronology, and then you can find what
Lengett calls the fingerprints of plants pollen grains or the
fingerprints of plants. They can help scientists reconstruct the ancient
natural vegetation past climate can do. So I say to
(31:01):
you in this improv scene, I say to you, go forward,
start collecting all the pollen you can, and remember that
one day we don't have to just think about you
as a pollinologist. Now we can think about those who
come after you. So save the pollen for them. You
may end up being there carl And aeus you may
end up being there. Charles Darwin.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
Well, it's so interesting though, because I mean, these are fossils,
this is part of the fossil record. They're just really
really tiny fossils. And you're right, they act as kind
of like a fingerprint in the same way maybe ice cores,
only obviously much much smaller do for you know, studying
the layers of collected ice, and that core tells a story,
(31:45):
and poland does the same thing, and it's a story
about past climates.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah, and we can paint a pretty accurate picture. Of course,
the only way we can know whether it's one hundred
percent accurate is to travel back there. And unless you
believe that paper by that recent undergrad there's not a
way to time travel. Yet. That's a story frustration, I think.
So right now we know that we know that this
(32:13):
research shows a very specific, very sharp decline in the
vegetation that up until that point was common. The scientists
led by Langett found that in twelve fifty BCE, the
traditional plant life of the Mediterranean, the Late Bronze Age,
(32:34):
seemed to just take a nose.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Dive, just be.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
And in its place, they saw plants that you would
find in semi desert areas.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, and that was in like carab trees, pine trees,
oak trees, they're out there. And they also noticed that
there was a huge drop in olive trees, you know,
and that is a major thing that is being produced
out for food sources and for other reasons. And there's
(33:06):
an there's an indication that horticulture in general in that
area at the time was on the decline, right, And
really what the team came away with is that the
region was in the grip of serious regular droughts within
a drought season that lasted for several seasons essentially. And
(33:30):
the dates of researchers came up with via all this
pollen analysis that they went through, they correspond pretty darn
well with a few remaining historical records that you know,
scientists and humanity has of that period, and they all
a lot of those, by the way, mentioned shortages of grains,
So you know, all this this seems to be, like
(33:53):
Ben said, painting a pretty clear picture of no matter
what was going on, this was a sign magnificant factor. Right.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
It's spooky to build a puzzle of this size. We're
finding puzzle pieces in the twentieth century that connect with
puzzle pieces from five thousand, like from thousand, three thousand
so years ago. That's a lot of work. That's one
hell of a jigsaw. And the thing about these scant
(34:23):
historical records is that they're pretty informative for what they
are also pretty cryptic, and they don't just mention shortages
of grain. We're going to pause for word from our sponsor,
and as long as our civilization doesn't collapse in the
next couple minutes or so, then we'll return and put
some more puzzle pieces of the Bronze Age collapse together,
(34:53):
and we're back off air. We were having a little
conversation about our earlier. Our earlier A great question. What's
the name for this age?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Noel, you proposed the plastics age. We talked about information
age because I do think information is a substance.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Silicon age was the first one.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Matt put forth.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
A Silicon age, yeah, or computer age. Some people are
calling it new media age, which all goes to show
we don't we don't know what future historians are going
to call it. They might just latch onto one thing
and they might be calling it the Ferby Age, like
the most technologically significant invention of these ancient benighted people
(35:33):
was our one true god, the Ferbie. And that'll be
how we're known by our descendants on Mars in the moon.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
And well, when when it ends up being the age
that leads to the destruction of all civilization, maybe we
could refer to it as the idiot age, the apocalypse age,
I don't know, just.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Call it, just call it the last age. Yeah, yeah, that.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Old, that old, that old joke. I think it was
from one of the chans about Handlejack. Do you guys
remember that you can't say his name or he diss anyway,
got me? It's okay, I mean, but yeah, the zoom
froze and he got me. But what's what's so interesting
about that name aside is that, you know, we have
(36:17):
to remember any fans of literature, one thing that's infuriating
is that, uh, while backs uh some time ago, now
as far back as a Bronze age, someone got the
bride idea to call a certain school of literature modernism,
and what do they call the next one postmodernism? We can't.
(36:40):
We can't name stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
It's the same with music genres. It's like you got rock.
Then you got post rock, which is basically just like
minimalist rock with it's got guitars, doesn't really have many changes,
it's a lot of it's like ambient music and rock
and roll had like a weird slow child. Or are
the same with punk and post punk? What do you even?
(37:02):
I guess post punk is just punk that's a little
more intelligent. I don't know, it's interesting all of those terms.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
You guys, when do you think we're going to reach
the post war stage? Do you think that's going to happen?
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, yeah, when humanity is Actually no, it'll still happen
after humanity is gone, because by that point, the machines
and algorithms we've made will continue fighting an entirely automated war.
But eventually they'll need repairs, and if they are successful enough,
it's self repairing. Then if they extend past the solar system,
(37:36):
the death of the sun won't matter. So I guess
by the heat death of the universe will definitely be
in a post war. The economy, the economy, Yes, the
universe is ended, but we fixed the economy. Good news,
bad news, right, which, First, you're right, the war is
a fundamental piece of this, and that's why I really
(37:58):
appreciate one of the things point out there, Matt, when
you said immediately, of course, some bright bulb, well we
can't say bulb. There there were no light bulbs. Some
some bright candle around that bronze discovery campfire said we
could we could use this to do amazing things. We
(38:19):
could build plumbing, you know, we could like probably make
some medical improvements, or we could kill like everybody, you guys.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
That's a last resort, though, gotta be a last resort.
Surely there's another way, right, And.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
Everyone's like yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, totally, yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Totally just not me, right, I mean, I'm good, Okay.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah, you're great, dude, you like put together the fire,
come on, man, So so uh yeah, let's just do
a show with historical reenactments that we make up. We
catch that one time behind the scenes. By the way,
it was still great. It was such a great idea.
(39:12):
I know, it was not drunk history. It was weirder anyway.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
War.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
The reason we're talking about it is because it is
unfortunately a very common process in human history, the fall
of a status quo or a stable government for some reason,
regardless of how good or fair, or how terrible or
authoritarian that structure might be, it inevitably leads to violence. Right.
It's the equivalent of removing those painted lines, those silly
(39:42):
painted lines that we have on the interstate highways. They
actually do reduce accidents, not just as a visual aid,
but because they remind people of these intangible laws that
we all obey, because we feel as though they are
constantly applied, and of course they're not. Just in general,
people tend to agree that those are good things. So
(40:03):
now those laws are removed, and people then, just like
people now, started doing whatever they wish when those laws
were not in play, especially when they felt like they
were fighting for their own survival. That's why the collapse
of le bronze age is marked by what would be
described as an upticking crime in the modern world, and
(40:26):
that is a very diluted milk socet way to say it.
We're talking about is widespread pillaging, disruption of those precious
international trade routes, civil unrest, let's fight, Let's get that
bastard the king. He's had it coming to him and
I don't think his God is going to stop us
this time. War over diminishing resources one of the biggest
(40:49):
mysteries here that we may have to dedicate an entire
episode to is the emergence of a mysterious seafaring confederation.
You could call them known as the Sea People's. They're like,
they're like Matt Max esque raiders in this scenario, or
(41:10):
they're like in water World, they're like the Smokers. They
were going to these stable, relatively stable, but struggling fonts
of civilization, and they were just running through them and
then you couldn't catch them because they were back on
(41:30):
the votes. They were gone and on to the next city.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah, it becomes a pretty horrifying vision thinking about the
quote see Peoples, and I'll tell you why. In quick
shout out to the podcast Fall of Civilizations for an
episode they did on a similar topic here about the
Bronze Age collapse. They did a great job of explaining
(41:57):
the very small descriptions that exist out there for the
Sea People's, and it sounds weird. They it sounds, I
think the way they put on the podcast like a
monster from the deep. When you hear the Sea People's,
it sounds like, what are those merman? Is that what
we're talking about? Are we talking about something from you know,
(42:19):
creatures from below the water that emerged and attacked these
towns and pillaged them. No, we're not, at least I
certainly don't think so. But there is so little evidence
about what they actually did and so few descriptions that
it becomes I don't know, more of a nightmare than
I guess it needs to be.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, because we know they're like the descriptions that we
find are sometimes just terrifies. The translations are like these
plaintive things from one authority to another saying, look, uh,
my armies are in the capitol that is way way
(43:00):
in land right let's say the Hittites, for example, and
then my ships whatever would pass from my naval force
is way over here, far to the west of me,
and they can't get there in time. There's an exact
quote where one authority says, thus, the lands are prostrate
(43:21):
to these raiders. There's no one to defend them, you
know what I mean. There's not like a police force
at this time that can stand up to reavers like this.
And the thing is that the cause of the difficulties
of transmitting both information and resources, they would these empires
would often find out after the fact that someone had
(43:45):
destroyed a trade hub or a city, or a or
a holy place, and this this devastated the many of
these empires. The Sea Peoples did lose campaigns at times,
(44:05):
but they kept coming. Ramsey's three I think we mentioned
he's got some He's got some inscriptions that people have
recovered in Thebes, and in those inscriptions in mortuary temple,
you can find sources recounting at least three different legitimate
victories against the Sea Peoples. But again that's Egypt. One
(44:28):
thing you need to remember about Egypt in this period
is that Egypt kind of survived. There's still a country
called Egypt. It's not a country called, you know, Home
of the Hittites.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
But I will say that is a number one on
my list or what they should have been called, just
like hyphenated maybe or maybe it all want work called Home.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Of the Hittites.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Love it and I like that as one word. Yeah,
so we again we can we can say that there
is a wealth of insightful and value valuable literature and
research into the ultimate identity of what is commonly called
the Sea People's the reason that everybody speaking English and
(45:10):
French definitely has been using this phrase for so long
is that it comes from a French egyptologist named Emmanuel
de Roge who kind of coined the term, and then
someone else popularized it and it started circulating in the
cannon because it answered a question a lot of scientists
and unrelated fields had had for a long long time.
(45:33):
They're also the explanation, they're one of the main explanations
for that common disaster, soil. I guess we could call
it disaster sediment, right, the one groove of the historical
record that is foo bar as the acronym.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Well, that showed clearly there was a massive fire here
and bodies were just in streets and you know, in
houses at the same time. It's really disturbing stuff. So
we've kind of been looking at these things individually is
as causes, right, But as we know just throughout history,
(46:12):
just because you're dealing with one disaster one bad thing,
doesn't mean another one can't come up. Right, we're dealing
with that right now. We've got a we've got three
handfuls at least of disasters that are hitting the globe
right now. And why would it be any different during
the Bronze Age.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Right, Yeah, because we've been we've been perhaps a little
a little misleading when we're when we're presenting these problems,
we said, natural disasters like ongoing droughts, like earthquakes like volcanoes,
human problems like war, or the fact that humans are
(46:56):
often just inherently greedy, bad.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
People, or you just uh, what unrest within cities right? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (47:05):
And competing for things? Right? Why should why should my
children die such that yours can live? You know, that's
not an even trade to me, says the other person
with kids.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
So each of these explanations alone, taken by their themselves
in a vacuum. They've all happened before, right, A lot
of them are happening now, as you said, Matt, in
the modern age. Uh. But these often were, These were
happening in the Bronze Age. But they weren't all happening
at once. Because these all happened, and these cultures, the
(47:38):
world's first stable, long term international trade network survived, weathered
every storm. But experts are arguing it's very clever that
what happened is humanity met a storm and had never
seen before, met a perfect storm, and met an insidious
geopolitical domino effect that probably yes began and with the
(48:00):
natural world. I think we can determine that. But when
we see it, it's got spooky parallels. Right, So climate change,
whether it's an eruption, whether it's something abrupt like a
natural disaster in eruption, whether it's a slow cycle that
maybe has nothing to do with humans. It leads to
(48:21):
political instability that leads to a rise in crime. I mean,
that's why the historian Robert Druz calls this the Late
Bronze Age collapse. He calls it the worst disaster in
ancient history, more calamitous than the collapse of the Western
Roman Empire. And people are saying, like, these sea people's
didn't just you know, wake up and say, yeah, you know,
(48:43):
I know we usually fish, but what if we just sacked.
What if we just sacked or something like that. What
if we guys, guys, what if we get into pillaging,
like in a big way and the other people the
boat didn't look around and just go yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Maybe they didn't. I'm gonna start a gang. It's called
the Sea Boys, and we're gonna I.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Was just gonna.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
I was just gonna put forth the Why can't we
just simplified and just call them the sea people, you know,
the people from the sea. I just I think that's
just a little more straightforward. The idea of the sea
peoples just makes it seem too too academic. Let's let's
let's have some fun with it.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
But you're making a yeah, yes, you're making a great point.
Then they didn't just decide to do it. It was
because they were facing some kind of issue, likely from
the natural world, like you're saying, like a drought, unable
to feed their families, and they had to go and
find something. And when they couldn't trade or they couldn't
find a viable way to do it peacefully, the only
(49:48):
option then was to take by force, or at least
perhaps it was thought that the only option was to
take what they needed by force. Again, the parallels freaking
me out a little bit exactly.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
I mean, think about it. So, this the positive domino
effect we mentioned earlier. Right, stable populations are creating more food, right,
and so those they don't naturally want to go out
into the wild. And I would hope if people are
people are creatures of convenience and necessity, right, So it's
(50:24):
relatively anomalous for a group to just decide to kill
people for fun rather than to kill them for resources
or something like that. So these stable populations during the
heyday of the Bronze Age, they are dependent on producing
food or importing food for their own consumption and then
(50:45):
possibly exporting it across trade networks for other things they
can't get, And so when they can't grow crops, they
cannot participate in that trade network, and most importantly, they
cannot feed themselves. That's the whole reason they're living in
this area, right, So they have to look for some
other means of sustenance. But the problem is, unless they're
(51:08):
the very first people who became these migrants and refugees,
other people have already hit the road. Other people have
been down these tracks before, been down this road before,
if you're a Hank Williams senior fan, and they have
done the same. And they already knew about these pre
existing trade routes. They already knew where the ports were,
they already knew where the cities were. The people who
(51:30):
were already pushed into a nomadic existence are therefore either
laying weight in established migration routes and waiting to pounce
on merchants and families and refugees, or they hopped in
their boats, perhaps driven by necessity, and decided that they
instead of waiting for something to be given to them,
(51:52):
they would take it by any means necessary, And morality
doesn't really enter the equation when you're talking about survival.
Think about it on a worldwide scale. Now, we think
about cities and empires as individuals, right, we know that
city states don't really have friends. Empires don't really have friends,
They have alliances. So these entire, these entire groups of
(52:16):
people are shifting into militarism. They're already probably pretty militaristic,
but they're protecting their own defenses, right, their upper classes
and their mid tiers from pillagers. And they're also trying
to send out their military forces to wage wars, wars
of acquisition of other resources, perhaps wars of protection against
these mysterious sea peoples who keep getting away. And it happens,
(52:41):
this is the scariest part. It happens very very quickly,
you know what I mean. These longstanding treaties are thrown away.
Egypt retreats into itself, right because it needs to tamp
down domestic unrest. You have to fix your own house
before you fix someone else's.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
Just think about what we're saying and describing here, just
overlay it onto the twenty first century. Who started start
in the late nineties and just like, oh god.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
It was during this time someone figured out how to
make iron.
Speaker 2 (53:18):
Oh there you go. Guess what, I guess what the
military has. They've just come out. They're saying that they
think fusion is definitely going to be a thing now.
They're like just talking about it openly. Yeah, fusion, you know,
for power, fusion for power. It's only gonna be for power.
It's gonna be fine. Are you serious? Yeah? Yeah, man?
And oh it's all good. The first round of fusion bombs,
(53:43):
we just gotta wait for that. That's that's somebody making
the first iron and going, oh.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
Those are those are fusion bombs for peace?
Speaker 3 (53:53):
But then we get some who gets them? You know,
who gets the fusion bombs? We gotta I don't know.
It's the same with like these weapons. You know, it's
all about who who figured it out first, and then
you know, people backwards engineer things. I'm sure both sides
of these these conflicts had similar weapons, but maybe the
upper hand goes to the ones that figured it out
a little better. I don't know it's interest.
Speaker 2 (54:15):
And then they get all the oil, and you know,
it lasts until it all burns out, and and there
we go.
Speaker 1 (54:25):
Yeah, and this is uh there, this is this the
spookiest part of this story. No, if we want to
give it a little bit of an epilogue, Yes, the
area entered dark age. You know, the closest thing we
had to global civilization full stop collapsed. Uh And you know,
Nol you raised the point earlier about the collapse in education.
(54:48):
Literacy bottomed out, right, who has time to learn to read?
I am trying to avoid these pillagers and possible cannibals.
I just threw cannibals in there.
Speaker 3 (54:59):
And now it's who has time to read? I'm being
distracted by these cat videos? Yes, I mean I was
joking at the top of the show about this maybe
maybe being the new dark I don't know. It makes
me think of that movie Idiocracy, which is all about
a breakdown in education, a breakdown in intelligence, leading to
a breakdown in civilization and society as we know it
(55:20):
because people can't solve problems anymore. People don't think about
how to fix these, you know, existential threats that face
them and that's when this really hits the fan.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
And this is our Daniel mol Right, this our epilogue.
Eventually the seasonal rains return, and experts believe that this
eventually again led the descendants of some of those uprooted
groups we talked about to settle down once again. But
make no mistake, history was forever and permanently stunted by
(55:53):
this collapse. We have no idea where the world would
be if this had not a curd right like, part
of the reason we are making this podcast now, part
of the reason podcasts exists, is because thousands of years ago,
the world as we knew it burned the down like.
(56:14):
That's true, And most importantly, we can't mistake this from
some for some like long ago story from some dusty
tome or I guess some dusty time before books, some
dusty tablet or a hieroglyph. We should, and I think
we must, take this as a parable. It's a warning
(56:36):
about the fragility inherent to all human civilizations. Civilization is
a covenant. It is an agreement, and it only works
so long as the majority of people agree that it works. Otherwise,
it's just like a thing we thought was a good
idea at the time, like you know, police Academy for it.
Speaker 3 (57:00):
As any Has anyone been watching the new season of
Fargo It just started the other night.
Speaker 2 (57:05):
Oh no, I can't wait.
Speaker 3 (57:07):
Well, I'm gonna This isn't really a spoiler, but it's
sort of about warring groups, waring factions, and they have
this ritual and this agreement where they essentially one faction
whether it's the Italians and the Irish or African American
gang comes in in the present day of the show,
which is like the fifties versus the Italians, and they
have this ritual. We're in order to kind of make peace,
(57:28):
quote unquote, they exchange a youngest child and each of
them raised the other's youngest child.
Speaker 2 (57:35):
And again there's ritual.
Speaker 3 (57:37):
Involved in that, and it's an inherent like agreement and
a compact. But do you know people don't always hold
up their endo the bargain, and otherwise if they did,
you wouldn't have a show. It's the same with history.
You know, people often, you know, make these agreements and
then decide, you know what, actually, I think we're just gonna.
Speaker 2 (57:55):
Kill all of you.
Speaker 1 (57:56):
And to this, like what we're talking about when we
talk about this dissolution of society is we're proposing essentially
what's called a general system's collapse. The argument is that
we made so much progress as a species during the
Bronze Age that we built a system that was too
(58:17):
intricate to fix, like we didn't know how to fix
it when parts of it started breaking. If it was
if it was disrupted, then we didn't have anybody with
the vantage point to say, okay, look, what we need
to do is to first off, maintain the trade routes.
Let's do that. Everybody was panicking because the building was
(58:39):
on fire and we had built everything except for a
fire escape basically socio politically, and so now we see
that the things that happened and the order in which
they occurred, they exposed existing flaws in the system. The
reason that is important is because it can happen again. Right.
(59:00):
One of the questions that I think I think we'd
have to ask is do you think experts are missing
another explanation for the bizarre story of the late Bronze
Age collapse, this weird murder mystery of a civilization, And
what do you think we can learn about it in
the modern day? Like, what what can we do we
are The easy argument that a lot of people would
(59:22):
make is that we are somehow better armed because we
have vastly more sophisticated information technology and dissemination. But how
much of an advantage is that really, Like to your
point about cat videos, Noel, how much does knowing does
the potential of knowing almost everything mean that it will
(59:44):
be applied in a useful way? I think that's a
logical misstep that.
Speaker 2 (59:49):
We may Yeah, oh, it absolutely is.
Speaker 3 (59:51):
I think we've seen that too much information leads people
to silo their education and and and and use do
what only seek out what only suits them as opposed
to you know, because you had to You used to
have to work for knowledge. You used to have to
work for you know, this access to it was a
very exclusive thing, and now everyone has it and nobody
appreciates it.
Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
So what do you guys think is the safest way
to ensure your family's survival in any coming disaster collapse
of our society? Is the safest way to become a
nuclear fusion engineer?
Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
Maybe? Or just play play the video game Superliminal, Like
right now, everybody, go play the video game Superliminal and
start thinking the way that game forces you to think,
and then I think we'll all get to a place
where we can solve any problem that's ever presented to us.
Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
I haven't heard of Superliminal.
Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
Well, if you haven't heard of it, I'm not I'm
not getting paid to tell you this, but you should
play it. For sure. It is a puzzle game, and yes,
it's it's it forces you to change your perspective literally
and figuratively, which is why I think it's important. It
could be a Yeah, that's why it could be applied
here because you know, to to find find answers to
(01:01:14):
some of these major problems that we face, as in,
you know, a global civilization right now. We just have
to think about things differently, and it's very difficult for
humans to do that.
Speaker 1 (01:01:24):
And what are your copy mechanisms, folks? What are your
heuristics for what has sometimes been called the end of history?
I think, well, I think we'll soldier on because I
have to. But but let us let us know what
do you think we can learn from the Bronze Age collapse?
Do you think something like this could slash would happen now?
And if so, how would it play out? We would
(01:01:46):
love to hear from you. You can find us on
the internet as long as that thing is still around.
Hopefully We're on Instagram, We're on Facebook, We're on Twitter.
We recommend Here's where it gets crazy. Just join up
by saying typing in Nole's name or Matt's name, super
producer code name, Doc Holiday or super producer mission control
my name, drop me a pun, something that makes me laugh,
(01:02:11):
or just you know, in a witty way illustrates the
darkness of civilization.
Speaker 3 (01:02:16):
Yeah, and in the event that we do have some
sort of like escape from La esque situation where you know,
the Internet disappears and all electronics, well, this wouldn't really
work nevermind, forget it.
Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
You don't work with the landline.
Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
Well, okay, there you go. That's what I was getting at, Ben,
thank you for rescuing me. You can give us a
call on a landline, presuming that that infrastructure hasn't been
This is too depressant one eight three to three std
wy t K is that number?
Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Reach out to us. You can leave us a voicemail.
Well that part won't never met. Yeah, the voicemail won't
work in this situation.
Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
But you know what, this is all just we're just
spitballing here and everything's fine for now. Leave us a voicemail,
keep it roughly around three minutes so that we can
have a nice, concise story we can use on one
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let us know if it's okay to use your story
and play your actual voice on the show. And if
you want us to call you something specific or not
use your name or be anonymous.
Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
We're all about that. Love to hear from you. And
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(01:03:33):
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Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
And if none of that quite bags or badgers or
collapses your bronze age, as long as the as long
as the electricity is moving and the great sky, and
the sky stays there. You can always contact us through
a good old fashioned email address where.
Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
So civilization comes and goes right, Empires rise and fall.
For the most part, we know what happened, and we
know approximately win with the benefit of retrospect. However, back
in twenty twenty, we started digging into a very strange,
unsolved historical mystery, not just the death of one person,
(00:24):
but the death of an entire series of civilizations.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
The whole century lost to time. Time.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
That's right, the Bronze Age.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
The mystery of the.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Bronze Age collapse. What exactly happened, and perhaps more disturbingly,
what can the Bronze Age collapse teach us about this
our modern day.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Let's roll the.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Tape from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History
is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now
or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
A production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control decade. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. I've always thought from
a very young age that the world is ending for
someone somewhere every day, and it's a thought that becomes increasingly,
(01:41):
as we say, top of mind in these the days
of our modern era. And it has a lot to
do with what we're investigating today. Today we are attempting
to solve a mystery, perhaps with your help, fellow conspiracy realist.
It is an old one. It is the very definition
of a cold case. You see about three one thousand,
two hundred years ago ballpark, the world of human civilization
(02:05):
as we know it collapsed, It imploded, and even now
in twenty twenty, the full causes of this collapse remain unsolved.
We have to wonder what would civilization be like today
if the civilization of the past hadn't been crippled all
those millennia go, And what does this collapse mean for
(02:29):
our present day? Maybe the best place for us to
start is what exactly is the Bronze Age? So here
are the facts.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yeah, the Bronze Age refers to a period that's generally
described as the third phase of development of material culture
among ancient civilizations in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
So you have the Stone Age which preceded the Bronze Age,
the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods collectively known as the Stone
Age and then the New Stone Age. And it was
(02:59):
a massive information because before the Bronze Age, civilization was
essentially a bunch of tiny city states that were ruled
by a heavy handed, oppressive politico religious priest or casts
of priests, kind of like a ruling class. And this
really shifted when the Bronze Age came into being.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah. Yeah, food was at a premium in a lot
of these pre Bronze Age societies, and it limited the
growth of both technology and population. It made us play
on hard mode in the Game of Civilization. Don't sue us, Sidmire.
We're big fans.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
We really are if you've ever played a lot of
those games. For me, it was Age of Empires that
really got me to understand the difference between some of
those early ages of civilization and now you know we
sit in Is this the Silicon Age? What do we
call this age? I don't know.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
Has it been coined yet?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I guess I haven't really seen it.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Maybe it's up for debate. Maybe there's like someone we
can submit ideas to, like like millennials and xenials and
all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
I haven't really seen it. Thrown around.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, I don't know. There are a plethora, meaning too many.
There are a plethora of proposed names for this age.
The anthrops scene would be one we could throw around.
But in the world of material culture, through that lens,
perhaps there is one. Perhaps silicon is a good one.
Perhaps that information age is another thing, because information is
(04:33):
a substance of its own.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Perhaps the new Dark Ages. No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Technology is obviously great, but that's the thing too, Ben
to your point, I mean technology and development of new ideas.
That's a huge impetus for cultures developing and pushing forward
because material is essentially a technology. When you start thinking
outside the box or outside the rocks, I just pulled
(04:58):
that off the top of my head, you get these
new ideas that are very important to actually make new
things that help you hunt and that help you keep
order in your civilization without depending on superstition as much.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Right. Yeah, So there's there's a there's already what could
be called kind of a catch twenty two for civilizations.
So to for a civilization to grow, to innovate, and
to expand, it needs to have some sort of leisure
time with necessity compelling the focused use of that free time.
(05:38):
But to to arrive at that free time, we have
to have the tools that allow that to exist. And
my tools also mean socio political things. So what we
see with the Bronze Age is we see something. If
I'm always using cliches like catch twenty two, it'd be
good to use a cliche like chicken in the egg.
Did fortuitous weather lead to more leisure time, which then
(06:01):
led to farming innovations, which led to an agricultural revolution,
creating a surplus of food that led to the existence
of specialized, specialized jobs and careers, which led to innovations
and technology, innovations in religion and government and so on.
Or did someone just figure out a better way to
(06:22):
farm themselves. It's tricky to extract these things, but we
know regardless of the order in which those things occurred,
we know those occurred and created what we define as
the Bronze Age. It was a brand new world, a
golden dawn for humanity in what's called you know, sometimes
the Near East, the Mediterranean, North Africa, Egypt, and so on.
(06:46):
And this was primarily due to the stability of these empires,
which can to be was primarily due to the surplus
of food at the beginning. It allowed for the creation
of big, bustling, multi cultrual cities instead of walled off,
isolated city states. And then it allowed these states to
(07:06):
institute treaties, to institute rule of law that went beyond
the stone walls of a citadel. So for the first
time in human history, as far as we know, as
far as we know, for the first time in human history,
we had international trade occurring on a regular, sustainable basis.
It was no longer quite as much of a pipe
(07:28):
dream to say, hey, let me get some hippopotamus ivory
from this place people are calling Egypt or whatever, and
just kind of pray it shows up in six months. No,
they were able to do this. Things were flourishing. This
is also, you know, it's called the Bronze Age because
it's the first period in which metal was used in
(07:51):
very widespread ways. Like as you said, Nol, Before then,
we were really really good with stone and a lot
of stone Age stuff. We built a ton, but comparatively
a lot of Stone Age stuff we built. It was
pretty durable. You can see some of it today if
you travel out to a museum or if you travel
to where some of these monuments might still stand. But
(08:13):
the Bronze Age itself, I don't know tough. It's tough
to say when it began for which people like in
China and Greece, for instance, If we define it just
by that use of metal, we're talking three thousand BCE,
and that's so long ago, it's more than five thousand
years ago. But if we're talking about a place like
(08:35):
what we call Britain today, it didn't start till nineteen
hundred BCE. The technology is disruptive, but it's not ubiquitous automatically.
It has to spread. So anyway, with all that, all
those caveats at astis Bronze Age thirty three hundred BC,
let's say three thousand, thirty three hundred BC to twelve
hundred BCE. Twelve hundred BCE is pretty much regarded as
(08:59):
the cutoff, and we'll see why. There's a reason we
have like a more definitive grasp of that for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
And you know we're talking about international trade and how
important that was for the Bronze Age. It seems very
elementary right now, so very normal just to have countries
and cities across the world gathering the things that are
near that city or close enough to that city or
place of civilization, and then sending some of that stuff
(09:29):
elsewhere so that we can so that they can then
receive something from somewhere else. Right. But as Ben was saying,
this was such a new thing. One of the one
of the big occurrences here is that there was one
particular place where you could find this stuff that was
called ten And we're going to tell you a little
(09:50):
bit more about that in the future there, but there's
one particular place where you could get it, at least
a good supply of it that then had to be
loaded onto donkey and then scent wherever it was going
to go to be traded with some other place. Right.
And tin is important because it creates bronze, right, or
(10:11):
it's really interesting you combine tin and copper, I believe
is that is that correct, guys, Tin and copper become bronze.
These are the two metals that you need to create
this durable thing that becomes the cornerstone of civilization and
everything from uh stuff to eat out of, to tools
to fix other things, to the weapons. And that's the
(10:34):
really the big thing here. The weapons were made of
this substance I have.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
There's one theory about this that is woefully unproven and
probably never prove it. But it's a cool story if
we want to put ourselves back in that time period.
How did people figure out bronze? It's a big question,
like did how how on earth did someone say, ah, tin,
you like it, you love it, you want some more
of it, and you it will copper. It's amazing, guys,
(11:02):
let's start a war. It's kind of like the story
about the discovery of cheese. The discovery of cheese story
is that someone was hauling milk in a saddle bag
and the continual churning and chafing of that made cheese
during their journey. No way to prove it.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, it's the same story with a lot of firsts, right,
like the first person to eat an oyster or a mushroom.
It seems like a really outlandish proposition when you think
of what is actually going into this act, and it
obviously required a lot of trial and error. Maybe gave
men eating poisonous mushrooms and dying off, and then people noticing, oh,
maybe don't eat that mushroom, eat the one that's delicious
(11:39):
and tasty, or maybe makes you hallucinate, because that's fun too,
But with this thing, it's such a process in and
of itself. The idea of smelting, like when you melt
this stuff down and to either maybe something spilled in
and they realized it made it a cool color, or
like it made it stronger. I'm wondering what point along
the maybe it was a whoopsie kind of moment, did
(12:01):
they realize, oh, this is actually a really solid idea.
Or maybe someone saw the person doing it and then
did it themselves and did it better again. It's interesting
to think about.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah, So that's what That's what I was getting to
is the is that there is a myth like that
with UH, or a theory we can call it if
we want to put a tie on it, about the
discovery of bronze, and the idea is that this, like
I was originally saying, let's picture ourselves were at a campfire, right,
we have copper, and we're hanging out. We're playing with
(12:31):
our copper or something, and we don't know that the
rocks lining our campfire are naturally rich in tin. So
how amazing is it to see the UH? To see
the rocks and the and the copper upon them start
to melt and mold together. While you're just sitting by
(12:51):
the fire, you know something's up, you know something's happening.
That is like the cinematic origin story of bronze. And
with this, I mean it's probably Again even if that's true,
we can't prove it, but we know people were always
experimenting with stuff as soon as they had that very
valuable free time. Again, right, So what we did see is,
(13:15):
even if there wasn't this aha revelatory moment of watching
this reaction occur accidentally, we know people immediately started experimenting
with it. We have to remember that before this point,
the most common tool in the world and as far
(13:35):
as we know in the universe was the stone axe,
which is better than your hand. I guess would be
the tagline for it. But now that they're able to
cast bronze, they're seeing that it has numerous qualities that
make it superior to either copper or tin. And like
you said, Matt, it becomes a game changer when people
(13:59):
realize it can be used as a weapon far superior
to stone. So there's still they don't perfect bronze in
a day, just like Rome wasn't built in a day.
We know the use of copper was already well known
throughout the area, and it was beginning to infiltrate the
cultures of Europe, which were still running a little behind.
They were still in what we would call the Stone
(14:22):
Acte days. During the second millennium BCE, the use of
bronze and the casting and the smelting, the creation of
it was increasingly improved. We see the emergence of what
is called true bronze. People are making bronze weapons, and
we know this because we can do a little bit
(14:42):
of forensic work, even in places you might not expect,
like Cornwall, England.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Yeah, not only the place known for you know, having
lego pieces wash up on the beach. It in fact
is also what you were indicating at the top of
the show, Matt. It has massive deposits of ten. It
gave them this kind of stronghold in terms of you know, civilization,
in terms of material evolution. I guess uh to be
kind of a source for that, because it was so
(15:10):
rich just in them hills that there was ten.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Oh for sure. And again a lot of the tin
carrying from the deposits there was by donkey for a
long time, but you have to remember it right around
this time. Guess what's invented the real game changer. The
wheel gets invented around this around this age.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
And I want to jump in here before anybody uh
reaches out, reaches out too me or to us with
a with a question about Incoan civilizations and why there
was quote unquote not a wheel invented in those civilizations.
The invention of the wheel is uh is a novelty
for many ancient cultures, unless they have domesticated livestock to
(15:58):
pull it. Also, the giography of a lot of those
mountainous cultures in South America did not lend itself to
a person hauling a wheelbarrow. So these people are not
somehow cognitively superior. They were just able to make a
tool that worked with the geography and the biology of
(16:20):
the creatures they had already conquered.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, because they had oxen, and you could they've figured
out how to attach a plow to the back of
a car with an oxen. So I mean, you've got wheels,
a large animal that can pull a lot of weight,
and there you go. Now you've got plenty of food
because you can plant way more.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Farm in revolution. Take that Norman borlog.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, yeah, that's right, wheat, get out of here, wheat.
So we then we know around one thousand BCE there's
a new thing that surfaced, and we kind of talked
about it a little bit, but that's the ability to
forge a different metal iron. That's you know, when you
(17:05):
get the Iron age, and when iron comes around, it's like, hey,
you know, Bronze was cool and everything. We appreciate you.
You did a lot for us, but I'm here now,
so bye. It really was the beginning of something completely
different when the forging of iron came around.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
However, there's more to this story. It's not as clean
cut as a brand new form of metal coming out
like a brand new iPhone, right, you see, for some reason,
instead of transitioning peacefully over a gradient, over a spectrum
over time to the Iron Age, multiple Bronze Age civilizations
(17:49):
and cultures just imploded. And what are we talking about.
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor, and
we're back. The Bronze Age did not end with a whimper,
(18:09):
as the old quotation goes. It ended with a bank.
It popped sort of abruptly, with the near simultaneous collapse
of multiple Bronze Age civilizations, the biggest empires in the world.
Modern day Egypt is like a survivor of this enormous
(18:29):
human catastrophe. Imagine now, for example, in the modern day,
imagine if China, the US, Canada, India, and Russia all
fell within less than a century, within fifty years of
each other, they became dreams of bygone empires. That's a
(18:49):
modern day version of exactly what happened during the Bronze Age.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Yeah, so major Bronze Age civilizations like Mycenaean Greece, the
Hittitere in Turkey, and ancient Egypt fell within a comparatively
short period of time. These ancient cities were abandoned. The
trade routes that we talked about they were so important
were abandoned as well, were lost, and literacy even declined
(19:15):
throughout that region. So more than just a little over
thirty two hundred years ago, they all went from being
huge power players in the world economy of the time,
world class civilizations, to essentially we refer to today as failed
states or more so even non existent states. And you
(19:36):
can today find crushed skeletons and scattered remnants and debris
from you know, artifacts of the time that remain. But
that's about all there is left of these once incredibly
influential and powerful cities.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, you can see, you know, where there was something
once and archaeologists, like like you said, have have found well,
I don't want to spoil anything here, Ben, but archaeologists
have found on a specific layer of soil of ground
essentially all in the same layer where all of these
(20:11):
various cities all went seemed to be with fire, some
kind of great battle or great terrible thing that occurred
in all of these cities within a very short time span.
It's very odd, very very odd.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah, within as little as the span of a century,
which is just like a fingersnap. It's the span of
his century is like a micrometer in the timeline. But
we know that other civilizations have disappeared in the past,
maybe not at this level, but very large populated places. Kahokio.
(20:50):
We did an episode on that. Ancient cultures in Southeast Asia,
like modern day Cambodia, South America as well. Some of
those things remain at least part the unexplained. But in
most of those cases, what we're seeing is a single
community or a single culture, a single civilization being affected.
(21:10):
We still have serious questions about what could have made
so many massive, successful cultures self destruct all at once,
especially when we know that they had a vested interest
in maintaining a status quo to a degree, supporting one
another to enable the whole to rise. And we're struggling
(21:33):
to figure out what happened. Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Oh oh jeez.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
So over the centuries, people have been guessing. Multiple scholars
have put forward multiple arguments of varying credibility to explain
this disturbing historical mystery.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
You know, well, yeah, the first one we you know,
I mentioned they're kind of as a spoiler or a precursor
to this, that there is a layer of ash in
a lot of these citadels, in what we would call
cities back in the day that existed around the same time.
And one of the theories that's been put forth is
that some kind of natural disaster caused these, you know,
(22:16):
various cities and civilizations to collapse simultaneously, and one of
those would be like a massive volcanic eruption or perhaps
an earthquake or series of those two things occurring. You know,
agent people didn't have any way to communicate, at least
through technology. That is, a disaster was coming from some
(22:37):
far flowing part of the world. But it doesn't mean
that the disasters couldn't impact them all simultaneously, right, And
there are few There are some Egyptologists that have dated
back the Hecla volcano. It's Hecla three volcanic eruption that
was in Iceland. It occurred in eleven fifty nine BCE.
They're saying that possibly it caused this these civilizations to collapse,
(23:00):
but not because of the eruption itself, because the volcanic
eruption may have caused a famine that affected this large
swath of area.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Yeah, we have some you know, we have evidence from
Egyptian sources. We know under Ramsey's three, during the wider
overall Bronze Age collapse, it's called the Late Bronze Age collapse.
We know that the rulers of the time were addressing
civil unrest and crime and it was tied into famine, right,
(23:34):
It was tied into migration to people becoming refugees. And
I love what you said, man, Just because they didn't
see an eruption in Iceland doesn't mean it didn't screw
up the connected weather systems equally less food. And remember,
part of the reason people were so successful in the
(23:54):
Bronze Age and this part of the world was entirely
because of that surplus of food and the positive domino effect,
the positive feedback loop that creates. Now we're seeing the
opposite its evil twin. We know an eruption of that
size could definitely impact agriculture, but I mean, scholars still
(24:15):
of course argue back and forth about the degree to
which that's affected it. Right, You'll hear a lot of
people say, well, that one eruption couldn't spell the end
of multiple empires. It just didn't have the size for that.
And even if there is this butterfly ripple effect, it
wouldn't have lasted long enough to destroy those empires by itself.
(24:39):
But we have to keep in mind. Volcanic eruptions can
also be linked to earthquakes, and earthquakes can also do
a massive amount of damage in a short amount of time.
They can also maybe be linked to tsunamis, so flooding
or saying as you can get a combo meal for
natural disaster, it doesn't always have to be ordered a
(24:59):
la carte.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, two meets two sides, one bread exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
I mean, can't some of those eruptions produce so much
ash and nastiness that it literally blocks out the sun
like for a while.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
That's what we're talking about. You could essentially disrupt the
weather systems in a large area, if not the entire planet.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
Or it's also you know, the ability for crops to
get you know, the nutrients they need from from sunlight
and all of that.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
That's a really good point. Yeah, because imagine you're you're
a farmer, and you know the religions of this time,
the ones that are authorized by the ruling class. When
it comes to the lower class, they're entirely meant to
keep you farming and feel like you're vaguely in trouble
and struggling. Right, it's cultur rules again. And and so
(25:51):
what do you do when this sky goes black? Someone
has messed something up. You're not a volcanologist. Volcanologists don't exist.
You're trying to grow food, and as politicians are so
fond of saying, today, feed your family. And then just
like you said, no, the sky goes black, No one
knows why. Perhaps, and then the rain disappears, right.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Or then the ground starts shaking.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Yep, and the crops are fallow.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
You just can't grow like you used to. There's a
geophysicist named Amos Nerve from Stanford, and he argues that
a string of massive earthquakes could have knocked down one
of these city states after another. You can pull up
I think there's a really cool Google Maps layer you
can pull up that will show you the Bronze Age
(26:45):
empires and you can see how his argument. You can
see how his argument proceeds that these cities fell one
by one to earthquakes. They didn't have FEMA, they didn't
have the communication or infrastructure resources available in the modern day,
so this could have brought those empires to a premature end.
(27:06):
He also and I thought this would be interesting to
historical scholars of the Bible in the audience. He also
argues that earthquake activity maybe the real life inspiration for
the biblical prophecy of Armageddon, that's the site of the
final conflict between good and evil. He says, you know,
(27:27):
the repeated destruction of the city Meguido probably ast and
this is almost nervous opinion. He says it inspired the
author of Revelation to write his prediction of the apocalypse,
like this guy saw an earthquake, experienced it, live through it,
said this is going to happen again, And now you
(27:49):
know he is a co author of one of the
most famous books of all time. But that's a cold comfort,
you know, it doesn't get you out of an earthquake.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah. Yeah, So we're telling you where talking about these
various things we've you know, we've gone through volcanoes and earthquakes. Well,
what if for one reason or another, it wasn't those things,
and it was just a lack of consistent rain water
for the crops that were so important at the time.
What if there was a massive drought that ended up
(28:20):
causing chaos essentially within the civilizations themselves. And you know,
is that even a possibility? Well guess what we have
good news for you. Intelligent people have been studying it.
Mm hmm, that's right.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
There was an article in the Journal of the Institute
of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University where researchers led by
a palaeonologist, Dafna Langett, put forth this very theory.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Yeah, yeah, exactly Langa argues that drought led to the
collapse of at least the ancient Southern levant and that
cascaded out to the rest of the known world like
this is we were talking about the known world at
this time. Uh. Palenologist is sort of a word for
(29:10):
the word of the day for us. I don't know
about you, guys, I didn't know this was a job.
It's someone who studies ancient pollens. So gtfo with your
modern pollms.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Oh man, it reminds keeps. Oh that's so specialized. I
love it that someone goes, I grow up. I want
to study ancient pollens.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
All right, I'm sorry, what do you want? What ancient pollens? Yes? Okay, No, No,
you can't do it.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Please, I really feel passionately about it.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Dad, there's no way. How are you going to even
find it? Get out of here?
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Well, you know you dig it up.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
I guess right. No, that's a good question, dad, Ben.
How do you find ancient pollen samples?
Speaker 1 (29:48):
I'm so glad you asked buddying a polynologists. Uh. You know,
a lot of people are going to tell you it's
a weird dream. And I've come to your career day
to let you know that all dreams are kind of weird,
and there's no reason that you should knock this one
out of the running. Look at all the pollen around today.
It had to come from somewhere. Start digging, Start reading,
(30:10):
start digging.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
If you.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Take you know, I don't want to get I don't
want to get lost in the weeds here kids on
how you actually find these things. But you can. If
you dig through the layers of soil in places that
had pollen producing plants right on a regular basis, then
you can take samples of those the same way you
take samples of a tree right at different chronicles in
(30:38):
its own dendo chronology, and then you can find what
Lengett calls the fingerprints of plants pollen grains or the
fingerprints of plants. They can help scientists reconstruct the ancient
natural vegetation past climate can do. So I say to
(31:01):
you in this improv scene, I say to you, go forward,
start collecting all the pollen you can, and remember that
one day we don't have to just think about you
as a pollinologist. Now we can think about those who
come after you. So save the pollen for them. You
may end up being there carl And aeus you may
end up being there. Charles Darwin.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
Well, it's so interesting though, because I mean, these are fossils,
this is part of the fossil record. They're just really
really tiny fossils. And you're right, they act as kind
of like a fingerprint in the same way maybe ice cores,
only obviously much much smaller do for you know, studying
the layers of collected ice, and that core tells a story,
(31:45):
and poland does the same thing, and it's a story
about past climates.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah, and we can paint a pretty accurate picture. Of course,
the only way we can know whether it's one hundred
percent accurate is to travel back there. And unless you
believe that paper by that recent undergrad there's not a
way to time travel. Yet. That's a story frustration, I think.
So right now we know that we know that this
(32:13):
research shows a very specific, very sharp decline in the
vegetation that up until that point was common. The scientists
led by Langett found that in twelve fifty BCE, the
traditional plant life of the Mediterranean, the Late Bronze Age,
(32:34):
seemed to just take a nose.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Dive, just be.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
And in its place, they saw plants that you would
find in semi desert areas.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
Yeah, and that was in like carab trees, pine trees,
oak trees, they're out there. And they also noticed that
there was a huge drop in olive trees, you know,
and that is a major thing that is being produced
out for food sources and for other reasons. And there's
(33:06):
an there's an indication that horticulture in general in that
area at the time was on the decline, right, And
really what the team came away with is that the
region was in the grip of serious regular droughts within
a drought season that lasted for several seasons essentially. And
(33:30):
the dates of researchers came up with via all this
pollen analysis that they went through, they correspond pretty darn
well with a few remaining historical records that you know,
scientists and humanity has of that period, and they all
a lot of those, by the way, mentioned shortages of grains,
So you know, all this this seems to be, like
(33:53):
Ben said, painting a pretty clear picture of no matter
what was going on, this was a sign magnificant factor. Right.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
It's spooky to build a puzzle of this size. We're
finding puzzle pieces in the twentieth century that connect with
puzzle pieces from five thousand, like from thousand, three thousand
so years ago. That's a lot of work. That's one
hell of a jigsaw. And the thing about these scant
(34:23):
historical records is that they're pretty informative for what they
are also pretty cryptic, and they don't just mention shortages
of grain. We're going to pause for word from our sponsor,
and as long as our civilization doesn't collapse in the
next couple minutes or so, then we'll return and put
some more puzzle pieces of the Bronze Age collapse together,
(34:53):
and we're back off air. We were having a little
conversation about our earlier. Our earlier A great question. What's
the name for this age?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Noel, you proposed the plastics age. We talked about information
age because I do think information is a substance.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Silicon age was the first one.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Matt put forth.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
A Silicon age, yeah, or computer age. Some people are
calling it new media age, which all goes to show
we don't we don't know what future historians are going
to call it. They might just latch onto one thing
and they might be calling it the Ferby Age, like
the most technologically significant invention of these ancient benighted people
(35:33):
was our one true god, the Ferbie. And that'll be
how we're known by our descendants on Mars in the moon.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
And well, when when it ends up being the age
that leads to the destruction of all civilization, maybe we
could refer to it as the idiot age, the apocalypse age,
I don't know, just.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Call it, just call it the last age. Yeah, yeah, that.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Old, that old, that old joke. I think it was
from one of the chans about Handlejack. Do you guys
remember that you can't say his name or he diss anyway,
got me? It's okay, I mean, but yeah, the zoom
froze and he got me. But what's what's so interesting
about that name aside is that, you know, we have
(36:17):
to remember any fans of literature, one thing that's infuriating
is that, uh, while backs uh some time ago, now
as far back as a Bronze age, someone got the
bride idea to call a certain school of literature modernism,
and what do they call the next one postmodernism? We can't.
(36:40):
We can't name stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (36:41):
It's the same with music genres. It's like you got rock.
Then you got post rock, which is basically just like
minimalist rock with it's got guitars, doesn't really have many changes,
it's a lot of it's like ambient music and rock
and roll had like a weird slow child. Or are
the same with punk and post punk? What do you even?
(37:02):
I guess post punk is just punk that's a little
more intelligent. I don't know, it's interesting all of those terms.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
You guys, when do you think we're going to reach
the post war stage? Do you think that's going to happen?
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, yeah, when humanity is Actually no, it'll still happen
after humanity is gone, because by that point, the machines
and algorithms we've made will continue fighting an entirely automated war.
But eventually they'll need repairs, and if they are successful enough,
it's self repairing. Then if they extend past the solar system,
(37:36):
the death of the sun won't matter. So I guess
by the heat death of the universe will definitely be
in a post war. The economy, the economy, Yes, the
universe is ended, but we fixed the economy. Good news,
bad news, right, which, First, you're right, the war is
a fundamental piece of this, and that's why I really
(37:58):
appreciate one of the things point out there, Matt, when
you said immediately, of course, some bright bulb, well we
can't say bulb. There there were no light bulbs. Some
some bright candle around that bronze discovery campfire said we
could we could use this to do amazing things. We
(38:19):
could build plumbing, you know, we could like probably make
some medical improvements, or we could kill like everybody, you guys.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
That's a last resort, though, gotta be a last resort.
Surely there's another way, right, And.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
Everyone's like yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, totally, yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Totally just not me, right, I mean, I'm good, Okay.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah, you're great, dude, you like put together the fire,
come on, man, So so uh yeah, let's just do
a show with historical reenactments that we make up. We
catch that one time behind the scenes. By the way,
it was still great. It was such a great idea.
(39:12):
I know, it was not drunk history. It was weirder anyway.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
War.
Speaker 1 (39:19):
The reason we're talking about it is because it is
unfortunately a very common process in human history, the fall
of a status quo or a stable government for some reason,
regardless of how good or fair, or how terrible or
authoritarian that structure might be, it inevitably leads to violence. Right.
It's the equivalent of removing those painted lines, those silly
(39:42):
painted lines that we have on the interstate highways. They
actually do reduce accidents, not just as a visual aid,
but because they remind people of these intangible laws that
we all obey, because we feel as though they are
constantly applied, and of course they're not. Just in general,
people tend to agree that those are good things. So
(40:03):
now those laws are removed, and people then, just like
people now, started doing whatever they wish when those laws
were not in play, especially when they felt like they
were fighting for their own survival. That's why the collapse
of le bronze age is marked by what would be
described as an upticking crime in the modern world, and
(40:26):
that is a very diluted milk socet way to say it.
We're talking about is widespread pillaging, disruption of those precious
international trade routes, civil unrest, let's fight, Let's get that
bastard the king. He's had it coming to him and
I don't think his God is going to stop us
this time. War over diminishing resources one of the biggest
(40:49):
mysteries here that we may have to dedicate an entire
episode to is the emergence of a mysterious seafaring confederation.
You could call them known as the Sea People's. They're like,
they're like Matt Max esque raiders in this scenario, or
(41:10):
they're like in water World, they're like the Smokers. They
were going to these stable, relatively stable, but struggling fonts
of civilization, and they were just running through them and
then you couldn't catch them because they were back on
(41:30):
the votes. They were gone and on to the next city.
Speaker 2 (41:34):
Yeah, it becomes a pretty horrifying vision thinking about the
quote see Peoples, and I'll tell you why. In quick
shout out to the podcast Fall of Civilizations for an
episode they did on a similar topic here about the
Bronze Age collapse. They did a great job of explaining
(41:57):
the very small descriptions that exist out there for the
Sea People's, and it sounds weird. They it sounds, I
think the way they put on the podcast like a
monster from the deep. When you hear the Sea People's,
it sounds like, what are those merman? Is that what
we're talking about? Are we talking about something from you know,
(42:19):
creatures from below the water that emerged and attacked these
towns and pillaged them. No, we're not, at least I
certainly don't think so. But there is so little evidence
about what they actually did and so few descriptions that
it becomes I don't know, more of a nightmare than
I guess it needs to be.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, because we know they're like the descriptions that we
find are sometimes just terrifies. The translations are like these
plaintive things from one authority to another saying, look, uh,
my armies are in the capitol that is way way
(43:00):
in land right let's say the Hittites, for example, and
then my ships whatever would pass from my naval force
is way over here, far to the west of me,
and they can't get there in time. There's an exact
quote where one authority says, thus, the lands are prostrate
(43:21):
to these raiders. There's no one to defend them, you
know what I mean. There's not like a police force
at this time that can stand up to reavers like this.
And the thing is that the cause of the difficulties
of transmitting both information and resources, they would these empires
would often find out after the fact that someone had
(43:45):
destroyed a trade hub or a city, or a or
a holy place, and this this devastated the many of
these empires. The Sea Peoples did lose campaigns at times,
(44:05):
but they kept coming. Ramsey's three I think we mentioned
he's got some He's got some inscriptions that people have
recovered in Thebes, and in those inscriptions in mortuary temple,
you can find sources recounting at least three different legitimate
victories against the Sea Peoples. But again that's Egypt. One
(44:28):
thing you need to remember about Egypt in this period
is that Egypt kind of survived. There's still a country
called Egypt. It's not a country called, you know, Home
of the Hittites.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
But I will say that is a number one on
my list or what they should have been called, just
like hyphenated maybe or maybe it all want work called Home.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
Of the Hittites.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
Love it and I like that as one word. Yeah,
so we again we can we can say that there
is a wealth of insightful and value valuable literature and
research into the ultimate identity of what is commonly called
the Sea People's the reason that everybody speaking English and
(45:10):
French definitely has been using this phrase for so long
is that it comes from a French egyptologist named Emmanuel
de Roge who kind of coined the term, and then
someone else popularized it and it started circulating in the
cannon because it answered a question a lot of scientists
and unrelated fields had had for a long long time.
(45:33):
They're also the explanation, they're one of the main explanations
for that common disaster, soil. I guess we could call
it disaster sediment, right, the one groove of the historical
record that is foo bar as the acronym.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Well, that showed clearly there was a massive fire here
and bodies were just in streets and you know, in
houses at the same time. It's really disturbing stuff. So
we've kind of been looking at these things individually is
as causes, right, But as we know just throughout history,
(46:12):
just because you're dealing with one disaster one bad thing,
doesn't mean another one can't come up. Right, we're dealing
with that right now. We've got a we've got three
handfuls at least of disasters that are hitting the globe
right now. And why would it be any different during
the Bronze Age.
Speaker 1 (46:33):
Right, Yeah, because we've been we've been perhaps a little
a little misleading when we're when we're presenting these problems,
we said, natural disasters like ongoing droughts, like earthquakes like volcanoes,
human problems like war, or the fact that humans are
(46:56):
often just inherently greedy, bad.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
People, or you just uh, what unrest within cities right? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (47:05):
And competing for things? Right? Why should why should my
children die such that yours can live? You know, that's
not an even trade to me, says the other person
with kids.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
So each of these explanations alone, taken by their themselves
in a vacuum. They've all happened before, right, A lot
of them are happening now, as you said, Matt, in
the modern age. Uh. But these often were, These were
happening in the Bronze Age. But they weren't all happening
at once. Because these all happened, and these cultures, the
(47:38):
world's first stable, long term international trade network survived, weathered
every storm. But experts are arguing it's very clever that
what happened is humanity met a storm and had never
seen before, met a perfect storm, and met an insidious
geopolitical domino effect that probably yes began and with the
(48:00):
natural world. I think we can determine that. But when
we see it, it's got spooky parallels. Right, So climate change,
whether it's an eruption, whether it's something abrupt like a
natural disaster in eruption, whether it's a slow cycle that
maybe has nothing to do with humans. It leads to
(48:21):
political instability that leads to a rise in crime. I mean,
that's why the historian Robert Druz calls this the Late
Bronze Age collapse. He calls it the worst disaster in
ancient history, more calamitous than the collapse of the Western
Roman Empire. And people are saying, like, these sea people's
didn't just you know, wake up and say, yeah, you know,
(48:43):
I know we usually fish, but what if we just sacked.
What if we just sacked or something like that. What
if we guys, guys, what if we get into pillaging,
like in a big way and the other people the
boat didn't look around and just go yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Maybe they didn't. I'm gonna start a gang. It's called
the Sea Boys, and we're gonna I.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Was just gonna.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
I was just gonna put forth the Why can't we
just simplified and just call them the sea people, you know,
the people from the sea. I just I think that's
just a little more straightforward. The idea of the sea
peoples just makes it seem too too academic. Let's let's
let's have some fun with it.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
But you're making a yeah, yes, you're making a great point.
Then they didn't just decide to do it. It was
because they were facing some kind of issue, likely from
the natural world, like you're saying, like a drought, unable
to feed their families, and they had to go and
find something. And when they couldn't trade or they couldn't
find a viable way to do it peacefully, the only
(49:48):
option then was to take by force, or at least
perhaps it was thought that the only option was to
take what they needed by force. Again, the parallels freaking
me out a little bit exactly.
Speaker 1 (50:02):
I mean, think about it. So, this the positive domino
effect we mentioned earlier. Right, stable populations are creating more food, right,
and so those they don't naturally want to go out
into the wild. And I would hope if people are
people are creatures of convenience and necessity, right, So it's
(50:24):
relatively anomalous for a group to just decide to kill
people for fun rather than to kill them for resources
or something like that. So these stable populations during the
heyday of the Bronze Age, they are dependent on producing
food or importing food for their own consumption and then
(50:45):
possibly exporting it across trade networks for other things they
can't get, And so when they can't grow crops, they
cannot participate in that trade network, and most importantly, they
cannot feed themselves. That's the whole reason they're living in
this area, right, So they have to look for some
other means of sustenance. But the problem is, unless they're
(51:08):
the very first people who became these migrants and refugees,
other people have already hit the road. Other people have
been down these tracks before, been down this road before,
if you're a Hank Williams senior fan, and they have
done the same. And they already knew about these pre
existing trade routes. They already knew where the ports were,
they already knew where the cities were. The people who
(51:30):
were already pushed into a nomadic existence are therefore either
laying weight in established migration routes and waiting to pounce
on merchants and families and refugees, or they hopped in
their boats, perhaps driven by necessity, and decided that they
instead of waiting for something to be given to them,
(51:52):
they would take it by any means necessary, And morality
doesn't really enter the equation when you're talking about survival.
Think about it on a worldwide scale. Now, we think
about cities and empires as individuals, right, we know that
city states don't really have friends. Empires don't really have friends,
They have alliances. So these entire, these entire groups of
(52:16):
people are shifting into militarism. They're already probably pretty militaristic,
but they're protecting their own defenses, right, their upper classes
and their mid tiers from pillagers. And they're also trying
to send out their military forces to wage wars, wars
of acquisition of other resources, perhaps wars of protection against
these mysterious sea peoples who keep getting away. And it happens,
(52:41):
this is the scariest part. It happens very very quickly,
you know what I mean. These longstanding treaties are thrown away.
Egypt retreats into itself, right because it needs to tamp
down domestic unrest. You have to fix your own house
before you fix someone else's.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
Just think about what we're saying and describing here, just
overlay it onto the twenty first century. Who started start
in the late nineties and just like, oh god.
Speaker 1 (53:12):
It was during this time someone figured out how to
make iron.
Speaker 2 (53:18):
Oh there you go. Guess what, I guess what the
military has. They've just come out. They're saying that they
think fusion is definitely going to be a thing now.
They're like just talking about it openly. Yeah, fusion, you know,
for power, fusion for power. It's only gonna be for power.
It's gonna be fine. Are you serious? Yeah? Yeah, man?
And oh it's all good. The first round of fusion bombs,
(53:43):
we just gotta wait for that. That's that's somebody making
the first iron and going, oh.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
Those are those are fusion bombs for peace?
Speaker 3 (53:53):
But then we get some who gets them? You know,
who gets the fusion bombs? We gotta I don't know.
It's the same with like these weapons. You know, it's
all about who who figured it out first, and then
you know, people backwards engineer things. I'm sure both sides
of these these conflicts had similar weapons, but maybe the
upper hand goes to the ones that figured it out
a little better. I don't know it's interest.
Speaker 2 (54:15):
And then they get all the oil, and you know,
it lasts until it all burns out, and and there
we go.
Speaker 1 (54:25):
Yeah, and this is uh there, this is this the
spookiest part of this story. No, if we want to
give it a little bit of an epilogue, Yes, the
area entered dark age. You know, the closest thing we
had to global civilization full stop collapsed. Uh And you know,
Nol you raised the point earlier about the collapse in education.
(54:48):
Literacy bottomed out, right, who has time to learn to read?
I am trying to avoid these pillagers and possible cannibals.
I just threw cannibals in there.
Speaker 3 (54:59):
And now it's who has time to read? I'm being
distracted by these cat videos? Yes, I mean I was
joking at the top of the show about this maybe
maybe being the new dark I don't know. It makes
me think of that movie Idiocracy, which is all about
a breakdown in education, a breakdown in intelligence, leading to
a breakdown in civilization and society as we know it
(55:20):
because people can't solve problems anymore. People don't think about
how to fix these, you know, existential threats that face
them and that's when this really hits the fan.
Speaker 1 (55:30):
And this is our Daniel mol Right, this our epilogue.
Eventually the seasonal rains return, and experts believe that this
eventually again led the descendants of some of those uprooted
groups we talked about to settle down once again. But
make no mistake, history was forever and permanently stunted by
(55:53):
this collapse. We have no idea where the world would
be if this had not a curd right like, part
of the reason we are making this podcast now, part
of the reason podcasts exists, is because thousands of years ago,
the world as we knew it burned the down like.
(56:14):
That's true, And most importantly, we can't mistake this from
some for some like long ago story from some dusty
tome or I guess some dusty time before books, some
dusty tablet or a hieroglyph. We should, and I think
we must, take this as a parable. It's a warning
(56:36):
about the fragility inherent to all human civilizations. Civilization is
a covenant. It is an agreement, and it only works
so long as the majority of people agree that it works. Otherwise,
it's just like a thing we thought was a good
idea at the time, like you know, police Academy for it.
Speaker 3 (57:00):
As any Has anyone been watching the new season of
Fargo It just started the other night.
Speaker 2 (57:05):
Oh no, I can't wait.
Speaker 3 (57:07):
Well, I'm gonna This isn't really a spoiler, but it's
sort of about warring groups, waring factions, and they have
this ritual and this agreement where they essentially one faction
whether it's the Italians and the Irish or African American
gang comes in in the present day of the show,
which is like the fifties versus the Italians, and they
have this ritual. We're in order to kind of make peace,
(57:28):
quote unquote, they exchange a youngest child and each of
them raised the other's youngest child.
Speaker 2 (57:35):
And again there's ritual.
Speaker 3 (57:37):
Involved in that, and it's an inherent like agreement and
a compact. But do you know people don't always hold
up their endo the bargain, and otherwise if they did,
you wouldn't have a show. It's the same with history.
You know, people often, you know, make these agreements and
then decide, you know what, actually, I think we're just gonna.
Speaker 2 (57:55):
Kill all of you.
Speaker 1 (57:56):
And to this, like what we're talking about when we
talk about this dissolution of society is we're proposing essentially
what's called a general system's collapse. The argument is that
we made so much progress as a species during the
Bronze Age that we built a system that was too
(58:17):
intricate to fix, like we didn't know how to fix
it when parts of it started breaking. If it was
if it was disrupted, then we didn't have anybody with
the vantage point to say, okay, look, what we need
to do is to first off, maintain the trade routes.
Let's do that. Everybody was panicking because the building was
(58:39):
on fire and we had built everything except for a
fire escape basically socio politically, and so now we see
that the things that happened and the order in which
they occurred, they exposed existing flaws in the system. The
reason that is important is because it can happen again. Right.
(59:00):
One of the questions that I think I think we'd
have to ask is do you think experts are missing
another explanation for the bizarre story of the late Bronze
Age collapse, this weird murder mystery of a civilization, And
what do you think we can learn about it in
the modern day? Like, what what can we do we
are The easy argument that a lot of people would
(59:22):
make is that we are somehow better armed because we
have vastly more sophisticated information technology and dissemination. But how
much of an advantage is that really, Like to your
point about cat videos, Noel, how much does knowing does
the potential of knowing almost everything mean that it will
(59:44):
be applied in a useful way? I think that's a
logical misstep that.
Speaker 2 (59:49):
We may Yeah, oh, it absolutely is.
Speaker 3 (59:51):
I think we've seen that too much information leads people
to silo their education and and and and use do
what only seek out what only suits them as opposed
to you know, because you had to You used to
have to work for knowledge. You used to have to
work for you know, this access to it was a
very exclusive thing, and now everyone has it and nobody
appreciates it.
Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
So what do you guys think is the safest way
to ensure your family's survival in any coming disaster collapse
of our society? Is the safest way to become a
nuclear fusion engineer?
Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
Maybe? Or just play play the video game Superliminal, Like
right now, everybody, go play the video game Superliminal and
start thinking the way that game forces you to think,
and then I think we'll all get to a place
where we can solve any problem that's ever presented to us.
Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
I haven't heard of Superliminal.
Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
Well, if you haven't heard of it, I'm not I'm
not getting paid to tell you this, but you should
play it. For sure. It is a puzzle game, and yes,
it's it's it forces you to change your perspective literally
and figuratively, which is why I think it's important. It
could be a Yeah, that's why it could be applied
here because you know, to to find find answers to
(01:01:14):
some of these major problems that we face, as in,
you know, a global civilization right now. We just have
to think about things differently, and it's very difficult for
humans to do that.
Speaker 1 (01:01:24):
And what are your copy mechanisms, folks? What are your
heuristics for what has sometimes been called the end of history?
I think, well, I think we'll soldier on because I
have to. But but let us let us know what
do you think we can learn from the Bronze Age collapse?
Do you think something like this could slash would happen now?
And if so, how would it play out? We would
(01:01:46):
love to hear from you. You can find us on
the internet as long as that thing is still around.
Hopefully We're on Instagram, We're on Facebook, We're on Twitter.
We recommend Here's where it gets crazy. Just join up
by saying typing in Nole's name or Matt's name, super
producer code name, Doc Holiday or super producer mission control
my name, drop me a pun, something that makes me laugh,
(01:02:11):
or just you know, in a witty way illustrates the
darkness of civilization.
Speaker 3 (01:02:16):
Yeah, and in the event that we do have some
sort of like escape from La esque situation where you know,
the Internet disappears and all electronics, well, this wouldn't really
work nevermind, forget it.
Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
You don't work with the landline.
Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
Well, okay, there you go. That's what I was getting at, Ben,
thank you for rescuing me. You can give us a
call on a landline, presuming that that infrastructure hasn't been
This is too depressant one eight three to three std
wy t K is that number?
Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Reach out to us. You can leave us a voicemail.
Well that part won't never met. Yeah, the voicemail won't
work in this situation.
Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
But you know what, this is all just we're just
spitballing here and everything's fine for now. Leave us a voicemail,
keep it roughly around three minutes so that we can
have a nice, concise story we can use on one
of our weekly listener mail episodes. And be sure and
let us know if it's okay to use your story
and play your actual voice on the show. And if
you want us to call you something specific or not
use your name or be anonymous.
Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
We're all about that. Love to hear from you. And
if you happen to enjoy looking at faces while you
hear voices talk to you, you can head over to
YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. Don't look at Ben's
face right now if you're hearing them, don't. Oh, oh
it haunts. Why do I get that it was that
specific face? Yeah, but YouTube dot YouTube dot com slash
(01:03:33):
conspiracy stuff, that's our channel. Subscribe, Tell your friends, we're
going to be putting these up there, these conversations, and
there will be other things on the way to you
as soon as we can get them to you. Just
be prepared.
Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
And if none of that quite bags or badgers or
collapses your bronze age, as long as the as long
as the electricity is moving and the great sky, and
the sky stays there. You can always contact us through
a good old fashioned email address where.
Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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