EP25 The Long View

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: DNA ancestry test, Jackie Kennedy, Larry King
2. 20:00 – 30:00: Cheddar Man
3. 30:00 – 40:00: Tacitus, Cheddar Man
4. 40:00 – 50:00: Cheddar Man

Notable quotes from "EP25 The Long View"

• A bunch of different things that have nothing to do with anything else I mean I used to love Larry King's newspaper column back in the 80s 1980s at that time Larry King was…

  about Larry King · at 1:39

• Alexander solzhenitson you know and then the next one would be I love the way Jackie Kennedy's wearing her hair now it takes years off her life you know it would just be you…

  about Jackie Kennedy · at 2:26

• Different people in you probably so this listener sent me this wonderful gift it was an early version of the DNA ancestry test the genealogy tests now these things are…

  about DNA ancestry test · at 5:54

• Had been done on a skeleton I don't know how much of a skeleton known in Britain as cheddar man and cheddar man is a figure from prehistory and they found this figure in Britain and I believe they've done.

  about Cheddar Man · at 27:54

• Most dangerous book ever written or something like that but it's a book about tacitus's work on the Germans now tacitus was an ancient Roman writer actually was Roman Imperial…

  about Tacitus · at 35:09

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Cheddar Man — Person · 6 mentions · first at 27:58
• Tacitus — Person · 2 mentions · first at 35:13
• Larry King — Person · 1 mention · first at 1:42
• Jackie Kennedy — Person · 1 mention · first at 2:31
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn — Person · 1 mention

Products & tech

• DNA ancestry test — Product · 1 mention · first at 5:59

Full transcript with timestamps

0:02 it's hardcore history I hear from many of you that say just turn on the microphone and talk and it'll be a good show and we'll be glad to get it so today will perhaps be a test of this Theory's validity what's held up today's show for a while now is probably some old training in a news business that doesn't exist anymore where as a youngster learning the ropes you would come back to your editor with some facts some information some quotes some background stuff um and you present it to them and they'd say okay what's the story right meaning all these elements that you have have the makings for a good news story but what are you trying to say I mean is this a man bites dog story or is it a dog bites man Story I mean you know you don't know a lot of the more complicated stories require somebody telling you what the story is what does all this mean write all this information you're throwing my

1:12 way what am I supposed to think and so I was trying to apply that to Today's Show and it just completely discombobulated the entire thing because I'm not trying to tell you what to think at all nor do I have a point sometimes I'll talk to people you know via social media or whatever and they'll say be fun to have dinner with you well this is what dinner might be like I'm just warning you a bunch of different things that have nothing to do with anything else I mean I used to love Larry King's newspaper column back in the 80s 1980s at that time Larry King was like the busiest man on Earth he did TV he did radio he did a newspaper column and uh looking at him now I have no idea how he accomplished it all but he certainly organized his projects in a way that you know took into account how busy he was because the newspaper column was well I don't even know how to describe it to you imagine 40 sentences

2:11 each sentence have have no connection to any of the other sentences in the piece so it would say something like before President Reagan heads off to this Summit with the Soviet Union he needs to bear in mind you know the words of uh Alexander solzhenitson you know and then the next one would be I love the way Jackie Kennedy's wearing her hair now it takes years off her life you know it would just be you know the Yankees have won five in a row keep up this pace and they'll make the playoffs I mean at the same time you kind of understood why he did it right it's a way for a very busy guy to churn out a newspaper column and that's maybe what my thing is going to sound like today where it's all the elements of a good news story without the reporter telling you what the story is because I don't know what the story is this actually started off as a completely different piece with a bunch of different strands all of whom all of

3:06 which went nowhere but they just sort of drifted off into the ether but they all at least emanated from the same point I thought that was progress if I could just tie up all those loose threads we'd have a heck of a show and that's what I spent the last two weeks trying to do it doesn't really work and as as I'm trying to do this as is normal with an art project like this it takes on a life of its own and develops in an area completely you know off in one direction from the original piece so I have a completely different show in front of me right now and much more in the way of notes than I'm accustomed to using and I find that if you have more than just a couple of notes um it's less helpful than having no notes at all I'm drowning in notes now I don't even know where to look and none of it's as I said connected to anything else it's a whole bunch of facts figures interviews quotes and data and no Editor

3:54 to tell me what the heck the story is so let me ask if we're reading the equivalent forget about like newspapers and what do they say journalism is the first draft of History so let's think about this less like the newspaper and more like the history book and less like a human history book than a great giant Galactic history book right the kind of history books that they're reading on other planets about the history of this Galaxy and I'm wondering about the section that they're going to have on us obviously in a great Galactic history book everybody's just going to be shrunk down to a small little space a little mention the poor students in Galactic Middle School are going to have to read about you know Earth and humanity and all that it's just going to be an extra credit you know assignment on the back of a real test but I mean what do you think the great galastic history book is going to say in its Earth section when

4:48 it has to condense you know our entire existence down to just you know a few points right what's the story here on this Earth Humanity timeline question and I was thinking about that because the only way of course to look at a subject like that is through a very in a long lens right you can't just take 15 20 A.D and say what's uh let's base it on this year what's Humanity like you got to take a big picture view right well let me start this conversation this dinner conversation that goes nowhere off with a gift one of your number gave me a long time ago now one of the greatest gifts I ever got a completely outside the box sort of thing and completely geared towards my own personal proclivities right being a history nut uh being a person from a country that's uh had many successive waves of immigration from other countries a person who is of multiple nationalities like so many other Americans and Canadians and Australians

5:51 and people like that right come from an immigrant country gonna have a lot of different people in you probably so this listener sent me this wonderful gift it was an early version of the DNA ancestry test the genealogy tests now these things are everywhere now but this was long before the craze hit very early on very outside the box not cheap and I was so intrigued by the possibilities that I overcame my natural reticence to sharing my genetic code with anyone swabbed my cheek or whatever the heck they were asking for back then put it back in the mailing uh packet send it to the lab and waited with baited breath for the results here to find out exactly how closely the DNA evidence matched the analog family tree history that like many of you I had also done talk to your grandmothers and grandfathers about who your you know deep ancestors were what countries did we come from what ethnicities are we and

6:51 I thought I had the math right you could say well if your grandmother on your mother's side is half this and half that that means you're 12 percent this and I mean I thought I had it figured out but I wanted confirmation that my math was right so I sent away to the DNA test and when it came back to me and I opened it up it was nothing like what I expected instead of answering questions about things like my ethnicity or the percentage of each ethnic group I belong to it didn't deal with ethnicity at all when I opened up this packet of results and I'm going you know I'm not this isn't just putting in fake numbers here but I mean it was something akin to uh you open it up and it says your ancestors moved out of Africa 150 000 years ago into what's now Southern Russia they lingered there for another 50 000 years before heading I mean it was one of those sorts of things in other words it was deep genealogy deep ancestry it

7:50 never even got to the point where Modern ethnicities developed right stopped before then so instead of finding out exactly how Irish or Scandinavian or whatever it might be you were all you found out about was what your you know the equivalent of your caveman ancestors were doing and at first I was disappointed because this was not what I was expecting nor what I was after but I've had the opportunity many times since to think about this to think what this DNA test was reminding me about that was reminding me about how long anatomically modern human beings have been around and it's important to remember this because it is the vast vast majority of you know the time that we've spent on this planet that happened before we started paying any real attention to ourselves in the history books and by that I mean you know how old your history books are in terms of how far back they go right now modern history combines with

8:59 archeology and anthropology and about a hundred other wonderful modern scientific Specialists whose job it is to uncover the prehistoric past but traditionally history started with writing and writing started with Urban societies and so you know the history books I have from 1950 start with like Mesopotamia and Sumeria the implication not the stated necessarily sometimes stated but but usually not stated is is that nothing of real value happened before urbanism and writing and all these sorts of things and there was also this implied idea that anything of value that even happened afterwards happened in the societies that were doing these things that set these new modern humans apart from all the humans that came beforehand right the humans that existed before cities and writing and complex modern societies but that's the vast vast vast majority of time right anatomically modern human beings

10:02 have been around and this is the current number the current number changes right it's it keeps getting revised earlier and earlier I'm just going to try to be really safe here and say anatomically modern human beings have been around from between 250 and 350 000 years ago let that sink in for a minute 250 000 to 350 000 years ago let's just take three hundred thousand as a good round current number 300 000 years now this doesn't take into account previous versions of humanity which lived at the same time there's some overlap right neanderthals are here when modern human beings are too there's interbreeding going on right that's another fascinating part of human history so we have anatomically modern human beings 300 000 years ago I was doing some preliminary research for this just so I didn't send like too much of an idiot and there was a distinction made um with anthropologists between

11:01 anatomically modern human beings and behaviorally modern human beings now I'm not sure what that necessarily means but I think they're talking about things like use of fire um and that sort of deal I I'm not sure but even that was suitably ancient something like 150 000 years ago just for comparison's sake now if we remember that the human history that our history books from 1950 would have said began began about five or six thousand years ago well when you have 300 000 years that you're playing with five or six thousand years is the very most recent edge of that entire history right the vast vast majority of the history of the human species predates where your history books start and there are well there are probably multiple ways of looking um at this but let me just look at it in sort of a pass fail way right two ways one way of looking at this is that all of human activity going on before what

12:17 my 1950s history book would consider to be the important time when things get started although they might have said the important time is the Agricultural Revolution right a date that also keeps getting pushed back but that would still mean the vast majority of human history happened before the Agricultural Revolution the point is is that if you try to Envision what's going on in that period before you know Real History begins it can either be something like a more complex version of like chimpanzee life right what societies of chimpanzees live like and what their daily activities are concerned with and their social structure and I mean obviously more complex like chimpanzees with fire chimpanzees with very modest religious you know understanding more complex chimps right and I think that's very possible you go look at you know cavemen in air quotes caveman society that looks a little to

13:17 me like complex Apes but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way there's also like the Middle Earth possibility and you know for those who don't know um tolkien's JRR tolkien's Lord of the Rings idea of this thing called Middle Earth is not a place Middle Earth is a time period in our own world and it's supposed to have existed before the so-called age of man began so it's deep prehistory and I guess with the age of man beginning you know Sumeria is in their future well based on this idea is the idea that there might have been all kinds of fascinating things going on in terms of the great human story just maybe on a much smaller scale right as much smaller venue a much more tight locality but the same sorts of drama and romances and great Wars and big leaders and heroes and villains and I mean in other words the exact same human story we have in the last six thousand years of human history just earlier smaller

14:24 there's that old line the quantity has a quality all its own well 300 000 years of History seems to give you enough time for a bunch of good stories to happen even if they're happening you know in a much slower Pace than they happen in the modern world I would think if that great Galactic history book you know it had the aliens monitoring the first 300 000 years of human history maybe they have some good stories in it that we don't know anything about but I've often wondered about the you know greatness of prehistory there's a line from Gwen Dyer's fabulous um late 70s early 1980s uh documentary on war where he had wondered about the first time a thousand human beings had ever gathered in the same place at the same time you know a very early pre-history question and he thought it likely that the first time a thousand people were ever in the same place at the same time it was because a battle was happening

15:23 when that makes you think of all the prehistoric battles right when was the first time an army of 500 men absolutely knocked everybody over in terms of its size wow 500 men can you believe it nobody's ever had an army that big where the first great Empire even on the you know the first great Empire might have been 20 miles long and five miles wide and but if that's the biggest amount of territory that's ever been controlled by one people over another that's an Empire isn't it by the strict definition of the terms so I think about all these sorts of things who was the first great king and we have to remember too when it comes to things like so-called pre-history pre-history and history happen at different times in different places don't they just because history started in a place like Sumeria in 3200 BCE it's still dark as heck in terms of prehistory not that far away from Sumeria isn't it you're going to

16:22 talk about the various nomadic tribes living outside the walls of a city like ore or something well it's still prehistory in their Community isn't it and that applies all the way up to modern times I mean the history of Native American or African tribal peoples that didn't pay attention to writing or didn't write that's all stuff that's dark to us now their history begins when it starts being written down by somebody themselves or some Outsider group makes you think about all the history that existed that didn't get written down so I think about this all the time though and ever since that DNA test specifically because I try to keep track of what I like to call the Long View right looking at history in terms of um they'd probably say in one of the new kinds of books that get marketed all the time the mega Trends right but there are certain elements of human behavior and conduct and activity

17:28 and what one might say make up the general pieces of information in the great Galactic history book that implies that there is some kind of story right we have lots of facts and interviews and data but the you know galactic history book writer of the future is going to have to try to come up because his editor is going to make him with what it all means when you're talking about these human beings on this planet for several hundred thousand years what's the story I was writing down some of the things that just seemed to be constants with us because some problems of course are temporary others are created by circumstances in your time period but some just seem to be ever present no matter you know how long the lens we're viewing our past is I mean there seems to always be war and conflict there is no sustained period of time that I've ever seen where people aren't fighting there used to be an idea and this is

18:30 because both history and many other disciplines are connected to the trends of human society during the time period that they arise that's a famous problem in history isn't it main thing they try to teach you in historiography is how the heck do you weed out the corruption that the historians operating within their own time period as we all do Infuse into how they're assessing the material right how do you divorce the historian and the times that they're working in from the times that they're assessing and this is a problem that we all have even today right and when I was a kid it was during this period where there were quite a few people who were trying to insinuate that something like war and conflict between human beings especially organized conflict was something that only developed with cities that we lived a more Garden of Eden type existence a more Gathering of the tribes kind of

19:29 existence before cities ruined it all for everybody and that man or woman or Humanity in their natural state is of a peaceful helping nature well there's enough stuff today I would say and this is my own personal bias coming in because I choose the sources as we all do that sound right to me but put me in the camp of those anthropologists and archaeologists who've come out and said ah the evidence seems to indicate we're pretty murderous species and that we were pretty murderous species before someone started writing down exactly how murderous we were war and human conflict and genocide and things like ethnic cleansing this stuff seems to have always been with us and if you doubt the ability of you know peoples in a much lower state of organized development to be that way just go look at chimpanzee Society now if you watch chimpanzees for a while and you get a pretty darn good idea of just

20:31 how murderous and hierarchical and everything else we could be because the chimpanzees I mean it's almost like holding up an embarrassing mirror when you go watch them because you go wow I see all these same elements still in us today we may think of ourselves so far removed but certain of the base level things seem pretty unchanged if you ask me and War and conflict and domination and those sorts of things seem to be pretty developed in chimpanzee Society especially for a bunch of non-humans and I think um we still exhibit those things today so that's a pretty much of a constant when I try to gain some perspective on Humanity as a species over the Long View ethnicity and immigration these are things that are still a big part of news stories today you could throw colonialization in there too and these things seem to be ever present in the you know historical Chronicles too and seem likely to have existed before

21:35 history did as well right same same things we have problems with and one of the great things about the Long View I feel like is the fact that it absolutely takes the ethnicity issue and makes it a non-issue over the Long Haul because what people and I think we've been maybe corrupted is not a bad way to put it corrupted by 19th and early 20th century historiography and the fact that just as it always is history and history writing and history research and history teaching is intimately wound up and intertwined with the values and attitudes of the time period where the writing the teaching and the reading is going on right and in the 19th century especially you have a time period where nation states are in search of their Roots they're doing their own National version of my DNA ethnicity test trying to find out where they come from but a lot of this isn't just an open-ended uh in search of and we'll go

22:42 wherever the data leads this kind of thing it's goal oriented I mean everyone wants to come from some wonderfully August glorious historical lineage nobody wants to be the descendants of a couple of peasants or a couple of surfs we all want to be um you know descended from great peoples and kings and you know societies that made an impact on on the past right we all want Royal lineage historically speaking that's why the 19th century spawned all these you know connections to pre-nation States mean that the French started glorifying their Golic past the Germans you know their Germanic histories and you go look at the statues they put up in their wonderfully romantic figures right but how's that any different from uh modern day Italians celebrating their Roman past or current Greek citizens celebrating their famous ancient Greek history and on and on and on right they're hardly the only ones I mean a

23:50 lot of people were infected by this 19th century desire to tie one's modern people to some ancient ancestors some glorious exalted ancient ancestor I mean the Kurds there's a belief in Kurdish society that their descendants of the ancient medes right Partners in Empire with the ancient Persians syrians today believe themselves and I've seen articles that back them up on this and articles that disagree so I I can't make it of any syrians today consider themselves to be the descendants of the ancient Assyrians I mean everybody's looking for glorious ancestors right and the truth is is some people have them I mean DNA seems to show uh waiting as always when we talk about DNA for more evidence but DNA seems to show that a lot of Jewish people today are descending from Jewish people who live thousands of years ago so it's not impossible one can come from an illustrious glorious past but in the 19th century

24:50 the implication almost was that peoples were hermetically sealed off from each other and you had these different peoples a perfect example would be uh look at how the Nazis although Nazi ideology when it came to race and ethnicity wasn't so much singular as it was past its sell by date because if you'd take a Nazi racial philosophy and you know taken it a hundred years into its own past there would have been a lot of people who would have thought the same way as the Nazis and the Nazis had a belief that people were pure of blood right and you'd pick up a history book from the late 18 early 1900s and you look at exactly how obsessed it is with ethnicity and race and peoples and you know where their background is in terms of their breeding and these people are Nordic and these people are Slavic and these people are uh Mongolian and I mean they it's an absurd amount of Fascination when the

25:52 Great Galactic history book readers are going to try to make sense of what Humanity was and the reason it's absurd is because of how temporary it all is when we're taking the Long View races and ethnicities are some of the long views version of short-term issues because they're ever changing and that's what the 19th century both peoples cultures and historians got wrong was this idea that somehow you know once upon a time on the world stage we'll just pick one people but you could fill anybody in for the same thing that there were a bunch of blonde-haired blue-eyed peoples that you know arose independently although back in that time period we might have been talking about Adam and Eve type Origins but you know what I'm saying Rose independently in the north where they're still to be found and then sometime in relatively recent history they started having interactions with other peoples and

26:45 ethnic societies and that's when interbreeding started in other words for me hit Larry and naziistic you know race Trader standpoint that's when things turned evil it was much better back in the days when blonde hair blue-eyed people never made it with people who weren't of Their Own Kind yeah became what the Harry Potter world would refer to as mud Bloods totally ignoring the fact that we're all mud Bloods that's one of the great secrets and pieces of perspective that the Long View gives us and that's that the current ethnicities as we identify them are temporary things long-term things from our short-term way of looking at it I mean if I'm going to live to be 90 years old ethnicity seems pretty set in stone to me if I'm going to live to be 200 000 years old every ethnicity I see is a passing fad there was a story I read um not that long ago and it was in a wasn't in a professional publication it

27:46 was something with the BBC or something it was a public thing but they were talking about a facial Recreation that had been done on a skeleton I don't know how much of a skeleton uh known in Britain as cheddar man and cheddar man is a figure from prehistory and they found uh this figure in Britain and I believe they've done DNA I don't know I don't remember the story well I didn't go look it up shows you how much prep went into this right trying to figure out what the story is without you know checking the facts of the story but the the news story was and they always say a dog bites man's stories not a news story but a man bites dog story now that's news right well the cheddar Man story probably wouldn't have been as big of a deal had this facial Recreation I guess it was like a forensic person who works maybe with murder victims or something today but they're they're taking the DNA and the

28:42 skulls and whatever they have to work with and they and they're giving you this this Recreation of a face of a prehistoric Britain and it doesn't look anything like the British people today doesn't look like a very you know good representation of the kentish Anglo-Saxon type because it had dark dark skin dark dark hair and maybe if I'm recalling it blue or green eyes or the light eyes in other words it was a completely different ethnicity that one than one would expect to see as an ancestor of the people in a place where it's assumed to be cold and dark and the people have very light skin very light hair although a lot of Celts don't have light here but you know what I'm saying there's a certain type we associate with the British Isles the problem is is that our view on this is skewed by the timeline because if you went back to the British Isles at around the time cheddar man was actually living you would expect

29:39 to see something different because back then something different was living there than the type of people that live there now and the reason why is because of that Eternal human quality that makes up one of those constants when we look at the Long View of history people move and they intermix with each other while they do my DNA test that showed that you know I came out of Africa or my ancestors did 150 000 years ago or whatever it was is something that's going to be the same for most if not all of us there's going to be some people that probably still live in the place where humankind first became anatomically modern right they can say we are the indigenous inhabitants of this place because when Humanity first arose we were here and we've never moved the vast majority of us have the implications for that though if you think about it are profound but only if we're looking at this through the Long

30:34 View and this gets me to a phrase that I'd like to jettison from my lexicon but it's going to be hard I'm going to need I'm addicted to it I'm gonna need some kind of patch or something to help me get through the process of weaning myself off a phrase maybe it's a phrase that I use um because I'm falling out of love with it and I like other phrases better that's a good way to put it the phrase is indigenous peoples now I use this phrase as many other people do I'm talking about the Native Americans for example I'll say the indigenous peoples but I'm falling out of love with this race I think I like the way the people in Canada treated better they call their Native American uh tribal peoples they call them first Nations and I think that's a better representation of what the term should mean because indigenous peoples gets me into trouble when I'm looking at things through my long-term Longview lens

31:28 because that implies that we're all indigenous to somewhere right so if you say well I'm not a a tribal Aboriginal person uh I my my family comes from a bunch of different places um where's their Homeland right where where am I indigenous to and you quickly can see what the problem in that sort of an approach might be and that's the people move right I don't live where my ancestors live in my indigenous to where my ancestors were from well when did they get there and how long do you have to be someplace to be considered indigenous to it because as we just said according to the long-term DNA tests we're all indigenous to like Northeastern Africa and once you leave there well you're either the first person to arrive someplace or you're squatting on somebody else's land that got there before you did 300 000 years of human history with people moving and intermixing all the time means that almost nobody is

32:29 probably on the land that they inhabited first before anyone else got there now the first nations in Canada I just assumed that they're the first people in that part of the world to establish hierarchies and governments and some sort of an organization you know tribal organization or whatever and I think that's accurate but this indigenous people's thing gets complicated ethnicity does too I mean I'm I was looking for um I was doing some searches but I couldn't figure out the right Search terms to spit back the results that I wanted I was trying to find a person who's up on the latest DNA and isotope evidence and everything else that can help us answer a question about how many people who inhabit certain geographical areas today are related to the people that used to be there and of course you've got to Define what you mean what I used to right but I was specifically thinking of like uh Roman

33:26 times so are the people in Italy or maybe the question should be how many of the people in Italy today can trace their genetic Heritage back to ancient Rome and I was starting to play with that and then the Long View question hit me again though in a shorter term sense but which Rome are we even talking about I I thought to myself after I'd posed the question to myself because the realm of like 450 BCE when it's a single city state at war with other Italian city-states 10 or 12 miles from itself well that's one kind of Italy isn't it made up of one kind of people but the realm of say Tiberius or Marcus a relation to the Roman Empire um well that's a multi-ethnic Multicultural Society isn't it with not just people from all over the world you know Rome's an international City back then but even the Emperors coming from places like Spain and the Balkans in North Africa and into Syria I mean all those places are contributing

34:33 leadership positions to the Roman States so if I was to say something like well how many people in Italy today can trace their Roots back to the Roman Empire some person who just got there one generation ago from Syria might be able to say I can so you got to be careful because people were moving around and interbreeding all the time this idea of race Purity that the Nazis had was a bunch of nonsense and it's worth looking for just two seconds upon how something like that gets started there's a book out there it's pretty darn good one too it's the term the title is something like the most dangerous book ever written or something like that but it's a book about tacitus's work on the Germans now tacitus was an ancient Roman writer actually was Roman Imperial writer and he wrote a famous book on um the ancient Germanic tribes right contemporaries of the Romans while the Nazis in their wisdom to try to find

35:31 racial history latched on to this book because there's parts of it that talk about something that the they could use as evidence of race Purity because tacitus says in one part that the Germans never mingled their blood with lesser people now the most dangerous book points out what any good history Professor talking about tacitista's book would also point out and that's the tacitus just like most ancient writers is not writing books for the same reason we write books so don't assume that he is he's actually writing a book to chastise Romans about things that they do and he uses this Germanic stuff as evidence for look at how they do it and they're so strong if we did it more like them we'd be so he's making a case with something this idea that the Germans didn't mix their DNA with other people during the Roman era is nonsense because the Germans like almost you don't want to say every human

36:24 society because that's not true but the vast majority of human societies and this is another thing that may be you know belongs on our list of constants is slavery the Germans were slave holding Society if you have slaves you're going to be mixing your DNA with them another example of you know how you can sort of be blind to this obvious fact I mean if you look at some of the great Kings from the past that would have been Nazi racial ideological um prototypes right the kind of people they were celebrating how about and this is a bit of a spoiler alert for the Viking show still to come but how about the famous Danish King Knute the king that ruled much of Scandinavia while he ruled England he seemed to be creating this giant theoretically had it continued you could have this giant Northern block of Nations right he's sort of the Nazis iconic dream of you know the Nordic people's ruling over vast areas but this

37:28 Danish King's mother had the Nazis done the classifying would have been seen as an unter mention a sub-human knut's mom was from a Slavic people she was the daughter of well you my history books often say polish King but this predates the creation of a real Poland but it's a Slavic King and and knut's parents married uh into a dynastic marriage and that's the other thing you forget it's not just people at the lower end of society the slaves mixing their DNA into the gene pool Royal marriages of the sort that were famous 100 200 years ago where you would marry you know your son off to another King's Daughter to try to cement a dynastic relationship that's been going on from time immemorial in fact romantic love is the new kind of reason people get married creating dynastic relationships between powerful families is the really old ancient reason that people get married and they're mixing their DNA at the very

38:33 highest level so these ideas of tacitism the Germans never mingled their blood with lesser peoples unless of course they're marrying the queens of lesser peoples and creating you know dynastic alliances I mean in other words all of that stuff is ridiculous and people have been mixing from time immemorial and moving from time immemorial and that means that none of the peoples who are in the locations that they are now probably used to be there and they almost certainly just like cheddar man in Britain looked differently I mean just look at some of the mass people movements that we have in the 6 000 years of recorded history and the good news for those of us wanting to look back on those moments is that they're often extremely disruptive of the status quo during the time period we're talking about and you know they've always said that journalism is the first draft of History well history writing

39:29 often follows similar rules in the old line if it bleeds it leads works just as well for history as it did for you know current news writing and many of the moments in history where the if it bleeds it leads standard most applies are these time periods where vast numbers of human beings are on the move I mean is the most famous the one where the Germanic tribes were set in motion the Famous folk or vandoren right the movement of peoples the great migrations they're sometimes called well everybody knows about that right these are the migrations that supposedly set in motion some of the forces that toppled the Western Roman Empire the tribes you know they're famous too the visigoth the Oster goth the vandals the Lombards there's a whole bunch of them but people forget that that movement of peoples was supposedly started by another great movement of peoples that hit those Germans like a bunch of

40:26 tumbling dominoes the Huns and the Huns of course live in one of the great ethnic melting pots on the face of the Earth they live in the Eurasian step where if we want to play the ethnic Melting Pot game uh you could have a ton of fun it's one of the most interesting parts of the great you know Eurasian step and that's how many different peoples have lived there and how often they've been mixing with each other because of course they have famously mobility and they move like waves across this giant flat expanse of land and the numbers of people that have exploded out of the the Heartland over by the altai mountains and then usually spreading Southward and Westward have you know subsumed numerous tribes uh in the past I mean the first one in recorded history that was mentioned in one of those books where writing happens are the chamarians contemporaries of the ancient Assyrians and people like that well what happened

41:28 to the camarians right these are supposedly they would say a hundred years ago ethnically Caucasian people probably speaking in Indo-European language I mean they have a whole bunch of ways of phrasing it but the chamarians got treated the same way that the Huns and the Mongols of later areas treated the uh step enemies that they ran into when they were overrun pushed farther Westward uh and then eventually absorbed by the scythian tribes sometimes called scythian in the old days I'm firmly in the camp by the way of those people trying to change the soft sea back to the hard sea as it used to be and as it still is in the languages that invented those terms right scythians is a Greek term and the Greeks would not have said scythians scythians just like Sumerians are not Sumerians they're chamarians and after the scythians they had the same treatment that they meted out to the camarions done to them by the

42:29 sarmatians who had the same thing done to them probably by the sakah who had the same thing done to them by early versions of the Huns you had Turks you had magyars you had avars which are both Turks um of course you had Mongolians eventually in other words over and over and over again you've had these tribes both ethnically cleansed areas drive people out of areas genocide peoples and usually after defeating them absorbing them well ethnically speaking these people of the step are endlessly fascinating some of the tribes the Chinese referred to a couple of them as the woo soon and the Yushi these are tribes which would be in modern day China today but looked much more like they belonged quite a lot farther west if we're just going to take their ethnicity their hair color their eye color into account you know people in modern day China generally look pretty Chinese and the more towards the

43:28 Han areas you go the more this is true but if you look at the great step overall you can see the remnants of the DNA mixing and scattering everywhere it's a fabulously mixed territory where people can have Asian features with Western color eyes or western style hair with I mean it's it's the the same culture that bred these descriptions of Genghis Khan that can ring true and you hear them that he had Asian features but maybe green eyes or red hair this same mixing that you see on the Eurasian step through all of recorded history and which my history books would have maybe treated from 1950 maybe you would have treated as an unusual aspect of this area the unusual mixing of different races and ethnicities is in fact the norm pretty much everywhere and cheddar man is a perfect example and if not cheddar man because someone will write me and go well that was all wrong with cheddar man it doesn't matter

44:29 you're finding this in all the other areas too the people that live there now often bear little resemblance to the people who used to live there that does not mean that you can't trace your history back to them there could be a very Anglo-Saxon looking person in modern day Kent that might find out that they're a direct descendant of cheddar man the only thing worth noting though is that if you um you know had gone back to your ancestors times they're all going to look quite a bit different than you and and here's the part that shows a certain continuity in the mixing of human DNA in another ten thousand twenty thousand thirty thousand years if we're looking at the Long View here people are going to be different colors yet again the ethnic question is an ever-changing Target right and I would like to say that it will solve itself when we're all some version of the same color but if you do

45:23 look at human history over the Long Haul and try to pick out commonalities one of the things we tend to be really good at is disliking people that are different than we are and just like that Star Trek episode where you had the one guy who had the left side of his face black and the right side of his face White and the other guy who had the exact black and white face but on different sides uh as that as the first character and they found a reason to not like each other because of that but to The Outsiders they they looked like the same people there's that great line where Captain Kirk says you know but you're both the same color and and the Frank gorshin played character says what are you talking about can't you see I'm black on the left side he's black on the right side I mean in other words we'll find some reason that we're ethnically different enough to get upset over our ethnic Heritage if human history is any

46:12 guide never mind that to us today people 30 000 years in the future may all appear to be the same color the star-bellied snitch-like aspect of human history shows will find a reason to declare some people better than others and other people worse the same question about movement and time seems to work pretty well with this um idea of things like land ownership or land rights I mean how much of our problems today in the in the world especially over the last 150 years seem to be related to who owns the land this is connected to colonialism too in colonialism is another one of these ancient things Native Americans and other tribal peoples often have as part of their founding origin legends that they are or were created as the human beings who lived in a certain spot now there are other tribal peoples who have a tribal story about moving from some other place I mean a lot of the tribes that we just spoke about the

47:28 Germanic type tribes that are famously involved in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire the Goths and stuff they all had origin legends that said that they were from elsewhere from Scandinavia so they knew that they had moved but many many people's uh have a founding origin legend that they come from the territory that they're currently in and have always been there it seems pretty obvious that unless they were the first people that showed up in the human migration that first step foot in a given area that they're wrong about this that none of us inhabit the area we used to inhabit as I said unless you come from the same part of Africa where human beings anatomically correct human beings first arose you're a squatter on somebody else's property or maybe you were the first people you arrived in Virgin Territory there were no human beings in the area that your ancestors first you know arrived at and declared

48:25 their Homeland that's fine seems unlikely a modern ethnicity or a Modern Nation a state can claim something like that it seems strange to us when you know some of the zionists in Israel will Proclaim that territory to be their ancestral land right going back to the Bible but the Bible in terms of its you know ancientness is a new document when we're looking at things through the Long View right the 300 000 year lens then you start asking well you know who was there ten thousand years ago who was there 20 000 years ago and then everything when it comes to the land that certain ethnic peoples don't just uh live on now but are associated with right their Heritage is connected to the land it all looks like they're just the people that own the current deed to the property it's like selling a house historically speaking oh yes they bought these from the amalekites who had gotten it from the gooty who had originally got it from the

49:26 Sumerian I mean you know makes you start to feel like there are no indigenous peoples that human beings are by their very nature newcomers everywhere I thought I'd play this little game and I found that I use it all the time now but I got the idea talking with my wife's grandfather once and I forgot when this happened I want to see there's like 2000 or 2005 somewhere in there and he was in his mid 90s one of those amazing people who are still exercising like crazy I mean just completely with it and you look at them and you go holy cow this person's 95 or whenever they were and he was telling me what it was like in the Pacific Northwest where I live and where he grew up when he was a kid here right so you know the 1930s 1920s and I was zoning out while he was talking because I just couldn't help but think to myself how Wild it was that if you took this man's lifetime whatever it was 95 years

50:25 and you just added another lifetime you know same lifespan as he was currently living to it so 295 year old lifetimes you would find yourself back in time to where there were almost no European people in the Pacific Northwest right the spot we're standing on has only native peoples um if you add this man's life time by another lifetime and that got me thinking about human lifetimes as a substitute for talking about years or centuries or dates because and I was trying to do the math correctly so if you just wanted to imagine that a human lifespan was about 50 years and we all know don't we that the infant mortality rates in earlier times skew the patterns a little bit I think 50 would still be considered a little high by some people but let's just say your average lifespan over time is 50 years if you take two of those lifetimes right then you have a century so two lives to a century that means that if you have four human

51:37 lives then you're back to that point my wife's grandfather was talking about right four 50-year human lives and there are no Europeans basically in the Pacific Northwest that seems pretty short right when you just say oh it's just your great great great grandfather well it gets even weirder when you go even farther back in time right if you take 10 or 11 of those 50-year life spans great great great great great whatever you want to say 10 or 11 of them and now you're back in Columbus's time and you're talking about there being no Europeans anywhere in the hemisphere you say 1492 well you say five or six hundred years ago it just seems like forever ago you say 10 or 11 50-year lifespans doesn't seem that long at all does it you want to keep playing that game if you say a 20 of those lifespans great great great great great grandfather whatever it is 20 lifespans and you are in you know the Early Middle

52:47 Ages Norman Saxons William the Conqueror Vikings 20 human lifetimes of 50 years 40 of those human lifetimes 40 of them and you're in Julius Caesar's time period the death throws of the Roman Republic 60 of those lifetimes and you're in Old Testament time 90 of those 50-year life spans 90. and you can watch the Great Pyramids being built in Egypt and before that it's basically prehistory so the thousands and thousands of human lifetimes that are part of your ancestral genetic code only the last 90 or 100 or something like that all that is is all recorded history and it's hardly any of your past that to me is absolutely mind-blowing and I feel like the ramifications should be huge even if you know to my editor's dismay I can't tell you what the story is here one of the things I have always been fascinated with is how the people from a very very long time ago saw their own very very ancient

54:09 past I mean for example there is a Kings list that the Neo Assyrian scribes put together in the neo-assyrian Empire the neo-assyrians were the last of the great Assyrian States the high water mark of their political and Military dominance uh think 750 BCE and you're right there well the Neo Assyrian scribes concocted a Kings list right one king after another after another that stretched all the way back in time that chronicled their rulers going back remember from their own time period which is like 750 BCE Going Back 2 000 years from there I loved that they referred to the first 17 Kings in their kings list as the Kings who lived in tents denoting that these were like nomadic Kings right people who didn't even live in houses now most historians will tell you that those sorts of legendary historical creation lists are a bunch of nonsense and that they go from you know really attestable rulers that we know existed

55:25 to people that may or may not have existed to a bunch of you know kings in the distant past that were almost certainly fictitious but how's that any different than all of us doing what the 19th century made common right trying to associate our current situation with some wonderful glorious ancient lineage the ancient the syrians were no different what is a little different though is what became of them maybe compared to what will become of us my favorite story almost certainly I mean I it's top five for me from the ancient world and all the ancient writings and we quoted it in the show we did on the Assyrians Judgment at Nineveh available from the website if you want it although one of the many shows I'd like to read you with the modern sort of approach where we go and do it more deeply and over a longer period of time but is the wonderful story from the um Greek General xenophon when he came upon what used to be some

56:23 of the grandest cities in the world a couple hundred years after their Grandeur had passed and they you know xenophon was a Greek General whose men were involved in a Persian dynastic struggle they ended up on the losing side and and had this amazing account of trying to get home from the battle site which was deep in in like Iraq uh all the way back to Greece harried the whole way by the by the enemy forces but at one point in xenophon's account and he's writing this you know like in 401 400 BCE right to us it's very very ancient times but he runs across ancient cities cities that are ancient in his time period right we wondered about how the Assyrians saw their ancient past well this wasn't xenophon's ancient past these weren't Greek cities these were Assyrian cities but Assyria had been gone for a couple hundred years and xenophon had no idea about them he talked about these I always call them ghost cities because

57:26 they're cities that are literally just turning to dust because the these cities were often made up of the mud bricks that they used to use as an archaeological building uh material back then and xenophon described how tall the walls were how big the city's circumferences were and all these kinds of things and you can tell he's plainly um astonished by what he sees these are cities that are probably bigger than anything in Greece or certainly as big as the big cities in Greece and yet they're clearly from a much earlier time period now this is a guy being pursued and On the Run by his enemies but he still had time to make a few inquiries to the local people squatting here and there around these giant ancient structures and the people give him the wrong answer they don't know who it belongs to either it's only a couple hundred years since they were destroyed a series enemies combined and brought that Empire down and destroyed

58:31 these cities but xenophon already can't figure out who it was that built them I love that story because it's a story about Antiquity looking back on an even earlier antiquity and there seems to be kind of a a sort of a cosmic lesson there that we seem to think ourselves immune from and it's the lesson that someday somebody could be going through our ruins and asking you know the few squatters here and there who built them and if you don't believe that's possible let me just suggest to you that that's probably what your average Assyrian person on the street would have said to me if I did one of those and I used to hate those those classic you know we used to call them Moses man on the street but today you'd say person on the street interviews if I'd gone to your average Assyrian and Nineveh and said so do you think someday this city will be a ruin and no one will even remember Assyria I would think they would think I

59:33 was crazy and that's what people today would think if I asked them a similar question but the Long View seems to indicate that that's how most things have gone in the past which means one of two things as I always say either things will continue to go as they always had and that will be interesting or they will defy the way things have always gone and go in a different direction which is equally interesting so either we end up a ruin to somebody else or we don't both fascinating outcomes there were some other things though that we haven't brought up that I think also are part of what the Long View seems to indicate to me we've always been hard on our environment and this is another thing that I think was part of an earlier era of things like anthropology that maybe is starting to also be seen in a different light this idea that human beings lived in harmony with nature Once Upon a Time I don't think that's true and I think

1:00:40 like I said the uh and again maybe I'm choosing sides here but the anthropologists and stuff that I've been reading seem to suggest the same thing we've always been extremely hard wherever we've lived on the environment the difference between earlier eras and today are twofold one we create stuff now that doesn't biodegrade so if you were tough on your environment but it was just a question of chopping down all the foliage and leaving around biodegradable material and all that kind of stuff well that goes away eventually If instead we're dealing with things like Plastics and polymers and all kinds of other things right um contaminants that don't go away well that's a different you know in other words we're being no better stewards of our environment than our ancestors were but the materials that were polluting our environment with are much more permanent so the environment stays much more damaged much longer

1:01:37 and of course the other thing is when you're moving around in a nomadic state which would have been most of human history if we're looking at the 300 000 year lens well that means that you're able to give land time to recover after you've been hard on it and you see this with eight populations right they just they'll move from one burned out territory to another and by the time they get back to the original location in their range it's had time to recover and they haven't polluted it with forever chemicals right but we've always been hard on the environment so the fact that we're still hard on the environment is part of the consistency of looking at human behavior over the Long Haul which means that trying to extricate ourselves from this mess of destroying our environment is going to be well no one ever said it was going to be easy but we would literally have to change the way we have always been not revert to a way

1:02:33 we used to be again I think it's a myth that we ever were in that that particular way way so humans have always moved and this is where the notes that I have around me just it would start to overwhelm me but there were two lines that I just juxtaposed one right by the other one was this concept and again you'll often hear this from environmental groups a concept known as uh Seventh Generation philosophy and this is supposedly tied back to the Iroquois Confederation and the story goes that the people who ruled those Native American groups were taught to think about their decision making and how it would affect Seven Generations into the future now I love this concept but I find it hard to believe in it and the quote that I juxtaposed next to it was a quote by the 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes who was and you know the re the context behind it was somebody was talking about uh going through some hard times and

1:03:43 letting the economic system correct itself over the Long Haul and he said and and the quote is something like well you know in the Long Haul we're all dead or in the long run we're all dead and the point he was trying to make was that if you tell somebody well things will get better but they won't get better till after your lifespan is over well you're condemning that poor person then to have to live a terrible life because you're telling them that that it's it's part of something that you're doing for the good of something farther past your Horizon and he was insinuating that you might change the future Horizon if you just tried to improve this person's life now and didn't try to worry about the amorphous stuff you know in the future well I was trying to think about artificial intelligence which is all on the news right now of course um and if you had said to an AI program that it needed to run Society but that

1:04:41 it needed to have as its founding sort of guiding principles the Seventh Generation philosophy is its thinking and I can't tell you that I came up with any specific scenarios except that AI destroys the world which is the one I normally come up with about 80 of the time but the idea of trying to manage human resources for the good of people 200 years from now for example just seemed to go against all of the human proclivities built into US I mean if you have to I mean throughout most of human history we live so hand-to-mouth that the idea of trying to preserve things for future generations and this goes back to the Keynes quote a little bit would certainly mean a poorer lifestyle or maybe not even surviving to the current generation you lived in right at the sea record really we're trying to decide things for seven generations in their future then they were prosperous people indeed most people don't have those kinds of

1:05:44 you know the wealth and the options and the Surplus it's hard enough getting through the winter much less trying to preserve stuff so the people 200 years in the future have enough for themselves right don't cut down this for us now well why it would make our lives so much better well what about people 200 years from now well if we don't manage our resources better now we won't be here 200 years from now see what I'm saying interesting to think about how an AI would try to figure out a way to manage human resources and needs and actions with that long of a timeline I mean we might have to put up with a ton of things today going away that make our lives what they are on the grounds that to do otherwise would be to hamstring people hundreds of years from now from living lives you know well at all this is exactly the sort of problem you know something that so runs against the grain of what our past history seems

1:06:51 to indicate is our pattern where a person like yours truly is susceptible to seduction by something like the artificial intelligence Wild Card answer to our problems because otherwise it can become depressing to look at just how consistently we live a certain way over the Long View and then expect those ways and those patterns of behavior to change just because we've invented weapons for example that are so destructive that fighting the kind of wars that we had become accustomed to fighting would be practically suicidal genocidal for sure and you can't even imagine something like that happening but our past history would suggest that imagining anything else is probably being far too optimistic unless of course you can throw a wild card into things that you know upsets that balance in other words what if you had a fix you know something that came in there and prevented us from doing the very

1:08:00 things we've always done depressingly always done right we're going to destroy the environment well let's invent something that will prevent us from destroying the environment right so Seventh Generation thinking infused into our robot overlords that's how the you know Kurt Vonnegut novel on Dan Carlin's idea for saving us from ourselves with artificial intelligence would go it would make a great movie wouldn't it perfect science fiction dystopian classic you know invented by misanthropic people who didn't trust people to handle people problems and wanted a wild card instead but you can see how it could seduce a person like yours truly and there's something wonderfully symmetric about the whole thing that's appealing also this idea that our answer to the problem of inventing all these things over time that have made Modern Life possible Right the kind of Lifestyles and progress that you know

1:08:56 we all live lives that only the very very very very most privileged and wealthy people in the past ever lived I mean we've got this wonderful Planet we've created through all of our inventiveness there's a wonderful symmetry to the idea that we could invent our way out of our inventiveness problem or at least our inventiveness byproducts problem I like that and one can also make the case that you know the last couple of hundred years have put human Collective intellectual capacity in the ability of entire human societies to adjust under huge amounts of pressure when the need to speedily evolve to handle what are historically very rapid changes I mean the last couple of hundred years there's well as we've always said there's going to come a time where you're going to reach the limits of Humanity's ability to evolve and adjust to changes at the pace of change as it continues to speed up now we may have reached that point

1:10:01 already or it may be in our future but at some point it's going to arrive and at that point the only thing one can suggest that would solve a problem like that is human inventiveness having invented something that could go beyond human evolutionary capacity to change more quickly than human brains and human societies can change that is a pro-artificial intelligence argument right there isn't it the idea that you need something like this to sort of save Humanity the anti-artificial intelligence argument though is well known and well understood too basically it boils down to a question is it ever Smart to build something that will be smarter than you are I don't know what the right answer is in a case like this because sometimes I wish we had something smarter than we are but the obvious downside of that is well obvious and even if we had a choice in the matter and I'm not sure we do I don't

1:11:15 know what the right choice would be I remember James Burke asking the question the great science historian a long time ago if you looked over the technological Horizon and you didn't like what you saw and you didn't want to invent and deal with the ramifications of inventing something in the future could you decide not to and I don't know what the answer to that is and I don't know exactly which way this will go but if you are a betting person it would be smart to look at exactly how things have gone and note that it's probably the safe bet to assume that we humans will do just what we have always done foreign foreign

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "EP25 The Long View"?

In order: 0:00 DNA ancestry test, Jackie Kennedy, Larry King; 20:00 Cheddar Man; 30:00 Tacitus, Cheddar Man; 40:00 Cheddar Man.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

6 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Cheddar Man, Tacitus, Larry King, Jackie Kennedy, DNA ancestry test, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP25 The Long View"?

The episode runs 1 h 12 min; the transcript is about 11,862 words in 70 timestamped sections.

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