Speaker 1: Hello Seattle, and hello San Francisco. We are coming out
Speaker 1: to do live shows in January for you guys, like
Speaker 1: we seem to do every year. Now. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of a pattern that's emerging. Chuck, that's right. And the
Speaker 1: pattern is you come to see us, you laugh, we
Speaker 1: have a good time, and everyone leaves happy. That's the pattern.
Speaker 1: So if you want to leave happy, you can come
Speaker 1: see us on Thursday, January at the More Theater in Seattle.
Speaker 1: And you can come see a Saturday January at the
Speaker 1: Castro in San Francisco. Yes, part of our annual retreat
Speaker 1: to Sketch Fest. Yes. So if you want tickets and information,
Speaker 1: go to s y s K live dot com, our
Speaker 1: home on the web, powered by our friends at Squarespace,
Speaker 1: and we'll see you in January. Welcome to Stuff You
Speaker 1: Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant. There's area over there, and this is Stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know the podcast. What else would it be?
Speaker 1: A TV show? Not for a long time? Every funny.
Speaker 1: I like that. I like that intro. Okay, that's good.
Speaker 1: If I'm not mistaken. Who did I say melted many
Speaker 1: years ago? Was it the Maya? No? Neanderthals, that's right,
Speaker 1: or Thals? If you don't want to be a douche,
Speaker 1: can we say that. I don't know. We'll find out.
Speaker 1: Jerry didn't even hear it. Maybe she will in the
Speaker 1: in the I bet she won't. Um, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: the Neanderthals. But I'm gonna go ahead and say it again.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's the Maya melted, sure due to climate change. Maybe,
Speaker 1: but that's what you were talking about right then, melted
Speaker 1: because the climate change, that's right. What's I thought was hilarious?
Speaker 1: But let's talk about the Maya civilization? Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I meant to tell you. Let's let's kind of move
Speaker 1: stuff around here. Do you want to? Sure? Do? I mean?
Speaker 1: What do you mean? Well, let's talk about Charles Lindbergh first. Okay,
Speaker 1: I think he's a better intro than just kind of
Speaker 1: randomly in the middle. All right, So sure, And that
Speaker 1: means we can start out in the way back machine,
Speaker 1: which we would have been in anyway, but we'll be closer.
Speaker 1: We'll save some gas. It's way closer, that's right. We're
Speaker 1: going back to February, Yes, February nine, when Chuck Limburgh
Speaker 1: was flying for pan Am and he was flying over
Speaker 1: what is now believes and if you can believe that,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. But what he would do back then,
Speaker 1: and this is after you know, of course his the
Speaker 1: big flight, the big one. Uh, he would get hired
Speaker 1: to do the like these little exploratory routes for airlines,
Speaker 1: in this case PanAm. He may have done that exclusive
Speaker 1: of your paying him. I have no idea. I wasn't
Speaker 1: in his contract business. But he would fly these routes
Speaker 1: to sort of blaze new trails for like for flying
Speaker 1: routes and say, hey, this is a pretty legit flying
Speaker 1: route for delivering stuff or or even passenger routes, and
Speaker 1: maybe add it to your to your docket. So he
Speaker 1: was doing this, and he was flying over this episode
Speaker 1: on air routes. No, it's not, because he was flying
Speaker 1: over Mexico and Central America well believes, like you said, yeah,
Speaker 1: And and it was just very dense jungle everywhere he
Speaker 1: looked until he went over this one part where it
Speaker 1: was described not by Charles Lindberg for some reason, but
Speaker 1: by an Associated Press writer who apparently got into the
Speaker 1: head of Charles Lindberg and said it looked like two
Speaker 1: emerald eyes staring up out of the jungle brush, the
Speaker 1: tangle of the jungle brush. So he went back, flew
Speaker 1: a little lower to investigate. And what he found was
Speaker 1: what that the that the emerald eyes were actually twin
Speaker 1: reflecting pools in a massive stone temple, like reflecting the
Speaker 1: sun into his face. And he was like, um, so
Speaker 1: is he a stone temple pilot? I guess so, Oh,
Speaker 1: my gosh, is that off the cuff? It was? That
Speaker 1: was pretty good? Um, that was great? Actually, uh. And
Speaker 1: he realized that he was looking at the ruins of
Speaker 1: a lost city, a massive stone lost city. Actually I
Speaker 1: don't think he realized that, probably, but we now know that. Well,
Speaker 1: he he saw that it was covered in jungle and
Speaker 1: overgrowth and everything. Yeah, and he so the legend goes
Speaker 1: chuck that that, um, Charles Lindbergh discovered the Lost Man
Speaker 1: in Civilization, right, which is not true. No, well, okay,
Speaker 1: it's nuanced. That particular article is probably totally made up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and but even if he did find that part he
Speaker 1: didn't he didn't discover and that's probably not what Evan said.
Speaker 1: He did not discovered the lost Maya civilization. He found
Speaker 1: a part of it. Right, It's it's it's apocryphal. It's
Speaker 1: an apocryphal story because by that time people were aware
Speaker 1: that the Maya had existed, but they had kind of
Speaker 1: been seen as legend for a very long time. But
Speaker 1: starting in from what I could tell, the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: they started um finding these massive, huge lost cities, just
Speaker 1: like Limburgh supposedly found. And later on Limburgh did actually
Speaker 1: fly over some of these lost cities and photograph him
Speaker 1: and he got into aerial archaeology. But the point is this,
Speaker 1: there are still are and there definitely were more lost
Speaker 1: cities that were just enormous, with huge temples, some of
Speaker 1: them pyramids that were among the tallest pyramids in the world,
Speaker 1: completely overgrown by the jungle, just overtaken, abandoned cities. And
Speaker 1: they started looking around and they started finding more of
Speaker 1: these cities and more and more all over the Yucatan
Speaker 1: and northern uh well actually all of Guatemala into Honduras,
Speaker 1: Belize and El Salvador, a big chunk of Central America
Speaker 1: that there's these lost cities that were found, and they
Speaker 1: all seemed to share something in common, so much so
Speaker 1: that they now realized that they were peopled by the
Speaker 1: same cultural group, the Maya. That's right, So let's talk
Speaker 1: about the Maya. Let's go back even further. Let's go
Speaker 1: back between twenty and twelve hundred or B c D
Speaker 1: or what we now would call ce CE or I
Speaker 1: think people now just say, like years ago, do they
Speaker 1: do they really? Yeah? I don't, well yeah, they're they're like,
Speaker 1: get religion out of it entirely, just say a long
Speaker 1: time ago. Yeah, this this many years ago. Okay, so
Speaker 1: many many years ago, the Maya civilization um occupied this
Speaker 1: big area that we were talking about. There's a period
Speaker 1: of time known as the classic Classic Maya that's what
Speaker 1: they call it, the classic period between double on their
Speaker 1: way through the door, between two fifty and nine hundred,
Speaker 1: where I mean you talk about flourishing as a culture
Speaker 1: like it was. It hadn't been seen since the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1: Basically the cities uh sixty or more sixty seventy thousand people. Um,
Speaker 1: they had sports arenas, they had pyramids, they had these
Speaker 1: advanced farming practices, they made calendars, they understood math, and
Speaker 1: we're really really advanced, and I believe even Um at
Speaker 1: the time, some of these cities outnumbered the amount of
Speaker 1: people that were in places like London in Paris at
Speaker 1: that same time. Yeah yeah, and like something like say
Speaker 1: eight hundred c e. If you travel over London in
Speaker 1: Paris you find far fewer people, like double or triple
Speaker 1: the amount in this Maya culture. The way that I
Speaker 1: saw it put was in these in the in the
Speaker 1: area of like Um, the Yucatan and Guatemala, the the
Speaker 1: southern Lowlands I think is what they call it, where
Speaker 1: like most of the great Mayan cities were. Um. The
Speaker 1: population density is about what it is today in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles County. Wow, imagine that. And now it's just overrun
Speaker 1: jungle rainforest mostly um. But it used to be as
Speaker 1: dense as l A County, Like people just everywhere in
Speaker 1: this Yeah, super dense. So uh, here's the thing about
Speaker 1: the may Empires that they were never one big group. Um.
Speaker 1: They were never unified politically. They were just a bunch
Speaker 1: of warring city states but really thriving. And they also
Speaker 1: had like political alliances between city states. But that same
Speaker 1: city state could be at like total war fifty years later,
Speaker 1: you know, the shifting constantly, that's right, But the thing
Speaker 1: we really need to hammer homes that they were doing
Speaker 1: great for themselves. They were really thriving as a culture
Speaker 1: and as a people, and then in about a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty year period between eight hundred and nine fifty,
Speaker 1: they disappeared. For all intents and purposes, the classic Maya
Speaker 1: culture just vanished into the jungle. And that is not
Speaker 1: to say that the people all died. Uh, they assimilated
Speaker 1: into other cultures. But what you were talking about, that
Speaker 1: Maya culture and those those big cities of seventy thousand
Speaker 1: people just went away. Yeah, it's it be kind of
Speaker 1: like a good analogy is if over you know, the
Speaker 1: next thirty years. Yeah, Um, the the United States just
Speaker 1: suddenly reverted to sixteenth century agrarian practices. That was it.
Speaker 1: We just abandoned our cities and went and farmed, and
Speaker 1: like we didn't farm with any tractors or anything like that.
Speaker 1: We started using ox um oxen. Just completely abandoned our
Speaker 1: culture and went back to a simple farming lifestyle. That
Speaker 1: would basically be the closest analogy you can come up with.
Speaker 1: And it happened really fast, super fast, and as a result,
Speaker 1: that Mayan culture, like you said, was sort of looked
Speaker 1: at as a legend before you know, we started finding
Speaker 1: these places again. Yeah, because you know, locals kind of
Speaker 1: knew about they'd be like, oh, if you go into
Speaker 1: the jungle, you you're going to find a lost city.
Speaker 1: Explorers were like, you're we're crazy, that's not real. But
Speaker 1: then they started to actually find these lost cities. And
Speaker 1: what's really surprising to me is they're still finding lost cities.
Speaker 1: Every year there'll be some new study coming out that says, oh,
Speaker 1: we used Leader. I think it's light Leader. Yeah. Leader.
Speaker 1: It's basically a way of looking through vegetation to see
Speaker 1: solid structures underneath. So they're looking through the jungle. It's
Speaker 1: like a jungle X kind of. Yeah, it's actually it's perfect. Um.
Speaker 1: And they're starting to find even more lost cities, and
Speaker 1: they're also finding that the lost cities that we know about,
Speaker 1: there's one called Elmir Door that hasn't been kind of
Speaker 1: excavated yet, but it's the pyramid is so tall that
Speaker 1: is sticking up out of the jungle canopy, so they
Speaker 1: know there's a lost city there. But um, using Leader,
Speaker 1: they've seen like, oh, it's way more extensive than we
Speaker 1: thought before. Elmir door probably had a hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: living in the city center at its peak. All right,
Speaker 1: so that's a good setup. We're gonna take a break
Speaker 1: and discuss the merits of Jungle X Ray as a
Speaker 1: band name and be back right after this. It's not bad.
Speaker 1: What kind of band would it be? That's your specialty?
Speaker 1: Sounds like a party band, right does. It's got a
Speaker 1: lot of funk going on. I think seventies, sure, but
Speaker 1: not but like a seventies throwback they like didn't exist
Speaker 1: in the seventies. Oh yeah, like uh the uh like
Speaker 1: a Ya sisters? Oh who's that? Wasn't that a band?
Speaker 1: Jerry Scissor Sisters? That It was like a funky throwback
Speaker 1: seventies thing? Okay, I gotta listen to them while they
Speaker 1: were around for a minute. I think they're not around anymore,
Speaker 1: all right, But did they leave like any kind of
Speaker 1: documentation of their music? I seem to remember them being
Speaker 1: like a party band. I don't know, but I mean,
Speaker 1: did they have a record out or what? Man they
Speaker 1: had records? It's gonna go check them out. Think I
Speaker 1: just made this up, all right? So the Maya disappeared,
Speaker 1: why would Jerry knows she hit all of a sudden.
Speaker 1: I don't know, she just what she just didn't so uh.
Speaker 1: Charles Lindbergh comes around, referred to previous. Uh story, we
Speaker 1: already talked about. Lindberg referre to previous story. That's why
Speaker 1: I said that. And he he puts this back on
Speaker 1: the map again, and everyone is excited about discovering about
Speaker 1: who these people were, right, But the whole thing, like
Speaker 1: from the outset, they're like, what happened to these people? Sure?
Speaker 1: And the more we learned about him, this is the
Speaker 1: other thing, like the legends of this sudden civilization just vanishing,
Speaker 1: Like the more we studied them, the more we realized
Speaker 1: that's actually kind of accurate. The legends are true. There
Speaker 1: was this amazing culture that just vanished into the forest.
Speaker 1: And um And one of the big things, one of
Speaker 1: the big breakthroughs in studying my culture was cracking UM.
Speaker 1: There written alphabet, they used hire glyphs. And there's a really,
Speaker 1: really good documentary called UM Cracking the Maya Coat On
Speaker 1: I think it was a Nova episode. Dude. It is good.
Speaker 1: It's thrilling, and it basically is them just sitting around
Speaker 1: some house one summer trying to figure this out. But
Speaker 1: they're like going back and forth and some like I
Speaker 1: think some like twenty year old woman figured it out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they now we understand a lot more. But what
Speaker 1: we're finding is it's like, oh no, this is this
Speaker 1: really happened. Something really weird happened here, and we still
Speaker 1: aren't quite sure what caused it. It was a very
Speaker 1: odd description of how they figured that out. What sitting
Speaker 1: around a house that's what they did. I think they
Speaker 1: had like a workshop or something. They're like, we're really
Speaker 1: going to try to figure this out. We're gonna try
Speaker 1: to crack this coat. And they actually did where we
Speaker 1: could go sit in. Well, that's what they were doing.
Speaker 1: It was a house, someone's house. I think, I love it,
Speaker 1: so that's knowing me. It was definitely not a house
Speaker 1: by any stretch, and I'll have to do it correct.
Speaker 1: They're like, Josh, is your house Harvard University. So there
Speaker 1: are some theories that have been developed over the years
Speaker 1: that all kind of makes sense, and some of them
Speaker 1: there that's not necessarily a binary thing that some of
Speaker 1: them could have all contributed to the collapse of the
Speaker 1: Maya um over farming is one which makes a lot
Speaker 1: of sense. And that's the idea that basically they were
Speaker 1: so successful. They had tons of food, tons of water,
Speaker 1: and so they said, well, let's just make tons and
Speaker 1: tons of babies, which all of a sudden, the farmers
Speaker 1: are like, gees, we're really growing. Yeah, like I don't
Speaker 1: know if we can grow this much corn. Um, so
Speaker 1: let's clear some forest land and grow grow, grow, which
Speaker 1: means they're not practicing safe and sound farming practices. All
Speaker 1: of a sudden, they weren't practicing safe sex, and they
Speaker 1: weren't practicing safe farming. That's right. So um, because of
Speaker 1: this over farming, they weren't allowed to they didn't have
Speaker 1: the opportunity let their fields lay fallow because everything was
Speaker 1: in production, which is there's really no faster way to
Speaker 1: overstretch your agricultural resources than that. That's right. What we're
Speaker 1: here to tell you, Uh, well, warfare. We know they
Speaker 1: were a warring people for sure, So the Maya rulers
Speaker 1: were they did a lot of disservice to their own
Speaker 1: people by kind of over inflating uh their resources, and
Speaker 1: how tough they were, Um, what kind of warriors they were,
Speaker 1: and how powerful they were. They could make it rain,
Speaker 1: they can control the weather and thus control the crops.
Speaker 1: And this may have backfired on them, as the theory
Speaker 1: goes that they warred so much that they sapped their
Speaker 1: own resources and eventually people retaliated and they were not
Speaker 1: able to fight back. And I think the guy who
Speaker 1: led that workshop at that dude's house where they cracked
Speaker 1: the code, I cannot remember his name, but he's a
Speaker 1: eminent Maya scholar. He he is of the camp. That's like,
Speaker 1: it was warfare, that's what That's what. It was, plain
Speaker 1: and simple. They just fought too much and they eventually
Speaker 1: they reached some tipping point from war. And there's real
Speaker 1: evidence about some of these cultures at least for some
Speaker 1: of these cities going down because of warfare. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean like they engaged in total war or they would
Speaker 1: like target civilians, they would burn your whole city down.
Speaker 1: They like. It wasn't like they were a very warlike group,
Speaker 1: which is funny because for a very long time they
Speaker 1: were portrayed as um one of the few Mesoamerican groups
Speaker 1: that didn't practice human sacrifice, and then once we cracked
Speaker 1: my code, were like, oh no, actually they were prolific
Speaker 1: at that. Yeah, it was bad news. The other is disease,
Speaker 1: and this is um not human disease necessarily, but like
Speaker 1: virus from their food supply. Yeah, that's another ecological disaster.
Speaker 1: That's right. I think mays mosaic virus was named in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventy nine articles. So like, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of good theory is out there and
Speaker 1: they aren't necessary. It's not a zero some kind of
Speaker 1: thing figuring it out, but there's over the years lately, Um,
Speaker 1: in the last decade or two, maybe people have really
Speaker 1: started to say, you know, I think we should look
Speaker 1: a little closer at the Royal climate change might play
Speaker 1: in this kind of stuff. And when they look specifically
Speaker 1: at the Maya, they said, actually, it looks a lot
Speaker 1: like climate change played a big role in in the
Speaker 1: decline of the classic Maya civilization. That's right. And just
Speaker 1: because the Maya didn't burn fossil fuels to run cars
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that the Earth wasn't affected by climate change
Speaker 1: and that they weren't affected by climate change. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: think that probably climate change happened on its own, but
Speaker 1: they've also pinpointed some ways that the Maya may have
Speaker 1: exacerbated it too. You mean, people can impact that some
Speaker 1: foo loops say so. So they've done some studies. They
Speaker 1: studied mineral deposits um in caves left by dripping water,
Speaker 1: and they have been able to put together a two
Speaker 1: thousand year history of weather patterns based on Speelio thumbs alone.
Speaker 1: That's right, uh. And what they found out, and this
Speaker 1: was published an article in Science, UH in two thousand
Speaker 1: twelve Science magazine, the journal Science. The journal Science. It's
Speaker 1: not called like Science Weekly or what the Ohio State Universe. Um.
Speaker 1: But what they did find out was for the first
Speaker 1: few hundred years, and this really lens UH a lot
Speaker 1: of credence to the theory that they may have overfarmed
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, is they really had a lot
Speaker 1: of rain and they flourished as a result of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which you can't really blame them. It's it's them saying, okay,
Speaker 1: well let's thrive and we can thrive in these conditions.
Speaker 1: It's not like they were like, Okay, it's this is
Speaker 1: a really wet period, let's take advantage of it and
Speaker 1: really overstretch our ourselves. Um. They just kind of went
Speaker 1: with it, and their population grew because it could be
Speaker 1: supported because is there was such a large amount of rain,
Speaker 1: their crops grew, their reservoirs were full, and this is
Speaker 1: a few hundred years, right over the course of a
Speaker 1: few hundred years. But from looking at the cave deposits,
Speaker 1: they found that there was a very wet record that
Speaker 1: corresponds with the classical Maya period. Wet record is a
Speaker 1: Scissor Sisters album. I don't know, Jump, what was it?
Speaker 1: Jungle x ray albu Jungle x ray wet record, so
Speaker 1: that hip, that's hip. Jerry doesn't disgusted with this at
Speaker 1: this point around six six d this all changed the rain.
Speaker 1: What's that funny for? I just thought have a good analogy.
Speaker 1: So Jungle x ray their album wet record is to
Speaker 1: seventies funk soul throwbacks. What the darkness Permission to land
Speaker 1: is the eighties hair metal throwback? That's not an s
Speaker 1: A T question. I think I think we just get it, Chuck.
Speaker 1: Did we correctly go? Yeah, we we cracked that Jungle lectory.
Speaker 1: Did you see where Motley Crue is gonna play shows
Speaker 1: again after we supposedly saw their farewell to her that
Speaker 1: they even signed a contract saying they could legally never
Speaker 1: perform again together. And they're going on a stadium tour
Speaker 1: with Poison and Deaf Leppard. What I know, I'll see
Speaker 1: you there. Yeah. So remember we got invited to that
Speaker 1: show by Nitas Strauss, That's right, who is like huge, Yeah,
Speaker 1: guitar player at the time. Maybe still for Alice Cooper's Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think she does that still, I think. But she's
Speaker 1: like a guitar legend, not jam She's great. I hope
Speaker 1: she still listens. He's probably not. But around six sixty
Speaker 1: the weather changed, the rains did not come like they
Speaker 1: used to, and they had the longest dry spell of
Speaker 1: the last two thousand years. And this is gonna have
Speaker 1: a real impact. When everything's flourishing and you're just planting
Speaker 1: and planting, all of a sudden you're a or thirsty.
Speaker 1: That's a big one, and you're not you're hungry that
Speaker 1: thirst thing. It's funny because like we're talking about rainforests,
Speaker 1: but this area in northern Guatemala where the Maya will
Speaker 1: live just called the petting or the pitten I don't know,
Speaker 1: pet e n And it is kind of like feast
Speaker 1: or famine depending on the rain cycle. So when it's dry,
Speaker 1: it's like you're you're in trouble because the closest groundwater
Speaker 1: is about five feet below the surface, and um, it's
Speaker 1: not going to rain for a very long time. So
Speaker 1: if you haven't prepared by building reservoirs your you might
Speaker 1: die of thirst. So a drought in the pattern, which
Speaker 1: is normally dry some parts of the year, would be
Speaker 1: a real problem. If you're talking about a drought that
Speaker 1: lasts over years or possibly decades. Now you have a
Speaker 1: civilization collapsing problem. Yeah, so that's a big problem in
Speaker 1: and of itself. You've got a big population that grew
Speaker 1: when it was wet. Suddenly it's not wet, and you
Speaker 1: still have that big population. There's a lot of internal
Speaker 1: problems that can that can develop, especially between classes too.
Speaker 1: Sure the haves and the have nuts, which existed back then,
Speaker 1: but also the rulers who are like, you know, more
Speaker 1: human sacrifices, We need to keep this this this thing
Speaker 1: going to get the rain to come back. Well, and
Speaker 1: the common folk being like, jeez, I don't know about this. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I hadn't rained in a while. It was
Speaker 1: my cousin before, but now I was asking for my brother,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly. So that created a lot of tension. The
Speaker 1: other thing that could have sped this whole thing up
Speaker 1: was the fact that they were thriving so much that
Speaker 1: they were expanding their territory and they were cutting down
Speaker 1: and deforesting the land around them for fuel and to
Speaker 1: build things. And they have found, uh, they found pollen.
Speaker 1: They studied pollen and these ancient layers and lake sediment
Speaker 1: in Central America, and around eight d that pollen went
Speaker 1: from tree pollen to weed pollen pretty quickly. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's about when the Maya reached their fluorescence, when they
Speaker 1: really reached their pinnacles about eight hundred. So what that
Speaker 1: suggests is they cut down all the forests and they
Speaker 1: were using what used to be forest for crop land
Speaker 1: because they practice slash and char where they would burn
Speaker 1: it down to introduce carbon nutrients into the ground. Um.
Speaker 1: The problem is as if there's no force whatsoever, you've
Speaker 1: just altered your ecosystem and by doing that, you can
Speaker 1: actually alter the local climate, which they think they may have. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Not only that, but it's going to have just the
Speaker 1: physical effect of erosion, like a massive erosion, because those
Speaker 1: tree roots are gone, and that's gonna screw up your
Speaker 1: farmland as well. Right, So your top soils gone, Your
Speaker 1: trees are no longer keeping things as cool as they
Speaker 1: were before. There was a NASA model that predicted that
Speaker 1: the the temperature in the area rose by about six
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit, which is a lot. I mean, that's noticeable
Speaker 1: for humans, but if you're talking about plants and soil,
Speaker 1: that's that can really exacerbated drought. When you've already got
Speaker 1: a bad drought and a normally dry area. That's not good.
Speaker 1: So the climate, the climate record is showing Okay, it's
Speaker 1: it was already bad, but they probably made things worse
Speaker 1: with the deforestation. Yeah, and that that all that stuff
Speaker 1: combined and then maybe throwing a little dash of the
Speaker 1: previous theories could very well explain why they said, you know,
Speaker 1: we're getting out of here and we're gonna go live
Speaker 1: a smaller life, a more sustainable, smaller life that's not
Speaker 1: in a big city, right. Yeah, And they think also
Speaker 1: that you know, the other things dashed in, like um,
Speaker 1: the warfare, Like if you're in a town and you
Speaker 1: know the next time or the next city state over
Speaker 1: has big reservoirs and your people are dying of thirst,
Speaker 1: invading that other city might seem like a pretty good idea.
Speaker 1: And if that happens enough times, then you have a
Speaker 1: lot of war going on everywhere, and that can really
Speaker 1: make your civilization to climb pretty bad too. Should we
Speaker 1: take another break? Sure? All right, we'll take another break
Speaker 1: and talk about how this climate change could have affected
Speaker 1: some other civilizations throughout history. Alright, Chuck. So it's not
Speaker 1: just the maya. This is the thing. This is kind
Speaker 1: of a new way of looking at history and especially
Speaker 1: social collapses, the idea that climate change played some driving
Speaker 1: role in it. And they started to look around. They're like, oh, actually,
Speaker 1: this kind of explains a lot of different ones that
Speaker 1: we didn't we thought we understood before. And the understanding
Speaker 1: before would be like, well, this king died and this
Speaker 1: created political instability, and they have evidence that there was
Speaker 1: this war and this group got got invaded. What they're
Speaker 1: starting to find now is actually there might have been
Speaker 1: climate change that led to crop failure that led to instability,
Speaker 1: that that allowed this this kingdom to be invaded because
Speaker 1: it was weakened by a dying population. Yeah. What it
Speaker 1: is is a more nuanced look at civilization and in
Speaker 1: ancient histories, because I'm sure there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people that when you talk about the Neo Assyrian Empire,
Speaker 1: which thrived in what is now modern Diarraq for a
Speaker 1: few hundred years, and that was one of those where
Speaker 1: the death of a king is what everyone has always said, Well,
Speaker 1: that's what did it. And there, I'm sure there were
Speaker 1: historians were like, you know that there's something missing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they had so many kings that had died leading up
Speaker 1: as why this one. And they started to look in
Speaker 1: particular at the Neo Assyrian Empire and they said, oh,
Speaker 1: actually if we go and look at the cave record again.
Speaker 1: They went to a cave called Kuna ba Um in
Speaker 1: northern Iraq and they said, actually, the record of rainfall
Speaker 1: captured by this cave, by these mineral deposits in these
Speaker 1: caves kind of show that there was that same thing
Speaker 1: that happened with the Maya, a very wet period that
Speaker 1: corresponds with the growth of the society, and a very
Speaker 1: very dry period that corresponds with its collapse. And that's
Speaker 1: not coincidence, they don't think. So it's starting to look
Speaker 1: like it's really not coincidence. Another one, uh the anchor
Speaker 1: Wat Temple in Asia in Southeast Asia Asia that was
Speaker 1: like old timing was who was it that said Paula Abduel,
Speaker 1: Because I've been saying that for like thirty something it
Speaker 1: was I think in a Spike Lee movie or something.
Speaker 1: It sounds like Toro or maybe Paula Abdul, who is
Speaker 1: the guy who ran sALS Pizza Danny a Yellow. I
Speaker 1: could totally see him saying it might have been Paula Abdul. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all I know is I've been saying it for many,
Speaker 1: many years now. So the anchor wat Temple, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Camir Empire in Southeast Asia flourished for between eight o
Speaker 1: two and four. That's a long time. It's a very
Speaker 1: long time. But they think that drought once again along
Speaker 1: with like monsoon like rains uh really is what brought
Speaker 1: them down as well. So again the effects of the climate.
Speaker 1: And if you look at the Khmer Empire, particularly around
Speaker 1: anchor watt Um that's the very famous like lost temple
Speaker 1: in the we've seen um. Historians have long known that
Speaker 1: they got invaded and taken over, and now they think
Speaker 1: actually the reason that was allowed to happen is because
Speaker 1: of climate change in it like it led to problems
Speaker 1: that weaken the society that allowed them to be invaded
Speaker 1: and taken over. This idea of that ingredient. That's right,
Speaker 1: that a civilization is just like doing fine, doing fine,
Speaker 1: suddenly invaded and taken over by a neighbor that's been
Speaker 1: there for hundreds of years, Like, but have stopped asking
Speaker 1: what was it that did that? Now they're saying it
Speaker 1: looks like climate change maybe played a role. I think
Speaker 1: that's just fascinating. Yeah, for sure. Uh, the same with
Speaker 1: the Vikings and the thirteenth and fourteen centuries. They left Greenland.
Speaker 1: They had been around for several hundred years, and that
Speaker 1: was because of the Little Ice Age. Yeah, they they
Speaker 1: had farming techniques that worked before the Little Ice Age,
Speaker 1: which was a very very cool period around the globe.
Speaker 1: UM I think from like eight hundred to or something
Speaker 1: like that, No, into the nineteenth century. I think at
Speaker 1: any rate, UM their farming techniques stopped working in Greenland
Speaker 1: because it was too cold, so they had to leave
Speaker 1: the land said you gotta leave Vikings, and they went, fine,
Speaker 1: we'll go take some shrooms and go berserk and get
Speaker 1: out of here. Yeah, berserkers. So there's a lot we
Speaker 1: can learn about, you know, looking back through history, not
Speaker 1: only UM on the battlefield and politically, but also, um,
Speaker 1: if we look at it through this lens, it maybe
Speaker 1: climate change was the cause of the collapse of an
Speaker 1: ingredient for the cause of collapse of some of these civilizations.
Speaker 1: That the same thing could be happening to us very slowly,
Speaker 1: right in front of our eyeballs. Yeah. And I mean
Speaker 1: one of the things is if you back and look
Speaker 1: at these these historic falls of civilizations, um, Like, it's
Speaker 1: not like they were like, oh, there's a drought going on,
Speaker 1: that's it for our culture. It's like this was an
Speaker 1: underlying driver that they may or may not have pointed
Speaker 1: to as the cause of these larger things. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're engaged in like a civil war or an invasion,
Speaker 1: you're not stopping and thinking like, gosh, it's because of
Speaker 1: this drought. You're focused on the invasion. It's the immediate thing.
Speaker 1: And in in the exact same way. I mean, we're
Speaker 1: not that removed from people who lived a millennia go.
Speaker 1: As long as the way that our brains work, we
Speaker 1: tend to look at the trees rather than the forest too.
Speaker 1: And if that's the case, and we're in this period
Speaker 1: of climate change right now, it's really worrying to think
Speaker 1: that a little bit of climate change can lead to
Speaker 1: social collapse, and not directly. Again, that's the thing, that's
Speaker 1: what a lot of people argue about, is the climate
Speaker 1: change isn't going to cause society collapse, not directly, but
Speaker 1: it could lay the groundwork for all the stuff that
Speaker 1: goes wrong that we're failing to identify is ultimately caused
Speaker 1: by climate change. That's what we need to be paying
Speaker 1: attention to. If that is in fact the case. That's right,
Speaker 1: And like we said, there are a lot of indicators
Speaker 1: that some of these same things are going on, deforestation
Speaker 1: not being the least among them. Uh, we are cutting
Speaker 1: down a lot of trees, and we have cut down
Speaker 1: a lot of trees of the forest of northern America,
Speaker 1: just the US alone, just the US have been cut
Speaker 1: down um trees or carbon roughly, and they absorbed and
Speaker 1: this is a very big deal. Uh, they absorbed between
Speaker 1: one and three million metric tons of c O two,
Speaker 1: which offsets which we need between twenty and what we
Speaker 1: put into the atmosphere. So you don't have to be
Speaker 1: a rocket scientist to figure out if there's fewer trees,
Speaker 1: then there's going to be more CEO two in the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: and I think it's even more significant than that. We
Speaker 1: did a whole episode. I don't remember the ins and
Speaker 1: outs of it. We did a whole episode on cutting
Speaker 1: down trees and the effect it has on weather UM
Speaker 1: and I remember it was it has a big effect,
Speaker 1: like from single trees to huge forests, like each each
Speaker 1: each loss of tree has an impact for sure. And
Speaker 1: it's not like, uh, we're stopping now. In the Pacific
Speaker 1: Northwest UM, roughly of the old growth forest is is
Speaker 1: slated for logging to go away for logging purposes. Which
Speaker 1: old growth forest? I read a really cool article on
Speaker 1: the old growth forest of Atlanta and how Atlanta is
Speaker 1: a you know, if anyone's ever been here from like
Speaker 1: out west, maybe they remark about how Atlanta is a
Speaker 1: city in a forest, and I was wondering what old
Speaker 1: growth meant. It was a really cool article. And the
Speaker 1: years differ depending on who you're asking, but it's basically
Speaker 1: a forest that has not been touched by humans for
Speaker 1: between a hundred and a hundred fifty years and there's
Speaker 1: still an old growth forest in Atlanta. It's great, is
Speaker 1: that right? Yeah? Wow? Like pine forests or no, just
Speaker 1: you know, like like hardwood. Wow, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. It is like when you fly into town,
Speaker 1: you're like, this is just in the It's like a
Speaker 1: lost city in the middle of a jungle, but still functioning.
Speaker 1: What about social change and uh and what's going on
Speaker 1: with that? So, I mean one of the things that
Speaker 1: seems to be a hallmark of a collapsing civilization for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, and as part of its collapse, it can
Speaker 1: engage in civil war um war with other neighboring countries
Speaker 1: or city states or whatever. Um. And if climate change
Speaker 1: is a driver of that, it seems to have happened
Speaker 1: very recently. You're happening right now, um because one of
Speaker 1: the ideas for the basis of the civil war in
Speaker 1: Syria right now is a drought brought on by climate
Speaker 1: change that started in two thousand and six and actually
Speaker 1: kind of cast a lot of farmers, a lot of
Speaker 1: Syrian farmers out of work from their fee into the cities.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of unemployed, restless people showed up
Speaker 1: to the cities. And they think that that was one
Speaker 1: of the exacerbators that led to this civil war. But
Speaker 1: that climate change, a drought brought on by climate change
Speaker 1: may have been the underlying driver for the Syrian Civil
Speaker 1: war going on right now. Yeah, that like four thousand
Speaker 1: people have died in so far. Population growth is another
Speaker 1: big one. We talked about both with the Maya and
Speaker 1: the Assyria Empires that you know, even if you're doing great,
Speaker 1: you still got to keep the population in check because
Speaker 1: there is there's a point where, um, you can't sustain
Speaker 1: it anymore. And we are expected to reach ten billion people.
Speaker 1: That crazy by ten billion humans on Earth yea just
Speaker 1: around the corner. And there is an argument that um
Speaker 1: technology is our favorable climate. Like we're doing great technologically speaking,
Speaker 1: so we're just growing and growing again. We're growing because
Speaker 1: we can invent anything we need to invent to help
Speaker 1: out any problem. Um. But if that goes away, then
Speaker 1: we're gonna be in big trouble. Um. I have to
Speaker 1: fess up. That was me editorialized now I can tell okay, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: thank you for the legitimacy you added to And I
Speaker 1: don't mean that goes away. But you know, if if
Speaker 1: there is a breaking point for technological advancement, well yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like the Green Revolution. We went from traditional agriculture
Speaker 1: to modern agriculture. But modern agriculture is on the verge
Speaker 1: of reaching its carrying capacity, and we have no idea
Speaker 1: what's coming after that. Plus we also are well aware
Speaker 1: that our modern intensive agricultural practices are problematic. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of fertilizer runoff that can spoil water, including drinking water. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of soil depletion that comes along with it.
Speaker 1: And in the same way that a lot of other
Speaker 1: cultures who have fallen seem to have been stubborn and
Speaker 1: not adapted, but they're just kept kept at it, kept
Speaker 1: at it, despite having warning signs that it wasn't working
Speaker 1: any longer. Um, we seem to be doing the same
Speaker 1: thing with our farming practices, and we need to figure
Speaker 1: out a more sustainable way to farm. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: the thing that distresses me is the lack of a
Speaker 1: and there are a lot of people that aren't doing this,
Speaker 1: but the lack of the long term outlook. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, it's not gonna happen in my lifetime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I need to keep I need to keep pushing
Speaker 1: forward with whatever farming practices I'm utilizing or whatever the
Speaker 1: case may be. One of the one of the suggestions
Speaker 1: I saw when I was researching the End of the
Speaker 1: World to get people to care about the future is
Speaker 1: to extend human lifespans so that you're like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: like two years in the future. Well, if that was
Speaker 1: middle age, you would care about that. And then just
Speaker 1: it's weird to think, you know, it's it's simple if
Speaker 1: you think about it, but it's also weird to think, like,
Speaker 1: just how quickly that would make us start planning for
Speaker 1: the future a lot more. Rather than shrinking the future
Speaker 1: into human size, we would be growing human size into
Speaker 1: the future. I feel like the human lifespan or the
Speaker 1: human awareness of what a lifespan, Yeah, that would change
Speaker 1: the whole outlook. Yeah, you we always had a good
Speaker 1: question about that too. She's like, at what point do
Speaker 1: we stop caring about our descendants? You know, we've got kids, grandkids,
Speaker 1: great curring kids, great great grandkids. Yeah, exactly, at one
Speaker 1: point we just stopped saying great and it's just descendants,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. Sure, I wonder like where where you
Speaker 1: really stopped caring, Like, do you really care about your
Speaker 1: great grandkids, great great curing kids less? So let's find
Speaker 1: it fascinating or maybe here's the thing. You could just
Speaker 1: not even think about it in terms of you your family,
Speaker 1: but maybe just planet Earth and and doing the right thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Luckily a lot of people do think that way an
Speaker 1: increasing amount. We also have to say, Chuck that like
Speaker 1: the idea that climate change is a driver for social
Speaker 1: collapse is very new. Some people, some historians so archaeologists,
Speaker 1: are like, this really smacks of a trendy thing. And
Speaker 1: I'm just not on this bandwagon. It's too young, it's
Speaker 1: too new. It's just seems to hip, you know, like
Speaker 1: a Scissor Sisters record. But um, I guess what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to say is it's not This isn't definitive, it's
Speaker 1: not set in stone. And there's also a lot of
Speaker 1: people who say, well, we are pretty smart, we're a
Speaker 1: lot smarter than we were a thousand years ago, and
Speaker 1: we can invent our way out of any problem. But
Speaker 1: I mean, we've done it so far. It's tough to
Speaker 1: argue with in some cases. You know, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: not to say that the world is necessarily going to
Speaker 1: end at any point in time in the near future,
Speaker 1: or that we cannot ourselves assimilate and change and roll
Speaker 1: with it and go back to maybe a different lifestyle.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, or continue on our technological progress, but like say,
Speaker 1: adopt more sustainable farming practices. I mean, that's the view
Speaker 1: of the future that i'll the Dystopian films have is
Speaker 1: this usually. I mean sometimes it's a barren wasteland Mad
Speaker 1: Max style, but a lot of times it's like a
Speaker 1: return to the earth and small villages of people farming.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what happened to the Maya. Yea, they moved
Speaker 1: out in new farms, the farm, the farm hinterlands where
Speaker 1: they just continued on like nothing happened, right, But the
Speaker 1: people in the cities were like, well we're Mad Max
Speaker 1: now coastal elites. Yeah right, you've got anything else? No, Well,
Speaker 1: this was the climate change leading to the fall of
Speaker 1: the Maya the episode. And that's the end of that.
Speaker 1: And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is from Rosanna in Surrey, United Kingdom. Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: my husband and I are currently renovating an Edwardian house
Speaker 1: in a very poor condition, and she detailed it. It
Speaker 1: just sounds like a wreck that they're in the middle of,
Speaker 1: the loose upside down, but but worth it in along
Speaker 1: running in the living room, there's a lift in the lory.
Speaker 1: When everything seems to be falling apart around you, the
Speaker 1: last thing you want is to be left with your
Speaker 1: own thoughts, and your podcast is always there so I
Speaker 1: don't have to be. For many years, I've listened to
Speaker 1: your show the way other people listen to the radio.
Speaker 1: The first thing I put it on in the morning
Speaker 1: when I get up, and this continues on my drive
Speaker 1: to and from work or whenever I'm in my car,
Speaker 1: and I often put it on before bed because I
Speaker 1: find your voices so soothing. Your show really helps with
Speaker 1: my anxiety as well. Both my husband and I are
Speaker 1: doing all the work on the house ourselves now, electrics, plumbing, plastering, tiling, decorating,
Speaker 1: you name it, and I've left my job to work
Speaker 1: on the house full time. So for the past six
Speaker 1: months I listened to YouTube talking to keep me company
Speaker 1: and learning while I'm working, which lasts at least nine
Speaker 1: hours a day. Solid Josh and Chuck, you basically become
Speaker 1: my main source of human contact. Guys. For example, it's
Speaker 1: only ten twenty in the morning and I've already been
Speaker 1: listening to you for four hours in twenty minutes laying
Speaker 1: are you okay? Alright? Uh? And we'll continue to do
Speaker 1: so until my husband gets home late tonight. Obviously this
Speaker 1: means a lot of repeated shows, but it never gets boring.
Speaker 1: Much of the d I y work is unbelievably slow
Speaker 1: and tedious. I've been there, Rosanna. I definitely would have
Speaker 1: lost my mind long ago if it wasn't for stuff
Speaker 1: you should know. I don't want to say a huge
Speaker 1: thank you for keeping me saying educated and chuckling along
Speaker 1: when I do, would otherwise be on the floor crying
Speaker 1: about how much I have to do that. What you
Speaker 1: guys do is brilliant, and I wanted to let you
Speaker 1: know you're not just educating people and helping to expand
Speaker 1: their beliefs. You're also genuinely helping me feel connected to others.
Speaker 1: Will I try to create a home for me, my
Speaker 1: husband and our two idiot cats and two house rabbits.
Speaker 1: I want to come see you. Yeah, that's pretty. I
Speaker 1: want to see your Victorian home, Edward. I want to
Speaker 1: see your two idiot cats in your two house rabbits. Um,
Speaker 1: are you gonna help what I say? Victorian? Yes? Edwardian
Speaker 1: You're gonna help plaster. I'll plastered the cred out of that.
Speaker 1: Get plastered and do some plasters. Right, He'll be all
Speaker 1: over the place, He'll get it all over the LORI well,
Speaker 1: thanks a lot, Rosanna, best of luck in the renovation.
Speaker 1: I'm glad we can help you out. That's good to hear. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you want to get in touch with us like
Speaker 1: Rosanna did, to let us know what you're doing with
Speaker 1: your time, we always want to hear about that. You
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