0:10

It's horns were curved and sharp at the ends.

0:12

His eyes were suspicious and baleful as he stared down the aging man, stepping gingerly over the woven fence that surrounded the corral.

0:21

The other few male goats kept well clear of the ornery patriarch of the herd.

0:26

And so did most of the herders in the village carefully without getting too close.

0:32

The man used his long stick and a few exaggerated gestures to get the old goat moving, driving him out of the enclosure toward the low mud brick walls of the houses.

0:42

Beyond the other goats in the flock, followed him driven onward by a few more herders, they needed less encouragement, deep bellowing and thumping hooves.

0:52

Soon drowned out the goats bleeding.

0:53

The elderly man in the enclosure felt his heart leap.

0:57

When he saw the Longhorns of the zebu projecting upwards and the hump behind it, one wrong move.

1:03

And the bull would drive that horn right into his gut.

1:05

He had caught the zebu as a calf down at the nearby stream.

1:09

We raised it for the past decade, but it wasn't tame.

1:12

The man had no illusions about that carefully.

1:15

He thought carefully opening the gate and keeping his eyes locked onto the bull.

1:20

It was one of his sons drove the big angry preacher into the enclosure with a few flicks of a flexible branch.

1:25

The zebu glared at the older man complied, heading for the basket full of fresh cut grass that had been left for him to hurt her breathed a sigh of relief.

1:35

As he stepped out of the corral and closed the gate behind it, he dropped his long stick and walked toward the mud brick walls.

1:41

The exteriors plastered with mud and painted with red ochre.

1:44

He waved a welcoming hand to the group of hunters, making their way into site carrying bloody hunks of meat carved from a water Buffalo when the whole corpse of a Jackal pausing for a moment near his home, he inspected the Flint work.

1:57

One of his sons was doing chipping off small pieces of razor-sharp stone, micro lifts, which could be used as spirits, the salt Lake blades of a sickle war for a dozen other purposes.

2:06

He offered a correction, hold the Flint Corps at more of an angle to get a slightly larger flake and moved on into the village.

2:14

He died the ladder leading up onto the roof of his home with the same suspicion.

2:18

As the goat had looked at him, his hips and knees ate.

2:21

He had no desire to climb up only to climb down again, up and down his joints hurting all the time.

2:27

That was the price of experience.

2:29

He thought looking back toward the zebu bowl in the corral and his sons, improving flakes, this community, which researchers know today as mayor Gar was alive with the sounds of farming, herding hunting and work more than 8,000 years ago, located in the Hills of Baluchistan in present day, Pakistan, exactly a hundred miles from the slow winding waters of the Indus river.

2:52

Maricar was one of the earliest farming communities in South Asia.

2:55

This village and its contemporaries were the, of a long and winding road that led all the way to the independent development of one of the world's first civilizations, the Indus Valley civilization, which laid the groundwork for everything else that's followed in South Asia.

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Enjoy hi everybody from Wondery welcome to another episode of tides of history.

5:24

I'm Patrick Wiman. Thanks for joining me.

5:26

The region between the Hindu Kush mountains, the Himalayas and the Bay of Bengal.

5:31

What we can broadly call South Asia is one of the cradles of human civilization.

5:37

Today. South Asia is home to about one in every four people on the face of the planet, living in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, the whore, Bangalore and Chennai all have more than 10 million inhabitants.

5:54

They're among the fastest growing urban areas in the world.

5:58

This region has a long, complex and multifaceted history.

6:01

It stretches back thousands of years through colonial rule, a series of empires cultural Efflorescence

6:07

is religious upheavals, Invasions

6:09

and migrations.

6:09

Even the written record in South Asia is ancient.

6:13

That goes back More than 3000 years to the religious texts of the rig Veda texts that are still in use today.

6:19

Before that continuous written record came into being one of the earliest urban civilizations in the world made the Indus Valley home to some of the world's first cities, more than 4,000 years ago.

6:30

The Indus Valley civilization as this bronze age culture is usually known is usually counted as one of the world's pristine inventions of civilization.

6:38

The Indus Valley civilization formed one of the key foundations of everything else that followed over the coming millennia from what's now the fringes of Northern Pakistan, all the way to the mouth of the Ganges.

6:49

We'll spend all of next week's episode talking about the Indus Valley civilization.

6:53

So what it was, how it grew and flourished.

6:56

And of course why it eventually disappeared, but everything has a beginning before the Indus Valley civilization came into being the Indus Valley was home to small communities of farmers, Hunter gatherers wandered the deck and plateau and made their homes along the banks of the Ganges river, where they fished and collected shellfish.

7:15

Some of these groups were even experimenting with plant cultivation.

7:18

Recent discoveries suggest that we should count South Asia as yet another independent center of plant domestication who were these early inhabitants of South Asia had their ancestors always lived there.

7:31

Had they like people all across the planet arrived from elsewhere.

7:34

What were their lives like?

7:36

And what led them along the winding paths to becoming one of the centers of global civilization before we get to the Indus Valley, we need to head back to the West over the Hindu Kush through what's now Afghanistan and across the Iranian plateau until we reached the Zagara's mountains, overlooking the broad Plains of Mesopotamia.

7:54

This was the fringe of the fertile Crescent, that curving area extending from Israel and Lebanon in the West through Syria and Northern Iraq onto the edges of the Iranian plateau.

8:05

The fertile Crescent. If we remember back a ways was where the neolithic and farming was born.

8:10

At least the fertile Crescent was one of the world's places where people invented agriculture.

8:15

We now know that there were many, many more, including a couple of spots in East Asia, new Guinea and several in the Americas.

8:23

The version of the human past, where all the good stuff started in the fertile Crescent 10,000 or 12,000 years ago is flatly wrong.

8:30

But the fertile Crescent did matter a great deal.

8:33

That's where wheat, barley, peas, lentils, sheep, goats, and cattle were all domesticated.

8:39

And it's from where they spread all across the planet.

8:42

Those domestic it's formed the subsistence basis for thousands and thousands of years of agricultural societies.

8:48

They continue to feed billions of people today.

8:51

So it's safe to say they're pretty important.

8:53

Now

8:53

we

8:53

still

8:53

have

8:58

it. A lot of questions about the emergence of farming in the fertile Crescent, but compared to the invention of agriculture elsewhere in the world, you have a lot more information.

9:06

We can tell a pretty detailed story about it and about how that farming package expanded outward in its basic form.

9:14

The story goes like this over the course of a couple of thousand years of experimentation.

9:18

People in the fertile Crescent figured out how to cultivate wild wheat, barley, and whatnot.

9:23

And they began to control the ancestors of domesticated animals.

9:26

After a couple of thousand more years of this, those crops and animals took on the visible characteristics we associate with their domesticated forms.

9:34

The plant seeds got bigger.

9:37

For example, the goat's horns got smaller.

9:39

Thanks to these innovations.

9:41

The groups of people who made these discoveries saw a rise in their numbers.

9:44

They founded new communities and expanded, outward, taking their farming way of life with them.

9:50

That's the basic story.

9:52

Anyway, as we dig deeper into the details, it gets more complicated and frankly, more interesting as it turns out, the fertile Crescent was home to a bunch of different groups of people on a genetic level, and presumably a linguistic and cultural one.

10:06

There were at least three different populations in the region than a two fins and their descendants in the Lavant a group in Southern Turkey and Northern Syria.

10:15

And then a third group in the East that lived in the foothills of the Zagara's mountains.

10:19

If we think about this in terms of Hunter gatherer group dynamics, it makes a lot of sense.

10:24

We have relatively small populations, they're highly fragmented and they're deeply diverged from one another.

10:29

But one of the fascinating things about early farming is that the basic pieces of the farming package originated in different places within the fertile Crescent, presumably among different groups and then diffused outward to the other groups, living in the region without the populations really coming together, there was no single group of early farmers.

10:48

Even within this region, there were several, and they went their own separate ways.

10:53

The group in Southern Turkey and Northern Syria, for example, expanded into Anatolia and then Europe, their direct descendant survived today everywhere from Turkey and Greece to Ireland.

11:03

We haven't talked much about that Eastern group though.

11:07

The one that lived in the foothills of the Zagara's, they're really important to back in 2016, This

11:14

is succeeded in sequencing, the genome of a middle-aged woman who lived in the village of in the middle zag gross almost 10,000 years ago.

11:22

It's a really cool site because it's where the oldest evidence of the management of goat herds has ever been found.

11:28

Getting the ancient DNA of a person who lived there at exactly that time tells you a ton about the past and future of the people who figured out these really fundamental innovations when this woman's DNA was analyzed, they suggested that she was a member of an ancient group whose descendants now live all over central and South Asia.

11:47

In other words, these early farmers and herders living in the foothills of the Zagara's grew in numbers, they expanded Over

11:55

the Iranian plateau and into central Asia and traveled South across the Hindu Kush And

12:00

to what would later become Pakistan and India.

12:02

That story with multiple groups of early farmers is the more complicated twist on the basic version.

12:08

What we call the demic diffusion model of farming, farming leads to population growth, which leads to migration and the diffusion of the farming lifestyle.

12:17

But as it turns out, even this more complicated version of the story, isn't quite right either when we look at the genes of later people living in the Indus Valley civilization and present day people living in Pakistan and India, they're not directly related to that hurting woman from the Zacharias.

12:34

Instead they're descendants of a population that was closely related to her and her people, but not that group, not exactly the ancestors of the folks who brought farming to the Indus Valley had actually diverged from those Sacra goat herders a few thousand years prior to the development of the farming package.

12:54

And they hadn't mixed with them.

12:56

Since I

12:59

know this is a bit complicated, the genetic stuff can make your head spin.

13:03

But bear with me for just a moment.

13:05

This is especially complicated because the descendants of that Xigris woman's population did in fact, expand into central Asia.

13:13

They introduced farming there and they lived there well into the bronze age.

13:17

It was natural to assume that this same group had also gone further South to the Indus, but we now know that's not the case.

13:24

It's a puzzle.

13:25

There are two ways of interpreting this, both of which have pretty significant implications for how we understand the origins of farming in the fertile Crescent.

13:33

First, there was another distinct population that would make at least four in total living in the region at the time farming was invented, then their population expanded, they moved outward and eventually they ended up in the Indus Valley.

13:47

It would just be that we haven't sampled ancient DNA from this specific group.

13:53

Yet. The other possibility is that this group was living somewhere other than the fertile Crescent, maybe the Iranian plateau, and wasn't involved in the initial domestication of crops and animals at all.

14:04

They just adopted them from those groups further to the West in the fertile Crescent, it's even possible that they had already been living in the Indus Valley or at least nearby, and didn't actually move much at all.

14:15

Instead they would have been a Hunter gatherer population related to those Zagara's farmers that had already come East sometime before.

14:23

Again, since we don't have samples directly from this group at this time, we can't identify exactly where they came from.

14:30

Both of those things I mentioned are possibilities.

14:32

They're both intriguing.

14:33

On the one hand, it would tell us either that the fertile Crescent was a much more crowded and interesting place 10,000 years ago than we thought or that our demic diffusion model isn't quite right, that it's too simple.

14:46

And that acculturation and adoption of the farming package really did happen.

14:50

In the second case.

14:52

It wouldn't just have been expansion in migration.

14:54

There would have been contacts, the adoption of ideas and crops and changing lifestyles to my guests.

15:01

If you were asking me, is that the ancestors of these future Indus Valley people and billions of people living in South Asia today, we're living somewhere to the East of the fertile Crescent, probably on the huge expanses of the Iranian plateau.

15:14

They slowly adopted domesticated crops and animals before moving East toward the Indus Valley, either way.

15:22

It's a long, Long way from the edge of the fertile Crescent to the Indus Valley.

15:25

It's about 1400 miles or 2200 kilometers.

15:28

The train in between isn't easy.

15:31

The Iranian plateau was cut through by jagged bridges of Hills and deep valleys.

15:36

Much of it's extremely arid.

15:38

It wouldn't have been welcoming for these early farmers eventually.

15:41

However, some of them probably did come through Afghanistan across the mountains, into the Indus Valley.

15:47

Maybe they came down through the famous Khyber pass, famous in the millennia to come as the gateway for invasions and devastating raids into South Asia.

15:55

Once these folks arrived in the Indus Valley, they found a gloriously fertile plain, some 800 miles long for 1200 kilometers from the foothills of the Himalayas and Kashmir down to the Arabian sea.

16:07

The Indus Valley snakes its way South makes this dry landscape bloom it occasionally over spills its banks and deposits fertile silt.

16:15

That's wonderful for farming.

16:17

So for these early farmers setting up shop with their wheat and barley lentils, legumes, sheep, and goats, this would have been about as good a place as any in the world to live the indiscipline.

16:28

Isn't nearly as broad as it is long.

16:31

It's just a couple of hundred miles across sandwiched between the Hills and mountains that run along today's border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the arid expanses of the Thor desert in the North though, the plane keeps going and going and going.

16:44

It's framed on the South by the deck and plateau and on the North, by the Himalayas all the way to the Bay of Bengal.

16:50

This Eastern extension of the plane revolves around the Ganges, the other great river of South Asia, only the Delhi Ridge, which isn't much of a barrier divides.

17:00

The two enormous drainage basins from one another.

17:03

But together, this region is known as the Indo Gangetic plain.

17:07

It's been the urban core of South Asia for as long as there have been cities there because that's where the food could be grown to feed the largest numbers of people that agricultural history goes all the way back to that arrival of those early farmers from further to the West, their early villages formed the basis for the complex societies, urban civilizations and empires that followed.

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19:33

Before we go any further, let's take a couple of steps back aside from the genetic evidence.

19:38

How can we be sure that agriculture actually did arrive in the Indus Valley from further West couldn't they simply have figured things out for themselves.

19:47

This one's pretty straightforward to answer it's because the suite of domesticated crops and animals that we see in the neolithic settlements of the Indus Valley is the classic fertile Crescent package.

19:56

We see wheat, barley, legumes, lentils, sheep, and goats.

20:00

They're morphologically, identical to what people were doing for their West.

20:04

The chances of a group domesticating, precisely that same package of crops and animals independently, a couple of thousand miles to the East of a place that had already done.

20:13

It seemed pretty small.

20:14

So at least one part of the agricultural package that took root in the Indus Valley came from the fertile Crescent.

20:21

As I mentioned, the people who implemented it probably came from further West to if not all the way from the Xigris themselves, but South Asia was far from uninhabited when they arrived, it wasn't an empty wasteland.

20:34

It wasn't a pristine wilderness ready to be settled by Intrepid pioneers.

20:37

There were already a whole bunch of people living all over South Asia with a variety of lifestyles.

20:43

Some of those groups were even experimenting agriculture themselves with a totally different series of packages of domesticated crops.

20:51

This gives us yet another place in the world where plant cultivation was tried and succeeded.

20:56

It's also yet another place where we see multiple groups of people, of extremely different backgrounds, language, families, and ways of life interacting.

21:06

So who were the People who were living in South Asia?

21:08

And what can we know about them?

21:10

We have to start by understanding that there are very, very few sites in the region data to the late paleolithic to the period immediately before the end of the younger Dryas around 12,000 years ago.

21:20

We're not sure exactly why this was the case.

21:23

There hasn't been much archeological work done in a lot of places, but it probably had something to do with the prevailing environmental conditions.

21:29

They were drier and cooler than they became in the early Holocene.

21:33

After about 12,000 years ago, there simply may not have been that many people across large stretches of South Asia.

21:40

The upshot of all this is that much of South Asia, especially the Deccan plateau would have been really arid and not especially welcoming for a foraging lifestyle.

21:49

But after the end of the younger dries, things got much better conditions got warmer and wetter, and generally more hospitable to people.

21:58

We see a lot more archeological sites throughout South Asia and people were probably getting thicker on the Ground.

22:04

When I say things got Warmer

22:06

and wetter. What this means is that we can see the beginnings of the classic South Asian monsoon monsoon is really complicated, but basically it refers to the annual reversal of prevailing winds over South Asia that brings heavy rainfall and moisture through part of the year.

22:22

It is the defining climatic feature of the region.

22:25

It's the thing that dictates environmental conditions throughout India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

22:30

Now, even today, the monsoon varies in strength and its details from one year to the next.

22:35

This has huge effects on life and the economy in the region.

22:38

That was the case in the past as well.

22:40

And in fact, its path and effects were even more variable.

22:43

So the innocent, the Ganges, the two biggest rivers of South Asia are fed by sources high up in the Himalayas.

22:48

They're going to run regardless though, maybe not with as much water volume at times when the monsoon either isn't as strong or as altogether absent, but that's not the case in the Deccan plateau where most of the rivers are fed by monsoon rainfall and the late paleolithic, the monsoon systems seem to have been either exceptionally weak or just not there at all.

23:08

That meant that the deck and plateau would have been incredibly dry way, too dry for many people at all to live there.

23:14

Even the Indo Gangetic plain would not have been as welcoming without regular rainfall and floods to replenish the soil with reversal.

23:22

This probably Explains why we start to see way more archeological sites in South Asia.

23:27

After the beginning of the Holocene around 12,000, It

23:31

was just a lot easier to live there.

23:33

The site of dumb DAMA on the Ganges plain about halfway through look now and Patna would have been a pretty great place to live around 8,000 or 9,000 years ago.

23:42

It sits on a raised patch around the of two rivers Tributaries

23:46

that flow into a larger river.

23:48

And it's one of a bunch of sites on the Ganges plain dating to roughly this period of time.

23:52

The other well-known sites tend to be at the edges of Oxbow lakes.

23:56

They're similarly rich spots from which to hunt fish and gather a bunch of plant foods at Dom DAMA.

24:02

There were tons of micro lithic artifacts, these small razor sharp multipurpose stone tools that we see a lot of during the measle listic period globally.

24:10

There were also postals, probably the frameworks for Thatcher tent like dwellings fireplaces and storage pits.

24:17

So there are a couple of really fascinating things about these kinds of Mesolithic sites on the Ganges plane.

24:23

First, they show repeated occupations with people living there for pretty extensive periods of time.

24:29

Don DAMA has especially thick deposits, at least 10 separate layers of occupation over a pretty long time.

24:35

People came there, they stayed for quite a while and they kept coming back.

24:38

Now at second, these sites all have cemeteries.

24:41

They have big gatherings of the dead.

24:43

There are 47 adult burials at Dom domino, which is a ton of people for a cemetery in this period, anywhere in the world.

24:51

Why do cemeteries matter? Well, because cemeteries usually represent permanence in the landscape.

24:56

It's the kind of place that matters to you and your group.

24:59

You bury your dead there to show that the land is yours, that it belongs to your ancestors and it'll belong to your descendants too.

25:06

We talked about this in the context of the Nile Valley, a few episodes back, people might wander, but the dead stay in place.

25:13

Maybe there was something similar happening at Dom DAMA and places like it in the Indian Mesolithic.

25:18

Thanks to the skeletal remains found in these cemeteries.

25:21

We can know quite a bit about the lives and lifestyles of these folks at Dom DAMA, that people were tall and healthy.

25:27

Men averaged around 180 centimeters, tall around five foot 10 while the women were around 174 centimeters, tall or five foot eight, they tend to have strong muscle attachments, particularly in their calves, which suggests a lifestyle that involved a lot of walking up and down Hills, over long distances and or lots of carrying heavy loads.

25:46

They also have really well-developed musculature in their forearms and shoulders, which researchers think came from a lot of forceful overhand throwing with the dominant hand.

25:56

Basically they spent a lot of time and energy throwing Spears or bowlers, maybe with their right hands.

26:01

They may have been on the receiving end of thrown Spears to a few of the skeletons have projectile points, either embedded in the bone or in a position that makes us think they were buried in the soft tissue at the time that the body went into the ground.

26:12

But there's little evidence for osteoarthritis or damage from repetitive movement patterns, the kind of stuff you see a lot of among farming populations that spent a lot of times stooped over grinding grain, or pulling weeds, things like that.

26:25

Now their teeth work quite heavily worn, which suggests that they ate a lot of course, plant foods that required serious chewing, but from their overall health, the food was very nutritious and good for the people who ate it.

26:37

The people who lived at Dom Dom, haven't been genetically analyzed as far as I know.

26:42

So we be exactly sure about their population affinities, but we have some ideas about who they were related to and whether they left ascendance.

26:49

When we look at present day, people living in South Asia and samples from the time of the Indus Valley civilization, we see a few major ancestral components, two of which are relevant to today's episode.

27:01

One of them is those farmers related to, but not identical with the goat herders from the Zagara's mountains that I talked about earlier.

27:08

But the other is a little harder to pin down it's related to, but not identical width people currently living in the remote Andaman islands of the Bay of Bengal between the Malay peninsula and the Southeastern coast of India.

27:21

That specific type of ancestry, which researchers call ancient ancestral, South Indian reaches its highest proportions in the tribal groups of India.

27:30

Now this doesn't mean that ancient ancestral, South Indians, whoever they were was a homogenous population or that they were the only one living in South Asia prior to the arrival of the farmers from further West.

27:41

But we can say for sure that they were in South Asia, their roots were extremely deep and that they soon mixed with the newly arriving farmers.

27:49

All the later people living in South Asia have large proportions of ancestry from both of these really ancient groups.

27:56

It's a fairly safe bet that the people who were buried at Dom DAMA, all of those thousands of years ago were representatives of this ancient ancestral South Indian group.

28:05

It's possible though, impossible to prove at this point in time that the Dravidian languages of South Asia go all the way back to this population.

28:13

These aren't the only components of ancestry in South Asia.

28:16

Either. There are later arrivals after this period, including ancestry, going back to people who originally came from the erasion step and ancestry related to people living in East Asia, but the Zagara's farmer related ancestry and the ancient ancestral South Indian components are the two biggest ones.

28:33

The vast majority of the ancestry of people living in South Asia today in varying proportions, depending on region ethnic background, social group, and whatnot goes back to these two distinct populations.

28:44

Let's

28:44

come

28:44

back

28:44

to

28:44

our

28:44

farming

28:44

friends

28:49

Around the time the foragers were burying their dead at Dom DAMA.

28:52

Permanent settlements were beginning to crop up In

28:55

the Indus Valley and its environs a thousand miles to the Northwest,

28:58

the best known of these sites.

29:00

The one that drives a great deal of our understanding of how farming took hold and spread in South Asia is a place called is an absolute treasure in a really limited and pretty well excavated area.

29:14

We can see the entire millennia long sequence leading directly from the earliest farming communities near the Indus, all the way to the emergence of cities and complex societies.

29:23

There are very few sites more important in the entire world.

29:28

Maricar is actually located just to the West of the Indus Valley proper.

29:33

And what's called Baluchistan in point of fact, it's basically where the Indus Valley and the Iranian plateau meet kind of a gateway between the worlds.

29:41

The part of Baluchistan in which mirror Gar is situated.

29:44

It looks pretty forbidding today.

29:46

It's really dry it's flanked on three sides by sizable mountains, around 7,000 BC though it would have been quite a bit wetter and more appealing.

29:54

That's when we see the earliest phases of permanent settlement at mayor Gar, with people they're living in small unfired mud brick buildings, this is an incredibly early date it's as early as the evidence for neolithic settlements around the GNC, quite a bit further away and harder to get through from that fertile Crescent Homeland, these folks, and what's called period one at Maricar we're exploiting crane resources, namely barley and wheat.

30:20

There's a bit of debate among scholars as to whether it was Wilder, domesticated, collected, or cultivated.

30:25

And if it was domesticated and cultivated, whether that was an independent development at Maricar or introduced from further West, this brings us back to that really basic fundamental question of who these early farmers work, whether they've been in the area for awhile already, or whether they themselves had migrated from further West, along with their crop package, what's clear about Maricar.

30:47

And very few things are, is that in the earliest stages, the people who lived there were eating all sorts of things, tons of grains and some domesticated goats, but also lots of wild game, including wild sheep and goat, wild cattle, water, Buffalo, even elephant.

31:01

That's a broad spectrum subsistence strategy.

31:04

It's not one that relied entirely on introduced domesticated elements from further West.

31:09

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31:55

It's not like we can look further to the West and track the movement of farming communities from the Zagara's mountains in the fertile Crescent, across the Iranian plateau, and then all the way to Maricar.

32:04

In fact, mayor Gar predates the earliest farming communities that have been excavated on the Iranian plateau.

32:10

Now some archeologists look at that evidence and say, it points in the direction of the independent rise of farming at Maricar and in its region.

32:17

That's what the archeologist who excavated most extensively at Maricar Jean-Francois Yachty Gaye believed, or at least that there was a combination of independent domestication along with some diffusion from the fertile Crescent.

32:29

That may be the case, but I'm not convinced mostly because today we have a much better idea of how migration operates.

32:36

We don't have to find some slow, steady advance Of

32:40

farmers moving one Valley at a time across the Iranian plateau toward Maricar.

32:44

That's not really how migrations work.

32:47

Now. Sometimes farmers do take short hops.

32:49

The village gets too crowded.

32:51

There's no more land available. A group will head out to the closest viable location and set up a new village.

32:55

They maintain close connections to the place they left.

32:58

If it's a group of young men moving, which it often is, they look back to their home communities for spouses and you retain these connections over space and time.

33:07

But these short jumps go hand in hand with much longer distance migrations that can cover hundreds or even thousands of miles.

33:15

A great deal of the Iranian plateau is inhospitable to the kind of farming that worked well in the fertile Crescent.

33:21

There isn't enough rainfall or the soil isn't right.

33:24

You'd have to adapt specific pieces of the package and develop new techniques to get it, to support viable farming communities.

33:30

Under those circumstances, people might move exceptionally long distances in search of the right conditions to set up new communities.

33:38

Now, if you're a group of new arrivals who was looking for a place to live, the area around Maricar would have looked dang near perfect in comparison to the drier, less hospitable reaches of the Iranian plateau it's worth moving to.

33:52

In other words, now, if this group was already living further East than the fertile Crescent, as I think they might already have had a sense for what they might find at the end of their migration, they might've had knowledge of it already, either through trade contacts or travel themselves.

34:05

So if we stop looking for a continuous chain of farming migrations, and instead think in terms of possible longer distance sleeps, it's not nearly as hard to see Maricar as at least partially the product of migrations from further West, they would have just skipped over the in-between parts.

34:22

They already knew wouldn't work for them.

34:24

So as a working theory, I think that these folks moved across the Iranian plateau and eventually wound up around by her car.

34:30

They may have been in contact with a group already living there.

34:33

Maybe they shared some cultural facets in common with them.

34:36

We don't know a ton about the preceding Mesolithic period in the region, but there isn't some huge dramatic shift.

34:41

So let's say we're walking toward that first settlement period one at Maricar.

34:46

What would we have seen?

34:48

Well, we would have walked through fields of wheat and barley heading toward the low walls of the shelters in which people lived.

34:55

The buildings were made of mud bricks.

34:57

Bricks are uniformly shaped and sized, but they're, unfired, they're covered with mud plaster and they're often painted with red ochre.

35:04

They look a bit strange at first glance and we realized that's because they don't have any doors.

35:09

Instead, people climb ladders and then come down into the dwellings from above they're small rooms, but there are a lot of them broken down into maybe 75 total structures on the site.

35:19

At this point, practically all of the animals we see in the pens are goats rather than sheep or cattle makes sense because goats could have thrived on the Uranian plateau, sheep, and cattle.

35:29

It would have been a lot harder.

35:30

The goats may have had some cultural meaning beyond their subsistence use.

35:34

As we're watching, we catch sight of the burial of a young woman.

35:37

She's Dug down into a pit and placed in between the mud brick houses.

35:41

The remains of several young goats are placed in the pit with her near her feet.

35:45

And the sickle is carefully laid next to her head.

35:48

As time went on century after century, the people of Maricar filled in the lower layers of their mud brick houses and built new structures on top.

35:57

In some cases, they buried their dead inside these holes of your layers.

36:00

They cut down into the filled in old rooms and placed the deceased inside later, they built whole cemeteries and the site moved around in the vicinity of this first location that her guard was a sizeable settlement from the very beginning and later phases were even bigger.

36:14

It had a sense of permanence and it eventually developed a Mount structure of the kind we see further to the West and the fertile Crescent Anatolia and the Balkans from mayor Gar and the other settlements around it.

36:26

Populations Rose and people moved South and East into the Indus Valley itself later layers that show the organic development of this specific farming tradition, wherever it came from, whatever the ultimate origins of the farming package here, it eventually got in touch with what was happening further to the North and West.

36:45

It maintained some contact with farming communities in central Asia and the fertile Crescent, but this is important.

36:51

It also developed along its own lines in really interesting ways.

36:54

At first, the people of America are only hunted wild game intended goats.

36:58

The bones of sheep and cattle are almost absent from the remains, but there was a local wild cattle variety living in the vicinity of mayor Gar and these farmers domesticated that local wild cattle, the lineages ancestral to the modern zebu one of the two major lineages of cattle surviving today.

37:17

In fact, Maricar guard itself may have been the actual center of domestication for this lineage.

37:23

It was the zebra rather than fertile Crescent cattle that eventually spread throughout South Asia and beyond the domestication of the zebu was just one component of this local South Asian neolithic flower.

37:35

In fact, it was just one of the neolithic plural, unlike in Europe, where we see the basically complete introduction of the neolithic way of life and it's spread throughout the continent.

37:46

That's not really what happens in South Asia.

37:48

Instead we have this one ultimately introduced, but also organically developing neolithic tradition around Maricar and spreads into the Indus Valley.

37:57

There were other settlements that echoed what was happening at Maricar that we found by the middle and late four thousands BC, but we also have other lines of development elsewhere in South Asia, other ways of life, other groups, other crops, other technological and cultural complexes that moved in many different directions.

38:15

So multiple neolithic in South Asia, not a single neolithic.

38:20

If we had North from the Punjab and the Indus Valley, we see another distinct neolithic way of life emerging in the high valleys of Kashmir and SWAT extending westward.

38:30

The Khyber pass that separates Afghanistan for Pakistan today, the foothills of the Himalayas Karakorum pioneer and Hindu Kush mountains, the highest on the planet make a formidable barrier, but they also provide rich rivers that flow through fertile valleys, places that provide great pasturage for domesticated animals and some good farmland.

38:49

The mountains are also studied with passes and pathways, and those routes tied this region to several different worlds.

38:56

This neolithic tradition began a fair bit later than it did at guard, but the earliest States coming from around 3,300 BC, rather than between 6,000 and 4,000 BC, they also seem to have adopted the crops of the Indus Valley and ultimately the fertile Crescent tradition, especially barley and wheat.

39:13

After around 2000 BC, this Kashmere slash SWAT tradition also had connections to central Asia.

39:20

What's now Afghanistan, Turkmenistan to GQ, Stan and Uzbekistan, even China, further to the East Jade beads and rectangular Sickles that are similar to those of the yang Shao culture along the yellow river, thousands of miles away have been found insights of this culture in Northern Pakistan.

39:35

Now this extends a bit later in time toward 2000 BC, even beyond.

39:40

So we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves here yet.

39:42

Let's head Southeast from there out of the mountains, past the Indus Valley and along the Ganges.

39:48

This plane, as we talked about a little earlier was a pretty great place for the foragers of the Indian Mesolithic.

39:54

These were the people who hunted, fished and gathered plant foods at places like Dom DAMA, as far back as the early Holocene, they, or groups like them followed their own trajectory toward agriculture, their own neolithic, the site of and which are Pradesh along a former tributary of the Ganges shows evidence of the heavy use of wild rice or even active cultivation of it.

40:17

As early as 7,000 BC, the people of Lara day, what we're living in a permanent settlement, they were gathering the native local rice and making the earliest pottery vessels found anywhere in South Asia that's as early, maybe even earlier than the first layer of settlement at Maricar based on the stone tool technologies.

40:35

This neolithic tradition seems to have grown locally out of the proceeding.

40:39

Mesolithic other sites seem to document a similarly evolving way of life based around wild rice exploitation.

40:46

And then later on cultivation, they're handmade pottery vessels even used rice husk for the temperature, which strongly suggest not just gathering wild rice, but planting it.

40:55

They also hunted everything from rhinoceros and elephant to wild cattle as well.

41:02

This is all far from settled though.

41:03

There are real problems with absolute dating in the sights, along the Ganges.

41:07

There just aren't many radiocarbon dates to work with compared to sites in Europe, East Asia, or the near East.

41:13

A bunch of these really important neolithic sites have absolutely no radiocarbon dates at all.

41:18

Now, whenever you're working with radiocarbon dates, you want more rather than fewer for a couple of specific reasons first, because there's always the chance that whatever you're sampling is contaminated or was somehow moved into the layer from which you excavated it either from above or below.

41:34

And second, because radiocarbon dates are expressed as probabilities covering a range of years rather than a single absolute point in time.

41:42

So the more of them you have, the more precise that range becomes.

41:46

I want to stop and talk about Rice

41:49

for a moment. Now we know that Rice

41:51

was domesticated along the Yangtze river in China and possibly a bit to the North of there as well.

41:55

Starting early in the neolithic, the rice we're talking about around the Ganges belongs to a different subspecies and it had its own complex history as complex, not least because this East Asian domesticated rice was eventually introduced to the Eastern parts of South Asia via Southeast Asia by migrants whose ancestors had ultimately come from what's.

42:15

Now, China, this introduced domesticated rice eventually hybridized with the native wild variety.

42:21

This later hybrid was what took off as a cultivated crop in South Asia.

42:26

After about 2000 BC,

42:28

all of this Later

42:30

stuff makes it really tough to nail down the early history of wild rice cultivation and domestication in South Asia.

42:36

But what we can say for certain is that there were foragers exploiting wild rice, and then at some point they started to cultivate it.

42:44

It's just that we can't tell whether the local variety of rice ever took on domesticated characteristics prior to the introduction of rice via Southeast Asia.

42:53

So we know that there were some steps toward domestication of rice in South Asia, but it wasn't the only plant native to South Asia that foragers and later farmers adapted for their own uses.

43:03

Mung bean, IRD, bean, and horse gram are the most important of these along with a couple of varieties of millet that Grew

43:10

locally. These crops ended Up

43:12

being essential to the development of the Indus Valley civilization and the later agricultural societies in South Asia, for one simple reason, they could be grown in the summer during the monsoon season, those West Asian crops that had been introduced from the fertile Crescent like wheat and barley and chickpeas were winter crops.

43:29

By combining these indigenous domesticated plants and rice with the fertile Crescent crops, agricultural societies in South Asia ended up with a much broader and more versatile base Subsistence.

43:40

There's still more to the story though.

43:43

So far, We only really talked about the fringes of the great mountains and the Indo Gangetic plain in the North.

43:49

That's only one part of South Asia.

43:51

There's also Gujarat and the Deccan plateau, which had their own neolithic transitions as with the Ganges plane, this involved a local domestications of indigenous plants.

44:00

Things like mung beans may have been domesticated several times, but also the introduction of domesticated zebu cattle from the Indus Valley and Balochistan lifestyles and and the Deccan where it was dryer were better suited to mix subsistence patterns and especially nomadic cattle.

44:16

Pastoralism of the kind we talked about in the Nile Valley.

44:19

In fact, in my interview with the archeologist David Weingrow, he talked about how the Ash piles of the Deccan and this period directly paralleled the scatters of pastoralist remains in the pre dynastic Nile Valley.

44:30

So let's bring this all back together.

44:34

One recent paper by Charlene Murphy and Dorian fuller, two of the world's experts on early plant cultivation in South Asia suggest that there were no fewer than five separate areas of indigenous plant cultivation in the region.

44:47

That's pretty amazing, especially alongside the introduction from outside of the fertile Crescent crops and later domesticated rice from the station.

44:55

That's why we're talking about multiple Neal lithics, not just one.

45:00

All of this makes South Asia a unique mosaic of agricultural ways of life.

45:04

There were enormous amounts of interplay between these various ways of cultivating and hurting the lifestyle packages that eventually emerged drew on all of them in the Indus Valley.

45:15

People came to cultivate both the winter and monsoon crops.

45:18

They heard zebu cattle and they grew rice as well.

45:20

We're talking about tremendous diversity.

45:22

We would expect that based on the geography and the ecology with everything from tropical rainforest to floodplain, to mountain, to desert, but the human element makes it even more compelling.

45:32

People moved around, they tried new things.

45:35

They adopted new animals, plants, and ideas.

45:37

They grew in numbers. They settled in villages and then cities before long, they invented complex societies.

45:43

And what we think of as civilization, that's what we'll talk about next time on tides of history, the Indus Valley civilization, one of the foundational pieces of the history of South Asia, the IVC as it's called deserves to be held alongside Mesopotamia, Egypt, Andes, Mesoamerica, and East Asia as a center of cultural development and future inspiration.

46:04

But it's not nearly as well known.

46:06

Let's see if we can fix that.

46:12

Okay. Until then. Thanks for joining me.

46:14

If you'd like to see some visuals of the things I've talked about today, go to Patrick Wyman dot sub stack.com, where I'm posting pictures and videos and a post to go along with each episode.

46:23

I also write the occasional essay on current events and historical perspective, but feel free to skip those.

46:28

If you just want the prehistory again, that's Patrick Wyman dot sub stack.com.

46:32

I've written a book called the verge reformation Renaissance and 40 years that shook the world.

46:38

It comes out in July, but you can, pre-order a hard copy e-book or audio book that I'll be reading from your distributor of choice.

46:45

There's a link in this episode description.

46:47

That'll take you there. Be sure.

46:48

And hit me up. If you'd like to chat about anything we've talked about on tides or something you'd like to see.

46:53

You can find me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Wyman or on Facebook at Patrick Wyman MMA or on Instagram at Wyman underscore Patrick.

47:00

As I mentioned, I write on other topics@patrickwymandotsubstack.com.

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The goat's horns were curved and sharp at the ends. His eyes were suspicious and vailful as he stared down the aging man stepping gingerly over the woven fence that surrounded the corral. The other few male goats kept well clear of the ornery patriarch of the herd, and so did most of the herders in the village. Carefully, without getting too close, the man used his long stick and a few exaggerated gestures. To get the old goat moving, driving him out of the enclosure toward the low mud brick walls of the houses beyond. The other goats in the flock followed him, driven onward by few more herds. They needed less encouragement. Deep bellowing and thumping hooves soon drowned out the goat's bleeding. The elderly man in the enclosure felt his heart weak when he saw the long horns of the zebra projecting upwards. And the hump behind it. One wrong move and the bull would drive that horn right into his gut. He had caught the Zebu as a calf down at the nearby stream and raised it for the past decade and it wasn't tame. The man had no illusions about that. Carefully, he thought carefully, opening the gate and keeping his eyes locked onto the bowl as one of his sons drove the big angry creature into the enclosure with a few flicks of a flexible binges. The z boat glared at the older man but complied, heading for the basket full of fresh cut grass that had been left for him to 2. The herder breathed the sigh of relief as he stepped out of the corral and closed the gate behind it. He dropped his long stick and walked toward the mud brick walls. The exteriors plastered with mud and painted with red okirk. He waved welcoming hand to the group of hunters making their way into sight, carrying bloody hunks of meat carved from a water buffalo in the whole corpse of a jackle. Causing for a moment near his home, he inspected the flint work one of his sons was doing. Chipping off small pieces of razor sharp stone, microlifts, which could be used as spearheads, the saw like blades of a sickle or for a dozen other purposes. He offered a correction, pulled the flint core at more of an angle to get a slightly larger flake, and moved on into the village. He eyed the ladder leading up onto the roof of his home with the same suspicion as the goat had looked at him. His hips and knees ached. Yet no desire to climb up, only to climb down again, up and down his joints hurting all the time. That was the price of experience he thought. Looking back toward the Zebu bowl in the corral and his son's improving flakes. This community, which researchers know today as Medgar, was alive with the sounds of farming, herding, hunting, and work more than eight thousand years ago. Located in the hills of Balochistan in present day Pakistan, exact a hundred miles from the slow Wondery waters of the Indus River. Mehrogar was one of the earliest farming communities in South Asia, This village and its contemporaries were the beginning of a long and winding road that led all the way to the independent development of one of the world's first civilizations. The Indus valley civilization, which laid the groundwork for everything else that's followed in South Asia over the past four thousand years. We We get support from the economist intelligence unit or EIU for short, they help business financial and government sectors strategize globally and navigate an ever-changing get support from the Economist Intelligence Unit or EIU for short. They help business, financial, and government sectors strategize globally and navigate an ever changing landscape. Their award-winning data and analysis helps clients understand the world today and prepare for the challenges of award winning data and analysis helps clients understand the world today and prepare for the challenges of tomorrow. They examine the economic and political landscape of almost every country in world. And they've been doing it for more than 70 the And they've been doing it for more than seventy years. They also add in potential challenges faced by each economy. So you'll get a deep dive as well as a so you'll get a deep dive as well as summary. The EIAU has a broad portfolio of world leading clients who value and depend on their data. Even governments rely on the EIU to support key policy Even governments rely on the EIAU to support key policy decisions. So to help your company understand the world and prosper within it, visit EIU dot com slash tides. That's EIU dot com slash tides. Stroke of genius season four explores the most pressing questions, fascinating stories, and often overlooked marvels that make up the world of intellectual property. Each episode transports us to a different place within the landscape of human innovation, with the unheard stories behind impactful inventions from the heroes of tomorrow. This season, we chat with entrepreneurs and innovators making history each day by positively affecting issues like COVID nineteen, food deserts and everything in between. Join us as we dig deeper into the journeys of the world's most influential difference makers. Subscribe to Stroke of Genius on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Before we get started, a reminder that when you join 1 Plus, you can listen to tides of history one week early and add free in the Wonderry app. Also, I have some really cool news. I wrote a book. It's called The Virgin, Reformation, Renaissance, and forty years that shook the world. If you enjoyed our seasons of tides on the early modern period, then you'll like this, I promise. The verge comes out in July, but you can preorder a hard copy or ebook from your attributor of choice right now. I'm working on getting a preorder page for the audiobook which I'll be reading. There's a link in this episode description that will take you there. Enjoy. Hi, everybody. From 1, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks for joining me. The region between the Hindu Cush mountains, the Himalayas, and the Bay of Bengal, what we can broadly call South Asia, is one of the cradles of human civilization. Today, South Asia is home to about one in every four people on the face of the planet, living in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Daka, Carachi, Kolkata, Lahore, Bangalore, and Chennai all have more than ten million inhabitants. And they're among the fastest growing urban areas in the world. This region has a long, complex and multifaceted history. It stretches back thousands of years through colonial rule, a series of empires, cultural evidences, religious upheaval, invasions and migrations. Even the written record in South Asia is Even the written record in South Asia is ancient. It goes back more than three thousand years to the religious texts of the rigveda, Texts that are still in use today. Before that continuous written record came into being, one of the earliest urban civilizations in the world made the Indus Valley home to some of the world's first cities more than four thousand years ago. The Indus Valley civilization as this bronze age culture is usually known is usually counted as one of the world's pristine inventions of civilization. The Indus valley civilization formed one of the key foundations of everything else that followed over the coming millennia from what's now the fringes of Northern Pakistan all the way to mouth of the Ganges. We'll spend all of next week's episode talking about the this valley civilization. So what it was, how it grew and flourished, and of course, why it eventually disappeared? But everything has a beginning. Before the Indus Valley civilization came into being, the Indus Valley was home to small communities of farmers. Hunter gatherers wandered the Deccan plateau and made their homes along the banks of the Binges river where they've fished and collected shellfish. Some of these groups were even experimenting with plant cultivation. Recent discoveries suggest that we should count South Asia as yet another independent center of plant domestication. Who were these early inhabitants of South Asia? Had their ancestors always lived there or had they like people all across the planet arrived from elsewhere? What were their lives like? And what led them along the winding paths to becoming one of the centers of global civilization? Before we get to the Valley, we need to head back to the west over the Hindu bush through what's now Afghanistan and across the Iranian plateau. Until we reach the Zagros mountains overlooking the broad plains of Mesopotamia. This was the fringe of the fertile crescent that curving area extending from Israel and Lebanon in the west through Syria and northern Iraq onto the edges of the Iranian plateau. The fertile crescent, if we remember back aways, was where the neolithic and farming was born. At least, the furt Crescent was one of the world's places where people invented agriculture. We now know that there were many many more including a couple of spots in East Asia, New Guinea, and several in the Americas. The version of the Human Pass where all the good stuff started in the fertile Crescent ten thousand or twelve thousand years ago is flatly But the fertile crescent did matter a great deal. That's where wheat, barley, peas, lentils, sheep Goats and cattle were all domesticated, and it's from where they spread all across the planet. Those domestics formed the subsistence basis, for thousands and thousands of years of agricultural societies. They continue to feed billions of people today, so it's safe to say they're pretty important. Now we still have a lot of questions about the emergence of farming in the fertile crescent. But compared to the invention of agriculture elsewhere in the world, you have a lot more information. We can tell a pretty detailed story about it. And about how that farming package expanded outward. In its basic form, the story goes like this. Over the course of a couple of thousand years of experimentation, People in the fertile crescent figured out how to cultivate wild wheat, barley, and whatnot, and they began to control the ancestors of domesticated animals. After a couple of thousand more years of this, those crops and animals took on the visible characteristics we associate with their domesticated forms. The plant's seeds got bigger. For example, the goat's horns got for example. The goat's horns got smaller. Thanks to these innovations, the groups of people who made these discoveries saw a rise in their numbers. They founded new communities and expanded outward, taking their farming way of life with them. That's the basic story anyway. As we dig deeper into the details, it gets more complicated and frankly more interesting. As it turns out, the fertile crescent was home to a bunch of different groups of people. On a genetic level and presumably a linguistic and cultural one, there were at least three different populations in the region. The 2 and their descendants in the Levant, a group in southern Turkey and northern Syria, and then a third group in the east that lived in the foothills of the Zagris mountains. If we think about this in terms of Hunter gatherer group dynamics, it makes a lot of If we think about this in terms of hunter gatherer group dynamics, it makes lot of sense. We have relatively small populations, they're highly fragmented, and they're deeply diverged from one another. But one of the fascinating things about early farming is that the basic pieces of the farming package originated in different places within the fertile crescent. Presumably among different groups and then diffused outward to the other groups living in the region without the populations really coming together. There was no single group of early farmers even within this region. There were several and they went their own separate ways. The group in southern Turkey and Northern Syria, for example, expanded into Anatolia and then Europe. Their direct descendants survived today everywhere from Turkey and Greece to Ireland. We haven't talked much about that eastern group though, the one that lived in the foothills of the Zagris. They're really important too. Back in twenty sixteen, geneticists succeeded in sequencing the genome of a middle aged woman who lived in village of Gondaré in the Zagros almost ten thousand years ago. It's a really cool site because it's where the oldest evidence of the management of goat herds has ever been found. Getting the ancient DNA of person who lived there at exactly that time tells you a ton about the past and future of the people who figured out these really fundamental innovations. When this woman's DNA was analyzed, they suggested that she was a member of an ancient group whose descendants now live all over Central and South Asia. In other words, these early farmers and herders living in the foothills of the Zagris mountains grew in numbers. They expanded over the Iranian plateau and into central Asia and traveled south across the Hindu push into what would later become Pakistan and India. That story with multiple groups of early farmers is the more complicated twist on the basic version, what we call the Demic diffusion model of farming. Farming leads to population growth, which leads to migration and the diffusion of the farming lifestyle. But as it turns out, Even this more complicated version of the story isn't quite right either. When we look at the genes of later people living in the Indus Valley civilization, and present day people living in Pakistan and India, they're not directly related to that herding woman from the Zagros. Instead, their descendants of a population that was closely related to her and her people, but not that group, not exactly. The ancestors of the folks who brought farming to the Indus Valley had actually diverged from those Zagris goat herders a few thousand years prior to the development of the farming package, and they hadn't mixed with them since. I know this is a bit complicated. The genetic stuff can make your head spin, but bear with me for just a moment. This is especially complicated because the descendants of that Zagros woman's population did in fact expand into central Asia. They introduced farming there and they lived there well into the bronze age. It was natural to assume that this same group had also gone further south to the but we now know that's not the case. It's a puzzle. There are two ways of interpreting this, both of which have pretty significant implications for how we understand the origins of farming in the fertile crescent. First, there was another distinct population that would make at least four in total living in the region at the time farming was invented. Then their population expanded, they moved outward, and eventually they ended up in the Binges Valley. It would just be that we haven't sampled ancient DNA from this specific group yet. The other possibility is that this group was living somewhere other than the fertile crescent maybe the Iranian plateau, and wasn't involved in the initial domestication of crops and animals at all. They just adopted them from those groups further to the west in the fertile crescent. It's even possible that they had already been living in the Indus valley or at least nearby and didn't actually move much at all. Instead, they would have been a hunter gatherer population related to those Zagris farmers that had already come east sometime before. Again, since we don't have samples directly from this group at this time, we can't identify exactly where they came from. Both of those things I mentioned are possibilities. They're both intriguing. On the one hand, it would tell us either that the fertile crescent was a much more crowded and interesting place ten thousand years ago than we thought or that arthymic diffusion model isn't quite right that it's too simple and that a culturation and adopt of the farming package really did happen. In this second case, it wouldn't just have been expansion and migration. There would have been contact the adoption of ideas and crops and changing lifestyles too. My guess, if you were asking me, is that the ancestors of these future Valley people and billions of people living in South Asia today were living somewhere to the east of the fertile crescent, probably on the huge expanses of the Iranian plateau. They slowly adopted domesticated crops and animals before moving east toward the Indus Valley. Either way, it's a long long way from the edge of the fertile crescent 2 the end is valley. It's about fourteen hundred miles or twenty two hundred kilometers. The terrain in between isn't easing, The Iranian plateau was cut through by jagged bridges of hills and deep valleys. Much of it's extremely arid and wouldn't have been welcoming for these early farmers Eventually, however, some of them probably did come through Afghanistan across the mountains and into the Valley. Maybe they came down through the famous Kyber Pass, famous in the millenia to come as the gateway for invasions and devastating raids into South Asia. Once these folks arrived in the Binges Valley, they found a gloriously fertile plain, some eight hundred miles long for twelve hundred kilometers from the foothills of the Himalayas and Kashmir down to the Arabian Sea. The Indus Valley snakes its way south, makes this dry landscape blue. It occasionally overspills its banks and deposits fertile silt that's wonderful for farming. So for these early farmers setting up shop with their wheat and barley lentils, legumes, sheep and goats, this would have been about as good a place as any in the world to live. The in this plane isn't nearly as broad as it is long. It's just a couple of hundred miles across, sandwiched between the hills and mountains that run along today's border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the arid expanses of the Thar desert. In the north though, the plane keeps going and going and going. It's framed on the south by the Deccan plateau and on the north by the Himalayas, all the way to the Bay of Bengal. This eastern extension of the plane revolves around the Gange the other great river of South Asia. Only the Delhi Ridge, which isn't much of a barrier, divides the two enormous drainage basins from one another. But together, this region is known as the indogangetic plain. It's been the urban core of South Asia for as long as urban cities there. Because that's where the food could be grown to feed the largest numbers of people. That agricultural history goes all the way back back to that arrival of those early farmers from further to the west. Their early villages formed the basis for the complex societies urban civilizations, and empires that follow. If If you're a business owner, you might be making, running your business harder on yourself than you're a business owner, you might be making running your business harder on yourself than necessary. Don't let QuickBooks and spreadsheets slow you down anymore. It's time to upgrade to NetSuite, stop paying for multiple systems that don't give you the information you, when you need it and ditch the spreadsheets and all the old software that you've outgrown now is the time to upgrade to NetSuite by Oracle, the world's number one cloud business It's time to upgrade to NetSuite. 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They have one of the Holly Akala They have one of the Haliakala waterfall that is the perfect thing to drift off to sleep 2. Start your free thirty day trial today. Visit audible dot com slash tides or text tides to five hundred five hundred. Again, that's audible dot com slash tides or text tides to five hundred five hundred. Before we go any further, let's take a couple of steps back aside from the genetic we go any further, let's take a couple of steps back. Aside from the genetic evidence, how can we be sure that agriculture actually did arrive in the Valley from further west. Couldn't they simply have figured things out for themselves? This one's pretty straightforward to answer. It's because the sweet of domesticated crops and animals that we see in the neolithic settlements of the Indus Valley is the classic fertile crescent package. We see wheat barley, legumes, lentils, sheep, and goats. They're morphologically, identical to what people were doing for their They're morphologically identical to what people were doing further west. The chances of group domesticating sizes that same package of crops and animals independently. A couple of thousand miles to the east of place that had already done it seems pretty small. So at least one part of the agricultural package that took root in the Indus Valley came from the fertile crescent. As I mentioned, people who implemented it probably came from further west 2, if not all the way from the Zagris themselves. But South Asia was far from uninhabited when they arrived, It wasn't an empty wasteland. It wasn't a pristine wilderness ready to be settled by intrepid pioneers. There were already a whole bunch of people living all over South Asia with a variety of lifestyles. Some of those groups were even experimenting with agriculture themselves with a totally different series of packages of domesticated crops. This gives us yet another place in the world where plant cultivation was tried and succeeded. It's also yet another place where we see multiple groups of people of extremely different backgrounds, language families and ways of life interacting. So who were the People who were living in South who were living in South Asian? What can we know about them? We have to start by understanding that there are very very few sites in region dated to the late paleolithic, 2 the period immediately before the end of the younger dryest, around twelve thousand years ago. We're not sure exactly why this was the case. There hasn't been much archaeological work done in lot of places, but it probably had something to do with the prevailing environmental condition. They were drier and cooler than they became in the early holocene after about twelve thousand years ago. There simply may not have been that many people across large stretches of South Asia. The upshot of all this is that much of South Asia especially that Deccan plateau would have been really arid and not especially welcoming for a foraging lifestyle. But after the end of the younger dryness, things got much better. Conditions got warmer, and wetter and generally more hospitable to people. We see a lot more archaeological sites throughout South Asia and people were probably getting thicker on the ground. When I say things got warmer and wetter, what this means is that we can see the beginnings of the classic South Asian monsoon. Montsoon is really complicated. But basically, it refers to the annual reversal of prevailing winds over South Asia that brings heavy rainfall and moisture through part of the year. It is the defining climatic feature of the region. It's the thing that dictates environmental conditions throughout India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Now even today, the monsoon varies in strength and its details from one year to the next. This has huge effects on life in the economy in the region. That was the case in the past as well. And in fact, its path and effects were even more variable. So the Indus and the Ganges, the two biggest rivers of South Asia are fed by sources high up in the Himalayas. They're going to run regardless, though maybe not with as much water volume at times when the monsoon either isn't strong or is altogether absent. But that's not the case in the Deccan plateau where most of the rivers are fed by monsoon rainfall. In the late paleolithic, the monsoon systems seemed to have been either exceptionally weak or just not there at all. That meant that the Deccan plateau would have been incredibly dry, way too dry for many people at all to live there. Even the Indo energetic plane would not have been as welcoming without regular rainfall and floods to replenish the soil with river salt. This probably explains why we start to see way more archaeological sites in South Asia after the beginning of the Holocene around twelve thousand years ago. Was just a lot easier to live there. The site of Dam Damma on the Ganji's plane about halfway through Look Now and Putna would have been pretty great place to live around eight thousand or nine thousand years ago. It sits on a raised patch around the confluence of two fers, tributaries that flow into a larger river, and it's one of a bunch of sites on the Binges plain dating to roughly this period of time. The other well known sites tend to be at the edges of oxbow lakes. They're similarly rich spots from which to hunt, fish, and gather a bunch of plant foods. At Dom Domo, there were tons of microlithic artifacts. These small, razor sharp, multipurpose stone tools that we see a lot of during the Smedesolithic Period Global. There were also postcodes, probably the frameworks for thatched or tent like dwellings, fireplaces, and storage pits. So there are a couple of really fascinating things about these kinds of mesolithic sites on the Binges plant. First, they show repeated occupations with people living there for pretty extensive periods of time. Domtarma has especially thick deposits at least ten separate layers of occupation over a pretty long time. People people came there. They stayed for quite a while and they kept coming back. Now, second, these sites all have cemeteries. They have big gatherings of the dead. There are forty seven adult burials at Dom Domo, which is a ton of people for a cemetery in this period anywhere in the world. Why do cemeteries cemeteries matter? Well, because cemeteries usually represent permanence in landscape. It's the kind of place that matters to you and your group. You bury your dead there to show that the land is yours, that it belongs to your ancestors, and it'll belong to your descendants too. We talked about this in the context of the Nile valley a few episodes back. People might Wondery, but the dead stay in place. Maybe there was something similar happening at Dom Domo and places like it in the Indian Mesolithic. Thanks to the skeletal remains found in these cemeteries, we can know quite a bit about the lives and lifestyles of these folks. At Dom Domo, the people were tall and healthy. Men averaged around one hundred and eighty centimeters tall, around five foot ten. While the women were around a hundred and seventy four centimeters tall or five foot eight. They tend to have strong muscle attachments, particularly in their calves, which suggests a lifestyle that involved a lot of walking up and down hills over long distances and or lots of carrying heavy loads. They also have really well developed musculature in their forearms and shoulders, which researchers think came from a lot of forceful overhand throwing with a dominant hand. Basically, they spent a lot of time and energy throwing spears or bowels maybe with their right hands. It may have been on the receiving end of throwing spears 2, A few of the skeletons have projectile points either embedded in the bone or in a position that makes us think they were buried in the soft tissue with the time that the body went into the ground. But there's little evidence for osteoarthritis or damage from repetitive movement patterns. The kind of stuff you see a lot of among farming populations that spend a lot of time stooped over grinding grain or pulling weeds, things like that. Now their teeth were quite heavily worn, which suggests that they ate a lot of coarse plant foods that required serious chewing. But from their overall health, the food was very nutritious and good for people who ate it. The people who lived at Dom Domo haven't been genetically analyzed as far as know, so we can't be exactly sure about their population affinities but we have some ideas about who they were related to and whether they left descendants. When we look at present day people living in South Asia, and samples from the time of the Indus Valley civilization, we see a few major ancestral components, two of which are relevant to today's episode. One of them is those farmers related to but not identical with the goat herders from the Sagris Mountain, so they talked about earlier. But the other is a little harder to pin down. It's related to but not identical with people currently living in the remote andaman islands of the Bayabengal between the Malay Peninsula and the Southeastern Coast of India. That specific type of ancestry which researchers call ancient ancestral South Indian reaches its highest proportions in the tribal groups of India. Now, this doesn't mean that ancient ancestral South Indians, whoever they were, was a homogeneous population, or that they were the only one living in South Asia prior to the arrival of the farmers from further west. But we can say for sure that they were in South Asia, their roots were extremely deep and that they soon mixed with the newly arriving farmers. All the later people living in South Asia have large proportions of ancestry from both of these really ancient groups. It's a fairly safe bet that the people who were buried at Dom Domo all of those thousands of years ago were representatives of this ancient ancestral South Indian group. It's possible though impossible to prove at this point in time that the Dravidian languages of South Asia go all the way back to this population. These aren't the only components of ancestry in South Asia either. There are later arrivals after this period including ancestry going back to people who originally came from the Eurasian step and ancestry related to people living in East Asia. But the Zagros farmer related ancestry and the ancient ancestral South Indian components are the two biggest ones. The vast majority of the ancestry of people living in South Asia today in varying proportions depending on region, ethnic backgrounds, social group, and whatnot, goes back to these two distinct populations. Let's come back to our farming friends. Around the time the foragers were burying their dead at Domdama, permanent settlements were beginning to crop up in the Indus Valley and its environs a thousand miles to the northwest. The best known of these sites, the one that drives a great deal of our understanding of how farming to a cold and spread in South Asia is a place called Mergar. Mergar is an absolute treasure. In a really limited and pretty well excavated area, we can see the entire millennia long sequence leading directly from the earliest farming communities near the Andes all the way to the emergence of cities and complex societies. There are very few sites more important in the entire world. PARAGARD is actually located just to the west of the Valley property. And what's called the Balochistan. In point of fact, it's basically where the Indus Valley and the Iranian plateau meet, a kind of a gateway between the two worlds. The part of Balochistan in which Mehrokhart is situated looks pretty forbidding today. It's really dry. It's flanked on three sides by sizable mountains. Around seven thousand BC though, it would have been quite a bit wetter and more appealing. That's when we see the earliest phases of permanent settlement at Merrick with people there living in small, unfired mudbrick buildings. This is an incredibly early date. It's as early as the evidence for Neolithic settlements around the AGNC quite bit further away and harder to get through from that fertile crescent homeland. These folks in what's called period one at PARAGARD were exploiting grain resource namely barley and wheat. There's a bit of debate among scholars as to whether it was wild or domesticated, collected, or cultivated, And if it was domesticated and cultivated, whether that was an independent development at Merrickar or introduced from further west. This brings us back to that really basic fundamental question of who these early farmers were, whether they've been in the area for while already or whether they themselves had migrated from further west along with their crop package. What's clear about PARAGARD and very few things are, is that in the earliest stages, the people who lived there were eating all sorts of things. Tons of grains and some domesticated goats, but also lots of wild game, including wild sheep and goat, wild cattle, water buffalo, even elephant. That's a broad spectrum subsystem strategy. It's not one that relied entirely on introduced domesticated elements from further It's not one that relied entirely on introduced domesticated elements from further west. So who were they? According to new one poll research shared by pay comm employees are so frustrated with the tech they use at work that 67% said, they're willing to take a pay cut for something to new one poll research shared by Paycom, employees are so frustrated with the tech they use at work that sixty seven percent said they're willing to take a pay cut. For something better. Ouch, only pay comms, comprehensive technology, automates their HR and payroll tasks and a single software that's easy to Ouch. Only Paycom's comprehensive technology automates their HR and payroll tasks in a single software that's easy to use. And for employers automatically measures the ROI that results learn how the right HR tech can help by visiting pay and for employers automatically measures the ROI that results. Learn how the right HR tech can help by visiting pay com dot com slash frustrations. That's paycom dot com slash frustrations. It's not like we can look further to the west and track the movement of farming communities from the Zagros mountains in the fertile crescent across the Iranian plateau and then all the way to PARAGARD. In fact, PARAGARD predates the earliest farming communities that have been excavated on the Iranian plateau. Now, some archaeologists look at that evidence and say it points in the direction of the independent rise of farming at PARAGARD and in its region. That's what the archaeologists 2 cavaded most extensively at Mehrogar, Jean François Yarege believed, or at least that there was a combination of independent domestication along with some diffusion from the fertile cressa. That may be the case, but I'm not convinced, mostly because today we have a much better idea of how migration operates. We don't have to find some slow, steady advance Of farmers moving one Valley at a time across the Iranian plateau toward farmers moving one valley at a time across the Iranian plateau toward Mahergar. That's not really how migrations work. Now societiesI farmers do take short hops. The village gets too cradles. There's no more land available. A group will head out to the closest viable location and set up a new village. They maintain close connections to the place they left. If it's a group of young men moving, which it often is, they look back to their home communities for spouses. And you retain these connections over space and time. But these short jumps go hand in hand with much longer distance migrations. That can cover hundreds or even thousands of miles. A great deal of the Iranian plateau is inhospitable to the kind of farming that worked well in the fertile crescent. There isn't enough rainfall or the soil isn't right. You'd have to adapt specific pieces of the package and develop new techniques to get it to support viable farming communities. Under those circumstances, people might move exceptionally long distances in search of the right conditions to set up new communities. Now, if you were a group of new arrivals who was looking for a place to live, the area around PARAGARD would have looked dang near perfect in comparison to the drier, less hospitable reaches of the Iranian plateau. It's worth moving to, in other words. Now, if this group was already living further east than the fertile crescent, as I think, they might already have had sense for what they might find at the end of their migration. They might have had knowledge of it already, either contacts or travel themselves. So if we stop looking for a continuous chain of farming migrations, and instead think in terms of possible longer distant sleeps, it's not nearly as hard to see PARAGARD as at least partially the product of migrations from further west. They would have just skipped over the in between parts they already knew wouldn't work for them. So as a working theory, I think that these folks moved crossed the Iranian plateau and eventually wound up around Baergar. They may have been in contact with a group already living there, maybe they shared some cultural facets in common with them. We don't know a ton about the preceding mesolithic period in the region, but there isn't some huge dramatic shift. So let's say we're walking toward that first settlement period one at PARAGARD. What would we have seen? Well, we would have walked through fields of wheat and barley heading toward the low walls of the shelters in which people lived. The buildings were made of mud bricks. Bricks are uniformly shaped and sized, but they're unfired. They're covered with mud plaster and they're often painted with red ochre. They look a bit strange at first glance and we realize that's because they don't have any doors. Instead, people climb ladders and then come down into the dwellings from above. They're small rooms, but there are lot of them, broken down into maybe seventy five total structures on the site. At this point, practically all of the animals we see in the pens are goats rather than sheep or cattle. This makes sense because goats could have thrived on the Iranian plateau, sheep and cattle would have been lot harder. The goats may have had some cultural meaning beyond their subsistence use. As we're watching the catch sight of the burial of a young woman, she's dug down into a pit and placed in between the mudbrick houses. The remains of several young goats are placed in the pit with her near her feet, and the sickle is carefully laid next to her head. As time went on, century after century, the people of PARAGARD filled in the lower layers of their mudbrick houses and built new structures on top. In some cases, they buried their dead inside these older layers. They cut down into the filled in old rooms and placed the deceased inside. Later, they built full cemeteries and the site moved around in the vicinity of this first location. Bahergarde was a sizable settlement from the very beginning and later phases were even bigger. It had a sense of permanence and it eventually developed a mount structure of the kind we see further to the west in the fertile crescent and italia in the Balkans. From Mehrogar and the other settlements around it, populations rose and people moved south and east into the Indus valley itself. The later layers at PARAGARD show the organic development of this specific farming tradition. Wherever it came from, whatever the ultimate origins of the farming package here, it eventually got in touch with what was happening further to the north and west. Stake maintained some contact with farming communities in Central Asia and the fertile crescent. But this is important, it also developed along its own lines in really interesting ways. At first, the people of America are only hunted wild game intended goats. The bones of sheep and cattle are almost absent from the remains. But there was a local wild cattle variety living in the vicinity of PARAGARD, and these farmers domesticated that local wild cattle the binges, ancestral to the zebra, one of the two major lineages of cattle surviving today. In fact, Merricar itself may have been the actual center of domestication for this lineage. It was the zebra, rather than fertile crescent cattle, that eventually spread throughout South Asia and beyond. The domestication of the zebra was just one component of this local South Asian neolithic flower. In fact, it was just one of the Neolithic's plural. Unlike in Europe, where we see the basically complete introduction of the Neolithic way of life and it spread throughout the continent. That's not really what happens in South Asia. Instead, we have this one ultimately introduced but also organically developing Neolithic tradition around PARAGARD and spreads into the Valley. There were other settlements that echoed happening at PARAGARD that we found by the cradles and late four thousand species. Though we also have other lines of development elsewhere in South Asia, other ways of life, other groups, other crops, other technological and cultural complexes that moved in many different directions. So Multiple neolithic in South Asia, not a single neolithic. If we head north from the Putin job in the Indus Valley, we see another distinct neolithic way of life emerging in the high valleys of Kashmir and SWAT, extending west toward the Kyber Pass that separates Afghanistan from Pakistan today. The foothills of the Himalayas, Carah Quorum, Palmir and Hindu Bush Mountains, the highest on the planet, make a formidable barrier but they also provide rich rivers that flow through fertile valleys, places that provide great passage for domesticated animals and some good farmland. The mountains are also studded with passes and pathways, and those roots tied this region to several different worlds. This Neolithic tradition began a fair bit later than it did at PARAGARD, with the earliest dates coming from around thirty three hundred BC rather than between six thousand and four thousand BC. They also seem to have adopted the crops of the Indus Valley and ultimately the fertile crescent tradition, especially barley and wheat. After around two thousand BC, this cashmere slash SWAT tradition also had connections to Central Asia. What's now Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, 2, and Uzbekistan. Even China further to the east. Jade beads and rectangular cradles that are similar to those of the Yangzhou culture along the yellow river thousands of miles away have been found in the sites of this culture in Northern Pakistan. Now, this extends a bit later in time toward two thousand BC even beyond, so we don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves here yet. Let's head southeast from there out of the mountains past the Indus Valley and along the Binges. This plane as we talked about little earlier was a pretty great place for the foragers of the Indian mezolithic. These were the people who hunted, fished, and gathered plant foods at places like Dhamdhamma, as far back as the early holocaust. They or groups like them followed their own trajectory toward agriculture, their own neolithic. The site of Lajoidewa in uttar Cradles along a former tributary of the Binges shows evidence of the heavy use of wild rice or even active cultivation of it as early as seven thousand BC. The people of Laharidewa were living in a permanent settlement, they were gathering the native local rice and making the earliest pottery vessels found anywhere in South Asia. That's as early, maybe even earlier than the first layer of settlement at Mirgar. Based on the stone tool technologies, this neolithic tradition seems to have grown locally out of the preceding mesolithic. Other fights seem to document a similarly evolving way of life based around wild rice exploitation and then later on cultivation. Their handmade pottery vessels even used rice husk for the temper, which strongly suggests not just gathering wild rice, but planting it. They also hunted everything from rhinocerus and elephant to wild cattle as well. This is all far from settled though. There are real problems with absolute dating in the sites along the Ganges. There just aren't many radiocarbon dates to work with compared to sites in Europe, East Asia, or the Near East. A bunch of these really important neolithic sites have absolutely no radiocarbon dates all. Now, whenever you're working with radiocarbon dates you want more rather than fewer for a couple of specific reasons. First, because there's always the chance that whatever your sampling is contaminated or was somehow moved into the layer from which you excavated it either from above or below. And second, because radiocarbon dates are expressed as probabilities covering a range of years rather than a single absolute point in time. So the more of them you have, the more precise that range becomes. I want to stop and talk about rice for a moment. Now, we know that rice was domesticated along the Yangtze river in China and possibly a bit to the north of there as well starting early in the Neolithic. The rights we're talking about around the Binges belong to a different subspecies and it had its own complex history. As complex, not least because this East Asian domesticated rice was eventually introduced to the eastern parts of South Asia, via Southeast Asia. By migrants whose ancestors had ultimately come from what's now China. This introduced domesticated rice eventually hybridized with the native wild variety, This later hybrid was what took off as a cultivated crop in South Asia after about two thousand BC. All of this later stuff makes it really tough to nail down the early history of wild rice cultivation and domestication in South Asia. But what we can say for certain is that there were foragers exploiting wild rice and then at some point they started to cultivate it. It's just that we can't tell whether the local variety of rice ever took on domesticated characteristics prior to the introduction of rice via Southeast Asia. So we know that there were some steps toward domestication of rice in South Asia, but it wasn't the only plant native to South Asia that foragers and later farmers adapted for their own uses. Mung bean, erdbean, and horsegram are the most important of these along with a couple of varieties of millet that grew locally. These crops ended up being essential to the development of the Indus valley civilization and the later agricultural societies in South Asia for one simple reason. They could be grown in the summer during the monsoon season. Those West Asian crops that had been introduced from the fertile crescent like wheat and barley and chickpeas were winter crops. By combining these indigenous domesticated plants and rice with the fertile crescent crops, agricultural societies in South Asia ended up with a much broader and more versatile base for subsistence. There's still more to the story though. Far, we've only really talked about the fringes of the Great Mountains and the Indogectic plain in the north. That's only one part of South Asia. There's also Gujiran and the Deccan plateau which had their own neolithic transitions. As with the Binges plain, this involved the local domestications of indigenous plants. Things like mung beans may have been domesticated several times, but also the introduction of domesticated zebra cattle from the Binges Valley and Baluchistan. Lifestyles in Gujarat and the Deakin where it was drier were better suited to mixed subsistence patterns and especially nomadic cattle pastoralism of the kind we talked about in the Nile Valley. In fact, in my interview with the archaeologist David Wenro, he talked about how the ash piles of the deccan in this period directly parallel the scatters of pastoralist remains in the pre dynastic Nile valley. So let's bring this all back together. One recent paper by Charlene Murphy and Dorian Fuller, two of the world's experts on early plant cultivation in South Asia suggests that there were no fewer than five separate areas of indigenous plant cultivation in the region. That's pretty amazing, especially alongside the introduction from outside of the fertile crescent crops and later domesticated rice from East Asia. That's why we're talking about multiple neolithic, not just one. All of this makes South Asia a unique mosaic of agricultural ways of life. There were enormous amounts of interplay between these various ways of cultivating and herding. The lifestyle packages that eventually emerged drew on all of them. In the Indus Valley, people came to cultivate both the winter and monsoon crops. They heard it zebra cattle and they grew rice as well. We're talking about tremendous diversity. We would expect that based on the geography and the ecology with everything from tropical rainforest to flood plain to mountain to desert, but the human element makes it even more compelling. People moved around. They tried new things. They adopted new animals, plants, and ideas. They grew in numbers. They settled in villages and then cities. Before long they invented complex societies in what we think of as civilization. That's what we'll talk about next time on tides of history. The Indus valley civilization, one of the foundational pieces of the history of South Asia. The IVC, as it's called, deserves to be held alongside Mesopotamian, Egypt, the Andes, Meso America, and East Asia as a center of cultural development and future inspiration. But it's not nearly as well known. Let's see if we can fix that. Okay. then, thanks for joining me. If you'd like to see some visuals of the things I've talked about today, go to patrick Wyman dot substack dot com, where I'm posting pictures and videos in a post to go along with each episode. I also write the occasional essay on current events and historical perspective, but feel free to skip those if you just want the pre history. Again, that's patrick wiman dot substack dot com. I've written a book called The Virgin Reformation, Renaissance, and forty years that shook the world. It comes out in July, but you can preorder a hard copy ebook or audiobook that I'll be reading from your distributor of choice. There's a link in this episode description that'll take you there. Be sure to hit me up if you'd like to chat about anything we've talked about on tides or something you'd like to see. You can find me on Twitter at patrick underscore Wyman or on Facebook at patrick Wyman MMA or on Instagram at wyman Patrick. As I mentioned, I write on other topics at patrick pyman dot substack dot com. Tides of history is written and narrated by me Patrick Wine. The Sound Design is by Molly Bakken for Airship. The Sound Engineer is Sergio Enrique's. Size of History is produced by Morgan Jack From 1, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Little. Thanks again for listening. Until next time from Wandering, this has been tides of history. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to tides of history on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, The 1 app, or wherever you're listening right now. Join 1 to three plus in the one to three app to listen early and ad free. If you've been enjoying the show, I'd really appreciate it if you left us a five star rating The review, Hey, I'm Mike 2 review. Hey, I'm Mike Cory, the host of Wondery Show Against The Odds. In our next season, we're bringing you the story of John McCain. 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