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Author: Patrick Wyman

Format: Audiobook (Narrator: Patrick Wyman)

Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World is a popular audience-oriented exploration of human pre-history that emphasizes how new developments in bioarchaeology, scientific analyses, etc., allow contemporary archaeologists to reconstruct the world of ancient humans in a much richer and holistic fashion. Lost Worlds is structured as a series of case studies of different prehistorical sites (e.g. Anzick-1, Gebelein Man) that traces the development of humans from the end of the last Ice Age to the Bronze Age Collapse. Wyman does a very good job of painting a scene for each of these case studies and, as he pretty explicitly tries to do throughout, humanizing these ancient figures where all we have are their remains. Importantly, Lost Worlds is fundamentally grounded in recent academic scholarship, and throughout Wyman clearly is trying to deliver a level of academic nuance to the conclusions that can be drawn from ancient human history that is often lacking in popular expositions of history, especially ancient history. Indeed, the emphasis on novel technologies (isotope analysis, for example) and the amount of academic rigour means that the text serves functionally as a revisionist text for many common myths and narratives about prehistory (e.g. there does not exist any sort of ‘Golden Path’ for humanity to ‘develop’ into ‘civilization’) despite nominally being merely a popular exposition of prehistory.

Wyman is particularly good at framing these academic debates and analyses for popular audiences; structuring the book through the lives of specific individuals throughout prehistory really adds colour to what often can be rather dry academic conclusions. While every chapter was individually compelling, his discussion of the expansion of the Austronesian peoples from South China to Taiwan to across the entire Pacific and the reconstruction of an entire battle in the Tollense Valley is a particular highlight. That said, the book may have benefited from a slightly larger emphasis on the novel technologies that were exploited for many of the new conclusions; many conclusions about the life of a person 5000 years dead seem almost magical but would become much more grounded with a quick explanation, possibly in a large introductory chapter or something.

The one unfortunate result of a focus on individual archaeological sites and remains is that the breadth of the book is rather lacking in places - while Lost Worlds covers the breadth of Eurasia and a couple of notable sites in North America, for example, there is no mention of any archaeological site in, say, sub-Saharan Africa. It’s hard to say if this was an oversight, a deliberate decision, or simply a function of there not being as many compelling sites that have been extensively studied, but it feels like these sorts of gaps would exist almost are necessary in a book of this length with this structure.

The book itself I found was quite a good listen as an audiobook specifically - as Wyman is known for being a podcaster (I would definitely recommend Tides of History, which just finished but whose semi-recent (say 2-5 years ago) episodes were very closely related to the content of the book, and his new series Past Lives, which is almost exactly the type of content in Lost Worlds), he serves as the narrator of the audiobook, and naturally executes his own text quite well. Possibly this shouldn’t be particularly surprising, as the text itself is structured essentially as a large sequence of podcasts on individual sites stapled together with some connective tissue. I do somewhat wonder how the book works when read in text, since it felt as if the writing style was particularly suited for an audiobook exposition (lots of short, punchy, sentences, e.g.). If anyone else reads the book lmk how it is 😌.