Map of Key Sites

Map of Key Sites

Dedication

For Luckez

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map of Key Sites

Dedication

Introduction: The End

Part 1: Foundations

Chapter 1: How We Misunderstood the Apocalypse of Human Extinction

Chapter 2: How Sea Level Rise Spurred Ingenuity

Chapter 3: How Apocalypse Brought People Together

Part 2: Transformations

Chapter 4: How Apocalypses Turn Inequality into Violence

Chapter 5: How Society Collapses but Civilization Survives

Chapter 6: How Postapocalyptic Societies Reinvent Themselves

Part 3: New Worlds

Chapter 7: How the Apocalypse of Colonialism Has Hidden in Plain Sight

Chapter 8: How Slavery Created the Modern World

Chapter 9: Why We’ve Stayed Trapped in the Apocalypse—And How We Can Find Our Way Out

Epilogue: The Beginning

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography and Further Reading

Notes

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

The End

Seven thousand years ago, the world ended. The sea ate the land, creeping up shorelines with the steadiness of a predator closing in on its prey. First it devoured beaches. Then it filled river mouths and estuaries where fresh water flowed to the ocean, sending poisonous torrents of salt water upstream. It strangled the life out of the plants people collected and the animals they hunted and fished. At first, those people could learn to gather new plants and hunt different animals, but that only worked for a time. Eventually, the sea covered their homelands, and they had to find new ones. But as soon as they settled into the rhythms of a new place, learned which animals lived there and how best to hunt them, which plants would nourish and which would kill, the sea came again.

The water followed them everywhere, relentless in its pursuit, all over the world. People who once lived on vast continents now found themselves on islands, cut off. Children paddled boats over the villages their grandparents had grown up in. Eventually the sea gave up, but the damage had been done. People were left living in a mere remnant of the world their ancestors once inhabited.

* * *

Four thousand years ago, the world ended. The city was a marvel, almost a miracle. People came from far and wide to trade there, and many of them stayed to build their fortunes and their futures. Ideas, cultures, religions, and goods mixed and mingled, as did the people who brought them to the city. Life was exciting, so exciting, but also comfortable, with a government that busied itself building homes and roads to serve its booming population. And then the rains that filled the city’s reservoirs each year stopped falling. People lost faith in their leaders, and when those leaders were toppled there was no one to replace them. Pristine streets became trash dumps, and sturdy houses that had stood for generations were scavenged to build makeshift shacks. As their city disintegrated, so did people’s sense of citizenship, of belonging. They retreated into family and kin groups and turned on anyone deemed an outsider. People grew accustomed to going to sleep hungry and startling awake many times in the night, ever vigilant to possible attack. The lucky ones had somewhere else to go, and the smart ones left even if they didn’t. Eventually, the bustling city became an empty ruin, its orderly streets serving only its ghosts.

* * *

Seven hundred years ago, the world ended. The people heard rumors of a plague sweeping across entire continents, and they knew it was only a matter of time before it reached their shores. But when it came, it was worse than anyone could have imagined. Half a city could die within a single year. The plague snuffed out entire family lines, with no one to remember or mourn them. Bodies piled up in the streets, and the gravediggers worked night and day until they, too, fell ill. Those who could afford it fled to the countryside, but nowhere was truly safe. The country was dotted with villages of the dead, their few survivors having staggered away from the homes they couldn’t maintain or bear to live in anymore. Life before the plague seemed like a distant memory, and no one could imagine an after.

* * *

Five hundred years ago, the world ended. The conquering army marched into the defeated capital, determined to remake it in their own image. The invaders installed themselves in the most opulent palaces and razed the rest to the ground. They tore down the temples of the old religion and used their stones to build churches of the new. Men who had been little more than beggars and outlaws in the old world killed the leaders of the former city and married their widows, claiming the right to noble lineages. Those residents of the capital who hadn’t died in the war were forced to work, erasing the place they had known while building its replacement. New diseases tore through their already ravaged communities, and those seeking comfort had no choice but to turn to the new religion. Meanwhile, the conquerors trumpeted their heroic victory against the barbarians to all corners of the world. People flocked to the center of this new empire, eager for a piece of its stolen wealth, and soon enough the horrors started to seem like fate.

* * *

Today, the world is ending. The climate is changing, and it’s too late to stop it. Crops are failing as vast areas of the world’s farmland dry up into desert, driving famine and war. Storms and wildfires are growing more powerful, consuming towns and threatening cities. Coastal communities, as well as entire island countries, are sinking under the rising seas. Fresh water is becoming ever scarcer, destabilizing the cities that remain. Millions of people are being driven from their homes and being met with violence when they try to move elsewhere. New pathogens are jumping from animals to the humans invading their territory, and terrifying novel diseases are spreading around an interconnected yet destabilized world with lightning speed. The wealthy and powerful are beginning to close themselves off, and governments are taking a turn for the authoritarian, controlling everyone but protecting no one. Some borders, and the countries they defined, are disappearing; others are growing violent and militarized. The changes are sometimes too slow to see, but they quickly become too fast to stop.

* * *

Life in the 2020s is not for the faint of heart. Less than a decade ago, the apocalypses we knew were coming—climate change, a novel pandemic, state collapse, unexpected invasions, and brutal wars—seemed, for many of us, like they could still be far away. We dreaded them, we may have even been expecting them, but we didn’t yet live inside them. Now, undeniably, we do. It feels like history suddenly sped up, leaving us scrambling for a foothold in a future we didn’t believe we’d be the ones to experience.

Against that backdrop, I have what I hope will be good news: We’ve been here before. Not every generation, or even every century. But history is long, and people in the past have confronted just about every apocalypse we’re facing today, from megadroughts to plagues, the end of empires to the extinctions of entire human species. What unites those past apocalypses isn’t suffering and death, though those things certainly happened. It isn’t the complete collapse of social order. It isn’t mass violence. It isn’t the hardening of hearts against outsiders. It isn’t the total loss of hope. What unites them is survival.

Not only have people already confronted almost every possible apocalypse, they have lived through them. All of them. Every time. Survival wasn’t always easy, and it definitely wasn’t pretty. Some of those apocalypses made life unquestionably worse, at least for a while. Many times, they meant that certain people suffered more than others—though who the unluckiest happened to be in any given apocalypse is surprisingly variable. But lots of people made it through.

That’s not to say life continued just as it had before apocalypse struck. It didn’t, and that’s a good thing. Apocalypses transformed the people and societies that experienced them. They were turning points, moments in which everybody, individually and together, had to make a decision. Are we going to keep going as we always have? Or are we going to change?

And so they changed. They had to. The beginnings of the new worlds our ancestors found themselves creating were chaotic and haphazard, and what would happen in their tomorrows was never certain. No change was guaranteed to improve anything in the moment, much less in the future. We’re still suffering from some of the changes born from past apocalypses. But sometimes, apocalypses made societies more equal. Sometimes they made people more creative. Sometimes apocalypses made communities stronger.

To understand who we are and where we came from, we need to understand those past apocalypses and how they shaped everything that came after, for better and for worse. We need to understand what survival, resilience, and transformation mean—and what they cost—under conditions we’d prefer not to imagine. Our own apocalypses are coming, or maybe they are already here. The more we know about the apocalypses that came before, the more prepared we will be to walk forward into our own uncertain tomorrows. We need to change how we think about human history—not as an inevitable march of progress but as a story of crises, cataclysms, and endings. Only when we do that will we be able to see our current world as just one, imperfect, already postapocalyptic option among many ways of being, and to understand each coming ending as a chance for a new beginning.

* * *

What, exactly, do I mean by apocalypse? The word has held many different meanings over millennia, from a religious judgment day to a city-destroying natural disaster to the imagined decimation of modern society by zombie hordes. But its layered meaning is also its strength. We need a way to conceive of, and talk about, existential threats to our societies and our species that transcend specific disasters and catastrophes, their relatively localized and temporary effects, and their iconic but particular symbols, from the bodies cast in ash in Pompeii to news footage of people stranded on roofs after Hurricane Katrina. Disasters can be part of apocalypse, but apocalypse has tentacles that reach farther and deeper into a society than any single crisis or calamity could.

In this book, I define apocalypse as a rapid, collective loss that fundamentally changes a society’s way of life and sense of identity. First, an apocalypse is a loss experienced by an entire society. It’s not an individual tragedy but a collective experience. What is lost can be environmental, like a coastline dotted with settlements that drowns under a rising sea or a stable climate that suddenly becomes unpredictable. It can be political, like a government that collapses or a country that fragments. It can be human, like the almost inconceivable number of people who died in epidemics such as the Black Death and the diseases introduced to the Americas by European colonists. Often an apocalypse fits in more than one of these categories, when, for example, an environmental loss spurs a political one in a feedback loop of destruction. An apocalypse can be provoked by outsiders, as in a conquest, or brought upon a society by its own actions. It can also be completely random—undeserved, unpredictable, and unpreventable.

Next, for a loss to be experienced collectively, it must happen relatively quickly. All societies experience gradual, non-apocalyptic change, which they are able to absorb and adjust to over time. Part of what distinguishes an apocalypse is its sheer speed. The loss must be noticeable and disruptive within the span of a community’s collective memory, which can mean anything from a few years to a few generations. Sometimes an apocalypse plays out within a person’s lifetime. Sometimes an apocalypse causes grandparents and grandchildren to grow up in fundamentally different worlds. But for a change to be experienced as an apocalypse, the Before must be remembered during the After. The faster the changes happen, the likelier that will be.

Finally, an apocalypse must transform a society. An isolated drought might make for a few bad harvests and some rough years, but it won’t force a society to give up on farming entirely. A drought that lasts for decades, however, might do just that. It could also lead to the overthrow or disintegration of the government that didn’t adequately prepare for such a crisis. An apocalypse can break up empires and empty out cities. It can force people to learn new ways of keeping themselves alive. It can plant the seeds for entirely new religions or forms of government, which will then shape the lives of generations to come. An apocalypse sets a society on a new path, often one that was unimaginable during the Before.

It may seem that my definition of apocalypse is missing an essential element: that it has to be a tragedy. Apocalypses can include mass death, unfathomably cruel violence, and the sudden disappearance of cooperation or even empathy. But they don’t have to, and not all of them have. What is lost in an apocalypse may be mourned for centuries, or its end may be welcomed. Sometimes different kinds of people in the same society react to an apocalypse in entirely opposite ways. To qualify as an apocalypse, a loss must be felt by the entire community or society—but each individual doesn’t have to respond to it in the same way. In fact, they almost certainly won’t.

In short, apocalypses are not endings. They are transformations.

* * *

It can be surprisingly hard to understand, or even recognize, an apocalypse while you’re living through it. There is, however, a whole group of people who study the ones that have already happened: archaeologists, the scientists who use the objects, buildings, and bones past people left behind to reconstruct their cultures and understand their lives.

I’m not an archaeologist, but I do spend a lot of time with them, trying to see the past through their eyes and understand how their knowledge might help the rest of us better navigate the present and the future. As a science journalist, I’ve crawled through tunnels, dug into pyramids, bushwhacked through undisturbed jungle hunting for lost ruins, searched for signs of the first ancient humans to reach a desert island, and visited laboratories where ancient genomes from all over the world are revealing their stories. It’s fun, and it’s fascinating. There are so many ways to be human and so many ways to build a society. Seeing even a handful up close opens a dizzying window into the complexity of the past, of how we came to be who we are, and who we could be if history had taken a slightly different path.

Much, though not all, of archaeology is about reconstructing and understanding the cultures that have come and gone before us. Inherent in that study is the question: What happened to them? Why don’t Egyptian pharaohs still build pyramids? Why aren’t Maya cities like Tikal and Chichén Itzá still thriving capitals? Why, for that matter, aren’t we all still hunter-gatherers, as our ancestors were for the vast majority of human history? Why, after centuries or millennia of living one way, do people and their cultures radically change?

Apocalypse is one answer. But archaeologists see apocalypse differently from the rest of us. We tend to think of such events as entirely out of our control. A natural disaster hits, a drought lasts for decades or centuries, a disease rips through a city. Archaeologists, on the other hand, can see the whole story, reflected in the objects, architecture, and sometimes bones past people left behind. They see what happened before a world-shattering event, and they see what happened after. They can see the trends that made a society vulnerable, and they can see how survivors regrouped and transformed. For archaeologists, the most important piece of the story is not the apocalypse itself but how people reacted to it—where they moved their settlements to escape, how they changed their rituals to cope, what connections they made with other communities to survive. That’s where they find countless stories of resilience, creativity, and even hope.

Much to these scientists’ frustration, these moments of survival and even revival are the parts of apocalyptic stories that often don’t get told. If a city, empire, or culture came to an end sometime in the past, it’s assumed to have failed, and it’s all too easy to turn it into a fable. We look for what they did wrong, both to assuage our fears and confirm our expectations. Look, we say, they cut down trees and ruined their soil. Look, we say, they couldn’t survive a drought. Look, we say, they didn’t know how to protect themselves against outsiders. It’s easy to turn them into a lesson, or perhaps a wake-up call.

But past civilizations were not parables, and their citizens were neither heedless fools nor passive victims. They were people, just as complicated, emotional, capable, strange, and imaginative as you and I are. Even Neanderthals, once considered the ur-brute of our family tree, are finally getting their due as sensitive, artistic, and human. And that means there are no easy answers about how any of these past people and their cultures lived, and even fewer about why they died. If we want to understand how and why apocalypse forever changed their worlds, it’s up to us to ask better questions.

Once an apocalypse comes to pass, there is no going back. But no apocalypse is inevitable. They only appear that way in retrospect, from vantage points firmly situated in the new world, on the other side. The routes leading up to and through any apocalypse are full of choices, decisions, successes, and failures made by people who didn’t know how their stories would end. People who made the best decisions they could in the world they knew, only to find that world utterly changed around them within a matter of months or years. People who were, like any of us, more concerned with surviving the immediate future than with how their choices would be remembered, understood, and misunderstood centuries later.

This book will tell the real stories of past apocalypses, using the latest archaeological evidence to illuminate them in all their complexity. Don’t get me wrong: Many of them were absolutely horrible to live through. We will see what it was like to lose your homeland under rising seas, to have everyone you know die of an incurable disease, to live in a once-great city as it collapsed under the weight of war. But we’ll also see that even in the worst of times, people had choices. They moved, they adapted, they changed. They survived.

* * *

Archaeology has never been as powerful or exciting as it is today. After a century or so of being defined by swashbuckling foreign explorers raiding other countries’ ancient tombs, palaces, and temples for breathtaking artifacts to bring home, archaeology is now a fully scientific enterprise. Its practitioners no longer seek to procure stand-alone artifacts destined for static existences in museum vitrines. Instead, they want to understand the full context of the cultures that produced those artifacts, including exactly when their people lived, what they ate, which diseases they suffered from, what jobs they did, and how they thought about big questions like religion, government, and leadership. Archaeologists are still explorers, but they are no longer plundering ancient ruins for the treasure of long-dead monarchs. They are flying planes equipped with lasers over impenetrable jungles to spot the ruins hidden underneath. They are sequencing the DNA of ancient people to see how our ancestors’ migrations and cultural mixing formed our identities today—and occasionally discovering a whole new human species in the process. They are scuba diving into shipwrecks and caves filled with mysterious ancient offerings. They are analyzing the isotopes preserved in long-dead people’s teeth and bones to reconstruct their diets and rediscover their homelands. Knowledge about the human past is simply exploding, often in completely unexpected ways.

Archaeologists’ trove of new data from every corner of the world allows them—even requires them—to ask previously unimaginable questions about the past, from rediscovering otherwise invisible, and long-since forgotten, migrations through dietary isotopes and ancient DNA to reconstructing, sometimes with year-by-year detail, how local and global climate patterns changed and affected the people who lived within them. In the process of asking new questions, archaeologists often find their new answers rewriting the stodgy historical narratives too many of us still grow up learning. Archaeologists can see the experiments, the dead ends, the alternate worlds that past people built and lived in, sometimes for centuries, that don’t fit with the story of progress our societies like to tell us. They can see that human history is not a straight line of economic growth, technological improvements, and cultural advancements, inevitably leading to where we are today. They can see that the past was much messier, less certain, and more contingent than we are taught to believe—and they can also see the contemporary prejudices and hierarchies working to obscure that truth and limit the possibilities we can imagine for ourselves and our societies, in the past, present, and future.

More than anything, many of today’s archaeologists are seeking to tell the whole stories of past communities, not just the official narratives that tend to be preserved and codified in written history compiled and popularized by its victors. Archaeologists are hunting for information about the lives not only of the kings or the overlords but of the workers, the commoners, the women, the children, and the outsiders. Many kinds of voices are excluded from historical documents, and that can make us feel like a society’s outsiders didn’t matter or didn’t even exist. But no type of person is invisible to archaeology.

That expansive view makes archaeology a particularly extraordinary tool for studying apocalypses, which by definition affect every rung of a society—but rarely in the same way. Archaeologists can examine mass graves that preserve evidence of massacres and widespread death, and they can rediscover when cities were abandoned, left to decay into the ruins we visit today. But in artifacts moving along trade routes, new architectural styles being invented, chemical residues left behind on ceramics, and DNA preserved in ancient bones, archaeologists can also see people migrating to new places, trying out new foods, and forming entirely new religions and governments. They can see not just the destruction of an apocalypse but also the regeneration that comes after.

* * *

We’ll begin by traveling deep into the past, to when Homo sapiens went from being one of many human species on the planet to being the only human species on the planet, after a wave of extinctions—the apocalypse that in some ways started it all. We’ll watch global sea level rise with devastating speed, drowning countless homelands around the world in just a few generations, but also creating new ones. In some places, natural disasters became regular occurrences, and preparing for them shaped the kinds of societies we still live in today.

You’ve heard of some of the apocalypses that came next: the fall of Old Kingdom Egypt, the collapse of the Classic Maya, the Black Death. Others might be less familiar, like the fall of Harappa in what is now Pakistan. We’ll examine how societies sometimes organized themselves in ways that invited these apocalypses in and multiplied the suffering they caused, and also how people learned, or didn’t, from their ancestors’ mistakes. We’ll see how people reacted to apocalypses with violence and cruelty, but also with creativity, solidarity, and a sense of liberation. We’ll also learn to see the modern world not as a triumph of technological and cultural progress but as the child of apocalypse, built from the rubble that hides in plain sight all around us.

I’ve almost certainly left out many of our shared history’s familiar apocalypses, but I hope I’ve included others you didn’t know to expect. I’ve tried to choose examples from many different places in the world, from what you could (perhaps) call the beginning of human history until the present day. Just as no two cultures or societies have ever been exactly alike, no apocalypses were, either. No single story can or should overwrite all others, but it is in each one’s specificity that we can see the outlines of broader truths.

As the forces of the next apocalypse gather on the horizon, it’s time for a new understanding of the endings that have led us here, not as sites of suffering and destruction—or at least not only that—but as times of change, uncertainty, resilience, survival, renewal, and opportunity. This book is that history, reckoning with what apocalypses are, how people have survived them, and the legacies they’ve imprinted on us and our cultures. The more I’ve learned about past apocalypses, the more hopeful I’ve become that we can and will survive our own. It won’t be pleasant. It won’t be fair. The world will be different on the other side, and our cultures and communities—perhaps even our species—will be different, too. We are cursed, and we are lucky, to be here to see the beginning.

Part 1: Foundations

Chapter 1

How We Misunderstood the Apocalypse of Human Extinction

The Düssel River snakes through a valley in west Germany, flowing westward toward the Rhine and the metropolis of Düsseldorf. The trails along the Düssel offer a respite in the middle of the Rhine-Ruhr region, a conglomeration of cities that forms Germany’s largest urban area. But something is missing from today’s version of the landscape, something that generations upon generations of people saw and experienced, beginning long before the river was named the Düssel or the faintest notion of Germany—or any country—existed. For millennia, in what would come to be called the Neander Valley, towering walls of limestone stood sentry over the banks of the Düssel. In those cliffs were countless caves.

During the long, late summer days of August 1856, a team of workmen scrambled down one of those cliff faces onto a ledge about sixty feet above the river, which jutted out in front of one of the caves. The men were the advance guard of industrialization, tasked with chipping the limestone walls into pieces that could be carted off and used in the construction boom that was busy transforming Düsseldorf and the rest of the Rhine-Ruhr. Although the limestone surrounding the cave was newly valuable, the five feet of mud blanketing its floor was not. In preparation for quarrying away the cliffs, the workmen hauled out load after load of mud, heaving it off the ledge and onto the valley floor below.

It was in this tossed-out muck that someone first noticed the skull. Well, part of a skull—it was missing its face below the forehead. The owner of the quarry was a member of the local natural history association and told the workers to keep an eye out for more bones. They might belong to an extinct animal like a cave bear, whose bones turned up all over northern Europe. Their fossils, as well as those of other extinct creatures such as mammoths and dinosaurs, were of increasing interest to scientists, who had recently realized the Earth was much older than the Bible taught, and its deep past much stranger. Eventually the workers found fifteen other bones in the cave, including long, sturdy limb bones and curved ribs.

Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a teacher and the founder of the local natural history association, was called out to take a look. Based on their general anatomy, he immediately recognized the bones didn’t belong to a cave bear. He suspected they belonged to a human, albeit a very unusual one, and likely a very old one. Fuhlrott needed some help understanding what he was looking at, and so he sent a letter, along with a cast of the partial skull, to Hermann Schaaffhausen, a respected anatomist at the University of Bonn. Soon, Fuhlrott would make the trip himself carrying the originals so that Schaaffhausen could examine them.

Schaaffhausen agreed with Fuhlrott that the bones belonged to a human. But what kind? Schaaffhausen got to work measuring the bones in order to compare them to the skeletons of modern and ancient people from all over the world. He immediately noticed the bones from the Neander Valley—or, in the German of the time, the Neander Thal—were very different from those of any known human. The limb bones and ribs were unusually thick, and the skull had a distinctive shape. Instead of the round dome of known human skulls, the Neanderthal skull was flatter and longer. It also had strikingly prominent brow ridges, which jutted out dramatically above the eye sockets. Schaaffhausen could find nothing quite like it in the museums of Europe. Its extraordinary form was hitherto not known to exist, Schaaffhausen wrote.

In addition to the question of its humanity, the Neanderthal skeleton presented another mystery: its age. Both Fuhlrott and Schaaffhausen suspected the skull was ancient because it had been buried under four or five feet of mud and dirt, a fact Fuhlrott made sure to confirm with the quarry workers as soon as he realized the bones might be special. But unlike some human bones found in different parts of Europe and the world, the Neanderthal skeleton was found alone, unaccompanied by the bones of mammoths, cave bears, or other extinct animals that were, in the nineteenth century, the only unequivocal proof of antiquity.

Unable to place the bones in an ancient context, Schaaffhausen decided to test whether they were fossilized. If not, the bones would be assumed to date to the historical period and therefore have little to say about humanity’s deep past. But if they were, it would imply they had been in the cave for a very long time, perhaps before any known European people or culture had existed. So Schaaffhausen employed the nineteenth century’s gold-standard dating technique: He licked them. Fossil bones would stick to his tongue, whereas more recent bones would slip off. The Neanderthal bone stuck. It was ancient, belonging to, Schaaffhausen believed, the world of the last ice age or perhaps an even older, and still largely unknown, geological era. He and Fuhlrott presented their findings at a scientific conference in Bonn in 1857, and Schaaffhausen published