🎧 How Brutish Were Our Ancestors?
Archive of Dan Snow's History Hit 🎧 • 39m
Was life for our ancient ancestors brutish and short or did they exist as noble savages free and living in harmony with nature and each other? Many of our assumptions about ancient societies stem from Renaissance theories about how society should be organized and what civilisation is. Dan is joined by David Wengrow, Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London and co-author of The Dawn of Everything to challenge some of these assumptions and show that they were founded on critiques of European society. David shines a light on the great variety of ancient civilisations, the different models of society they offer and how that might influence us today.
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The Azores, an autonomous region of Portugal in the middle of the Atlantic, was said to be discovered in 1427 by Portuguese explorer Diogo de Silves. However, new studies of the land suggest the Portuguese may not have been the island's first inhabitants. The key to these studies? Mice. Similarit...
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🎧 How Alcohol Built the British Empire
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the British Empire expanded across the globe an almost ubiquitous but often underappreciated commodity went with it; alcohol. The distillation, sale and drinking of booze played an essential role in trade, seafaring and colonial societies. But for...
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🎧 The Ruin of All Witches: Life and D...
On a remote Massachusetts plantation in 1651, an unpopular local brickmaker was blamed for a wave of animal ailments, children dying and vanishing property. The argumentative Hugh Parsons was accused of being a vengeful witch.
In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb...
