Episode 168 - How Long Ago Was The Past?

We’re tying up our informal two-part “we have a lot of questions” series with…more questions! When does “The Past” start, and how far back does it go? How long did it take people to get places in the past? How crowded was the past? How do we attempt to hold the vastness of time and geography in our minds? Not well, especially in an audio medium, but we’re excited to blow your minds.

Links

• The Greatest Animal War (Nautilus)

• The last slave ship survivor and her descendants identified (National Geographic)

• How Far Can A Horse Travel In A Day? (8 Facts) (Deep Hollow Ranch)

• RGS-IBG Expedition Handbook (Royal Geographical Society)

• Speed Under Sail of Ancient Ships (Transactions of the American Philological Association)

• An Ordinary Ship and Its Stories of Early Globalism: World Travel, Mass Production, and Art in the Global Middle Ages (Journal of Medieval Worlds)

• Royal Road (Livius.org)

• ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World (Stanford University)

• Modeling Ancient Population Structures and Movement in Linguistics (Annual Review of Anthropology)

• Convergent geographic patterns between grizzly bear population genetic structure and Indigenous language groups in coastal British Columbia, Canada (Ecology and Society)

• Human mobility and innovation spreading in ancient times: a stochastic agent-based simulation approach (EPJ Data Service)

• Optimising human community sizes (Evolution and Human Behavior)

• Size of human groups during the Paleolithic and the evolutionary significance of increased group size (Behavioral and Brain Sciences)

• The Oaxaca Barrio in Teotihuacan: Mortuary Customs and Ethnicity in Mesoamerica's Greatest Metropolis (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)

Image: Leading instructional image from the “How to Ride a Camel” entry on Wikihow.com.