December 3, 2019 • 43 mins
After millennia of development, the Maya culture suddenly collapsed at its peak. Why is one of the biggest mysteries of history. One theory says catastrophic climate change was the cause. And it may have happened to other cultures too.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello Seattle, and hello San Francisco. We are coming out
to do live shows in January for you guys, like
we seem to do every year. Now. Yeah, it's kind
of a pattern that's emerging. Chuck, that's right. And the
pattern is you come to see us, you laugh, we
have a good time, and everyone leaves happy. That's the pattern.
So if you want to leave happy, you can come
see us on Thursday, January at the More Theater in Seattle.
(00:25):
And you can come see a Saturday January at the
Castro in San Francisco. Yes, part of our annual retreat
to Sketch Fest. Yes. So if you want tickets and information,
go to s y s K live dot com, our
home on the web, powered by our friends at Squarespace,
and we'll see you in January. Welcome to Stuff You
(00:46):
Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W
Chuck Bryant. There's area over there, and this is Stuff
you Should Know the podcast. What else would it be?
A TV show? Not for a long time? Every funny.
(01:11):
I like that. I like that intro. Okay, that's good.
If I'm not mistaken. Who did I say melted many
years ago? Was it the Maya? No? Neanderthals, that's right,
or Thals? If you don't want to be a douche,
can we say that. I don't know. We'll find out.
Jerry didn't even hear it. Maybe she will in the
(01:33):
in the I bet she won't. Um, yeah, it was
the Neanderthals. But I'm gonna go ahead and say it again.
Maybe it's the Maya melted, sure due to climate change. Maybe,
but that's what you were talking about right then, melted
because the climate change, that's right. What's I thought was hilarious?
(01:53):
But let's talk about the Maya civilization? Oh yeah, yeah,
I meant to tell you. Let's let's kind of move
stuff around here. Do you want to? Sure? Do? I mean?
What do you mean? Well, let's talk about Charles Lindbergh first. Okay,
I think he's a better intro than just kind of
randomly in the middle. All right, So sure, And that
(02:13):
means we can start out in the way back machine,
which we would have been in anyway, but we'll be closer.
We'll save some gas. It's way closer, that's right. We're
going back to February, Yes, February nine, when Chuck Limburgh
(02:34):
was flying for pan Am and he was flying over
what is now believes and if you can believe that,
I'm so sorry. But what he would do back then,
and this is after you know, of course his the
big flight, the big one. Uh, he would get hired
to do the like these little exploratory routes for airlines,
(02:57):
in this case PanAm. He may have done that exclusive
of your paying him. I have no idea. I wasn't
in his contract business. But he would fly these routes
to sort of blaze new trails for like for flying
routes and say, hey, this is a pretty legit flying
route for delivering stuff or or even passenger routes, and
maybe add it to your to your docket. So he
(03:20):
was doing this, and he was flying over this episode
on air routes. No, it's not, because he was flying
over Mexico and Central America well believes, like you said, yeah,
And and it was just very dense jungle everywhere he
looked until he went over this one part where it
was described not by Charles Lindberg for some reason, but
(03:42):
by an Associated Press writer who apparently got into the
head of Charles Lindberg and said it looked like two
emerald eyes staring up out of the jungle brush, the
tangle of the jungle brush. So he went back, flew
a little lower to investigate. And what he found was
what that the that the emerald eyes were actually twin
(04:04):
reflecting pools in a massive stone temple, like reflecting the
sun into his face. And he was like, um, so
is he a stone temple pilot? I guess so, Oh,
my gosh, is that off the cuff? It was? That
was pretty good? Um, that was great? Actually, uh. And
he realized that he was looking at the ruins of
(04:25):
a lost city, a massive stone lost city. Actually I
don't think he realized that, probably, but we now know that. Well,
he he saw that it was covered in jungle and
overgrowth and everything. Yeah, and he so the legend goes
chuck that that, um, Charles Lindbergh discovered the Lost Man
(04:46):
in Civilization, right, which is not true. No, well, okay,
it's nuanced. That particular article is probably totally made up. Yeah,
and but even if he did find that part he
didn't he didn't discover and that's probably not what Evan said.
He did not discovered the lost Maya civilization. He found
(05:11):
a part of it. Right, It's it's it's apocryphal. It's
an apocryphal story because by that time people were aware
that the Maya had existed, but they had kind of
been seen as legend for a very long time. But
starting in from what I could tell, the nineteen twenties,
they started um finding these massive, huge lost cities, just
like Limburgh supposedly found. And later on Limburgh did actually
(05:33):
fly over some of these lost cities and photograph him
and he got into aerial archaeology. But the point is this,
there are still are and there definitely were more lost
cities that were just enormous, with huge temples, some of
them pyramids that were among the tallest pyramids in the world,
(05:54):
completely overgrown by the jungle, just overtaken, abandoned cities. And
they started looking around and they started finding more of
these cities and more and more all over the Yucatan
and northern uh well actually all of Guatemala into Honduras,
Belize and El Salvador, a big chunk of Central America
(06:15):
that there's these lost cities that were found, and they
all seemed to share something in common, so much so
that they now realized that they were peopled by the
same cultural group, the Maya. That's right, So let's talk
about the Maya. Let's go back even further. Let's go
back between twenty and twelve hundred or B c D
(06:36):
or what we now would call ce CE or I
think people now just say, like years ago, do they
do they really? Yeah? I don't, well yeah, they're they're like,
get religion out of it entirely, just say a long
time ago. Yeah, this this many years ago. Okay, so
many many years ago, the Maya civilization um occupied this
(06:57):
big area that we were talking about. There's a period
of time known as the classic Classic Maya that's what
they call it, the classic period between double on their
way through the door, between two fifty and nine hundred,
where I mean you talk about flourishing as a culture
like it was. It hadn't been seen since the Roman Empire.
(07:21):
Basically the cities uh sixty or more sixty seventy thousand people. Um,
they had sports arenas, they had pyramids, they had these
advanced farming practices, they made calendars, they understood math, and
we're really really advanced, and I believe even Um at
(07:43):
the time, some of these cities outnumbered the amount of
people that were in places like London in Paris at
that same time. Yeah yeah, and like something like say
eight hundred c e. If you travel over London in
Paris you find far fewer people, like double or triple
the amount in this Maya culture. The way that I
saw it put was in these in the in the
(08:05):
area of like Um, the Yucatan and Guatemala, the the
southern Lowlands I think is what they call it, where
like most of the great Mayan cities were. Um. The
population density is about what it is today in Los
Angeles County. Wow, imagine that. And now it's just overrun
(08:25):
jungle rainforest mostly um. But it used to be as
dense as l A County, Like people just everywhere in
this Yeah, super dense. So uh, here's the thing about
the may Empires that they were never one big group. Um.
They were never unified politically. They were just a bunch
of warring city states but really thriving. And they also
(08:45):
had like political alliances between city states. But that same
city state could be at like total war fifty years later,
you know, the shifting constantly, that's right, But the thing
we really need to hammer homes that they were doing
great for themselves. They were really thriving as a culture
and as a people, and then in about a hundred
and fifty year period between eight hundred and nine fifty,
(09:07):
they disappeared. For all intents and purposes, the classic Maya
culture just vanished into the jungle. And that is not
to say that the people all died. Uh, they assimilated
into other cultures. But what you were talking about, that
Maya culture and those those big cities of seventy thousand
(09:30):
people just went away. Yeah, it's it be kind of
like a good analogy is if over you know, the
next thirty years. Yeah, Um, the the United States just
suddenly reverted to sixteenth century agrarian practices. That was it.
We just abandoned our cities and went and farmed, and
(09:53):
like we didn't farm with any tractors or anything like that.
We started using ox um oxen. Just completely abandoned our
culture and went back to a simple farming lifestyle. That
would basically be the closest analogy you can come up with.
And it happened really fast, super fast, and as a result,
(10:14):
that Mayan culture, like you said, was sort of looked
at as a legend before you know, we started finding
these places again. Yeah, because you know, locals kind of
knew about they'd be like, oh, if you go into
the jungle, you you're going to find a lost city.
Explorers were like, you're we're crazy, that's not real. But
then they started to actually find these lost cities. And
(10:35):
what's really surprising to me is they're still finding lost cities.
Every year there'll be some new study coming out that says, oh,
we used Leader. I think it's light Leader. Yeah. Leader.
It's basically a way of looking through vegetation to see
(10:55):
solid structures underneath. So they're looking through the jungle. It's
like a jungle X kind of. Yeah, it's actually it's perfect. Um.
And they're starting to find even more lost cities, and
they're also finding that the lost cities that we know about,
there's one called Elmir Door that hasn't been kind of
excavated yet, but it's the pyramid is so tall that
(11:16):
is sticking up out of the jungle canopy, so they
know there's a lost city there. But um, using Leader,
they've seen like, oh, it's way more extensive than we
thought before. Elmir door probably had a hundred thousand people
living in the city center at its peak. All right,
so that's a good setup. We're gonna take a break
and discuss the merits of Jungle X Ray as a
band name and be back right after this. It's not bad.
(12:01):
What kind of band would it be? That's your specialty?
Sounds like a party band, right does. It's got a
lot of funk going on. I think seventies, sure, but
not but like a seventies throwback they like didn't exist
in the seventies. Oh yeah, like uh the uh like
a Ya sisters? Oh who's that? Wasn't that a band?
(12:24):
Jerry Scissor Sisters? That It was like a funky throwback
seventies thing? Okay, I gotta listen to them while they
were around for a minute. I think they're not around anymore,
all right, But did they leave like any kind of
documentation of their music? I seem to remember them being
like a party band. I don't know, but I mean,
did they have a record out or what? Man they
(12:46):
had records? It's gonna go check them out. Think I
just made this up, all right? So the Maya disappeared,
why would Jerry knows she hit all of a sudden.
I don't know, she just what she just didn't so uh.
Charles Lindbergh comes around, referred to previous. Uh story, we
(13:09):
already talked about. Lindberg referre to previous story. That's why
I said that. And he he puts this back on
the map again, and everyone is excited about discovering about
who these people were, right, But the whole thing, like
from the outset, they're like, what happened to these people? Sure?
And the more we learned about him, this is the
(13:30):
other thing, like the legends of this sudden civilization just vanishing,
Like the more we studied them, the more we realized
that's actually kind of accurate. The legends are true. There
was this amazing culture that just vanished into the forest.
And um And one of the big things, one of
the big breakthroughs in studying my culture was cracking UM.
(13:54):
There written alphabet, they used hire glyphs. And there's a really,
really good documentary called UM Cracking the Maya Coat On
I think it was a Nova episode. Dude. It is good.
It's thrilling, and it basically is them just sitting around
some house one summer trying to figure this out. But
(14:18):
they're like going back and forth and some like I
think some like twenty year old woman figured it out. Yeah,
and they now we understand a lot more. But what
we're finding is it's like, oh no, this is this
really happened. Something really weird happened here, and we still
aren't quite sure what caused it. It was a very
odd description of how they figured that out. What sitting
(14:39):
around a house that's what they did. I think they
had like a workshop or something. They're like, we're really
going to try to figure this out. We're gonna try
to crack this coat. And they actually did where we
could go sit in. Well, that's what they were doing.
It was a house, someone's house. I think, I love it,
so that's knowing me. It was definitely not a house
by any stretch, and I'll have to do it correct.
(15:01):
They're like, Josh, is your house Harvard University. So there
are some theories that have been developed over the years
that all kind of makes sense, and some of them
there that's not necessarily a binary thing that some of
them could have all contributed to the collapse of the
Maya um over farming is one which makes a lot
(15:22):
of sense. And that's the idea that basically they were
so successful. They had tons of food, tons of water,
and so they said, well, let's just make tons and
tons of babies, which all of a sudden, the farmers
are like, gees, we're really growing. Yeah, like I don't
know if we can grow this much corn. Um, so
let's clear some forest land and grow grow, grow, which
(15:44):
means they're not practicing safe and sound farming practices. All
of a sudden, they weren't practicing safe sex, and they
weren't practicing safe farming. That's right. So um, because of
this over farming, they weren't allowed to they didn't have
the opportunity let their fields lay fallow because everything was
in production, which is there's really no faster way to
overstretch your agricultural resources than that. That's right. What we're
(16:09):
here to tell you, Uh, well, warfare. We know they
were a warring people for sure, So the Maya rulers
were they did a lot of disservice to their own
people by kind of over inflating uh their resources, and
how tough they were, Um, what kind of warriors they were,
and how powerful they were. They could make it rain,
(16:30):
they can control the weather and thus control the crops.
And this may have backfired on them, as the theory
goes that they warred so much that they sapped their
own resources and eventually people retaliated and they were not
able to fight back. And I think the guy who
led that workshop at that dude's house where they cracked
(16:50):
the code, I cannot remember his name, but he's a
eminent Maya scholar. He he is of the camp. That's like,
it was warfare, that's what That's what. It was, plain
and simple. They just fought too much and they eventually
they reached some tipping point from war. And there's real
evidence about some of these cultures at least for some
(17:10):
of these cities going down because of warfare. Yeah, I
mean like they engaged in total war or they would
like target civilians, they would burn your whole city down.
They like. It wasn't like they were a very warlike group,
which is funny because for a very long time they
were portrayed as um one of the few Mesoamerican groups
(17:31):
that didn't practice human sacrifice, and then once we cracked
my code, were like, oh no, actually they were prolific
at that. Yeah, it was bad news. The other is disease,
and this is um not human disease necessarily, but like
virus from their food supply. Yeah, that's another ecological disaster.
(17:52):
That's right. I think mays mosaic virus was named in
the nineteen seventy nine articles. So like, there's a lot
of a lot of good theory is out there and
they aren't necessary. It's not a zero some kind of
thing figuring it out, but there's over the years lately, Um,
in the last decade or two, maybe people have really
started to say, you know, I think we should look
(18:13):
a little closer at the Royal climate change might play
in this kind of stuff. And when they look specifically
at the Maya, they said, actually, it looks a lot
like climate change played a big role in in the
decline of the classic Maya civilization. That's right. And just
because the Maya didn't burn fossil fuels to run cars
(18:34):
doesn't mean that the Earth wasn't affected by climate change
and that they weren't affected by climate change. Yeah, they
think that probably climate change happened on its own, but
they've also pinpointed some ways that the Maya may have
exacerbated it too. You mean, people can impact that some
foo loops say so. So they've done some studies. They
(18:55):
studied mineral deposits um in caves left by dripping water,
and they have been able to put together a two
thousand year history of weather patterns based on Speelio thumbs alone.
That's right, uh. And what they found out, and this
was published an article in Science, UH in two thousand
twelve Science magazine, the journal Science. The journal Science. It's
(19:20):
not called like Science Weekly or what the Ohio State Universe. Um.
But what they did find out was for the first
few hundred years, and this really lens UH a lot
of credence to the theory that they may have overfarmed
and stuff like that, is they really had a lot
of rain and they flourished as a result of that. Yeah,
which you can't really blame them. It's it's them saying, okay,
(19:42):
well let's thrive and we can thrive in these conditions.
It's not like they were like, Okay, it's this is
a really wet period, let's take advantage of it and
really overstretch our ourselves. Um. They just kind of went
with it, and their population grew because it could be
supported because is there was such a large amount of rain,
(20:02):
their crops grew, their reservoirs were full, and this is
a few hundred years, right over the course of a
few hundred years. But from looking at the cave deposits,
they found that there was a very wet record that
corresponds with the classical Maya period. Wet record is a
Scissor Sisters album. I don't know, Jump, what was it?
(20:23):
Jungle x ray albu Jungle x ray wet record, so
that hip, that's hip. Jerry doesn't disgusted with this at
this point around six six d this all changed the rain.
What's that funny for? I just thought have a good analogy.
So Jungle x ray their album wet record is to
(20:46):
seventies funk soul throwbacks. What the darkness Permission to land
is the eighties hair metal throwback? That's not an s
A T question. I think I think we just get it, Chuck.
Did we correctly go? Yeah, we we cracked that Jungle lectory.
Did you see where Motley Crue is gonna play shows
again after we supposedly saw their farewell to her that
(21:10):
they even signed a contract saying they could legally never
perform again together. And they're going on a stadium tour
with Poison and Deaf Leppard. What I know, I'll see
you there. Yeah. So remember we got invited to that
show by Nitas Strauss, That's right, who is like huge, Yeah,
guitar player at the time. Maybe still for Alice Cooper's Yeah,
I think she does that still, I think. But she's
(21:33):
like a guitar legend, not jam She's great. I hope
she still listens. He's probably not. But around six sixty
the weather changed, the rains did not come like they
used to, and they had the longest dry spell of
the last two thousand years. And this is gonna have
a real impact. When everything's flourishing and you're just planting
(21:56):
and planting, all of a sudden you're a or thirsty.
That's a big one, and you're not you're hungry that
thirst thing. It's funny because like we're talking about rainforests,
but this area in northern Guatemala where the Maya will
live just called the petting or the pitten I don't know,
pet e n And it is kind of like feast
(22:16):
or famine depending on the rain cycle. So when it's dry,
it's like you're you're in trouble because the closest groundwater
is about five feet below the surface, and um, it's
not going to rain for a very long time. So
if you haven't prepared by building reservoirs your you might
die of thirst. So a drought in the pattern, which
(22:37):
is normally dry some parts of the year, would be
a real problem. If you're talking about a drought that
lasts over years or possibly decades. Now you have a
civilization collapsing problem. Yeah, so that's a big problem in
and of itself. You've got a big population that grew
when it was wet. Suddenly it's not wet, and you
still have that big population. There's a lot of internal
(22:59):
problems that can that can develop, especially between classes too.
Sure the haves and the have nuts, which existed back then,
but also the rulers who are like, you know, more
human sacrifices, We need to keep this this this thing
going to get the rain to come back. Well, and
the common folk being like, jeez, I don't know about this. Uh,
(23:19):
you know, I hadn't rained in a while. It was
my cousin before, but now I was asking for my brother,
yeah exactly. So that created a lot of tension. The
other thing that could have sped this whole thing up
was the fact that they were thriving so much that
they were expanding their territory and they were cutting down
and deforesting the land around them for fuel and to
build things. And they have found, uh, they found pollen.
(23:42):
They studied pollen and these ancient layers and lake sediment
in Central America, and around eight d that pollen went
from tree pollen to weed pollen pretty quickly. Yeah, and
that's about when the Maya reached their fluorescence, when they
really reached their pinnacles about eight hundred. So what that
suggests is they cut down all the forests and they
(24:04):
were using what used to be forest for crop land
because they practice slash and char where they would burn
it down to introduce carbon nutrients into the ground. Um.
The problem is as if there's no force whatsoever, you've
just altered your ecosystem and by doing that, you can
actually alter the local climate, which they think they may have. Yeah.
(24:24):
Not only that, but it's going to have just the
physical effect of erosion, like a massive erosion, because those
tree roots are gone, and that's gonna screw up your
farmland as well. Right, So your top soils gone, Your
trees are no longer keeping things as cool as they
were before. There was a NASA model that predicted that
the the temperature in the area rose by about six
(24:47):
degrees fahrenheit, which is a lot. I mean, that's noticeable
for humans, but if you're talking about plants and soil,
that's that can really exacerbated drought. When you've already got
a bad drought and a normally dry area. That's not good.
So the climate, the climate record is showing Okay, it's
it was already bad, but they probably made things worse
(25:07):
with the deforestation. Yeah, and that that all that stuff
combined and then maybe throwing a little dash of the
previous theories could very well explain why they said, you know,
we're getting out of here and we're gonna go live
a smaller life, a more sustainable, smaller life that's not
in a big city, right. Yeah, And they think also
(25:27):
that you know, the other things dashed in, like um,
the warfare, Like if you're in a town and you
know the next time or the next city state over
has big reservoirs and your people are dying of thirst,
invading that other city might seem like a pretty good idea.
And if that happens enough times, then you have a
lot of war going on everywhere, and that can really
make your civilization to climb pretty bad too. Should we
(25:49):
take another break? Sure? All right, we'll take another break
and talk about how this climate change could have affected
some other civilizations throughout history. Alright, Chuck. So it's not
(26:19):
just the maya. This is the thing. This is kind
of a new way of looking at history and especially
social collapses, the idea that climate change played some driving
role in it. And they started to look around. They're like, oh, actually,
this kind of explains a lot of different ones that
we didn't we thought we understood before. And the understanding
(26:40):
before would be like, well, this king died and this
created political instability, and they have evidence that there was
this war and this group got got invaded. What they're
starting to find now is actually there might have been
climate change that led to crop failure that led to instability,
that that allowed this this kingdom to be invaded because
it was weakened by a dying population. Yeah. What it
(27:03):
is is a more nuanced look at civilization and in
ancient histories, because I'm sure there are a lot of
people that when you talk about the Neo Assyrian Empire,
which thrived in what is now modern Diarraq for a
few hundred years, and that was one of those where
the death of a king is what everyone has always said, Well,
that's what did it. And there, I'm sure there were
(27:24):
historians were like, you know that there's something missing. Yeah,
they had so many kings that had died leading up
as why this one. And they started to look in
particular at the Neo Assyrian Empire and they said, oh,
actually if we go and look at the cave record again.
They went to a cave called Kuna ba Um in
northern Iraq and they said, actually, the record of rainfall
(27:48):
captured by this cave, by these mineral deposits in these
caves kind of show that there was that same thing
that happened with the Maya, a very wet period that
corresponds with the growth of the society, and a very
very dry period that corresponds with its collapse. And that's
not coincidence, they don't think. So it's starting to look
like it's really not coincidence. Another one, uh the anchor
(28:10):
Wat Temple in Asia in Southeast Asia Asia that was
like old timing was who was it that said Paula Abduel,
Because I've been saying that for like thirty something it
was I think in a Spike Lee movie or something.
It sounds like Toro or maybe Paula Abdul, who is
(28:31):
the guy who ran sALS Pizza Danny a Yellow. I
could totally see him saying it might have been Paula Abdul. Yeah,
all I know is I've been saying it for many,
many years now. So the anchor wat Temple, Yeah, the
Camir Empire in Southeast Asia flourished for between eight o
(28:52):
two and four. That's a long time. It's a very
long time. But they think that drought once again along
with like monsoon like rains uh really is what brought
them down as well. So again the effects of the climate.
And if you look at the Khmer Empire, particularly around
anchor watt Um that's the very famous like lost temple
(29:15):
in the we've seen um. Historians have long known that
they got invaded and taken over, and now they think
actually the reason that was allowed to happen is because
of climate change in it like it led to problems
that weaken the society that allowed them to be invaded
and taken over. This idea of that ingredient. That's right,
that a civilization is just like doing fine, doing fine,
(29:37):
suddenly invaded and taken over by a neighbor that's been
there for hundreds of years, Like, but have stopped asking
what was it that did that? Now they're saying it
looks like climate change maybe played a role. I think
that's just fascinating. Yeah, for sure. Uh, the same with
the Vikings and the thirteenth and fourteen centuries. They left Greenland.
They had been around for several hundred years, and that
(30:00):
was because of the Little Ice Age. Yeah, they they
had farming techniques that worked before the Little Ice Age,
which was a very very cool period around the globe.
UM I think from like eight hundred to or something
like that, No, into the nineteenth century. I think at
any rate, UM their farming techniques stopped working in Greenland
(30:22):
because it was too cold, so they had to leave
the land said you gotta leave Vikings, and they went, fine,
we'll go take some shrooms and go berserk and get
out of here. Yeah, berserkers. So there's a lot we
can learn about, you know, looking back through history, not
only UM on the battlefield and politically, but also, um,
(30:44):
if we look at it through this lens, it maybe
climate change was the cause of the collapse of an
ingredient for the cause of collapse of some of these civilizations.
That the same thing could be happening to us very slowly,
right in front of our eyeballs. Yeah. And I mean
one of the things is if you back and look
at these these historic falls of civilizations, um, Like, it's
(31:06):
not like they were like, oh, there's a drought going on,
that's it for our culture. It's like this was an
underlying driver that they may or may not have pointed
to as the cause of these larger things. You know,
if you're engaged in like a civil war or an invasion,
you're not stopping and thinking like, gosh, it's because of
this drought. You're focused on the invasion. It's the immediate thing.
(31:27):
And in in the exact same way. I mean, we're
not that removed from people who lived a millennia go.
As long as the way that our brains work, we
tend to look at the trees rather than the forest too.
And if that's the case, and we're in this period
of climate change right now, it's really worrying to think
that a little bit of climate change can lead to
(31:50):
social collapse, and not directly. Again, that's the thing, that's
what a lot of people argue about, is the climate
change isn't going to cause society collapse, not directly, but
it could lay the groundwork for all the stuff that
goes wrong that we're failing to identify is ultimately caused
by climate change. That's what we need to be paying
attention to. If that is in fact the case. That's right,
And like we said, there are a lot of indicators
(32:11):
that some of these same things are going on, deforestation
not being the least among them. Uh, we are cutting
down a lot of trees, and we have cut down
a lot of trees of the forest of northern America,
just the US alone, just the US have been cut
down um trees or carbon roughly, and they absorbed and
(32:34):
this is a very big deal. Uh, they absorbed between
one and three million metric tons of c O two,
which offsets which we need between twenty and what we
put into the atmosphere. So you don't have to be
a rocket scientist to figure out if there's fewer trees,
then there's going to be more CEO two in the atmosphere,
and I think it's even more significant than that. We
(32:57):
did a whole episode. I don't remember the ins and
outs of it. We did a whole episode on cutting
down trees and the effect it has on weather UM
and I remember it was it has a big effect,
like from single trees to huge forests, like each each
each loss of tree has an impact for sure. And
it's not like, uh, we're stopping now. In the Pacific
Northwest UM, roughly of the old growth forest is is
(33:21):
slated for logging to go away for logging purposes. Which
old growth forest? I read a really cool article on
the old growth forest of Atlanta and how Atlanta is
a you know, if anyone's ever been here from like
out west, maybe they remark about how Atlanta is a
city in a forest, and I was wondering what old
(33:42):
growth meant. It was a really cool article. And the
years differ depending on who you're asking, but it's basically
a forest that has not been touched by humans for
between a hundred and a hundred fifty years and there's
still an old growth forest in Atlanta. It's great, is
that right? Yeah? Wow? Like pine forests or no, just
you know, like like hardwood. Wow, I didn't know that.
(34:07):
That's pretty cool. It is like when you fly into town,
you're like, this is just in the It's like a
lost city in the middle of a jungle, but still functioning.
What about social change and uh and what's going on
with that? So, I mean one of the things that
seems to be a hallmark of a collapsing civilization for
whatever reason, and as part of its collapse, it can
(34:30):
engage in civil war um war with other neighboring countries
or city states or whatever. Um. And if climate change
is a driver of that, it seems to have happened
very recently. You're happening right now, um because one of
the ideas for the basis of the civil war in
Syria right now is a drought brought on by climate
(34:50):
change that started in two thousand and six and actually
kind of cast a lot of farmers, a lot of
Syrian farmers out of work from their fee into the cities.
And so a lot of unemployed, restless people showed up
to the cities. And they think that that was one
of the exacerbators that led to this civil war. But
(35:11):
that climate change, a drought brought on by climate change
may have been the underlying driver for the Syrian Civil
war going on right now. Yeah, that like four thousand
people have died in so far. Population growth is another
big one. We talked about both with the Maya and
the Assyria Empires that you know, even if you're doing great,
(35:32):
you still got to keep the population in check because
there is there's a point where, um, you can't sustain
it anymore. And we are expected to reach ten billion people.
That crazy by ten billion humans on Earth yea just
around the corner. And there is an argument that um
technology is our favorable climate. Like we're doing great technologically speaking,
(35:59):
so we're just growing and growing again. We're growing because
we can invent anything we need to invent to help
out any problem. Um. But if that goes away, then
we're gonna be in big trouble. Um. I have to
fess up. That was me editorialized now I can tell okay, yeah, well,
thank you for the legitimacy you added to And I
don't mean that goes away. But you know, if if
there is a breaking point for technological advancement, well yeah,
(36:22):
it's like the Green Revolution. We went from traditional agriculture
to modern agriculture. But modern agriculture is on the verge
of reaching its carrying capacity, and we have no idea
what's coming after that. Plus we also are well aware
that our modern intensive agricultural practices are problematic. There's a
lot of fertilizer runoff that can spoil water, including drinking water. Um,
(36:46):
there's a lot of soil depletion that comes along with it.
And in the same way that a lot of other
cultures who have fallen seem to have been stubborn and
not adapted, but they're just kept kept at it, kept
at it, despite having warning signs that it wasn't working
any longer. Um, we seem to be doing the same
thing with our farming practices, and we need to figure
(37:07):
out a more sustainable way to farm. Yeah. I think
the thing that distresses me is the lack of a
and there are a lot of people that aren't doing this,
but the lack of the long term outlook. You know,
it's like, well, it's not gonna happen in my lifetime. Yeah,
so I need to keep I need to keep pushing
forward with whatever farming practices I'm utilizing or whatever the
(37:29):
case may be. One of the one of the suggestions
I saw when I was researching the End of the
World to get people to care about the future is
to extend human lifespans so that you're like, oh, that's
like two years in the future. Well, if that was
middle age, you would care about that. And then just
it's weird to think, you know, it's it's simple if
(37:49):
you think about it, but it's also weird to think, like,
just how quickly that would make us start planning for
the future a lot more. Rather than shrinking the future
into human size, we would be growing human size into
the future. I feel like the human lifespan or the
human awareness of what a lifespan, Yeah, that would change
the whole outlook. Yeah, you we always had a good
(38:11):
question about that too. She's like, at what point do
we stop caring about our descendants? You know, we've got kids, grandkids,
great curring kids, great great grandkids. Yeah, exactly, at one
point we just stopped saying great and it's just descendants,
you know. Yeah. Sure, I wonder like where where you
(38:31):
really stopped caring, Like, do you really care about your
great grandkids, great great curing kids less? So let's find
it fascinating or maybe here's the thing. You could just
not even think about it in terms of you your family,
but maybe just planet Earth and and doing the right thing. Yeah,
Luckily a lot of people do think that way an
(38:52):
increasing amount. We also have to say, Chuck that like
the idea that climate change is a driver for social
collapse is very new. Some people, some historians so archaeologists,
are like, this really smacks of a trendy thing. And
I'm just not on this bandwagon. It's too young, it's
too new. It's just seems to hip, you know, like
(39:13):
a Scissor Sisters record. But um, I guess what I'm
trying to say is it's not This isn't definitive, it's
not set in stone. And there's also a lot of
people who say, well, we are pretty smart, we're a
lot smarter than we were a thousand years ago, and
we can invent our way out of any problem. But
I mean, we've done it so far. It's tough to
(39:33):
argue with in some cases. You know, it's it's it's
not to say that the world is necessarily going to
end at any point in time in the near future,
or that we cannot ourselves assimilate and change and roll
with it and go back to maybe a different lifestyle.
Well yeah, or continue on our technological progress, but like say,
(39:55):
adopt more sustainable farming practices. I mean, that's the view
of the future that i'll the Dystopian films have is
this usually. I mean sometimes it's a barren wasteland Mad
Max style, but a lot of times it's like a
return to the earth and small villages of people farming.
That's exactly what happened to the Maya. Yea, they moved
out in new farms, the farm, the farm hinterlands where
(40:18):
they just continued on like nothing happened, right, But the
people in the cities were like, well we're Mad Max
now coastal elites. Yeah right, you've got anything else? No, Well,
this was the climate change leading to the fall of
the Maya the episode. And that's the end of that.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Uh.
(40:42):
This is from Rosanna in Surrey, United Kingdom. Hey, guys,
my husband and I are currently renovating an Edwardian house
in a very poor condition, and she detailed it. It
just sounds like a wreck that they're in the middle of,
the loose upside down, but but worth it in along
running in the living room, there's a lift in the lory.
(41:06):
When everything seems to be falling apart around you, the
last thing you want is to be left with your
own thoughts, and your podcast is always there so I
don't have to be. For many years, I've listened to
your show the way other people listen to the radio.
The first thing I put it on in the morning
when I get up, and this continues on my drive
to and from work or whenever I'm in my car,
and I often put it on before bed because I
find your voices so soothing. Your show really helps with
(41:27):
my anxiety as well. Both my husband and I are
doing all the work on the house ourselves now, electrics, plumbing, plastering, tiling, decorating,
you name it, and I've left my job to work
on the house full time. So for the past six
months I listened to YouTube talking to keep me company
and learning while I'm working, which lasts at least nine
(41:50):
hours a day. Solid Josh and Chuck, you basically become
my main source of human contact. Guys. For example, it's
only ten twenty in the morning and I've already been
listening to you for four hours in twenty minutes laying
are you okay? Alright? Uh? And we'll continue to do
so until my husband gets home late tonight. Obviously this
means a lot of repeated shows, but it never gets boring.
(42:11):
Much of the d I y work is unbelievably slow
and tedious. I've been there, Rosanna. I definitely would have
lost my mind long ago if it wasn't for stuff
you should know. I don't want to say a huge
thank you for keeping me saying educated and chuckling along
when I do, would otherwise be on the floor crying
about how much I have to do that. What you
guys do is brilliant, and I wanted to let you
(42:32):
know you're not just educating people and helping to expand
their beliefs. You're also genuinely helping me feel connected to others.
Will I try to create a home for me, my
husband and our two idiot cats and two house rabbits.
I want to come see you. Yeah, that's pretty. I
want to see your Victorian home, Edward. I want to
see your two idiot cats in your two house rabbits. Um,
(42:54):
are you gonna help what I say? Victorian? Yes? Edwardian
You're gonna help plaster. I'll plastered the cred out of that.
Get plastered and do some plasters. Right, He'll be all
over the place, He'll get it all over the LORI well,
thanks a lot, Rosanna, best of luck in the renovation.
I'm glad we can help you out. That's good to hear. Uh.
If you want to get in touch with us like
Rosanna did, to let us know what you're doing with
(43:16):
your time, we always want to hear about that. You
can go to stuff you Should Know dot com and
check out our social links, or you can send us
an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio
because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello Seattle, and hello San Francisco. We are coming out
to do live shows in January for you guys, like
we seem to do every year. Now. Yeah, it's kind
of a pattern that's emerging. Chuck, that's right. And the
pattern is you come to see us, you laugh, we
have a good time, and everyone leaves happy. That's the pattern.
So if you want to leave happy, you can come
see us on Thursday, January at the More Theater in Seattle.
(00:25):
And you can come see a Saturday January at the
Castro in San Francisco. Yes, part of our annual retreat
to Sketch Fest. Yes. So if you want tickets and information,
go to s y s K live dot com, our
home on the web, powered by our friends at Squarespace,
and we'll see you in January. Welcome to Stuff You
(00:46):
Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W
Chuck Bryant. There's area over there, and this is Stuff
you Should Know the podcast. What else would it be?
A TV show? Not for a long time? Every funny.
(01:11):
I like that. I like that intro. Okay, that's good.
If I'm not mistaken. Who did I say melted many
years ago? Was it the Maya? No? Neanderthals, that's right,
or Thals? If you don't want to be a douche,
can we say that. I don't know. We'll find out.
Jerry didn't even hear it. Maybe she will in the
(01:33):
in the I bet she won't. Um, yeah, it was
the Neanderthals. But I'm gonna go ahead and say it again.
Maybe it's the Maya melted, sure due to climate change. Maybe,
but that's what you were talking about right then, melted
because the climate change, that's right. What's I thought was hilarious?
(01:53):
But let's talk about the Maya civilization? Oh yeah, yeah,
I meant to tell you. Let's let's kind of move
stuff around here. Do you want to? Sure? Do? I mean?
What do you mean? Well, let's talk about Charles Lindbergh first. Okay,
I think he's a better intro than just kind of
randomly in the middle. All right, So sure, And that
(02:13):
means we can start out in the way back machine,
which we would have been in anyway, but we'll be closer.
We'll save some gas. It's way closer, that's right. We're
going back to February, Yes, February nine, when Chuck Limburgh
(02:34):
was flying for pan Am and he was flying over
what is now believes and if you can believe that,
I'm so sorry. But what he would do back then,
and this is after you know, of course his the
big flight, the big one. Uh, he would get hired
to do the like these little exploratory routes for airlines,
(02:57):
in this case PanAm. He may have done that exclusive
of your paying him. I have no idea. I wasn't
in his contract business. But he would fly these routes
to sort of blaze new trails for like for flying
routes and say, hey, this is a pretty legit flying
route for delivering stuff or or even passenger routes, and
maybe add it to your to your docket. So he
(03:20):
was doing this, and he was flying over this episode
on air routes. No, it's not, because he was flying
over Mexico and Central America well believes, like you said, yeah,
And and it was just very dense jungle everywhere he
looked until he went over this one part where it
was described not by Charles Lindberg for some reason, but
(03:42):
by an Associated Press writer who apparently got into the
head of Charles Lindberg and said it looked like two
emerald eyes staring up out of the jungle brush, the
tangle of the jungle brush. So he went back, flew
a little lower to investigate. And what he found was
what that the that the emerald eyes were actually twin
(04:04):
reflecting pools in a massive stone temple, like reflecting the
sun into his face. And he was like, um, so
is he a stone temple pilot? I guess so, Oh,
my gosh, is that off the cuff? It was? That
was pretty good? Um, that was great? Actually, uh. And
he realized that he was looking at the ruins of
(04:25):
a lost city, a massive stone lost city. Actually I
don't think he realized that, probably, but we now know that. Well,
he he saw that it was covered in jungle and
overgrowth and everything. Yeah, and he so the legend goes
chuck that that, um, Charles Lindbergh discovered the Lost Man
(04:46):
in Civilization, right, which is not true. No, well, okay,
it's nuanced. That particular article is probably totally made up. Yeah,
and but even if he did find that part he
didn't he didn't discover and that's probably not what Evan said.
He did not discovered the lost Maya civilization. He found
(05:11):
a part of it. Right, It's it's it's apocryphal. It's
an apocryphal story because by that time people were aware
that the Maya had existed, but they had kind of
been seen as legend for a very long time. But
starting in from what I could tell, the nineteen twenties,
they started um finding these massive, huge lost cities, just
like Limburgh supposedly found. And later on Limburgh did actually
(05:33):
fly over some of these lost cities and photograph him
and he got into aerial archaeology. But the point is this,
there are still are and there definitely were more lost
cities that were just enormous, with huge temples, some of
them pyramids that were among the tallest pyramids in the world,
(05:54):
completely overgrown by the jungle, just overtaken, abandoned cities. And
they started looking around and they started finding more of
these cities and more and more all over the Yucatan
and northern uh well actually all of Guatemala into Honduras,
Belize and El Salvador, a big chunk of Central America
(06:15):
that there's these lost cities that were found, and they
all seemed to share something in common, so much so
that they now realized that they were peopled by the
same cultural group, the Maya. That's right, So let's talk
about the Maya. Let's go back even further. Let's go
back between twenty and twelve hundred or B c D
(06:36):
or what we now would call ce CE or I
think people now just say, like years ago, do they
do they really? Yeah? I don't, well yeah, they're they're like,
get religion out of it entirely, just say a long
time ago. Yeah, this this many years ago. Okay, so
many many years ago, the Maya civilization um occupied this
(06:57):
big area that we were talking about. There's a period
of time known as the classic Classic Maya that's what
they call it, the classic period between double on their
way through the door, between two fifty and nine hundred,
where I mean you talk about flourishing as a culture
like it was. It hadn't been seen since the Roman Empire.
(07:21):
Basically the cities uh sixty or more sixty seventy thousand people. Um,
they had sports arenas, they had pyramids, they had these
advanced farming practices, they made calendars, they understood math, and
we're really really advanced, and I believe even Um at
(07:43):
the time, some of these cities outnumbered the amount of
people that were in places like London in Paris at
that same time. Yeah yeah, and like something like say
eight hundred c e. If you travel over London in
Paris you find far fewer people, like double or triple
the amount in this Maya culture. The way that I
saw it put was in these in the in the
(08:05):
area of like Um, the Yucatan and Guatemala, the the
southern Lowlands I think is what they call it, where
like most of the great Mayan cities were. Um. The
population density is about what it is today in Los
Angeles County. Wow, imagine that. And now it's just overrun
(08:25):
jungle rainforest mostly um. But it used to be as
dense as l A County, Like people just everywhere in
this Yeah, super dense. So uh, here's the thing about
the may Empires that they were never one big group. Um.
They were never unified politically. They were just a bunch
of warring city states but really thriving. And they also
(08:45):
had like political alliances between city states. But that same
city state could be at like total war fifty years later,
you know, the shifting constantly, that's right, But the thing
we really need to hammer homes that they were doing
great for themselves. They were really thriving as a culture
and as a people, and then in about a hundred
and fifty year period between eight hundred and nine fifty,
(09:07):
they disappeared. For all intents and purposes, the classic Maya
culture just vanished into the jungle. And that is not
to say that the people all died. Uh, they assimilated
into other cultures. But what you were talking about, that
Maya culture and those those big cities of seventy thousand
(09:30):
people just went away. Yeah, it's it be kind of
like a good analogy is if over you know, the
next thirty years. Yeah, Um, the the United States just
suddenly reverted to sixteenth century agrarian practices. That was it.
We just abandoned our cities and went and farmed, and
(09:53):
like we didn't farm with any tractors or anything like that.
We started using ox um oxen. Just completely abandoned our
culture and went back to a simple farming lifestyle. That
would basically be the closest analogy you can come up with.
And it happened really fast, super fast, and as a result,
(10:14):
that Mayan culture, like you said, was sort of looked
at as a legend before you know, we started finding
these places again. Yeah, because you know, locals kind of
knew about they'd be like, oh, if you go into
the jungle, you you're going to find a lost city.
Explorers were like, you're we're crazy, that's not real. But
then they started to actually find these lost cities. And
(10:35):
what's really surprising to me is they're still finding lost cities.
Every year there'll be some new study coming out that says, oh,
we used Leader. I think it's light Leader. Yeah. Leader.
It's basically a way of looking through vegetation to see
(10:55):
solid structures underneath. So they're looking through the jungle. It's
like a jungle X kind of. Yeah, it's actually it's perfect. Um.
And they're starting to find even more lost cities, and
they're also finding that the lost cities that we know about,
there's one called Elmir Door that hasn't been kind of
excavated yet, but it's the pyramid is so tall that
(11:16):
is sticking up out of the jungle canopy, so they
know there's a lost city there. But um, using Leader,
they've seen like, oh, it's way more extensive than we
thought before. Elmir door probably had a hundred thousand people
living in the city center at its peak. All right,
so that's a good setup. We're gonna take a break
and discuss the merits of Jungle X Ray as a
band name and be back right after this. It's not bad.
(12:01):
What kind of band would it be? That's your specialty?
Sounds like a party band, right does. It's got a
lot of funk going on. I think seventies, sure, but
not but like a seventies throwback they like didn't exist
in the seventies. Oh yeah, like uh the uh like
a Ya sisters? Oh who's that? Wasn't that a band?
(12:24):
Jerry Scissor Sisters? That It was like a funky throwback
seventies thing? Okay, I gotta listen to them while they
were around for a minute. I think they're not around anymore,
all right, But did they leave like any kind of
documentation of their music? I seem to remember them being
like a party band. I don't know, but I mean,
did they have a record out or what? Man they
(12:46):
had records? It's gonna go check them out. Think I
just made this up, all right? So the Maya disappeared,
why would Jerry knows she hit all of a sudden.
I don't know, she just what she just didn't so uh.
Charles Lindbergh comes around, referred to previous. Uh story, we
(13:09):
already talked about. Lindberg referre to previous story. That's why
I said that. And he he puts this back on
the map again, and everyone is excited about discovering about
who these people were, right, But the whole thing, like
from the outset, they're like, what happened to these people? Sure?
And the more we learned about him, this is the
(13:30):
other thing, like the legends of this sudden civilization just vanishing,
Like the more we studied them, the more we realized
that's actually kind of accurate. The legends are true. There
was this amazing culture that just vanished into the forest.
And um And one of the big things, one of
the big breakthroughs in studying my culture was cracking UM.
(13:54):
There written alphabet, they used hire glyphs. And there's a really,
really good documentary called UM Cracking the Maya Coat On
I think it was a Nova episode. Dude. It is good.
It's thrilling, and it basically is them just sitting around
some house one summer trying to figure this out. But
(14:18):
they're like going back and forth and some like I
think some like twenty year old woman figured it out. Yeah,
and they now we understand a lot more. But what
we're finding is it's like, oh no, this is this
really happened. Something really weird happened here, and we still
aren't quite sure what caused it. It was a very
odd description of how they figured that out. What sitting
(14:39):
around a house that's what they did. I think they
had like a workshop or something. They're like, we're really
going to try to figure this out. We're gonna try
to crack this coat. And they actually did where we
could go sit in. Well, that's what they were doing.
It was a house, someone's house. I think, I love it,
so that's knowing me. It was definitely not a house
by any stretch, and I'll have to do it correct.
(15:01):
They're like, Josh, is your house Harvard University. So there
are some theories that have been developed over the years
that all kind of makes sense, and some of them
there that's not necessarily a binary thing that some of
them could have all contributed to the collapse of the
Maya um over farming is one which makes a lot
(15:22):
of sense. And that's the idea that basically they were
so successful. They had tons of food, tons of water,
and so they said, well, let's just make tons and
tons of babies, which all of a sudden, the farmers
are like, gees, we're really growing. Yeah, like I don't
know if we can grow this much corn. Um, so
let's clear some forest land and grow grow, grow, which
(15:44):
means they're not practicing safe and sound farming practices. All
of a sudden, they weren't practicing safe sex, and they
weren't practicing safe farming. That's right. So um, because of
this over farming, they weren't allowed to they didn't have
the opportunity let their fields lay fallow because everything was
in production, which is there's really no faster way to
overstretch your agricultural resources than that. That's right. What we're
(16:09):
here to tell you, Uh, well, warfare. We know they
were a warring people for sure, So the Maya rulers
were they did a lot of disservice to their own
people by kind of over inflating uh their resources, and
how tough they were, Um, what kind of warriors they were,
and how powerful they were. They could make it rain,
(16:30):
they can control the weather and thus control the crops.
And this may have backfired on them, as the theory
goes that they warred so much that they sapped their
own resources and eventually people retaliated and they were not
able to fight back. And I think the guy who
led that workshop at that dude's house where they cracked
(16:50):
the code, I cannot remember his name, but he's a
eminent Maya scholar. He he is of the camp. That's like,
it was warfare, that's what That's what. It was, plain
and simple. They just fought too much and they eventually
they reached some tipping point from war. And there's real
evidence about some of these cultures at least for some
(17:10):
of these cities going down because of warfare. Yeah, I
mean like they engaged in total war or they would
like target civilians, they would burn your whole city down.
They like. It wasn't like they were a very warlike group,
which is funny because for a very long time they
were portrayed as um one of the few Mesoamerican groups
(17:31):
that didn't practice human sacrifice, and then once we cracked
my code, were like, oh no, actually they were prolific
at that. Yeah, it was bad news. The other is disease,
and this is um not human disease necessarily, but like
virus from their food supply. Yeah, that's another ecological disaster.
(17:52):
That's right. I think mays mosaic virus was named in
the nineteen seventy nine articles. So like, there's a lot
of a lot of good theory is out there and
they aren't necessary. It's not a zero some kind of
thing figuring it out, but there's over the years lately, Um,
in the last decade or two, maybe people have really
started to say, you know, I think we should look
(18:13):
a little closer at the Royal climate change might play
in this kind of stuff. And when they look specifically
at the Maya, they said, actually, it looks a lot
like climate change played a big role in in the
decline of the classic Maya civilization. That's right. And just
because the Maya didn't burn fossil fuels to run cars
(18:34):
doesn't mean that the Earth wasn't affected by climate change
and that they weren't affected by climate change. Yeah, they
think that probably climate change happened on its own, but
they've also pinpointed some ways that the Maya may have
exacerbated it too. You mean, people can impact that some
foo loops say so. So they've done some studies. They
(18:55):
studied mineral deposits um in caves left by dripping water,
and they have been able to put together a two
thousand year history of weather patterns based on Speelio thumbs alone.
That's right, uh. And what they found out, and this
was published an article in Science, UH in two thousand
twelve Science magazine, the journal Science. The journal Science. It's
(19:20):
not called like Science Weekly or what the Ohio State Universe. Um.
But what they did find out was for the first
few hundred years, and this really lens UH a lot
of credence to the theory that they may have overfarmed
and stuff like that, is they really had a lot
of rain and they flourished as a result of that. Yeah,
which you can't really blame them. It's it's them saying, okay,
(19:42):
well let's thrive and we can thrive in these conditions.
It's not like they were like, Okay, it's this is
a really wet period, let's take advantage of it and
really overstretch our ourselves. Um. They just kind of went
with it, and their population grew because it could be
supported because is there was such a large amount of rain,
(20:02):
their crops grew, their reservoirs were full, and this is
a few hundred years, right over the course of a
few hundred years. But from looking at the cave deposits,
they found that there was a very wet record that
corresponds with the classical Maya period. Wet record is a
Scissor Sisters album. I don't know, Jump, what was it?
(20:23):
Jungle x ray albu Jungle x ray wet record, so
that hip, that's hip. Jerry doesn't disgusted with this at
this point around six six d this all changed the rain.
What's that funny for? I just thought have a good analogy.
So Jungle x ray their album wet record is to
(20:46):
seventies funk soul throwbacks. What the darkness Permission to land
is the eighties hair metal throwback? That's not an s
A T question. I think I think we just get it, Chuck.
Did we correctly go? Yeah, we we cracked that Jungle lectory.
Did you see where Motley Crue is gonna play shows
again after we supposedly saw their farewell to her that
(21:10):
they even signed a contract saying they could legally never
perform again together. And they're going on a stadium tour
with Poison and Deaf Leppard. What I know, I'll see
you there. Yeah. So remember we got invited to that
show by Nitas Strauss, That's right, who is like huge, Yeah,
guitar player at the time. Maybe still for Alice Cooper's Yeah,
I think she does that still, I think. But she's
(21:33):
like a guitar legend, not jam She's great. I hope
she still listens. He's probably not. But around six sixty
the weather changed, the rains did not come like they
used to, and they had the longest dry spell of
the last two thousand years. And this is gonna have
a real impact. When everything's flourishing and you're just planting
(21:56):
and planting, all of a sudden you're a or thirsty.
That's a big one, and you're not you're hungry that
thirst thing. It's funny because like we're talking about rainforests,
but this area in northern Guatemala where the Maya will
live just called the petting or the pitten I don't know,
pet e n And it is kind of like feast
(22:16):
or famine depending on the rain cycle. So when it's dry,
it's like you're you're in trouble because the closest groundwater
is about five feet below the surface, and um, it's
not going to rain for a very long time. So
if you haven't prepared by building reservoirs your you might
die of thirst. So a drought in the pattern, which
(22:37):
is normally dry some parts of the year, would be
a real problem. If you're talking about a drought that
lasts over years or possibly decades. Now you have a
civilization collapsing problem. Yeah, so that's a big problem in
and of itself. You've got a big population that grew
when it was wet. Suddenly it's not wet, and you
still have that big population. There's a lot of internal
(22:59):
problems that can that can develop, especially between classes too.
Sure the haves and the have nuts, which existed back then,
but also the rulers who are like, you know, more
human sacrifices, We need to keep this this this thing
going to get the rain to come back. Well, and
the common folk being like, jeez, I don't know about this. Uh,
(23:19):
you know, I hadn't rained in a while. It was
my cousin before, but now I was asking for my brother,
yeah exactly. So that created a lot of tension. The
other thing that could have sped this whole thing up
was the fact that they were thriving so much that
they were expanding their territory and they were cutting down
and deforesting the land around them for fuel and to
build things. And they have found, uh, they found pollen.
(23:42):
They studied pollen and these ancient layers and lake sediment
in Central America, and around eight d that pollen went
from tree pollen to weed pollen pretty quickly. Yeah, and
that's about when the Maya reached their fluorescence, when they
really reached their pinnacles about eight hundred. So what that
suggests is they cut down all the forests and they
(24:04):
were using what used to be forest for crop land
because they practice slash and char where they would burn
it down to introduce carbon nutrients into the ground. Um.
The problem is as if there's no force whatsoever, you've
just altered your ecosystem and by doing that, you can
actually alter the local climate, which they think they may have. Yeah.
(24:24):
Not only that, but it's going to have just the
physical effect of erosion, like a massive erosion, because those
tree roots are gone, and that's gonna screw up your
farmland as well. Right, So your top soils gone, Your
trees are no longer keeping things as cool as they
were before. There was a NASA model that predicted that
the the temperature in the area rose by about six
(24:47):
degrees fahrenheit, which is a lot. I mean, that's noticeable
for humans, but if you're talking about plants and soil,
that's that can really exacerbated drought. When you've already got
a bad drought and a normally dry area. That's not good.
So the climate, the climate record is showing Okay, it's
it was already bad, but they probably made things worse
(25:07):
with the deforestation. Yeah, and that that all that stuff
combined and then maybe throwing a little dash of the
previous theories could very well explain why they said, you know,
we're getting out of here and we're gonna go live
a smaller life, a more sustainable, smaller life that's not
in a big city, right. Yeah, And they think also
(25:27):
that you know, the other things dashed in, like um,
the warfare, Like if you're in a town and you
know the next time or the next city state over
has big reservoirs and your people are dying of thirst,
invading that other city might seem like a pretty good idea.
And if that happens enough times, then you have a
lot of war going on everywhere, and that can really
make your civilization to climb pretty bad too. Should we
(25:49):
take another break? Sure? All right, we'll take another break
and talk about how this climate change could have affected
some other civilizations throughout history. Alright, Chuck. So it's not
(26:19):
just the maya. This is the thing. This is kind
of a new way of looking at history and especially
social collapses, the idea that climate change played some driving
role in it. And they started to look around. They're like, oh, actually,
this kind of explains a lot of different ones that
we didn't we thought we understood before. And the understanding
(26:40):
before would be like, well, this king died and this
created political instability, and they have evidence that there was
this war and this group got got invaded. What they're
starting to find now is actually there might have been
climate change that led to crop failure that led to instability,
that that allowed this this kingdom to be invaded because
it was weakened by a dying population. Yeah. What it
(27:03):
is is a more nuanced look at civilization and in
ancient histories, because I'm sure there are a lot of
people that when you talk about the Neo Assyrian Empire,
which thrived in what is now modern Diarraq for a
few hundred years, and that was one of those where
the death of a king is what everyone has always said, Well,
that's what did it. And there, I'm sure there were
(27:24):
historians were like, you know that there's something missing. Yeah,
they had so many kings that had died leading up
as why this one. And they started to look in
particular at the Neo Assyrian Empire and they said, oh,
actually if we go and look at the cave record again.
They went to a cave called Kuna ba Um in
northern Iraq and they said, actually, the record of rainfall
(27:48):
captured by this cave, by these mineral deposits in these
caves kind of show that there was that same thing
that happened with the Maya, a very wet period that
corresponds with the growth of the society, and a very
very dry period that corresponds with its collapse. And that's
not coincidence, they don't think. So it's starting to look
like it's really not coincidence. Another one, uh the anchor
(28:10):
Wat Temple in Asia in Southeast Asia Asia that was
like old timing was who was it that said Paula Abduel,
Because I've been saying that for like thirty something it
was I think in a Spike Lee movie or something.
It sounds like Toro or maybe Paula Abdul, who is
(28:31):
the guy who ran sALS Pizza Danny a Yellow. I
could totally see him saying it might have been Paula Abdul. Yeah,
all I know is I've been saying it for many,
many years now. So the anchor wat Temple, Yeah, the
Camir Empire in Southeast Asia flourished for between eight o
(28:52):
two and four. That's a long time. It's a very
long time. But they think that drought once again along
with like monsoon like rains uh really is what brought
them down as well. So again the effects of the climate.
And if you look at the Khmer Empire, particularly around
anchor watt Um that's the very famous like lost temple
(29:15):
in the we've seen um. Historians have long known that
they got invaded and taken over, and now they think
actually the reason that was allowed to happen is because
of climate change in it like it led to problems
that weaken the society that allowed them to be invaded
and taken over. This idea of that ingredient. That's right,
that a civilization is just like doing fine, doing fine,
(29:37):
suddenly invaded and taken over by a neighbor that's been
there for hundreds of years, Like, but have stopped asking
what was it that did that? Now they're saying it
looks like climate change maybe played a role. I think
that's just fascinating. Yeah, for sure. Uh, the same with
the Vikings and the thirteenth and fourteen centuries. They left Greenland.
They had been around for several hundred years, and that
(30:00):
was because of the Little Ice Age. Yeah, they they
had farming techniques that worked before the Little Ice Age,
which was a very very cool period around the globe.
UM I think from like eight hundred to or something
like that, No, into the nineteenth century. I think at
any rate, UM their farming techniques stopped working in Greenland
(30:22):
because it was too cold, so they had to leave
the land said you gotta leave Vikings, and they went, fine,
we'll go take some shrooms and go berserk and get
out of here. Yeah, berserkers. So there's a lot we
can learn about, you know, looking back through history, not
only UM on the battlefield and politically, but also, um,
(30:44):
if we look at it through this lens, it maybe
climate change was the cause of the collapse of an
ingredient for the cause of collapse of some of these civilizations.
That the same thing could be happening to us very slowly,
right in front of our eyeballs. Yeah. And I mean
one of the things is if you back and look
at these these historic falls of civilizations, um, Like, it's
(31:06):
not like they were like, oh, there's a drought going on,
that's it for our culture. It's like this was an
underlying driver that they may or may not have pointed
to as the cause of these larger things. You know,
if you're engaged in like a civil war or an invasion,
you're not stopping and thinking like, gosh, it's because of
this drought. You're focused on the invasion. It's the immediate thing.
(31:27):
And in in the exact same way. I mean, we're
not that removed from people who lived a millennia go.
As long as the way that our brains work, we
tend to look at the trees rather than the forest too.
And if that's the case, and we're in this period
of climate change right now, it's really worrying to think
that a little bit of climate change can lead to
(31:50):
social collapse, and not directly. Again, that's the thing, that's
what a lot of people argue about, is the climate
change isn't going to cause society collapse, not directly, but
it could lay the groundwork for all the stuff that
goes wrong that we're failing to identify is ultimately caused
by climate change. That's what we need to be paying
attention to. If that is in fact the case. That's right,
And like we said, there are a lot of indicators
(32:11):
that some of these same things are going on, deforestation
not being the least among them. Uh, we are cutting
down a lot of trees, and we have cut down
a lot of trees of the forest of northern America,
just the US alone, just the US have been cut
down um trees or carbon roughly, and they absorbed and
(32:34):
this is a very big deal. Uh, they absorbed between
one and three million metric tons of c O two,
which offsets which we need between twenty and what we
put into the atmosphere. So you don't have to be
a rocket scientist to figure out if there's fewer trees,
then there's going to be more CEO two in the atmosphere,
and I think it's even more significant than that. We
(32:57):
did a whole episode. I don't remember the ins and
outs of it. We did a whole episode on cutting
down trees and the effect it has on weather UM
and I remember it was it has a big effect,
like from single trees to huge forests, like each each
each loss of tree has an impact for sure. And
it's not like, uh, we're stopping now. In the Pacific
Northwest UM, roughly of the old growth forest is is
(33:21):
slated for logging to go away for logging purposes. Which
old growth forest? I read a really cool article on
the old growth forest of Atlanta and how Atlanta is
a you know, if anyone's ever been here from like
out west, maybe they remark about how Atlanta is a
city in a forest, and I was wondering what old
(33:42):
growth meant. It was a really cool article. And the
years differ depending on who you're asking, but it's basically
a forest that has not been touched by humans for
between a hundred and a hundred fifty years and there's
still an old growth forest in Atlanta. It's great, is
that right? Yeah? Wow? Like pine forests or no, just
you know, like like hardwood. Wow, I didn't know that.
(34:07):
That's pretty cool. It is like when you fly into town,
you're like, this is just in the It's like a
lost city in the middle of a jungle, but still functioning.
What about social change and uh and what's going on
with that? So, I mean one of the things that
seems to be a hallmark of a collapsing civilization for
whatever reason, and as part of its collapse, it can
(34:30):
engage in civil war um war with other neighboring countries
or city states or whatever. Um. And if climate change
is a driver of that, it seems to have happened
very recently. You're happening right now, um because one of
the ideas for the basis of the civil war in
Syria right now is a drought brought on by climate
(34:50):
change that started in two thousand and six and actually
kind of cast a lot of farmers, a lot of
Syrian farmers out of work from their fee into the cities.
And so a lot of unemployed, restless people showed up
to the cities. And they think that that was one
of the exacerbators that led to this civil war. But
(35:11):
that climate change, a drought brought on by climate change
may have been the underlying driver for the Syrian Civil
war going on right now. Yeah, that like four thousand
people have died in so far. Population growth is another
big one. We talked about both with the Maya and
the Assyria Empires that you know, even if you're doing great,
(35:32):
you still got to keep the population in check because
there is there's a point where, um, you can't sustain
it anymore. And we are expected to reach ten billion people.
That crazy by ten billion humans on Earth yea just
around the corner. And there is an argument that um
technology is our favorable climate. Like we're doing great technologically speaking,
(35:59):
so we're just growing and growing again. We're growing because
we can invent anything we need to invent to help
out any problem. Um. But if that goes away, then
we're gonna be in big trouble. Um. I have to
fess up. That was me editorialized now I can tell okay, yeah, well,
thank you for the legitimacy you added to And I
don't mean that goes away. But you know, if if
there is a breaking point for technological advancement, well yeah,
(36:22):
it's like the Green Revolution. We went from traditional agriculture
to modern agriculture. But modern agriculture is on the verge
of reaching its carrying capacity, and we have no idea
what's coming after that. Plus we also are well aware
that our modern intensive agricultural practices are problematic. There's a
lot of fertilizer runoff that can spoil water, including drinking water. Um,
(36:46):
there's a lot of soil depletion that comes along with it.
And in the same way that a lot of other
cultures who have fallen seem to have been stubborn and
not adapted, but they're just kept kept at it, kept
at it, despite having warning signs that it wasn't working
any longer. Um, we seem to be doing the same
thing with our farming practices, and we need to figure
(37:07):
out a more sustainable way to farm. Yeah. I think
the thing that distresses me is the lack of a
and there are a lot of people that aren't doing this,
but the lack of the long term outlook. You know,
it's like, well, it's not gonna happen in my lifetime. Yeah,
so I need to keep I need to keep pushing
forward with whatever farming practices I'm utilizing or whatever the
(37:29):
case may be. One of the one of the suggestions
I saw when I was researching the End of the
World to get people to care about the future is
to extend human lifespans so that you're like, oh, that's
like two years in the future. Well, if that was
middle age, you would care about that. And then just
it's weird to think, you know, it's it's simple if
(37:49):
you think about it, but it's also weird to think, like,
just how quickly that would make us start planning for
the future a lot more. Rather than shrinking the future
into human size, we would be growing human size into
the future. I feel like the human lifespan or the
human awareness of what a lifespan, Yeah, that would change
the whole outlook. Yeah, you we always had a good
(38:11):
question about that too. She's like, at what point do
we stop caring about our descendants? You know, we've got kids, grandkids,
great curring kids, great great grandkids. Yeah, exactly, at one
point we just stopped saying great and it's just descendants,
you know. Yeah. Sure, I wonder like where where you
(38:31):
really stopped caring, Like, do you really care about your
great grandkids, great great curing kids less? So let's find
it fascinating or maybe here's the thing. You could just
not even think about it in terms of you your family,
but maybe just planet Earth and and doing the right thing. Yeah,
Luckily a lot of people do think that way an
(38:52):
increasing amount. We also have to say, Chuck that like
the idea that climate change is a driver for social
collapse is very new. Some people, some historians so archaeologists,
are like, this really smacks of a trendy thing. And
I'm just not on this bandwagon. It's too young, it's
too new. It's just seems to hip, you know, like
(39:13):
a Scissor Sisters record. But um, I guess what I'm
trying to say is it's not This isn't definitive, it's
not set in stone. And there's also a lot of
people who say, well, we are pretty smart, we're a
lot smarter than we were a thousand years ago, and
we can invent our way out of any problem. But
I mean, we've done it so far. It's tough to
(39:33):
argue with in some cases. You know, it's it's it's
not to say that the world is necessarily going to
end at any point in time in the near future,
or that we cannot ourselves assimilate and change and roll
with it and go back to maybe a different lifestyle.
Well yeah, or continue on our technological progress, but like say,
(39:55):
adopt more sustainable farming practices. I mean, that's the view
of the future that i'll the Dystopian films have is
this usually. I mean sometimes it's a barren wasteland Mad
Max style, but a lot of times it's like a
return to the earth and small villages of people farming.
That's exactly what happened to the Maya. Yea, they moved
out in new farms, the farm, the farm hinterlands where
(40:18):
they just continued on like nothing happened, right, But the
people in the cities were like, well we're Mad Max
now coastal elites. Yeah right, you've got anything else? No, Well,
this was the climate change leading to the fall of
the Maya the episode. And that's the end of that.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Uh.
(40:42):
This is from Rosanna in Surrey, United Kingdom. Hey, guys,
my husband and I are currently renovating an Edwardian house
in a very poor condition, and she detailed it. It
just sounds like a wreck that they're in the middle of,
the loose upside down, but but worth it in along
running in the living room, there's a lift in the lory.
(41:06):
When everything seems to be falling apart around you, the
last thing you want is to be left with your
own thoughts, and your podcast is always there so I
don't have to be. For many years, I've listened to
your show the way other people listen to the radio.
The first thing I put it on in the morning
when I get up, and this continues on my drive
to and from work or whenever I'm in my car,
and I often put it on before bed because I
find your voices so soothing. Your show really helps with
(41:27):
my anxiety as well. Both my husband and I are
doing all the work on the house ourselves now, electrics, plumbing, plastering, tiling, decorating,
you name it, and I've left my job to work
on the house full time. So for the past six
months I listened to YouTube talking to keep me company
and learning while I'm working, which lasts at least nine
(41:50):
hours a day. Solid Josh and Chuck, you basically become
my main source of human contact. Guys. For example, it's
only ten twenty in the morning and I've already been
listening to you for four hours in twenty minutes laying
are you okay? Alright? Uh? And we'll continue to do
so until my husband gets home late tonight. Obviously this
means a lot of repeated shows, but it never gets boring.
(42:11):
Much of the d I y work is unbelievably slow
and tedious. I've been there, Rosanna. I definitely would have
lost my mind long ago if it wasn't for stuff
you should know. I don't want to say a huge
thank you for keeping me saying educated and chuckling along
when I do, would otherwise be on the floor crying
about how much I have to do that. What you
guys do is brilliant, and I wanted to let you
(42:32):
know you're not just educating people and helping to expand
their beliefs. You're also genuinely helping me feel connected to others.
Will I try to create a home for me, my
husband and our two idiot cats and two house rabbits.
I want to come see you. Yeah, that's pretty. I
want to see your Victorian home, Edward. I want to
see your two idiot cats in your two house rabbits. Um,
(42:54):
are you gonna help what I say? Victorian? Yes? Edwardian
You're gonna help plaster. I'll plastered the cred out of that.
Get plastered and do some plasters. Right, He'll be all
over the place, He'll get it all over the LORI well,
thanks a lot, Rosanna, best of luck in the renovation.
I'm glad we can help you out. That's good to hear. Uh.
If you want to get in touch with us like
Rosanna did, to let us know what you're doing with
(43:16):
your time, we always want to hear about that. You
can go to stuff you Should Know dot com and
check out our social links, or you can send us
an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio
because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.