It started with famine... and ended with four great civilizations' utter destruction. What can we learn from the Bronze Age Collapse? Support us on Patreon for early access, topic suggestions, and more! www.patreon.com/ExtraCredits
Extra Credits Address the concerns of the citizenry promptly and in well measured steps. Be willing to break the mold of your society or the standard way of thinking. Be willing to use every tool in your tool box (citizens with different ideas and ways of approaching the problem than you or current leadership, upward mobility, capitalism, speed of communication, etc.)
Extra Credits Just use Far more abundant ressources, create more supplies, study more and try to improve on everything, then You can create a stable society. Our Modern World is far less Fragile and is actually not declining, but rising due to the internet and all of that, I doubt that there will another collapse in the next year's.
Great series, really fascinating. I would be curious to read some of the books mentioned on the collapse of societies and empires, and the one about systems collapse. Can you post some of the titles?
"For today, in this modern era, where we can probably weather most any crisis, if we fool ourselves into believing that we're immune, we may go on to create so many crises of our own that we may bring about the collapse of our own systems." it's been a month and four days since the capitol riot in america and more than a year after the coronavirus was first discovered as of writing. this quote aged EXCEEDINGLY well.
That was fun to watch for many anti western people. I think the "deliveries of democracy" (bombardment, coups supported by cia, etc) is beginning to paying back in USA soil.
I don't think that we're immune, but modern society is able to absorb much more shocks than centuries ago, we live in an interconnected world now, it's no longer just a few kingdoms, I think most countries have learned from the coronavirus, Asia has dealt with outbreaks for years already, next time will be more prepared
History has a way of repeating itself, I suppose. At least I am aware of the precedent. The people of the bronze age would rightly have cursed the gods for the apocalypse of their world. I get to curse man instead.
Quote from "Red Dwarf": ""They say that every society is only three meals away from revolution. Deprive a culture of food for three meals, and you'll have an anarchy. And it's true, isn't it? You haven't eaten for a couple of days, and you've turned into a barbarian." Kind of sums it up.
every society is maybe 3 meals from revolution. but modern western societies are way less vulnerable to hunger. but Venezuela is an nice example. ppl gotta eat. (but countries like iraq are in heavy war but still most of the population can eat.)
There was a study immediately after WW2 meant to examine the effect of malnutrition on the human psyche. This was to get an idea of what was going on with the people of Europe, who were going through a bit of a food shortage, due to most of the continent getting chewed up by a war (again). The subjects were Quakers, conscientious objectors who welcomed the opportunity to serve their country in a non-violent way, and also viewed it as an opportunity to deepen their faith through what could be viewed as fasting. What they got instead was a crisis of faith. The study found that humans become temperamental and less capable of reason and logic. In short, when we're hungry, we revert to an almost primal state. The young Quaker men that participated in the study were shaken to their cores to learn that the only thing between the moral and polite people they'd been raised as, and a mean brute, was a few good meals.
I'm a "Systems and Complexity Associate" (yes, this is a real job title) for a large non-profit organization. My background is in Systems Thinking and Practices. Specifically, I create systems maps for the purposes of informing social-change strategies. You have no idea how excited I am to stumble across a video talking about systems thinking and theory naturally (usually you'd have to go out of your way to search for and find one). Systems thinking is so important and relevant, yet it's still mostly unknown. So thank you for showing interest in the topic and highlighting it in your video! :)
SamDorios Any chance you can recommend a good, accessible introduction for laypeople? I think Systems thinking is an important skill for everyone to learn.
Yeah, that's the thing. We've not done a good job of providing good, accessible materials for newcomers. We definitely need to get on that. I’m not sure how "accessible" it is, but a good place to start might be TheSystemsThinker. It's a website featuring some good articles on the subject. Might want to begin with the readings under their "How-To Guides." Good authors on the subject are Donella Meadows, Daniel Kim, Peter Senge, and David Stroh. A colleague of mine, Robert Ricigliano also has a great book (Making Peace Last), and a course about Systems Practice on plusacumen. But that's not for laypeople; it's for practitioners... Hope that's somewhat helpful. Wish I had a better answer.
Although, to be fair, The Waters Foundation works with schools to introduce systems thinking to teachers and students. I helped run a workshop for their Milwaukee Conference, so got the chance to talk shop with them. Their work seemed great for students, but that also means it was a bit watered down (pun not intended). Though I do love that they’re introducing it at all! Also, this is gonna be an off-the-wall recommendation, but if you do a google search for Nicky Case you'll come across her page. She does some small flash games/articles that are influenced by systems thinking. They're very neat. I particularly like the "Parable of the Polygon" which is about migration/segregation.
Age of Decadence sort of has something like that, but with a dark fantasy bent. More along the lines of a post apocalyptic fall of Rome though, if Rome literally had demi-gods fighting alongside them lol
Herrius Le Crabe Québécois Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!
Mr. O tbh the modern system wont collapse hard bcs of the rich protecting themself. Then after the disaster they just have to lead the majority working class
@@mr.o8539 a lot because the world hasnt entirely stopped, a lot of systems are still working what has been stopped are non esential systems like entertainment or restaurants but food production, energy production, technological and scientific investigation are still going strong, if something they are going even smoother now that mayor centers that consume a lot of resources have stopped, for a real collapse those would have to stop and not all countries are suffering the same, some countries are actually taking the pandemic quite well, maybe some small countries will fall into caos and i'm also of the opinión that the world after the pandemic is not going to look the same as before the pandemic, but it's posible that is for the best
For everyone talking about covid-19 in this video: Yes, covid-19 is a naughty boy, but it's like a bad harvest for our society. Covid-19 is something that will make 2020 and 2021 very bad years; but our real sea people and collapse is climate change. That is the real threat that can combine all the elements the series has explained about the bronze age collapse
The only solution to climate change is to erect a worldwide government of resource distribution, corral as many people as possible into mass population pods, enforce a strict diet of insects, ban individual travel and property rights, oh yeah and to enact massive carbon taxes.
@@scottydu81 I'm not 100% sure how serious you are but it's not anywhere near that amount of doom and gloom. Modernized nuclear power, combined with forest restoration initiatives and increased regulation of resource usage gets is most of the way there. Granted that's not easy and requires international cooperation but it's not awful.
@@SpectralPotatoSP Nah, if global warming leads to system collapse China is going to be a pillage destination, not a source. Your Sea People are going to be the millions of refugees fleeing from famine and govt collapse all over the Third World. You kind of saw a preview of that with the arrival of the Central American caravans on the US Southern border as people fled from famine, droughts, gang violence, and government corruption and repression in Central America.
@@Septimus_ii The fall of the northern kingdom of arnor and its successors was a lot more like the bronze age collapse. Tolkien certainly knew all we know about the subject
In the nineties, when I was a kid, I noticed a lot of the sci-fi shows that I enjoyed had minor storylines or single episodes devoted to warning us about complex societies. Usually they took it from the angle of losing the "self", like being part of a complex society requires the sacrifice of one's personal identity or freedoms. And to some degree they're right, you do give up some freedoms to be part of a system. But the people who had these ideas in these shows almost always took the extreme route of going completely in the opposite direction, becoming amish-like refugees from the space-faring or interdimensional-exploring civilisations they hailed from, citing that such advancement invited its own end, and that simplicity was the way by which one avoided whole-sale collapses. With no system, no collapse. But even as a child, I remember thinking "Yeah, but then you have no police or an army to defend your way of life. You have no hospitals with advanced medical care to treat simple diseases or injuries. You don't have robust farming techniques that almost guarantee plentiful food." Of course, I didn't put it quite like that when I was 7, but it was the same idea in principle. All these "going back to a simpler time" episodes almost never showed these people being overrun by opposing armies, or hit by devastating curable diseases, or starving when their finite crop system bugged out for a week. They always just showed the philosophical inadequacies, or more often put them in an agreeable light, as though becoming agrarian hermit societies was actually the right way to go.
The great thing is that, as long as complex societies exist, the people who want simplicity can just go off on their own and do whatever they want in the middle of nowhere. The opposite isn't true if the simpletons were to drag us back to the dark ages.
Notice! This episode concludes the Bronze Age Collapse series, and after this Extra History will be taking a one week break. We'll be back with a few one-off episodes starting on July 29!
Am I alone in saying that this series gave me a new fear in life? The fact that these thriving societies collapsed in the space of just 40-50 years is horrifying and gives me anxiety.
Well it wouldn't be the first or last time. modern societies hardly collapse to the same extent that they did in the past, simply because technology and interconnection make it difficult for a society to remain collapsed. think Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Myanmar and a few others recently have gone through the throws of collapse and civil war, but for the most part have reasserted themselves as individual states and so on. now 300 years ago an unstable society would just be consumed by its neighbor, but as that rarely happens any more through international pressures, societies have a greater chance of coming back and can do it much faster than the Egyptians and Greeks did so many millennia ago.
I have no doubt at all that our current societies will collapse as well. My number one reason for that is global warming, but an asteroid or a solar flare resetting us all are all likely. To me it's not a matter of if, but when. Will it be in next 10 years? 100? 1000?
All it would take is one nuclear war. We would collapse in 5 years. Our societies are now fully dependent on digital technology, if supply routes are disrupted new devices can’t be made, the entire modern system would implode very quickly.
LeBron's age comes to an end. No longer could the people look to the Cavaliers to defend what was once theirs. Warriors had invaded from west, and had left Cleveland ravaged and broken.
The great cowardice of Kevin 'The Rat' Durant has set a new low and plunged the world into a dark age, his rabid lap dog Zaza doing dirty work to destroy great soldiers like Kawhi Leonard delegitimizing a once-great era.
@@fantasyfanatical5510 I'd say it's more like we've or our leaders have gone on to create problems for ourselves and our societies. The Corona virus could've been contained or atleast slow it's advance greatly but because of greed, selfishness, negligence, willful ignorance, and arrogance we thought ourselves to be invincible and untouchable. We as a species could've easily dealt with the problem but chose not to because why sacrifice even a little bit of profits or risk angering corporate shareholders over the long term stability of our societies. Basically preventive measures are something that we could easily do but won't because preventative maintenance isn't profitable.
The conclusion makes me realize that our modern societies globally will collapse not in the way of the romans, but in the way of the Bronze Age collapse - and catastrophic climate change might be the biggest culprit
Roman society became one of worrying more about who ruled rome, than about competing with foreigners. With relying on foreign soldiers to fight for you and foreign slaves to work. Then, when plague strikes and foreigners are already the majority of your society, they cast you down. Our collapse will be the same, AI and robots will surely replace us. Give at a couple hundred years
Your conclusion reminds me a lot of thoughts I had when reading up on the Library of Alexandria. While the decay of that institution was gradual and not nearly as dramatic as often thought, it still represents to me the idea that 'progress' may not be as inevitable as we believe. Knowledge that was gained can be lost, and Civilisation's march forward is not a permanent given. Mostly unthinkable in today's society, it made me consider that 'progress' can be reversed.
Civilisation's march forward is something that has essentially continued throughout history; the Bronze Age collapse is one of only a handful of examples of a relatively long-lasting negative trend in human civilisation, but this march forward is not a continuous line either; zoom in and you see that it rises far more sharply than the average, then quickly collapses, and starts quickly rising again.
After checking their "Bronze Privilege" the advanced Civilizations were paralyzed by guilt... There was a decision to invite less educated, less specialized people from less organized societies.... Then, for the sake of cultural enhancement and community cohesion, allow the newcomers to practice their traditional ways.... After 2 or 3 generations the guilt ridden people, along with their privilege producing systems, had disappeared.
All complex civilizations are multicultural, like it or not. The Hittite empire included Nesli (the "Hittites" proper), Hattians, and Hurrians. The Romans, of course, included diverse peoples from every part of the known world. Ancient Egyptians came from sources as diverse as North Africa, the Near East, and even Europe. The dream of an "ethnically pure" state has always been a fantasy.
Define disease , if you mean a pathogen then yes we can, but if you mean a narrative designed to keep a population in a lower class by creating a narrative and using censusual science that's based on feelings rather than facts, then we'll just have to wait and see.
@@TheDude2111 is Exhibit A: disproving the idea modern societies can handle the appearance of a new disease Guess Extra Credits didn't count on the depths to which people can be gullible morons who believe everything they see on Facebook!
As a software engineer, I have to wonder if there are ways to build more robustness into our societies. After Hurricane Katrina, lots of folks became interested in disaster preparedness. But they were focused on an individual or family level. What if we could build disaster preparedness on an urban block level, where a street of 40-80 people have a plan to withstand some major shock.
maybe a region by region disaster "tax" which would go to a disaster box to help those in a certain city or county the money should then strictly be used for housing and provisions etc.
Or we could just direct those efforts towards preventing the kinds of disasters that can bring our whole global society down by preserving biodiversity, combating the depletion of phosphorus, nitrogen and other crucial limited resources, reverting harmful land use patterns, preventing top soil loss and the waste of fresh water in agriculture, and limiting climate change. Yes, that will cost growth, just as making systems more resilient but if all those things come crushing down on us at the same time, it would be foolish to assume that our civilization can handle that, no matter how many bunkers we build and how much food we stockpile.
If Katrina taught the US any lessons t should be that States counties and cities need to be in charge and the Feds need to come by after and help pay the bills. So much time and effort was wasted because all of the authority to act was placed in DC thousands of miles away. If a disaster to be managed it needs to have locals running the show. They know the people, the terrain, the problems and the needs. If everybody is waiting on the feds to act the disaster is already aftermath by that point. So much time was wasted by the Governor and Mayor waiting on orders rather than just saying "I don't give a crap about regulations let them bill me, get people on anything with wheels and get them out of the way of this thing NOW!"
James Cusack many people miscontextualize this quote, thinking it meant "the banks are so big that they are incapable of collapse", when in reality the quote was referring to the idea that the financial systems and banks were so big and integral to the economy that the consequences would be disastrous if they failed, so the government couldn't allow them to fail. a better phrasing of the quote would be "too integral to allow to fail"
The banks essentially held the government ransom. They were too big to fail. If they did, it would have disastrous effects to the economy. So the government is forced to bail them out. Knowing that they can get away with anything, they will continue to give unreasonable loans. After all, if the loans succeed, you profit. If they fail, you get bailed out and nothing happens. If they don't bail you out, you drag the rest of the country down. You hold them as ransom.
_The bailout was a mistake_ I don´t think it was. I mean, a lot of crooks in the banking system got paid for essentially doing a lousy job, which is totally unfair... but the collapse of the banking system would have brought far worse things than just some rich douchebags getting to skip jail. th-cam.com/video/2f2kGHcdJYU/w-d-xo.html
This reminds me of a angry rant of a paper that I read for a grad student course that was written by environmental extremists, basically it argued that a majority of the population should be humanely euthanized or forced to starve to death in order to atone for our destruction of the environment. Scary stuff.
Thus the Assyrians rise to power and reach their peak, one man's Dark age is another ones Golden age. With that out of the way, we can focus on something else: Cyrus II the great and his rise of power of becoming the Justinian of Alexander
I did, just wanted you to know since you are obviously interested to go and watch their videos on Justinian, and I would like to see Cyrus or Alexander as well(but that was secondary to informing you of Justinian video that exists already).
To sum up the final point in a slightly simpler way: Titanic sank. Nothing to our knowledge has proven to be unsinkable, and the assumption that something is usually leads to catastrophe. That is probably why Titanic proved so traumatic we still remember the jist of the story today. The assumption of infallibility is bound to self-destruct. There's probably something to the concepts presented in the theory of systems collapse.
Not really, on normal settings you start at usually 3000 BC which is about 2,000 years before all these events. If you decide to start in Classical Era, however...
Yeah, that makes sense. So you research a little bit and suddenly you have writing? No, most likely writing already existed and you just adapted it to your civilization's needs and expanded the knowledge base from a few sages to an entire working class of record keepers.
No, not really. I'm not saying that writing was never invented. We're talking about the beginning of the Sid Meier's Civilization games. This explanation that your civilization isn't the first makes sense. Consider all the ruins you can find, for example. It really feels like you're staring off as a small tribe that survived the something like the bronze age collapse in isolation.
KaptenN There were large cities in the ancient world like The Legendary Jeriko these cities are absurdly old some dates back to 8000 bc! let that number sink in! 5000 years before the age if Sumerian Cities! To Sumer Jeriko is as old as Sumer is to US! incredible! So yes if yo start as a tribe in 3000 bc you probably not the first to invent like any technology for a while... and those ruins speek of an unkown age when The first cities prospered...
I was thinking of Tropico and how easy it is to mess up an island there by not getting enough merchandise to market to cover the cost of all your workers
Ancient history is always so interesting, remarkable that there are still so many things we can learn from them in building our societies now to be better and stronger.
Do you think that Plato's tale of Atlantis might have been an allegory of the Bronze Age collapse? Also, it seems that the eruption of Thera and the tale of Joseph might have coincided with the BAC.
@@MrNucleosome Was once a rich, powerful civilization, check. Often depicted with Hellenistic architecture and clothing, check. Destroyed by an earthquake and water, check. "Atlantis" was Mycenea.
@@theunreadyone Given the number of cases and the occasional appearance of more vaccine resistant strands, coronavirus is undoubtedly a system shock that will burden our system for a long time, and will probably be cited as a factor if/when our current system does collapse when other threats start adding to the pressure. (cough, climate change, cough)
coming back to this after the world's situation brought by the pandemic. "even today, we are not invulnerable" is a statement that resonates in almost terrifying manner in today's context. we thought that we could handle another outbreak, another - chaos as something we could control. the common sense expected from people to follow EACH and every one of our safety protocols was overestimated. due to one major crisis, the world's tradjectory had been changed, causing a domino effect that exposes how our systems are infallible. i'm partly grateful that due to this plague, we weren't wiped off the earth, or forced into a dark age similarly to the civilizations of the bronze age. it gives me hope, that despite our lack of preparation, we can survive this. we can keep leaving our marks for many more decades to come.
"Hey you know those rich people across the sea have food AND treasure, wanna raid them?" "Bet. They didn't pay my friends this year either might as well get revenge." "Yea, famine hitting hard might as well stock up lets go!" ~ Walpole and the South Sea People.
@@10Tabris01 this. The lockdowns, shortages and overall damages this pandemic has caused is just a mild inconvinience compared to the last big pandemic (1918 flu). We didnt loose millions of people yet abd have multiple treatments and vaccines within a year. Lets be happy about that.
That's something I used to think when I was at high school - that with how complex and interwoven our society is, it felt so unreal that it functions and at a maddening pace nonetheless. It felt to me that such a delicate system cannot be maintained for long, especially since _every_ society before that collapsed (true, some collapsed because of our advanced society, but still). It was only after I delved more into technology that I saw how this can work - how technology supports us and holds our society together. It's sad that most people don't understand technology even on a basic level because it invites a risk of misinterpreting its abilities and, as you said in the video, grants an illusion of immunity. Nowadays, it's most palpable in coding - it's absolutely everywhere and yet people have no clue what it takes to make a simple script, let alone a functioning app. Like Carl Sagan said, "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
I cannot agree. It was a bunch of questionable speculation and non-sequiturs, cobbled together into a long, convoluted speculation with no historical evidence. Really, they tried to use _Ramses III from seven hundred years later,_ to justify the existence of the Sea People during the Bronze Age collapse. Also, it ignores a well-evidenced theory which is the best explanation for the collapse of Egypt and the Hittites. The Hittites had a civil war. And Egypt had the Israelites. The latter detail also explains the razed cities, the new cities appearing along the Jordan River, inland, and among the mountains, and the existence of Israel itself.
How does Egypt a day Hitting xollapsing explain the collapse of other kingdoms? Yes, trade was a little dependent on them but what Egypt has was crops and gold. The Hittites were constantly at war etc.
The systemic collapse theory was developed by *Joseph Tainter,* you can find out more about his argument in his book *The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)*
The Indus River valley civilisation collapsed 800 years before the Bronze Age collapsed, mainly because the quality of the soil of the river had a capacity for food production nearly not enough to supply a great palace, not to mention of the salinisation of the area, and the Shang, collapsed mostly for their fragility after years of government, outside force and maybe some disease or famine along the way, not to mention the break up of their empire.
@@ilmisteriosofranceseradene7548 what if the people of Indus valley civilization are the referred as sea people ?! Late Harappan had migrated and they didn't find a proper settlement anywhere in the northern Europe but were excellent in warfare and just dived back
Systems collapse is like having someone get a hold of your leg in a fight. You can't reach the person holding it to try to make him let go, and the leg can't get free on its own. You can't just cut off your leg, either; that would put you at an even worse disadvantage. All you can do is hope the other guy has mercy-but usually they don't.
@@everettduncan7543 Mass immigration has always been a thing in history. For it to become catastrophic, it'd need to be entire countries packing up and moving to other countries. I mean hundreds of millions becoming migrants. A few million is no big deal considering our current population numbers.
@@ghyslainabel 'containment' is never a realistic possibility, we just needed to 'pause' until we get a reasonable understanding, then adapt and continue. we're really screwing up the 'continue' part b/c all of the ignorant sensationalism to drive fear.
@Musta Krackish watching vid about the collapse of an ancient civilization while living through what may someday be known as the beginning of the collapse of our civilization
@@jaewok5G Various human civilizations have been through far, FAR worse than the COVID-19 pandemic and still came out functioning (Spanish Flu, Bubonic Plague in Europe, etc.). The shutdown we're seeing is just for non-essential things like entertainment and restaurants. We're still producing food and power and global transportation is still running fine. Only if those last 3 things fail would civilization be in trouble, and they are nowhere close to threatened. COVID-19 will not be the end of civilization. It's barely even a bump in the road.
Somehow, Walpole finds a way to get into a video series about events that happened centuries before his great-great-great grandparents did the horizontal hula. *clap clap clap* Well played.
pateron supporters get early acces to video. Speak: The video is uploaded in advance, then 24 hour before the main release, the private video is shared on pateron and then the video is changed from "private" to "public".
Why do I feel like the Sea Peoples are the Reapers of the Bronze Age era, wiping out civilization at the end of their cycles in order for civilization to survive and evolve
Yes. It evolved once they were back at the point of the pre-Collapse civilizations. The Bronze Age Collapse is like downloading a file at 85% but then something happens and then you have to redownload the entire file again.
We may be entering the "Oil Age Collapse" (Personally I like the ring of "Silicon Age" but Earth is mostly Silicon). It gets harder and harder to find new rare oil sources and can't be replenished fast enough. It's starting to slow as evidenced in some oil based countries, take away the oil and society crumbles. Some countries can hold out, but most countries need trade to stay afloat. Even robust economies are starting to slow.
RebelBeamMaster X84 There are already plenty of alternatives, though, and it's not as though the world's remaining oil supply is likely to disappear overnight. Oil will be replaced by alternatives when it starts getting too expensive. This might slow economic growth if the alternatives are significantly more expensive (as they are today), but it's unlikely to cause a collapse.
This comment would have made sense in 2006. With the advent of new technology we have found new supplies of oil in fields thought long dead. Economies around the world are slowing because of diminishing returns. China specifically.
What we need is to start working together and colonize new planet or something. Instead with turn to blind new age of authoritarianism and hate groupism while the competionist nature of capitalism is just increase. There are plenty of resource in space that we can mined and can solve the overpopulation problem in some region of earth, which i believe can solve the problem of tribalism where everyman for himself thinking.
I think this is actually a really good example of what he's talking about. Because if it was just a disease, the world could tough it out easily. Hell, 1918 had the entire world eating casualty numbers rivaling their most bloody wars and just toughing it out. What's happening now is the virus being our "Sea People", a painful disaster hitting when we're already suffering from massive systemic problems that we were formerly able to chug along through, but are now openly displaying the massive cracks that we've just been ignoring because the world lulled itself into a false sense of invincibility.
On a civilizational scale, we weathered even the COVID crisis and a few other major health crises. It looks rough when you zoom in, but as a civilization we did better than most other times in history.
7 years later, still sprinting towards systems collapse at maximum speed because a few dozen people would rather be skeletons laying on Scrooge McDuckian piles of gold coins for alien archaeologists to find than solve literally any problem we are facing.
Is it possible to implement some sort of redundancy into the system? So that if one piece breaks, the second or even third piece can easily take its place? Is there a way to do this with all the pieces of our society today? Because relying on very specific things to maintain what we have doesn't sound safe. It sounds fragile. Because if those things go wrong, everything is over. We're practically asking for a collapse. We back up files on our computers so that we can replace them if they're lost. Is there a way to do that with our society?
There's also the potential that agriculture itself did these people in. They wouldn't have had any real knowledge of mineralization, erosion, or the like. Building these big societies would have required near-constant agriculture on already limited semiarid land. Generation after generation and the soil is less and less productive. And then the animals. Oh, the animals. This period isn't too long after goat, sheep, and cattle were domesticated. These animals are the point of origin for most pandemic human diseases - smallpox, measles, influenza, etc. If one of these diseases made the leap between livestock and human in a communicable form, it would have absolutely destroyed the population. And those diseases had to have appeared at some point, and to last and spread among humans as they have, the initial infection would have been in a large, well-connected society.
_They wouldn't have had any real knowledge of mineralization, erosion, or the like_ I wouldn't read too much into this idea of soil degradation. Those civilizations farmed their land almost 2000 Years before they collapsed. Soil degradation is MUCH faster. The idea of new diseases from domestic animals is far more compelling. This would be actually something new to those societies even tho I'm not sure about the actual timeline of domestication. But maybe the disease didn't originate in the mediterranen area. It's totally possible that it developed somewhere else and spread due to changing (environmental) factors. Like the pandemic of cholera. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cholera
Keyboard runner soil degradation can be quick when its is farmed in massive mechanised manners, like the great dustbowls occurred not too long after introduction of chemical fertiliser and tractors. But if the main point is constant, minerals are drained quicker than they are replaced, it will still cause soil degradation. To give it numbers (as im a fan of strategy games) if the soil had 100 mineral (abstraction) and lost 30 a year, it would degrade in a short amount of time, but what if it lost only 0.1 mineral a year, that gives you a massive amount of time before it degraded, far longer than any persons single lifetime to notice.
@Punkrawk "They wouldn't have had any real knowledge of mineralization, erosion, or the like". This is strictly not true, while they may not have known the specifics, it doesn't take a degree in agriculture or geology to realize that the soil along the Nile is more fertile than the soil in the Sahara desert. They almost certainly instinctively knew that the soil had something to do with crop yields but didn't have any effective ways of handling the problem.
Thanks for the amazing series. I like the subtil meaning brought in by the deceptively simple looking cartoon characters. My favorite ones are the bar bar people :D. Very accurate information throughout, while yet entertaining. Wish they'd use that format in schools.
It started with famine... and ended with four great civilizations' utter destruction. What can we learn from the Bronze Age Collapse?
Support us on Patreon for early access, topic suggestions, and more! www.patreon.com/ExtraCredits
Extra Credits Address the concerns of the citizenry promptly and in well measured steps. Be willing to break the mold of your society or the standard way of thinking. Be willing to use every tool in your tool box (citizens with different ideas and ways of approaching the problem than you or current leadership, upward mobility, capitalism, speed of communication, etc.)
Extra Credits Just use Far more abundant ressources, create more supplies, study more and try to improve on everything, then You can create a stable society.
Our Modern World is far less Fragile and is actually not declining, but rising due to the internet and all of that, I doubt that there will another collapse in the next year's.
Great series, really fascinating. I would be curious to read some of the books mentioned on the collapse of societies and empires, and the one about systems collapse. Can you post some of the titles?
Fear the Long Summer?
I second the request for the titles of any books used for researching this series
“Weapons are buried. Plans are made to collect these weapon caches, but no one will ever return.” This was truly a chilling phrase.
You must scare easy.
Why are there so few replies after 1 year and 391 likes
@@JohnNotAMurderer i gave 450th like
@@hellomoto2084 ok
replication reply
BTW - Why did the Egyptian Empire end????
ANS: All pyramid schemes end badly.
Who dabbled in pyramid schemes? Walpole
ANS?
@@stevenchoza6391 answer
malgold88
Oh. Thanks.
no
"For over a thousand years the chariots were the backbone of peace and order in the kingdom. Before the dark times. Before the sea people"
Is this from a series?
@@GreenKnight343 hahahaha
@@GreenKnight343 and years with “generations”
@@GreenKnight343 lol didn’t even see kingdom, you are right
There was a massive destruction that drove people from europe into the Mediterranean.
Who's watching this during Corona pandemic
Time for some Corona.
Bronze Age: food is scarce. 2020: toilet paper is scarce.
@@pop5678eye a good one
Is the world prepared to withstand prelonged quarentine?
Me
"For today, in this modern era, where we can probably weather most any crisis, if we fool ourselves into believing that we're immune, we may go on to create so many crises of our own that we may bring about the collapse of our own systems."
it's been a month and four days since the capitol riot in america and more than a year after the coronavirus was first discovered as of writing. this quote aged EXCEEDINGLY well.
Trying to stay optimistic, but to many patterns are appearing.......getting worried.
That was fun to watch for many anti western people.
I think the "deliveries of democracy" (bombardment, coups supported by cia, etc) is beginning to paying back in USA soil.
i second that
I don't think that we're immune, but modern society is able to absorb much more shocks than centuries ago, we live in an interconnected world now, it's no longer just a few kingdoms, I think most countries have learned from the coronavirus, Asia has dealt with outbreaks for years already, next time will be more prepared
History has a way of repeating itself, I suppose. At least I am aware of the precedent. The people of the bronze age would rightly have cursed the gods for the apocalypse of their world. I get to curse man instead.
Quote from "Red Dwarf": ""They say that every society is only three meals away from revolution. Deprive a culture of food for three meals, and you'll have an anarchy. And it's true, isn't it? You haven't eaten for a couple of days, and you've turned into a barbarian."
Kind of sums it up.
Unless your Soviet Russia. Then you can go more without a revolution
JjMmccnerd
**you're
:3
Mao be like: You can't have a revolution if you're already in a revolution *taps head
every society is maybe 3 meals from revolution. but modern western societies are way less vulnerable to hunger.
but Venezuela is an nice example. ppl gotta eat.
(but countries like iraq are in heavy war but still most of the population can eat.)
There was a study immediately after WW2 meant to examine the effect of malnutrition on the human psyche. This was to get an idea of what was going on with the people of Europe, who were going through a bit of a food shortage, due to most of the continent getting chewed up by a war (again). The subjects were Quakers, conscientious objectors who welcomed the opportunity to serve their country in a non-violent way, and also viewed it as an opportunity to deepen their faith through what could be viewed as fasting.
What they got instead was a crisis of faith. The study found that humans become temperamental and less capable of reason and logic. In short, when we're hungry, we revert to an almost primal state. The young Quaker men that participated in the study were shaken to their cores to learn that the only thing between the moral and polite people they'd been raised as, and a mean brute, was a few good meals.
I'm a "Systems and Complexity Associate" (yes, this is a real job title) for a large non-profit organization. My background is in Systems Thinking and Practices. Specifically, I create systems maps for the purposes of informing social-change strategies.
You have no idea how excited I am to stumble across a video talking about systems thinking and theory naturally (usually you'd have to go out of your way to search for and find one). Systems thinking is so important and relevant, yet it's still mostly unknown. So thank you for showing interest in the topic and highlighting it in your video! :)
SamDorios Any chance you can recommend a good, accessible introduction for laypeople? I think Systems thinking is an important skill for everyone to learn.
Yeah, that's the thing. We've not done a good job of providing good, accessible materials for newcomers. We definitely need to get on that.
I’m not sure how "accessible" it is, but a good place to start might be TheSystemsThinker. It's a website featuring some good articles on the subject. Might want to begin with the readings under their "How-To Guides."
Good authors on the subject are Donella Meadows, Daniel Kim, Peter Senge, and David Stroh.
A colleague of mine, Robert Ricigliano also has a great book (Making Peace Last), and a course about Systems Practice on plusacumen. But that's not for laypeople; it's for practitioners...
Hope that's somewhat helpful. Wish I had a better answer.
Although, to be fair, The Waters Foundation works with schools to introduce systems thinking to teachers and students. I helped run a workshop for their Milwaukee Conference, so got the chance to talk shop with them. Their work seemed great for students, but that also means it was a bit watered down (pun not intended). Though I do love that they’re introducing it at all!
Also, this is gonna be an off-the-wall recommendation, but if you do a google search for Nicky Case you'll come across her page. She does some small flash games/articles that are influenced by systems thinking. They're very neat. I particularly like the "Parable of the Polygon" which is about migration/segregation.
SamDorios thanks a bunch!
SamDorios I would love to have more talks with you about systems and complexity
This is the perfect background story for a post-apocalypse adventure set in the bronze age!
Age of Decadence sort of has something like that, but with a dark fantasy bent. More along the lines of a post apocalyptic fall of Rome though, if Rome literally had demi-gods fighting alongside them lol
*M A K E I T N O W*
Herrius Le Crabe Québécois Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!
You ARE in the bronze age post apocalypse...
Fallout: bronze collapse
World in 2020: *sweats in coronavirus crisis
Simon Bernard that’s what I’ve been thinking man, how many months of quarantine can the world handle until systems start breaking down
Mr. O tbh the modern system wont collapse hard bcs of the rich protecting themself. Then after the disaster they just have to lead the majority working class
@@xuan.1611 that seems to "Metropolis" to me
@@mr.o8539 A lot more than current state, decline of GDP just by 2 years seems like no crisis at all compared to fall of civilisasion...
@@mr.o8539 a lot because the world hasnt entirely stopped, a lot of systems are still working what has been stopped are non esential systems like entertainment or restaurants but food production, energy production, technological and scientific investigation are still going strong, if something they are going even smoother now that mayor centers that consume a lot of resources have stopped, for a real collapse those would have to stop and not all countries are suffering the same, some countries are actually taking the pandemic quite well, maybe some small countries will fall into caos and i'm also of the opinión that the world after the pandemic is not going to look the same as before the pandemic, but it's posible that is for the best
For everyone talking about covid-19 in this video: Yes, covid-19 is a naughty boy, but it's like a bad harvest for our society. Covid-19 is something that will make 2020 and 2021 very bad years; but our real sea people and collapse is climate change. That is the real threat that can combine all the elements the series has explained about the bronze age collapse
Just as refugees fleeing the seaborne raiders escalated the crisis, so to will refugees fleeing island nations that are consumed by the oceans
@@SpectralPotatoSP nah it's racists.
The only solution to climate change is to erect a worldwide government of resource distribution, corral as many people as possible into mass population pods, enforce a strict diet of insects, ban individual travel and property rights, oh yeah and to enact massive carbon taxes.
@@scottydu81 I'm not 100% sure how serious you are but it's not anywhere near that amount of doom and gloom. Modernized nuclear power, combined with forest restoration initiatives and increased regulation of resource usage gets is most of the way there. Granted that's not easy and requires international cooperation but it's not awful.
@@SpectralPotatoSP Nah, if global warming leads to system collapse China is going to be a pillage destination, not a source. Your Sea People are going to be the millions of refugees fleeing from famine and govt collapse all over the Third World. You kind of saw a preview of that with the arrival of the Central American caravans on the US Southern border as people fled from famine, droughts, gang violence, and government corruption and repression in Central America.
And so the kingdom of Gondor sank into ruin. The line of kings failed. The white tree withered. The rule of Gondor was given over to lesser men.
@Garrett Strauser WTF du nazi ?!
Sounds like the US now.
@@Alusnovalotus
yee
fucking
*H A W*
in reality i hate my own country right now
I think Gondor was much more based on the gradual crumbling of the Roman Empire than the sudden collapse of the Bronze Age Collapse
@@Septimus_ii The fall of the northern kingdom of arnor and its successors was a lot more like the bronze age collapse.
Tolkien certainly knew all we know about the subject
In the nineties, when I was a kid, I noticed a lot of the sci-fi shows that I enjoyed had minor storylines or single episodes devoted to warning us about complex societies. Usually they took it from the angle of losing the "self", like being part of a complex society requires the sacrifice of one's personal identity or freedoms. And to some degree they're right, you do give up some freedoms to be part of a system.
But the people who had these ideas in these shows almost always took the extreme route of going completely in the opposite direction, becoming amish-like refugees from the space-faring or interdimensional-exploring civilisations they hailed from, citing that such advancement invited its own end, and that simplicity was the way by which one avoided whole-sale collapses. With no system, no collapse.
But even as a child, I remember thinking "Yeah, but then you have no police or an army to defend your way of life. You have no hospitals with advanced medical care to treat simple diseases or injuries. You don't have robust farming techniques that almost guarantee plentiful food." Of course, I didn't put it quite like that when I was 7, but it was the same idea in principle.
All these "going back to a simpler time" episodes almost never showed these people being overrun by opposing armies, or hit by devastating curable diseases, or starving when their finite crop system bugged out for a week. They always just showed the philosophical inadequacies, or more often put them in an agreeable light, as though becoming agrarian hermit societies was actually the right way to go.
polyculture
That’s what they did with the forerunners in the Halo Franchise
@john smith *whistling the tune of the MAGNIFICENT 7*
The great thing is that, as long as complex societies exist, the people who want simplicity can just go off on their own and do whatever they want in the middle of nowhere. The opposite isn't true if the simpletons were to drag us back to the dark ages.
I believe the story of Atlantis was an early version of these stories.
Notice! This episode concludes the Bronze Age Collapse series, and after this Extra History will be taking a one week break. We'll be back with a few one-off episodes starting on July 29!
Extra Credits have a great break!
What series is next?
Extra Credits Could you maybe mention some of the books on societal collapse if possible?
Will there be a Lies episode about this particular series?
This was a fantastic ending!
Am I alone in saying that this series gave me a new fear in life? The fact that these thriving societies collapsed in the space of just 40-50 years is horrifying and gives me anxiety.
Well it wouldn't be the first or last time. modern societies hardly collapse to the same extent that they did in the past, simply because technology and interconnection make it difficult for a society to remain collapsed. think Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Myanmar and a few others recently have gone through the throws of collapse and civil war, but for the most part have reasserted themselves as individual states and so on. now 300 years ago an unstable society would just be consumed by its neighbor, but as that rarely happens any more through international pressures, societies have a greater chance of coming back and can do it much faster than the Egyptians and Greeks did so many millennia ago.
I have no doubt at all that our current societies will collapse as well. My number one reason for that is global warming, but an asteroid or a solar flare resetting us all are all likely. To me it's not a matter of if, but when. Will it be in next 10 years? 100? 1000?
All it would take is one nuclear war. We would collapse in 5 years. Our societies are now fully dependent on digital technology, if supply routes are disrupted new devices can’t be made, the entire modern system would implode very quickly.
Get your moats dug
@@felixschrider9037 And imagine that some people are against globalism. It's a matter of survival and better living conditions for our entire species.
Some dude a few years back: "new deseases? No problem"
Corona: allow me to introduce myself
"Hold my beer..."
There should be a bronze age collapse total war game
does troy total war count?
It was Walpole. He invested in a time machine and tried to run his scheme with the Pharaohs and whatnot back then.
that time traveling sociopath
ok, you win the internet. Now go home.
You sir just solved one of the great historical mysteries.
A wild Walpole appears!
Where's a Quick Ball when you need one?
LeBron's age comes to an end. No longer could the people look to the Cavaliers to defend what was once theirs. Warriors had invaded from west, and had left Cleveland ravaged and broken.
Dessa great comment 😂
Dessa xD I don't even like sports but I still found this funny
We poor wretches in upstate New York share your pain, for we still suffer from the results of the Buffalo Bills Age Collapse.
The great cowardice of Kevin 'The Rat' Durant has set a new low and plunged the world into a dark age, his rabid lap dog Zaza doing dirty work to destroy great soldiers like Kawhi Leonard delegitimizing a once-great era.
The Warriors were then set upon and devoured by vicious Raptors from the north.
"the appearance of some new disease"
Yeah, about that...
Sigh. Extra Credits tried to warn us... we did not listen.
Hm... too reliant on trade... new disease.... unrest... Oh sh*t.
@@fantasyfanatical5510
I'd say it's more like we've or our leaders have gone on to create problems for ourselves and our societies. The Corona virus could've been contained or atleast slow it's advance greatly but because of greed, selfishness, negligence, willful ignorance, and arrogance we thought ourselves to be invincible and untouchable. We as a species could've easily dealt with the problem but chose not to because why sacrifice even a little bit of profits or risk angering corporate shareholders over the long term stability of our societies. Basically preventive measures are something that we could easily do but won't because preventative maintenance isn't profitable.
The conclusion makes me realize that our modern societies globally will collapse not in the way of the romans, but in the way of the Bronze Age collapse - and catastrophic climate change might be the biggest culprit
Asked.
I was thinking that too, especially that most of humanity is on the coast.
Or alien invaders taking the role of the Sea People.
Roman society became one of worrying more about who ruled rome, than about competing with foreigners. With relying on foreign soldiers to fight for you and foreign slaves to work. Then, when plague strikes and foreigners are already the majority of your society, they cast you down.
Our collapse will be the same, AI and robots will surely replace us. Give at a couple hundred years
Climate change plus pandemic plus economic collapse plus wars plus natural disaster
Your conclusion reminds me a lot of thoughts I had when reading up on the Library of Alexandria. While the decay of that institution was gradual and not nearly as dramatic as often thought, it still represents to me the idea that 'progress' may not be as inevitable as we believe. Knowledge that was gained can be lost, and Civilisation's march forward is not a permanent given. Mostly unthinkable in today's society, it made me consider that 'progress' can be reversed.
Civilisation's march forward is something that has essentially continued throughout history; the Bronze Age collapse is one of only a handful of examples of a relatively long-lasting negative trend in human civilisation, but this march forward is not a continuous line either; zoom in and you see that it rises far more sharply than the average, then quickly collapses, and starts quickly rising again.
you should read 'Sapiens'
I think that todays political climate is evidence enough of that.
After checking their "Bronze Privilege" the advanced Civilizations were paralyzed by guilt... There was a decision to invite less educated, less specialized people from less organized societies.... Then, for the sake of cultural enhancement and community cohesion, allow the newcomers to practice their traditional ways.... After 2 or 3 generations the guilt ridden people, along with their privilege producing systems, had disappeared.
All complex civilizations are multicultural, like it or not.
The Hittite empire included Nesli (the "Hittites" proper), Hattians, and Hurrians. The Romans, of course, included diverse peoples from every part of the known world. Ancient Egyptians came from sources as diverse as North Africa, the Near East, and even Europe.
The dream of an "ethnically pure" state has always been a fantasy.
Now the Phoenicians can get down to business!
Sarsath Pun Noted
Also, can we switch to something that's a little more easier to find, thanks
and then Carthage......
Look who came to Israel. It's the 12 Tribes of Israel!
And they believe in god!!!!!!!!!
Just one though, he has like a 10 step program
“The appearance of some new disease: no problem, we can handle it.” This hits different after COVID
All things considered, it was no problem, and it was handled. Back in the day such a virulent disease would take 1/3 of civilization's population.
"The appearance of a new disease, no problem, we can handle that." So much for that one.
Society: yall mind if i dip
Society has left the chat
Define disease , if you mean a pathogen then yes we can, but if you mean a narrative designed to keep a population in a lower class by creating a narrative and using censusual science that's based on feelings rather than facts, then we'll just have to wait and see.
Did your society crumble and completely collapsed?
@@TheDude2111 is Exhibit A: disproving the idea modern societies can handle the appearance of a new disease
Guess Extra Credits didn't count on the depths to which people can be gullible morons who believe everything they see on Facebook!
@@spliceosome I remember when people all over the internet acted like 2020 was going to look like the bronze age collapse
Ooooh...the end message of this series aged like the finest of wines.
As a software engineer, I have to wonder if there are ways to build more robustness into our societies.
After Hurricane Katrina, lots of folks became interested in disaster preparedness. But they were focused on an individual or family level. What if we could build disaster preparedness on an urban block level, where a street of 40-80 people have a plan to withstand some major shock.
maybe a region by region disaster "tax" which would go to a disaster box to help those in a certain city or county
the money should then strictly be used for housing and provisions etc.
the tax could be collected in non disaster times, and then distributed only in case of a disaster
Or we could just direct those efforts towards preventing the kinds of disasters that can bring our whole global society down by preserving biodiversity, combating the depletion of phosphorus, nitrogen and other crucial limited resources, reverting harmful land use patterns, preventing top soil loss and the waste of fresh water in agriculture, and limiting climate change.
Yes, that will cost growth, just as making systems more resilient but if all those things come crushing down on us at the same time, it would be foolish to assume that our civilization can handle that, no matter how many bunkers we build and how much food we stockpile.
If Katrina taught the US any lessons t should be that States counties and cities need to be in charge and the Feds need to come by after and help pay the bills. So much time and effort was wasted because all of the authority to act was placed in DC thousands of miles away. If a disaster to be managed it needs to have locals running the show. They know the people, the terrain, the problems and the needs. If everybody is waiting on the feds to act the disaster is already aftermath by that point. So much time was wasted by the Governor and Mayor waiting on orders rather than just saying "I don't give a crap about regulations let them bill me, get people on anything with wheels and get them out of the way of this thing NOW!"
Tesla-Effect go drink some juice, edgelord.
They also said that the banks are "too big to collapse"
Then, 2008 happens
and they were too big to collapse, so they were bailed out.
James Cusack
many people miscontextualize this quote, thinking it meant "the banks are so big that they are incapable of collapse", when in reality the quote was referring to the idea that the financial systems and banks were so big and integral to the economy that the consequences would be disastrous if they failed, so the government couldn't allow them to fail. a better phrasing of the quote would be "too integral to allow to fail"
They were so big they had to collapse. The bailout was a mistake
The banks essentially held the government ransom. They were too big to fail. If they did, it would have disastrous effects to the economy. So the government is forced to bail them out. Knowing that they can get away with anything, they will continue to give unreasonable loans. After all, if the loans succeed, you profit. If they fail, you get bailed out and nothing happens. If they don't bail you out, you drag the rest of the country down. You hold them as ransom.
_The bailout was a mistake_
I don´t think it was. I mean, a lot of crooks in the banking system got paid for essentially doing a lousy job, which is totally unfair... but the collapse of the banking system would have brought far worse things than just some rich douchebags getting to skip jail.
th-cam.com/video/2f2kGHcdJYU/w-d-xo.html
“And once you can’t support that population, there’s no nice way to bring that number down”.
History doesn’t repeat, but history rhymes
That quote made me shudder. It is shocking how easily the things that hold up our society can crumble.
This reminds me of a angry rant of a paper that I read for a grad student course that was written by environmental extremists, basically it argued that a majority of the population should be humanely euthanized or forced to starve to death in order to atone for our destruction of the environment. Scary stuff.
1:13 So you ask Anubis for a harvest and you expect it to be great?
He was only supposed to kill the weeds! 😭
@@shioneshiori4471 "Kill in my name, Chaka, and I shall secure a harvest better than your Father, Rufus, ever could!!"
He was supposed to be an advisor on how to avoid death, not act directly.
He did his best okay!? Its not his fault they didnt pray to the right god
Literally what happens in age of empires when you don't scout your enemy
Thus the Assyrians rise to power and reach their peak, one man's Dark age is another ones Golden age.
With that out of the way, we can focus on something else: Cyrus II the great and his rise of power of becoming the Justinian of Alexander
I'm sure they did Justinian already.
Frane Šustić You didn't even read my comment, they should do CYRUS THE GREAT
I did, just wanted you to know since you are obviously interested to go and watch their videos on Justinian, and I would like to see Cyrus or Alexander as well(but that was secondary to informing you of Justinian video that exists already).
Perhaps. In modern economics assuming wealth is zero sum is a fool's mindset
The Rising Theurge the "justinian of Alexander? " what's that mean
To sum up the final point in a slightly simpler way: Titanic sank.
Nothing to our knowledge has proven to be unsinkable, and the assumption that something is usually leads to catastrophe.
That is probably why Titanic proved so traumatic we still remember the jist of the story today.
The assumption of infallibility is bound to self-destruct.
There's probably something to the concepts presented in the theory of systems collapse.
so was Tschernobyl.
Nah, Titanic sunk because people were idiots...
@@ondras5241 These two idea's need not be mutually exclusive. haha
I feel that this is the backstory for every game of civ
Not really, on normal settings you start at usually 3000 BC which is about 2,000 years before all these events. If you decide to start in Classical Era, however...
Yeah, that makes sense. So you research a little bit and suddenly you have writing? No, most likely writing already existed and you just adapted it to your civilization's needs and expanded the knowledge base from a few sages to an entire working class of record keepers.
No, not really. I'm not saying that writing was never invented. We're talking about the beginning of the Sid Meier's Civilization games. This explanation that your civilization isn't the first makes sense. Consider all the ruins you can find, for example. It really feels like you're staring off as a small tribe that survived the something like the bronze age collapse in isolation.
KaptenN There were large cities in the ancient world like The Legendary Jeriko these cities are absurdly old some dates back to 8000 bc! let that number sink in! 5000 years before the age if Sumerian Cities! To Sumer Jeriko is as old as Sumer is to US! incredible! So yes if yo start as a tribe in 3000 bc you probably not the first to invent like any technology for a while... and those ruins speek of an unkown age when The first cities prospered...
I was thinking of Tropico and how easy it is to mess up an island there by not getting enough merchandise to market to cover the cost of all your workers
Ancient history is always so interesting, remarkable that there are still so many things we can learn from them in building our societies now to be better and stronger.
"We have to handle these incredible cultures that we've built thoughtfully, and respect"
Well said.
Do you think that Plato's tale of Atlantis might have been an allegory of the Bronze Age collapse? Also, it seems that the eruption of Thera and the tale of Joseph might have coincided with the BAC.
Blown
"Atlantis" was Mycenea. Why do you think it's always depicted as Greek-like?
You're way off, buddy. Read some more.
@@andyjay729 Not sure if trolling or stupid.
@@MrNucleosome Was once a rich, powerful civilization, check. Often depicted with Hellenistic architecture and clothing, check. Destroyed by an earthquake and water, check.
"Atlantis" was Mycenea.
“A new disease? We can handle it.”
“Unless our leaders are complete morons, but what are the chances...?” 🤔
To be fair I’d hardly say being stuck in your home for a little while is akin to entire nations collapsing
@@theunreadyone And even then, the entire chain of production and consumption was barely impacted
@@theunreadyone There are many letters left in the Greek alphabet!
@@theunreadyone Given the number of cases and the occasional appearance of more vaccine resistant strands, coronavirus is undoubtedly a system shock that will burden our system for a long time, and will probably be cited as a factor if/when our current system does collapse when other threats start adding to the pressure. (cough, climate change, cough)
coming back to this after the world's situation brought by the pandemic. "even today, we are not invulnerable" is a statement that resonates in almost terrifying manner in today's context. we thought that we could handle another outbreak, another - chaos as something we could control. the common sense expected from people to follow EACH and every one of our safety protocols was overestimated.
due to one major crisis, the world's tradjectory had been changed, causing a domino effect that exposes how our systems are infallible.
i'm partly grateful that due to this plague, we weren't wiped off the earth, or forced into a dark age similarly to the civilizations of the bronze age. it gives me hope, that despite our lack of preparation, we can survive this. we can keep leaving our marks for many more decades to come.
A wonderfully put and concise cautionary tale. I wish I found these earlier, but that just means I have a bunch to binge on now.
That final statement was beautifully spoken. We are not gods, we are frail humans.
speak for yourself I can bench 100kg.
@@samoak123 Until you can shoot ice from your hands and sing a catchy Disney song in tune, I am not impressed.
@@debachiazabache8782 lol nerd!
@@samoak123 The Laidlaw bus is that way 👉😆
@@samoak123 100 only? i can bench upto 150 if you are gonna flex ,flex a number which seems impressive
Now the Phoenicians can get down to business!
Altair ibn la ahad you can make a religion out of this
You can make a religion out of this... Is loving Jesus legal yet?
Pepe Montuenga No! But then constantine saya its ok
Hey Altair! Learned to swim yet?
Now this looks like a job for me
Any chance you guys will do a series on the Indus Valley Civilization or of other points in Ancient India in the future?
I'd love something on the Mahabharata or other Vedic texts. Maybe the Epic of Gilgamesh or ancient Chinese folklore? "Extra Literature?"
we can still determine a lot of things based on archaeology alone.
1 series of Extra Mythology is a Patreon goal at the moment
And then can we get Norte Chico after that?
I think Ashoka would fit the style of this series really well.
"Hey you know those rich people across the sea have food AND treasure, wanna raid them?"
"Bet. They didn't pay my friends this year either might as well get revenge."
"Yea, famine hitting hard might as well stock up lets go!"
~ Walpole and the South Sea People.
“Droughts, the appearance of some new disease? No, problem”
We have to see how this ends first.
KNEW SOMEONE WOULD QUOTE THIS DURING THE PANDEMIC
“We are not invulnerable “
HA SCREW THAT IM GOIN TO THE BEACH
I mean, back in the day we would have just been dying on mass, so yay?
@@10Tabris01 this. The lockdowns, shortages and overall damages this pandemic has caused is just a mild inconvinience compared to the last big pandemic (1918 flu). We didnt loose millions of people yet abd have multiple treatments and vaccines within a year. Lets be happy about that.
if ya can't beat em, join em. I'm a sea person now
That's something I used to think when I was at high school - that with how complex and interwoven our society is, it felt so unreal that it functions and at a maddening pace nonetheless. It felt to me that such a delicate system cannot be maintained for long, especially since _every_ society before that collapsed (true, some collapsed because of our advanced society, but still).
It was only after I delved more into technology that I saw how this can work - how technology supports us and holds our society together. It's sad that most people don't understand technology even on a basic level because it invites a risk of misinterpreting its abilities and, as you said in the video, grants an illusion of immunity. Nowadays, it's most palpable in coding - it's absolutely everywhere and yet people have no clue what it takes to make a simple script, let alone a functioning app.
Like Carl Sagan said, "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
This was a good series.
Fascinating
I cannot agree. It was a bunch of questionable speculation and non-sequiturs, cobbled together into a long, convoluted speculation with no historical evidence. Really, they tried to use _Ramses III from seven hundred years later,_ to justify the existence of the Sea People during the Bronze Age collapse.
Also, it ignores a well-evidenced theory which is the best explanation for the collapse of Egypt and the Hittites. The Hittites had a civil war. And Egypt had the Israelites.
The latter detail also explains the razed cities, the new cities appearing along the Jordan River, inland, and among the mountains, and the existence of Israel itself.
What on Earth are you talking about?
There's no concrete e identical for the sea people. They themselves said that this has a lot of speculation.
How does Egypt a day Hitting xollapsing explain the collapse of other kingdoms? Yes, trade was a little dependent on them but what Egypt has was crops and gold. The Hittites were constantly at war etc.
"The appearance of some new disease".......Well, that happened now...
"...the appearance of some new disease? No, problem”
*laughs nervously in 2020*
2:26
So in the end what caused the Bronze Age collapse? We may never kn- Walpole. It was Walpole.
He time travelled and sent the Sea Peoples to invade the Bronze Age?
Should I evolve my Walpole?
Walpoleon?
Sealand Ball he upgraded to prime minister
Loren so, should I trade him in for a Yi or a Oda?
Walpoleceus!
Yi is a strong water class, but a Walpole is good in all scenarios.
I knew it! Walpole is behind everything!!!
In one way or another. ;)
Dammit walpole!
What is Walpole?
Declan Newton-Maharaj watch their videos of the south bubble sea its great and hilarious ;)
Rewatching the original societal collapse before the remake drops.
Yup
The systemic collapse theory was developed by *Joseph Tainter,* you can find out more about his argument in his book *The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)*
Thanks!
I wonder how the bronze age collapse effected the Indus valley and the Shang dynasty
As far as I know, not at all.
Really??? Why was that so?
The Indus River valley civilisation collapsed 800 years before the Bronze Age collapsed, mainly because the quality of the soil of the river had a capacity for food production nearly not enough to supply a great palace, not to mention of the salinisation of the area, and the Shang, collapsed mostly for their fragility after years of government, outside force and maybe some disease or famine along the way, not to mention the break up of their empire.
Mathias Radenez Shang wasn't broken up, it was eventually conquered and absorbed by the Zhou
@@ilmisteriosofranceseradene7548 what if the people of Indus valley civilization are the referred as sea people ?!
Late Harappan had migrated and they didn't find a proper settlement anywhere in the northern Europe but were excellent in warfare and just dived back
Systems collapse is like having someone get a hold of your leg in a fight. You can't reach the person holding it to try to make him let go, and the leg can't get free on its own. You can't just cut off your leg, either; that would put you at an even worse disadvantage. All you can do is hope the other guy has mercy-but usually they don't.
"droughts or new diseases, we can handle it all" lol
we still are here, aren't we?
@@Storming360 3.9 million people would disagree
@@abram7186 "we" in that sentence is referring to civilization.
The scary thing is, I kind of see this sort of systems failure beginning to occur in our modern day society. I just hope the cat videos survive.
I’m afraid to ask but could you elaborate please?
@@KlaxontheImpailr man said this commenting on a TH-cam video after a big meal 🤡
@@killboxman30 mass immigration is the first sign something is seriously wrong. The problems always start somewhere else
@@everettduncan7543 Mass immigration has always been a thing in history. For it to become catastrophic, it'd need to be entire countries packing up and moving to other countries. I mean hundreds of millions becoming migrants. A few million is no big deal considering our current population numbers.
just wait until the gulf stream collapses and climate chaos gets going in earnest@@KlaxontheImpailr
Ironically watching this during the Corona virus quarantine.
Yes, and we in the West thought ourselves invulnerable. We should have implemented quarantine in January, when containment was still a possibility.
@@ghyslainabel 'containment' is never a realistic possibility, we just needed to 'pause' until we get a reasonable understanding, then adapt and continue. we're really screwing up the 'continue' part b/c all of the ignorant sensationalism to drive fear.
@Musta Krackish watching vid about the collapse of an ancient civilization while living through what may someday be known as the beginning of the collapse of our civilization
Same
@@jaewok5G Various human civilizations have been through far, FAR worse than the COVID-19 pandemic and still came out functioning (Spanish Flu, Bubonic Plague in Europe, etc.). The shutdown we're seeing is just for non-essential things like entertainment and restaurants. We're still producing food and power and global transportation is still running fine. Only if those last 3 things fail would civilization be in trouble, and they are nowhere close to threatened.
COVID-19 will not be the end of civilization. It's barely even a bump in the road.
Very Interesting. How about Extra History on the Dark Ages and the lead up to the High Middle Ages?
Hell yeah!
Somehow, Walpole finds a way to get into a video series about events that happened centuries before his great-great-great grandparents did the horizontal hula. *clap clap clap* Well played.
Horizontal hula, now that's a new one. ;)
Robert Walpole I have a question. Was it you?
I think the image of those two scholars at 0:24 is funny. Honestly, some of them would do that if it were legal.
9:32 Not sure about that one😂
Ho, man. I joined the Early access club a while back, but FINALLY I caught it before the public release! HA!
Rynosaur94 how you post this 23 hours ago if this video is out for 1 hour?
pateron supporters get early acces to video.
Speak: The video is uploaded in advance, then 24 hour before the main release, the private video is shared on pateron and then the video is changed from "private" to "public".
thanks for the info
i didn't know about this, nice system. normal people miss nothing and rich ppl still get something. wish the world was always like this XD
Why do I feel like the Sea Peoples are the Reapers of the Bronze Age era, wiping out civilization at the end of their cycles in order for civilization to survive and evolve
But civilization did not survive and evolve.
It took ages for anything to regrow there.
Well it didn't survive true, but after many millennia it evolved
Yes. It evolved once they were back at the point of the pre-Collapse civilizations.
The Bronze Age Collapse is like downloading a file at 85% but then something happens and then you have to redownload the entire file again.
Damn internet speed... or pirates, or net neutrality xD
The Reapers?
Damn it we need Pokémon Rusty to capture Wild Walpole.
YOU WILL NEVER CATCH ME! Woop, woop, woop ,woop!
Robert Walpole it was you
@@robertwalpole360 *throws master ball at walpole*
@@azelfdaboi5265 it misses.
Which video originate this precious meme?
Well, well, well. Here we are now. Let's just see how we come out of this COVID19 thing.
People in 2021: uh oh
This was the most entertaining yet highly educational and eye-opener video that I've seen in months! I just want to say Thank you!
systems collapse is something I already knew about - Thank you grand strategy/citybuilders/empire management games.
Our modern era may collapse under climate change
9:32 *Coronavirus: Am i a joke to you?*
Anyone else watching this with coronavirus setting in?
9:31
"...the appearence of new disease, no problem we can handle it"
Knock-knock, whos there?
It's Covid-19!
I now want a fantasy series where the collapse was caused by a sorcerer/magical being and in the modern day they awake.
We may be entering the "Oil Age Collapse" (Personally I like the ring of "Silicon Age" but Earth is mostly Silicon). It gets harder and harder to find new rare oil sources and can't be replenished fast enough. It's starting to slow as evidenced in some oil based countries, take away the oil and society crumbles. Some countries can hold out, but most countries need trade to stay afloat. Even robust economies are starting to slow.
RebelBeamMaster X84 There are already plenty of alternatives, though, and it's not as though the world's remaining oil supply is likely to disappear overnight. Oil will be replaced by alternatives when it starts getting too expensive. This might slow economic growth if the alternatives are significantly more expensive (as they are today), but it's unlikely to cause a collapse.
RebelBeamMaster X84 we are the digital age
This comment would have made sense in 2006. With the advent of new technology we have found new supplies of oil in fields thought long dead.
Economies around the world are slowing because of diminishing returns. China specifically.
What we need is to start working together and colonize new planet or something. Instead with turn to blind new age of authoritarianism and hate groupism while the competionist nature of capitalism is just increase. There are plenty of resource in space that we can mined and can solve the overpopulation problem in some region of earth, which i believe can solve the problem of tribalism where everyman for himself thinking.
Elon's gotcha covered!
I’m prepared to see the sea people show up any second now
9:35 : Message from the future: The appearance of a new disease can still be a problem.
I think this is actually a really good example of what he's talking about. Because if it was just a disease, the world could tough it out easily. Hell, 1918 had the entire world eating casualty numbers rivaling their most bloody wars and just toughing it out. What's happening now is the virus being our "Sea People", a painful disaster hitting when we're already suffering from massive systemic problems that we were formerly able to chug along through, but are now openly displaying the massive cracks that we've just been ignoring because the world lulled itself into a false sense of invincibility.
On a civilizational scale, we weathered even the COVID crisis and a few other major health crises. It looks rough when you zoom in, but as a civilization we did better than most other times in history.
"The appearance of a new disease? No problem. We can handle it."
YOU'D THINK SO, WOULDN'T YOU?
:)
Covid 19 says “hold my beer.”
What scares me the most about these kinds of societal collapses it is seems like by the time there's any obvious sign, it's too late.
7 years later, still sprinting towards systems collapse at maximum speed because a few dozen people would rather be skeletons laying on Scrooge McDuckian piles of gold coins for alien archaeologists to find than solve literally any problem we are facing.
Is it possible to implement some sort of redundancy into the system? So that if one piece breaks, the second or even third piece can easily take its place? Is there a way to do this with all the pieces of our society today?
Because relying on very specific things to maintain what we have doesn't sound safe. It sounds fragile. Because if those things go wrong, everything is over. We're practically asking for a collapse.
We back up files on our computers so that we can replace them if they're lost. Is there a way to do that with our society?
9:38 New Diesease
"We survived but barely"
As society progresses, the costs go up. This is a phenomenon every 4X strategy game player knows all too well.
This series feels more and more relevant
Wow. The last words of this video resonate strongly today!
There's also the potential that agriculture itself did these people in. They wouldn't have had any real knowledge of mineralization, erosion, or the like. Building these big societies would have required near-constant agriculture on already limited semiarid land. Generation after generation and the soil is less and less productive.
And then the animals. Oh, the animals. This period isn't too long after goat, sheep, and cattle were domesticated. These animals are the point of origin for most pandemic human diseases - smallpox, measles, influenza, etc. If one of these diseases made the leap between livestock and human in a communicable form, it would have absolutely destroyed the population. And those diseases had to have appeared at some point, and to last and spread among humans as they have, the initial infection would have been in a large, well-connected society.
_They wouldn't have had any real knowledge of mineralization, erosion, or the like_
I wouldn't read too much into this idea of soil degradation. Those civilizations farmed their land almost 2000 Years before they collapsed. Soil degradation is MUCH faster.
The idea of new diseases from domestic animals is far more compelling. This would be actually something new to those societies even tho I'm not sure about the actual timeline of domestication.
But maybe the disease didn't originate in the mediterranen area. It's totally possible that it developed somewhere else and spread due to changing (environmental) factors. Like the pandemic of cholera. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cholera
Keyboard runner soil degradation can be quick when its is farmed in massive mechanised manners, like the great dustbowls occurred not too long after introduction of chemical fertiliser and tractors.
But if the main point is constant, minerals are drained quicker than they are replaced, it will still cause soil degradation.
To give it numbers (as im a fan of strategy games) if the soil had 100 mineral (abstraction) and lost 30 a year, it would degrade in a short amount of time, but what if it lost only 0.1 mineral a year, that gives you a massive amount of time before it degraded, far longer than any persons single lifetime to notice.
@Punkrawk "They wouldn't have had any real knowledge of mineralization, erosion, or the like". This is strictly not true, while they may not have known the specifics, it doesn't take a degree in agriculture or geology to realize that the soil along the Nile is more fertile than the soil in the Sahara desert. They almost certainly instinctively knew that the soil had something to do with crop yields but didn't have any effective ways of handling the problem.
Some of these stuff is eerily similar to what’s happening today.
Oranges actually are produced in winter time.
Yeah, but not in the northern hemisphere 200 years ago.
And not cheap enough without the Agricultural Revolution
Watching this video (particularly the end) in Nov of 2020 is haunting.
Good summary @9:24 (also good point on new disease and droughts)
Oh my god... The Joker was involved in this too! 4:14
This has aged far too well
And also from the ruins of bronze age will soon rise an iron age
Ungoogleable o_O i know the bronze age era kingdom was now in ruins but i will take a long time for iron age kingdom to built
Thanks for the amazing series. I like the subtil meaning brought in by the deceptively simple looking cartoon characters. My favorite ones are the bar bar people :D. Very accurate information throughout, while yet entertaining. Wish they'd use that format in schools.
The "theory" you threw out at the end reminds me of Billy Madison when he tells the story of the lost puppy
Wow this has not aged well