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Stepping out of the reed boat, the woman’s feet sank deep into the mud. It was thick, black stuff, the fine, fertile Nile silt deposited by the river’s annual floods. The river had only just started to fall after months of rising waters; soon, it would be time to start sowing the fields on either bank. There was still a little time to spare before the work began in earnest.

The mud oozed up to the woman’s ankles and squelched with every step. Dragging the boat away from the bank to drier land took effort, especially when the little reed craft was loaded full of baskets of grain. But the workers at the building site needed to eat, and that meant straining her back and getting thick clods of soil stuck all over her feet.

When the boat was finally out of the mud, she nearly collapsed from exhaustion. Bending at the waist and bracing her hands on her hips, she stopped to catch a few deep breaths. Every one of her forty years seemed to stab at her aching hands, legs, and joints, punishing her for the endless days of toil that made up her daily life. Grinding grain was the worst, a neverending punishment for the wrists and fingers. Carrying water from the river was a close second. Paddling a boat and pulling it onto the riverbank wasn’t nearly as bad as those two interminable tasks, which was why she had volunteered to bring their village’s grain downstream to the building site, but it still took its toll.

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Everything did. Her hair, which had been thick and black in her younger years, had thinned dramatically after six pregnancies and a lifetime of physical labor. What was left was mostly gray. Her right ankle had never healed correctly after that time a donkey’s hoof came down on it at an odd angle. That one tooth in the back of her mouth was giving her trouble again, and a growing pain in her abdomen sometimes kept her up at night.

But at least she was alive and moving. Her belly was full of porridge and thick, tasty beer. The late-autumn sun wasn’t too hot on her exposed face and neck. The flood had been good this year, promising a rich crop at harvest time. She flicked a clod of that thick mud off her foot: Kemet, she thought, the Black Land. That earth, even more than the kings who mediated between her people and the gods, whose visages stared down from enormous statues and whose names were constantly repeated by administrators and priests, was really Egypt.

Break

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another episode of Past Lives. I’m your host, Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today.

When we think about ancient human remains, particularly mummified remains, the first place our minds reach for is Egypt. There are two reasons for this. The first is the centrality of ancient Egypt in our - and I’m using “our” loosely here - understanding of human history: The fact that the pyramids, temples, and tombs are still visible today, some of the oldest monuments still in close proximity to where people live now, certainly plays a role in that. So too does the continuous presence of European archaeologists in Egypt for the better part of two centuries. Hieroglypic writing was deciphered 200 years ago, thanks to the Rosetta stone. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt created a craze for Egyptian-style designs and even furniture across Europe early in the 19th century, and since then, Egypt has never really left the popular consciousness. On top of that, much of what we take for granted about how archaeology works and what it can tell us comes from excavations carried out in Egypt. It’s hardly uncommon to read a new report on a recent dig and see a section about excavations carried out at the same site in the 19th or early 20th centuries.

By the standards of the ancient world, we know Egypt extremely well. We have copious artifacts scattered in museums around the world: I was in Florence, Italy recently, and even the small archaeological museum there has an extraordinary collection of ancient Egyptian objects, sarcophagi, and mummies. There are dozens of places like that museum in Florence, the product of decades of constant excavation and a healthy, if not entirely ethical, market in Egyptian antiquities. Unlike most times and places long ago, we have an almost complete list of Egyptian kings from around 3000 BC - the first being Narmer - all the way down to the last ruler of an independent Egypt, a woman by the name of Cleopatra. You might have heard of her. Even more striking is the fact that the earliest rulers in Upper Egypt would have immediately understood the visual and ideological language of kingship in Cleopatra’s time, a sign of the general cultural and political conservatism and stability that Egypt enjoyed throughout that long age.

We’re talking about nearly 3,000 years of continuous history, from the earliest pharaohs who rose in Upper Egypt all the way to the Kushites, Persians, and Macedonians who ruled the country before it finally became a Roman province. Not every age is perfectly documented, especially the eras known as “Intermediate Periods” that lie between the major divisions of Egyptian history. We know far more about the elite than we do the ordinary people who farmed fields near the Nile and worked on the construction sites that became famous monuments. Some regions are much better understood than others: Our knowledge of the Nile Valley is far superior to our understanding of the Delta, for example. The long history of archaeological and historical work in and about Egypt sometimes makes this particular field of study insular and resistant to change; Egyptology is a separate discipline from either history or archaeology, with its own training programs and ways of doing things. Despite the copious human remains from ancient Egypt, for example, we have few genetic or isotopic studies of the kind that are remaking our understanding of other ancient societies. Even so, the sheer amount we can and do know about the land of the pharaohs is mind-boggling. From the precise methods of construction used on the Great Pyramid to the religious program of a zealous reformer to the lives of the people who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the information we have about ancient Egypt is as abundant and rich as the Nile.

For the next several episodes of Past Lives, we’re going to linger in Egypt and meet some of the people who lived there over the thousands of years that separated Narmer and Cleopatra. We’ve already encountered one ancient Egyptian, Gebelein Man, who lived before the first kings rose to rule the land from the Cataracts to the Mediterranean. But we would be remiss if we didn’t also talk about some of the other, extraordinarily well-preserved individuals from this extremely well-documented time and place. To do that, however, it’s helpful to familiarize ourselves with the broad patterns of ancient Egypt’s history, and that’s what we’ll discuss here today.

The basic continuity of Egyptian civilization from before 3000 BC to 30 BC is so obvious as to be a cliche, but that doesn’t mean nothing ever changed; very much the opposite. A great deal did change over time, from the identities of the ruling kings to the structure of the state to the geographic orientation of the country as a whole. Squaring 3,000 years of incremental change with a deep, foundational conservatism is the challenge that everyone discussing the long run of ancient Egypt’s history has to face, and there are no easy answers. Do we choose to emphasize the unbroken seque nce of kings, the similarities in religious expression and language, and the consistent unity of the Nile Valley and Delta? Or should we instead focus on the constant introduction of new deities, the success of rulers of foreign extraction, or the tensions that just as constantly threatened to break the perilous unity of the Valley and Delta, and often succeeded in doing so? Balancing adaptation and flexibility with deeply rooted conservatism was the Egyptian way, and any decent accounting of Egypt’s history requires an understanding of both.

As we discussed a while back in our episode on Gebelein Man, Egypt wasn’t always ruled by a single king. In fact, Egypt as a concept didn’t exist before the reign of Narmer, the man generally held as having united Egypt sometime around 3000 BC. I say “sometime,” because the exact chronology of Egyptian history…isn’t. We have to wait until the period we call the New Kingdom, starting around 1570 BC, for more precise calendar dates. Prior to Narmer, or whoever was the first unifying king back in the mists of time, there was no “Egypt,” only the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta. Archaeologically, we know far less about the Delta than the Valley. In the Delta, the constant movements of the Nile, its flooding and channel-shifting, have buried surface signs of a great many archaeological sites under thick layers of silt. This phenomenon is also true in the Nile Valley, at least close to the river, where the annual floods deposited tonnes of soil every year when the waters rose. It was this fertile new soil that gave Egypt its name: Kemet, the Black Land, as opposed to Deshret, the Red Land, the arid desert that brackets the river.

Away from the immediate flood zone, the Nile Valley is an archaeological paradise. It’s one of the most heavily investigated and excavated places on the planet, with an unbroken and well-documented sequence of material culture stretching all the way back to the Neolithic. But for most of the prehistory of the region, the Valley and the Delta didn’t form a natural pair. The Delta was more tightly connected to happenings in western Asia and Libya than to the long, thin river valley. The Nile Valley’s more natural orientation was south, past the Cataracts - the series of rapids that break up the river near Egypt’s present-day border - and into what is now Sudan. Cultural mores and subsistence patterns extended up and down the river from what would eventually become Upper Egypt all the way south to Khartoum, where the Nile’s two major tributaries meet; while we know less about what was happening in the surrounding desert, these same groups probably ventured out into what we know was then a much greener and more welcoming landscape. Rather than being a land of village-dwelling farmers, the Nile Valley was occupied mostly by mobile pastoralists, cattle-herders who moved from place to place and settled down only in death.

We know these people largely from their cemeteries, where they buried their dead in elaborate fashion with everything they had worn and used in life. Because cattle-herding pastoralists moved around a great deal in search of fresh pastures for their herds, they communicated their identities - who they were and what groups they belonged to - through their bodies: jewelry, hair decorations, body paints, makeup, clothing, and quite probably scarification and tattooing as well. Upon interment, the deceased had to showcase all of those aspects of their identity to the surviving members of their community. Items like combs, palettes and brushes for applying paints, and necklaces and anklets made from rare stones, gems, and seashells were common inclusions. Whatever they had with them at the time of burial would remain with them in their afterlives forever. The prominence of cemeteries and the emphasis on the body as the major site of identity display would have a long afterlife. As the Nile Valley became one of the two constituent parts of Egypt, the centrality of the dead and the body wound their way into the developing DNA of Egyptian culture.

By around 3800 BC, when the Badarian Era gave way to what archaeologists call the Naqada period, farming was replacing pastoralism throughout the Nile Valley. Populations were rising. Permanent settlements were becoming towns, if not yet cities. Powerful men, perhaps the descendants of the old pastoralist chieftains, were carvin g out a place for themselves at the top of an increasingly explicit social hierarchy. By roughly 3200 BC at the latest, those chieftains had begun to think of themselves as kings. Three towns, each with its own petty ruler, stood above the rest: Hierakonpolis, Naqada, and Abydos. Each of them built increasingly substantial tombs for themselves that they packed with rich grave goods. The earliest examples of hieroglyphic writing come from these tombs, symbols of the increasing power and sophistication of the Nile Valley chieftains. They competed with one another for prestige and territory, and when they weren’t fighting each other, they fought their still-pastoralist neighbors living to the south along the Nile. This was the time when Upper Egypt separated, both culturally and politically, from the similar regions and peoples who lived nearby; as much as the political unification of the Delta and the Valley, it was this severance that created the boundaries of Egypt as we understand it.

Break

One of the beefs I have with popular presentations of ancient Egyptian history is this idea that it’s all orderly and precise: We know who the kings were, when they ruled, when dynasties fell and why, and we should expect centralized power will one day appear again after periods of fragmentation and disunity. It’s just not how any of this works! Nowhere are these issues clearer than with the earliest stages of Egyptian statehood, what we call the Early Dynastic period. According to the Egyptian historian Manetho, who lived nearly 3,000 years after the unification of Egypt and on whom we rely for our basic outline of Egyptian history, the first king was named Menes; but the first king we see wearing the distinctive crown of both Upper and Lower Egypt, on a fascinating image called the “Narmer Palette,” is a man named Narmer. Narmer and Menes may have been different names for the same person - Egyptian kings had a variety of appellations - or Menes may have been Narmer’s successor. The combination of radiocarbon dating and estimates from written sources tells us that these two kings, whatever their actions or relationship to one another, lived between roughly 3100 BC and 3000 BC. And to be clear, we have no real idea what the “unification” of Egypt actually entailed, how much progress previous kings had made toward that goal, or what steps remained to be taken after the reign of Narmer-slash-Menes. It presumably involved conspicuous violence, or alternatively, kings like Narmer wanted to portray their takeover as a violent process: The Narmer Palette contains one of the earliest examples of the “smiting scene,” which depicted the ruler ceremonially beating a captive, while a decorated macehead from Narmer’s reign records quantities of plunder taken during his campaigns. While these scenes were idealized, there’s no reason to think unification was a peaceful, much less welcomed, event.

From the time of Narmer, kings were depicted wearing the distinctive crowns of both Upper and Lower Egypt: Visually and ideologically, we can say that Egypt had been unified. What that meant on the ground, for the people living under the rule of these earliest pharaohs, is harder to say. There’s no noticeable difference between the tomb of Narmer and his immediate predecessors in Abydos, who belong to what Egyptologists call “Dynasty Zero.” It’s possible that most or all of the work had been done before Narmer ever took the throne, and later Egyptians chiseled away the messy bits to make a cleaner story.

Over the next several centuries, however, Egypt transformed into the state and society we in the present are most familiar with. Royal tombs became enormous constructions that took years or even decades to build. These sometimes included human sacrifices, what are euphemistically called “retainer burials” in the academic literature. The king became the focal point for Egyptian society as a whole, standing at the top of a unified hierarchy. By virtue of that topmost position, the pharaoh gave order and meaning to those below him: If not actually a god himself, he was at least adjacent to divinity, semi-divine, much closer to the gods than his counterparts in the cities of Mesopotamia at that same time. Because of their near-divinity, Egyptian kings played an essential role as mediators between the gods and their human subjects. The gods spoke directly to the kings and guided their actions in accordance with their will, and the people’s service made it possible for the kings to fulfill this role.

This was the proper order of things, and order - channeled through the kings - was perhaps the most central concept in the Egyptians’ understanding of the world and how it was supposed to work. Their word for this proper order was Maat, associated with light, and the concept was personified in a goddess of that same name. Maintaining the correct relationship between the people and the gods was one foundational aspect of Maat; the other was triumphing over foreign enemies, because proper order obviously involved Egypt being kept safe from the darkness and chaos - Isfet - that represented Maat’s polar opposite and threatened Egypt on all sides. While we have practically no details of military campaigning during this period, the Early Dynastic saw the end of the pastoralist cultures that had existed around the Cataracts of the Nile for centuries: The Nubian A-Group, as these pastoralists are known, were surely victims of Egyptian state-building.

By the dawn of the Old Kingdom, the period we understand to be Egypt’s first great golden age, the outlines of the ancient Egyptian state, society, and culture had all been drawn. The transition from the Early Dynastic to the Old Kingdom happened around 2700 BC, as the Second Dynasty to rule Egypt gave way to the Third, headed by a fellow named Djoser. You may have heard of Djoser—he was the first king to build a pyramid.

The pyramids are probably the most instantly recognizable expression of ancient Egypt. For at least 3,000 years, the Great Pyramid of Giza was the largest building on the planet, an eternal reminder of the power and will of the pharaohs. While singular in its majesty, it wasn’t alone: Throughout the Old Kingdom, rulers and their immediate family members constructed pyramids to serve as their tombs, bending the resources of a vast—and vastly wealthy—kingdom to this overarching task. Later kings built pyramids as well, but the pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom used less durable mud-brick instead of stone and those of the Kushite kings are much smaller. Pyramid-building and the Old Kingdom are essentially synonymous: Djoser, the founder of the Old Kingdom, built the first, while the last major stone construction was that of Pepy II, the last of the Old Kingdom to rule all of Egypt.

This isn’t an accidental correlation. It wasn’t aliens or secret advanced technology that built the pyramids, but the combined efforts of hundreds of thousands of workers over the course of decades. People were moved en masse by the power of the Egyptian state to building sites, where they were provided with food, tools, and raw materials drawn from the distant corners of the country to provide for and shelter them as they labored. To aid the transportation of goods to Giza, for example, Egyptian engineers built a new river harbor on a now-extinct branch of the Nile. Copper for chisels came from the Sinai. Other materials were sourced from a specially built port on the Red Sea. All of those workers weren’t farming while they were cutting limestone and fixing copper tools, so their food had to come from somewhere; that meant administrators had to oversee the collection and shipment of grain and other staples. The Egyptian state did far more than build tombs during the days of the Old Kingdom, but there is no better sign of the capabilities of that state than the pyramids themselves.

But while its monuments remain enshrined in our public consciousness, the Old Kingdom didn’t last forever. Around 2200 BC, a combination of internal fragmentation and climatic pressure caused by a major episode of aridification - the 4.2ka Event - brought an end to the Old Kingdom and inaugurated the First Intermediate Period. Instead of a single unified state, Egypt split into multiple smaller-scale kingdoms, each with its own ruling dynasty and geographic center of power. This wasn’t a brief interlude, but approximately 125 years, or four or five generations, in which there was no centralized state ruling the country. Two distinct centers of power emerged: Memphis in the north, and Thebes in the south. For much of this period, local leaders controlled their own districts, with as many as 22 petty kings ruling each of Egypt’s administrative divisions, called nomes. It’s possible, though not certain, that populations declined drastically throughout the Nile Valley during this period, a sign of serious economic and social stress. Eventually, the Theban rulers succeeded in extending their control over all of Egypt, inaugurating the beginning of Egypt’s second golden age: the Middle Kingdom.

The Middle Kingdom wasn’t a rerun of the Old Kingdom. Times had changed. When we look at the wide variety of media produced during the Middle Kingdom - visual, literary, ideological - the opposition between order and chaos, Maat and Isfet, becomes much more stark. It’s as if the demise of the Old Kingdom shattered some kind of civilizational self-confidence; now Egyptians knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that chaos could, in fact, triumph over the forces of order, that pharaohs weren’t all-powerful, that the solidity of their lives and world were merely illusions. The founding ruler of the Middle Kingdom, a man named Mentuhotep II, was the first pharaoh to be deified while he was still alive, rather than posthumously, as was common during the Old Kingdom; he was also the first pharaoh to be depicted in one of those famous smiting scenes, bashing his defeated Egyptian - rather than foreign - enemies with a mace. The Old Kingdom had seen its share of war, of course, but the pharaoh’s role as a bulwark against the outside world became much stronger during the Middle Kingdom. Mentuhotep II fought against Nubians living along the Nile to the south, Libyans living to the west of the Delta, the desert people living to the east of the Nile between the river and the Red Sea, and probably even led an expedition into southern Palestine. Unlike the long-ruling dynasties of the Old Kingdom, Mentuhotep II’s line lasted for only a few decades after his death, and the Twelfth Dynasty that followed came to the throne amid yet another period of disorder. Their pyramids, built of mud-brick rather than stone, were smaller and less durable.

Yet the Middle Kingdom was no less successful than the Old, despite the lack of enduring and easily identifiable monuments. Its priorities were simply different—they had to be, because the world itself wasn’t the same. Aside from royal monuments, which quickly replaced the self-directed constructions of regional elites, the most stunning examples of Middle Kingdom architecture are the fortresses built to protect the country’s borders. New gods came to the fore: This was the period when Osiris became the most important deity for most Egyptians, for example. Egyptian literature flourished for the first time, as the rulers of the Middle Kingdom and their courts patronized poets and authors of wisdom literature. One of my favorite texts from this period is entitled “A Debate Between a Man and His Soul,” and there’s a section I really like about the impermanence of life: “The gods who existed previously, who rest in their pyramids; the effective privileged likewise, who rest in their pyramids— their enclosures were built, but their places are no more … their walls are lost and no more, their places like that which has not come into being … Let your heart be informed about it, but let your heart forget about it: it is useful for you to follow your heart while you exist.” It’s as if to say, even though you know everything must end, you can’t live your life despairing over that fact. That’s a beautiful thing to read in a 4,000-year-old text.

Yet the Middle Kingdom didn’t last, either. Around 1700 BC, after about 300 years of stability and centralized power, things began to unravel once again. The kings moved their capital back to Thebes in the south, essentially admitting that they had lost control over the Delta and Lower Egypt. This time, however, their rivals had come from outside Egypt: The Hyksos, as they’re generally known, had come from the east during the peak of the Middle Kingdom. We can see their increasing archaeological imprint in Lower Egypt in the form of religious and burial practices identical to those found in the Levant at the same time. As central control waned, these people of foreign extraction became the most important political figures in the north, eventually founding the Fifteenth Dynasty and ruling Lower Egypt from their new capital at Avaris. They were the first, but not the last, kings of foreign extraction to rule Egypt, and their rise marked the end of the Middle Kingdom and the beginning of the Second Intermediate Period. Whatever Egyptian writers had to say about the Hyksos, however, they mostly ruled in the same fashion as any other dynasty. There was no major cultural or political break associated with their two centuries in power, which came to an end around 1550 BC.

A new age was dawning, and once again, the impetus came from the south. The rulers of Thebes had never given up on their claims to power over the whole country, fighting constantly against the Hyksos: We’ll talk about one of these warrior kings in next week’s episode, a fellow named Seqenenre Tao, who died in battle and whose mummy tells us exactly what happened to him at the end. Seqenenre Tao’s two successors would go on to succeed where he had failed, founding the third of ancient Egypt’s three golden ages.

This was the New Kingdom, and aside from the pyramids, most of what you and I and the general public probably associate with ancient Egypt comes from this period. This was the era when pharaohs led armies north and east into Asia, establishing an extended empire that stretched through Syria and the Levant, as well as south into present-day Sudan. New Kingdom pharaohs built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, filling them with riches like those made famous by the discovery of Tutankhamun’s burial site. The famous temple complexes at Luxor and Abu Simbel were the fruits of the New Kingdom’s prosperity. As a participant in the rich international world of the Late Bronze Age, Egyptian goods crisscrossed the sea lanes of the Mediterranean and wound up in the palaces of Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian, and Mycenaean Greek rulers. Egypt was never more powerful as a state among states than during the New Kingdom, when rulers like Thutmose, Seti, and the various Ramesses made their kingdom one of the linchpins of the world’s first true international order. We’ll spend two episodes exploring the ordinary folk of the New Kingdom in the coming weeks, one on the workers who built the Valley of the Kings and the other on their downtrodden contemporaries who constructed a new capital city at Amarna for Tutankhamun’s father, Akhenaten, a religious zealot.

When this glittering world of palaces and kings crumbled across the rest of the eastern Mediterranean amid the events of the Bronze Age Collapse, New Kingdom Egypt held on, even as the Hittites and Mycenaeans disappeared. Another Intermediate Period followed - the third, for those keeping score at home - but even then, Egypt retained its basic cultural and political orientation. The foundations laid in the days of Narmer and the earliest pharaohs were still there, holding up the ancient boundaries of the state and its society despite the passing of thousands of years.

Egypt would rise and fall, again and again, many times before its eventual incorporation into the Roman Empire. Whether its kings were Theban or foreign, whether it was under the rule of a centralized state or not, Egypt survived, a testament to the power of its animating ideas and the work of generations to weave those ideas inextricably into the tapestry of Egyptian society. They were there when Alexander the Great arrived on the banks of the Nile, and they were there when Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian made their own journeys to the land of the pharaohs. They’re still with us today, animating our most basic concepts of what a civilization and a state are supposed to be.

Next time on Past Lives, we’ll meet a real person who lived in ancient Egypt. Unusually for us here, this individual was a king - Seqenenre Tao - but his demise was anything but kingly.

Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

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Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

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The young man never saw the knife that killed him. The long, thin blade slid under his shoulder blade, broke his rib, and punched into the lung beneath. Despite the overwhelming pain, he didn’t scream; he couldn’t, as all of the air in his body was forced out of him in one sudden exhalation. Shock drove his eyes wide. He gasped, or tried to. His jaw hung open, struggling to suck in air. A thin, rattling noise escaped his lips. Trying to find the source of the injury, he reached behind him, but his strength fled before his hand could reach the wound. He fell and never rose again. Whatever hopes and dreams he might have had died with him.

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For his people, however, the young man’s journey was just beginning. For his burial they dug a pit in the hot sand on the outskirts of their town, where the black land of the valley gave way to the red of the harsh deserts. Wrapping him in mats of woven reeds, they placed him on his side with his legs pulled up to his chest. His right shoulder, decorated with tattoos of an aurochs and a Barbary sheep, faced the sky. A few clay pots filled with grain and the paint he’d used to adorn his body in life went into the pit with his remains.

There were other graves nearby, many of them, a small city of the dead that existed parallel to the settlement of the living near the Nile and its bounty. The living used the same clay pots that served the dead, the same fine combs to brush their hair, the same instruments for mixing and applying body paint, the same jewelry of exotic shell, ivory, and polished stone.

He was well provided for. The living owed that much to the dead.

Break

Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode of Past Lives. I’m Patrick Wyman.

More than 5,000 years ago, a young man died along the Nile River. His people buried him in the dry sand, and there he stayed until 1896, when a local resident discovered him and five other sets of remains. That resident went on to bring the famous British archaeologist and looter of antiquities extraordinaire Wallis Budge to the site. Budge immediately recognized that these were extremely old mummies, the oldest he’d ever seen, and set about excavating the burial pits. As was so often the case in these early excavations, Budge simply discarded what he found uninteresting, like the buried pots and the remains of the furs and mats in which the bodies had been wrapped. The British Museum, where Budge was the Keeper of the Oriental Department, acquired the mummies several years later. The young man’s remains were put on display in 1901, the earliest mummy the public could view in the museum’s extensive collections. If you go to the British Museum today, you can still see this extraordinarily ancient person - numbered EA32751 - in the same gallery where he’s been for more than a century. The early curators called him “Ginger,” because of the tufts of reddish hair still protruding from his scalp; today, he’s known as Gebelein Man.

Compared to our friend Otzi, who lived around the same time in northern Italy, we know far less about the physical aspects of Gebelein Man’s life. From his mummy we can glean some hints about the manner of his death and a few other things about him, but what really makes Gebelein Man so special is that he comes from a time and place we know in extraordinary detail: the Nile Valley, in what’s known as the Predynastic Period, the age just before the first kings rose to unite all of Egypt from the Cataracts of the Nile to the Delta. Radiocarbon dating of Gebelein Man’s mummy indicates that he lived between 3341 and 3017 BC, the later years of the long centuries leading up to Egypt’s unification. This means Gebelein Man was a witness to the processes of state formation and cultural transformation that would eventually, over the course of millennia, turn Egypt into the civilization we know today. For Gebelein Man, all of that lay in the unknowable future, but from our vantage point, we can see the swirling forces of change that defined his era and, in all likelihood, his life.

In today’s episode, rather than focusing exclusively on what we can learn from human remains, we’re going to try to reconstruct the world in which Gebelein Man lived in as much detail as possible. This wasn’t the ancient Egypt that produced the pyramids, much less the stunning tombs of the Valley of the Kings or an empire that reached as far as the Levant; in Gebelein Man’s time, Egypt was a fractured land of petty kings warring and competing with one another for preeminence, when hieroglyphic writing was a brand-new invention, and the first experiments with intentional mummification of human remains were underway. This was the Predynastic Period, which lasted for the better part of a thousand years. Gebelein Man lived in the latter half of that period. To understand his world, we need to excise our sense of the inevitable future and focus on the uncertainty of a time when nobody knew the kings would one day prevail, let alone that “Egypt” would one day exist as a unified entity.

Let’s start with Gebelein Man himself, and what we can learn from his mummified remains. The reams of cutting-edge scientific tests that have told us so much about the lives of people like the Ancient One and Ötzi simply haven’t been performed on Gebelein Man: no detailed study of the pathologies on his bones, no isotope analysis, no DNA testing, no analysis of the contents of his digestive tract or the pollen that hitched a ride with the food he ate. The contents of hi s grave were lost in the course of excavation, either discarded by Wallis Budge or taken and sold by the locals who found them after the fact. In the case of Gebelein Man, we can only really talk about the basics: The mummy belongs to a man aged between 18 and 21, which we can tell because the growth plates in his bones were recently fused. He stood 5’4” tall, was robustly built, and generally looks to have been a healthy lad. When researchers placed his remains in a CT scanner in 2012, they found something remarkable: a puncture wound under his left shoulder blade, a stabbing blow delivered with so much force that it nicked that bone, shattered the rib behind it, and penetrated his lung. The dimensions of the entry wound are probably too large to belong to a projectile point, but not large enough for a spear; the most likely candidate for the responsible weapon is a long, thin dagger made of flint or more likely copper. The CT scan identified no signs of defensive injuries, like the gash on Ötzi’s palm or the bruises on his wrists. The location of the wound strongly suggests that someone took him by surprise: Gebelein Man never saw the blow that killed him coming.

There was plenty of warfare happening in the Nile Valley around this time, and archaeologists have found cemeteries with burials that clearly belonged to soldiers who had fallen in combat, including one with a number of decapitated bodies whose heads were taken as trophies. Gebelein Man wasn’t buried in one of these cemeteries, but in the same location as a number of other contemporary individuals, none of whom have shown any sign of violent death. Whoever killed this young man, and whatever their reason, we can tentatively suggest that the end of his life perhaps didn’t take place in the context of a pitched battle. Murder seems more likely.

There is one more fascinating thing that recent analysis has revealed about Gebelein Man. Visitors to the British Museum have long noted the dark smudges on his upper right arm, but it wasn’t until a team led by the archaeologist Renee Friedman examined his remains using infrared imaging that they were able to identify what those smudges were: the world’s oldest figural tattoos, a pair of horned animals facing toward the front of his body. The upper of the two animals is probably a wild bovine known as an aurochs; the lower is a Barbary sheep. Both were extraordinarily common in Predynastic art, with bovines remaining a symbol of male power and virility - particularly of the royal variety - well into the ages of Egyptian history we’re more familiar with.

Those basic facts and their narrow interpretation amounts to just about everything we know and can say about Gebelein Man’s physical remains. But we’ve hardly maxed out on possible ways to interpret his life. The Nile Valley in which Gebelein Man was buried is one of the best-understood archaeological landscapes in the world. We’re most familiar with the later millennia of occupation under the pharaohs of a united Egypt, but since the 19th century, archaeologists have carried out hundreds of excavations and performed a hundred years of continuous analysis. All of that means that we have a far better grasp of Gebelein Man’s home region and the time in which he lived than we do Ötzi or the Ancient One. Gebelein Man may be a less distinct figure than his fellow ancients, but we can view the world around him in much greater focus.

Broadly speaking, Egypt can be divided into two major regions: the Delta in the north, where the Nile splits into dozens of intertwining, braided channels before it meets the Mediterranean; and the Nile Valley further south, a long, thin strip of incredibly fertile land that was constantly replenished by the river’s floods until the introduction of massive dams in the 20th century. Most research on ancient Egypt has focused on sites in the Nile Valley rather than the Delta because they’re easier to find: The constantly shifting landscape of intersecting channels and surrounding marshes tends to erase signs of past activity. The Delta also had fewer of the conspicuous monumental structures that attracted early archaeologists to the region; that’s changing now as more sites dating to the distant Predynastic are excavated to modern standards, but the fact remains that we have far less information about the Delta than we do about the Nile Valley to the south.

Luckily for us, Gebelein Man lived in the Nile Valley, and in a particular slice of it that we happen to know extremely well. Gebelein is more than 300 miles south of Cairo, located along a bend in the river that looks like a backwards C. This relatively small area, with a desert route linking the two ends of the bend, is widely considered the heartland of ancient Egyptian political life, society, and culture. Thebes, the longtime capital of the pharaohs, was located here, along with a great many of the monuments that come to mind when we think of ancient Egypt. So too was the Valley of the Kings, where the pharaohs of the New Kingdom buried their rulers, including Tutankhamun and his infamous treasure hoard.

More than 2,000 years before that, however, the region around that bend in the Nile wasn’t the center of a sprawling state; it was a battleground between at least three warring petty kingdoms, each of which was centered on a substantial settlement. Hierakanpolis, or Nekhen, was one; the second, Naqada, gives its name to the archaeological cultures found in the region during the Predynastic; and the third, Abydos, eventually produced the rulers who would unite Egypt and served as the location of their earliest magnificent burials. In this region, we can see the entire sequence of cultural and political development that transformed the fractured Nile Valley into the homeland of powerful rulers, its people from wandering pastoralists and subsistence farmers into subjects of the pharaoh. In the second half of the fourth millennium BC, we can see the roots of nearly every aspect of ancient Egyptian society that would eventually come to define it, from reverence for the dead to hieroglyphic writing to massive royal tombs. Superficially, much of what appears in the archaeological record from this time looks familiar to us, but this familiarity carries a major risk: When we read this age in light of the future we know, we risk treating it as a prelude, where the only historical threads that matter are the ones we can easily spot and carry through into later ages.

For all the fascinating things we can learn from this approach, I think it’s a misleading way to actually make sense of the past. Not all of the threads woven during the Predynastic carried through to the Egypt of the pharaohs, and the continuities we do see don’t necessarily reflect what actually mattered most to the people living in that earlier time. Just because we can see kings or wannabe kings in the archaeological record doesn’t mean they were as powerful or important to Predynastic society as they would later become. Moreover, there’s no reason to think that those kings were on an orderly road to the ultimate power they would later come to wield: State formation, the process that defined the world in which Gebelein Man lived and died, was messy, violent, and unpredictable. Perhaps the tensions that went along with that process were the cause of his death.

Break

“State formation” sounds like a daunting idea, but it’s actually pretty straightforward: It’s the process that created states, with kings or other leaders at the top, underlings to do their bidding, and claims over people and territory. Ancient Egypt is generally considered to be one of the purest examples of state formation: We can see, both in the archaeological record and in scattered textual references to the Predynastic period in which Gebelein Man lived, how chieftains became kings ruling over a unified state. Because the ancient Egyptian state lasted for so long, and was so consistent in its basic ideological orientation and ways of doing business, it stands as the case to which all others are compared. This is often an implicit comparison rather than a conscious choice: Our idea of how states come into existence is so shaped by the Egyptian example that it seems like a checklist of traits, a roadmap to follow, rather than one possibility among many. Millennia of intensive agriculture in a rich, fruitful landscape - the thick, black soil of the Nile Valley - led to surplus production, which created an elite, who then competed with one another over the spoils until one of them emerged victorious and unified the country. Et voilà: state formation.

More recent research, however, has found cases of state formation all around the world over many thousands of years: in Neolithic China, not once but several times; in Bronze Age Europe north of the Alps, centuries before the Greeks and Romans invented “civilization”; in the tropical forests of Mesoamerica on multiple occasions between 1000 BC and 1000 AD; and a hundred other times and places. Few of them look much like Predynastic Egypt. What’s even more fascinating is that even the Egyptian case doesn’t look much like scholars used to think, now that we’ve had a long time to examine the concept and its execution.

That old idea of ancient Egyptian state formation was rooted in a 19th-century European conception of what a state was supposed to look like: Ancient states must have been the products of orderly, rational processes of construction, to that way of thinking, just like the sleek, powerful new nation-states of 19th-century Europe. But - and this seems obvious to say now in 2026 - ancient Egypt wasn’t a 19th-century nation-state. It never was. These early systematic excavators of ancient Egypt were reading back into the distant past their own ideas of what a state was and how it came into being, filling in the gaps of the evidence like the scientists in Jurassic Park using frog DNA to make dinosaurs. Official titles and seals had to speak to a single ruler with an efficient bureaucracy, the purpose of writing had to be administration, and so on. As it turns out, state formation in the 19th century was a lot less orderly than these scholars believed, but it was their belief in that orderly model that influenced their portrayal of ancient Egypt’s creation as a state, not the reality.

In this old way of thinking, every political development during Gebelein Man’s time - the Predynastic - had to lead up to a sharp break that created a new order with a single, all-powerful king ruling the entire country. This meant that for years, scholars hunted for the aspects of Predynastic life that proved this break occurred with the accession of Narmer, the first pharaoh. Those aspects had to conform to the model of civilization they believed to be true, one that emphasized agriculture, the generation of surplus, hierarchical leadership, cities, and writing for administration. Everything else was at best a dead end and unimportant to the future, or at worst completely unworthy even of notice, like the humble goods in clay pots that had been placed in Gebelein Man’s grave. How much richer would our understanding of this person be if Wallis Budge had bothered to pay attention to those pots, and what was in them? While we recognize how much was lost in the age of careless excavation, it’s easy to forget that our knowledge is still being shaped by the ideas that animated those careless excavators and their analysis of what they found.

When we go back and reexamine Gebelein Man’s world on its own terms, rather than those imposed by modern scholarship, it flares into brilliant light. Looking at the Predynastic from the perspective of its past, rather than its future, makes it both more alien and less. The key insight once again sounds basic, but it’s essential: Nobody knew the warring chiefdoms of the Upper Nile Valley were on their way to becoming ancient Egypt, that there would be any sort of unified state ruling over this entire region, or that the next 3,000 years would see remarkable cultural and political stability. We think of Egypt as a quintessentially agricultural society dependent on the Nile’s annual flooding to replenish its fields with moisture and rich silt, but during Gebelein Man’s life, agriculture was relatively new to the region; unlike Mesopotamia, where the earliest cities grew out of agricultural villages and landscapes that were already millennia old, the people of the Nile Valley were latecomers to farming. When we look at sites of an equivalent age in Mesopotamia, we see layer after layer after layer of occupation, a slow and steady movement to towns and cities. In Upper Egypt, the introduction of agriculture came like a bolt of lightning out of the sky.

Archaeologists have spent decades looking for the earliest farming villages along the Upper Nile, which would date to between 5000 and 4000 BC, and they haven’t found many. That’s in part because the Nile’s flooding constantly dumped new layers of soil on top of old settlements, which means that any evidence would be buried under ten or twenty feet of sediment; even so, that lack is striking. It’s possible we just haven’t found them, but these early farming villages do exist further to the north in Egypt, near the Faiyum Oasis and in the Delta; maybe we haven’t found them in Upper Egypt because they either weren’t common or didn’t exist at all. What we do see in the archaeological record of this earlier age, what we call the Badarian Culture - from about 5000-3800 BC - is evidence of mobile pastoralism: people moving around from campsite to campsite with their herds of cattle and sheep. All that remains of these people are thin scatterings of stone artifacts and animal bones and what are believed to be post-holes left behind by temporary structures. These people simply didn’t stay in a single place for long, and whatever farming they engaged in was opportunistic and secondary to stockraising. It was probably what we call “flood-retreat agriculture,” where the seeds are planted immediately after the flood and simply left to grow until harvest time. It’s less efficient than tending crops year-round, but offers more flexibility to people who still want to be mobile. That seems to have been the case in the Upper Nile Valley until quite late, around 3800 BC, just a few centuries before Gebelein Man’s life and death.

There was one exception to their general mobility, though. In life, they wandered, not just through the Nile Valley but into the deserts beyond; in death, they settled down in vast necropolises. To paraphrase the memorable words of the archaeologist David Wengrow, in Egypt, cities of the dead came long before cities of the living. This makes a certain kind of sense: Mobile pastoralists might not have permanent settlements, but they still require land to graze their cattle, perhaps fields for their flood-retreat agriculture, and access to particular routes through the landscape. Their necropolises were claims to territory, to the rights to graze, grow, move, and bury their dead. When other groups wandered into that territory, they would see the surface markers and know that the land belonged to someone else, that their dead made eternal claims to it. These pre-Egyptians of the Badarian Culture spent an enormous amount of time and effort on the dead, filling their graves with everything they had needed in life: combs, cosmetic palettes, and jewelry were all common, and while some people were buried with more than others, practically everyone had something.

But why then, in the fifth millennium BC, did these cemeteries come into being? The answer probably lies not in the Nile Valley itself, but in what was happening in the surrounding deserts. The era of the Green Sahara, when vastly increased rainfall had transformed the sand and bare rock of the desert into welcoming savannahs spliced by rivers, was coming to an end. The herders who had for centuries wandered through those savannahs with their cattle could no longer survive as the water dried up and the sands encroached. The Nile Valley became increasingly crowded with people. Perhaps mobile pastoralism was no longer as viable; it required more land than dedicated agriculture, after all, and with rising populations, there wasn’t enough yield to go around. It was these pressures that created the world Gebelein Man knew in the few centuries before his birth, transforming a pastoral society into an agricultural one, with petty kings waging ceaseless wars for supremacy in the Nile Valley.

The recency of this transition from pastoralism to farming and mobility to sedentism left deep marks on the culture Gebelein Man encountered in life. Compared to Mesopotamia around this same time, when the city of Uruk was already blossoming into an urban center with tens of thousands of residents and gigantic monumental buildings, the Upper Nile Valley was rather bland and crude; the first experiments in large-scale construction were just getting underway. Unlike Mesopotamia, however, it was mostly the dead who received the honor of occupying those new monumental structures, not the living. That intense emphasis on the centrality of death stuck around long after cemeteries were no longer the only way to lay claim to territory, with generations of practice winding its way into the cultural DNA Egypt would eventually carry into the age of the pharaohs.

The chieftains competing to be kings in the centuries of the Naqada Culture in the Upper Nile Valley, the age lasting from about 3800 to 3100 BC that included Gebelein Man’s life, did build some stunning structures, like the palace with imported cedar posts holding up a massive ornamental facade more than 40 feet wide that one powerful man constructed at Hierakonpolis around 3600 BC. Their largest investments, however, were in their eternal resting-places. Around that same time, one of the earliest identifiable rulers in Hierakonpolis erected a tomb measuring some 200 by 130 feet and filled it with his riches, most of which were later plundered, but enough beautiful, high-status pottery survived to tell us its occupant was a singular figure. Even more intriguing, a ring of animal burials surrounded the main tomb: Some were domesticated, but others clearly weren’t, like baboons, a hippo, and even an elephant, all of which had been kept alive for some time prior to their deaths. This would-be king had an exotic menagerie and enormous ambitions centuries before Narmer ruled over a united Egypt.

On the one hand, this looks like state formation, right? But on the other hand, the fact that centuries separate this man from the first kings of a united Egypt tells us that there were no straight lines from wandering pastoralists to a unified state. Instead, we see short bursts of intense competition and then decades of relative stability. Gebelein Man, to his misfortune, seems to have lived during one of those competitive bursts. He had no way of knowing, nor did anyone living in Upper Egypt at the time, that this last burst would lead directly to the rulers of Abydos uniting the Delta and the Valley. How could they? Such a thing had never existed before, nor was there any sense of inevitability pushing them toward that future. Their pastoralist heritage was still centuries closer to them in time than the Great Pyramid.

We can see that pastoralist heritage in Gebelein Man’s tattoos, of all places. One of the defining features of the old Badarian Culture was its emphasis on bodily decoration: paints, necklaces, earrings, anklets, bracelets, lip- and nose-studs. Graves contained extraordinary decorated combs and cosmetic palettes. This makes a certain kind of sense: When you have to carry around your possessions as you travel through the landscape, your body becomes a declaration of identity and status to the world. Even as Badarian pastoralists settled in the Upper Nile Valley and slowly transformed into the sedentary subjects of warring petty kings in the Naqada period, the body remained central, both in life and in death. Those two tattoos on Gebelein Man’s shoulder have survived, legible only under infrared light, when the body paints that adorned him washed away and the jewelry tha t decorated his body decayed or simply wasn’t thought important enough by Wallis Budge and his ilk to save. In those faded marks, the recency of the transitions that created Gebelein Man’s world are still visible.

Gebelein Man lived in a time of widespread and convulsive transformations. We’ll never know if the blade that killed him was wielded during a confrontation in some way related to the rise of those warring chieftains at Abydos, Hierakonpolis, and Naqada: A young, robust man dying violently in a time of conflict raises suspicions, but the evidence is gone forever. He certainly wasn’t the only young man of his time to die for the ambitions of the powerful. What we can say with certainty is that despite his life being shaped by these forces, Gebelein Man wasn’t aware of where they would one day lead. He would never see a king of a united Egypt, or even the concept of Egypt, for that matter. He had no idea that the ruler of Abydos in his day would have descendants who would wield maces and crush their insignificant enemies in reality and the images they disseminated to their subjects. Despite the royal tombs that were being built on a larger scale than ever before around him, despite the invention of the earliest hieroglyphic writing, his life owed just as much or more to the pastoralist past of his people. He was interred in a city of the dead, his body displaying to all around him who he was and why he mattered, probably with the goods necessary for his journey into death. Those aspects of Egyptian society, present long before his birth and remaining long after his death, were more vital and enduring than any king.

Next time on Past Lives, we’ll move a long way to the east, where we’ll meet another mummy. She was buried around 1800 BC in the hyper-arid Tarim Basin of Xinjiang — we know her as the Princess of Xiaohe.

Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

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Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

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Today is the day - my new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World - is finally out!

This has been a long road. It took more than five years to research and write Lost Worlds. As things turned out, covering 10,000 years from the end of the Ice Age to the Bronze Age Collapse was a rather more ambitious project than I had initially anticipated. Writing a book that managed to both tell a coherent story and make an argument about the broad shape of our shared human past without losing the complexity of diverse societies around the globe was a challenge, the most serious I’ve ever undertaken. I can only hope that I’ve done the material justice.

The basic thrust of Lost Worlds is this. We have an old story about how a world recognizable to us came into being. It begins with a prelapsarian state of innocence, in which humans lived as wandering foragers for uncounted millennia, trudging across the frozen tundra of a planet caught in the grips of the last Ice Age. It ends with “civilization,” the amorphous grab-bag of characteristics that generally includes cities, states with kings at the top, laws, and writing.

How we got from that state of innocence to civilization is usually presented as an orderly, logical process: People settled down and started farming, which created surplus production of food, which created specialized jobs and leaders to decide where the surplus since some people no longer had to toil all day, every day. Fast-forward a few thousand years, and you get cities, defined hierarchies, mechanisms of political and social control, and a world that is recognizably on its way to becoming our own. We can see how we went from the late Bronze Age to the present; seeing how we got here from the Ice Age is rather harder.

Hunter-gatherers never existed in a state of innocence and harmony with the natural world, but there were far fewer people, living simpler lives, 13,000 years ago than there were 3,000 years ago. Something very definitely changed in that period, not just in one place but all around the globe. But the orderly story no longer holds. We’ve learned too much about the distant past, thanks largely to extraordinary new archaeological methods that give us access to aspects of the ancient world we could only imagine, for us to see any sort of clear, neat global march of progress.

Lost Worlds offers a new story that explores just how different our conception of the distant past is today than it was even a couple of decades ago. It’s a story of ups and downs, trials and failures, the creation of stunning monuments that still stand today and the end of centuries-old ways of life. The major driver in this story is not inevitability, but contingency: how people made choices that made sense to them in the context of their own world.

This story is messy, far messier than the logical, ordered path that led us from wandering to civilization, but human beings are messy creatures. That’s true today, it was true in the Middle Ages, and it was true for all of the 10,000 years Lost Worlds encompasses. The benefit is a much more human portrait of our shared past. We can learn a great deal from these people - their struggles and successes both - who were like us in far more ways than they weren’t.

Order Lost Worlds from your retailer of choice today. I really hope you enjoy it!

Hello, my friends! My new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World, comes out May 5th. I recorded the audiobook a couple of months ago, and I wanted to share a sample chapter with you all - it’s on life at the end of the Ice Age, as the glaciers receded for the final time and people around the planet were forced to figure out how to live in a new world:

If you enjoy this, you can preorder the book through your retailer of choice, or get the audiobook here or through another platform. Nothing is more helpful to an author than preorders, and I would be honored if you would buy the book!

Be sure to subscribe to the Past Lives Patreon for tons of great bonus content, including Q&As, interviews with amazing scholars, and much more.

The Arctic winds blowing in buffeted the hunters in their mammoth- and camel-hide clothing. Spring was coming to the valley, but the dying days of winter still carried the freezing burn of the great ice sheets which lay a few weeks’ walk to the north.

The hunters and their people had come from the north not long ago; the eldest among them were the grandchildren of those original migrants, sages who told generational stories of enormous glaciers stretching as far as the eye could see. They themselves had seen the vast lakes where meltwater collected behind dams of ice, and they told of the apocalyptic floods that scoured the land when those dams collapsed.

This was a hard place, but it was home, a vast territory that promised new possibilities around every spiky, snowy ridge and at each new river juncture. Countless, well-trod pathways through the grass betrayed the recent passage of migrating herds: camels, horses, bison, and even the occasional mastodon or mammoth. The hunters tracked them for miles, leaving behind tiny signs of their presence in an enormous and nearly empty landscape.

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On this particular journey, the hunters left just such a sign behind them under a sandstone ledge. On the surface, it was a tiny mound of dirt, but beneath the mound lay the remains of an infant. The baby boy, born toward the end of the previous spring, had not lived to see the wildflower meadows erupt in their riotous colors. With him the hunters had left a few of their stone tools, the treasured, razor-sharp points that speared their prey, the scrapers they used to clean hides, the blades they used to cut their meat. Maybe he would need them, wherever he went next.

Perhaps the band of hunters would pass this way again. If the herds traveled this direction, they would follow, but if their path took them elsewhere, so be it. They were wanderers, strangers in unfamiliar territory. Within a few centuries, their many descendants had journeyed thousands of miles from this place: south into Mexico, east across the Great Plains, and perhaps even back up north. The secrets of all those future journeys lay in the bones of that tiny infant, who died before he could take his first steps.

I’m Patrick Wyman. Welcome to Past Lives.

Around 13,000 years ago, a band of wandering hunters stopped at an overhanging rock ledge in what is now Montana. They probably didn’t stay for long, at most a few days, but they left behind something extraordinarily precious and heartbreaking: the remains of a year-old baby, felled by the harsh conditions of life on the northern Great Plains during the last gasp of the Ice Age.

Millennia later, in 1968, two men were digging away at a hillside with a backhoe and a dump truck, collecting fill dirt to take down to the local high school for the construction of a septic tank drain field. As they churned through the soil with the machine, the two caught sight of bone and stone artifacts sticking up out of the ground, and immediately stopped digging. They got more delicate tools, and dug down further. Before long, they ran across fragments of crushed human bone: the infant’s remains, still in place after 13,000 years. Archaeologists quickly got to work on what the diggers had unearthed, naming the location the “Anzick Clovis Site,” after the owners of the land - the Anzicks - and the archaeological group to which the stone tools placed with the baby belonged, the Clovis Culture. The infant they called “Anzick-1.” He will be the subject of today’s episode, the first person we meet in our brand-new season, Bodily Experiences.

The Clovis people, as we call them, were among the first to arrive in the Americas as the glaciers receded and the Ice Age finally came to an end. Anzick-1’s remains are the only human skeleton ever discovered in association with Clovis artifacts. The artifacts found in Anzick-1’s tiny grave are numerous and among the finest examples of Clovis technology ever discovered: mammoth-ivory rods, razor-sharp stone flakes, and most of all, the beautiful double-sided projectiles - Clovis points - that define this archaeological culture. Even then, the most stunning evidence the Anzick site had to offer wasn’t stone or ivory; it was the wealth of thousands of years of genetic information, kept safe inside the infant’s bones beneath the earth.

It would take another half-century after the site’s discovery for its true importance to become clear. Testing Anzick-1’s remains for DNA revealed that the group to which he belonged, the Clovis people, was ancestral to practically all later indigenous Americans. Anzick-1’s life was extraordinarily brief, but in death, his bones unlocked the secrets of how humans populated the Americas.

Today, the Anzick site lies just south of the tiny town of Wilsall, Montana, situated among the rolling grasslands and hills nestled between sub-ranges of the Rocky Mountains. The Shields River, a tributary of the Yellowstone, burbles through the bottomland just below a rocky sandstone outcrop. Thirteen thousand years ago, that sandstone formed the ledge of an overhanging rock shelter, a welcome respite for the nomadic hunters who passed by. The Crazy Mountains lie just to the east, easily visible on a clear summer day; they would have been even more prominent when the infant and his Clovis relatives came to this place, covered at the time by a thick layer of ice extending well down the slopes.

The world was a colder and harsher place then. The Ice Age - technically the “Last Glacial Period” - that had dominated the last 100,000 years of the planet’s history was nearing its end, but the hunters had no way of knowing that; the world had warmed and cooled in regular but unpredictable cycles several times over those thousand centuries. They were living in the midst of the last cold snap of the Ice Age, a period we call the Younger Dryas. While the Earth had steadily warmed over the past 5,000 or so years following the Last Glacial Maximum,when the ice sheets reached their greatest extent, the Younger Dryas reversed that progress; new forests reverted to hardy tundra, and glaciers expanded once more.

The whole planet looked wildly different then. It was substantially colder: With the onset of the Younger Dryas, temperatures dropped about 5 degrees Fahrenheit in At the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels had been 440 feet below where they stand today, and they were still hundreds of feet below their present levels despite thousands of years of steady warming between then and the Younger Dryas. The continental shapes we know so well now were unrecognizable: The broad expanses of continental shelf that extend out into the ocean from present-day coastlines were dry land. Much of the North Sea between Britain and the European continent was a landmass called Doggerland; the islands of Southeast Asia, like Java and Borneo, were an extended region known as Sundaland; and in the far north, Beringia, a distinctive region in its own right, linked Alaska and Siberia together. The center of Beringia was about 500 miles from the most distant coastline; the submerged portions of the landmass would have doubled the present-day size of Alaska, so it was hardly a “land bridge.”

The vegetation and animal life that covered the planet were different, too. The vast temperate forests of the northern hemisphere didn’t exist, nor did many of the jungles that now blanket the tropics. In their places were diverse, thriving grasslands: savannah in Amazonia and parts of Southeast Asia, and highly productive Mammoth Steppe across most of Eurasia and North America. Animals suited to these environments, namely large grazers and the predators that ate them, abounded: These were the Pleistocene megafauna, like woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, cave lions, and sabre-tooth tigers. Wild horses and camels roamed the Great Plains, and herds of reindeer ranged far south into France and southern Europe.

It was probably the migrations of these animals that pulled Anzick-1’s ancestors down through Beringia into North America. Evidence for people living in the Americas prior to that time, around 13,000 years ago, is sparse and controversial; it’s likely that there were humans living somewhere on those two continents before then, but our scattered archaeological and genetic indications don’t cohere into any sort of viable narrative about what those earlier occupants were doing or how they were related to later indigenous people in the Americas. There were, however, many groups of people living up north in Beringia. Their ancestors had probably migrated east from Siberia in the past 10,000 years or so, becoming isolated from other groups living in northeast Asia for long enough to develop a distinctive genetic signature. Since Beringia was such a big place, with huge distances separating Yukon and Siberia, those groups had hundreds or thousands of years to diverge from one another. This created what geneticists call “population structure” among the ancient Beringians. While these groups shared recent common ancestors, genetic drift within a limited set of mating partners made them distinctive enough that we can track their signatures in the DNA record through vast periods of time and across staggeringly huge geographic spaces.

Around 14,000 years ago, Anzick-1’s ancestors were probably living somewhere along the eastern edges of Beringia, in what is today central Alaska. For thousands of years, their overland path south had been blocked by the two enormous ice sheets that covered most of present-day Canada. The Cordilleran ice sheet, in the west, stretched from Washington state to Yukon; the much larger Laurentide ice sheet extended from the Canadian Rockies to Greenland to the Arctic. As the planet slowly warmed following the Last Glacial Maximum, these two ice sheets began to melt along their edges. Where the two ice sheets had once met and merged along the continental divide, the melting created an open, ice-free corridor, the viable land route to the south that had so long eluded the Beringians.

While it’s likely that some people went south along the coast via boat before and after this time, the opening of the ice-free corridor aligns neatly with the dates we have for the Clovis people. The archaeological site of Swan Point, located near what’s now Fairbanks, dates to between 14,000 and 14,500 years ago. It sits close to what would have been the northern opening of the ice-free corridor. Stone artifacts discovered at Swan Point bear a strong resemblance to the later toolkit of the Clovis people. It is as close to a smoking gun as the archaeological record is likely to provide: A group very much like the Clovis people lived near what was likely the northern entrance to the ice-free corridor, at precisely the time they would have needed to start moving south in order to meet the dates we see in North America a thousand years later.

Among those people who camped at Swan Point, cooking red deer over the fire and cracking the leftover bones for their marrow while others flaked their stone tools, were Anzick-1’s ancestors. As years, decades, and then centuries passed, plants and animals colonized the ice-free corridor from both directions. Anzick-1’s ancestors followed the animals as they had always done, tracking them south and eventually emerging into a brand-new world.

Anzick-1 lived his all-too-brief life within a pioneer society. If there were other people living south of the ice sheets or not, there weren’t very many of them, and the small founding groups of Clovis people entered a landscape that was effectively empty of humans. Its animal occupants were wildly different from what we see in North America today. Herds of woolly mammoth rumbled across the open grassl ands. Camels and horses wandered the Great Plains, pursued by dire wolves, lions, and saber-toothed cats. Short-faced bears, far larger than the biggest grizzly, hibernated in protected dens. Giant ground sloths and other megafauna were a common sight. Combined with the bitter cold and omnipresent ice, it sounds like a lethal and unwelcoming environment to us in the present; to Anzick-1’s hardy band, however, it was more like paradise.

People have been hunting animals since long before our ancestors could be classified as Homo sapiens. We as a species tend to follow predictable patterns in how we choose our prey, the same general patterns that most predators follow: We take the biggest game first, because bigger animals provide more meat and thus more return on the energy investment we make to hunt and kill the animal. An adult Columbian mammoth weighed roughly 22,000 pounds; a white-tailed deer weighs about 150 pounds. Given the choice, a hunter is going to take the mammoth over the deer every time. The land the Clovis people entered around 13,000 years ago was full of enormous ambulatory meat lockers with little-to-no experience of human predation. It wasn’t exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, but they didn’t have a lot of competition; the prey didn’t make it very hard for them, either. In those conditions, the Clovis people thrived. A small initial group, probably no more than a few hundred people, multiplied over and over again, spreading quickly through this new continent. Within just a few hundred years, by about 12,750 years ago, descendants of that group could be found across much of North America, from Montana to northern Mexico and the Pacific Northwest to the Atlantic shores of the southeast. The sheer speed of their expansion is remarkable, and in my opinion, perhaps the clearest example of demographic success we can see anywhere in prehistory.

Anzick-1 was born roughly halfway through this period of extraordinarily rapid expansion. The first Clovis artifacts date to about 150 years before his birth; the latest come from about 150 years after. Those artifacts are well known and understood, particularly the double-sided projectile points the Clovis people used to hunt big game. Clovis points, as these are known, are intricate three-to-four-inch-long blades with a groove - or a “flute” - running down the center. They’re extremely difficult to make, aesthetically beautiful but razor-sharp and dangerous. When affixed to the end of a hunter’s spear—which he would hurl in a move not unlike the plastic contraption we use to throw tennis balls for our dogs—the damage caused would be lethal even to the largest game. Modern experiments have shown that a Clovis point can penetrate between five and nine inches of flesh equivalent, easily enough to reach the organs of an ancient bison or mastodon. And there was always more than one being thrown: The Naco Mammoth, found in Arizona in 1951, had no fewer than eight Clovis points embedded in its flesh when it died. Armed with Clovis points, these hunters were perfectly equipped to stalk and kill the large grazers that were still common in the unexplored lands of North America.

When the people of his band placed little Anzick-1 in his grave, they also put a finished Clovis point in the ground with him, along with dozens of other stone and bone artifacts: double-sided blades used like knives to cut meat, sharp scrapers to clean hides, enigmatic beveled rods made from bone, and larger pieces of stone that would eventually have been knapped into smaller tools. The infant was buried with most of the technological necessities that would have allowed him to survive in the freezing cold of the northern Great Plains as an adult. Scientific investigations of those tools have revealed a great deal about how Anzick-1’s band would have lived, and what he saw around him during his all-too-brief life.

Our understanding of the lives of the Clovis people relies on inference and educated guesswork. Archaeologists have never found an unambiguous settlement, only the possible remains of seasonal or nightly campsites. Most of what we know about the Clovis people comes from widespread but limited finds of stone artifacts, particularly those distinctive points, and the kill sites where they dispatched mammoth, mastodon, and giant bison. We know they were hunter-gatherers, but that doesn’t narrow it down much. Foragers can live in many different ways: Some stay put in limited areas, extensively exploiting the animals, plants, fish, and other resources available nearby; others travel widely. Some rely almost exclusively on wild game, while others are dedicated to collecting berries and nuts, and still others collect shellfish and kelp as their preferred foods. Even among dedicated hunters, variation rules: Stalking deer or boar through a dense forest is a much different lifestyle than going out onto the ice-choked waters of the Arctic to hunt seal or whale or trapping small game in the Kalahari. The stone tools buried with Anzick-1 weren’t suitable for any of those purposes: They were the implements of dedicated big-game hunters, nomads who traversed extraordinarily long distances in search of their preferred prey.

When the archaeologist Samuel Stockton White V ran tests on the Anzick artifacts, he found in the surviving flint traces of their original uses from 13,000 years ago. The traces could be found in the form of microscopic proteins caught between the tiny, jagged crenellations on the edges of the tools that made them so useful to their makers. One blade had been used to cut through the flesh of a Pleistocene camel, a species that has only rarely been documented as prey for the Clovis people. Scraper tools were used to shape the elk bones that became long rods, perhaps the foreshafts of darts tipped with Clovis points. Other traces were lost to time, or the items had been made but not put to use before the burial. Between those protein traces, the tools’ shape, and parallels with other Clovis artifact assemblages, the basic conclusion is that Anzick-1 spent his short life on the move.

We have all the information we need to reconstruct a day in that life.

As babies generally do, Anzick-1 probably woke up with a cry for his mother. Infants in forager societies, particularly those that included hypermobile hunters like the Clovis people, tend to spend their time in close contact with their mothers, often carried in some sort of sling. It was surely a frigid morning, and would have seemed so even for those who live in that part of Montana today. The looming ice sheets had receded over the past millennia, but they were still close, and the freezing winds that blew down through the unprotected plains were viciously cold. The landscape was open, even more so than it is now; fewer trees crowded the hillsides and riverbanks. Snow never left the peaks of the mountains, not even at the height of what passed for summer, with seasons less defined than they are today. Anzick-1’s year of life was spent amid variations of cold that simply don’t exist anywhere on the planet anymore.

Assuming it was a day to move camp, which would have happened dozens of times every year, the baby first saw light as portable shelters of wood and hide were broken down and lashed into bundles that could be dragged across the grasslands with a travois or sled. We have no idea how large Clovis bands were, but several dozen members is likely based on parallels to other groups of big-game hunters: enough to form a durable community whose members could reproduce without inbreeding, but not so many that food intake became unsustainable.

We have no indications of food storage among the Clovis people, and most archaeologists assume they exploited plants only opportunistically, drawing most of their caloric intake from meat. Anzick-1 was obviously too small to consume mammoth or elk, but as his eyes adjusted to the brightness of a Montana morning, he smelled meat roasting over a small cookfire. He saw the adults of his band munching on greasy, fatty flesh or struggling to masticate preserved, rawhide-tough meat that was weeks or even months old. Even in a ta rget-rich environment like North America at this time, with perfectly tailored weaponry, taking big game was a chancy business: A single failed hunt could plunge the band into days or weeks of hunger. Better to live off stale scraps and ensure their longer-term chances of survival.

Once the camp was packed, it was time to move. To the limited extent that we can reconstruct their patterns of movement, the Clovis people followed the rivers that cut through North America’s interior. In this particular area, that was the Yellowstone River and its tributaries, which drain thousands of square miles of land in the northern Plains. The higher reaches of the region were even less hospitable than they are today, but elk grazed on the hillsides while herds of bison, mammoth, horses, and other animals followed the same migration routes the newly arrived people did. We know, thanks to that single protein analysis, that camel was on the menu at some point not too long before Anzick-1’s death.

This was the rhythm of Anzick-1’s short life. His mother strapped him into a sling or baby-board of some kind and went about the innumerable tasks that required her attention: drawing water from the nearby creek or river into a leather container; feeding the baby; packing up their sleeping furs and other belongings before beginning the journey; dressing in garments of elk-, mammoth-, and camel-hide; and seeing to any other children she might have had, who were probably at least five years old, based on usual patterns of birth spacing in mobile foraging societies. That’s because it was almost impossible for a woman to care for more than one child who couldn’t walk at a time. Their band was only viable if it kept moving.

Their most fundamental collective experience was walking: at least a few miles every day while encamped, perhaps ten miles per day when burdened with their possessions and moving between campsites, thirty miles or even more for hunters moving fast while tracking prey. Anzick-1 spent the majority of his brief life in that carrier with his mother, gently swaying as she took long strides through the omnipresent grass or stepped carefully onto slick river rocks, napping as she trudged along the banks of the Yellowstone and its tributaries, squawling when a nap was disturbed by the ruckus of the hunters returning to camp with hundreds of pounds of camel meat. By afternoon, they were stopping at a promising campsite, breaking out the shelters and sleeping furs, and preparing food. Work would get underway, hammerstones ringing on flint as broken stone tools were sharpened and retouched. As night descended and the baby fell asleep again, the band bedded down. Perhaps they would stay a few days, or not, depending. There was always a next day, a next journey, until, for Anzick-1, there wasn’t.

We don’t know whether Anzick-1’s illness was brief or long. The bones are poorly preserved and fragmentary, as the remains of infants so often are, but there’s no obvious indication of physical trauma. As with every society before the very recent past, infant and child mortality would have been astronomically high among the Clovis people: Roughly half of all babies born would not have reached adulthood, whether because of malnutrition, injury, or illness. That last option is the most likely in this case, as it has been throughout human history, so vulnerable are the very young to infection. In some cases, archaeologists have excavated sizable skeletal samples from a single time and place: With that much data, we can reconstruct actual demographic patterns that tell us about population health and the kinds of stresses they experienced. In the case of the Clovis people, however, we have almost no human remains to work with - except those of little Anzick-1. His are the only remains ever discovered in association with any of the hundreds of Clovis artifact finds, the sole human face of the first people we know well from the ancient Americas.

Because he is the only Clovis person ever discovered, the information hidden inside those tiny, fragmentary bones is beyond priceless. When analyzed, Anzick-1’s DNA revealed that his group was ancestral to practically all later indigenous people living in the Americas. It may not have been his band specifically, but their close relatives - cousins, uncles, people removed by only a few degrees - lay at the root of the family trees of people who would soon live everywhere from the Great Lakes to Tierra del Fuego. In genetic terms, the effective population size of this founding population of Clovis people numbered only in the low hundreds. The initial group that migrated south from Beringia was tiny, and everyone living in the Americas for the following 13,000 years was descended in whole or in part from them. Anzick-1 is our only indisputable proof of that connection, the link in the chain connecting millions upon millions of later people to some of their earliest identifiable ancestors.

But he was also a baby whose life ended far too soon. There is no reason to believe that people mourned the loss of the youngest among them any less than we do now simply because it happened so often; they weren’t inured to the pain, they just lived with more of it. That was a burden that every premodern person carried to a degree that is difficult, even impossible to imagine today. Yet we still know the pain of loss, and that is what a mother and a tight-knit community felt when they laid a baby to rest underneath a sandstone ledge 13,000 years ago. We can hope that they never again experienced that tragedy, though they surely did; more often, however, they felt the joy of children entering the world. Perhaps more than any other group in the archaeological record, the Clovis people succeeded in bringing more of those babies into the world and raising them to adulthood, soon to have children of their own. New bands split off and traveled far away from that spot near the Shields River, forgetting about the infant buried so long ago above the burbling waters. We remember him now, and thanks to him, the story of untold millions of later people deepens and expands in ways we never could have imagined.

Next time on Past Lives, we’ll head west a ways, to the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state. Around 8,500 years ago, a man was buried there, after he had already traveled hundreds of miles in his forty or fifty years of life. He’s known today as Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, and he’s one of the best understood people we have from the distant past.

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Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

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