-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World – A History of Civilization Through Trial and Error, Ice Age to Bronze Age
by Patrick Wyman
The creator of the hit podcast Tides of History offers a new look at humanity's deep past, showing us how our world was built not by inevitability, but by trial and error on a global scale.
There's a familiar story about us humans: we went from hunting and gathering to farming, wandering bands to villages and cities, clans and chieftains to states and kings. But Lost Worlds offers a new narrative of humanity's deep history. Here beloved podcast host Patrick Wyman focuses on the 10,000-year span between the end of the Ice Age and the decline of the Bronze Age—the period when civilization as we understand it emerged, introducing social hierarchies, urbanism, complex political organizations, and the written word.
But instead of being an arc of progress, this period of immense change was not linear; it was littered with fits and false starts, failures, disasters, and the complete collapse of complex societies. With the recent explosion in available archaeological evidence, including ancient human DNA, we can now understand long-past people in unprecedented detail. By focusing on lost worlds of individuals and societies, we see that to be human is to try and fail. But it is also to endure.
In this nuanced retelling, human progress is no longer a straight march from caves to cities: Farming didn't always replace foraging, villages didn't automatically spark agriculture, and cities didn't necessitate rigid hierarchies. For thousands of years, humans merely improvised. By the end of the Bronze Age, the world had become unrecognizable: mammoths and giant sloths replaced by cattle and sheep, scattered nomadic bands replaced by millions living in cities, and farming on nearly every continent. Wyman argues that the rise of states and steady food production wasn't inevitable, but rather, the outcome of countless choices that reshaped the planet and made us who we are today.
Sweeping, accessible, and filled with colorful detail, Lost Worlds is the story of how humanity built the world we live in—not by destiny, but by experiment.
"In a narrative at once demystifying and awe-inspiring, Wyman vividly conjures the distant past while at the same time making it seem like a window into the future. It's a remarkable achievement." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An illuminating history of prehistory." —Kirkus Reviews
"This book is great. Wyman manages to move both quickly and patiently through a vast swath of time, focusing on a period before many histories even begin. His research and artful storytelling doesn't shy away from the darker side of events, but the tales he tells us about the deep past reveal something almost magical about our shared humanity." —Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, co-authors of The Bright Ages and Oathbreakers
"Propelled by the latest archaeological methods and discoveries, Patrick Wyman transforms cutting-edge science into vivid human history as he reconstructs the lifeways of long-forgotten societies and upends outdated linear narratives about the emergence of civilization around the world. A spellbinding tour de force!" —Walter Scheidel, author of What Is Ancient History?
This information about Lost Worlds was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
One of the most popular history podcasters in the world, Patrick Wyman is the host of Past Lives, Tides of History, and Fall of Rome, and the author of The Verge: Renaissance, Reformation, and Forty Years That Shook the Worlds and Lost Worlds. He received a PhD in History from the University of Southern California and has written for The Atlantic, Slate, and Mother Jones. In a past life, he covered mixed martial arts for Bleacher Report, Deadspin, and the Washington Post.
If you liked Lost Worlds, try these:
by Moudhy Al-Rashid
Published 2026
Humanity's earliest efforts at recording and drawing meaning from history reveal how lives millennia ago were not so different from our own.
by David Graeber
Published 2023
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution―from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality―and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
by Neil Shubin
Published 2021
The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life on Earth--a new view of the evolution of human and animal life that explains how the incredible diversity of life on our planet came to be.
Polite conversation is rarely either.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
