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Apocalypse then: how cataclysms shaped human societies

·28 min·2 clips

Lizzie Wade reveals how apocalypses are not just endings but society's best chance for radical transformation.

Lizzie Wade is a science journalist whose book Apocalypse draws on modern archaeology to examine how human societies throughout history have experienced and navigated catastrophic events, from volcanic eruptions to pandemics to the collapse of political systems. She appears on Nature Podcast's Nature Hits the Books segment to discuss the book's central argument and some of its case studies. Wade defines an apocalypse not as a singular end event but as a rapid collective loss that fundamentally transforms a society's way of life and sense of identity. This includes literal losses such as deaths in a plague, and more abstract losses such as the collapse of state systems, the disappearance of a language, or the dismantling of a trade network. For Wade, the transformation is more defining than the loss itself: catastrophes are the moments when societies must radically rethink their structure, identity, and purpose. She resists the language of better or worse transformations, preferring to see past peoples as fully human, as creative and unpredictable as contemporary people, rather than as moral exemplars or cautionary tales. The book was conceived in 2018 and written largely during the pandemic, and Wade notes that the pandemic made the emotional core of the research feel immediate in a new way: the isolation, the uncertainty, the need to understand what comes next, are not new feelings but among the most persistent in human experience. Two consistent factors emerge across the historical case studies. Climate change, particularly multi-year droughts, appears in many of the stories, not as a sole cause but as a vulnerability amplifier that stressed already fragile political systems. Community is the second factor: survivors consistently reorganized around smaller or larger collective units depending on what the disaster required, and this social reorganization is what enabled continuity. Wade challenges the popular post-apocalyptic narrative in which catastrophe produces lone survivors or competing factions by arguing that historical evidence shows cooperative community formation was the dominant response. The episode closes with a discussion of how the book can serve as a source of comfort rather than dread, since understanding that humans have successfully navigated enormous disruption repeatedly suggests future resilience.

As heard by us

A clear look at how catastrophe can reshape labor, power, and identity.

Lizzie Wade treats catastrophe as a fast-moving collective break that can reorder a society's work, power, and sense of identity. Through the Black Death, the episode shows how elites can shape the story after the fact, while also making room for people whose lives usually slip…

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If you want history that explains upheaval without melodrama, start here.

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