Patrick Wyman’s new book Lost Worlds shatters the myth that we were destined to succeed

Title: Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World
Author: Patrick Wyman
Publisher: Harper
Publication Year: 2026
Available from: Amazon

If you think of human development as having moved in a smoothly linear fashion—from foraging to farming to villages to cities to modern states—Patrick Wyman’s new book will add a dollop of messy complexity to your perspective. Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World paints a picture that’s the opposite of orderly.

“In some places, villages came before farming; in other places where people began planting crops and tending animals, newly minted farmers never settled down at all. Foragers were perfectly capable of building permanent settlements without ever taking a single step down the path toward domestication of plants or animals.”

Nor was the development trajectory consistently positive. Success for a while didn’t guarantee that it would be sustained: “In reality, rather than a convenient model of steadily increasing population and sophistication, societies fell to pieces all the time.”

Wyman focuses on what he views as the “transformative” 10,000-year period between the end of the Ice Age and the end of the Bronze Age. And the story he tells is facilitated by the revolution in archaeological science.

Satellite imagery, lasers and ground-penetrating radar provide maps to locate sites buried long ago. DNA and isotope analysis of excavated, ancient bones yield information about who these people were, their relationships to each other, their diets and their geographic origins.

Putting form to all this new data, Wyman identifies several themes.

As noted earlier, there’s the sheer variety, even chaos, of the early human experience. Apparent success could morph into total failure. Some groups even “died out completely, leaving behind no trace in the genetic record.”

The relationship between people and their environments is a big part of the story. With the climate “constantly in flux on every scale from the global to the hyper-local,” how people adapted to change or proactively shaped their environments was important. These actions were often, but not always, beneficial to human flourishing.

Demography—defined as the number of people living in a time and place—is another theme. Groups that were able to exploit resources thrived and their greater numbers magnified their influence. To a substantial degree, the future belonged to those who showed up for it.

Migration was also material, not only in the geographic spread of languages and cultures, but also in the adoption of new technologies and patterns of resource use. To quote: “The spread of farming around the world was almost entirely a record of migration, driven by demographic growth, rather than indigenous peoples adopting a new mode of subsistence and ecological engineering.”

To his credit, Wyman doesn’t shy away from the darker side of the story. Violence was a constant. Indeed, he characterizes it as “a foundational part of the human experience.”

A 2011 discovery of a mass grave in southern Poland offers a small-scale example. It contains the remains of 15 people who were clubbed to death, children included. Radiocarbon data narrows the timing of the massacre to between 2880 and 2776 BC. Further detail comes from DNA and isotope analysis, indicating that the victims were a familial group—four half-brothers with their locally born spouses and children. And the absence of defensive injuries suggests calculated, cold-blooded killing.

Wyman illustrates the prevalence of warfare in the Late Bronze Age with three roughly contemporaneous examples.

One is the Battle of Kadesh, fought in 1274 BC, in Syria between two kings—the Egyptian Ramesses II and the Hittite Muwatalli II. It was a large-scale affair, featuring 5,000 or 6,000 chariots and tens of thousands of infantry. All in all, there were at least 40,000 participants. As Wyman puts it, “Ramesses and Muwatalli had resources to burn, territory to conquer, and glory to seek.” Tendentiously written contemporary accounts notwithstanding, the resulting carnage seems to have been inconclusive.

A second example takes us to China and what was then the largest settlement in the world. With a population of around 100,000 spread over 14 square miles, Anyang was the capital of China’s first historical dynasty, the Shang.

It was a nasty place, rigidly hierarchical and characterized by an elite ruling class that waged endless wars and enslaved thousands, the latter constituting not only an involuntary workforce but also fodder for human sacrifices to placate ancestral spirits and deities.

Although on a much smaller scale, the third example is particularly interesting. Unlike the other two, there are no contemporary written records as the region where it transpired—northern Germany—was “entirely without writing for at least another thousand years.” So what we now know is a function of modern archaeology.

The location is in the Tollense Valley and the combatants were a mixture of locals and non-locals, the latter coming from as far afield as 350 miles. Weapons ranged from swords and axes to wooden clubs, and the fighting took place along a short stretch of the Tollense River. Evidence suggests it was a vicious, close-quarters affair with bodies being left to decompose where they fell or dumped into shallow nearby pits.

Reading Wyman’s book is a sobering experience, a reminder that prosperity and security aren’t the natural order of things. And certainly not something to be taken for granted.

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical—well, perhaps a little bit.

Our Verdict

Patrick Wyman’s Lost Worlds succeeds because it replaces the familiar story of human progress with one that is richer, more complicated and far more convincing. Accessible without sacrificing scholarly depth, Lost Worlds challenges long-held assumptions about humanity’s past while offering a fascinating reminder that history is shaped as much by chance and circumstance as by progress.