A short historical past of humankind’s many apocalypses

People have endured quite a bit over the course of our existence, undoubtedly rather more than can totally be explored within the confines of a 300ish web page guide, however Lizzie Wade’s Apocalypse: How Disaster Reworked Our World and Can Forge New Futures nonetheless paints a reasonably wealthy image of a few of the most disastrous occasions in our historical past. Going again to the demise of the Neanderthals and thru the assorted civilization-collapsing forces within the tens of 1000’s of years that adopted — years-long droughts, plagues, colonialism, slavery — Wade examines the idea of the apocalypse via an archaeological lens, and makes use of all of this to place our trendy crises into perspective.

Regardless of the subject material, it is not likely a doom-and-gloom form of guide. In spite of everything, people are nonetheless round. As a lot as it is a story about dying and destruction, it is also about human resilience.