Patrick Wyman: There’s No Substitute for Deep Knowledge of Your Topic
In this interview, author Patrick Wyman discusses connecting with the people of the past in his new book, Lost Worlds.
Patrick Wyman, one of the best known and most followed podcasters in the world, is the founder and host of "Tides of History," "Fall of Rome," "Past Lives," and "The Pursuit of Dadliness." He is also the author of The Verge: Renaissance, Reformation, and Forty Years That Shook the World. He holds 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. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.
In this interview, Patrick discusses connecting with the people of the past in his new book, Lost Worlds, his advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Patrick Wyman
Literary Agent: William Callahan, Inkwell
Book title: Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release date: May 5, 2026
Genre: Nonfiction; history; popular science
Previous titles: The Verge: Renaissance, Reformation, and Forty Years that Shook the World (Twelve Books, 2021)
Elevator pitch: For the last hundred years, we’ve had a story about how humanity went from hunting and gathering to farming, living under the rule of states, and living in cities, a straight line of progress from barbarity to civilization. After decades of cutting-edge scientific research, that straight line of progress no longer holds, and Lost Worlds tells the new story of how we got to where we are.
What prompted you to write the book?
I heard so much about the incredible new tools archaeologists were using to reconstruct what happened many thousands of years ago, like ancient DNA and paleoclimate. When I went looking, however, there wasn’t a good book-length overview of how much our understanding of the distant human past has changed thanks to those new tools and perspectives: Our portrait of how we got from hunting and gathering to cities and states looks nothing like it did even 20 years ago. I wanted to tell that story in light of everything we simply couldn’t know a couple of decades in the past, drawing on everything from studies of ancient environments to preserved genetic material to big data methods of analysis. It took years for me to learn how to read those studies and how to talk to specialists in archaeological science, but it was completely worth it.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication?
About six years from idea to publication. I started the research process in the summer of 2020 while covering prehistory on my podcast, “Tides of History”; it took a year to write the proposal and sell the book in the fall of 2021; and then three full years of writing were necessary to turn in the draft, with another year and a half of editing. The idea didn’t really change in that time, but the execution certainly did.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I didn’t expect it to be as difficult as it was to turn archaeological studies of differently colored soils or microscopic plant remains into a compelling narrative; now that I’m saying it aloud, I’m grasping how that might have been a mistaken assumption on my part, but I thought it would flow more easily. More to the point, however, I wasn’t prepared for the emotional impact of writing about mass graves, falling civilizations, and sheer human resilience in the face of adversity. More than once I had to take some time to gather myself before I could keep going.
What do you hope readers will take from the book?
My greatest hope is that readers will see the people of the past as fundamentally like us today in their capacities, aspirations, and flaws. People are people, whether we’re talking about mammoth-hunting wanderers 20,000 years ago, the first farmers 10,000 years ago, or city-dwelling white-collar workers today; we all care for our children, feel hungry when we haven’t eaten, and want a roof over our heads. Sometimes we come up with truly brilliant solutions to our problems, and on other occasions we really foul things up: exhausting the soil, clearcutting forests, building unsanitary places to live. We’re capable of so much, for both good and bad.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
No matter how much you think you’ve already read, dig into that next footnote and follow the trail of citations wherever it leads. There’s no substitute for deep knowledge of your topic: not craft, not a team of research assistants, not marketing, not publicity, not a gigantic social media platform that allows you to sell books no matter the quality of the product. Do the research and learn the material, because there are no shortcuts if you want to produce something you can be proud of.
