Figuring Out The Past

The numbers that tell the story of humanity

What was the tallest building of the ancient world? Or the average life expectancy in medieval Byzantium? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ritual human sacrifice ever? We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we understand our own world through data: vast arrays of statistics that reveal the workings of our societies. Radical historians Peter Turchin and Dan Hoyer draw on their own Seshat project - a staggeringly ambitious log of demographic and econometric information for every society that has ever existed - to find the large-scale patterns in Figuring Out the Past. Join them now for a dive into the numbers that reveal the true shape of the past.