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Hi everybody, from Wundery, welcome

0:12

to another episode of Tides

0:14

of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks

0:17

so much for joining me today.

0:19

Now, it's not an exaggeration to

0:21

say that ancient DNA has fundamentally

0:24

changed our understanding of the human

0:26

past. The genomes of people who

0:28

have been dead for hundreds, thousands,

0:31

or even tens of thousands of

0:33

years offer new insights into aspects

0:35

of human experience that had previously

0:37

been completely unknown to us. Whole new

0:40

species of archaic human have come

0:42

into view. So too have the processes

0:44

of migration and diffusion that brought our

0:46

ancestors to every corner of the planet. But

0:48

we are only just scratching the surface

0:50

of what ancient DNA can do. Today's

0:52

guest works on the absolute cutting edge

0:54

of this exciting new tool. Dr. Pontuscoglin

0:57

is the group leader of

0:59

the Francis Crick Institute's ancient

1:01

genomics laboratory. He has worked

1:04

on a wide variety of

1:06

topics over the years, ranging

1:08

from migration to changes in

1:11

the immune system. There's a

1:13

great chance that if you've

1:15

been listening to tides for

1:17

a while, you have heard me

1:19

discuss some aspect of his research,

1:21

and I couldn't possibly be more

1:23

stoked to talk to him today.

1:25

Thank you, Patrick's great to

1:27

be here. So how did you get

1:30

interested in the study of ancient

1:32

DNA? Yeah, it's a long story, I

1:34

guess. I chose to study biology because

1:36

I liked evolution. It was a

1:38

little bit reminiscent of physics,

1:41

right? There's sort of these

1:43

laws that relatively well described

1:45

things, how they happened through time.

1:47

I was interested in that for some

1:49

reason I went into biology. And people used to

1:51

talk about green biology when you're kind of out

1:54

in the field and white biology when you're in

1:56

the lab. And I was like, well, what? Can

1:58

you sort of like just do theory? practical

2:00

stuff for some kind of like armchair

2:02

biology. And indeed, yeah, of course

2:04

now there's a lot of data science

2:07

biology, so that's very cool. But

2:09

yeah, I was studying evolutionary biology,

2:11

but always been interested in

2:13

humans, of course. That's kind of

2:15

perhaps was the motivating factor for

2:17

me to study biology, you know, this

2:19

kind of fascinating dynamic where, you know,

2:22

one part of this is biological and

2:24

another part is of course, you know,

2:26

not biological shape our environment, shape

2:29

by ideas, social influences and

2:31

so that interface always you know

2:33

because it's tricky and it always

2:35

fascinated me and so yeah I

2:38

was working on evolutionary biology and

2:40

there were these people it seemed

2:42

fascinating to have ancient DNA right

2:44

because you can study evolution in

2:47

time you know from between that

2:49

point time point to another time

2:51

point it seemed like the natural

2:53

way to study evolution rather

2:55

than extrapolating things from the

2:57

present into the past. And so

2:59

in the department that I was at was

3:02

under Giato Sturm, who is a co-author of

3:04

this paper, you mentioned actually, and you

3:06

know, he had his office and he would

3:08

have like, you know, samples from like

3:10

strange places in the world, this was,

3:12

you know, archaeology flavor to it. That

3:14

seemed really fascinating as well, and somehow

3:17

I was drawn into it. And we are

3:19

all the luckier for it because the

3:21

work that you have done is absolutely

3:23

fascinating. I mean, you've done a lot

3:25

of work on migration. That's something we'll

3:28

talk about today. But you mentioned looking

3:30

at evolution in the past, and it

3:32

seems like we spend so much time

3:34

in the past, and it seems like

3:36

we spend so much time in the

3:39

present trying to assemble what are basically

3:41

proxies for evolution, like ways of getting

3:43

it past evolutionary processes on the basis

3:45

of data that's available in the past.

3:47

Yeah, so that's how it's defined,

3:49

you know, even though Darwin didn't

3:52

know about the nuts and bolts

3:54

of genetics, you know, he talked

3:56

about heritability. And so evolution

3:58

is genetic change through time. Not

4:00

necessarily adaptation or natural selection.

4:02

I like to think of

4:04

it in these kind of

4:06

five forces, at least in

4:08

biology, where two of them

4:10

create variation, mutation, you know,

4:12

your X-Men, all this kind

4:15

of stuff, recombination that shuffles,

4:17

ardent genetic material in its

4:19

generation, those two create variation.

4:21

And then there's three that

4:23

shape variations through time. So

4:25

selection, everyone will be aware

4:27

of. but there's also those

4:29

that are affected really by

4:31

history, right? History shapes our

4:34

genes, you know, the political

4:36

decisions of medieval, perhaps leaders

4:38

to, you know, go somewhere,

4:40

you know, has shaped the

4:42

genetic variation today, migration and

4:44

genetic drift, and so, yeah,

4:46

I think that's really fascinating.

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code audio 40. So

6:20

speaking of ancient DNA, this is a

6:22

really new field in the grand scheme

6:24

of things. It's only been around for

6:26

a few decades really. How have you

6:28

seen this change during your time working

6:31

on it? I mean, you're right at

6:33

the forefront of it. You get to

6:35

have a say in the kinds of

6:37

projects that get worked on. How have

6:39

you seen the field change? Yeah, of

6:41

course, I haven't been from the very

6:43

beginning in 84, 85. There was his

6:45

early work in children by Svantapelbo

6:47

who won the Nobel price, 2002.

6:50

And that was a time when people were

6:52

not at all convinced that we could

6:54

study human ancient DNA at all. In

6:56

fact, most people thought it would

6:58

be impossible because how can you get

7:01

rid of contamination that's just floating around

7:03

in the air? How could you ever

7:05

be sure that the DNA that you think

7:07

you have retrieved is from an ancient

7:09

individual? And by all the sequencing techniques

7:11

and the data science techniques that I've

7:13

worked on as well, now we can

7:16

do this. And actually, if you do

7:18

things right, you can do things right.

7:20

completely exclude the possibility

7:23

of contamination. So that's been

7:25

a big thing I think. And I mean

7:27

it's just where we are now 15 years

7:29

later I think it's like way beyond any

7:31

reasonable expectation 15

7:33

years ago. And that kind of

7:36

optimism I guess is something that I really

7:38

you know carry with me today as well

7:40

where of course we should do reasonable

7:42

things and you know really think

7:44

about things but you know try to

7:46

you know imagine and imagine and

7:49

imagine big. Well, so this was what was

7:51

always so striking to me about the field

7:53

of ancient DNA because I started getting interested

7:55

around the time that you did around 2009

7:57

was when I first started paying attention. to

8:00

the work that was being published in the

8:02

field. And coming at it as a historian

8:04

who was interested in these periods and was

8:06

looking for other tools through which to understand

8:09

the past, that optimism really stuck with me

8:11

that I was like, we don't have to

8:13

be stuck thinking in terms of just this

8:16

like really limited body of texts that we

8:18

have or trying to read the archaeological material

8:20

that we have through the lens of these

8:22

texts, we can get other independent sources of

8:25

data that are going to give us insight

8:27

into aspects of human life that we couldn't

8:29

before it. That was so incredibly exciting to

8:32

me. It made me want to study this

8:34

stuff more. Yeah, and actually that's a really

8:36

analogy to history, right? Our DNA is kind

8:38

of like books, and you know, you find

8:41

a manuscript a thousand years ago, you find

8:43

a genome with DNA from a thousand years

8:45

ago, it's very similar thing, and they will

8:47

not be the same. We have to decode

8:50

them, we have to interpret them, it's very

8:52

similar. Yeah, what frustrated me. I remember what

8:54

I was talking to historian and archaeologist colleagues

8:57

back then, and I think this attitude is

8:59

still there, to a lesser extent today, is

9:01

that they thought that ancient DNA was either

9:03

going to be a silver bullet to answer

9:06

everything, or it was going to be completely

9:08

useless, and that there was no real middle

9:10

grounds to it. And more of them, I

9:12

think, than not, fell on the side of,

9:15

it's going to be useless. I'm like, well,

9:17

no, it's that you wouldn't read any sort

9:19

of written written source, where the Goths come

9:22

from, you use that as a source of

9:24

information. It's a text that's written at a

9:26

particular time. A genome is no different. It's

9:28

in a particular time and a particular place,

9:31

and there are factors that influence why it

9:33

is that way at that time, and it's

9:35

your job to figure it out. It's just

9:38

an investigation, like anything else. Yeah, yeah, it's

9:40

just one of the things, and I guess

9:42

maybe we'll talk about it. And of course,

9:44

you know, there are much better things, like

9:47

in the modern things, like in the modern

9:49

world, like in the modern world, the modern

9:51

world, the data sources, the data sources, you

9:53

know if people have done personal genomics or

9:56

medical genomics of hospitals. But of course a

9:58

lot of the other things it would be

10:00

great to have all the podcasts or like

10:03

you know from like 2000 years ago or

10:05

you know or video information or all this

10:07

kind of source of information but it happens

10:09

that DNA actually survives at like basically a

10:12

level you know almost a medical grade level

10:14

from that time period and all these other

10:16

things that people would talk about a lot

10:19

of things in their daily lives are not

10:21

around anymore but DNA is as of course

10:23

a lot of archaeological and historical information but

10:25

in just in terms of data richness right

10:28

we're talking three billion base pairs in our

10:30

genome you know tens of millions of variants

10:32

between people, just the scale of that data,

10:34

it's hard for me to think about other

10:37

sources of data in the past that it

10:39

just has information richness on a sort of

10:41

like data level. Yeah, I mean, the only

10:44

thing that comes to mind as a parallel

10:46

for historical periods that are this far in

10:48

the past, right, is for the Roman Empire

10:50

would be like inscriptions, right, where you have

10:53

tens of thousands of inscriptions, but they're much

10:55

more difficult. to use on a large scale

10:57

than genomic data is because our tools for

10:59

analyzing genomic data are so much more sophisticated

11:02

than they are for, you know, reading through

11:04

the linguistic content of 10,000 inscriptions. Yeah, so

11:06

exactly. And so I guess what I'm saying

11:09

is that if you want to answer questions

11:11

about, like, you know, the fall of the

11:13

Roman Empire that you're an expert in, yes,

11:15

DNA is like not the best thing you

11:18

could imagine from that time at all. It's

11:20

like, you know, there would be a hundred

11:22

other things that would be more useful. But

11:25

it is one of the things that survived.

11:27

Oh, yeah, look, you know, you work with

11:29

what you have to give you the historian's

11:31

parallel for this. I was really interested in

11:34

questions of migration and mobility and how people

11:36

were moving around the world, but like. People

11:38

didn't talk about the trips that they took

11:40

that were two or three or five or

11:43

seven days long. You end up with these

11:45

tiny little fragments of information. What I did

11:47

was I looked at letters that people sent

11:50

because somebody had to take a letter, which

11:52

is a proxy for a communications network, a

11:54

root of mobility that at one point existed

11:56

in the past. And if you know the

11:59

parameters, you can probably figure out what route

12:01

someone took to get there. That's not a

12:03

direct window onto. mobility, they're all proxies, but

12:06

that's what you have, you know, for that

12:08

period, that's what's available to you. And so

12:10

yeah, so genomics, not perfect, but the sheer

12:12

quantity of data, the quality of data, this

12:15

is just incredibly rich. It's so striking

12:17

to me. So along those lines,

12:19

what kinds of questions do you

12:21

think ancient DNA is best suited

12:23

to answer? Like where does it have

12:26

the most utility? Yes. So. At

12:28

an archaeological site, there are some things

12:30

that are, I think, useful for

12:32

archaeologists. Without question, you know, we

12:35

can get genetic sex, if you want

12:37

to call it, if a person has an

12:39

XY, or chromosomes, or XX chromosomes, or

12:42

some other combination, XXY, one

12:44

X chromosome, they're different ones. That

12:46

we can get with, you know, 99%

12:48

or more of individuals, because we need

12:51

really little DNA. Also... we can

12:53

find things like first degree relatives,

12:55

so siblings, parent offspring, these

12:57

kind of things without questions,

12:59

second degree, you know, cousins,

13:01

this is an increasing amount

13:03

of information available to archaeologists.

13:06

So those are some of the first

13:08

things. And then there's ancestry, which

13:10

I'm really interested in. And ancestry

13:13

is really, you know, you can imagine that there

13:15

is a real thing that has existed

13:17

in the universe, which is the family

13:19

tree of everyone. Let's say in the

13:21

past 10,000 years. Although, of course, it

13:23

goes back to the beginning of life. But

13:26

let's say in the past 10,000 years,

13:28

imagine if we had a database of

13:30

the two biological parents of everyone who

13:33

ever lived. That would be like an

13:35

enormously rich source of historical information. And

13:37

so we're trying to kind of get close to

13:39

that with DNA. And it can be

13:41

questions, you know, with ancestry, it's

13:43

important to remember it's not, you

13:46

know, that there's a singular ancestry of

13:48

a person, right? You know, I am... perhaps in

13:50

the past couple of hundred years,

13:52

have mostly Swedish ancestry, but then

13:54

if you would go back 10,000 years ago,

13:57

you know, some of my ancestry will be

13:59

in near east. because it was carried

14:01

in with farming, for example. And

14:03

if you would go back 100,000 years

14:05

ago, 2% of my ancestors, 2% as

14:07

a proportion of my ancestors, would be

14:10

Neanderthals. They would be found in Neanderthals.

14:12

And the other 98% probably in

14:14

Africa. So there's a time dimension

14:16

that's really important to remember

14:18

about this. It's not just about

14:20

what this year ancestry. It's also

14:22

in what time perspective are you

14:24

talking about it. I think ancestry is really

14:27

important and that's yeah, so that's one

14:29

of the things that we can start

14:31

to understand the mobility in the

14:33

past and sort of broader mobility

14:35

processes. It's a lot of work going

14:37

into that, you know, it's not like

14:39

you get the straight answer right away.

14:41

Yeah, ancestry provides you with a window

14:43

onto migration and mobility, but it is

14:45

not a direct proxy for it, right?

14:47

And I think this is where. a

14:49

lot of the confusion among archaeologists and

14:51

historians come in is that when they

14:53

read an ancient DNA paper that's talking

14:55

about migration, they assume that the people

14:57

who are doing the work are thinking

14:59

about it in a purely biological sense

15:01

and that there's a one-to-one correlation. It's

15:03

like, no, that's not what the ancient

15:05

DNA paper is saying. There's a

15:08

lot more sophistication in there, and

15:10

to some extent, that's archaeologists and

15:12

historians talking past geneticists and

15:14

not understanding the tools that

15:16

they're using. being able to

15:18

communicate the results with archaeologists,

15:20

which is a long dialogue.

15:22

It started for me, you know, 15 years

15:25

ago as well. I mean, in general, I

15:27

think it's actually a little bit

15:29

also, I would say it's sometimes

15:31

a bit exaggerated, the sort of,

15:33

you know, disagreement, if you will,

15:35

in the media, you know, it

15:37

kind of sounds appealing, you know,

15:39

in the media to have this

15:41

kind of archaeology or historians on

15:43

one side. But of course there

15:45

is disagreement. And yes, but I

15:47

think it's coming along quite well, a lot

15:49

of work to be done, you know, not

15:52

least by us, geneticists. And I mean, there's

15:54

even been fundamental things like, you know,

15:56

the way we say things could sound

15:58

to archaeologists as we if... we were

16:00

saying that, you know, it's because these

16:02

people had this ancestry that they chose

16:04

to move, you know, to some new

16:07

region. That's not at all, you know.

16:09

It's not like a biological sort of

16:11

essentialist view of that it sort of

16:13

encoded them to have particular behaviors or,

16:16

you know, encoded them to want to

16:18

create some particular pot, you know, that's

16:20

absolutely not, I think, I hopefully, at

16:22

least what Genesis mean, but it could

16:25

have sounded like that in some of

16:27

the early papers. It's not helped by

16:29

the fact that quite frankly a lot

16:31

of the work that was being done

16:33

on migration by historians and archaeologists 20,

16:36

25 years ago was not especially sophisticated

16:38

and was not in dialogue with migration

16:40

studies and studies of mobility and the

16:42

understanding of how people actually moved through

16:45

the world. There was this idea that

16:47

migration was a one-off process that you

16:49

had a group of people who went

16:51

someplace and that was kind of that.

16:53

That turns out that's not how migration

16:56

works at all. It is a multi-direction.

16:58

flow of people over long periods of

17:00

time that doesn't necessarily work in straightforward

17:02

ways. Yeah, and you know a hundred

17:05

years ago or so the archaeologists were

17:07

doing this work and they would often

17:09

have these kind of strong interpretations of

17:11

migration and you know it has this

17:14

particular history you know was associated with

17:16

the Nazis at some point of course.

17:18

And there was a big reaction to

17:20

that in the 70s, for example, archaeology,

17:22

rightfully so, because they were very simplistic,

17:25

and it's been sort of very starkly

17:27

refuted, and many of those things. But

17:29

I think we're at a place, hopefully,

17:31

where we can sort of look at

17:34

things with different sources of data and

17:36

really try to understand the past. Yeah,

17:38

because there was this, just to put

17:40

it in kind of layman's terms for

17:42

the audience here, that that that idea,

17:45

it's what's called the culture historical model

17:47

of archaeology. This was what was pioneered

17:49

in the early 20th century. And so

17:51

for the listeners, if you've ever seen

17:54

a map of early medieval Europe or

17:56

late antique Europe and quote unquote barbarian

17:58

migrations with lines on a map moving

18:00

from one place to another. We called

18:03

this the bowling ball model or the

18:05

billiard ball model of migration where you

18:07

would have one group that presses against

18:09

another group and forces that group to

18:11

move, which forces another group to move.

18:14

And this is kind of the culture

18:16

historical model for how migration worked. This

18:18

is not how migration has ever worked

18:20

in practice. And so the reaction was

18:23

against that specific model. But migration as

18:25

an explanatory tool for understanding, especially the

18:27

first millennium AD, the baby got thrown

18:29

out with the bathwater, so to speak.

18:32

But now we have the tools to

18:34

be able to study it in a

18:36

much more fine-grained way, which I am

18:38

extremely excited to talk to you about.

18:40

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I do think,

18:43

you know, the rightful critique of this

18:45

thinking, perhaps the pendulum kind of like

18:47

swung a little bit too far at

18:49

some point. Not in all cases, you

18:52

know. each historical case is separate. But

18:54

yes, like the possibility of people moving

18:56

around, you know, should not be discounted

18:58

everywhere. Yeah, just to clarify a little

19:00

bit, there were some pretty nasty associations

19:03

that culture historical archaeology had and the

19:05

way that it was used and politicized

19:07

in the middle of the 20th century

19:09

was genuinely not good. So the backlash

19:12

to it is not at all unreasonable,

19:14

but there's a huge difference between there

19:16

are biologically defined... cultural groups that are

19:18

moving around and are the drivers of

19:21

history, which is what culture historical archaeology

19:23

more or less says, and people move

19:25

from place to place for reasons that

19:27

make sense to them. And one of

19:29

those two is entirely defensible, the other,

19:32

maybe not so much. Absolutely, yeah. And

19:34

it's really, you know, cannot emphasize this

19:36

enough, this essentialist view, that there are

19:38

these groups that are kind of monolithic

19:41

or whatever, and that they're... That's just

19:43

in conflict with the loss of the

19:45

universe, right? You know, time is much

19:47

deeper than that. It didn't start, you

19:49

know, with sort of the Roman Empire,

19:52

the time of the Roman Empire, and

19:54

it didn't start in the Stone Age.

19:56

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21:44

most of the ancient DNA studies that

21:46

I think people are probably familiar with,

21:48

the ones that get the biggest headlines,

21:50

tend to be ones that are looking

21:52

at more distant parts of the past,

21:55

where we're finding new species of archaic

21:57

human, where we're able to unlock, how

21:59

does farming arrive in Europe, for example,

22:01

like that another. big question that is

22:03

now more or less been solved through

22:05

ancient DNA. But what does it do

22:07

when we get to historical periods where

22:09

we have more texts where we have

22:11

archaeology? What kind of utility does ancient

22:13

DNA offer for those periods? So

22:15

the utility, yeah, I mean it is

22:17

a few different things. You can

22:19

see some of the individual mobility.

22:21

We can quantify that if we study

22:24

large enough sample sizes and

22:26

there's also of course the broader

22:28

processes. you know, I think try

22:30

to understand these hypothesized migrations,

22:33

migrations or movements or

22:36

expansions, whatever word you prefer. But

22:38

yeah, of course, just with hypothesis

22:40

driven in some ways. I mean,

22:42

we also see new things that

22:45

we wouldn't expect. So in

22:47

our paper that you mentioned,

22:49

we find evidence for this

22:51

change in ancestry in Scandinavia,

22:53

southern Scandinavia, so Denmark and

22:55

southern Sweden, that I think

22:57

there's... You know, there was no real

22:59

idea of previously, but clearly, sort

23:02

of we see from the early Iron

23:04

Age to say the Viking Age, there's

23:06

a change. So the people in the

23:08

Viking Age in this region trace a

23:10

large part of their ancestry from outside

23:12

of the region. So this is a

23:14

previously unrecognized... change in ancestry that nobody

23:16

had ever seen before. Like, because in

23:18

the paper, we'll come to some of

23:21

the other ones shortly, you find good

23:23

evidence to support ideas of population movements

23:25

that have previously been hypothesized on the

23:27

basis of other sources. We'll dig deeper

23:29

into those in a moment. But this

23:31

one is the one that really struck

23:33

me, because you're absolutely right. There is,

23:35

to my knowledge, this is a period

23:38

I know pretty well, there has been

23:40

no hypothesis about large scale population

23:42

movements into southern Scandinavia from elsewhere

23:44

in the first millennium. that is

23:46

not a suggestion that anybody, so

23:48

far as I know, has made.

23:50

But you find it with ancient

23:52

DNA. So what are kind of

23:55

the implications of that? What does that

23:57

mean to you? Yeah, I'm really an amateur

23:59

on this. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating.

24:01

What are the implications? And, you

24:03

know, we've looked at this also,

24:05

there was, we were lucky to,

24:07

there was previous studies of stable

24:09

isotopes as well. So, for example,

24:11

we could see that this was,

24:13

you know, tended to be locals.

24:15

It's not a transient phenomenon or

24:17

anything like that. Yes, so that,

24:19

you know, we obtained this result,

24:21

right? And then it's really in

24:23

the hands of history and archaeology,

24:25

it tried to make sense of

24:27

it. Let's see, the adoption of

24:29

the younger photorke happened maybe sort

24:32

of a, this is like several

24:34

centuries that both of these things

24:36

might happen in, might have something

24:38

to do with it, perhaps the

24:40

sort of consolidation of old Norse

24:42

in the region, some of these

24:44

things, perhaps some of the pantheon

24:46

with kind of odiness, the main

24:48

god, to my very amateur eye,

24:50

some of these things I've seen

24:52

mentioned in the recent paper, might

24:54

call it I also might have

24:56

to do with these things. This

24:58

all makes good sense to me

25:00

and I mean I think because

25:02

you're seeing an increase in what

25:04

you label in the paper to

25:06

be kind of Central European Iron

25:09

Age ancestry that had previously not

25:11

been present I mean to me

25:13

this makes a ton of sense

25:15

in the context of the end

25:17

of the Roman Empire and kind

25:19

of the erasure of what had

25:21

been the old frontier right that

25:23

where previously there had been a

25:25

lot of mobility. in the zone

25:27

along the frontier, right? Like lots

25:29

of people are moving back and

25:31

forth on either side of the

25:33

border, but then the frontier is

25:35

kind of its own zone, and

25:37

in Roman territory is doing one

25:39

thing, and kind of a different

25:41

thing is happening in the barbarian

25:44

lands, and barberian lands, and barberical,

25:46

right? But when the frontier goes

25:48

away, that barrier to long-distance movement

25:50

across that boundary is no longer

25:52

there. And so when you fast

25:54

forward several hundred years, because you're

25:56

getting this kind of time section

25:58

of, of DNA of DNA, of

26:00

DNA, Over a few centuries, it

26:02

makes a lot of sense that

26:04

if you had more people moving

26:06

from present-day France into Western Germany,

26:08

from Western Germany, into southern Scandinavia,

26:10

that over a few centuries, you

26:12

can see how that ancestor... change

26:14

might have happened, even without it

26:16

being connected to a large-scale political

26:19

process, the formation of a new

26:21

state, something like that. Yes, right,

26:23

exactly. This is, I think, a

26:25

great hypothesis. So we worked centrally

26:27

on this paper with Peter Heather,

26:29

who's professor of medieval history at

26:31

King's College London, and sort of

26:33

to do my best to paraphrase

26:35

one of his models is that,

26:37

yes, exactly as you say, during

26:39

the Roman Empire, There were these

26:41

kind of border states beyond the

26:43

immediate frontier that had increasing trade

26:45

and some of them were sort

26:47

of clients of Rome, built up

26:49

wealth and created this kind of

26:51

like new dynamics in the... quote-unquote

26:54

barbarian sort of lands beyond the

26:56

frontier, increasing evidence of, you know,

26:58

martiality, sort of violence in this

27:00

region. And so, yeah, you couldn't

27:02

very much imagine that both the

27:04

presence of the Roman Empire building

27:06

up wealth, changing the dynamics of

27:08

these groups, and perhaps its collapse

27:10

in the western side, precipitated this

27:12

kind of convulsions, if you will,

27:14

or, you know, really political events,

27:16

probably. Yeah, it gives you a

27:18

sense for just how much was

27:20

happening in this world that we

27:22

don't have a view on and

27:24

how limited our textual material really

27:26

is, which I mean, I'm fine,

27:29

just absolutely fascinating. The one thing

27:31

that occurs to me for that

27:33

particular phenomenon is there's a bog

27:35

in southern Denmark that is just

27:37

full of Roman weapons. And this

27:39

is probably a votive deposit of

27:41

some kind, dates to late antiquityish,

27:43

but that's exactly the kind of

27:45

movement of goods, which people had

27:47

to take from one place to

27:49

another, that would correlate very nicely

27:51

with the kind of social, cultural,

27:53

political conditions that lead to this

27:55

ancestry change over a long time.

27:57

Yeah, absolutely. To me it was

27:59

really fun. I've mostly worked on

28:01

prehistory, questions in prehistory, Europe, but

28:04

also other places. And it was

28:06

really cool to work in this

28:08

period that, I don't know, I

28:10

think... Proto history or whatever you

28:12

want to call it where the

28:14

you know the Romans wrote some

28:16

things beyond the frontier Later authors

28:18

wrote down this kind of the

28:20

Saugas sort of Germanic speakers But

28:22

it's not direct information in general,

28:24

but there's this clues and you

28:26

can just see it sort of

28:28

in the horizon or in the

28:30

twilight of these sources You know

28:32

read some of the Saugas where

28:34

they talk about the real regions

28:36

and like you know things that

28:38

may or may not have happened.

28:41

It's just super fascinating to have

28:43

these sort of two things that

28:45

are kind of blurry genetics on

28:47

one side, this kind of proto-history

28:49

or distant historical sources, and see

28:51

what the overlap and what correspondence

28:53

and corroboration you can find in

28:55

them. That's one of my favorite

28:57

things about. having access to these

28:59

tools is that you can check

29:01

them against one another. And if

29:03

one says one thing and the

29:05

other says another, that doesn't necessarily

29:07

mean that one of the two

29:09

is wrong. It could mean they're

29:11

talking about different aspects of reality.

29:13

I thought about this especially with

29:16

regard to the migration that you

29:18

found, this previously unknown population movement,

29:20

where like that kind of stuff

29:22

strikes me as much more like.

29:24

daily movement, like the formation of

29:26

new trade routes, a boat going

29:28

someplace that hadn't gone before, somebody

29:30

meets somebody's cousin and they have

29:32

a baby, this kind of stuff

29:34

is not the kind of thing

29:36

that appears in analytic or Chronicle

29:38

type historical texts of the kind

29:40

that we have for this period,

29:42

except incidentally, like maybe every once

29:44

in a while you get this

29:46

little detail that says, oh yeah,

29:48

there was a merchant there from

29:51

here. But that's not the kind

29:53

of stuff that people talked about

29:55

or thought was important to record

29:57

to record. incredibly crucial historical processes

29:59

that just don't make it into

30:01

the texts because that's not what

30:03

the authors were interested in. Yeah,

30:05

exactly. So I want to follow

30:07

up and ask you about a

30:09

couple of the migrations that have

30:11

been hypothesized in the past for

30:13

which you found evidence. So there's

30:15

the idea of the Germanic peoples

30:17

and Germanic migrations has a very

30:19

long history. in the study of

30:21

this period, goes all the way

30:23

back into the 16th, 17th, 18th,

30:26

century and the kind of the

30:28

first round of German language intellectuals,

30:30

it's a big topic. And it

30:32

has been debated and fought over,

30:34

attacked, rejected, embraced, whether these migrations

30:36

happened, how important they were, how

30:38

many people were moving, where they

30:40

were going to exactly. But I

30:42

think you guys did a pretty

30:44

dang good job of threading the

30:46

needle of that incredibly complex. and

30:48

not especially fund scholarship, and shedding

30:50

light on actual processes. So what

30:52

kind of evidence did you guys

30:54

find for migrations in this period,

30:56

in what way do those correlate

30:58

with what we might expect from

31:01

the texts? Yeah, absolutely. And so,

31:03

yes, too, for background, it's been

31:05

really hard to study these things

31:07

before, because you can imagine, right,

31:09

it's one thing when you're in

31:11

the Stone Age, and we're looking

31:13

for movements. and the groups involved,

31:15

you know, farmers in the near-east

31:17

compared to hunter-gathers in Europe, were

31:19

genetically quite distinguished, simply because they'd

31:21

been, you know, more or less

31:23

isolated for thousands and thousands of

31:25

years. So we can do just

31:27

as the data science relatively easily

31:29

on that. But you could imagine,

31:31

you could imagine that there was

31:33

a complete replacement. you know, let's

31:36

say within Denmark or something like

31:38

that, of one region by the

31:40

people from another region. And we

31:42

wouldn't be able to tell because

31:44

they're so similar to each other

31:46

they don't have this deep time

31:48

isolation that has allowed them to

31:50

kind of drift apart, you know,

31:52

quite literally by the process of

31:54

genetic drift. And so we developed

31:56

these new methods that Leo Spidal

31:58

postoc in my lab who worked

32:00

on these genealogical methods across the

32:02

genome to basically do... a tree

32:04

in each part of the genome

32:06

and look at the really recent

32:08

ancestry and really boost our resolution

32:10

that way. We don't have to

32:13

go so much into it. Yes,

32:15

we looked at these different things.

32:17

And yeah, we could see that

32:19

we had much more resolution to

32:21

look at the early medieval period.

32:23

And yeah, you talked about these

32:25

sort of Germanic migrations. I think

32:27

the way we started it was

32:29

to look at the Viking age,

32:31

but with the data that was

32:33

available. So we actually didn't sequence,

32:35

so in my lab we sequenced

32:37

hundreds and thousands of individuals per

32:39

year, but actually this study had

32:41

just used available literature. And there

32:43

was some really surprising things. For

32:45

example, there's this individual from Struvokia,

32:48

a site called Zuhor, about 2,000

32:50

years old, I think it's first

32:52

or second century, this people, a

32:54

journalism research lab, sequence of genome,

32:56

and its ancestry is sort of

32:58

completely dissimilar to earlier Ironage Central

33:00

Europe. and the region as a

33:02

whole, but very similar, basically a

33:04

perfect match to the Scandinavian early

33:06

Iron Age about 2,000 years ago,

33:08

in Slovakia, you know, very different

33:10

to what you would see at

33:12

any other point, you know, at

33:14

other points in history, certainly more

33:16

recently. That was really astounding, and

33:18

I think it's perhaps a movement

33:20

of people down to the Black

33:23

Sea. Eventually, perhaps giving rise to

33:25

a tested language of Gothic, right,

33:27

on the Crimean Peninsula, although speculation

33:29

still. That was one that really

33:31

stood out to me, but also

33:33

everywhere we looked we could see

33:35

this kind of change 500 AD

33:37

or, you know, give or take

33:39

a few centuries, also in Lombardy,

33:41

in Italy, of course, with Longobards,

33:43

an attested Germanic speaking group, in...

33:45

Southern Germany in Bavaria also attested

33:47

sort of Germanic speaking associated sort

33:49

of contexts and of course also

33:51

Britain which is in the early

33:53

Dava period also the arrival of

33:55

Germanic speaking you know the reason

33:58

we're speaking sort of English in

34:00

this post today? Well, this was

34:02

really striking to me because it

34:04

matches the historical record or kind

34:06

of like if you were to

34:08

draw a crude narrative from the

34:10

historical sources, the genetic data that

34:12

you found broadly supports even that

34:14

kind of crude narrative that there

34:16

were people who were moving from

34:18

what is now southern Scandinavia into

34:20

Central Europe and into Eastern Europe

34:22

at this time. Yeah, and what

34:24

I didn't say is that it's

34:26

a complex process, so with the

34:28

data we have, which is very

34:30

limited, need much more individuals, right?

34:33

In some places, the pandeling switches

34:35

back, we see no evidence of

34:37

this Scandinavian-related ancestry later on. For

34:39

example, in the samples from Presentate

34:41

Poland that are available, complete switch,

34:43

as well as we can see,

34:45

we might have incomplete individuals. In

34:47

the more central Europe, so in

34:49

the case of the... of Lombardy

34:51

or Bavaria, it seems to be

34:53

more of a mixture. Same thing

34:55

in England, same thing in Scandinavia

34:57

perhaps, if we think of it

34:59

as the same process, we don't

35:01

know. So there are different outcomes

35:03

and there's definitely interactions with local

35:05

groups. There will be people of

35:08

different ancestry incorporated within the same

35:10

groups or societies for sure. This

35:12

is when we sum everything up

35:14

and you know, history rolls by

35:16

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35:18

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in the Wondery app, Spotify, or

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Apple Podcasts. These

37:29

are questions that I myself have been

37:31

interested in for a very long time,

37:33

and this is the kind of data

37:36

that I would have killed for when

37:38

I was writing my master's thesis 15

37:40

years ago, when I was trying to

37:42

work on these questions. And what struck

37:45

me was that you find evidence for

37:47

things like multidirectionality of movement, for population

37:49

replacements, local population replacements, splits between closely

37:51

related groups. Things that make a ton

37:54

of sense if you're looking at the

37:56

broad spectrum of evidence available to you,

37:58

it's what makes the Germanic. languages

38:00

in Scandinavia such a great case study

38:03

is because this happens in historical time

38:05

and we have a pretty good sense

38:07

on the basis of the surviving Germanic

38:09

languages, how long ago protodromantic was spoken,

38:12

how long ago the various branches of

38:14

Germanic languages were spoken. And so we

38:16

can look to see in the genetic

38:19

data, is there any correlation between these

38:21

things? And it sure looks like it

38:23

to me. Yeah, exactly. And so it's

38:25

fascinating just to. try to reconstruct this

38:28

and imagine you know these people encountering

38:30

each other meeting each other they spoke

38:32

probably very different languages so it just

38:35

gives an insight into that I think

38:37

that's really fascinating but of course it

38:39

would be cool to think about these

38:41

larger questions and if it can be

38:44

answered and it's not that simple you

38:46

know even sort of simplifying for example

38:48

questions about if you know movements of

38:51

people beyond the Roman frontier had a

38:53

role in precipitating the sort of collapse

38:55

of the Western Roman Empire, not, how

38:57

do you answer that with DNA? Like,

39:00

we might be able to corroborate, you

39:02

know, some of the predictions of that,

39:04

but it's not like it can, it

39:07

just provides a straightforward answer in that

39:09

way. Yeah, and that's what makes it,

39:11

to me, such a rich thing, is

39:13

that it helps you move beyond. questions

39:16

like that. And as somebody who's spent

39:18

the better part of two decades working

39:20

on the fall of the Roman Empire,

39:23

I'm pretty tired of did the Roman

39:25

Empire fall or what caused it, those

39:27

questions to me are not that interesting.

39:29

What I find a lot more interesting

39:32

as a historian is to what extent

39:34

were people moving across what had been

39:36

the frontier? What were the kind of

39:39

broad scale cultural implications of that population

39:41

movement? Were people moving in the other

39:43

direction? And these are the kinds of

39:45

questions that ancient DNA helps us answer.

39:48

Maybe not. Did migration cause the fall

39:50

of the Roman Empire, which is a

39:52

pretty... I can say firmly the answer

39:55

to that one is no on the

39:57

basis of the on the basis of

39:59

the sources, but to what extent was

40:01

there migration around that time and was

40:04

it involved in the... processes is a

40:06

different and actually answerable question. Yeah, and

40:08

also, you know, it just creates a

40:11

sense of wonder, I think we can

40:13

see this mobility in the Viking Age.

40:15

I think it's safe to say, you

40:17

know, Northern Europe was a more cosmopolitan

40:20

place perhaps than in later medieval time

40:22

or early modern times. I mostly grew

40:24

up on this island, this island in

40:27

the Baltic, one of the two big

40:29

ones, and we're lucky that there's a

40:31

lot of data from there, primarily sequenced

40:33

by the Copenhagen group, for example. And

40:36

it's just like amazingly cosmopolitan in this

40:38

village just as people who were buried

40:40

in the Viking Age. There are several

40:43

that have clearly ancestry from what I

40:45

think is the British Isles, you know,

40:47

probably Celtic speakers or they had Celtic

40:49

speakers, you know, in their immediate as

40:52

their immediate ancestors in a way that

40:54

I do not think you would find

40:56

if you would look into 1800, for

40:59

example, or 1700a. very diverse ancestries of

41:01

the people that were growing in these

41:03

places. Yeah, I'm really glad that you've

41:05

used words like hope and wonder because

41:08

this is absolutely the right way to

41:10

be thinking about this is not to

41:12

think about like like obviously you need

41:15

to consider the limitations, what can we

41:17

answer, what aspects of life can this

41:19

not shed light on, but the fact

41:21

that you can do these kinds of

41:24

things is wild. That's insane. I like

41:26

the idea, if you had told me

41:28

15 years ago when I was studying

41:31

Lombards a lot, that you could look

41:33

at genetic samples from people who archaeologically

41:35

look like Lombards and discover relationships between

41:37

them, do such fine-grained analysis that you

41:40

can. calculate the proportion of their ancestry

41:42

that is coming recently from the Scandinavian

41:44

Iron Age, that you can compare them

41:47

to other groups of putatively East Germanic-speaking

41:49

migrants from other places. Like the idea

41:51

that that is even something that you

41:53

could hope to do what I would

41:56

have said you were insane 15 years

41:58

ago and now that analysis is not

42:00

only here you've done it and you've

42:03

done a really great job of it.

42:05

Thanks but yeah an individual level ancestry

42:07

is really key to that right and

42:09

so actually it is true that 20

42:12

years ago a lot of the genetics

42:14

that would try to study history you

42:16

could criticize it because it would use

42:19

things like mitochondrial DNA and then it

42:21

would have to say like this is

42:23

a group of people this 50 I

42:25

classify or like you know I categorize

42:28

this way and I use the average

42:30

among them but now we can do

42:32

it per individual and that's absolutely key

42:35

right because yeah in the case of

42:37

the lumbards the people that have sequenced

42:39

the genomes we run this analysis there's

42:41

variation you know there's like very complex

42:44

variation some of them will have more

42:46

local sort of pre-Germanic migrations, if you

42:48

will, ancestry, and getting that and then

42:51

being able to give that to archaeologists

42:53

to put together with a context, like

42:55

that's absolutely key. Without it, you know,

42:57

it would be a very crude science

43:00

if we still had to categorize in

43:02

group to be able to try to

43:04

make conclusions. And the more precise the

43:07

data is and the closer the collaboration

43:09

is the more useful the data is,

43:11

right? Like people's we label is the

43:13

goss, Langobards, Burgundians, Vandals, like... from my

43:16

perspective, looking at the linguistics of it,

43:18

and I've looked at all of the

43:20

linguistic samples that survived for them, they

43:23

may be kind of related varieties of

43:25

a single mutually intelligible language. I think

43:27

a fifth century Lombard and a fifth

43:29

century Goth could probably understand each other.

43:32

You're only maybe 200 or 300 years

43:34

away from the point of divergence with

43:36

protogermanic, leaving aside those two varieties. So

43:39

if you want to try to find

43:41

in the ancient DNA record... correlations for

43:43

those things, you have to use extremely

43:45

fine-grained analysis, because the divergence point between

43:48

those populations, the split point, is only

43:50

a couple of centuries in the past,

43:52

in the most optimistic sense. Yeah. That's

43:55

fascinating that I didn't know that they

43:57

were actually quite similar. Burgundian Vandel Gothic

43:59

all extremely similar. Yeah, so Lombard, West

44:01

Germanic. They would understand each other, you

44:04

know, it's more similar than German and

44:06

some other, you know, German and Dachshor's.

44:08

Yeah, I would say probably if we're

44:11

looking for a modern day parallel, the

44:13

difference between Vandelik and Gothic or Burgundian

44:15

and Gothic is like two divergent English

44:17

varieties. So maybe like West country English

44:20

from the UK and North American, like

44:22

West Coast North American. English would be

44:24

like that, that's probably the kind of

44:27

scale of divergence that you're talking about.

44:29

But this is like, that's just the

44:31

kind of, if you're looking for genetic,

44:33

for genomic correlates of those kinds of

44:36

splits, you're not going to be looking

44:38

for easily identifiable things. You're going to

44:40

have to be looking very closely. Yeah,

44:43

and we have not, you know, I

44:45

don't think, at the moment, we haven't

44:47

been able to, you know, sort of

44:49

separate Vandals and Goths in any way.

44:52

What we do think we see is

44:54

that sort of like east and west,

44:56

hints of an east and west difference.

44:59

And so in this eastern direction, sort

45:01

of from the Baltic to the Black

45:03

Sea, there's a kind of like a

45:05

single affinity to a particular Iron Age,

45:08

earlier Iron Age groups in Scandinavia. And

45:10

in the western one, there's a kind

45:12

of a different one. leading to England

45:15

and southern Germany and Lombards. But we

45:17

do see that, but it's preliminary and

45:19

yeah, would be cool to understand that's

45:21

an issue. Yeah, this is, I mean,

45:24

this is so exciting. This is just

45:26

like the coolest thing I can imagine.

45:28

So when you're thinking about the future

45:31

of this field and the kind of

45:33

work that you'd like to see done,

45:35

the kind of work that you'd like

45:37

to support in your lab, like what

45:40

kind of stuff is most interesting and

45:42

exciting to you? Like where do you

45:44

want to see people putting their time,

45:47

effort and energy? Yeah,

45:49

in this field as a whole. It's

45:51

a one good thing, you know, we

45:53

may be wrong in our interpretations. The

45:55

good thing is that at the moment,

45:58

at least, 99% of all, ancient DNA...

46:00

data is made fully publicly available. So

46:02

anyone listening can download it and you

46:04

can actually I would say there's a

46:06

distilled form of the data that you

46:08

can still can do a lot with

46:11

that you can download on a laptop

46:13

and you are if you are a

46:15

teenager you motivate that and you have

46:17

taken some coding classes like you can

46:19

get going with that in two days.

46:21

So this is like a really great

46:24

thing I think that all data is

46:26

made publicly available. That's what I would

46:28

say and I think it would be

46:30

really important for the field to move

46:32

to whole genomes. For example, that's what

46:34

we need to be able to do

46:37

this genealogy analysis. So much of the

46:39

ancient DNA is 10,000 plus individuals. It's

46:41

more of a select set of markers.

46:43

It's a large set of ramillion, but

46:45

it's not all of the variants in

46:47

the genome. So I think that's really

46:50

important to move towards. Yeah, I mean,

46:52

this genetic history all over the world.

46:54

It's all equally important. Right, every single

46:56

place, every single time period. I have

46:58

to choose something for our lab to

47:00

work on that we think we can

47:03

add value in and that we're sort

47:05

of well set to do a few

47:07

things. At least I'm not having any

47:09

aims to do like the whole genetic

47:11

history of the world. It gets very

47:13

difficult to try to understand the archaeology

47:16

and history of all the places. So

47:18

I'm really interested in working more with

47:20

Europe. We have good data here, you

47:22

know, sort of based in Europe. That's

47:24

really cool, work with this historical time

47:26

periods, further back in time, apply some

47:29

of this higher resolution things, and put

47:31

it together with biomedicine. So what we

47:33

didn't talk about is that of course

47:35

our DNA also encodes our biology. And

47:37

if we can understand change in disease

47:39

risk, particular genes, changing in time, we

47:42

can understand that fifth evolutionary force, the

47:44

Romanian selection. maybe to, you know, for

47:46

biomedical benefits, see what environmental changes happened,

47:48

epidemics, other things, how do human genomes

47:50

respond to that. in an evolutionary sense.

47:52

That's something I'm really excited about as

47:55

well. And the third thing that I'm

47:57

curious about is that ancient time period

47:59

beyond history, well into prehistory, human origins,

48:01

where DNA doesn't preserve these fossils, the

48:03

morphology of skulls and fossils is by

48:05

far the most important information. We have

48:08

some amazing Neanderthal genomes, like there will

48:10

be more of that type of data,

48:12

but a lot of the most interesting

48:14

specimens will never yield DNA. Maybe proteins.

48:16

They do preserve better. Maybe we can

48:18

build a bit of a genetic history

48:20

from that, but the jury is still

48:23

out. Well, this is all incredibly exciting

48:25

stuff. I mean, this is one of

48:27

the things that I love about talking

48:29

to people who are in your line

48:31

of work is the sense of the

48:33

possible that like whenever I ask someone

48:36

who works in genomics, like what are

48:38

you excited about? What do you want

48:40

to work on? They always have a

48:42

list of 17,000 different things. Every single

48:44

one of them is fascinating. To be

48:46

in a field like that is pretty

48:49

cool, I have to tell you. Yeah,

48:51

I mean, it's very lucky to get

48:53

into it. I mean, I would love

48:55

to work with something like, you know,

48:57

personally, like languages are fascinating. I don't

48:59

know anything about it. Linguistics also sounds

49:02

very cool. Things like that, I would

49:04

have loved to work on. I guess

49:06

the advantage of dynamics now is that

49:08

the data is really sort of growing

49:10

at a very rapid pace by the

49:12

work that everyone's doing. That makes it

49:15

exciting. Yeah, what a cool time to

49:17

be in this field. I cannot wait

49:19

to see the work that you and

49:21

your colleagues are putting out. Dr. Skalgan,

49:23

thank you so much for joining me

49:25

today. Is there anything you'd like to

49:28

plug to the people, any papers you

49:30

want folks to read, anything you've got

49:32

coming out that you want to talk

49:34

about? No, this is exciting. Yeah, you

49:36

know, we're all excited about history and

49:38

the perspectives and the wonder it gives

49:41

us on the modern world. You know,

49:43

you know, I just think it's great.

49:45

hope it grows more like you know

49:47

I sort of rediscovered history I think

49:49

it's not taught enough to kids I

49:51

hope that's a growing sort of a

49:54

thing where all of these different disciplines

49:56

can build on to that. Oh God

49:58

yeah well like because The human past

50:00

doesn't belong to anyone discipline, right? Like

50:02

I think historians get like territorial about

50:04

it sometimes and it's like, no, there's a bajillion

50:06

different aspects to human experience, only some of which resolve

50:09

themselves in texts, only some of which resolve themselves in

50:11

texts, only some of which ever make it into a

50:13

textual record in the first place. And to your point

50:15

about like, I hear this from people a lot that

50:17

you know, oh, I never liked history when I was

50:20

a kid, I had bad history teachers. I had bad

50:22

history teachers. And it's like, I had bad history teachers.

50:24

I had bad history teachers. I had bad history teachers.

50:26

I had bad history teachers. And that's not

50:28

what history is. History is people

50:31

doing people things. It's people moving

50:33

to try to find a better

50:35

life. It's people learning a new

50:38

language. It's all of these different

50:40

aspects of the human experience that

50:43

are so much richer than this

50:45

person was king from 1277 to

50:47

1300. Like, that's not a history.

50:50

That's something that somebody wrote down

50:52

at some point. That's not the

50:54

essence of what makes us who

50:56

we are. Exactly. actually doing this

50:58

paper going into some of the historical period made

51:00

me realize you know that there's this like you

51:03

know like the North Saugas and they literally talk

51:05

about you know battles that happened in places where

51:07

I lived and I have you know never taught

51:09

this in school like this would be this would

51:11

have been awesome you know like there's so much things

51:14

and as you say you know this king followed the

51:16

next king it's hard to make a relevant

51:18

there's so much more that you can create

51:20

connections and wonder in people. Yeah, this is,

51:23

I always tell people, we're talking about the

51:25

past, like, you imagine yourself in the past,

51:27

buddy, you wouldn't have been a king. You

51:29

would have been a regular person doing regular

51:32

people things. So if you really want to

51:34

understand the past, you should probably understand

51:36

what regular people were doing, not when

51:38

a king happened to rain or some

51:40

bishop's bit of canon law. Like, the

51:43

kind of stuff that people who wrote

51:45

texts were really interested in is to

51:47

me, very rarely the stuff that's actually

51:49

interesting about a period. On that note, thank

51:51

you so so so much for taking the time

51:54

to chat with me. This paper is awesome. I

51:56

hope everybody goes and reads it who has an

51:58

interest in genomics and ancient DNA. And I

52:00

cannot wait to see the work

52:02

that you guys do next. This

52:04

was such a great chat, Patrick.

52:06

Thank you. Yeah, it's really stimulating

52:08

and I learned some stuff about

52:10

history. Thank you. If you like

52:12

Tides of history, you can listen

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tell us about yourself by filling

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52:33

Thanks so much for joining me

52:36

today. Be sure and hit me

52:38

up if you'd like to chat

52:40

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52:42

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53:23

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