You're listening to the History Extra Podcast brought to you by the team behind BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Matt Elton. Today's podcast is the archaeologist and TV presenter Neil Oliver.

Neil joined Ellie Korthorn to discuss his latest book, Wisdom of the Ancient's Life Lessons from the Distant Past,

which looks to our ancient ancestors for inspiration on how to live better lives today.

In the introduction to the book, which I'm assuming was written last year but actually feels more timely now than ever with everything that's happened over the last six months,

you speak about being in search of

reassurance and a source of optimism. Why do you think that our ancient ancestors are the

place to turn for that. I think I am an archaeologist by training I suppose and I would

call myself an amateur historian, but I read widely of history. I think partly because I'm not a specialist,

you know, so I'm not limited to one period. I read across everything, you know,

thousands of years worth of history and I think if you do that, you quite

quickly come to the realization that what's happening now has happened before in cycles.

There's a slowly turning wheel of time

and the human race has been through the same sort of problems again and again and again. You know human populations have been

invaded by strangers or they in turn have invaded the neighbors. They've had wars,

they've had outbreaks of pestilence and plague, you know, they've had tyrannies, they've had benign kingships, they've had democracies.

The whole thing just keeps on coming around and around and around. If you don't pay attention to history, it can be even more stressful because you might think that what's happening to us in the 21st century is unique and especially bad. If you look back at history you see that it's

happened to people before us many, many, many times and I feel that if you look back at other times and see how people

coped with situations there's just a reassurance to be had from knowing there is

nothing new our species has been dealing with the same big

challenges again and again and again and here we are and it's our term.

You cite a quote from Edward Osbun Wilson about having paleolithic emotions but god-like technology.

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