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Hi, everybody.

From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

I'm Patrick Weiman.

Thanks for joining me today.

So instead of an interview for today, I've decided to do something on my own, but a little

less formal than our normal scripted episodes.

For now a few months into the prehistory season, and there's a lot of stuff that for a variety

of reasons just hasn't ended up making it into the final episodes.

There are topics that I had to cut for space.

There are things that just didn't quite fit the flow of the narrative.

Discussions of disagreements in the scholarship, the range of research materials I'm using,

things like that.

On top of that, I pretty regularly get questions from listeners that get me to think differently

about stuff I'd glossed over, or that I now realize deserves some more attention.

Even in the past couple of months, there have been new developments that shake up the state

of knowledge and scholarship on key topics.

So with that in mind, I thought this would be a good opportunity to revisit those things,

kind of a grab bag of topics on prehistory that folks have been asking about.

I want to start by talking about how we know what we know, about evidence, methodology,

and how we can put this all together into something like a coherent package.

...