Scott here with another episode of the History and Plug podcast.

There are huge swaths of history that we simply know nothing about because we have no sources about it.

And if we happen to find a source, whether it's written or archaeological evidence,

it can completely rewrite our understanding of that period.

This is known as the Beowulf effect.

The old English poem Beowulf is a vital source of information on history, language, and belief

from the darkest of the dark ages. Only one copy is known to exist, it's in the British Library,

and it was rescued from a fire that is known to have destroyed many other manuscripts.

If Beowulf didn't exist, how much would we know about that period? It's a sobering

thought because between 410 and 597, no scrap of writing survives from what is now England. This is

an interval that's similar in length between now and the Napoleonic Wars. The Beowulf effect also

applies to fossils. What we know about the fossil record is a tiny dot on what really happened. Almost

everything that once exists on our planet has been launched. This means that anything new we find is the potential

to change everything. In today's rebroadcast episode, I'm speaking to Henry Gee, author of

a very short history of life on Earth. We looked through the last 4.6 billion years to tell a tale

of survival and persistence and how our history is constantly being rewritten,

from the dinosaurs to the dark ages. Hope you enjoyed this discussion.

And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

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Henry, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.

I've got nothing to be here. Well, as my listeners know, I have a lot of cheesy jokes that I refer back to, and one of them is when I'm telescoping out about a subject and providing large-scale context, if I think I'm going too far out, I'll refer to the splitting of the Panjian supercontinent. So I'll say, the story of Margaret Thatcher begins 150 million

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