Annie Jacobsen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you think it’s possible that some humans will survive all of this? If we look, I mean, how long would it be? Would it be decades? Would it be centuries before the earth starts to have the capacity to grow food again? Carl Sagan talked about that in this amazing book that he wrote with two scientist colleagues called The Cold and the Dark. There’s a bunch of essays about exactly this. What would happen and how long would it take? It’s really interesting. It’s dated. It’s from the ’80s. But man, is it shocking. You think about that where men return to sort of the worst, most base versions of themselves. Civilization is gone, meaning civil society. There’s no rule of law. It’s just fend for yourself. There’s people fighting over what little resources there are. Man returns to a hunter-gatherer state. To really think about this idea, I looked at the oldest known archeological site in the world in Turkey, which is called Gobekli Tepe. It’s really fascinating to me because I interviewed one of the two archeologists who first found this site in the early ’90s. The lead archeologist was a guy named Klaus Schmidt, and Michael Morsch was the young graduate student who was with him. Morsch’s description of coming upon this rumored to be site, there was something called a wishing tree on the site, which I just found so human and perfect, that it was this magical place, and it was Locatable because there was a wishing tree on a hill. It’s where people went to wish and to hope that their wishes came true. I mean, how human is that? That is where beneath the wishing tree, in the shadow of the wishing tree, there was a tepe, which is a hill. Beneath that, there is the oldest known civilization in the world. 12,000 years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers built this site. Why? We don’t know. But I imagined through Morsch’s descriptions of coming upon. He tripped on a rock, he told me. He tripped over a stone that turned out to be the top part of a 12,000 year old sculpted man, giant pillar. He talked about coming upon that. And then, no one knows really what Gobekli Tepe was for. That makes my mind try and answer the question you asked me internally, just as a human who’s here on earth for the amount of time I’m here. If there were a nuclear war, what would it be like? What would it be like when someone in the future, would we become archeologists one day? Would civilization rebuild? Would we develop computers? Who knows? It’s interesting to think about. I hope we never have to. What would we remember about this time?…

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