HeyJaredOlder, Further, Stranger: A Podcast of the Possible Past
Older Further Stranger applies the Copernican Principle to the reimagining of the human past. The problem is not that we know too little, but that a narrow, settled set of stories has been allowed to stand in for a history that was vastly more inventive, daring, and strange.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 11, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest episodes
Episode 14 - Holiday Fiction Special: Apples & Honey (opens the original)
Read excerpt
in honor of the sweet fruit and honey eaten in the hopes of a sweet new year to come, I present to you, a tale… of two young musicians, a summer on the road, and a strange journey through the farms and forests of the Hudson Valley. There are songs, bees, apples, old records, unexpected friends, and a few things beneath the surface that are better left undiscovered. A story about music, memory, friendship, and the places a song can take you.
Episode 13: Mixed Company (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Who moved when they married? Who inherited the house? Who did the grinding, weaving, trading, ruling, and writing? In Mixed Company, archaeology, ancient DNA, isotopes, bones, houses, laws, letters, and forgotten archives let us ask what life between men and women actually looked like across deep time. From Neanderthal caves to Bronze Age farms, Babylonian merchants, Egyptian villages, and ancient royal courts, the evidence keeps overturning the stories we thought we knew.
Episode 11: Salt of the Earth (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Episode 11: Salt of the Earth Salt is everywhere, but the ways humans have hunted, mined, boiled, traded, taxed, and worshipped it are anything but ordinary. From elephants digging for minerals in the darkness of Mount Elgon to prehistoric salt factories, desert caravans, submerged Maya kitchens, ancient fish sauce, and miners preserved for millennia inside salt itself, this is a global history of the substance that quietly built economies, technologies, and states. And the strangest part? Much
Older, Further, Stranger, Episode 10: The Zen of Erectus (opens the original)
Read excerpt
The Zen of Erectus Homo erectus emerged in East Africa around two million years ago and was still alive at least a hundred and ten thousand years ago in Java — a run about six times longer than our own species has managed. From the neck down they were built much as we are. They walked exactly the way we walk, threw with a shoulder configured for it, spread from South Africa to the Norfolk coast to central China, and reached islands across water that has never closed at any sea level. They also m
OLDER FURTHER STRANGER, EPISODE 9: WE CAN BE FERALS (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Fifty thousand years. Six continents. One vast and varied yearning for transformation, made again and again in materials as different as ivory, ochre, gold, and human skin. They painted it in total darkness, four hundred meters into the earth. They carved it into a throne so that to rule was to sit inside an animal’s mouth. They buried it with their dead, wore it into battle, danced it until they died, and swore afterward that dying was exactly what it felt like. Lion, bear, jaguar, serpent, cro
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.
See coverage about Older, Further, Stranger: A Podcast of the Possible Past