Hi, everybody, welcome, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit recently voted the best and greatest podcast in the world. Such a great honor. Wonderful, wonderful. You don't need any details of how that vote was conducted, who the electorate were or where it was published. Don't worry about it. Take it from me.

On this episode of the podcast, we have the absolutely brilliant British scholar Robert McFarlane. He's written a book called Underland, and he's talking about all the hidden worlds beneath our feet.

This is a very interesting interview. I was particularly taken as your head by his description of going to massive raves in the catacombs underneath Paris.

I mean, he's got a stronger head than I have, but it's a remarkable tale of our species and our relationship with the ground beneath our feet.

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In the meantime, everyone here is the brilliant Robert McFarlane enjoy. Rob, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Everyone who's anyone follows you on Twitter because you post beautiful pictures and calming thoughts and scenes. But this book talks about what's beneath our feet. What's the fascination with the history of the underground?

We know so little about it. I think that's the first answer. We know more about the surface of Mars than we do about a great deal of what lies beneath us. We're only just beginning to fathom some of the extraordinary mysteries it holds, the deep earth biome that has a greater diversity than the Amazon and the Galapagos, its microbial biome that runs to about seven miles down, probably further in the crust. It's got more biomass than all human population on Earth.

The World Wide Web, the fungal mycelia network that lets trees communicate with one another. Well, modern science only just discovered it. We've been walking over it for as long as we've been human.

It makes you think when I read your book, from the microbes point of view, they're fine as we decide to destroy our own atmosphere and make it toxic for human life. They're doing just fine down there.

So well, they're extremophiles. They love this stuff. We're not. But we're turning ourselves, our atmosphere into an extremophile environment that is happening fast. But we won't adapt in time.

How of our human ancestors dealt with the subterranean?

This fascinates me. When I began writing this book, I thought it was going to be all about stone and ice and time and trees and nothing to do with humans except in so far as they crossed into the brains of those beings that matter every now and then. In fact, it turned out to be all about humans. The first book over it was about mountains and why we climb them, why we love them. That's a very young feeling in it's actually probably about 250, 300 years old.

The urge to go into darkness is arguably older than we are anatomically modern humans. So there's a recent disputed dating of some of the earliest cave art in western Spain, puts it at about sixty four thousand years ago. That's about 20000 years before we think that modern humans got to that part of Europe. So that's Neanderthal art making. Basically, there's incredible archaeology done by a female team and Rising Star Cave, which is dated a really early human relative as a barrier of its of the bodies of its kind.

That's about 300000 years ago. It goes way back.

And deep down, isn't that astonishing that we seek to put our dead into the earth? And that's before we knew that we are made from the same atoms and the same elements as the Earth. I just got shivers down my spine. Just listening to you say that. It strikes me as an astonishing it's it's not even a habit. It's an act every time it's an act. Of course, we don't do it necessarily so much. Now, there are since cremation came in as a powerful sort of body disposal force in the well, depending on how you dated around the time the First World War.

But yes, as long as we have been human, we have been burying our dead. I went down into Avalon's hole in the depths, which is the earliest known cemetery in Britain, if we want to call it that. It's about 10000 years ago that Mesolithic hunter gatherers who lived unbelievably hard, marginal lives, nevertheless went to the trouble of taking their dead over the course of about a century, we think, and placing them in that dark, secure place where the calcite ram down off the cave walls and crystallised lacquered the faces of their dead.

And then they would roll stones, pile stones over the entrance, we think, to protect those bodies what was happening there.

So apart from that, I don't even know how we describe it. Is that sacramental? I don't know what that is. But in terms of artistic and defence and storage, the underground has provided all those functions as well.

Yeah, it's incredibly versatile. I think we associate it culturally, broadly now with sort of confinement, ickiness, exploitative labor practices, all sorts of bad stuff. It's negative associations buried deep in our language.

People are depressed when you know you're down, but when you're up, you're high. There's a pretty clear gradient of qualitative relationship there. But actually the underworld is full of marvels as well. And it has been in many of the stories that many cultures have told. It's a place of vision, paradoxically, somewhere you can see in the dark. And that came to absolutely fascinate me that it's a place of protection for the dead, for the valuable, as well as a place that we get rid of things that we fear or hate.

What about protection?

What about living? The problem with caves is food, isn't it? But other than that, we'd be very happy hiding and living in these caves. You can think of many examples from fiction or from history in that Second World War when Italians found themselves reinhabited or these cave systems, and particularly in that campaign, we can't see their amazing place of shelter and habitation.

That's a really good point. They're not permanent dwellings, really. It's really tough and rough to stay out of the light. And as you say, food supply and to an extent water supply become a problem. But as places of protection, we might think of the global seed vault up in Svalbard in the Arctic, which is a place of protection for the rebuilding of a future. Agriculture after apocalypse has scorched the land. So in the Svalbard seed vault, we are place or they are placing millions of varieties of seeds from cultures and geographies around.

The world, in order that in the case of effectively a catastrophe that affects the entire surface world, a diverse agriculture could be regrown from that. Unfortunately, it's not really working as a storage system because climate change is melting the permafrost so fast. That water began leaking into the seed vault, which was thought to be one of the most secure underground spaces that we as a species could construct.

Reminds me of the water leaking. I've been to a lot. I'm sure you have to a lot of nuclear bunkers and they realize that particular ones that, for example, in the Dover Castle. And it quietly tell you, as you're doing the tour, as you're talking to experts, that actually this would have provided virtually no safety from the aftermath of a nuclear fallout because the water would have managed to get it, you know, water ingress.

These underground spaces are connected to the surface of them. They are.

And they are sort of paranoid architecture, a kind of bunker system which goes way back, goes back to Cappadocia, to the buried cities of Darinka. You and others in Turkey, which their generous bunkers designed to hold whole societies, are extraordinary underground cities. But now we have the, as it were, the selfish bunker, the billionaires bunker, who's constructing it to set out a pandemic underground or nuclear conflict underground in New Zealand. So it's hard to make a foolproof bunker.

You mentioned in the book Invisible Cities and Catacombs and these ones, Cappadocia, they're not a long term solution to enemy scouring the land. I mean, why do you think we were driven underground and went to enormous trouble to hollow out these giant spaces?

I keep thinking of us as an animal. I mean, we are animals and we are a species and we are a burrowing species. I came to realize this. We are morrin makers as much as as rabbits or as ants.

We think of our Lauryn's and our burrows is very well planned and rationally constructed. I was in Bilby Potash mine where I drove five miles out under the North Sea where the miners have followed. The mining machines have followed the seams. You've probably been down in the Cornish tin mines, which likewise sort of wander out under the sea. And if you look at an underground map of Britain, if you could imagine one, if one could be drawn, it would show us to be termite's astonishing termite.

So one answer is, I think we make them because we like to think of ourselves as an aboveground building species, but we're also a below ground burrowing species going to the top of mountains and building gigantic skyscrapers.

There's a very recent innovation in human behaviour. Yeah, we've been going down for much longer than we've been going up.

Our certainly our cities have become more and more vertical in their axes. I think that's true. We again imagine ourselves perhaps typically as moving laterally around within a city, along the pavement, along the street. But actually more and more we move vertically up into buildings, down into subway satellites, connect us with our glowing blue dots from tens of thousands of vertical feet above us. But Paris was doing this from the medieval period. Paris, much more visibly than almost any other famous world city has.

An invisible city has a negative image of itself because it quarried its own stone out of the bedrock below southern Paris. And it created this immense catacomb network that was originally a quarry network. But then in the late 18th century, when Paris ran out of places to store its dead, became an ossuary, became a catacomb network. I spent three days down there dodging various authorities and moving from party room to hellhole to a flooded tunnel. I mean, it was one of the most intense three days I've ever spent without seeing the sun once what I thought about.

So you went down there like I did with a sort of historians that are filming project. So you went down there and hung out with all those wild people down in the bits that you're not meant to go into? Yeah, yeah. The caterpillars look at the feel and they carry sound systems with them for a bit of leafcutter boom. And they genuinely do play going underground by the jam at full volume in the party rooms. But yeah, I was down there for well two and a half days.

We slept a couple of nights in once in a former resistance bunker and once in a former quarryman chamber and up to our waist in flooded water, crawling through these strange semi collapsed tunnels, finding a ways into 18th century mineralogy chamber. I mean, it's it's history on speed down there. Astonishing. And then people will turn up in costumes of Indiana. Jones appeared at one point and I was just anyway.

Well, take less speed next time is all I can say. How does that make you feel? You're someone who I associate with standing on mountaintops and taking a panoramic Twitter photos with beautiful quotes from romantic poets.

So are you also you're happy on the ground, are you? I mean, I'm not happy, but I don't get claustrophobic easily, so.

But no, I mean, I don't go down there recreationally, but I did find myself drawn back and back and back again. It's I mean, there are there are things that you find in the dark that will never be found on the surface. Well, they've dropped down to the river tomorrow, which runs out of Slovenia and into Italy for about 12 miles. More runs for the underground as a river about a thousand feet underground through the limestone. It comes off sandstone and then burrough's down into limestone.

And I descended a thousand foot shaft, dropped through a little absol trapdoor in the roof of a chamber the size of a cathedral, which was filled with black sand dunes of black sand. The river had washed down. And then. Walk through that desert, that underworld desert to the banks of the river, and that I went to another planet there and only travelled a thousand vertical feet.

I feel like that. And also it's the fact that it's so near the Titan cave in Derbyshire, which is like, yeah, I've been in and it's like a bus ride from Sheffield. You're on a different planet. I mean, it's completely, as you say, a cathedral sized space. It's extraordinary.

And I love the fact that they discovered that the New Year of 2000 or something is and very recently. And you imagine what would it be, you know, if somebody suddenly reported reportedly found a mountain bigger than Ben Nevis somewhere in the west of Scotland? Unthinkable. But you can find a cave space bigger than any we've ever known in the country on Tuesday, in the year 2000, slightly hungover.

So there's a peaceful section in your book when you talk about the history of ice and what it tells us, you'll read it out.

Sure. Yeah. ICE has a memory it remembers in detail and it remembers for a million years or more, Ice remembers forest fires and rising seas. Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last ice age. It remembers how many days of sunshine fell upon it a summer 50000 years ago. It remembers the temperature in the clouds at a moment of snowfall early in the Holocene. It remembers the explosions of Tambora in 1850, in Mount St.

Helens in 1982 and Kumai and 14 54. It remembers the smelting boom of the Romans and the lethal quantities of lead that were present in petrol in the decades after the Second World War. It remembers and it tells tells us that we live on a fickle planet capable of swift shift and rapid reversals. ICE has a memory and the color of this memory is blue. Yeah, I love that I found that so profound and on that note, in terms of the great sweep of history, that is both enormously broad and yet moments will be identified within it.

I like your idea of being good ancestor. I mean, think of ourselves as being good ancestors for all those people in the future that will that will look back at the ice. That's, well, not much created perhaps in our world at the moment. But what will that ice tell them? Absolutely.

They'll look back. They'll have to read records other than ICE, because there won't be much left, if any, by the time we've gone. Yeah, the idea of good ancestry isn't mine, I should say. It's many peoples. It's indigenous nations. It's and the question itself of the phrase itself was formulated by Yoona s the great American Nobel Prize winning immunologist. And yeah, he says his question is, are we being good ancestors? And it just stopped me and searched me that question.

And it became the animating, ethical and indeed political question of the book. And the answer clearly at the moment is no. But we find ourselves in covid times, even less able to think in the long term as individuals and as polities.

And yet it's so depressing that over time, because our capacity for spending vast amounts of money and pursuing radical solutions like a vaccine that will be ready unimaginably quickly, we hope it shows me what we could achieve if we if we turn this energy in, this money, in this direction towards getting rid of our 19th century technology, which which produces so much crap.

Absolutely. Absolutely. If we recognised I mean, we're speaking as as climate fires are burning, burning most of the west coast of America, and we find it very, very hard to recognise crisis even as it absorbs us. I mean, so a really good example of the success of that kind of thinking. I think it's only two weeks ago that Africa formally declared itself polio free, and that was Salkin, his team and the doing of them and many others.

But it was done. I mean, incredible vaccines working and you can eradicate a horrendous disease from a mega continent so it can be done. It's a question of focus and and long term forward thinking. And I guess that idea of deep time, the geological histories of our planet also needs to be turned to the future. We have deep time futures to think of as well as deep time past's that we inherit. And we are the legacy levers.

Now, again and again, it strikes me that the one lesson we learn from this crisis, if we didn't know it from the Second World War, is the ability of modern states to borrow money. There is a magic monetary if you've got a 300 year decent credit rating like the UK or the US. Absolutely.

The money, the money's there, but the will isn't. I mean, I was dismayed to see actually how little in the way of carbon emissions was reduced during the great anthropoids, as they called it, the full sort of global lock down global emissions only went down around 14 percent in April to May. Just shows how embedded so, so much emissions are in terms of systemic output. But also so much of that was road transport. That was that was the predominant contributor to what was missing in that in during the great pause.

So we have this chance to remake cities, to remake transport systems, to build nature into them and to take carbon out of them. And we have to seize it.

Oh, I can agree more. And let's I'm slightly less optimistic. Note you talked about your nuclear waste eternity, too.

Well, to me, this is a very optimistic note. This is good ancestry in action. So the book ends only ends in Onkalo, which means the hiding place in Finnish, which is a Finnish, but the only high level nuclear waste, deep storage facility that anyone has managed to construct anywhere in the world successfully in. The Finns have done it and they've done it for their nuclear waste. And it's about 400 meters underground on the Gulf of Bosnia.

And I went, I think I was going to the end of the world, but in fact, where I was going was a place where good ancestry was practiced. These were people who were taking care of a legacy that would remain toxic for ten certainly of thousands of years. And they were making trying to create an architectural space which would hold this stuff safely for that duration of time, long after the lives of any of these people or their children or grandchildren, probably, arguably after the after the human species.

This was a post human architecture, the pyramids around four thousand six hundred years old, something like that. These people were trying to design a tomb which would last for 100000 years.

The seed bank story isn't the film with much confidence, but you reckon you reckon they've done that? Yeah, they've done it better than anyone else. They took it basically put a penny on the energy tax back in the 1970s, and that slowly filled up the immense war chest, as it were necessary to construct this thing. So very communal, democratically mandated structure. So I found it an intensely hopeful place. I mean, there are nay sayers in there are there will be problems, but they probably by the time this the team is backfilled with to two million tonnes of nice and granite and smoothed off and the forests grow back over it and the ice age comes in due course, the waste will be safely deposited there.

That's that's what we hope. But the problem is that no other country in the world has managed to do this. And we have hundreds, literally hundreds of thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste sitting around on the surface without very developed long term disposal of storage solutions. Sorry, I didn't mean doom. I promised you hope. And I ended with doom. The fence, the fence. Look to the fence scandals. The scandals have got it. All right.

Robert McFarlane, thank you so much. What is the book called?

Underland The Deep Time Journey. Everybody Gone By Immediately. Thank you for coming on the boat.

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