History isn’t just a story of kings and battles — it’s the story of how humans learned to create value, survive collapse, and reinvent themselves again and again.
In this episode of Decoded by Mo, we take a long journey through time — from the hunters painting bison on cave walls, to the farmers who built temples from surplus grain, to the merchants who turned oceans into highways of fortune. Along the way, we’ll see how resilience — a word we use sooften today — was always at the heart of human survival.
We begin in the Extractive Age, when survival depended on memory, ritual, and movement. Hunter-gatherers tracked stars, plants, and animals with astonishing knowledge. Their myths — from Anansi the Spider in Africa to Raven Steals the Sun in the Pacific Northwest — carried lessons of resilience throughwit, courage, and storytelling. Cave art and songlines became the first libraries of value.
Then came the Agricultural Age, where planting seeds transformed everything. Farming created surplus, specialization, and inequality. Religion, law, and education became instruments of power: Pharaohs tied divinity to theNile, Babylon carved laws in stone, scribes trained in cuneiform and hieroglyphs, the Maya created humans from maize. Monumental art — from pyramids to ziggurats — stood as symbols of stored value. Resilience shifted from mobility to stability, but also carried fragility: droughts, floods, andinvasions could destroy entire civilizations.
The Mercantile Age followed, where value left the soil and moved to the seas. Spices, silver, and silk remade the world. Nations embraced mercantilism, colonies became engines of extraction, and joint-stock companies like the Dutch East India Company pioneered capitalism. Myths and storiesreflected this new horizon: Sinbad’s voyages, Odysseus’s cunning, Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage with so much gold it disrupted economies. Coffeehouses became the“internet of the Enlightenment,” where information itself became value. Resilience scaled globally — nations rose by adapting to networks of trade, and fell whenthey failed.
Across these ages, one truth emerges: value is never static. It moves, transforms, collapses, and rebuilds. And resilience is always the deciding factor — whether through mobility, storage, fleets, or finance.
Why does this history matter now? Because the challenges we face today ; climate risk, inequality, technological disruption — are echoes of the past.Ancient myths and systems remind us that resilience isn’t just about surviving shocks, but about creating meaning, building systems of cooperation, and adapting faster than collapse.
This isn’t just economic history. It’s a story of art, education,religion, geography, and human imagination. It’s about how we got here — and what lessons we might need again as we enter the age of AI.