Nov. 10, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:05:41
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unidentified
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Welcome Thanks for doing this, man. | |
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| I'm very, very fascinated by this subject. | ||
| Well, thank you for having me. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| So this is a long journey for you to have written this book and to be involved in this project. | ||
| Can you talk us through how you got involved in this? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It was completely unintentional. | ||
| I had started off working on a different book on the evolution of human locomotion and, I mean, just as an aside, Humans are weird primates in a lot of ways, but one way we're weird is just we're slow, we're weak, but we have this ability to walk and run long distances, which is kind of unique. | ||
| So I thought, okay, I mean, certainly a lot of other people have noted that before, but as far as I was concerned, no one had really written the deep history of that. | ||
| So I was going to go sort of investigate the anthropology of where this weird human capacity came from. | ||
| And, you know, so I thought that the early human history like Artie would be this, you know, a little sliver of background before I got to the interesting stuff. | ||
| But anyway, I started reading the Artie papers and they kind of undercut a lot of the things that I had, the research community had taken for granted, or at least challenged them, let's say. | ||
| So anyway, I started talking to the people on the Artie team and then thinking, oh, tell me about how you found this thing. | ||
| Oh, that sounds pretty interesting. | ||
| So I thought, okay, well, maybe Artie, it'll be a page. | ||
| It's more than this little line. | ||
| Then, you know, learn a little more. | ||
| Ah, it's five pages. | ||
| Actually, this is a whole chapter. | ||
| No, this is three chapters. | ||
| And then at some point after this agonizing time of reappraisal, I said, you know what, this is Much better than the actual story I was working on. | ||
| I mean, this is a discovery that has been announced to the world, but it hasn't really been described in detail. | ||
| And it's interesting at a whole number of different levels. | ||
| I mean, there's the anatomy, it's just the exploring the natural history of the human body, literally from head to toe, because the skeleton was so remarkably complete, they had a skull, they had hands. | ||
| They had feet, and the hands and feet were almost complete, which is unheard of. | ||
| I mean, you're lucky to find any skeleton at this age, and to get something that's that complete is really unusual. | ||
| And so there are other parts of the skeleton, too. | ||
| So it sort of became a way to sort of tickle this interest I had in the natural history of the human body and human biology. | ||
| So that's the science of it. | ||
| And then the... | ||
| The discovery story, the sheer adventure story was just astounding to me when I started talking to the field crew in particular and hearing about how they, you know, all the challenges in the field. | ||
| And I'm like, oh my god, I mean, this is like collision of cultures in the Ethiopian desert. | ||
| You know, the Iginist Afar people and the Highland Ethiopians and then the foreigners, you know, the Americans, the Japanese, you know, coming in and all. | ||
| You know, meeting and the initial meetings were not friendly. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You got guys coming out, FR guys coming out with guns and saying, you know, get the hell out of here. | ||
| And so that part is fascinating. | ||
| And then the drama of discovery and there's bullets flying overhead and there's this excitement of finding one little piece and another little piece. | ||
| I mean, anyway, to make a long story short, I kind of stumbled on this. | ||
| And every time I turned over a rock, there was something interesting. | ||
| And then it got, you know, more interesting once this whole Saga kind of moved into the lab because, you know, there's this old cliché in the science, and that is it's not so much what you find, it's what you find out. | ||
| So in other words, when you find a skeleton or something like that, the truths that it contains, the scientific revelations aren't immediately evident. | ||
| You know, you look at the skeleton and say, oh, that's, you know, these people spend years studying this thing, measuring, you know, thinking about it. | ||
| There was also this other detective story that sort of followed the field. | ||
| There's a lab detective story that sort of followed the field detective story that went along with it. | ||
| And then, of course, when this thing finally was revealed to the world, there was this, again, another clash, you know, this time a clash in the world of science, in academia, about people taking issue with the interpretation or denying its importance or trying to Trying to bury the skeleton again, if you will, with inattention and denial. | ||
| So anyway, long story short, I didn't set out to do this, but it just sort of dawned on me that this was like a huge scientific saga. | ||
| That was still mostly untold. | ||
| We should fill people in on exactly what we're talking about. | ||
| So we're talking about a skeleton that was discovered that is 1.2 million years older than Lucy? | ||
| Yeah, a skeleton is 4.4 million years old. | ||
| The oldest known human relative. | ||
| Well, it's the oldest known skeleton. | ||
| Actually, this is an important distinction I should make. | ||
| So, like I said before, skeletons are rare. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is the oldest skeleton. | ||
| There are three other members of the human family that are older, but the thing is they're much more fragmentary. | ||
| They're not anywhere near as complete. | ||
| There's another one from Ethiopia found by the same team that found the skeleton we're talking about. | ||
| That's some teeth, like a toe bone, a few other broken elements of the skeleton. | ||
| And there's another thing, another species called Auroran from Kenya, which is about six million years old. | ||
| Again, you know, much more fragmentary, some teeth. | ||
| I think they've got a couple thigh bones, partial thigh bones. | ||
| And then there's a skull from Chad called Salanthropus that's about six million, maybe seven years old, depending on who's dating you believe. | ||
| And that's a very nice skull, but it's a head without body. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So anyway, so there are people sometimes get confused by this. | ||
| So Artie is indeed the oldest skeleton. | ||
| It's by far more complete than this other stuff. | ||
| But there are some... | ||
| You know, fragmentary things that are older. | ||
| And they all become part of the story, too. | ||
| And what is the scientific controversy? | ||
| Do you think it's... | ||
| Is it based on real skepticism? | ||
| Or is ego involved in this? | ||
| You're laughing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ego? | |
| It's science? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| It's unfortunate, man. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| These are scientists. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| A lot of egos involved in science, unfortunately, right? | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of egos. | ||
| There's a lot of disbelief because the skeleton was so surprising in a lot of ways and so contrary to the predictions that many people in science had made that there was kind of like a head explode for a lot of people. | ||
| So we should break down those particular things that are different than what was expected, right? | ||
| First of all, it walked upright. | ||
| Yeah, so it walked upright. | ||
| So it's primitive. | ||
| I mean, if you saw, you know, if we could go back in the time machine and look at it, you know, this thing, the species name is Artipithecus ramidus. | ||
| That's kind of a mouthful, but Arti is the individual skeleton that they found. | ||
| That's, you know, the individual, like your joke, you're the individual... | ||
| And your species is homo sapiens. | ||
| That's how you think about this. | ||
| Ardipithecus ramidus, species, ardi, the individual skeleton. | ||
| So the interesting revelations with it is it has upright posture, so it's standing upright, but it's still got the opposable toe. | ||
| So this is a creature that was in the trees, clearly climbing, but It also appears to be upright, walking with this opposable toe. | ||
| Everyone knows that sometime deep in the human past there was some kind of a boreal ancestor, some kind of ape. | ||
| But the question has always been, well, what kind of ape? | ||
| Does it look like a modern ape or does it look like something we've never seen before? | ||
| So, the surprising thing about Artie is it's actually quite different than the living apes. | ||
| So, yeah, it's got the supposable toe, walks upright. | ||
| Are there proportions? | ||
| Chimps have shorter legs than they have arms. | ||
| Are Artie's proportions similar to that? | ||
| No, Artie, I mean, it's certainly more ape-like than any of us, but it's... | ||
| There's a couple of interesting things about its proportions. | ||
| So all the other living apes have longer arms than they do legs. | ||
| They spend a lot of time climbing. | ||
| That's, you know, long arms, long... | ||
| And they have, you know, they're different proportions, but they all have that in common. | ||
| They got longer forelimbs than hind limbs. | ||
| Artie was a big surprise because it actually had longer legs than forelimbs. | ||
| I mean, you know, it definitely has bigger hands, has longer arms than we do, but... | ||
| That was a surprise, at least to me and I think to some of the researchers. | ||
| I was talking before about these kind of surprises that appear after the fact. | ||
| Well, that was one, because the bones are broken. | ||
| These guys on this research team, it's called the Middle Outwash Research Project. | ||
| They spent a lot of time, you know, reconstructing this and then estimating, you know, what are the lengths of the pieces that are not there, and then, you know, run all kinds of regressions and a lot of calculations and stuff. | ||
| So that revelation was sort of a delayed bombshell, if you will, that it actually had these limb proportions that were more like a biped. | ||
| And so ours, our legs are longer. | ||
| Chimps have longer arms. | ||
| So is this like, does it have almost equal length arms and legs? | ||
| Jamie actually just put a photo of it up here and I'm getting a chance to take a look at it. | ||
| Oh, it's fascinating. | ||
| So it has long legs, almost like a person, but longer arms than we do. | ||
| Yeah, longer arms than we do for sure. | ||
| I think, I don't remember the exact name, but I think the calculation they did was that legs are... | ||
| I think the arms... | ||
| I want to say it's like 90-something percent. | ||
| So it's pretty close to one-to-one of length, but indeed the arms are a bit shorter. | ||
| So the surprising part was that it didn't walk at all on its knuckles? | ||
| Being that it was that old? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So humans are... | ||
| We come from the African apes. | ||
| That's pretty clear from genetics. | ||
| That's been clear for a long time. | ||
| There are two main groups of African apes. | ||
| There's gorillas and there's chimps. | ||
| And chimps also includes this other species you might have heard of called bonobos. | ||
| And within those, there's debate about, should we divide them into some subspecies and stuff? | ||
| But don't worry about that for now. | ||
| But anyway, what they all have in common is they knock a walk. | ||
| So they got these long fingers, and when they walk, you know, I mean, they, you know, do this. | ||
| I mean, if you look at a video sometime, you'll see it. | ||
| And, you know, because our two closest cousins both do that, you know, there was a perfectly plausible theory that human ancestors did it well. | ||
| So we evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor. | ||
| I mean, there was even a cover story in Nature that... | ||
| The headline was almost that, you know, humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor. | ||
| So, yeah, so that was the theory. | ||
| And then, so here with Artie, we have a creature that's, you know, it's not the last common ancestor with the African apes. | ||
| But it's certainly getting closer. | ||
| It's getting a big step closer. | ||
| And the people, you know, the anatomists who specialize in these things There's no hint of knuckle-walking. | ||
| Not only was it not knuckle-walking to get around, but also it has no vestige of a knuckle-walking ancestry. | ||
| So in other words, there's no residual anatomy that would suggest that its ancestors knuckle-walking. | ||
| So it was bipedal from the very early days? | ||
| Very early days of the species evolution. | ||
| Well, it's bipedal period. | ||
| All you know is what you find at that 4.4 million year old window. | ||
| And what comes before that is... | ||
| Speculation. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, these people that do this, it's intelligent speculation, obviously, but you don't know what you haven't found. | ||
| And so... | ||
| There's a debate about just how long ago the last common ancestor of humans and chimps lived. | ||
| It's probably at least anywhere from 1.5 million years before Artie to, some estimates put it even further back than that. | ||
| There's another school of thought that's kind of emerged that says, well, it still could be a knuckle-walking ancestor that But it seems so fascinating that it has these really long arms, | ||
| but that there's no evidence whatsoever of not only knuckle-walking in that species, but knuckle-walking as an ancestry. | ||
| Yeah, and that blew the mind of a lot of people. | ||
| And there's a school of thought, of critic out there, sort of... | ||
| Okay, so this thing was announced in 2009. It surprised a lot of people. | ||
| When was it discovered? | ||
| Okay, it was discovered... | ||
| The skeleton itself was discovered in 1994. And how did they discover it? | ||
| Well, I can... | ||
| Short answer or long? | ||
| Long, long. | ||
| Stretch it out. | ||
| I want to hear the whole thing. | ||
| Alright, well, I'll take you back to the beginning of how the whole detective story was framed. | ||
| If you want me to speed up, just... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| This show's all about just letting you... | ||
| I want you to have air. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, this group went to Ethiopia. | ||
| They started doing this work in... | ||
| First went on an expedition to Ethiopia in 1981. Specifically for this purpose of looking for ancient man? | ||
| They were looking for fossils. | ||
| They found this fossil, but they found a lot of other stuff too. | ||
| All up and down the timeline of human evolution. | ||
| Some stuff that's recent and in the order of hundreds of thousands of years ago. | ||
| Just stuff that's getting near six million years ago. | ||
| These fragments I was talking about earlier. | ||
| Their research agenda is just broad. | ||
| It's just like, what can we find about human evolution? | ||
| But anyway, one of the big burning research questions at the time was, what came before Lucy? | ||
| Now, you've probably heard about Lucy. | ||
| Lucy was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. It was discovered by a guy named Don Johansson, an American guy, with his assistant, a guy named Tom Gray. | ||
| They find this thing. | ||
| It turns out to be a skeleton. | ||
| It's 3.2 million years old. | ||
| I think it's fair to say it's the best known human ancestor. | ||
| I mean, people who know nothing else about human origins will at least recognize the name Lucy. | ||
| And there's a lot of reasons for that in terms of how it's publicized and et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| I'm sorry to bother you. | ||
| Pause for a second. | ||
| Wasn't Lucy also controversial? | ||
| Any discovery in this field is controversial. | ||
| These are people all having the paleoidentity politics of humanity. | ||
| There is no easy consensus in this field. | ||
| Lucy has discovered she's 3.2 million years old. | ||
| This is a huge revelation at the time because she was I think the oldest skeleton at that point was a Neanderthal, which was less than a million years old. | ||
| So this was like a big, big deal when they find something this old. | ||
| So anyway, that thing is studied. | ||
| There's popular books written about it, et cetera, et cetera, from like the 1970s into the early 80s. | ||
| That's the time when Lucy was sort of being intensely studied and revealed to the world. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, meanwhile, Ethiopia is going into this period of turmoil. | ||
| So, one of the big elements in this story is the difficulty of doing this kind of work in a place like Ethiopia. | ||
| So, right around the time that Duluth Sea was discovered, the ancient monarchy of Ethiopia, headed by the last emperor, Haile Selassie, fell. | ||
| It's like a 2,000-year-old monarchy. | ||
| It traces its roots to biblical times and claims to be the descendants of King Solomon and Queen Sheba. | ||
| It's an ancient monarchy, but it hadn't really modernized, and then it was toppled by student activists, the military, this whole kind of coalition that wanted to modernize Ethiopia. | ||
| Well, what happens is the power is seized by the military. | ||
| It becomes a Marxist dictatorship. | ||
| Ethiopia, this longtime ally of the Americans in the Cold War, shifts to the Soviet bloc. | ||
| And now it's like a frontier of the Cold War. | ||
| Suddenly, the Americans, the Europeans who were kind of welcomed as foreign researchers before are now viewed with hostility. | ||
| People are thinking a U.S. CIA agent. | ||
| Research kind of shuts down for a number of years because it just becomes too dangerous. | ||
| Meanwhile, there's this tribal warfare happening in the desert where they're doing this stuff. | ||
| But finally, in 1981, things have calmed down enough that this research team is able to go back. | ||
| And they go back and they have acquired a new project area. | ||
| It's big. | ||
| It's like the size of Rhode Island. | ||
| And in that project area, there's all kinds of... | ||
| It's like the layer cake of time. | ||
| I mean, some... | ||
| Anthropology depends on geology, okay? | ||
| So there's like this layer cake of time, you know, where you have, you know, things are, you know, 1 million, 2 million years old. | ||
| I'm giving a really simple model here. | ||
| And this project area is really valuable because it's a sprawling area, but they have all these different time periods exposed. | ||
| So in other words, there's rocks from, you know, a million years old. | ||
| There's rocks that are more than, you know, as old as 6 million, all up and down the timeline of human evolution. | ||
| So these guys go there. | ||
| And they see this place and they say, holy crap, this place is like, it's a gold mine. | ||
| It's a gold mine like spread out all over all this place. | ||
| I mean, and we can learn so much about human evolution if we just spend all these years studying. | ||
| So then, unfortunately, they spend one season here and just doing kind of reconnaissance to see what's there. | ||
| Then Ethiopia shuts down again. | ||
| The government says, basically, It puts a halt to research. | ||
| They want to rewrite their antiquities laws so they can better control these foreigners who are coming to look at this stuff. | ||
| And they say, okay, well, hopefully we'll let you back next year. | ||
| Anyway, it takes nine years before they can resume research. | ||
| So finally, this team goes back in 1990, and they're starting to go back. | ||
| Find things and learn more about this area that they have in their project area. | ||
| And finally, in 1992, they find a first tooth of what becomes the species of Ardipithecus. | ||
| At that point, they're not expecting to find a skeleton because that's just like hoping you're going to win the lottery tomorrow, right? | ||
| You buy your ticket and it's like, yeah, right, yeah, I'm going to win the lottery. | ||
| Yeah, sure you are. | ||
| So they find a tooth and then they start finding these pieces and walking kilometers after kilometers, day after day, and then find a few more elements. | ||
| Anyway, over a couple of years, they collect enough to realize that this is a new species. | ||
| This is something different. | ||
| But at this point, it's just like a few teeth, a few bone fragments and stuff. | ||
| But anyway, then in 1994, They find the skeleton, and that's kind of an interesting piece, too, because it's kind of against all odds, and I can tell you how that happened if you're interested. | ||
| Yeah, I'd love to hear it. | ||
| Yeah, so anyway, they're walking along, and I should introduce some of the characters here. | ||
| The characters sound like a movie, by the way. | ||
| The way everybody lays out. | ||
| Yeah, we haven't talked about the personnel here, but I'll mention some of them. | ||
| Okay, so one of the guys who starts in 1981 is a young paleoanthropologist. | ||
| His name is Tim White. | ||
| He's an anthropologist from the University of California at Berkeley. | ||
| He's a guy from the American West. | ||
| He's a very hard-charging, strong-willed guy. | ||
| Profane, encyclopedic knowledge. | ||
| And everyone who works with him will tell you that he is probably the most intense fossil hunter who they've ever met. | ||
| That's Tim. | ||
| He would be the star of our movie. | ||
| He'd be the Harrison Ford character. | ||
| Yeah, but he would... | ||
| I can tell you that it's ridiculous to compare him to Harrison Ford because that's complete bullshit. | ||
| Because he is famously skeptical. | ||
| He's a relentless killer of ideas. | ||
| I mean he's got this encyclopedic knowledge and he's got hair trigger bullshit detector and that's why a lot of people are afraid of him. | ||
| Anyway, but he's also very exacting in the field. | ||
| And, you know, so when they realize that they're in such a dense... | ||
| They're starting to, you know, pick up fossils, you know, he organizes people to basically crawl, you know, hands and knees in these areas. | ||
| He lays down, like, these lanes in the fossil-rich areas, either, you know, carve... | ||
| You know lines in the sand with his little walking stick or he sometimes will put down ropes you know and it's like you know Joe your job is to walk shoulder to shoulder next to you know whoever and all 10 of you are just gonna crawl this space hands and knees and you're gonna pick up every damn thing that you see even if you think it's a rock put it in there put it in the can because we're not gonna know for sure until we get back and look at it more closely and and Anyway, so he's one guy. | ||
| There's a team working underneath him. | ||
| Another character in this whole thing is one of Tim's former students, a guy named Burhani Asfaw, who's Ethiopian. | ||
| There's an interesting backstory with Burhani. | ||
| He had been a student in the time of the Revolution, and like a lot of other students, he was swept up in the whole Political reform movement, and like a lot of other students, he was horrified to see what happened when the military dictatorship came in. | ||
| He was arrested, he was put in jail, he was tortured. | ||
| He was lucky to survive. | ||
| He told me he went into prison on a chain gang with like seven other guys, and when he's released two years, or excuse me, six months later, there's only two guys alive. | ||
| This is a story of that generation, and the suffering that Ethiopia went through at that time is astounding, and most Americans would find it hard to believe. | ||
| But anyway, he's a member of this crew. | ||
| There's a number of other Ethiopian guys. | ||
| So part of the mission of this team has been, obviously, to find fossils, but they sort of made it a dual mission to Train Africans. | ||
| We can talk more about that later. | ||
| But, you know, if you look at a lot of the old, you know, documentaries about human origins, you see people, I mean, oftentimes they're like, a lot of European people, you know, Americans and, you know, Africa's the country of human origins, but historically, at least, for a long time, Africans were not, they were hardly represented in the ranks of the scientists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But anyway, so this team had made it part of their mission to train Ethiopians, not only to be, you know, field crew, but PhD scientists. | ||
| And Burhani is one of those people. | ||
| And another guy who actually found the first piece of art, his name is Yohannes Haile Selassie. | ||
| He came, he was trained by Burhani and Tim. | ||
| So anyway, one of these days, he's out there with this group of people, and they're crawling across, and he finds a little bit of bone, like a little hand bone. | ||
| I think it was a second metacarpal. | ||
| It's a bone right here in your hand. | ||
| And it's broken. | ||
| And they say, great, we got a piece. | ||
| And so, you know, and at first, you know, in this fascia sandwich, everything's broken. | ||
| You know, the isolated tooth here, the little bone fragment there, you know. | ||
| No one's expecting that if you find a piece like that, there's necessarily going to be anything else from that skeleton that you find because the stuff is just scattered and It came from God, eroded out of God knows where. | ||
| But anyway, a few days later, they go back, they do the crawl again, they start finding more pieces and then more pieces. | ||
| And then, you know, there's sieving, which is basically like, you know, taking dirt and shaking it through a screen and then, you know, seeing what's there. | ||
| And there's, of course, a lot of rocks and all kinds of crap, but they start finding some bones in there. | ||
| And then, you know, light bulb goes off. | ||
| Oh, there's multiple elements of a skeleton here. | ||
| Or multiple elements of an individual. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| But still, it's kind of optimistic to think there may be a skeleton. | ||
| But anyway, then they're finding piece after piece. | ||
| And then when you start finding multiple pieces, then the kind of suspicion grows that you may be close to the original Yeah, so this is fossil material. | ||
| So basically what a fossil is, for people to know, it's basically a bone that has turned to stone. | ||
| So when stuff sits in the ground for a long time, minerals kind of come in. | ||
| And displace the original biological material. | ||
| So, you know, you could have fossil, you know, all kinds of fossil stuff. | ||
| I mean, usually they're bones. | ||
| Here's a question. | ||
| How long do bones exist as bones before they become fossilized? | ||
| I actually don't know. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| And my guess is that it probably varies a lot on the condition, you know, like just the geological condition. | ||
| I don't know, but my guess would be that that answer varies a lot depending on the depositional environment. | ||
| I can't give you a good answer. | ||
| Jamie will find it, I'm sure. | ||
| So another question is, is it always that bones become fossilized or is it very specific conditions? | ||
| Like, do bones, for the most part, just deteriorate and be eaten by parasites and the environment and bugs and whatnot? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, it's pretty rare to be lucky enough to find something like this. | ||
| Okay, so in that part of Africa, there are a lot of predators, you know, and there's hyenas. | ||
| I mean, now and then, you know, because they find, like, you know, along with these fossils of things like Arnie, they also find, like, you know, ancient hyenas, ancient big cats, you know, all these things that were, like... | ||
| We're eating our ancestors. | ||
| A lot of these fossils have tooth marks in them. | ||
| Something dies. | ||
| A carcass lands on the ground. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| It's probably consumed by some big cat or whatever. | ||
| One of the really ravaging things are hyenas. | ||
| They come in in packs. | ||
| And they have these really powerful jaws, and they can actually chew bones down to splinters. | ||
| And so now, if something dies, after a couple days, there could just be splinters left. | ||
| So it's not like they just clean off the skeleton for you. | ||
| So anyway, they come in, and then there's this whole chain of other scavengers that move in. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of ancient pigs. | ||
| And believe it or not, you may think of a nice little pig as being... | ||
| This cute barnyard animal, but actually pigs are surprisingly annihilated scavengers. | ||
| They're ruthless. | ||
| They're ruthless. | ||
| We have an answer for you. | ||
| Fossilized, preserved remains become fossils if they reach an age of about 10,000 years. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So it's 10,000 years, which is not that long at all. | ||
| It comes off the internet, so we know it's true. | ||
| What is the source? | ||
| Nationalgeographic.org I went to for that. | ||
| So it's National Geographic. | ||
| It's a good source. | ||
| Yeah, so it's a long time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so back to Wild Pigs. | ||
| Yeah, Wild Pigs. | ||
| Well, that was famously a scene in the movie Snatch, right? | ||
| You remember that movie? | ||
| The Brad Pitt movie. | ||
| It's a great Guy Ritchie crime movie. | ||
| The guy keeps pigs because pigs will eat everything. | ||
| They eat the bones, they eat everything. | ||
| So when he murders people, he throws them in the pen with the pigs, and the pigs eat every part of the body. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So there's pigs, and then there's... | ||
| It's like, you know, little, you know, rodents that come in. | ||
| So, you know, dung beetles. | ||
| I mean, so by the time, this is like going down through this whole thing. | ||
| So, by the time there's nothing left to eat, there's not much left of this skeleton. | ||
| And so, anyway... | ||
| So that's just preserving the bones. | ||
| Now there's another thing that has to happen. | ||
| It has to be in a depositional environment that will encourage the bone to fossilize and not just degrade. | ||
| There's different places that are conducive to that. | ||
| One is a place where there's a lake or something covering it with sediment. | ||
| This particular place, they think, was probably an ancient floodplain. | ||
| So somewhere near a river where there'd be overbank flooding every now and then, it would Put on these layers of silt over time, and then the stuff would just be buried in the silt, and then it would fossilize. | ||
| But anyway, to answer your question, you could have a herd of antelope or whatever, 100 antelope, and they'd all meet their ends in various ways, but none of them could actually be fossilized in the end. | ||
| So it's a pretty small minority of things that have the courtesy to leave their bones for us. | ||
| And then, so that's one element that makes this thing so hard. | ||
| And then the other one is just, you know, you have to be, if you are the fossil hunter, you know, the paleontologist, you have to come along at the right time when that fossil is coming out of the ground. | ||
| You know, so basically this stuff gets buried, you know, in our layer cake. | ||
| And, you know, it... | ||
| Other layers stack up and then fossilize it, but then they come to the surface again, usually by geological faulting or erosion. | ||
| And once the stuff comes to the surface, some fossils are like rock, and they'll last for a long, long, long time. | ||
| But other stuff, like this particular skeleton, are actually really chalky. | ||
| And, I mean, Tim White, the fellow who was... | ||
| Sort of guiding this whole operation says that it could come apart in your hands if you didn't handle it right. | ||
| So they just happened to have the good fortune to kind of show up in this spot when it was coming out of the ground just enough to be found but it hadn't been on the surface for long enough to sort of be degraded and stomped on by animals and blown around. | ||
| Because once the stuff comes to the surface it doesn't It's on a slope, right? | ||
| And they get these torrential... | ||
| It's a desert, so they don't get a lot of rain. | ||
| But when they do get rains, they can be torrential. | ||
| And then that just sends everything downstream. | ||
| So they just hit the Goldilocks zone. | ||
| They just happen to be there at the right time. | ||
| And some of that is luck, but it's also... | ||
| You make your own luck. | ||
| It's putting yourself in the position to find things, to spot them if they're on the ground, and then to do the detective work to find the original resting place. | ||
| Tim White, this guy mentioned he's the paleoanthropologist. | ||
| When they found this scatter of stuff on the ground, the question is, where did it come from? | ||
| Where's the original in situ site? | ||
| Which is kind of what I left off when I was telling you that story a minute ago. | ||
| Because they're founding all these things on the ground, so they're planting flags to mark where each one came from. | ||
| And they see a pattern, you know, converging, getting narrower and narrower on this little hillock. | ||
| And Tim compares it to... | ||
| You know, what the gold miners did in California. | ||
| He's from California. | ||
| You know, the 49ers where you sort of like see what the pattern is and then sort of follow it up slope to the source. | ||
| And that's what they did. | ||
| And then they start to dig in there. | ||
| They found some bones that were still embedded in the original sediments. | ||
| That tells you like, okay, now we've found The, you know, the original resting spot of this thing. | ||
| And that's when they start digging. | ||
| And that's, you know, I mean, it's a very slow process. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't happen nearly as fast. | ||
| I mean, this stretches over days and weeks. | ||
| But anyway, they start digging there. | ||
| And this is when they say, holy crap, this is like a skeleton. | ||
| So between finding the initial bone in 94 to actually pulling it out of the ground in a skeleton form, how much time is this taking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, so I think they found the first piece of the skeleton in, I think it was sometime in November of 94. And then, meanwhile, there's all kinds of stuff going on. | ||
| So they're doing surveys elsewhere, because as I mentioned before, this particular project, they've got stuff, sediments of all kinds of ages, and it's huge. | ||
| And so, you know, they've got a lot of places to look. | ||
| So they're not going to start... | ||
| If you're in this line of work, you don't start digging... | ||
| Until you have a pretty good reason to believe there's something there, because otherwise you're just going to waste your time, and you don't have much time in the field. | ||
| You've got to pay to sustain these expeditions in the desert. | ||
| There's people running around with guns. | ||
| We haven't talked about this, but there's this tribal warfare going on there. | ||
| So you don't waste your time digging unless you have a pretty good reason to believe that there's something there. | ||
| So anyway, they find this first piece in November, and then I think they come back some days later and then start finding these other pieces that I mentioned. | ||
| It was some weeks later before they started digging. | ||
| Some of that was... | ||
| Waiting until there was enough evidence to really strongly indicate that there was something there, and some of that was just juggling the conflicting priorities in the field. | ||
| And one of those conflicting priorities is actually they were searching for another, what they hoped would be another skeleton quite close to this one, just maybe a couple hundred meters away, because they had found a nice arm bone there the year before, And then dug this hole, and dug, and dug, and dug, and they dug for years there, but never found any more of that creature. | ||
| So that's kind of an example of what is not at all an unusual experience, where you've got your hopes up, you dig, and then, dang it, there's nothing there. | ||
| But in this case, there was something there, and it was a lot there. | ||
| So, yeah, go ahead. | ||
| Was there skepticism that it was all from the same individual? | ||
| Yeah, well, that is... | ||
| Of course, unclear when you're starting to dig, you know. | ||
| But, you know, I think over the days and weeks as they were, you know, slowly pulling pieces out of this excavation site, which is a very slow process. | ||
| I mean, they're literally working with like... | ||
| Dental tools. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of pictures of Tim there chipping away at this, and his students, they're using brushes to brush because you don't want to go in there with a trowel because you're going to destroy something. | ||
| So over the days and weeks, they discover there's no duplication of parts, which is a strong indication that it might be Excuse me, one individual. | ||
| Now, can I stop you again? | ||
| Are they filming all this so that if there are skeptics, because with anthropologists and paleontologists, there are a lot of skeptics, right? | ||
| So are they preparing for this and filming every step of the way? | ||
| Not every step of the way, but Tim White is a relentless record keeper. | ||
| And he has this voluminous photo archive, for one. | ||
| He's also a relentless record keeper. | ||
| And when the excavation started, as you said, they did set up a video camera on a tripod and train it on the excavation era and just let it roll. | ||
| And this is back in the days of... | ||
| VHS? Yeah, I don't know if it was VSS or Micro something. | ||
| But anyway, so they're filming all this stuff. | ||
| So by the time I come along, you know, many, almost 20 years later, Tim lets me see all this stuff. | ||
| And to me, this was like an absolute goldmine. | ||
| Because I, you know, this thing that I would normally have to reconstruct, you know, after the fact, which, you know, I wouldn't be able to see the conversations that people told me what they said, I'd have to... | ||
| Treat that with some skepticism because how reliable was this person's memory after 20 years? | ||
| I mean, I couldn't really be there in any way. | ||
| But now that I have this videotape, I'm watching while these guys are digging up these little pieces. | ||
| I'm watching while Tim is exposing this smile of this ancient I'm a member of the human family. | ||
| And there's hours and hours of this stuff. | ||
| So I can actually hear the excitement and then all the other kind of cross-talk, the jokes, the fact that they're playing the Grateful Dead in the background or Bob Marley or listening to the BBC, all this stuff. | ||
| So to me, as a reporter, that was like the equivalent of them finding the skeleton. | ||
| For me, having this trove of records, It was just such an astounding jackpot for me because it let me be there. | ||
| Yeah, that's amazing. | ||
| So how many teeth were intact? | ||
| Did it have a full smile? | ||
| The teeth? | ||
| Well, they were in the jawbone. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I shouldn't give you a number because I don't remember. | ||
| But they pretty much got most of the teeth of this creature. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe not on this one individual. | ||
| But there are... | ||
| This operation went on for years and over the years they collected a lot of fragments from other individuals. | ||
| So I'm sure they have pretty much all the teeth or pretty close to all the teeth. | ||
| I mean the number of teeth they have is It's in the book somewhere. | ||
| I don't remember the number, but it's well over 100. So with Artie in the skeleton, is this the only example of this particular member of this period in evolution? | ||
| Or are there other of the similar time frame that they found? | ||
| Other individuals or other species? | ||
| Other individuals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah, so there's a lot of individuals of this species, but again, they're not complete. | ||
| They find part of a jawbone of another individual. | ||
| Actually, they found a nice jaw, or part of a jaw, just like a stone's throw away from where Artie was found. | ||
| They found a foot bone of a jawbone. | ||
| Bigger member, they're kind of jokingly nicknamed Bigfoot. | ||
| And they're aging these creatures based on the biological material that's around it? | ||
| Yeah, well, this is interesting, and this, if you read the book, this becomes part of the sort of scientific detective story, is all the techniques that are used. | ||
| And for me as a reporter, this was actually part of the richness of this story, was getting to learn about all these component sciences and That go into paleoanthropology. | ||
| And there are a lot of them. | ||
| It's definitely a multidisciplinary field. | ||
| But one of the most important sub-disciplines within this is geology. | ||
| And the reason is that geology gives you the timeline to answer the question that you just asked. | ||
| And so there's different methods of dating. | ||
| If you're in the field, you can begin to make estimates about the age of the sediments based on the other animals that are there. | ||
| Like if you know if you find a certain type of pig that this particular species of pig lived between this date and that date. | ||
| So that kind of narrows it down. | ||
| So they call that biochronology. | ||
| So that's one. | ||
| But the real specific method of dating is dating the volcanic ashes and lavas. | ||
| And I can give you like a one-minute tutorial on that. | ||
| So basically, you could think of geology as like a layer cake, right? | ||
| So let's just say, like, here are the ancient layers that were laid down like I was describing. | ||
| Let's just say this one is a million years old, this one's two million, this one's three, this one's four. | ||
| Okay, so how do you know how old things are? | ||
| Well, the main method of dating is called radiometric dating. | ||
| And so that basically means that they find volcanic ashes and lavas everywhere. | ||
| That are, because this is on the edge, the Great Rafale, there's like tons of volcanoes all up and down eastern Africa, and every once in a while they erupt, and they spew out, you know, ashes and lavas, and the stuff settles on the ground. | ||
| In some cases, I mean, these ash layers are really thick, I mean, like several feet thick, and you think, oh my god, what an apocalyptic eruption that must have been when that happened. | ||
| But anyway, it's great for the geologists, because they can take these ashes, and they take them into the lab, and then They can tell basically by the... | ||
| It's called isotopic dating. | ||
| And so basically it's just... | ||
| There's a change in the isotopes of potassium in particular and argon, which are components here. | ||
| And this stuff decays at a constant rate, which is not affected by temperature or pressure if it's in the Earth or whatever. | ||
| It's just a constant rate. | ||
| So this gives you... | ||
| A yardstick to measure how old something is. | ||
| So they can't figure out the age of the individual bones, but you can figure out the layers of the ashes and lavas that are above it and below it. | ||
| And that gives you a bracket. | ||
| And there's literally hundreds of ash and lava layers in this area. | ||
| And all these things have been dated over the years. | ||
| That gives you a timeline. | ||
| So with this particular skeleton, Very conveniently, an ash in the layer above it and another one below it. | ||
| And when they did the dating, they both were calculated to be 4.4 million years old. | ||
| So that means that the area between them was deposited in a pretty short period of time. | ||
| I mean, you know, this method dating doesn't give you it down to like the year or even, you know, tens of years, so no one knows like just how long that period of time was, but it's probably on the order of Maybe a hundred years, something in the hundreds of years. | ||
| Not long. | ||
| And for something of this age, that's actually really precise dating. | ||
| So to answer your question, it's using volcanic ashes and lavas above and below it to figure out the date of things. | ||
| And what is the window of possibility? | ||
| How tightly can they narrow that down? | ||
| Within a million years? | ||
| I'm not a geologist, so I don't want to speak beyond my layer of knowledge here. | ||
| With this one, they brought it down to 4.4, so that's pretty tight. | ||
| There's certainly a margin of uncertainty or margin of error in there that they reported, and it's some long number with a lot of decimal points, which I don't remember. | ||
| Long story short, that 4.4 is a pretty good date, and for stuff of this age, it's It's quite solid. | ||
| Now, when you have a being like this that's so unusual, it's not like anything they've encountered before with the longer legs and the thumbs on the feet and the whole deal. | ||
| When they're piecing this together, how do they know exactly where everything goes? | ||
| How are they absolutely sure Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's different than what they've seen, but they know how skeletons go together. | ||
| Femurs and tabulas. | ||
| You don't get a fever confused with a thumb phalanx. | ||
| I don't have this knowledge, but certainly those people do. | ||
| They can pick up a tooth and say, oh yeah, this is the upper right side of the mouth. | ||
| The people that know skeletons can do all this mental rotation in their head And they can often do it from fragments of bones. | ||
| So it's not the whole tooth, but like a fraction of the tooth or a fraction of some foot bone. | ||
| And to me, that was actually one of the fascinating things about this, is how these people that know their skeletons can read the revelations in the skeletons. | ||
| Do you know the story of Gigantopithecus, how they discovered that? | ||
| No. | ||
| It was an apothecary shop in China. | ||
| There was an anthropologist who found, I believe he found a tooth. | ||
| And he was like, what the hell is this? | ||
| And he realized it was a primate tooth, but it was much larger than anything they'd ever seen before. | ||
| And then he asked them to, I think it was, I want to say 1920s or 1930s. | ||
| And then they, I mean, I don't think they've gotten anything more than some jaw bones and teeth. | ||
| And they realized it's a bipedal hominid that was somewhere in the neighborhood of eight feet tall. | ||
| It wouldn't have been a hominid if it was... | ||
| A hominid, at least in the old meaning, the meaning has changed, but means member of the human family, which was basically after our split from the chimps. | ||
| Now they call them hominines with an I-N at the end. | ||
| Gigantopithecus, I believe, is a Miocene ape. | ||
| It's a primate, but you wouldn't consider it a member of the human family. | ||
| It's just one of many Weird things from this period they call the Miocene. | ||
| I fucked the terminology up, but the point I was getting at is that just from looking at a jawbone, they can figure out what this thing was and how tall it was. | ||
| It's bonkers. | ||
| Yeah, because the body proportions are... | ||
| I mean, they vary somewhat, but you can tell a lot from... | ||
| Sometimes individual bone. | ||
| Believe it or not, the head of the femur is often used as kind of a ball and socket joint on your thigh bone is often used, was used in Artificus, in fact, to scale different parts. | ||
| So they've got this complete skeleton. | ||
| There's nothing missing from Artie? | ||
| Well, there are some things missing, yeah. | ||
| A couple of small pieces. | ||
| I mean, it's relatively... | ||
| I mean, by the standards of paleoanthropology, it's remarkably complete. | ||
| And actually, the hands and the feet... | ||
| Which usually you don't get. | ||
| Like Tim White, the paleoanthropologist, he calls them carnivore hors d'oeuvres, because you're lying, your carcass is there, and the pack of hyenas comes in, and here's a handout for the carnivore. | ||
| They chew off your feet and whatever. | ||
| So it's remarkably complete, but there are some pieces missing, and there are some pieces that are just present but really damaged. | ||
| Most of the spine is not there, and it sure would be nice To have the spine, because you can tell a lot about the design of the creature, the organization of the creature, if you know how its spinal segments are divided. | ||
| The pelvis, they have a lot of, but it's pretty distorted by geology. | ||
| And some of the limb bones are fragmentary. | ||
| So... | ||
| For example, they don't have a knee joint, which sure would be nice to have, because that's an interesting bit of data to figure out just how this creature was a biped. | ||
| So anyway, there are certainly pieces missing, and I'm sure that science would love to have them. | ||
| Is it already on display? | ||
| Or at least online? | ||
| Is there a place to view it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, there are some photographs of it that have been published and you can see it. | ||
| So do they lay it out on a table in the form that they think that it came in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| To reconstruct the skeletal elements is not terribly hard for these guys to do. | ||
| I think in one case there might have been a question about one of the hand bones There was a phalanx of one of the fingers and there was a question, did it go in this finger or another finger? | ||
| But for the most part, it's easy for these experts to know where an element goes in the skeleton. | ||
| So there's pictures of the skeleton laid out not long after discovery. | ||
| Not in the field, but in the lab. | ||
| There's other parts that took a long time, like the skull. | ||
| I mean, that took... | ||
| More than 10 years to put that together. | ||
| So the skull came in several fragments, obviously. | ||
| Yeah, so it looks... | ||
| Some of the pictures were published of it, but when it came out of the ground, I think it had been kind of pounded down just by the force of ecology. | ||
| So it was like if you took a pile driver and just whap! | ||
| And pounded the thing down. | ||
| And so... | ||
| That was quite fragmentary, and so they had to reconstruct it. | ||
| It was reconstructed by a scientist from Japan named Gensuwa. | ||
| Jamie put an image of it up on the screen right now. | ||
| We're taking a look at it right now. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| So it shows basically half of it was intact or somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of it up at the top of the left side of the head. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's really cool what you can do. | ||
| So this guy who reconstructed that, his name is Gensui. | ||
| He's from the University of Tokyo Museum. | ||
| And he's, you know, a very exacting scientist. | ||
| I haven't met him personally, but I've met a lot of people who work with him and they've... | ||
| He's a very unassuming guy, but he kind of leaves all of his colleagues in awe because of his acumen. | ||
| Anyway, he reconstructed that with his team. | ||
| This is incredible. | ||
| I said it the wrong way. | ||
| I'm viewing the left side. | ||
| It's actually the right side that was reconstructed, but the left side is the actual skull itself, which is a bunch of pieces, but the teeth are remarkably intact. | ||
| The other part that was fascinating to me was that it doesn't have canines like a chimp. | ||
| It has them more like a human being. | ||
| Yeah, and actually that was one of the big, well, number one, that's one of the indicators, the strong indicators that tells us that this is something somewhere in the human lineage, number one. | ||
| Because we have, as you mentioned, canines that are different than most other apes. | ||
| The other Most other primates have these interlocking canines. | ||
| I mean, chimps and gorillas are two closest cousins both to do. | ||
| They have big fangs. | ||
| And they sharpen themselves by rubbing against the premolar. | ||
| The canine rubs against the premolar. | ||
| So it's kind of like always keeping your knife sharp. | ||
| But humans are unique because we have these things that are not these dagger-like fangs. | ||
| They are diamond-shaped. | ||
| So Artie's canines are certainly bigger than yours or mine or later members of the human family, but it shows that this, what they call canine reduction, was already well underway by the time Artie lived. | ||
| And actually, this is an important point because the teeth, the canines in particular, are kind of a diagnostic feature of these early members of the human family. | ||
| Because when you get back in time, The clues that tell you that this is a member of the human family, they become much more subtle because these creatures get more and more ape-like and less and less human-like as you go back in time. | ||
| So canines are a sort of reliable way, or let's say a reliable indicator to tell you that you're looking at some... | ||
| A bit of early humanity here. | ||
| Does it tell us anything about Artie's diet? | ||
| Or is it a defensive thing? | ||
| Because when we're looking at gorillas, gorillas, they have canines, but they're vegetarians. | ||
| And their canines are for defense, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, yeah, this is interesting. | ||
| So if you're a gorilla, they spend a lot of time eating leaves and stuff. | ||
| And you don't need these big canines to take out a leaf. | ||
| So this is... | ||
| The sort of predominant interpretation is that this is a sign of intraspecies aggression. | ||
| Because, you know, with gorillas, for example, they Their mating structure is that there's a big alpha male, I'll call him a silverback, and he lords over this harem of females and tends to sire the kids. | ||
| And there are these bachelor males that will sometimes challenge alpha male and try to take them out. | ||
| So natural selection, in the case of gorillas, would favor these big Sharp canines and then these big brute bodies. | ||
| Male gorillas are quite big. | ||
| In some cases, they're twice as big as the females. | ||
| And this is all interpreted as intraspecies aggression for mating. | ||
| Now, humans are interesting because we don't have these big canines. | ||
| And actually, this factors into the Artie story because one of the... | ||
| The main investigator is an evolutionary theorist who interpreted art. | ||
| He was a fellow named Owen Lovejoy, and he's from Kent State University in the United States. | ||
| And he has a theory that what you're looking at with canine reduction is a social revolution, that this is monogamy happening, basically. | ||
| That instead of, you know, some gorilla-like mating structure, you know, where you have, like, Instead of like the harem or a mating structure like chimps or bonobos, which are more promiscuous, but certainly starting to not monogamous. | ||
| But he thinks that the canine reduction we see in the human lineage is because there was pair bonding and that the reduction in canines is a sign of reduced aggression in our species. | ||
| And this was He believes one of the early human major adaptations that That's got to be a very controversial theory, isn't it? | ||
| Because there's a lot of paleontologists that think that, even with human beings, there's a lot of people that think that human beings weren't really monogamous until they figured out whose kids there were. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Well, it's hugely controversial for a whole number of reasons. | ||
| But one thing I should clarify is what What the biologists mean about monogamy. | ||
| So it's wrong to kind of understand that in kind of like our modern moralistic way. | ||
| This is not like, you know, the American Family Council talking here about monogamy. | ||
| This is monogamy in the way that like, so there's a lot of examples of creatures that do have, that are monogamous, like birds. | ||
| You know, think of like, you know, mom and dad in the nest. | ||
| Or, you know, I think coyotes are. | ||
| I mean, there's, or gibbons is another species. | ||
| Another primate that are monogamous. | ||
| So this is not unusual in the world of biology. | ||
| So anyway, so sometimes people say, oh, you know, that's kind of like bringing in some of these moralistic things. | ||
| It's not that. | ||
| It is a legitimate Way to describe a baiting strategy that exists in many places in nature. | ||
| Okay, so yeah, and there's other theories that have ascribed human sexuality to something more like a chimp. | ||
| It's promiscuous, and especially, as the book mentions, this whole model of a chimp-like ancestor has been prevalent in anthropology for For decades, and one subcategory there is mating strategy. | ||
| If you ever want to amuse yourself, read about theories about human mating strategies. | ||
| There's all kinds of ways that people have explained our peculiarities and our Yeah, our sexuality and all that stuff. | ||
| Now, what we're looking at already, we're talking about an animal that predates weapons, correct? | ||
| Yeah, as far as we know. | ||
| So the first stone tools do not appear until, well, certainly by around 2.5, 2.6 million years ago, there's stone tools. | ||
| There's some things that have been found in Kenya that are older, that are like 3.5. | ||
| 2 or 3.3. | ||
| That one is a little controversial, so we'll see how that all shakes out. | ||
| But anyway, in either case, at least the stone tools are way after Artie, way after Lucy. | ||
| So it's possible they use weapons, sticks and things along those lines? | ||
| Yeah, so that's the part... | ||
| We may never know. | ||
| Because if there's something like a stick that biodegrades, then who knows? | ||
| Or throwing a rock. | ||
| You could... | ||
| How do we know? | ||
| The idea would be that they're not hunting with weapons. | ||
| Most likely. | ||
| No. | ||
| And actually, surprisingly, weapons arrive pretty late in human origins. | ||
| I... The figures in the book, and I don't want to say it now because I don't remember what it is offhand, but the early tools are things like, you know, choppers and then hand axes. | ||
| But those are tools for processing food, you know. | ||
| They're not, I mean, the weapons come late. | ||
| It's kind of interesting that, you know, the things that are identifiable weapons are... | ||
| Like spears and atlatls and stuff like that. | ||
| Yeah, or, you know, particularly like lithic things, you know, that leave a... | ||
| Excuse me, leave a, you know, that are stone, that are preserved. | ||
| Those come pretty late. | ||
| It's an interesting question about just why weapons were developed and why we started using them. | ||
| So do we know, do we have speculation as to what Artie's diet was? | ||
| Like, was Artie an herbivore? | ||
| Yeah, so they can make some determinations based on a couple of lines of evidence. | ||
| One is the microscopic striations in the teeth, because when you eat something, you know, whatever you eat leaves kind of like scratches on the surface of the dental material, so they can make some inferences there. | ||
| Another one is using This gets kind of complicated, but they can make some inferences about what kind of plant foods they ate based on... | ||
| There's two kinds of plants, like C3 or C4, and this refers to two different forms of photosynthesis. | ||
| C4 plants tend to be more open, sunny sort of thing. | ||
| C3 plants tend to be more shady things. | ||
| I mean, this is not an absolute difference, but it's an important one. | ||
| Make some inferences there that Ari's diet was mostly like C3 things, which tends to be things that are in more kind of wooded areas, not the open food of the grasslands and that sort of thing. | ||
| I mean, it did have some C4 in its diet, but it's mostly C3. So mostly vegetables? | ||
| Is this what's believed? | ||
| Or is it inferred that it's omnivorous? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, they think it's probably omnivorous. | ||
| I've heard some speculation that maybe if they are maybe eating some bugs and stuff like that. | ||
| I mean, the interesting thing is you can get this C3 or C4 signature from eating the plant foods directly, but you can also get it if you eat... | ||
| Another animal that's been eating one of those two things. | ||
| So this kind of moves up through the food chain. | ||
| Is there speculation as to what natural selection benefit there would be for it to stand up? | ||
| Like for it to be upright? | ||
| Yeah, so this actually gets back to that monogamy theory I was telling you about, which is admittedly quite controversial. | ||
| But so what Owen Lovejoy theorizes, and this was presented when With the announcement of the series of papers when Artie was finally revealed to the world in 2009. Owen's theory is that monogamy is a mating strategy. | ||
| And that basically... | ||
| Let's go back to your question. | ||
| So you're interested in speculating or answering the question, why is this creature erect? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is quite an interesting... | ||
| Take on the whole question. | ||
| So this, of course, you know, why did humans stand upright is the million-dollar question of human origins. | ||
| I mean, Darwin tried to answer it, you know, and many, many people have tried to answer it. | ||
| There's more theories than you can shake a stick at, you know. | ||
| I mean, Darwin said, you know, people stood up because they were using tools, you know, to free the hands. | ||
| And other people have said, no, it's because they were Trying to minimize sun exposure because if you're standing up in a hot place, you're getting less sun. | ||
| People have said it's phallic display. | ||
| It's all kinds of stuff. | ||
| Picking fruit, seeing over tall grass. | ||
| You name it. | ||
| But the interesting thing is that most of these theories look for a direct benefit for standing up to some direct evolutionary benefit. | ||
| Owen's theory is a little different because he doesn't think There is a direct benefit. | ||
| He thinks it's sort of a secondary thing. | ||
| So just to tell you a little bit more about Owen, he's kind of an interesting guy. | ||
| He has an interesting history. | ||
| But earlier in his career, he specialized in biomechanics. | ||
| And actually, he was the main biomechanical expert. | ||
| Analyst on the Lucy team 20 years before Artie came along. | ||
| But anyway, his early career, he worked with scientists who designed artificial joints. | ||
| And so he grew up as a scientist with a pretty keen awareness of how biomechanics worked and also what could go wrong with the skeleton. | ||
| And Owen will tell you that That bipedality is a really stupid thing to do from an evolutionary perspective because it makes you slow. | ||
| If you want to be a fast runner, you probably should stay on all fours. | ||
| It's an invitation for disaster. | ||
| Why do we have artificial joints? | ||
| It's because people blow out knees or blow out hips. | ||
| Standing upright also causes these vulnerabilities in your back because of the way the spine is kind of contorted with humans. | ||
| So why on earth would this species do this stupid thing? | ||
| And why are there 8 billion of us here now if we did this stupid thing? | ||
| So Owen's theory is that it was actually a sacrifice in locomotion, but what it did do is it gave us this big payoff In reproduction. | ||
| So he thinks that standing erect was to free the hands that, within the context of these monogamous relationships I was telling you before, so that the males, you know, guys like you and me, became provisioners. | ||
| So they basically became, the males became partners in the child rearing, and this increased survivorship. | ||
| So it's an interesting thing, like, other apes, you know, are not very... | ||
| Not very involved dads. | ||
| I call them deadbeat dads. | ||
| But humans are... | ||
| Usually we have these monogamous relationships. | ||
| So anyway, Owen's theory is that the bipedality was just a means to an end. | ||
| It allowed the males to provision and that the females would be able to spend more time nurturing children. | ||
| And this was a demographic revolution. | ||
| And then the reduction in canines is part of that theory and that this was like a reduction in aggression. | ||
| So we're not fighting over, you know, who's the alpha male? | ||
| We're in these monogamous pairs within a troop of primates. | ||
| And that explains why, you know, bipedality appears pretty early in human evolution and why the reduced canines also appears. | ||
| So anyway, this is Owen's theory. | ||
| It's quite controversial and, you know, it's... | ||
| Without finding things, even if you were able to find skeletons older than already, it would still be controversial. | ||
| But anyway, that's the theory. | ||
| Is there a compelling competing theory? | ||
| There are lots of competing theories, probably too many to mention here. | ||
| I mentioned some, standing ups. | ||
| The phallic display? | ||
|
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You don't hear much about that one anymore, but that one came shortly after the sexual revolution. | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| So, we don't know, basically. | ||
|
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We don't know. | |
| And then, I mean, some of the stuff, to be honest, from my point of view, is... | ||
| May ultimately be unknowable. | ||
| Does the fact that Artie was basically intact despite being around predators and scavengers and all these different things, and the fact that Artie was walking on hind legs despite the fact that walking on hind legs makes you more vulnerable, does this signify that it was in some sort of a protected environment where it wasn't at such risk of predation? | ||
| Well, remember, these things can go, you know, in terms of escaping predators. | ||
| Trees. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it can go up a tree, and I mean, I'm not, you know, between you and me, I don't have an opposable toe, but if I were out on, you know, out in some dangerous place in Africa when the sun is going down, and, you know, the hyenas were coming out, I would be probably heading up a tree, too, and I would recommend you do the same. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that's the move. | |
| But, you know, of course, you still have to worry about the big cats, but... | ||
| Anyway, so it did have the ability to go into the trees. | ||
| But yeah, how did these things survive? | ||
| That's an interesting question. | ||
| You know, I mean, there are other animals that, you know, monkeys that live there that have the same, you know, the same challenge today. | ||
| But actually, I'll tell you, just a little interesting aside here and sort of the fieldwork part of the detective story. | ||
| So the fact that they found this skeleton that was remarkably complete It was all the more miraculous because of the condition of all the other stuff they were finding until that point. | ||
| So Tim White, the main paleoanthropologist on the team, he's very experienced and has been working in Africa for a long time. | ||
| And when he looked at the fossil assemblage, the word that he used, it was ravaged. | ||
| And this was visible to him from... | ||
| You know, from their first days on the site because they're finding all these fragments of things that have clearly been chewed apart. | ||
| And instead of finding teeth, they're finding pieces of teeth and like bones that are chewed to splinters. | ||
| In some cases, they actually found things that are etched by digestive acid. | ||
| So basically what that means is that, you know, it was eaten by some carnivore, you know, passed through the digestive tract and shit out, you know, left in some pile, you know, that then, you know, degrades, but the tooth is still there. | ||
| But they can see, like, the surface has this, you know, kind of altered texture to it that tells these people that, yeah, there's digestive acid at work on this thing. | ||
| Because that was the signature of all this fossil sandwich that they were seeing. | ||
| If you're just getting teeth and things that have been passed through the adjecture, track record and splinters, you're not hoping for a skeleton. | ||
| You're not going to find a skeleton here. | ||
| But somehow, just by great luck, they did. | ||
| that for some reason this carcass wound up on the ground was not you know demolished by all these predators and had a chance to fossilize so that that is just remarkably good fortune was that one of the reasons why it was treated with so much skepticism? | ||
| because well No one doubts the existence of the skeleton. | ||
| What do they doubt? | ||
| There's so many things that are so specific, like the carbon dating of the upper and lower layers, the fact that you have so many bones, the fact that they're not repeating, the fact that It's clearly some sort of a primate, and you've put all this stuff together and reconstructed the skull. | ||
| I mean, what is the controversy? | ||
| The controversy... | ||
| Well, there's a couple of things. | ||
| I mean, you could talk for a long time about this, but I guess one point of controversy is, is it indeed a member of the human family? | ||
| And, you know, as I said before, you get... | ||
| Further back in time, the things that tell you it's a member of the human family become more subtle, like these canine teeth, for example. | ||
| The bipedality is another one. | ||
| But there's a great deal of skepticism in the field. | ||
| There's people who I talk to who doubt that any of these early species Species that have been identified as hominins or early members of the human family. | ||
| They doubt that any of them really are, or that it's just unknowable. | ||
| So there's kind of like this, I don't know, almost in some people, this almost like nihilistic view that you can really ever know. | ||
| That's one. | ||
| But I do think that has changed. | ||
| The validation of Arti as a member I think there is a growing number of people who are accepting it. | ||
| And there's some people with a lot of outside people who have basically endorsed what the research team Whether it's a direct ancestor or one of your extinct aunt-uncle. | ||
| Maybe it's not your grandfather, but maybe it's your aunt-uncle. | ||
| We may never know that. | ||
| Anyway, that's one point of controversy. | ||
| Is it in the human lineage? | ||
| Another one is the arguments that the discovery team has made about what it reveals about the last common ancestor of humans and apes. | ||
| For example, we were talking before about this model of a chimp-like common ancestor of humans and African apes. | ||
| The ARTI team spent 15 years studying this thing before they announced it to the world. | ||
| They believed and strenuously argued that The skeleton shows you that the common ancestor of humans and the African apes was in fact not like a chimp, nowhere near as chimp-like as everyone thought, because there's no vestige of knuckle-walking. | ||
| I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that gets into sort of like some anatomical, very esoteric anatomical stuff. | ||
| So if you read the book, if you're interested, because it gets into all that. | ||
| So anyway, that's part of the controversy. | ||
| So there is a sort of subset of the critics who have come to accept Artie as indeed a member of the human family. | ||
| So they say, yeah, they're right. | ||
| They placed it correctly in the human family tree, but they are not yet convinced that it falsifies this idea of a chimp-like ancestor. | ||
| Their argument would be, well, Sure, in the ways that Artie may have still descended from this chimp-like ancestor, but it evolved these new adaptations that sort of erased those from its anatomy. | ||
| So that's one element of controversy. | ||
| The great thing about this skeleton, actually, because it is so complete and because it It was released with this huge package of this whole series of paper about the hand, the foot, the pelvis, the skull. | ||
| There was a lot of fodder there for debate and disagreement, and that's what's been happening for the last 10 years. | ||
| Now, when they talk about a chimp ancestor, a chimp-like ancestor, is this just because chimps are around and we know genetically that we're at least closely related to chimps? | ||
| So it's just presumed? | ||
| And is it possible that all the way back, like from the beginning, that our ancestors were bipedal? | ||
| Well, I don't think many people would say... | ||
| Well, ancestors of the human lineage? | ||
| Right. | ||
| When you look at Artie, Artie is the oldest known full skeleton that we have of our ancestors. | ||
| If we go back, if we somehow or another found something that was 12 million years old, what if that thing was bipedal? | ||
| Okay, so one problem is that the split between humans and chimps, it's probably not that old. | ||
| So if you're at 12 million, you're probably somewhere... | ||
| Before the huge gym split. | ||
| There's a lot of squish time in this. | ||
| Actually, as it happens, I think some of the The estimates that are kind of furthest out are in fact 12 million, but somewhere between 6 and 12 million where humans and chimps split. | ||
| But they do think that once upon a time there was a split between humans and chimps. | ||
| So if you go back far enough, you'll find a chimp or something like a chimp. | ||
| Well, you'll find an ancestor of a chimp. | ||
| The big question is, does it look like a modern chimp or does it look like something you've never seen before? | ||
| Or does it look like something that's sort of... | ||
| A more primitive version of Ardipithecus. | ||
| I mean, this is the great unknown. | ||
| I mean, this is, of course, another quest for science. | ||
| So the discovery of Ardipithecus was really a monkey wrench into this whole idea of what we... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so that was one of the things that was quite controversial about it. | ||
| And we haven't talked much about the discovery team that put this together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they're very good scholars. | ||
| They're very good at what they do, but they're also quite provocative, which for me, of course, made them great material. | ||
| But they don't present the skeleton and say, here's a physical description of the skeleton. | ||
| Go ahead and make up your own minds. | ||
| They presented it, and it said, here's a... | ||
| You know, skeleton, and this is why you're wrong, and you're wrong, and you're wrong, and you're wrong. | ||
| So it was a provocative series of papers with some, you know, stunning revelations, but a lot of... | ||
| Some people in the research community did not take kindly to the mode of presentation, let's say. | ||
| Because, you know, at one point... | ||
| There's this huge research community that studied chimpanzees. | ||
| Either it studied them in the field doing observational studies or studied them in the lab to try to find clues about the origin of human locomotion or anything. | ||
| I mean, chimps kind of became this all-purpose model. | ||
| and so when the arty team came along and told them they're all kind of barking up the wrong tree there was there was a lot of consternation about that it's so fascinating to me that there was a time where this thing didn't exist we didn't know it existed and that it was only 1994 and that our understanding of where the human species came from relies on these perfect conditions to happen | ||
| and then someone to come across this thing at just the right time and that this person has to be a skilled researcher that knows how to handle it and | ||
| Our understanding of where we came from, as much as we know about the internet and space travel and the galaxy, it's so crazy to me that we need to piece together our understanding Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's a reason why these skeletons are so rare. | ||
| I mean, they're hard to find. | ||
| I mean, you need the right geological conditions. | ||
| I mean, let's just start with where you find these things. | ||
| We're pretty certain that early human origins was in Africa. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty clear at this point. | ||
| And humans were confined to Africa, as far as we know, until about two million years ago when some of these primitive species started to go out. | ||
| So the early stories in Africa. | ||
| Now, you often hear people say, well, the Great Rift Valley is the cradle of humanity, or South Africa is the cradle of humanity, or the Eden, or whatever. | ||
| And these places were not necessarily the only places that human ancestors dwelt. | ||
| The reason we know about these things is just because these are the countries that Where the geological conditions favor the preservation of fossils. | ||
| And so there's this whole mythology, you know, it's sort of about like, well, this place or that place is like the Eden of humanity or whatever. | ||
| I mean, a lot of that is just self-promotion, tourist board stuff, sometimes science is self-promoting. | ||
| Again, what they should be saying is we're not the... | ||
| The birthplace of humanity, we're the graveyard. | ||
| But that doesn't have the same PR appeal. | ||
| We're the graveyard of humanity. | ||
| But if you look at where fossils are found, like look at a map of Africa, it's a tiny portion of the African continent has a fossil record. | ||
| And there's Ethiopia we've talked about, there's Kenya, there's South Africa, there's different geological conditions there that explain You know, South Africa things tend to be preserved in caves, tend to be a little, not quite as old as the oldest things from the Rift Valley. | ||
| But we have a few scatterings of things elsewhere, like in Chad and some other countries, but most of Africa is totally unknown, the fossil record. | ||
| And so there could be a large part of the human story of just, you know, evolutionary biology in general that are just Just gone, or at least not yet discovered. | ||
| So our windows into the past are like these little pinholes. | ||
| And the places where you find those things, like in this Afar Depression of Ethiopia that I'm talking about, are pretty rare. | ||
| So you need to have those rare places, and then you also need to have this skill. | ||
| And this is not an easy... | ||
| I mean, I've spent a couple of... | ||
| I've gone out to the field with this particular group a couple of times, and this is not easy work to do at all. | ||
| It's not easy to find the stuff, to have the eyes to see it, and then, you know, to spot it on the ground. | ||
| And it's also not easy to do just logistically. | ||
| I mean, like right now, for example, I mean, the work in Ethiopia has kind of come to a standstill because their country is again having, you know, some political turmoil. | ||
| There's fear that might Be heading into civil war, and so that means it's too... | ||
| A lot of these teams are probably reluctant to go to the field because of the danger. | ||
| And so we're kind of back to a situation like what I was describing earlier, where it's just too dicey to go into the field. | ||
| Anyway, so why are there so... | ||
| It gets back to the question, why are there so few skeletons? | ||
| Well, the places where you find it are rare. | ||
| The logistical challenges are severe, and also the skill level that it takes to find something, even if it does exist, it takes a lot of skill. | ||
| I was quite impressed when I went there to see how people could find things, because people would find things that I, as a layperson walking, It just makes you wonder how much we've missed, how much people have stumbled upon where they didn't have that skill, or they didn't know what they were looking at, or they weren't trained, or they weren't educated in it, and they just found some piece of something that probably could have changed the way we look at our history. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's just like, yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there could be, you know, I mean, somewhere under the surface in Africa, there's all kinds of skeletons and fossils that could answer all kinds of questions for us, but if it's just buried that far underneath the surface and, you know, some surveyor comes along and walks over it, you know, there's nothing eroding to the surface yet, you know, it's invisible. | ||
| Right, and there's so much ground space. | ||
| Yeah, or something eroded. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, and so it's... | ||
| You only know what you can find. | ||
| Now, since the time of the initial discovery in 1994, there's been a lot of different versions of the human being that have also been discovered. | ||
| How many different humans have they discovered now? | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| Denisovans? | ||
| Is that the name of them? | ||
| Am I saying that right? | ||
| Yeah, so that is some fragments of bone that are from a cave up in Siberia, and actually that one's kind of interesting because they were able to get some ancient DNA out of it. | ||
| So stuff like Artie and Lucy are too old to get DNA out of. | ||
| All the biological material is gone. | ||
| But in some of the newer stuff, or younger stuff, the They can get what they call ancient DNA out of them. | ||
| So, I mean, just as an example, that about 10 years ago, some researchers were able to extract some DNA from some old Neanderthal bones. | ||
| There's been this interesting question, you know, for decades about whether Neanderthals, you know, Neanderthals are, of course, these famous You know, fossil species known from Europe and from Asia. | ||
| And for a long time, there had been this debate about whether Neanderthals evolved into modern humans. | ||
| There was one school of thought that they did, and then another school who thought, they called it the Out of Africa group, who believed that another species of Homo sapiens, that's us, arose in Africa and then moved into Europe and Asia and displaced the Neanderthals and basically either out-competed them or killed them or whatever. | ||
| Somehow we showed up, they disappeared. | ||
| And some of the early DNA studies kind of supported that out-of-Africa deal, that sort of displacement thing. | ||
| But anyway, about 10 years ago, The people that study ancient DNA were able to start extracting ancient DNA from some Neanderthal bones that had not completely fossilized. | ||
| So there was like a little bit of biological material there where they could start to knit together these ancient genomes. | ||
| And that science has advanced a lot. | ||
| I mean, it's astounding what they're doing now. | ||
| And I shouldn't say too much about it because that's not my focus. | ||
| So don't ask me too many hard questions about that. | ||
| But anyway, so one of the things that they have discovered was that, in fact, there was some interbreeding between, you know, these modern Homo sapiens who came out of Africa and went to Europe and Asia. | ||
| And, you know, there's some portions of the Neanderthal genome that are still alive or still exist in the genomes of People who are of what they call non-African descent. | ||
| So basically, the people who left Africa interbred, at least to a limited degree, with Neanderthals, and so there's a little Neanderthal in a lot of us. | ||
| So that's like a huge revelation. | ||
| And then there's been many other revelations with ancient DNA. I mean, this Denisovans is another one. | ||
| So it appears that Anyway, you asked about all these ancient species, and I don't know how many there are now. | ||
| There's probably a couple dozen members. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| A couple dozen? | ||
| Really? | ||
| There's that many? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, that are named. | ||
| I mean, this is a controversial thing, too, because it's like... | ||
| If you are a scientist, you find, let's say, a fossil. | ||
| And if you name it something new... | ||
| There's great incentive to name something new because, you know, new species, headlines, you know, and it's interesting. | ||
| Let's say you find another something that is a species that's already known. | ||
| You know, maybe it's just like a variation of that or, you know, slightly older, slightly younger, slightly like, you know, physically different. | ||
| I mean, you know, ho-hum, who cares? | ||
| That step just doesn't get the same amount of attention. | ||
| So there is, you know, a professional... | ||
| Bias, I think, toward naming new species. | ||
| Now, some of this stuff, I mean, there's no question it's a new species. | ||
| I mean, Artipithecus is one. | ||
| There's many other things that have been discovered. | ||
| But I think the thing that's difficult here is that the whole idea of species is people say, oh, something is a species, but what does that mean? | ||
| And in modern humans, for all We like to talk about our diversity. | ||
| We're actually, at least genetically, pretty homogenous, you know, compared to other primates. | ||
| And so I think in the ancient past, there's probably a lot of variation, at least in some species, that's greater than what we see in our cells now. | ||
| And anyway, so that's part of the problem. | ||
| Creates this debate about whether something is a new species or just another example of something that we already know about. | ||
| And the other thing is that—yeah, go ahead. | ||
| I was going to say, that little guy that they found on the island of Flores, Homo floreensis, is that what you say? | ||
| Yeah, this little dwarf-like thing, yeah. | ||
| Was that considered a human? | ||
| Yeah, well, that's a big—that's, again, another point of debate. | ||
| I mean, there's everyone— I haven't heard anyone doubt that it's a member of the human family, but it's really weird because it has this tiny head. | ||
| There's this phenomenon called island dwarfism where sometimes Let's say it goes on an island and the sea levels change. | ||
| Things get small or some things get big. | ||
| Like reptiles. | ||
| Reptiles get bigger on islands, right? | ||
| Yeah, like Komodo dragons or whatever. | ||
| But in this case, this thing got small. | ||
| And so there's a big debate about what it evolved from. | ||
| And, you know, are there more of these things? | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| That thing lived as recently as how... | ||
| I mean, it wasn't that long ago, right? | ||
| Wasn't it like 15,000 years ago or something crazy? | ||
| I don't remember, but yeah, it is recent. | ||
| I don't remember the exact number, but it's kind of... | ||
| Frequently recent, yes. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And certainly within the lifetime of our species, yeah. | ||
| Well, it's something where cryptozoology, which is always a weird thing, right? | ||
| But there's people that believe, I think it's called Orang Pendek. | ||
| There's a legendary animal in the jungle of Vietnam that is very much like this Homo floriensis, a very small person, very small, hairy little person that lives in the jungle. | ||
| I think it's Vietnam, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| And they think now that, well, hey, they might be really talking about something that did exist thousands of years ago. | ||
| Is this a fossil species? | ||
| It's a legend. | ||
| I think it's probably a lot of it is horseshit, but when they found this Homo floriensis, I think a lot of the people that were proponents of this Orang Pendek thing, they were like, well, hey, that's what we're talking about. | ||
| This is the actual creature. | ||
| A little small, hairy person. | ||
| Is this like the Bigfoot of Vietnam? | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| But it's a little foot. | ||
| It's a little tiny guy. | ||
| The little foot, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but the speculation is that this thing – it used to be they just thought it was just one of those crazy legends. | ||
| But now they think, hey, they might have been talking about something that existed in human history like this Homo floreensis did. | ||
| Yeah, well, maybe it's a mutant from, I don't know, Angel Orange or something. | ||
| No, I think it's a pretty old story. | ||
| I think it predates Vietnam. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, just a final note on the species, just a little food for thought. | ||
| So people bandy around this term species, and people don't really question the category. | ||
| So the weird thing about species is we know... | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of definitions in biology. | ||
| One of them, the classic definition, is the biological species definition. | ||
| And this dates from the 1940s from a guy named Ernst Maher, who's a prominent biologist. | ||
| A very important historical figure. | ||
| But anyway, he defined the species as the group, the population that could breed with each other. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So you can make babies, you have the opportunity to make babies, you're a species. | ||
| So it's this big inclusive thing, right? | ||
| But of course, with a lot of the fossil species, we don't know who could breed with who. | ||
| We just know what they look like, what's physically different. | ||
| And so for a long time, I mean, so take humans and Neanderthals. | ||
| There's been this big debate. | ||
| What's the relation between them? | ||
| Did they interbreed? | ||
| And so a Neanderthal is something that looks sufficiently different from Homo sapiens that it's put in a different category. | ||
| So one of the big wows of ancient DNA is you have two things that look physically different enough to be categorized as different species, but now the genetics tell us that they did interbreed. | ||
| So now there's like this big problem with like, what is a species? | ||
| Like, what do you, you know, and I don't think biology has, at least, I mean, I'm sure others have different opinions about this, and some avoid the question altogether, but that was one thing I wrestled with in this book, you know? | ||
| It's like people, we have this, we're using like language to describe biology, but those are two different mediums. | ||
| And sometimes the biology defies the categories of language and the categories of classification. | ||
| And this is like a constant theme through, well, at least in human origin science is that, you know, when people build these categories and these narratives to construct, to sort of hold the facts of what little we know, but then, you know, the body of knowledge expands and suddenly, you know, your old categories the body of knowledge expands and suddenly, you know, your old categories are leaking all over Right. | ||
| And that's, that's, therein lies the limitations of calling these things humans. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, you could call them humans, you could call them species. | ||
| I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| Except that we should be... | ||
| Clearly you need language to have for precision, for science. | ||
| I mean, that's absolutely necessary. | ||
| But you can't be too dogmatic about your categories because... | ||
| Nature is not dogmatic. | ||
| Nature is far more fluid and dynamic than that. | ||
| And we don't have a complete picture of the exact process from ancient ape to human being in the current form. | ||
| No. | ||
| We have a series of snapshots. | ||
| Snapshots that we've been lucky enough To capture, and Artypithecus is one, you know, Lucy was one, Homo erectus, you know, Homo naledi, you know, this Denisovans, the little florist thing, I mean, those are all these snapshots, but, you know, it's not like we have anything like a complete picture. | ||
| I mean, you can certainly see some trends, some through lines, you know, from the more, you know, primitive things to modern things, you know, the Becoming more advanced bipeds, the limb proportions changing, the brain, of course, growing. | ||
| That's a huge storyline in human evolution. | ||
| But there are a lot of... | ||
| Yeah, all we have are these snapshots that we're lucky enough to get because of just the happenstance of geology and discovery. | ||
| One other thing about species that I found quite interesting in this whole thing... | ||
| You've probably heard about the tree of life, the human family tree. | ||
| This is an old metaphor, but the tree is having a little trouble right now. | ||
| Not that we should get rid of it. | ||
| When you have this idea of a tree where everything is splitting into dead ends, You know, it leaves these questions when people say, like, humans and Neanderthals, which one led to modern humans? | ||
| And it becomes like this either-or thing, right? | ||
| So when you have all these species that look different from—I'm trying to center my hand on the frame here. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| I think it has sometimes led science into false choices, where we say, okay, well— You know, the ancestor has to either be this one or that one because, look, there's a split here, you know, and they went their separate ways because that's kind of what the tree metaphor depicts. | ||
| But actually what ancient DNA is showing you is that things that are actually looking different are actually able – you're getting some crossover there. | ||
| And so now your tree is looking a lot – A lot less like a tree. | ||
| It's looking more like a web or a lattice sometimes. | ||
| People are searching for these other metaphors to convey the complexity of what biology is showing. | ||
| But it's a lot more complex than the simple trees of the species. | ||
| Anyway, just wanted to insert that little word of I mean, the tree is a really powerful metaphor for the diversity of life, but when creatures that have recently split, you know, those branches don't necessarily remain isolated from each other. | ||
| They can have some crossover and some interbreeding or hybridization, whatever you want to call it, that makes it kind of hard to give you Nice, neat through lines from this species to that species. | ||
| This is what I was going to get to with all these various species of human or different types of humans that we know of now since 1994. | ||
| Is it possible that there were multiple different types of creatures like Ardipithecus, like there's multiple different types of what we call a human being, and that they're simultaneously like there's multiple different types of what we call a human being, and that they're simultaneously evolving in these different parts of the world in | ||
| and creating the Denisovans and the Homo floriensis and Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and it's all just kind of happening at the same time but not along the exact same timeline with the exact same ancestor. | ||
| Okay, well, okay, so let's take Art of Piggas. | ||
| Because at that point, Ardipithecus is only known at this point, as far as I know, from Ethiopia. | ||
| And one is the middle Awash, the place where Artie came from that I was describing earlier. | ||
| And then they've also found some other Ardipithecus at a place called Gona, which is basically another project area that's adjacent to the middle Awash. | ||
| They're basically neighbors. | ||
| So this is in this one part of Ethiopia. | ||
| So how widespread was Ardipithecus in Africa? | ||
| Did it range through the entire continent or was it a regional species? | ||
| I guess the answer is unknown. | ||
| And for the reasons I mentioned earlier that there's just so little of Africa that gives you the windows. | ||
| But anyway, there is another Ardipithecus skeleton that's been announced in the last couple of years from Gona. | ||
| And that one is interesting. | ||
| So, it has Ardipithecus, the original Ardipithecus, had this opposable toe. | ||
| When it was upright, it apparently walked when the toe kind of splayed off to the side, kind of like an outrigger. | ||
| At this Gona creature, they have something that they're calling a skeleton. | ||
| I haven't actually seen it. | ||
| I don't think it's actually been... | ||
| They've published... | ||
| They revealed its existence, but I haven't seen a picture of it, and I don't think they've revealed that. | ||
| But I was talking to the scientist there. | ||
| There's a fellow named Scott Simpson from Case Western Reserve University, and he's very competent. | ||
| A paleoanthropologist. | ||
| He says that their creature has this toe that's like Artie. | ||
| I mean, there's no doubt they belong to the same species, but this one has its toe more in line with the foot. | ||
| So it's more kind of human-like. | ||
| What's the timeline? | ||
| It's about the same age as Artie. | ||
| It's like 4.4, 4.5. | ||
| So anyway, the point here is that there is, just as there is in modern species like baboons or whatever, there's different populations or subspecies that sometimes develop different adaptations for whatever reason. | ||
| And they're quite similar, but you'd get these variations for whatever reason. | ||
| Reason of a local adaptation. | ||
| How far apart are they from the original Artie? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| It's like maybe 50 miles or within that. | ||
| It's just down – the river that runs through there is called the Eyewash River, and Gona is the – Is it speculation that they were living in the same specific type of environment? | ||
| Do they know that? | ||
| Yeah, there's some difference in environmental interpretation between the two, but they're similar. | ||
| The reason why I ask, have you ever seen images of indigenous people in the Amazon that walk around barefoot and their feet literally start to look like hands? | ||
| They splay out in a very bizarre way? | ||
| I haven't seen those particular pictures, but I do know that people that walk around unshod, you know, so in other words without shoes, tend to develop toes that are more divergent. | ||
| Not opposable like a primate, but... | ||
| For whatever reason about being unshot, it just gives you You know, you look at the toe and it's like visibly separated. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We're looking at a picture of it right now on the screen. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it's very strange where it's almost like they're gripping the ground with their toes and the toes are very thick and strong because they're constantly walking around barefoot and they use their toes and the toe muscles in a way that we don't use them anymore because essentially we're in casts with our shoes. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, well, you know what's really interesting about when you look at, like, modern adaptations of modern humans, you know, in all these different pockets of the world, or, you know, particularly when you look into all these ancient species, which are even weirder, is you realize there's nothing about our form that's like an end destination. | ||
| There's nothing about our form that is like, you know, we have arrived, that this was, you know, where primates were going the whole time. | ||
| It's, you know, if you want to talk about who are the weird ones, It's not all these other things. | ||
| The modern humans are weird. | ||
| We got these big heads. | ||
| We got this funny way of walking. | ||
| We're bald. | ||
| And we vary so much. | ||
| Yeah, and we vary. | ||
| And then there's all these kind of myths about why... | ||
| I mean, God, there's so many myths in the field of human origins. | ||
| But one of them is you've probably heard about the divine proportions or the golden ratio that humans were constructed according to these ratios. | ||
| The so-called golden ratio. | ||
| This is just storytelling. | ||
| There's nothing about our proportions. | ||
| Our proportions are just a function of adaptation. | ||
| They're a function of evolutionary biology. | ||
| When certain chemicals are released in the developmental process that governs how long your limbs grow or your digits or whatever. | ||
| We're just all variations of Primate. | ||
| We're just one of them. | ||
| Sometimes you see literature or people positing that somehow we've reached some sort of end state. | ||
| I'll tell you, we're not reaching end state. | ||
| We're just a variation of creatures that adapt. | ||
| They take these common elements and adapt them for a different... | ||
| For different uses. | ||
| Modern humans, though, we do vary size-wise much more than ancient apes that we find, though, correct? | ||
| For instance, you know Mountain from the Game of Thrones, that enormous giant human being? | ||
| That's a human being. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I should confess, I am sort of illiterate when it comes to... | ||
| My kids would know. | ||
| I need to turn to them. | ||
| He's literally one of the world's strongest men. | ||
| He's like seven feet plus tall, 300 plus pounds, enormous. | ||
| But my point was that he exists As a human being. | ||
| Also, Chris Rock is a human being. | ||
| And he's a very thin, very small man. | ||
| But they're both human beings. | ||
| We don't find that when you're looking at things like Neanderthal or when you're looking at... | ||
| You find much more uniformity. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Well, no, not necessarily. | ||
| Actually, in some cases, there's a lot of variation. | ||
| And I'll give you one good example. | ||
| So, Lucy. | ||
| There's this famous fossil. | ||
| Lucy was, the species is called Australopithecus afarensis, named afarensis after the AFR, you know, this part of the world that I was describing, the AFR depression. | ||
| She was discovered in 1974. She's very petite, probably a female, and I forget how tall she is, but it's like three foot something. | ||
| And Artie's a female too, correct? | ||
| Artie's a female. | ||
| Artie's taller. | ||
| Artie's... | ||
| You know, a head taller than Lucy. | ||
| But anyway, so with Lucy, you know, when her skeleton was found, you know, this was, you know, the only skeleton of that species. | ||
| They had a lot of other pieces of things, but no skeletons. | ||
| But there was this assumption that that species was small, or at least the female. | ||
| And now, thanks to some other work that's done in Ethiopia at a place called Oronzo Miele, A few years ago, a team announced discovery of another skeleton of Lucy's species. | ||
| It's a male. | ||
| It's a lot bigger than Lucy. | ||
| They call it katanumu, which is a FR word for big guy. | ||
| But it's the same species as Lucy, but it's a big guy. | ||
| You know, substantially taller. | ||
| So it sort of falsifies this idea that all Lucy's species was petite. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And why is that? | ||
| Is that because there's a so-called sexual demorphism of males are bigger than females? | ||
| Or is it just a different population? | ||
| Or is that just, you know, just a difference in, you know, the normal range within a population? | ||
| You know, like you have short people and tall people, you know, in our population. | ||
| In any population, I don't know what the answer is to that. | ||
| But they're both mature specimens? | ||
| Yeah, and they're both attributed to the same species. | ||
| So anyway, just to give you an example of a paleo species where there is actually a substantial variation. | ||
| How much difference is it between Lucy and this other one? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Actually, I wish I had looked this up before we talked because I'd love to give you a number. | ||
| The big guy is substantially taller and bigger than Lucy. | ||
| But the skeletons, they have, you know, the anatomy is similar enough so that they are attributed to the same species. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And they're of similar age. | ||
| Like Katanumu, I think, is like 3.6 million years old. | ||
| And Lucy is, I think, 3.2 million. | ||
| So when we look at humans like the Denisovans, and we consider that to be a different human than Homo sapien or than Neanderthal, do we have any idea how that came about? | ||
| Well, so first of all, I should say I don't know much about Denisovans. | ||
| My understanding is there's not too much skeletally I mean, to have enough bones, they've obviously been able to take... | ||
| It's a fairly recent discovery, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's within the last, I don't know, 10 years or something. | ||
| So, it's a question like, why do they look so different? | ||
| Yeah, like, where do they come from? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know, and I don't think a lot is known about that. | ||
| Maybe the scientists are studying it at no more than they've published, but I don't know much about it. | ||
| But anyway, just the general idea of why do these things look so different. | ||
| So there's this concept in science that helps explain this. | ||
| Some people call it speciation. | ||
| It's just like an adaptive radiation of all these things going out and turning into these different species, and that's kind of one way to look at it. | ||
| The way I prefer to look at it is what the scientists call isolation by distance, which sounds horribly boring, I know. | ||
| You're like, what the hell does that mean? | ||
| But basically what it means is that things spread out, and particularly when ancient humans got the technology to basically live in all these different parts of the world, they were isolated and then could adapt You know, make these local adaptations, which make the Neanderthals look different than the sub-Saharan Africans, for example, who were their contemporaries. | ||
| But yet, they're still closely enough related, so when they do come back in contact, as they sometimes do, they can still potentially interbreed. | ||
| So what the isolation by distance means, it just means that these things spread out enough so that they get Local adaptations, like your example from the Amazon or people from the Inuit, from the northern areas or wherever. | ||
| It's such a fascinating field of study because you see how they're piecing together this puzzle slowly but surely. | ||
| For someone who's impatient, you're not going to get the answers to this very quickly. | ||
| It's so amazing though. | ||
| Yeah, but the truth is always so much more interesting than the fiction. | ||
| And I think, I mean, I'm just a journalist, right? | ||
| So I'm not a scientist. | ||
| So I should just remind people of that. | ||
| But if I were a scientist in this field, you just have this lifetime of material information. | ||
| Ahead of you. | ||
| And you just know that the revelations are going to be so fantastic. | ||
| Like genomic science. | ||
| I mean, I know my book is about fossils, and that's mostly what I know about. | ||
| But genomics, genetics, in ancient DNA, it's an important cutting edge right now. | ||
| But anyway, there's a guy, a prominent geneticist at Harvard named David Reich. | ||
| We're like kindergartners in our knowledge of this stuff at some point. | ||
| As advanced as the science is, and as amazing as the breakthroughs have been, they're still only just beginning to understand how that genetic code really translates into biology, for example. | ||
| The code has been transcribed. | ||
| We now have the three billion places in the human genome transcribed. | ||
| But what does that mean? | ||
| What does the code say and how does that code turn into Artipithecus and Denisovans and you and me? | ||
| There's so many questions waiting to be answered. | ||
| If you're an impatient person, you won't get the big answers maybe in our lifetime for the big questions. | ||
| But God, there's so many fascinating Questions that are within reach that are being answered. | ||
| It's endlessly fascinating. | ||
| As a journalist, when you're writing a book about this and you have to take a deep dive into all the science behind it and just the history of it, what is that experience like for you? | ||
| I mean, it seems like it would be all-consuming because it's such a deep field of study. | ||
| It was all-consuming for me. | ||
| I mean, this book took me a lot longer than I ever intended. | ||
| What did you intend? | ||
| Well, people would keep, you know, people would ask. | ||
| I mean, I had numerous conversations that went like this, right? | ||
| I'd be talking to some scientists, you know, someone I've been talking to for a while. | ||
| I'd say, oh yeah, what's your timeline? | ||
| And I'd say, oh yeah, I'll probably be done this time next year. | ||
| I mean, I was saying that in like 2012. Here the book is being published, you know, this week. | ||
| So part of the, I mean, and this kind of gets to the richness of the story that I was telling you about. | ||
| I mean, so I was you know, there was this Interesting story about this fossil, the oldest skeleton ever found in a human family. | ||
| So I wanted to understand the full life cycle of that discovery, like how the hunt, the research question, was framed in the beginning, and then how it was found, interpreted, announced to the world, and then all the debate that followed. | ||
| I want to follow the life cycle of this whole thing through, because to me, that's a really interesting story. | ||
| And there are all these interesting components along the way, like geology and genomics and Developmental biology and the anatomy of all these different parts. | ||
| So anyway, that obliged me to sort of learn all these topics. | ||
| And so that was just a lot of reading, a lot of talking to people. | ||
| I'm so indebted to a lot of scientists who guided me through the geology, through the fieldwork, through the interpretation of the skeleton. | ||
| I mean, they provided a service to me personally, but they also, more importantly, provided a service to public understanding. | ||
| And I can't say enough how grateful I am to those people. | ||
| Where do you go from here? | ||
| I mean, when you spend eight years working on a book about an ancient ancestor to human beings, and then you take a big deep breath, you do all the publicity work, where do you go from here? | ||
| Well, that's a good question. | ||
| I'll go back into a cave, probably, to write another book. | ||
|
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It'll be on a different topic, for sure. | |
| I mean, I like stories that have narrative, and I like stories that have depth. | ||
| And this one was quite rewarding. | ||
| It was quite challenging. | ||
| I can't spend that long on every book, because I'll be dead before I get anywhere. | ||
| But... | ||
| So anyway, I'm looking at a topic now. | ||
| It'll be, you know, sort of deep history of science. | ||
| I have to do a lot of legwork to see if it'll pan out the way I think it is. | ||
| I mean, I tend to keep things under wraps until I know that it's going to be worthwhile to do. | ||
| So that one I'll keep under wraps. | ||
| But something like that. | ||
| Something... | ||
| A big story with characters and with depth and narrative. | ||
| And do you just choose them based on your curiosity? | ||
| Like, what's intriguing to you? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, like with Ardipithecus, I didn't really choose it in the sense that, like, I sort of sat down eight years ago and said, okay, well, what am I going to do? | ||
| I mean, as I said, I started off on this other road. | ||
| And then it just, over time... | ||
| This story just sort of appeared in front of me and sort of told me that there's another road here that actually might be more rewarding. | ||
| And then, as I kind of went along, I kept having to stop and learn about the geology and all these component sciences, or about Ethiopia. | ||
| We haven't talked much about that, but the backdrop of Ethiopia while all this was going on. | ||
| It's an important part of the story at multiple levels. | ||
| I mean, there's the turmoil in the country that makes it difficult to work there. | ||
| There is this sort of ascendance of indigenous African scientists from Ethiopia who are entering the science and sort of claiming a place at the table in a science that has some colonialist roots. | ||
| There's all, you know, all these component pieces that took me, were not visible at the outset, but I just sort of had to delve into them as I waded through this topic. | ||
| And believe me, there was a lot of pain and suffering that went into this book. | ||
| I mean, I know parts of it are, you know, sometimes, you know, strike people as maybe hard science, but believe me that there was like, I could have written, And did write, in some cases, what you might see in a couple sentences that I tossed off about this or that. | ||
| There may have been a 10-page draft of that topic, or five-page, or whatever, that I needed to write to be able to understand it, and then to reduce it, reduce it, reduce it, and then sort of reduce it down to just one brick that I could just sort of put in the wall of this story. | ||
| But yeah, there was a lot of that, and that accounts for why it was such a drawn-out process. | ||
| Well, congratulations on the completion, and thank you very much for spending some time with me today. | ||
| I really appreciate it, man. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| It's a great pleasure. | ||
| You have a great show. | ||
| It's eclectic, and I'm still scratching my head trying to think of where I fit in with Bernie and Kanye and all these other guys. | ||
| You fit in that I'm interested in what you do. | ||
| You fit in because it's a fascinating subject to me. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, thank you for your high-five. | ||
| It's been a pleasure. | ||
| Can you hold up a copy of the book behind you? | ||
| It's right over your shoulder so people can get an image of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the book is Fossil Men. | ||
| It's published by HarperCollins, the William Morrow imprint. | ||
| And it's released November 10th. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And this is Artie's hand right here. | ||
| I think November 10th is today, right? | ||
| Isn't that today? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it'll be the day the show comes out. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Tomorrow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the day it comes. | ||
| Today's the 9th that we're filming this. | ||
| It'll come out tomorrow on the 10th. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Thank you, Kermit. | ||
| Appreciate it, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| You guys do a great job. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Take care. |
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