The Joe Rogan Experience - November 10, 2020


Joe Rogan Experience #1561 - Kermit Pattison

Topics
geological dating timeline weapons development ancient DNA discoveries ancient DNA and species evolution
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Kermit Pattison
Mentioned
Lucy Owen Lovejoy Tim White Burhani Asfaw Homo Gona Jamie Yohannes Haile Selassie Saharan Africans Wild Biggs Miocene Darwin Train Africans William Morrow Don Johansson Harrison Ford Scott Simpson Orang Pendek Angel Orange Oronzo Miele and 20 more
Joe Rogan Experience #1560 - Mike Baker Joe Rogan Experience #1562 - Dave Smith

Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 5 minutes

Words per minute

147.32

Word count

18,518

Sentence count

1,401

Harmful content

Misogyny

11

sentences flagged

Toxicity

19

sentences flagged

Hate speech

30

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk to the author of the new book, "A Skeleton in the Desert," about the discovery of the skeleton of an ancient human skeleton in the Ethiopian desert, the discovery story behind the discovery, and how the discovery changed the field of archaeology forever. In this episode we discuss the story of the discovery and how it led to the creation of a new kind of detective story in the field and in the lab. We also discuss the challenges and challenges faced by the field team in the search for this ancient skeleton, and the challenges they faced in their efforts to find it. And finally, we discuss what it means to be an archaeologist, and why it's important to be a detective. This episode is brought to you by the National Museum of American Ethnology and the National Park Service. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: CRIMINALS at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase of a copy of his new book. Thank you so much for supporting our new book! We hope you enjoy this episode and look forward to hearing from you in the future episodes! We'll see you next week for our next episode! Thanks again for listening to CRIMES OF THE DECADE! - Tom Bell Tom Bell is an Internationally Syndicated Author, Editor, Author, and Journalist, and Educator. and Founder of CRIMETICALLY Advanced in the best book in the world and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The New York Review of Science and The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, The Harvard Crimson, and The Atlantic, and many other publications around the world. Tom talks about all things science and much more! Tom is an expert in all things related to archaeology, and he's also an avid reader of books, and so much more. His work can be found everywhere. . Tom's book is out on Amazon. His work is excellent, Tom is excellent. He's work is also on the internet is amazing, and you should check out Tom's blog is amazing! and you can find Tom's work on his podcast is worth listening to Tom's podcast is amazing. It's worth checking out Tom s profile on Tom s work is incredible, too, too Tom s book is incredible.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:12.000 Welcome.
00:00:13.000 Thanks for doing this, man.
00:00:14.000 I really appreciate it.
00:00:15.000 I'm very, very fascinated by this subject.
00:00:18.000 Well, thank you for having me.
00:00:19.000 It's great to be here.
00:00:20.000 So this is a long journey for you to have written this book and to be involved in this project.
00:00:27.000 Can you talk us through how you got involved in this?
00:00:30.000 Sure.
00:00:31.000 It was completely unintentional.
00:00:35.000 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,
00:00:51.000 we're weak, but we have this ability to walk and run long distances, which is kind of unique.
00:00:57.000 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.
00:01:07.000 So I was going to go sort of investigate the anthropology of where this weird human capacity came from.
00:01:15.000 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.
00:01:25.000 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.
00:01:36.000 So anyway, I started talking to the people on the Artie team and then thinking, oh, tell me about how you found this thing.
00:01:44.000 Oh, that sounds pretty interesting.
00:01:48.000 So I thought, okay, well, maybe Artie, it'll be a page.
00:01:52.000 It's more than this little line.
00:01:54.000 Then, you know, learn a little more.
00:01:55.000 Ah, it's five pages.
00:01:56.000 Actually, this is a whole chapter.
00:01:58.000 No, this is three chapters.
00:02:00.000 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.
00:02:09.000 I mean, this is a discovery that has been announced to the world, but it hasn't really been described in detail.
00:02:17.000 And it's interesting at a whole number of different levels.
00:02:21.000 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.
00:02:32.000 They had feet, and the hands and feet were almost complete, which is unheard of.
00:02:38.000 I mean, you're lucky to find any skeleton at this age, and to get something that's that complete is really unusual.
00:02:44.000 And so there are other parts of the skeleton, too.
00:02:47.000 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.
00:02:56.000 So that's the science of it.
00:02:58.000 And then the...
00:03:00.000 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.
00:03:11.000 And I'm like, oh my god, I mean, this is like collision of cultures in the Ethiopian desert. 0.98
00:03:15.000 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.
00:03:23.000 You know, meeting and the initial meetings were not friendly.
00:03:26.000 You know what I mean?
00:03:27.000 You got guys coming out, FR guys coming out with guns and saying, you know, get the hell out of here.
00:03:31.000 And so that part is fascinating.
00:03:34.000 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.
00:03:40.000 I mean, anyway, to make a long story short, I kind of stumbled on this.
00:03:45.000 And every time I turned over a rock, there was something interesting.
00:03:50.000 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.
00:04:05.000 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.
00:04:16.000 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.
00:04:23.000 There was also this other detective story that sort of followed the field.
00:04:28.000 There's a lab detective story that sort of followed the field detective story that went along with it.
00:04:34.000 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,
00:04:53.000 if you will, with inattention and denial.
00:04:57.000 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.
00:05:08.000 That was still mostly untold.
00:05:11.000 We should fill people in on exactly what we're talking about.
00:05:14.000 So we're talking about a skeleton that was discovered that is 1.2 million years older than Lucy?
00:05:19.000 Yeah, a skeleton is 4.4 million years old.
00:05:23.000 The oldest known human relative.
00:05:27.000 Well, it's the oldest known skeleton.
00:05:29.000 Actually, this is an important distinction I should make.
00:05:32.000 So, like I said before, skeletons are rare.
00:05:35.000 Yeah.
00:05:37.000 This is the oldest skeleton.
00:05:39.000 There are three other members of the human family that are older, but the thing is they're much more fragmentary.
00:05:50.000 They're not anywhere near as complete.
00:05:51.000 There's another one from Ethiopia found by the same team that found the skeleton we're talking about.
00:05:58.000 That's some teeth, like a toe bone, a few other broken elements of the skeleton.
00:06:05.000 There's another thing Right.
00:06:32.000 So anyway, people sometimes get confused by this.
00:06:36.000 So Artie is indeed the oldest skeleton.
00:06:37.000 It's by far more complete than this other stuff.
00:06:41.000 But there are some...
00:06:43.000 You know, fragmentary things that are older.
00:06:45.000 And they all become part of the story, too.
00:06:48.000 And what is the scientific controversy?
00:06:50.000 Do you think it's...
00:06:51.000 Is it based on real skepticism?
00:06:56.000 Or is ego involved in this?
00:07:00.000 You're laughing.
00:07:01.000 Ego?
00:07:02.000 It's science?
00:07:02.000 What are you talking about?
00:07:03.000 It's unfortunate, man.
00:07:04.000 No, no, no.
00:07:05.000 These are scientists.
00:07:07.000 There's a lot.
00:07:08.000 A lot of egos involved in science, unfortunately, right?
00:07:11.000 Yeah, there's a lot of egos.
00:07:13.000 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.
00:07:31.000 So we should break down those particular things that are different than what was expected, right?
00:07:36.000 First of all, it walked upright.
00:07:38.000 Yeah, so it walked upright.
00:07:41.000 So it's primitive.
00:07:42.000 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.
00:07:50.000 That's kind of a mouthful, but Arti is the individual skeleton that they found.
00:07:56.000 That's, you know, the individual, like your joke, you're the individual...
00:08:00.000 And your species is homo sapiens.
00:08:02.000 That's how you think about this.
00:08:03.000 Ardipithecus ramidus, species, ardi, the individual skeleton.
00:08:07.000 So the interesting revelations with it is it has upright posture, so it's standing upright, but it's still got the opposable toe.
00:08:17.000 So this is a creature that was in the trees, clearly climbing, but It also appears to be upright, walking with this opposable toe.
00:08:30.000 Everyone knows that sometime deep in the human past there was some kind of a boreal ancestor, some kind of ape.
00:08:38.000 But the question has always been, well, what kind of ape?
00:08:42.000 Does it look like a modern ape or does it look like something we've never seen before?
00:08:50.000 So, the surprising thing about Artie is it's actually quite different than the living apes.
00:08:55.000 So, yeah, it's got the supposable toe, walks upright.
00:08:59.000 Are there proportions?
00:09:02.000 Chimps have shorter legs than they have arms.
00:09:04.000 Are Artie's proportions similar to that?
00:09:08.000 No, Artie, I mean, it's certainly more ape-like than any of us, but it's... 0.98
00:09:16.000 There's a couple of interesting things about its proportions.
00:09:18.000 So all the other living apes have longer arms than they do legs.
00:09:23.000 They spend a lot of time climbing.
00:09:24.000 That's, you know, long arms, long...
00:09:27.000 And they have, you know, they're different proportions, but they all have that in common.
00:09:29.000 They got longer forelimbs than hind limbs.
00:09:32.000 Artie was a big surprise because it actually had longer legs than forelimbs.
00:09:37.000 I mean, you know, it definitely has bigger hands, has longer arms than we do, but...
00:09:44.000 That was a surprise, at least to me and I think to some of the researchers.
00:09:50.000 I was talking before about these kind of surprises that appear after the fact.
00:09:56.000 Well, that was one, because the bones are broken.
00:10:00.000 These guys on this research team, it's called the Middle Outwash Research Project. 0.92
00:10:05.000 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.
00:10:17.000 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.
00:10:30.000 And so ours, our legs are longer.
00:10:34.000 Chimps have longer arms.
00:10:35.000 So is this like, does it have almost equal length arms and legs?
00:10:40.000 Jamie actually just put a photo of it up here and I'm getting a chance to take a look at it.
00:10:44.000 Oh, it's fascinating.
00:10:45.000 So it has long legs, almost like a person, but longer arms than we do.
00:10:51.000 Yeah, longer arms than we do for sure.
00:10:53.000 I think, I don't remember the exact name, but I think the calculation they did was that legs are...
00:11:01.000 I think the arms...
00:11:03.000 I want to say it's like 90-something percent.
00:11:06.000 So it's pretty close to one-to-one of length, but indeed the arms are a bit shorter.
00:11:15.000 So the surprising part was that it didn't walk at all on its knuckles?
00:11:19.000 Being that it was that old?
00:11:22.000 Yeah.
00:11:23.000 So humans are...
00:11:28.000 We come from the African apes.
00:11:30.000 That's pretty clear from genetics.
00:11:32.000 That's been clear for a long time.
00:11:35.000 There are two main groups of African apes. 0.99
00:11:38.000 There's gorillas and there's chimps. 0.99
00:11:42.000 And chimps also includes this other species you might have heard of called bonobos.
00:11:46.000 And within those, there's debate about, should we divide them into some subspecies and stuff?
00:11:50.000 But don't worry about that for now.
00:11:52.000 But anyway, what they all have in common is they knock a walk.
00:11:55.000 So they got these long fingers, and when they walk, you know, I mean, they, you know, do this.
00:12:00.000 I mean, if you look at a video sometime, you'll see it.
00:12:02.000 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.
00:12:14.000 So we evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor.
00:12:17.000 I mean, there was even a cover story in Nature that...
00:12:21.000 The headline was almost that, you know, humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor.
00:12:25.000 So, yeah, so that was the theory.
00:12:29.000 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. 0.91
00:12:38.000 But it's certainly getting closer.
00:12:39.000 It's getting a big step closer.
00:12:41.000 And the people, you know, the anatomists who specialize in these things There's no hint of knuckle-walking.
00:12:48.000 Not only was it not knuckle-walking to get around, but also it has no vestige of a knuckle-walking ancestry.
00:12:59.000 So in other words, there's no residual anatomy that would suggest that its ancestors knuckle-walking.
00:13:05.000 So it was bipedal from the very early days?
00:13:11.000 Very early days of the species evolution.
00:13:16.000 Well, it's bipedal period.
00:13:19.000 All you know is what you find at that 4.4 million year old window.
00:13:25.000 And what comes before that is...
00:13:28.000 Speculation.
00:13:29.000 Yeah, I mean, these people that do this, it's intelligent speculation, obviously, but you don't know what you haven't found.
00:13:37.000 And so...
00:13:42.000 There's a debate about just how long ago the last common ancestor of humans and chimps lived.
00:13:50.000 It's probably at least anywhere from 1.5 million years before Artie to, some estimates put it even further back than that.
00:14:01.000 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,
00:14:24.000 but that there's no evidence whatsoever of not only knuckle-walking in that species, but knuckle-walking as an ancestry.
00:14:34.000 Yeah, and that blew the mind of a lot of people.
00:14:36.000 And there's a school of thought, of critic out there, sort of...
00:14:43.000 Okay, so this thing was announced in 2009. It surprised a lot of people.
00:14:48.000 When was it discovered?
00:14:49.000 Okay, it was discovered...
00:14:50.000 The skeleton itself was discovered in 1994. And how did they discover it?
00:14:56.000 Well, I can...
00:14:58.000 Short answer or long?
00:15:01.000 Long, long.
00:15:02.000 Stretch it out.
00:15:02.000 I want to hear the whole thing.
00:15:04.000 Alright, well, I'll take you back to the beginning of how the whole detective story was framed.
00:15:10.000 If you want me to speed up, just...
00:15:12.000 No, no, no.
00:15:13.000 This show's all about just letting you...
00:15:16.000 I want you to have air.
00:15:17.000 Okay.
00:15:18.000 So, this group went to Ethiopia.
00:15:24.000 They started doing this work in...
00:15:27.000 First went on an expedition to Ethiopia in 1981. Specifically for this purpose of looking for ancient man?
00:15:38.000 They were looking for fossils.
00:15:40.000 They found this fossil, but they found a lot of other stuff too.
00:15:45.000 All up and down the timeline of human evolution.
00:15:47.000 Some stuff that's recent and in the order of hundreds of thousands of years ago.
00:15:54.000 Just stuff that's getting near six million years ago.
00:15:59.000 These fragments I was talking about earlier.
00:16:02.000 Their research agenda is just broad.
00:16:04.000 It's just like, what can we find about human evolution?
00:16:06.000 But anyway, one of the big burning research questions at the time was, what came before Lucy?
00:16:12.000 Now, you've probably heard about Lucy.
00:16:14.000 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.
00:16:26.000 They find this thing.
00:16:27.000 It turns out to be a skeleton.
00:16:29.000 It's 3.2 million years old.
00:16:34.000 I think it's fair to say it's the best known human ancestor.
00:16:39.000 I mean, people who know nothing else about human origins will at least recognize the name Lucy.
00:16:44.000 And there's a lot of reasons for that in terms of how it's publicized and et cetera, et cetera.
00:16:51.000 I'm sorry to bother you.
00:16:52.000 Pause for a second.
00:16:53.000 Wasn't Lucy also controversial? 0.99
00:16:58.000 Any discovery in this field is controversial.
00:17:02.000 These are people all having the paleoidentity politics of humanity.
00:17:13.000 There is no easy consensus in this field.
00:17:19.000 Lucy has discovered she's 3.2 million years old.
00:17:22.000 This is a huge revelation at the time because she was I think the oldest skeleton at that point was a Neanderthal,
00:17:38.000 which was less than a million years old.
00:17:39.000 So this was like a big, big deal when they find something this old.
00:17:42.000 So anyway, that thing is studied.
00:17:45.000 There's popular books written about it, et cetera, et cetera, from like the 1970s into the early 80s.
00:17:52.000 That's the time when Lucy was sort of being intensely studied and revealed to the world.
00:17:56.000 Okay.
00:17:57.000 So, meanwhile, Ethiopia is going into this period of turmoil.
00:18:03.000 So, one of the big elements in this story is the difficulty of doing this kind of work in a place like Ethiopia. 0.93
00:18:13.000 So, right around the time that Duluth Sea was discovered, the ancient monarchy of Ethiopia, headed by the last emperor, Haile Selassie, fell.
00:18:23.000 It's like a 2,000-year-old monarchy.
00:18:26.000 It traces its roots to biblical times and claims to be the descendants of King Solomon and Queen Sheba.
00:18:35.000 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.
00:18:46.000 Well, what happens is the power is seized by the military.
00:18:53.000 It becomes a Marxist dictatorship.
00:18:55.000 Ethiopia, this longtime ally of the Americans in the Cold War, shifts to the Soviet bloc.
00:19:01.000 And now it's like a frontier of the Cold War.
00:19:04.000 Suddenly, the Americans, the Europeans who were kind of welcomed as foreign researchers before are now viewed with hostility.
00:19:11.000 People are thinking a U.S. CIA agent.
00:19:14.000 Research kind of shuts down for a number of years because it just becomes too dangerous.
00:19:18.000 Meanwhile, there's this tribal warfare happening in the desert where they're doing this stuff.
00:19:23.000 But finally, in 1981, things have calmed down enough that this research team is able to go back.
00:19:32.000 And they go back and they have acquired a new project area.
00:19:38.000 It's big.
00:19:38.000 It's like the size of Rhode Island.
00:19:40.000 And in that project area, there's all kinds of...
00:19:44.000 It's like the layer cake of time.
00:19:48.000 I mean, some...
00:19:51.000 Anthropology depends on geology, okay?
00:19:54.000 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.
00:20:00.000 I'm giving a really simple model here.
00:20:02.000 And this project area is really valuable because it's a sprawling area, but they have all these different time periods exposed.
00:20:09.000 So in other words, there's rocks from, you know, a million years old.
00:20:12.000 There's rocks that are more than, you know, as old as 6 million, all up and down the timeline of human evolution.
00:20:18.000 So these guys go there. 0.50
00:20:19.000 And they see this place and they say, holy crap, this place is like, it's a gold mine.
00:20:28.000 It's a gold mine like spread out all over all this place. 0.59
00:20:30.000 I mean, and we can learn so much about human evolution if we just spend all these years studying.
00:20:36.000 So then, unfortunately, they spend one season here and just doing kind of reconnaissance to see what's there.
00:20:43.000 Then Ethiopia shuts down again.
00:20:45.000 The government says, basically, It puts a halt to research.
00:20:51.000 They want to rewrite their antiquities laws so they can better control these foreigners who are coming to look at this stuff. 1.00
00:20:59.000 And they say, okay, well, hopefully we'll let you back next year.
00:21:01.000 Anyway, it takes nine years before they can resume research.
00:21:05.000 So finally, this team goes back in 1990, and they're starting to go back.
00:21:11.000 Find things and learn more about this area that they have in their project area.
00:21:17.000 And finally, in 1992, they find a first tooth of what becomes the species of Ardipithecus.
00:21:28.000 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?
00:21:37.000 You buy your ticket and it's like, yeah, right, yeah, I'm going to win the lottery.
00:21:39.000 Yeah, sure you are.
00:21:41.000 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.
00:21:54.000 Anyway, over a couple of years, they collect enough to realize that this is a new species.
00:22:00.000 This is something different.
00:22:01.000 But at this point, it's just like a few teeth, a few bone fragments and stuff.
00:22:06.000 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.
00:22:16.000 Yeah, I'd love to hear it.
00:22:18.000 Yeah, so anyway, they're walking along, and I should introduce some of the characters here.
00:22:26.000 The characters sound like a movie, by the way.
00:22:29.000 The way everybody lays out.
00:22:32.000 Yeah, we haven't talked about the personnel here, but I'll mention some of them.
00:22:36.000 Okay, so one of the guys who starts in 1981 is a young paleoanthropologist.
00:22:44.000 His name is Tim White.
00:22:45.000 He's an anthropologist from the University of California at Berkeley.
00:22:49.000 He's a guy from the American West.
00:22:51.000 He's a very hard-charging, strong-willed guy.
00:22:59.000 Profane, encyclopedic knowledge.
00:23:01.000 And everyone who works with him will tell you that he is probably the most intense fossil hunter who they've ever met.
00:23:10.000 That's Tim.
00:23:11.000 He would be the star of our movie.
00:23:14.000 He'd be the Harrison Ford character.
00:23:16.000 Yeah, but he would... 1.00
00:23:19.000 I can tell you that it's ridiculous to compare him to Harrison Ford because that's complete bullshit. 0.98
00:23:24.000 Because he is famously skeptical. 0.99
00:23:28.000 He's a relentless killer of ideas. 0.96
00:23:31.000 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. 0.83
00:23:39.000 Anyway, but he's also very exacting in the field.
00:23:44.000 And, you know, so when they realize that they're in such a dense...
00:23:49.000 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.
00:23:56.000 He lays down, like, these lanes in the fossil-rich areas, either, you know, carve...
00:24:03.000 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,
00:24:32.000 so he's one guy.
00:24:35.000 There's a team working underneath him.
00:24:37.000 Another character in this whole thing is one of Tim's former students, a guy named Burhani Asfaw, who's Ethiopian.
00:24:47.000 There's an interesting backstory with Burhani.
00:24:49.000 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.
00:25:07.000 He was arrested, he was put in jail, he was tortured.
00:25:12.000 He was lucky to survive.
00:25:14.000 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.
00:25:24.000 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.
00:25:36.000 But anyway, he's a member of this crew.
00:25:39.000 There's a number of other Ethiopian guys.
00:25:41.000 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.
00:25:51.000 We can talk more about that later.
00:25:52.000 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,
00:26:09.000 at least, for a long time, Africans were not, they were hardly represented in the ranks of the scientists.
00:26:17.000 Yeah.
00:26:19.000 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.
00:26:26.000 And Burhani is one of those people.
00:26:28.000 And another guy who actually found the first piece of art, his name is Yohannes Haile Selassie.
00:26:33.000 He came, he was trained by Burhani and Tim.
00:26:37.000 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.
00:26:47.000 I think it was a second metacarpal.
00:26:49.000 It's a bone right here in your hand.
00:26:50.000 And it's broken.
00:26:52.000 And they say, great, we got a piece.
00:26:54.000 And so, you know, and at first, you know, in this fascia sandwich, everything's broken.
00:27:03.000 You know, the isolated tooth here, the little bone fragment there, you know.
00:27:07.000 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.
00:27:19.000 But anyway, a few days later, they go back, they do the crawl again, they start finding more pieces and then more pieces.
00:27:24.000 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.
00:27:34.000 And there's, of course, a lot of rocks and all kinds of crap, but they start finding some bones in there.
00:27:39.000 And then, you know, light bulb goes off.
00:27:40.000 Oh, there's multiple elements of a skeleton here.
00:27:44.000 Or multiple elements of an individual.
00:27:46.000 Okay.
00:27:46.000 But still, it's kind of optimistic to think there may be a skeleton.
00:27:49.000 But anyway, then they're finding piece after piece.
00:27:52.000 And then when you start finding multiple pieces, then the kind of suspicion grows that you may be close to the original Yeah,
00:28:14.000 so this is fossil material.
00:28:17.000 So basically what a fossil is, for people to know, it's basically a bone that has turned to stone.
00:28:23.000 So when stuff sits in the ground for a long time, minerals kind of come in.
00:28:30.000 And displace the original biological material.
00:28:33.000 So, you know, you could have fossil, you know, all kinds of fossil stuff.
00:28:37.000 I mean, usually they're bones.
00:28:38.000 Here's a question.
00:28:39.000 How long do bones exist as bones before they become fossilized?
00:28:44.000 I actually don't know.
00:28:46.000 That's a good question.
00:28:48.000 And my guess is that it probably varies a lot on the condition, you know, like just the geological condition.
00:28:58.000 I don't know, but my guess would be that that answer varies a lot depending on the depositional environment.
00:29:09.000 I can't give you a good answer.
00:29:11.000 Jamie will find it, I'm sure.
00:29:12.000 So another question is, is it always that bones become fossilized or is it very specific conditions?
00:29:21.000 Like, do bones, for the most part, just deteriorate and be eaten by parasites and the environment and bugs and whatnot?
00:29:30.000 Yeah.
00:29:31.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:29:31.000 So, it's pretty rare to be lucky enough to find something like this.
00:29:38.000 Okay, so in that part of Africa, there are a lot of predators, you know, and there's hyenas.
00:29:41.000 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...
00:29:53.000 We're eating our ancestors.
00:29:57.000 A lot of these fossils have tooth marks in them.
00:30:02.000 Something dies.
00:30:04.000 A carcass lands on the ground.
00:30:05.000 Boom.
00:30:06.000 It's probably consumed by some big cat or whatever.
00:30:12.000 One of the really ravaging things are hyenas.
00:30:15.000 They come in in packs.
00:30:17.000 And they have these really powerful jaws, and they can actually chew bones down to splinters.
00:30:23.000 And so now, if something dies, after a couple days, there could just be splinters left.
00:30:31.000 So it's not like they just clean off the skeleton for you.
00:30:33.000 So anyway, they come in, and then there's this whole chain of other scavengers that move in. 0.98
00:30:41.000 I mean, there's a lot of ancient pigs. 0.94
00:30:43.000 And believe it or not, you may think of a nice little pig as being... 0.67
00:30:47.000 This cute barnyard animal, but actually pigs are surprisingly annihilated scavengers.
00:30:53.000 They're ruthless.
00:30:54.000 They're ruthless.
00:30:54.000 We have an answer for you.
00:30:56.000 Fossilized, preserved remains become fossils if they reach an age of about 10,000 years.
00:31:03.000 Okay.
00:31:03.000 So it's 10,000 years, which is not that long at all.
00:31:06.000 It comes off the internet, so we know it's true.
00:31:09.000 What is the source?
00:31:11.000 Nationalgeographic.org I went to for that.
00:31:13.000 So it's National Geographic.
00:31:14.000 It's a good source.
00:31:15.000 Yeah, so it's a long time.
00:31:18.000 Yeah.
00:31:18.000 Yeah, so back to Wild Pigs.
00:31:20.000 Yeah, Wild Pigs.
00:31:20.000 Well, that was famously a scene in the movie Snatch, right?
00:31:24.000 You remember that movie?
00:31:25.000 The Brad Pitt movie.
00:31:27.000 It's a great Guy Ritchie crime movie. 0.97
00:31:30.000 The guy keeps pigs because pigs will eat everything. 0.99
00:31:32.000 They eat the bones, they eat everything.
00:31:34.000 So when he murders people, he throws them in the pen with the pigs, and the pigs eat every part of the body.
00:31:41.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:31:42.000 So there's pigs, and then there's...
00:31:45.000 It's like, you know, little, you know, rodents that come in.
00:31:48.000 So, you know, dung beetles.
00:31:49.000 I mean, so by the time, this is like going down through this whole thing.
00:31:53.000 So, by the time there's nothing left to eat, there's not much left of this skeleton.
00:31:59.000 And so, anyway...
00:32:01.000 So that's just preserving the bones.
00:32:04.000 Now there's another thing that has to happen.
00:32:06.000 It has to be in a depositional environment that will encourage the bone to fossilize and not just degrade.
00:32:14.000 There's different places that are conducive to that.
00:32:16.000 One is a place where there's a lake or something covering it with sediment.
00:32:24.000 This particular place, they think, was probably an ancient floodplain.
00:32:27.000 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.
00:32:36.000 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.
00:32:51.000 So it's a pretty small minority of things that have the courtesy to leave their bones for us.
00:32:59.000 And then, so that's one element that makes this thing so hard.
00:33:02.000 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.
00:33:16.000 You know, so basically this stuff gets buried, you know, in our layer cake.
00:33:21.000 And, you know, it...
00:33:23.000 Other layers stack up and then fossilize it, but then they come to the surface again, usually by geological faulting or erosion.
00:33:33.000 And once the stuff comes to the surface, some fossils are like rock, and they'll last for a long, long, long time.
00:33:41.000 But other stuff, like this particular skeleton, are actually really chalky.
00:33:46.000 And, I mean, Tim White, the fellow who was...
00:33:53.000 Sort of guiding this whole operation says that it could come apart in your hands if you didn't handle it right.
00:34:04.000 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.
00:34:20.000 Because once the stuff comes to the surface it doesn't It's on a slope, right?
00:34:23.000 And they get these torrential...
00:34:25.000 It's a desert, so they don't get a lot of rain.
00:34:28.000 But when they do get rains, they can be torrential.
00:34:30.000 And then that just sends everything downstream.
00:34:34.000 So they just hit the Goldilocks zone.
00:34:37.000 They just happen to be there at the right time.
00:34:40.000 And some of that is luck, but it's also...
00:34:44.000 You make your own luck.
00:34:47.000 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.
00:34:59.000 Tim White, this guy mentioned he's the paleoanthropologist.
00:35:06.000 When they found this scatter of stuff on the ground, the question is, where did it come from?
00:35:10.000 Where's the original in situ site?
00:35:12.000 Which is kind of what I left off when I was telling you that story a minute ago.
00:35:15.000 Because they're founding all these things on the ground, so they're planting flags to mark where each one came from.
00:35:20.000 And they see a pattern, you know, converging, getting narrower and narrower on this little hillock.
00:35:27.000 And Tim compares it to...
00:35:31.000 You know, what the gold miners did in California.
00:35:34.000 He's from California.
00:35:35.000 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.
00:35:40.000 And that's what they did.
00:35:41.000 And then they start to dig in there.
00:35:44.000 They found some bones that were still embedded in the original sediments.
00:35:50.000 That tells you like, okay, now we've found The, you know, the original resting spot of this thing.
00:35:59.000 And that's when they start digging.
00:36:00.000 And that's, you know, I mean, it's a very slow process.
00:36:03.000 I mean, it doesn't happen nearly as fast.
00:36:05.000 I mean, this stretches over days and weeks.
00:36:06.000 But anyway, they start digging there. 0.87
00:36:08.000 And this is when they say, holy crap, this is like a skeleton.
00:36:11.000 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?
00:36:19.000 Yeah.
00:36:21.000 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.
00:36:31.000 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.
00:36:41.000 And so, you know, they've got a lot of places to look.
00:36:46.000 So they're not going to start...
00:36:47.000 If you're in this line of work, you don't start digging...
00:36:50.000 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.
00:37:00.000 You've got to pay to sustain these expeditions in the desert.
00:37:03.000 There's people running around with guns.
00:37:08.000 We haven't talked about this, but there's this tribal warfare going on there.
00:37:18.000 So you don't waste your time digging unless you have a pretty good reason to believe that there's something there.
00:37:24.000 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.
00:37:36.000 It was some weeks later before they started digging.
00:37:41.000 Some of that was...
00:37:45.000 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.
00:37:56.000 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,
00:38:12.000 and dug, and dug, and dug, and they dug for years there, but never found any more of that creature.
00:38:17.000 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.
00:38:26.000 But in this case, there was something there, and it was a lot there.
00:38:29.000 So, yeah, go ahead.
00:38:31.000 Was there skepticism that it was all from the same individual?
00:38:36.000 Yeah, well, that is...
00:38:38.000 Of course, unclear when you're starting to dig, you know.
00:38:42.000 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.
00:38:55.000 I mean, they're literally working with like...
00:38:59.000 Dental tools.
00:39:00.000 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.
00:39:12.000 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.
00:39:23.000 Now, can I stop you again?
00:39:24.000 Are they filming all this so that if there are skeptics, because with anthropologists and paleontologists, there are a lot of skeptics, right?
00:39:33.000 So are they preparing for this and filming every step of the way?
00:39:38.000 Not every step of the way, but Tim White is a relentless record keeper.
00:39:46.000 And he has this voluminous photo archive, for one.
00:39:51.000 He's also a relentless record keeper.
00:39:54.000 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.
00:40:05.000 And this is back in the days of...
00:40:08.000 VHS? Yeah, I don't know if it was VSS or Micro something.
00:40:12.000 But anyway, so they're filming all this stuff.
00:40:14.000 So by the time I come along, you know, many, almost 20 years later, Tim lets me see all this stuff.
00:40:21.000 And to me, this was like an absolute goldmine.
00:40:24.000 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...
00:40:35.000 Treat that with some skepticism because how reliable was this person's memory after 20 years?
00:40:39.000 I mean, I couldn't really be there in any way.
00:40:43.000 But now that I have this videotape, I'm watching while these guys are digging up these little pieces.
00:40:50.000 I'm watching while Tim is exposing this smile of this ancient I'm a member of the human family.
00:41:03.000 And there's hours and hours of this stuff.
00:41:05.000 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.
00:41:17.000 So to me, as a reporter, that was like the equivalent of them finding the skeleton.
00:41:27.000 For me, having this trove of records, It was just such an astounding jackpot for me because it let me be there.
00:41:40.000 Yeah, that's amazing.
00:41:41.000 So how many teeth were intact?
00:41:43.000 Did it have a full smile?
00:41:46.000 The teeth?
00:41:47.000 Well, they were in the jawbone.
00:41:49.000 I don't remember.
00:41:50.000 I shouldn't give you a number because I don't remember.
00:41:52.000 But they pretty much got most of the teeth of this creature. 0.95
00:41:56.000 I don't know.
00:41:57.000 Maybe not on this one individual.
00:41:59.000 But there are...
00:42:01.000 This operation went on for years and over the years they collected a lot of fragments from other individuals.
00:42:07.000 So I'm sure they have pretty much all the teeth or pretty close to all the teeth.
00:42:12.000 I mean the number of teeth they have is It's in the book somewhere.
00:42:17.000 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?
00:42:33.000 Or are there other of the similar time frame that they found?
00:42:38.000 Other individuals or other species?
00:42:42.000 Other individuals.
00:42:43.000 Yes.
00:42:43.000 Yeah, so there's a lot of individuals of this species, but again, they're not complete.
00:42:52.000 They find part of a jawbone of another individual.
00:42:57.000 Actually, they found a nice jaw, or part of a jaw, just like a stone's throw away from where Artie was found.
00:43:04.000 They found a foot bone of a jawbone.
00:43:09.000 Bigger member, they're kind of jokingly nicknamed Bigfoot.
00:43:13.000 And they're aging these creatures based on the biological material that's around it?
00:43:20.000 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.
00:43:29.000 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.
00:43:39.000 And there are a lot of them.
00:43:40.000 It's definitely a multidisciplinary field.
00:43:42.000 But one of the most important sub-disciplines within this is geology.
00:43:50.000 And the reason is that geology gives you the timeline to answer the question that you just asked.
00:43:56.000 And so there's different methods of dating.
00:44:00.000 If you're in the field, you can begin to make estimates about the age of the sediments based on We're good to go.
00:44:39.000 You could think of geology as like a layer cake, right?
00:44:42.000 So let's just say, like, here are the ancient layers that were laid down like I was describing.
00:44:45.000 Let's just say this one is a million years old, this one's two million, this one's three, this one's four.
00:44:51.000 Okay, so how do you know how old things are?
00:44:54.000 Well, the main method of dating is called radiometric dating.
00:44:58.000 And so that basically means that they find volcanic ashes and lavas everywhere.
00:45:03.000 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.
00:45:16.000 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.
00:45:27.000 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...
00:45:37.000 It's called isotopic dating.
00:45:39.000 And so basically it's just...
00:45:40.000 There's a change in the isotopes of potassium in particular and argon, which are components here.
00:45:49.000 And this stuff decays at a constant rate, which is not affected by temperature or pressure if it's in the Earth or whatever.
00:45:57.000 It's just a constant rate.
00:45:58.000 So this gives you...
00:45:59.000 A yardstick to measure how old something is.
00:46:04.000 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.
00:46:14.000 And that gives you a bracket.
00:46:16.000 And there's literally hundreds of ash and lava layers in this area.
00:46:23.000 And all these things have been dated over the years.
00:46:26.000 That gives you a timeline.
00:46:26.000 So with this particular skeleton, Very conveniently, an ash in the layer above it and another one below it.
00:46:35.000 And when they did the dating, they both were calculated to be 4.4 million years old.
00:46:40.000 So that means that the area between them was deposited in a pretty short period of time.
00:46:49.000 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.
00:47:02.000 Not long.
00:47:03.000 And for something of this age, that's actually really precise dating.
00:47:07.000 So to answer your question, it's using volcanic ashes and lavas above and below it to figure out the date of things.
00:47:14.000 And what is the window of possibility?
00:47:18.000 How tightly can they narrow that down?
00:47:21.000 Within a million years?
00:47:26.000 I'm not a geologist, so I don't want to speak beyond my layer of knowledge here.
00:47:33.000 With this one, they brought it down to 4.4, so that's pretty tight.
00:47:39.000 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.
00:47:48.000 Long story short, that 4.4 is a pretty good date, and for stuff of this age, it's It's quite solid.
00:47:59.000 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.
00:48:08.000 When they're piecing this together, how do they know exactly where everything goes?
00:48:14.000 How are they absolutely sure Right.
00:48:34.000 Right.
00:48:37.000 It's different than what they've seen, but they know how skeletons go together.
00:48:43.000 Femurs and tabulas.
00:48:45.000 You don't get a fever confused with a thumb phalanx.
00:48:51.000 I don't have this knowledge, but certainly those people do.
00:48:56.000 They can pick up a tooth and say, oh yeah, this is the upper right side of the mouth.
00:49:00.000 The people that know skeletons can do all this mental rotation in their head And they can often do it from fragments of bones.
00:49:12.000 So it's not the whole tooth, but like a fraction of the tooth or a fraction of some foot bone.
00:49:18.000 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.
00:49:32.000 Do you know the story of Gigantopithecus, how they discovered that?
00:49:37.000 No.
00:49:37.000 It was an apothecary shop in China.
00:49:40.000 There was an anthropologist who found, I believe he found a tooth.
00:49:44.000 And he was like, what the hell is this?
00:49:46.000 And he realized it was a primate tooth, but it was much larger than anything they'd ever seen before.
00:49:50.000 And then he asked them to, I think it was, I want to say 1920s or 1930s.
00:49:54.000 And then they, I mean, I don't think they've gotten anything more than some jaw bones and teeth.
00:49:59.000 And they realized it's a bipedal hominid that was somewhere in the neighborhood of eight feet tall.
00:50:06.000 It wouldn't have been a hominid if it was... 1.00
00:50:08.000 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. 0.76
00:50:17.000 Now they call them hominines with an I-N at the end.
00:50:24.000 Gigantopithecus, I believe, is a Miocene ape.
00:50:28.000 It's a primate, but you wouldn't consider it a member of the human family.
00:50:32.000 It's just one of many Weird things from this period they call the Miocene.
00:50:41.000 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.
00:50:52.000 It's bonkers.
00:50:53.000 Yeah, because the body proportions are...
00:50:58.000 I mean, they vary somewhat, but you can tell a lot from...
00:51:01.000 Sometimes individual bone.
00:51:04.000 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.
00:51:18.000 So they've got this complete skeleton.
00:51:21.000 There's nothing missing from Artie?
00:51:25.000 Well, there are some things missing, yeah.
00:51:26.000 A couple of small pieces.
00:51:27.000 I mean, it's relatively...
00:51:29.000 I mean, by the standards of paleoanthropology, it's remarkably complete.
00:51:32.000 And actually, the hands and the feet...
00:51:34.000 Which usually you don't get.
00:51:36.000 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.
00:51:48.000 They chew off your feet and whatever.
00:51:50.000 So it's remarkably complete, but there are some pieces missing, and there are some pieces that are just present but really damaged.
00:51:58.000 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.
00:52:13.000 The pelvis, they have a lot of, but it's pretty distorted by geology.
00:52:18.000 And some of the limb bones are fragmentary.
00:52:23.000 So...
00:52:25.000 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.
00:52:37.000 So anyway, there are certainly pieces missing, and I'm sure that science would love to have them.
00:52:46.000 Is it already on display?
00:52:49.000 Or at least online?
00:52:51.000 Is there a place to view it?
00:52:55.000 No.
00:52:55.000 Well, there are some photographs of it that have been published and you can see it.
00:53:03.000 So do they lay it out on a table in the form that they think that it came in?
00:53:07.000 Yeah.
00:53:10.000 To reconstruct the skeletal elements is not terribly hard for these guys to do.
00:53:19.000 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?
00:53:30.000 But for the most part, it's easy for these experts to know where an element goes in the skeleton.
00:53:37.000 So there's pictures of the skeleton laid out not long after discovery.
00:53:44.000 Not in the field, but in the lab.
00:53:47.000 There's other parts that took a long time, like the skull.
00:53:50.000 I mean, that took...
00:53:52.000 More than 10 years to put that together.
00:53:55.000 So the skull came in several fragments, obviously.
00:53:59.000 Yeah, so it looks...
00:54:02.000 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.
00:54:11.000 So it was like if you took a pile driver and just whap!
00:54:15.000 And pounded the thing down.
00:54:17.000 And so...
00:54:19.000 That was quite fragmentary, and so they had to reconstruct it.
00:54:24.000 It was reconstructed by a scientist from Japan named Gensuwa.
00:54:29.000 Jamie put an image of it up on the screen right now.
00:54:32.000 We're taking a look at it right now.
00:54:33.000 It's fascinating.
00:54:35.000 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.
00:54:45.000 It's amazing.
00:54:47.000 Yeah, I mean, it's really cool what you can do.
00:54:49.000 So this guy who reconstructed that, his name is Gensui.
00:54:51.000 He's from the University of Tokyo Museum.
00:54:53.000 And he's, you know, a very exacting scientist.
00:54:58.000 I haven't met him personally, but I've met a lot of people who work with him and they've...
00:55:02.000 He's a very unassuming guy, but he kind of leaves all of his colleagues in awe because of his acumen.
00:55:09.000 Anyway, he reconstructed that with his team.
00:55:12.000 This is incredible.
00:55:14.000 I said it the wrong way.
00:55:16.000 I'm viewing the left side.
00:55:18.000 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.
00:55:27.000 The other part that was fascinating to me was that it doesn't have canines like a chimp. 0.73
00:55:32.000 It has them more like a human being.
00:55:36.000 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.
00:55:50.000 Because we have, as you mentioned, canines that are different than most other apes.
00:55:57.000 The other Most other primates have these interlocking canines.
00:56:00.000 I mean, chimps and gorillas are two closest cousins both to do.
00:56:03.000 They have big fangs.
00:56:05.000 And they sharpen themselves by rubbing against the premolar.
00:56:11.000 The canine rubs against the premolar.
00:56:13.000 So it's kind of like always keeping your knife sharp.
00:56:16.000 But humans are unique because we have these things that are not these dagger-like fangs.
00:56:23.000 They are diamond-shaped.
00:56:26.000 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.
00:56:39.000 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.
00:56:51.000 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.
00:57:07.000 So canines are a sort of reliable way, or let's say a reliable indicator to tell you that you're looking at some...
00:57:17.000 A bit of early humanity here.
00:57:19.000 Does it tell us anything about Artie's diet?
00:57:21.000 Or is it a defensive thing?
00:57:23.000 Because when we're looking at gorillas, gorillas, they have canines, but they're vegetarians. 0.87
00:57:30.000 And their canines are for defense, right?
00:57:33.000 Right, right.
00:57:34.000 I mean, yeah, this is interesting.
00:57:35.000 So if you're a gorilla, they spend a lot of time eating leaves and stuff.
00:57:39.000 And you don't need these big canines to take out a leaf.
00:57:44.000 So this is...
00:57:46.000 The sort of predominant interpretation is that this is a sign of intraspecies aggression.
00:57:57.000 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.
00:58:13.000 And there are these bachelor males that will sometimes challenge alpha male and try to take them out.
00:58:23.000 So natural selection, in the case of gorillas, would favor these big Sharp canines and then these big brute bodies. 1.00
00:58:33.000 Male gorillas are quite big.
00:58:35.000 In some cases, they're twice as big as the females. 0.99
00:58:37.000 And this is all interpreted as intraspecies aggression for mating.
00:58:43.000 Now, humans are interesting because we don't have these big canines. 0.94
00:58:49.000 And actually, this factors into the Artie story because one of the...
00:58:53.000 The main investigator is an evolutionary theorist who interpreted art.
00:58:58.000 He was a fellow named Owen Lovejoy, and he's from Kent State University in the United States.
00:59:03.000 And he has a theory that what you're looking at with canine reduction is a social revolution, that this is monogamy happening, basically.
00:59:15.000 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.
00:59:32.000 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.
00:59:47.000 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?
01:00:01.000 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.
01:00:14.000 Right?
01:00:15.000 Well, it's hugely controversial for a whole number of reasons.
01:00:19.000 But one thing I should clarify is what What the biologists mean about monogamy.
01:00:24.000 So it's wrong to kind of understand that in kind of like our modern moralistic way.
01:00:28.000 This is not like, you know, the American Family Council talking here about monogamy.
01:00:32.000 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.
01:00:40.000 You know, think of like, you know, mom and dad in the nest.
01:00:44.000 Or, you know, I think coyotes are.
01:00:46.000 I mean, there's, or gibbons is another species.
01:00:49.000 Another primate that are monogamous.
01:00:51.000 So this is not unusual in the world of biology.
01:00:57.000 So anyway, so sometimes people say, oh, you know, that's kind of like bringing in some of these moralistic things.
01:01:06.000 It's not that.
01:01:07.000 It is a legitimate Way to describe a baiting strategy that exists in many places in nature.
01:01:17.000 Okay, so yeah, and there's other theories that have ascribed human sexuality to something more like a chimp.
01:01:29.000 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. 0.53
01:01:52.000 If you ever want to amuse yourself, read about theories about human mating strategies.
01:01:58.000 There's all kinds of ways that people have explained our peculiarities and our Yeah, our sexuality and all that stuff.
01:02:09.000 Now, what we're looking at already, we're talking about an animal that predates weapons, correct?
01:02:15.000 Yeah, as far as we know.
01:02:16.000 So the first stone tools do not appear until, well, certainly by around 2.5, 2.6 million years ago, there's stone tools.
01:02:26.000 There's some things that have been found in Kenya that are older, that are like 3.5.
01:02:31.000 2 or 3.3.
01:02:34.000 That one is a little controversial, so we'll see how that all shakes out.
01:02:39.000 But anyway, in either case, at least the stone tools are way after Artie, way after Lucy.
01:02:47.000 So it's possible they use weapons, sticks and things along those lines?
01:02:52.000 Yeah, so that's the part...
01:02:54.000 We may never know.
01:02:56.000 Because if there's something like a stick that biodegrades, then who knows?
01:03:01.000 Or throwing a rock.
01:03:02.000 You could...
01:03:04.000 How do we know?
01:03:09.000 The idea would be that they're not hunting with weapons.
01:03:13.000 Most likely.
01:03:15.000 No.
01:03:15.000 And actually, surprisingly, weapons arrive pretty late in human origins.
01:03:22.000 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.
01:03:33.000 But those are tools for processing food, you know.
01:03:38.000 They're not, I mean, the weapons come late.
01:03:40.000 It's kind of interesting that, you know, the things that are identifiable weapons are...
01:03:45.000 Like spears and atlatls and stuff like that.
01:03:48.000 Yeah, or, you know, particularly like lithic things, you know, that leave a...
01:03:53.000 Excuse me, leave a, you know, that are stone, that are preserved.
01:03:57.000 Those come pretty late.
01:03:58.000 It's an interesting question about just why weapons were developed and why we started using them.
01:04:06.000 So do we know, do we have speculation as to what Artie's diet was?
01:04:10.000 Like, was Artie an herbivore?
01:04:13.000 Yeah, so they can make some determinations based on a couple of lines of evidence.
01:04:21.000 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.
01:04:37.000 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...
01:04:49.000 There's two kinds of plants, like C3 or C4, and this refers to two different forms of photosynthesis.
01:04:58.000 C4 plants tend to be more open, sunny sort of thing.
01:05:04.000 C3 plants tend to be more shady things.
01:05:08.000 I mean, this is not an absolute difference, but it's an important one.
01:05:12.000 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.
01:05:27.000 I mean, it did have some C4 in its diet, but it's mostly C3. So mostly vegetables?
01:05:32.000 Is this what's believed?
01:05:33.000 Or is it inferred that it's omnivorous?
01:05:36.000 Yeah.
01:05:36.000 Yeah, they think it's probably omnivorous.
01:05:39.000 I've heard some speculation that maybe if they are maybe eating some bugs and stuff like that.
01:05:45.000 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...
01:05:54.000 Another animal that's been eating one of those two things.
01:05:57.000 So this kind of moves up through the food chain.
01:05:59.000 Is there speculation as to what natural selection benefit there would be for it to stand up?
01:06:05.000 Like for it to be upright?
01:06:07.000 Yeah, so this actually gets back to that monogamy theory I was telling you about, which is admittedly quite controversial.
01:06:15.000 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.
01:06:34.000 And that basically...
01:06:38.000 Let's go back to your question.
01:06:41.000 So you're interested in speculating or answering the question, why is this creature erect?
01:06:47.000 Yes.
01:06:49.000 This is quite an interesting...
01:06:54.000 Take on the whole question.
01:06:55.000 So this, of course, you know, why did humans stand upright is the million-dollar question of human origins.
01:07:01.000 I mean, Darwin tried to answer it, you know, and many, many people have tried to answer it.
01:07:07.000 There's more theories than you can shake a stick at, you know.
01:07:10.000 I mean, Darwin said, you know, people stood up because they were using tools, you know, to free the hands.
01:07:15.000 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.
01:07:25.000 People have said it's phallic display.
01:07:29.000 It's all kinds of stuff.
01:07:30.000 Picking fruit, seeing over tall grass.
01:07:32.000 You name it.
01:07:35.000 But the interesting thing is that most of these theories look for a direct benefit for standing up to some direct evolutionary benefit.
01:07:45.000 Owen's theory is a little different because he doesn't think There is a direct benefit.
01:07:49.000 He thinks it's sort of a secondary thing.
01:07:53.000 So just to tell you a little bit more about Owen, he's kind of an interesting guy.
01:07:57.000 He has an interesting history.
01:07:58.000 But earlier in his career, he specialized in biomechanics.
01:08:04.000 And actually, he was the main biomechanical expert.
01:08:08.000 Analyst on the Lucy team 20 years before Artie came along.
01:08:12.000 But anyway, his early career, he worked with scientists who designed artificial joints.
01:08:20.000 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. 0.94
01:08:33.000 And Owen will tell you that That bipedality is a really stupid thing to do from an evolutionary perspective because it makes you slow. 0.72
01:08:44.000 If you want to be a fast runner, you probably should stay on all fours. 0.99
01:08:51.000 It's an invitation for disaster.
01:08:55.000 Why do we have artificial joints?
01:08:57.000 It's because people blow out knees or blow out hips. 1.00
01:09:01.000 Standing upright also causes these vulnerabilities in your back because of the way the spine is kind of contorted with humans. 1.00
01:09:09.000 So why on earth would this species do this stupid thing? 1.00
01:09:14.000 And why are there 8 billion of us here now if we did this stupid thing? 1.00
01:09:20.000 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. 0.95
01:09:32.000 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.
01:09:46.000 So they basically became, the males became partners in the child rearing, and this increased survivorship.
01:09:54.000 So it's an interesting thing, like, other apes, you know, are not very...
01:09:59.000 Not very involved dads.
01:10:01.000 I call them deadbeat dads.
01:10:04.000 But humans are...
01:10:06.000 Usually we have these monogamous relationships. 0.85
01:10:08.000 So anyway, Owen's theory is that the bipedality was just a means to an end.
01:10:11.000 It allowed the males to provision and that the females would be able to spend more time nurturing children. 0.94
01:10:23.000 And this was a demographic revolution.
01:10:28.000 And then the reduction in canines is part of that theory and that this was like a reduction in aggression.
01:10:34.000 So we're not fighting over, you know, who's the alpha male?
01:10:37.000 We're in these monogamous pairs within a troop of primates.
01:10:42.000 And that explains why, you know, bipedality appears pretty early in human evolution and why the reduced canines also appears.
01:10:50.000 So anyway, this is Owen's theory.
01:10:53.000 It's quite controversial and, you know, it's...
01:10:56.000 Without finding things, even if you were able to find skeletons older than already, it would still be controversial.
01:11:05.000 But anyway, that's the theory.
01:11:06.000 Is there a compelling competing theory?
01:11:10.000 There are lots of competing theories, probably too many to mention here.
01:11:16.000 I mentioned some, standing ups.
01:11:19.000 The phallic display?
01:11:22.000 You don't hear much about that one anymore, but that one came shortly after the sexual revolution. 0.99
01:11:29.000 That's hilarious.
01:11:33.000 So, we don't know, basically.
01:11:36.000 We don't know.
01:11:37.000 And then, I mean, some of the stuff, to be honest, from my point of view, is...
01:11:44.000 May ultimately be unknowable.
01:11:47.000 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,
01:12:05.000 does this signify that it was in some sort of a protected environment where it wasn't at such risk of predation?
01:12:14.000 Well, remember, these things can go, you know, in terms of escaping predators.
01:12:18.000 Trees.
01:12:19.000 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,
01:12:36.000 too, and I would recommend you do the same.
01:12:37.000 Yeah, that's the move.
01:12:38.000 But, you know, of course, you still have to worry about the big cats, but...
01:12:41.000 Anyway, so it did have the ability to go into the trees.
01:12:45.000 But yeah, how did these things survive?
01:12:46.000 That's an interesting question.
01:12:49.000 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.
01:12:58.000 But actually, I'll tell you, just a little interesting aside here and sort of the fieldwork part of the detective story.
01:13:04.000 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.
01:13:14.000 So Tim White, the main paleoanthropologist on the team, he's very experienced and has been working in Africa for a long time.
01:13:24.000 And when he looked at the fossil assemblage, the word that he used, it was ravaged.
01:13:29.000 And this was visible to him from...
01:13:33.000 You know, from their first days on the site because they're finding all these fragments of things that have clearly been chewed apart.
01:13:42.000 And instead of finding teeth, they're finding pieces of teeth and like bones that are chewed to splinters.
01:13:47.000 In some cases, they actually found things that are etched by digestive acid.
01:13:55.000 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.
01:14:06.000 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.
01:14:21.000 Because that was the signature of all this fossil sandwich that they were seeing.
01:14:27.000 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.
01:14:38.000 You're not going to find a skeleton here.
01:14:40.000 But somehow, just by great luck, they did.
01:14:45.000 For some reason, this carcass wound up on the ground.
01:14:55.000 Was that one of the reasons why it was treated with so much skepticism?
01:15:07.000 No one doubts the existence of the skeleton.
01:15:11.000 What do they doubt?
01:15:17.000 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.
01:15:35.000 I mean, what is the controversy?
01:15:38.000 The controversy...
01:15:40.000 Well, there's a couple of things.
01:15:42.000 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?
01:15:52.000 And, you know, as I said before, you get...
01:15:56.000 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.
01:16:05.000 The bipedality is another one. 0.60
01:16:08.000 But there's a great deal of skepticism in the field.
01:16:12.000 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.
01:16:25.000 They doubt that any of them really are, or that it's just unknowable.
01:16:28.000 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.
01:16:39.000 That's one.
01:16:42.000 But I do think that has changed.
01:16:45.000 The validation of Arti as a member I think there is a growing number of people who are accepting it.
01:16:58.000 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.
01:17:14.000 Maybe it's not your grandfather, but maybe it's your aunt-uncle.
01:17:18.000 We may never know that.
01:17:22.000 Anyway, that's one point of controversy.
01:17:24.000 Is it in the human lineage?
01:17:27.000 Another one is the arguments that the discovery team has made about what it reveals about the last common ancestor of humans and apes.
01:17:39.000 For example, we were talking before about this model of a chimp-like common ancestor of humans and African apes. 0.72
01:17:52.000 The ARTI team spent 15 years studying this thing before they announced it to the world.
01:17:59.000 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,
01:18:17.000 because there's no vestige of knuckle-walking.
01:18:19.000 I mean, there's a whole bunch of things that gets into sort of like some anatomical, very esoteric anatomical stuff.
01:18:27.000 So if you read the book, if you're interested, because it gets into all that.
01:18:34.000 So anyway, that's part of the controversy.
01:18:36.000 So there is a sort of subset of the critics who have come to accept Artie as indeed a member of the human family.
01:18:47.000 So they say, yeah, they're right.
01:18:49.000 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.
01:19:00.000 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. 0.90
01:19:16.000 So that's one element of controversy.
01:19:21.000 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.
01:19:36.000 There was a lot of fodder there for debate and disagreement, and that's what's been happening for the last 10 years.
01:19:46.000 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?
01:19:57.000 So it's just presumed?
01:19:59.000 And is it possible that all the way back, like from the beginning, that our ancestors were bipedal?
01:20:10.000 Well, I don't think many people would say...
01:20:13.000 Well, ancestors of the human lineage?
01:20:16.000 Right.
01:20:16.000 When you look at Artie, Artie is the oldest known full skeleton that we have of our ancestors.
01:20:22.000 If we go back, if we somehow or another found something that was 12 million years old, what if that thing was bipedal?
01:20:30.000 Okay, so one problem is that the split between humans and chimps, it's probably not that old.
01:20:37.000 So if you're at 12 million, you're probably somewhere...
01:20:40.000 Before the huge gym split.
01:20:41.000 There's a lot of squish time in this.
01:20:44.000 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.
01:20:57.000 But they do think that once upon a time there was a split between humans and chimps.
01:21:02.000 So if you go back far enough, you'll find a chimp or something like a chimp. 1.00
01:21:06.000 Well, you'll find an ancestor of a chimp. 0.72
01:21:09.000 The big question is, does it look like a modern chimp or does it look like something you've never seen before?
01:21:16.000 Or does it look like something that's sort of...
01:21:18.000 A more primitive version of Ardipithecus.
01:21:20.000 I mean, this is the great unknown.
01:21:22.000 I mean, this is, of course, another quest for science.
01:21:28.000 So the discovery of Ardipithecus was really a monkey wrench into this whole idea of what we...
01:21:33.000 Yeah.
01:21:35.000 Yeah, so that was one of the things that was quite controversial about it.
01:21:41.000 And we haven't talked much about the discovery team that put this together.
01:21:46.000 Yeah.
01:21:47.000 But they're very good scholars.
01:21:53.000 They're very good at what they do, but they're also quite provocative, which for me, of course, made them great material.
01:22:01.000 But they don't present the skeleton and say, here's a physical description of the skeleton.
01:22:09.000 Go ahead and make up your own minds.
01:22:10.000 They presented it, and it said, here's a...
01:22:14.000 You know, skeleton, and this is why you're wrong, and you're wrong, and you're wrong, and you're wrong. 0.76
01:22:18.000 So it was a provocative series of papers with some, you know, stunning revelations, but a lot of...
01:22:27.000 Some people in the research community did not take kindly to the mode of presentation, let's say.
01:22:35.000 Because, you know, at one point...
01:22:38.000 There's this huge research community that studied chimpanzees.
01:22:42.000 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.
01:22:53.000 I mean, chimps kind of became this all-purpose model.
01:22:56.000 And so...
01:23:06.000 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.
01:23:35.000 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.
01:23:54.000 Yeah.
01:24:10.000 We're pretty certain that early human origins was in Africa.
01:24:15.000 I mean, that's pretty clear at this point.
01:24:18.000 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.
01:24:27.000 So the early stories in Africa.
01:24:30.000 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.
01:24:38.000 And these places were not necessarily the only places that human ancestors dwelt.
01:24:46.000 The reason we know about these things is just because these are the countries that Where the geological conditions favor the preservation of fossils.
01:24:57.000 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.
01:25:05.000 I mean, a lot of that is just self-promotion, tourist board stuff, sometimes science is self-promoting.
01:25:12.000 Again, what they should be saying is we're not the...
01:25:17.000 The birthplace of humanity, we're the graveyard.
01:25:20.000 But that doesn't have the same PR appeal.
01:25:23.000 We're the graveyard of humanity.
01:25:25.000 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.
01:25:36.000 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,
01:25:51.000 tend to be a little, not quite as old as the oldest things from the Rift Valley.
01:25:56.000 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.
01:26:06.000 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.
01:26:17.000 So our windows into the past are like these little pinholes.
01:26:22.000 And the places where you find those things, like in this Afar Depression of Ethiopia that I'm talking about, are pretty rare.
01:26:30.000 So you need to have those rare places, and then you also need to have this skill.
01:26:36.000 And this is not an easy...
01:26:37.000 I mean, I've spent a couple of...
01:26:40.000 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.
01:26:47.000 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.
01:26:53.000 And it's also not easy to do just logistically.
01:26:57.000 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.
01:27:08.000 There's fear that might Be heading into civil war, and so that means it's too...
01:27:14.000 A lot of these teams are probably reluctant to go to the field because of the danger.
01:27:22.000 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.
01:27:32.000 Anyway, so why are there so...
01:27:34.000 It gets back to the question, why are there so few skeletons?
01:27:36.000 Well, the places where you find it are rare.
01:27:40.000 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.
01:27:55.000 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,
01:28:12.000 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.
01:28:22.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's just like, yeah.
01:28:25.000 Amazing.
01:28:26.000 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,
01:28:44.000 you know, there's nothing eroding to the surface yet, you know, it's invisible.
01:28:49.000 Right, and there's so much ground space.
01:28:51.000 Yeah, or something eroded.
01:28:53.000 Yeah, yeah, and so it's...
01:28:58.000 You only know what you can find.
01:29:02.000 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.
01:29:14.000 How many different humans have they discovered now?
01:29:17.000 What is it called?
01:29:18.000 Denisovans? 1.00
01:29:19.000 Is that the name of them?
01:29:21.000 Am I saying that right?
01:29:22.000 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.
01:29:32.000 So stuff like Artie and Lucy are too old to get DNA out of.
01:29:38.000 All the biological material is gone.
01:29:41.000 But in some of the newer stuff, or younger stuff, the They can get what they call ancient DNA out of them.
01:29:54.000 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.
01:30:09.000 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.
01:30:22.000 And for a long time, there had been this debate about whether Neanderthals evolved into modern humans.
01:30:29.000 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.
01:30:54.000 Somehow we showed up, they disappeared.
01:30:58.000 And some of the early DNA studies kind of supported that out-of-Africa deal, that sort of displacement thing.
01:31:04.000 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.
01:31:18.000 So there was like a little bit of biological material there where they could start to knit together these ancient genomes.
01:31:25.000 And that science has advanced a lot.
01:31:27.000 I mean, it's astounding what they're doing now.
01:31:29.000 And I shouldn't say too much about it because that's not my focus.
01:31:36.000 So don't ask me too many hard questions about that.
01:31:39.000 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.
01:31:52.000 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. 0.73
01:32:04.000 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. 0.53
01:32:15.000 So that's like a huge revelation.
01:32:19.000 And then there's been many other revelations with ancient DNA. I mean, this Denisovans is another one.
01:32:26.000 So it appears that Anyway, you asked about all these ancient species, and I don't know how many there are now.
01:32:33.000 There's probably a couple dozen members.
01:32:35.000 Really?
01:32:35.000 A couple dozen?
01:32:36.000 Really?
01:32:37.000 There's that many?
01:32:38.000 Yeah.
01:32:38.000 Well, that are named.
01:32:40.000 I mean, this is a controversial thing, too, because it's like...
01:32:43.000 If you are a scientist, you find, let's say, a fossil.
01:32:53.000 And if you name it something new...
01:32:56.000 There's great incentive to name something new because, you know, new species, headlines, you know, and it's interesting.
01:33:04.000 Let's say you find another something that is a species that's already known.
01:33:09.000 You know, maybe it's just like a variation of that or, you know, slightly older, slightly younger, slightly like, you know, physically different.
01:33:16.000 I mean, you know, ho-hum, who cares?
01:33:20.000 That step just doesn't get the same amount of attention.
01:33:22.000 So there is, you know, a professional...
01:33:25.000 Bias, I think, toward naming new species.
01:33:30.000 Now, some of this stuff, I mean, there's no question it's a new species. 1.00
01:33:36.000 I mean, Artipithecus is one.
01:33:38.000 There's many other things that have been discovered.
01:33:40.000 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?
01:33:52.000 And in modern humans, for all We like to talk about our diversity.
01:33:57.000 We're actually, at least genetically, pretty homogenous, you know, compared to other primates.
01:34:02.000 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.
01:34:15.000 And anyway, so that's part of the problem.
01:34:21.000 Creates this debate about whether something is a new species or just another example of something that we already know about.
01:34:28.000 And the other thing is that—yeah, go ahead.
01:34:30.000 I was going to say, that little guy that they found on the island of Flores, Homo floreensis, is that what you say?
01:34:37.000 Yeah, this little dwarf-like thing, yeah. 0.99
01:34:39.000 Was that considered a human?
01:34:42.000 Yeah, well, that's a big—that's, again, another point of debate.
01:34:45.000 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.
01:34:56.000 There's this phenomenon called island dwarfism where sometimes Let's say it goes on an island and the sea levels change.
01:35:05.000 Things get small or some things get big.
01:35:07.000 Like reptiles.
01:35:08.000 Reptiles get bigger on islands, right?
01:35:10.000 Yeah, like Komodo dragons or whatever.
01:35:12.000 But in this case, this thing got small.
01:35:14.000 And so there's a big debate about what it evolved from.
01:35:20.000 And, you know, are there more of these things?
01:35:23.000 I mean, that's...
01:35:24.000 That thing lived as recently as how...
01:35:27.000 I mean, it wasn't that long ago, right?
01:35:29.000 Wasn't it like 15,000 years ago or something crazy?
01:35:31.000 I don't remember, but yeah, it is recent.
01:35:34.000 I don't remember the exact number, but it's kind of...
01:35:37.000 Frequently recent, yes.
01:35:39.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:35:40.000 And certainly within the lifetime of our species, yeah.
01:35:46.000 Well, it's something where cryptozoology, which is always a weird thing, right?
01:35:51.000 But there's people that believe, I think it's called Orang Pendek.
01:35:57.000 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.
01:36:12.000 I think it's Vietnam, I'm pretty sure.
01:36:13.000 And they think now that, well, hey, they might be really talking about something that did exist thousands of years ago.
01:36:21.000 Is this a fossil species?
01:36:23.000 It's a legend.
01:36:24.000 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.
01:36:40.000 This is the actual creature. 0.80
01:36:43.000 A little small, hairy person.
01:36:45.000 Is this like the Bigfoot of Vietnam?
01:36:47.000 Exactly.
01:36:48.000 But it's a little foot.
01:36:49.000 It's a little tiny guy.
01:36:51.000 The little foot, yeah.
01:36:52.000 Yeah, but the speculation is that this thing – it used to be they just thought it was just one of those crazy legends.
01:37:00.000 But now they think, hey, they might have been talking about something that existed in human history like this Homo floreensis did.
01:37:08.000 Yeah, well, maybe it's a mutant from, I don't know, Angel Orange or something.
01:37:12.000 No, I think it's a pretty old story.
01:37:16.000 I think it predates Vietnam.
01:37:19.000 Yeah.
01:37:19.000 Anyway, just a final note on the species, just a little food for thought.
01:37:23.000 So people bandy around this term species, and people don't really question the category.
01:37:28.000 So the weird thing about species is we know...
01:37:36.000 I mean, there are a lot of definitions in biology.
01:37:39.000 One of them, the classic definition, is the biological species definition.
01:37:44.000 And this dates from the 1940s from a guy named Ernst Maher, who's a prominent biologist.
01:37:50.000 A very important historical figure.
01:37:52.000 But anyway, he defined the species as the group, the population that could breed with each other.
01:37:58.000 Okay?
01:37:59.000 So you can make babies, you have the opportunity to make babies, you're a species.
01:38:03.000 So it's this big inclusive thing, right?
01:38:06.000 But of course, with a lot of the fossil species, we don't know who could breed with who.
01:38:13.000 We just know what they look like, what's physically different.
01:38:17.000 And so for a long time, I mean, so take humans and Neanderthals. 0.99
01:38:21.000 There's been this big debate.
01:38:23.000 What's the relation between them?
01:38:24.000 Did they interbreed?
01:38:27.000 And so a Neanderthal is something that looks sufficiently different from Homo sapiens that it's put in a different category.
01:38:36.000 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.
01:38:54.000 So now there's like this big problem with like, what is a species?
01:38:58.000 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?
01:39:11.000 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 biology.
01:39:26.000 I think?
01:39:53.000 Well, you could call them humans, you could call them species.
01:39:56.000 I don't know the answer to that.
01:40:06.000 Except that we should be...
01:40:09.000 Clearly you need language to have for precision, for science.
01:40:14.000 I mean, that's absolutely necessary.
01:40:15.000 But you can't be too dogmatic about your categories because...
01:40:20.000 Nature is not dogmatic.
01:40:22.000 Nature is far more fluid and dynamic than that.
01:40:27.000 And we don't have a complete picture of the exact process from ancient ape to human being in the current form.
01:40:37.000 No.
01:40:38.000 We have a series of snapshots.
01:40:40.000 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,
01:40:56.000 but, you know, it's not like we have anything like a complete picture.
01:41:02.000 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,
01:41:17.000 growing.
01:41:17.000 That's a huge storyline in human evolution.
01:41:21.000 But there are a lot of...
01:41:24.000 Yeah, all we have are these snapshots that we're lucky enough to get because of just the happenstance of geology and discovery.
01:41:36.000 One other thing about species that I found quite interesting in this whole thing...
01:41:41.000 You've probably heard about the tree of life, the human family tree.
01:41:46.000 This is an old metaphor, but the tree is having a little trouble right now.
01:41:56.000 Not that we should get rid of it.
01:41:59.000 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?
01:42:11.000 And it becomes like this either-or thing, right?
01:42:13.000 So when you have all these species that look different from—I'm trying to center my hand on the frame here.
01:42:17.000 Here we go.
01:42:19.000 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.
01:42:36.000 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.
01:42:43.000 And so now your tree is looking a lot – A lot less like a tree.
01:42:49.000 It's looking more like a web or a lattice sometimes.
01:42:52.000 People are searching for these other metaphors to convey the complexity of what biology is showing.
01:43:00.000 But it's a lot more complex than the simple trees of the species.
01:43:07.000 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.
01:43:24.000 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.
01:43:35.000 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 was...
01:44:00.000 I think?
01:44:07.000 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.
01:44:23.000 Okay, well, okay, so let's take art of physics.
01:44:28.000 Because at that point, Ardipithecus is only known at this point, as far as I know, from Ethiopia.
01:44:34.000 And one is the middle Awash, the place where Artie came from that I was describing earlier.
01:44:38.000 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.
01:44:47.000 They're basically neighbors.
01:44:48.000 So this is in this one part of Ethiopia.
01:44:54.000 So how widespread was Ardipithecus in Africa?
01:44:58.000 Did it range through the entire continent or was it a regional species?
01:45:05.000 I guess the answer is unknown.
01:45:09.000 And for the reasons I mentioned earlier that there's just so little of Africa that gives you the windows. 0.90
01:45:17.000 But anyway, there is another Ardipithecus skeleton that's been announced in the last couple of years from Gona.
01:45:25.000 And that one is interesting.
01:45:28.000 So, it has Ardipithecus, the original Ardipithecus, had this opposable toe.
01:45:37.000 When it was upright, it apparently walked when the toe kind of splayed off to the side, kind of like an outrigger.
01:45:45.000 At this Gona creature, they have something that they're calling a skeleton. 1.00
01:45:54.000 I haven't actually seen it.
01:45:56.000 I don't think it's actually been...
01:45:57.000 They've published...
01:45:58.000 They revealed its existence, but I haven't seen a picture of it, and I don't think they've revealed that.
01:46:03.000 But I was talking to the scientist there.
01:46:09.000 There's a fellow named Scott Simpson from Case Western Reserve University, and he's very competent.
01:46:16.000 A paleoanthropologist.
01:46:17.000 He says that their creature has this toe that's like Artie.
01:46:21.000 I mean, there's no doubt they belong to the same species, but this one has its toe more in line with the foot.
01:46:28.000 So it's more kind of human-like.
01:46:34.000 What's the timeline?
01:46:36.000 It's about the same age as Artie.
01:46:39.000 It's like 4.4, 4.5.
01:46:43.000 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.
01:46:58.000 And they're quite similar, but you'd get these variations for whatever reason.
01:47:07.000 Reason of a local adaptation.
01:47:10.000 How far apart are they from the original Artie?
01:47:16.000 I'm not sure.
01:47:17.000 It's like maybe 50 miles or within that.
01:47:21.000 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?
01:47:38.000 Do they know that?
01:47:41.000 Yeah, there's some difference in environmental interpretation between the two, but they're similar.
01:47:50.000 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? 0.98
01:48:00.000 They splay out in a very bizarre way?
01:48:03.000 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.
01:48:13.000 Not opposable like a primate, but...
01:48:17.000 For whatever reason about being unshot, it just gives you You know, you look at the toe and it's like visibly separated.
01:48:25.000 Yes.
01:48:26.000 We're looking at a picture of it right now on the screen.
01:48:28.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:48:29.000 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.
01:48:48.000 Yeah.
01:48:49.000 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.
01:49:07.000 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.
01:49:14.000 It's, you know, if you want to talk about who are the weird ones, It's not all these other things.
01:49:20.000 The modern humans are weird.
01:49:22.000 We got these big heads.
01:49:22.000 We got this funny way of walking.
01:49:24.000 We're bald.
01:49:25.000 And we vary so much.
01:49:27.000 Yeah, and we vary.
01:49:30.000 And then there's all these kind of myths about why...
01:49:35.000 I mean, God, there's so many myths in the field of human origins.
01:49:38.000 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.
01:49:47.000 The so-called golden ratio.
01:49:49.000 This is just storytelling.
01:49:51.000 There's nothing about our proportions.
01:49:53.000 Our proportions are just a function of adaptation.
01:49:55.000 They're a function of evolutionary biology.
01:49:59.000 When certain chemicals are released in the developmental process that governs how long your limbs grow or your digits or whatever.
01:50:11.000 We're just all variations of Primate.
01:50:16.000 We're just one of them.
01:50:21.000 Sometimes you see literature or people positing that somehow we've reached some sort of end state.
01:50:33.000 I'll tell you, we're not reaching end state.
01:50:35.000 We're just a variation of creatures that adapt.
01:50:41.000 They take these common elements and adapt them for a different...
01:50:45.000 For different uses.
01:50:48.000 Modern humans, though, we do vary size-wise much more than ancient apes that we find, though, correct?
01:50:56.000 For instance, you know Mountain from the Game of Thrones, that enormous giant human being?
01:51:02.000 That's a human being.
01:51:03.000 I don't.
01:51:04.000 I should confess, I am sort of illiterate when it comes to...
01:51:13.000 My kids would know.
01:51:14.000 I need to turn to them.
01:51:17.000 He's literally one of the world's strongest men.
01:51:20.000 He's like seven feet plus tall, 300 plus pounds, enormous.
01:51:24.000 But my point was that he exists As a human being.
01:51:29.000 Also, Chris Rock is a human being.
01:51:32.000 And he's a very thin, very small man.
01:51:35.000 But they're both human beings.
01:51:38.000 We don't find that when you're looking at things like Neanderthal or when you're looking at...
01:51:44.000 You find much more uniformity.
01:51:46.000 Is that correct?
01:51:46.000 Well, no, not necessarily.
01:51:48.000 Actually, in some cases, there's a lot of variation.
01:51:51.000 And I'll give you one good example.
01:51:53.000 So, Lucy.
01:51:55.000 There's this famous fossil.
01:51:57.000 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.
01:52:07.000 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. 0.64
01:52:15.000 And Artie's a female too, correct?
01:52:18.000 Artie's a female.
01:52:19.000 Artie's taller.
01:52:21.000 Artie's...
01:52:22.000 You know, a head taller than Lucy.
01:52:25.000 But anyway, so with Lucy, you know, when her skeleton was found, you know, this was, you know, the only skeleton of that species.
01:52:34.000 They had a lot of other pieces of things, but no skeletons.
01:52:36.000 But there was this assumption that that species was small, or at least the female.
01:52:43.000 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.
01:52:56.000 It's a male.
01:52:57.000 It's a lot bigger than Lucy.
01:52:59.000 They call it katanumu, which is a FR word for big guy.
01:53:03.000 But it's the same species as Lucy, but it's a big guy.
01:53:08.000 You know, substantially taller.
01:53:09.000 So it sort of falsifies this idea that all Lucy's species was petite.
01:53:15.000 Interesting.
01:53:16.000 And why is that?
01:53:17.000 Is that because there's a so-called sexual demorphism of males are bigger than females?
01:53:21.000 Or is it just a different population?
01:53:24.000 Or is that just, you know, just a difference in, you know, the normal range within a population?
01:53:32.000 You know, like you have short people and tall people, you know, in our population.
01:53:37.000 In any population, I don't know what the answer is to that.
01:53:39.000 But they're both mature specimens?
01:53:41.000 Yeah, and they're both attributed to the same species.
01:53:44.000 So anyway, just to give you an example of a paleo species where there is actually a substantial variation.
01:53:51.000 How much difference is it between Lucy and this other one?
01:53:56.000 I don't know.
01:53:57.000 Actually, I wish I had looked this up before we talked because I'd love to give you a number.
01:54:03.000 The big guy is substantially taller and bigger than Lucy.
01:54:06.000 But the skeletons, they have, you know, the anatomy is similar enough so that they are attributed to the same species.
01:54:18.000 Interesting.
01:54:19.000 And they're of similar age.
01:54:20.000 Like Katanumu, I think, is like 3.6 million years old.
01:54:23.000 And Lucy is, I think, 3.2 million.
01:54:26.000 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?
01:54:41.000 Well, so first of all, I should say I don't know much about Denisovans.
01:54:45.000 My understanding is there's not too much skeletally I mean, to have enough bones, they've obviously been able to take...
01:54:53.000 It's a fairly recent discovery, right?
01:54:55.000 Yeah, it's within the last, I don't know, 10 years or something.
01:54:59.000 So, it's a question like, why do they look so different?
01:55:02.000 Yeah, like, where do they come from?
01:55:06.000 Yeah, I don't know, and I don't think a lot is known about that.
01:55:14.000 Maybe the scientists are studying it at no more than they've published, but I don't know much about it.
01:55:21.000 But anyway, just the general idea of why do these things look so different.
01:55:26.000 So there's this concept in science that helps explain this.
01:55:32.000 Some people call it speciation.
01:55:35.000 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.
01:55:42.000 The way I prefer to look at it is what the scientists call isolation by distance, which sounds horribly boring, I know.
01:55:53.000 You're like, what the hell does that mean?
01:55:54.000 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,
01:56:11.000 make these local adaptations, which make the Neanderthals look different than the sub-Saharan Africans, for example, who were their contemporaries.
01:56:21.000 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.
01:56:33.000 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,
01:56:50.000 from the northern areas or wherever.
01:56:54.000 It's such a fascinating field of study because you see how they're piecing together this puzzle slowly but surely.
01:57:05.000 For someone who's impatient, you're not going to get the answers to this very quickly.
01:57:13.000 It's so amazing though.
01:57:15.000 Yeah, but the truth is always so much more interesting than the fiction.
01:57:19.000 And I think, I mean, I'm just a journalist, right?
01:57:22.000 So I'm not a scientist.
01:57:23.000 So I should just remind people of that.
01:57:27.000 But if I were a scientist in this field, you just have this lifetime of material information.
01:57:36.000 Ahead of you.
01:57:37.000 And you just know that the revelations are going to be so fantastic.
01:57:41.000 Like genomic science.
01:57:43.000 I mean, I know my book is about fossils, and that's mostly what I know about.
01:57:47.000 But genomics, genetics, in ancient DNA, it's an important cutting edge right now.
01:57:55.000 But anyway, there's a guy, a prominent geneticist at Harvard named David Reich.
01:58:01.000 We're like kindergartners in our knowledge of this stuff at some point.
01:58:05.000 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.
01:58:20.000 The code has been transcribed.
01:58:22.000 We now have the three billion places in the human genome transcribed.
01:58:29.000 But what does that mean?
01:58:32.000 What does the code say and how does that code turn into Artipithecus and Denisovans and you and me?
01:58:40.000 There's so many questions waiting to be answered.
01:58:46.000 If you're an impatient person, you won't get the big answers maybe in our lifetime for the big questions.
01:58:53.000 But God, there's so many fascinating Questions that are within reach that are being answered.
01:59:00.000 It's endlessly fascinating.
01:59:03.000 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?
01:59:15.000 I mean, it seems like it would be all-consuming because it's such a deep field of study.
01:59:21.000 It was all-consuming for me.
01:59:23.000 I mean, this book took me a lot longer than I ever intended.
01:59:27.000 What did you intend?
01:59:30.000 Well, people would keep, you know, people would ask.
01:59:32.000 I mean, I had numerous conversations that went like this, right?
01:59:35.000 I'd be talking to some scientists, you know, someone I've been talking to for a while.
01:59:37.000 I'd say, oh yeah, what's your timeline?
01:59:39.000 And I'd say, oh yeah, I'll probably be done this time next year.
01:59:43.000 I mean, I was saying that in like 2012. Here the book is being published, you know, this week.
01:59:49.000 So part of the, I mean, and this kind of gets to the richness of the story that I was telling you about.
01:59:57.000 I mean, so I was you know, there was this Interesting story about this fossil, the oldest skeleton ever found in a human family.
02:00:04.000 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.
02:00:18.000 I want to follow the life cycle of this whole thing through, because to me, that's a really interesting story.
02:00:23.000 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.
02:00:34.000 So anyway, that obliged me to sort of learn all these topics.
02:00:41.000 And so that was just a lot of reading, a lot of talking to people.
02:00:44.000 I'm so indebted to a lot of scientists who guided me through the geology, through the fieldwork, through the interpretation of the skeleton.
02:00:58.000 I mean, they provided a service to me personally, but they also, more importantly, provided a service to public understanding.
02:01:06.000 And I can't say enough how grateful I am to those people.
02:01:12.000 Where do you go from here?
02:01:13.000 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?
02:01:24.000 Well, that's a good question.
02:01:26.000 I'll go back into a cave, probably, to write another book.
02:01:33.000 It'll be on a different topic, for sure.
02:01:35.000 I mean, I like stories that have narrative, and I like stories that have depth.
02:01:40.000 And this one was quite rewarding.
02:01:41.000 It was quite challenging.
02:01:42.000 I can't spend that long on every book, because I'll be dead before I get anywhere.
02:01:52.000 But...
02:01:54.000 So anyway, I'm looking at a topic now.
02:01:56.000 It'll be, you know, sort of deep history of science.
02:02:00.000 I have to do a lot of legwork to see if it'll pan out the way I think it is.
02:02:04.000 I mean, I tend to keep things under wraps until I know that it's going to be worthwhile to do.
02:02:11.000 So that one I'll keep under wraps.
02:02:14.000 But something like that.
02:02:16.000 Something...
02:02:16.000 A big story with characters and with depth and narrative.
02:02:20.000 And do you just choose them based on your curiosity?
02:02:23.000 Like, what's intriguing to you?
02:02:25.000 Yeah.
02:02:26.000 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?
02:02:34.000 I mean, as I said, I started off on this other road.
02:02:37.000 And then it just, over time...
02:02:41.000 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.
02:02:51.000 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.
02:03:01.000 We haven't talked much about that, but the backdrop of Ethiopia while all this was going on.
02:03:05.000 It's an important part of the story at multiple levels.
02:03:09.000 I mean, there's the turmoil in the country that makes it difficult to work there.
02:03:13.000 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.
02:03:34.000 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.
02:03:45.000 And believe me, there was a lot of pain and suffering that went into this book.
02:03:48.000 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,
02:04:04.000 what you might see in a couple sentences that I tossed off about this or that.
02:04:09.000 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.
02:04:26.000 But yeah, there was a lot of that, and that accounts for why it was such a drawn-out process.
02:04:31.000 Well, congratulations on the completion, and thank you very much for spending some time with me today.
02:04:37.000 I really appreciate it, man.
02:04:38.000 I really enjoyed it.
02:04:40.000 It's a great pleasure.
02:04:41.000 You have a great show.
02:04:42.000 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.
02:04:51.000 You fit in that I'm interested in what you do.
02:04:54.000 You fit in because it's a fascinating subject to me.
02:04:58.000 All right.
02:04:58.000 Well, thank you for your high-five.
02:05:03.000 It's been a pleasure.
02:05:04.000 Can you hold up a copy of the book behind you?
02:05:06.000 It's right over your shoulder so people can get an image of it.
02:05:11.000 Yeah.
02:05:12.000 So the book is Fossil Men.
02:05:14.000 It's published by HarperCollins, the William Morrow imprint.
02:05:19.000 And it's released November 10th.
02:05:23.000 All right.
02:05:23.000 And this is Artie's hand right here.
02:05:26.000 I think November 10th is today, right?
02:05:28.000 Isn't that today?
02:05:28.000 Yeah, it'll be the day the show comes out.
02:05:30.000 Yeah.
02:05:31.000 Tomorrow.
02:05:31.000 Yeah.
02:05:32.000 Well, the day it comes.
02:05:33.000 Today's the 9th that we're filming this.
02:05:35.000 It'll come out tomorrow on the 10th.
02:05:36.000 All right.
02:05:37.000 Beautiful.
02:05:38.000 Thank you, Kermit.
02:05:38.000 Appreciate it, man.
02:05:39.000 Thank you.
02:05:39.000 You guys do a great job.
02:05:40.000 Thank you.
02:05:41.000 Thank you.
02:05:41.000 Take care.
02:05:42.000 Bye-bye.