Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Ancient Civilizations Expert CANCELLED over "Forbidden Discovery" | Elizabeth Weiss • 182

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Elizabeth Weiss is an American Anthropologist, Archaeologist & Historian. EPISODE LINKS: - MY AMAZON STORE FOR PODCAST GUEST BOOKS/FILMS: https://amzn.to/3RPu952  - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/JunfTEsc  - SUBSCRIBE to Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  ELIZABETH LINKS: - TWITTER: https://twitter.com/eweissunburied  - WEBSITE: https://elizabethweiss74.wordpress.com/  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Controversy around Elizabeth’s most recent book; Ancient Native American Remains Controversy 10:53 - Fake Native American Imposter 15:38 - Elizabeth speaks up; Skull Photo Controversy 28:49 - Elizabeth accused; Human Remains issue 35:11 - “Sacred” Controversy; University attacks Elizabeth 39:28 - Gender Skeletal Studies cancellation 46:58 - Biological Questioning 54:06 - Heterodox Academy & Civil Disagreement 1:01:37 - Child mortality 1:11:04 - Julian reacts; Anthropology & Medicine 1:19:50 - Earliest form of looting, Graham Hancock attacks Elizabeth 1:31:04 - Comparing animal and human bones 1:36:28 - Native American & Quebec Prisoner; Byzantine Collections; 2 Million-Year-Old foot Bone 1:43:24 - Re-patriating bones; Solving University issue 1:51:37 - Philly Bombing; Sitting Bull’s Great-Grandson; Oldest US Ancient Civilizations 2:00:57 - Younger Dryas Age; Discovery of “Lucy” Ancient Remains 2:07:54 - Determining the age of bones 2:15:38 - Neanderthal DNA & current breakthrough 2:24:06 - Darwin, Origin of Species, The Galapagos & Evolution 2:35:34 - Wallace & other evolutionary biologists; the Origins of Life; UFOs & AI 2:47:07 - Elizabeth’s activity CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 182 - Elizabeth Weiss Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up guys, if you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. So she put the focus on the importance of walking upright as opposed to the importance of a big brain. It used to be thought that you need that the first distinction between humans and apes would be big brain, but that turns out not to be the case and the first change really is a different type of locomotion and what that means is that it is the ability to walk upright that likely led to the big brain as opposed to the other way around do we have any evidence whatsoever that can point to potential lingual patterns and communication

the first evidence lingual pattern is in a... So I had the opportunity to speak with your husband, Nick, recently, which was an awesome, awesome podcast, great guy. You chose a good dude for your husband. But he was telling me a bit about what's been happening to you. And then I looked more,

we only talked about the most recent thing, And then I looked more, we only talked about the most recent thing, but then I looked more at some of the stuff with your former university and things that went on there. They have really put you over the ringer in the last few years. Yeah. Basically, it started about three years ago. I published a book called Repatriation and Erasing the Past. And what this book was about was the problems that occur when you rebury bones, basically Native American bones that are used to study how to reconstruct the past, what people's lives were like in the past, but also to understand bone biology, to understand ways to practice ways to, or improve ways on how to age and sex individuals that can then be cross-applied to forensics.

And I basically take the position that we should not rebury remains. That would be a good start for your studies. And this is very controversial because there are laws that are for the repatriation and rebury all of remains. The major one is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA. But there are also like state laws, like CalNAGPRA. And the book that I wrote and then got published, it was published in 2020. We timed it for the 30 year anniversary of NAGPRA. So basically, I'm the co-author, I'm the lead author, but the co-author, my co-author, James W. Springer, is actually a retired attorney.

So he's an anthropologist, but also a retired attorney. And so he covered in the book the legal aspects of it, the difficult part. And I just did the fun part, the bone stuff, right? And this book came out and, you know, most academic books don't cause any controversy. Actually, I would say that most academic books are not read by even other academics. But the book came out in September and then by, or maybe October, so late September, early October. And by December, we had heard from our publishers, University of Florida Press, that they were in crisis mode because there was a campaign to get the book depublished, otherwise known as censoring. Yeah, literally. And this was, they wrote, the academics who wanted the book not to be published wrote an open letter against the book, calling it racist and saying that we had Victorian perspective

and those kinds of things, anti-indigenous. What do you mean by Victorian perspective? Well, basically, perspective from the 1800s. So I would consider myself then in good company since that was when Darwin was around. But yeah, so basically just saying that we're antiquated in one way and that we didn't, that we were, I think the most scandalous thing to say in some ways is that they were calling us racists. And I couldn't quite understand that at the beginning because the book is not about race differences. It's about Native American skeletal remains

and how those should not be buried. And I actually take the line that any skeletal collection that has been excavated and is curated, so it's preserved for research or teaching, should not be reburied, whether it's Native American, whether it's European. It's not for me to say that, you know, I'm not saying that, oh, these groups should be reburied, but another group shouldn't.

I think that none of the groups should be. And so the open letter, it's kind of funny because when this started happening, I think my publishers were very, they were about to pull the book. I'm pretty sure they were about to pull the book. Who was your publisher? A University of Florida press. The book was peer reviewed. So what that means is that there were anthropologists who read the book, anthropologists, archaeologists who read the book and approved it.

Now, we had to make changes like you always have to make, but there was no, you know, oh, my goodness, you can't publish this type of moment during that process. I don't understand why, I mean, as an archaeologist, the whole point is to dig up old things and study them. What were they claiming is the value of reburying the remains other than, oh, we want to give it back to those people because we took their land? Or was that it? I think that's part of it.

And I would say that this is a false equivalency for a couple reasons. So part of it is, oh, the Native American tribes and modern tribes should be allowed to claim the skeletal remains and sacred artifacts, the grave goods, and rebury them or study them. But, you know, they don't have to rebury them. They could study them as well. And that because there's an ancestral link that they should make that decision. Now, the links are very tenuous in a sense. Most Native American tribes are not clearly linked to any past collections, any collections that we hold.

The ones where there was a clear link were basically repatriated and reburied very early on in the process. Basically, where there was clear historic documents or so forth, those decisions had been made 30 years ago and done. So what's left now is the collections that are pre-contact where we don't have a good indicator of who

they were ancestral to. What years approximately do you think they're from? Well, like the collection that I looked at in San Jose. And so San Jose State University has one of the largest skeletal collections of a single site west of the Mississippi. And that collection is all pre-contact, so these individuals had never come into contact with Europeans.

And it ranges from about 3,500 years old to about 300 years old. So, you know, so it's a large range, right? So it's a collection that was, the site had amassed the remains for many generations, right? It's not just one time period. So it went all the way back to 3,500 years ago. Yeah. That's longer than usually here in America.

The oldest skeletal remains in the U.S. date from about 9,000 years, 9,000, 10,000 years. So like Kennewick Man is one of the most famous of what we call our Paleo-Indians, which are Native American remains or indigenous remains that date 7,500 or older. Whoa. And yet it seems that it doesn't matter how old these remains are, there's always a modern tribe who thinks that they are connected. And that's what happened with Kennewick Man. And so some people may say, well, you know what, why don't you do DNA studies? But DNA studies will not tell you whether the skeletal remains belong to any specific tribes.

It will only tell you what kind of overall general population it would belong to, like Native American versus Siberian, right? Really? I didn't know that. And tribes themselves don't use DNA to determine who's in the tribe. They use what they call blood quantum a lot of times, which has nothing to do with blood, but rather is tracing family trees. How reliable is that?

I think it's pretty reliable for recent, for a few generations. But there's lots of what we call pretendians, right? People who pretend to be Indians and they're not. And they get outed all the time. One of the most famous, of course, is Sachin Littlefeather, right? Isn't she the one who gave the speech for Brando? Yes. In 1973 at the Oscars?

Yes. Oh, my God. Pull that out. I love Brando. I'm an enormous fan. Look behind you right there. Yeah. But he was wrong.

He was trying to do the right thing. It just didn't really work out. There's been a few of those. Oh, my God. This one wasn't Indian. What was the name of the woman in Seattle who like claimed that she was African American? Oh, yes. Rachel Dolezal.

Yes, that's it. Right? Right. I don't know why people do this stuff. Well, I mean, I think one of the reasons why they do it sometimes is because they actually get some benefit from it. So, I mean, there are, for example, scholarships that just go to Native Americans, right? Yeah, that's true.

That's true. I mean, ironically, we had a whole genre of these films where men dressing up as females to get some benefit, right? The whole bosom buddy thing or some like it hottest about that. So it's, you know, there is that. But yeah, so I ended up, my co author, Jim, basically talked to the publishers with me and said, you know, you're not going to pull this book. Given that he's now a retired attorney, he wasn't retired at the time, that probably worked in our favor. And basically, they didn't pull the book, but they sent out an apology letter for publishing it. And they said that they would try to, you know, the classic

apology, we'll try to do better next time. We'll try to do better. We're glad we got to make money on this and put our authors to the ringer, but we'll be better. Yeah. And so the other thing was that the open letter against the book had like over a thousand signatures, which is huge for an academic book. And I just know, I just know that most of those people didn't read the book. Because had they read it, it would have been like one of the best selling, best read books of the year in my field. Yeah.

None of them read it. And the other thing is that it came, the letter was so, came so quickly after it came out that it seemed unlikely that people had read it. And then, you know, then people would sign it. And then a whole bunch of other people sign it. Half of my department signed it, and all of the graduate students. So it was a huge thing. And so what I basically, what basically ended up happening is I called the chair of my department to let him know. And he's like, Oh, yeah, I've seen some of this trouble. No worries. Thanks for keeping me up to date. And, and when I, when I applied for leave, to so so that I wouldn't have to teach during the time I was working on the book, I had a book proposal that explained what

I was going to write about, right. And my chair had to approve that proposal and write his comments. And he was like, Oh, Elizabeth takes a very controversial perspective on the repatriation issue. We love her for it type of thing and say, this will bring the university, you know, we'll have a national or international reputation and, you know, very positive. After it all blew up up he was not so positive at all yeah using the word when i hear that and i hear them leading with a word like controversial that tells me yeah it's going to point in the hedge direction if it goes wrong yeah that's why i laugh when i heard that so um and so you know i have been at San Jose State, and I'm actually still a professor there until May. Really?

Then I will retire. Then I will retire, and I'll be professor emeritus, which is basically a status of a retired professor, so you still, you know, have certain privileges there, but I'm not required to teach or things like that. And basically what ended up happening is there were a couple other things that were bubbling away during this winter of 2020 to 2021.

And of course, you know, we get COVID around that time too. And so a couple of things that ended up happening beyond the book was that I said that graduate students should use this database called Cite Black Authors to make sure that they cite black authors for citational justice. And I sent a reply to that, very polite. And I said, you know, I know this is well-intentioned. However, I recommend that students cite the authors who did the best work, regardless of their skin color. Something along those lines, right?

Very controversial. Yes. So that was another thing that people were upset about. And then I went to a webinar for my university wanted to start a Native American Studies Center. And so I went to the webinar and the speakers were saying things that I would consider racist. For example, they said that in a Native American study center, you should not, if at all possible, you should not have Hispanics in the office. What? Yeah, because those Hispanics, like a secretary, because they may be mistaken for Native American,

or vice versa. And so I said, well, you know, why would that be bad if a Hispanic is mistaken for Native American or vice versa or if a Native American is mistaken for Hispanic? It's only bad if you think there's something wrong with being Hispanic. If you think there's something wrong with being Mexican, then it might be bad. But if you don't think there's anything wrong with Mexicans, it's not bad. Just like I have reddish hair.

If somebody mistakes me for an Irish person, it doesn't upset me. Why would it? It would only upset me if I think that there's something wrong with being Irish. Right. Common sense opinion. And so this ended up entailing a call from my chair telling me that I shouldn't attend such events, that these were echo chambers. And that he, although he agreed with me, he said, he thought I shouldn't attend them. And he basically said, you know, it could hurt the chances of the junior faculty's chances for tenure and promotion.

And I said, I didn't believe that. And he's like, well, how would you feel if you were a junior faculty and this kind of controversy would come up? And I told him, I said, I would hope that I would be the type of faculty at any time in my career that would support people's freedom of speech and academic freedom. You know, so that kind of passed. And then two other things happened. This is like a laundry list. this is not even the the most recent right two other things happened can i say one thing before you say i just want to keep everyone out there we are going to talk all about your actual research today as well and go through some cool history and stuff i wanted to make sure at the beginning here you got to outline all this

bullshit that has happened so that we get that on the table. But please continue. So the other things that happened was I wrote an op-ed for the Mercury News, which is the Bay Area's newspaper, main newspaper, I should say, about the new laws for reburying bones, the CalNACPRA's new laws. So the California Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. And I said that CalNAGPRA was like the federal law, NAGPRA, but on steroids. Because the position is that if there's a disagreement between the Native Americans' perspective and the scientists' perspective,

you have to give deference to the Native Americans. And so it's not a balance. It's not a preponderance of evidence. It's basically, so what is the whole point of even debating anything, then, if you're just going to say, well, you are always wrong if you disagree with the other group. That's the problem, yeah. And so when this op-ed came out,

I had a huge number of tweets about it, like negative tweets about it, from what I would call the pro-repatriation group. And it's kind of interesting. Most of the tweets were very personal attacks. A lot of them were like, oh, you're a grave robber, a ghoul, you know, things like that. And then I posted a photo not too long afterwards. So what happened was we got, of course, everybody had to leave the campus when COVID hit, right? And what happened was then we got to go back. And when I went back, I went into the curation facility

that holds the skeletal remains to resume my work. And when I got back after, I think it was, was it maybe 17 months or something? It was like some crazy length of time that we were gone, right? I was so happy to be back doing work. And like one of the things is that I really love the study of anatomy, the study of skeletal remains. It brings me joy. And so I was curating the collection, taking care of the collection in the sense of making sure that, you know,

the boxes were intact, the bags were good, that the bones were taken care of. And I opened one of the boxes and there was one of the individuals that I had many times seen when I've done research. And I held the skull and I thought, wow, I'm so happy to be back here. And so I took a photo and I tweeted that photo and I said, so happy to be back with old friends. And that like exploded. And the provost basically, you know, called it disgusting. He said, oh, why was I holding the bones without gloves? Actually, the National Park Service even, which is like one of the largest employers of archaeologists, says that you shouldn't use gloves unless like it's in a crime setting or something, right? Because, of course, if you have gloves on, you're more likely to drop the remains, right? So you're better off not holding it with gloves. You're better off holding it

barehanded. Didn't know that. This is common practice. You can Google photos of anthropologists with skulls. You'll see lots of them with gloves and lots of them without gloves. It's not unusual at all, but they made a big deal about it. And basically then the president, the president decided that she was going to change the protocols to, change the protocols to access. And I was a curator of the collections. So that means I get, was the one to take care of them. And she basically removed me from that post. And she removed me from that post. And then they changed the locks. They literally changed the locks of the curation facility,

like in the middle. So you couldn't even go in. Yeah. Can we have that picture, Alessi? I think I saw it. It's that one, that first one. This is it? Yeah, that one. that's what caused the huge yeah outrage yeah god people have too much time on their hands yeah i don't know what to tell you

that's crazy and so and like anybody who looks at that picture honestly can see that that's a sincere smile there's nothing of course that's not That's not fake. What's the other one right here? Oh, the other one is a photo that actually the university had used for their promotional materials for years. So they weren't upset about that one. And had no problem with that one or the other one. Yeah. That's so stupid.

So in a sense, they only started having problems with it after the book was published. And there's, you know, the one below that, too, where I'm holding it. I have my... No, over here, Alessia, on the right side. On the right side. On the right side. All the way. No, down.

No, no, no. Yeah, that one. Well, the big one. Yeah. That one. Yeah. That one, too. Used. Yeah. Not the one. Yeah. Yeah. That one too, used in promotional materials for the university. Same picture, right? Wow. And so basically,

um, and because all this was happening, um, I w I started to be concerned that I would lose my job. Of course. And throughout the whole thing, I was always civil. I always reached out to people to say, you know, let's talk about this and try to basically be, in a way, talk about it in a manner that is a civil manner to help people understand that the big reason why people were attacking me was not because of the photo, but because of the book and the op-ed.

Nevertheless, they basically changed the protocols to gain access to the collection and access to any of the collections. And that protocol read like a list of everything I hate. So, for example, you know, you have to wear gloves. And if your glove is torn, you have to wear and you have to put on a new glove. You have to wear a mask. For what? For what? We're not going to give them COVID.

Oh, my God. But then even more ridiculously, like you cannot take photos. You cannot take photos of the boxes in which the bones are in. So, you know, even if the box closed, you can't take, yeah. What about for record-keeping purposes? Yeah, so no more photos. And then, unbelievably, they decided to also have some behavioral guidance

that says you cannot cuss. You have to wear appropriate attire. And everybody knows when you say appropriate attire, you're talking about telling women what to wear. You're not talking about, you know, like so what, you can't go in there with shorts or a v-neck. Is a v-neck too risque to deal with bones? The bones are going to be very, very offended. And then top it off that they had a protocol that said menstruating personnel, they didn't even use the word women, are not allowed in the curation facility or to handle bones.

Oh, my God. all this was happening, I had, I basically had contacted Pacific Legal Foundation to get some legal help. And they basically helped me assume my university. There were other aspects such as in the summer, before we, I think it was before we returned, but sometimes timing is difficult when there's so much. Right. My chair, hosted by my dean, had held a talk, a webinar talk, on what to do when your tenured colleague has been branded a racist. And they then changed the name. My chair then went ahead and told the whole story from his perspective

but changed my name so that people wouldn't be able to figure out. I'm the only person studying skeletal remains at San Jose State, and it's a small department, so anybody could have figured it out within five seconds of a Google search. And they're only calling you a racist, just to make sure I'm following here, they're only calling you that because you didn't want to repatriate. Well, I think that that's where it started. Yeah. Then they say I'm racist because I didn't like the citational justice part, right?

So that's the other aspect. So there's the site black authors and then the Native American Studies Center. Oh, my God. But they changed when my chair talked about it. He changed my name. Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino. Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer

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Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. From Professor Weiss to Professor Jones. So to try to hide my identity. Yeah. So after, and basically what he said during that talk was

what to do if you have this, you know, this evil in your department is to keep, basically keep resources away from them and try to take them out of their classes. And, you know, just kind of things like... At first he was like, no, you know, I'm not worried about the classroom because Professor Jones doesn't teach her perspective in the classroom,

doesn't use her materials in the classroom. And I do, of course. I teach both perspectives. That's how a good professor does. I wouldn't say I'm an excellent professor, but I did try to keep things balanced. But basically, when he was challenged, they said, well, what about if Professor Jones

decided to teach, to assign her a book? And he said, well, yeah, then I might, I might consider taking her out of a class. So when he said all this, I, that was basically the jumping off, the big jumping off point for the, this lawsuit. So that kind of triggered the biggest step in there. So along with all the stuff happening at my university, I was to give a talk at the Society for American Archaeology, which was online because of COVID. And this is the largest academic archaeology association or organization in the U.S. And so I had submitted an abstract and basically got accepted. And the abstract challenged the use of creation myths to make determinations on whether bones should go back. So most anthropologists would agree that you shouldn't use

the biblical creation myths to try to reconstruct what happened in the past. But they have no problem accepting creation myths from Native Americans. And so my perspective is that they're both creation myths and neither should be used to determine what we can and cannot study. So after that talk ran, they did take it off the platform and issue an apology and basically said, we'll make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen again. So that was another aspect of it. So all of these things are happening within a fairly short period of time. In the meantime, I was desperate to get back into studying skeletal remains.

And there was one collection. There was actually three things that I was trying to gain access to in order to rebuild my scholarly or my research career. One of the things is animal bones, non-human animal bones that are clearly not grave goods. So, you know, like if you have a bird bone whistle that's buried with the individual, I would say that's a grave good. I'm not interested in that because that falls under NAGPRA. But the other animal bones, basically like the refuse, you know, like the deer that they butchered to eat. And part of the reason why I was interested in gaining access to animal bones is that a lot of

my research is actually about bone biology and not just specific to reconstructing the past. And so I figured I had a few ideas that I could use animal bones for as a substitute for human bones. Upon requesting those animal bones, which are not under NAGPRA or CalNAGPRA, which only deals with human remains and sacred artifacts, I was told that the tribe had decided that the animal bones, all animal bones, were sacred, and I would not be getting access to them. So basically they decided that those were sacred, and unfortunately when I was suing my university for access,

the judge, I would say, misunderstood the law. And her understanding of deference to the tribe was that deference was to mean that everything they say goes. Whereas, basically, deference in even in Kalanagpra which i'm completely opposed to but i can i can understand the the nuance from it is that basically deaf in relation to human remains and sacred artifacts that doesn't mean that they can say everything is sacred and the definition of sacred is something that you need there the definition in the law i should say is that it's something that needs um would be needed for a religious ritual did they say this i just want to make sure i followed this part did they say make this sacred remains claim about the animals as a result of you looking into it specifically or had they already said it before and now we're just like reinforcing their little bullshit law?

They had never claimed that they were sacred before. It just came right after I asked for it. There you go. And then the other aspect was – so that was, you know, strike one. I think we're on like strike eight now, according to these people. The other aspect was I asked for x-rays. Now, I've done x-ray and CT scan studies since 1997. So this is one area of my research is looking at bones with x-rays and CT scans. And so a large amount of x-rays have been taken from these skeletal remains. And they're housed in the curation facility, they're housed in that room. And so I asked for access to the x-rays.

And lo and behold, the x-rays are now sacred. Now, x-rays cannot be sacred because they didn't have x-rays in the past. How many years? And so they could not have been used in their traditional ancient rituals. And Nick has, his line is that if I had asked for a pencil, it would have turned sacred. You know, that it didn't matter what I asked for. The third thing that I asked for was a collection from Carthage, Tunisia. And they actually did ask the tribe whether this

collection was related to them and the tribe said no. I think now if they would ask them again, I have the feeling they probably would, realizing that they know. But they took, the university took 10 months to grant me access to the Carthage collection, looking for a way to keep me away, you know. I finally did get access to it. And, but the Carthage collection, although it's kind of interesting because it's like 6th to 7th century Carthage, Tunisia, around the circus times, you know, the Byzantine circus, it's a very poorly preserved collection. twofold. One is that the soils are very sandy, and that's not good for bone preservation, because you get like the rains and then dry and the rains dry is very bad for bone preservation. But they were in coffins, but the coffins had been opened because they the site had been looted historically by Muslims. And so so it's not a great, well-preserved collection. I was able to do a few studies on them, but, you know, that was pretty much it.

Where was the collection housed? In San Jose State. Okay, it was there. Because it was excavated by the anthropologist who was there before me, Bob Germain, in the early 80s, I believe, like 81 to 83 or so, I think. And in the other collection, the large skeletal collection that I curated and did research on for 18 years or so,

the Ryan Mound, that prehistoric collection, it's beautifully preserved. It has over 300 individuals. The preservation is so beautiful that even finger bones are preserved and toe bones. I mean, it's just a beautiful collection. And it's a real shame that it's not going to be able to help us reconstruct the past or understand humans anymore because now it's off limits to everybody. That is just absurd.

And then your most recent one, I think what Nick was telling me about was you identified some remains as female. Is that right? And they tried to say that they didn't know if they would identify that way so this is um one of them one of the first things you do when you're doing skeletal studies is you try to figure out the age and sex of the individuals yeah no kidding right so male females like and actually you do the sex before the age because the sex sometimes determining the sex will affect how you age the individual because there's some nuances of differences how males and females age. And also, of course, females mature faster in the young years, and that has a slight effect on what the age determination is.

So you sex and age the scalp hormones. So there's males and females. The sex is binary. It's biological. All these things we've known. You're going to get a jumble for saying that. And so I was asked from a cultural anthropologist to, she's a cultural anthropologist,

and she also looks at sex differences. I was asked to be on a panel with her and three other anthropologists, so cultural and me and I think there was one linguist, if I'm not wrong. So five of us all together, all females. That was the panelist, the person who created the panel, Kathleen Lowry. She's in the University of Alberta. That was her decision. I didn't even know that this was necessarily an intentional decision or not.

But anyways, anthropology has far more females than males anyway. But five females, me from the U.S., her from Alberta, then one from Quebec, one from the U.K., and one from Spain. So three languages, four countries, five females. And we all agreed that the panel should be on binary biological sex, but we had different perspectives on other aspects, right? So, for example, some of them are concerned about the gap, the sex gap between males and females in technology. I'm also concerned about that.

So the idea was that the panel's title was Let's Talk About Sex, Baby. Biological sex is still an important analytical variable for anthropology or something like that. And we submitted it. It got accepted to the panel, the American Anthropological Association. It was a conference. And the other, and they were holding the conference as a joint conference with the Canadian Anthropology

Society and what we call the AAA, the American Anthropological Association. And this is their annual conference. We submitted the panel with a description of the panel and each of our abstracts. So my abstract's title was No Bones Bout It, Skeletons Are Binary, or People May be. I think that that's what it was. And I talk about how anthropologists are very good at determining who's male and female by looking at the bones. I've done this on multiple collections. It's an important aspect to consider. And one of the things is, a lot of my research revolved around trying to determine what people did in the past. So not,

not only, you know, biological differences, but activity differences. And there are traits that anthropologists have used to determine what people did in the past that always show up that the males are more robust or bigger and we call some of these like muscle markers or emphases so this is basically where a muscle literally attaches on your bone and when you use that muscle it will have it will create a marker or a ridge on the bone and the concept is that the more you use that muscle the bigger the ridges but there are sex differences in how bone is deposited and so if you and i were to do the same activity for the same length of time and then you'd look at our bones your bone would be more robust than mine even if we did the exact same thing because of the hormonal difference

is that occur and so basically what was happening was there was this great focus on male activity and saying oh males were doing all this stuff and ignoring female activity or downplaying it. And so my perspective was like we have to understand the biological differences or basically we're going to be always saying, well, males were doing more than females. Seems like a progressive idea. It does. It was for a long time a progressive idea. So that was part of my talk.

And then the other part of it was about the importance of understanding sex differences for forensics. It's like if you find skeletal remains in a crime setting, an anthropologist will go in there and determine whether it was male and female. If it's skeletal, right? And they learn this by looking at collections, right? You're trained in a human osteology class. And this is a basic thing to do, but we've gotten better and better at it. So pretty much throughout the pelvis is the best indicator of sex differences, which is not surprising because of childbirth. Makes sense. But almost the entire skeleton can be used to determine male and female differences. And if you use multiple traits, then you can get a practically

a hundred percent. If you're looking at juveniles, because a lot of those sex differences don't come about on the bones until puberty, you can still use DNA look at for forensic reasons, to be able to identify if somebody died, whether they were male or female, to be able to best identify who that person was, and then hopefully find the person who did the crime, right? Bringing closure to those people's families and so forth. So I think that the problem when you say that sex is not binary is that you then think, okay, well, we don't have to improve our methods because anybody who we can't identify as male or female, and of course there will always be times when you can't do the identification because the remains are not well enough preserved, and so we get better and better the more we study them we could you know get

improve our methods but there will be people who are classified as unidentified and this is just because we're not perfect with our methods it's not because these people were trans or that sex is on a spectrum. And so I talk about that. And then I also, there's a misunderstanding, I would say, of disorders of sexual development, like individuals who have abnormal chromosome numbers, like XYY or XXY, you know, or a missing one. And these are pathologies. They're birth defects. They're not another sex. It's an insult to people to say if you have, you know,

one of these things that you are some kind of intersex or some kind of in between sex or it's it's a pathology and these people are a quick question on that are there medical this is something i know a little less about but is the term hermaphrodite is there something medical where they do say for example you are in very rare cases you are technically born between the two? Hermaphrodite is now called either intersex or disorders of sexual development. defects, abnormalities, they are basically, you can think of it as something's gone wrong, right? So like, for example, a female who has an you know, who's born with, you know, undescended testicles, this is still a man, right? So the... I see. Sometimes if

we're just looking at soft tissue we might make a mistake. But the ability to either produce sperm or to ovulate is one of the main factors. That then controls all sorts of things. So it's not like there's only one thing that tells you it's male or female. And some things can go wrong. But we have five fingers on each hand. There are people who have six fingers, seven fingers on each. We wouldn't say, oh, well, you know, the normal human hand has between five and seven fingers. We would just say that that's a birth defect.

You know? Defect defects happen. So I think, and I think that people think, oh, that's mean, but it's not mean, it's just factual. And I actually think it's mean to not be factual. That's, it feels like in society, and it's got to drive people who are like you, you know, on the scientific or observational end of things nuts even more than the regular people like me. But it seems like in society, we have over-delted not hurting people's feelings so much that as a result, we're kind of hurting everybody's feelings.

Yeah. It's like a circle and it's flipped back around to the other side. Yeah. And so basically, and then I ended my talk with the argument that, you know, gender, which I would define as, and I think this is the definition that most anthropologists would have defined it, would have used as a definition up to about five years ago or so, right? As the expression of someone's femininity or masculinity, which can be, you know, in between, right? So I would say gender is on a spectrum. Most often somebody's gender aligns with their sex, but there are people whose gender doesn't. And so one of the things that I talk about is that anthropologists, especially forensic anthropologists, should try to learn ways to identify whether somebody was transgendered, and specifically, had they undergone feminization surgery, you know, which changes bones.

All the way back then? No, no, no, modern day. So it's forensics. All right, all right. So forensics, for forensic collection. I was thinking, Sam, like, damn, they were really up to some shit back then. No.

And so, yeah, so just for the forensic samples. For the archaeological samples, I would say that you cannot make that determination and you just have to stick to sex differences. And I think it's kind of insulting to assume that just because a woman is buried with a male artifact or an assumed male artifact that she couldn't have been a normal woman. Doesn't that just mean that maybe the sex roles weren't as strict as we had sometimes said? And there are some anthropologists who are making that argument that, you know,

if you find a female with, you know, a sword, it means that they were women warriors. And so I think that that's a much more reasonable conclusion to draw than oh that individual was trans when you know that's we we cannot say that about people from hundreds of years ago and it's kind of um it's it's really like ethnocentric to think that, like using our own culture to put it back onto the others, right? Like, oh, well, you know, we have trans people now, so they must have always existed.

Even like the term two-spirit, Native American term, to mean individuals who are both male and female. That term is new. It's from like 1990. It's a renewed term. These are new concepts. And so I do think that now there were probably always people who sometimes felt like a gender dysphoria, you know, I mean, just like there are people who have other, you know, mental disorders or mental anxieties or, you know, and I'm not a psychologist, so I don't

know what percentage of those people there are and how those different disorders interrelate. late. But I think now that we do have sex feminization surgery, which doesn't change the sex, it just makes people look more feminine. It's up to the forensic anthropologists to see if they can then use that to identify whether somebody was a different gender. But that doesn't mean that we should abandon the term sex, and it's very different. So I thought this was all very politically correct, quite honestly. Oh, this time around I'm not being that controversial. Well, I was wrong. And so our panel was accepted

in July. And then about end of September, we got an email basically saying, signed by the president of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society, saying that they're withdrawing our acceptance, that it's been rescinded because of the harm it will cause to the LGBTQIA community. There's a lot. There's pluses, nines, minuses, and things like that. And so, yeah. So this is the first time a panel has been rescinded in the whole 122-year history of the American Anthropological Association.

Fortunately, Heterodox Academy, which is where I'm at now, Heterodox Academy is an organization that's trying to get people to come back to civil disagreement as opposed to uncivil disagreement. I like that. And so their motto is great minds don't always think alike. And so Heterodox Academy has a center for academic pluralism which is basically academic, some academics there, and we think differently or have different perspectives even within our group. And so their position is that, you know, you make your case with evidence, you stay humble,

you give people the benefit of the doubt. You be true to yourself. Those kinds of thoughts, like they're the heterodox way. All good stuff. All good stuff. And so they came in, and I'm there for the year as a faculty fellow, and they came in and said, look, we'll rescue this panel. They didn't use the term rescue, but that's what they did. And we'll put it on as a webinar.

And so it ran on November 8th, I believe. It was live streamed. We had 400 registered viewers, which is pretty good for an academic webinar, and over 2,000 live viewers. And I think it's probably about up to 4,000 views now. It's still on YouTube. And basically, we all gave the talks that we would have given at the conference. It's still a shame. In a sense, it's still a shame that anthropologists are basically saying, we don't want to debate it. We don't want a debate.

Basically, we're not letting you on to our conference. One of the interesting things is that then they, when this hit the news media, mainstream media, most people, I would say most of the reports were on our side. I would say we got favorable coverage. And the AAA basically did not reach out to any of us, any of the panelists.

And then they put out a statement for journalists, and some of the other panelists were like, are we sure that this is really from the AAA? Maybe this is like a hoax or so because it was so outrageous. They're doubling down and their examples. I believe, and I could be getting this wrong, but I believe they included things like to argue that sex is not binary, that some lizards can change their sex. Oh, man. So I was sure that it was the AAA

because I was like, who else would take the time to write this, right? So, but we did get to present. I just think, like, if we abandon the concept of identifying sex, we've really lost a huge part of anthropology, you know, not only in forensics but archaeology. And then the other thing is many anthropologists are...

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they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer so download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes plus enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders service fees exclusions and terms apply instacart groceries that over deliver really important um Really important in medical research and biomedical research. So they teach anatomy. But also almost every university student will take at least one anthropology class because there's in the U.S. Because anthropology has so many GE, general education classes. And so, like, if anthropology decides that sex is on a spectrum, the science is settled, they said.

Sex is on a spectrum. Oh, isn't that the best when they say the science is settled? As if we haven't disproven every goddamn thing anyone's ever come up with in science? Come on, man. So the science is settled. Sex is on the spectrum. They get to spread this narrative to almost everyone going into schools, which gets to spread to those people who are going to be teaching children. And I think that we need to, as anthropologists, need to understand the impact this has on people's lives. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Our Discord and Patreon links are in the description. We are starting to do AMAs on Discord. We are also now releasing a new show called The Julian and Alessi Show with my producer Alessi Alamon on Patreon along with some other exclusive content from episodes that we have been putting out on YouTube that are not seen on YouTube. And like one of the things I'm interested in is seeing how transitioning, especially young transitioners, what effect that will have on their bones. Because the jury is still out whether it will increase osteoporosis, you know, whether it will, does it stunt growth in certain individuals, and, you know, all sorts of other things.

I mean, I'm a bone person, so I'm interested in what it does to bones, but I've read, like, some quite scary stuff from other medical areas, such as, you know, we don't know what it does to, when you stop puberty, we don't know what that does to a person's brain development. Oh, yeah. I would definitely be concerned about that if I was a parent. Yes. You know, so I think that anthropologists really do need to walk away from the term settled science and or the phrase the science is settled and reopen up the debate about this on the this is a phenomenon and it's not just an

anthropology as we laid out it's in a lot of things that has taken hold i would say from my seat looking more over the last decade i don't think i even need to go too much farther back than that i'm sure there were little signs and stuff but it's happened so fast to where we're living in this world that wants to demand an iron line on everything based on usually a complete lack of evidence and just some arbitrary definition. And it is affecting the ability of professionals like yourself to go out and do the work you're quite literally trained to do. Is this a funding problem, like the people who are funding things? Where does this begin in your estimation? Well, I think that the identity politics, I guess that's what I'll, you know, which I think encompasses all of this, right? So the Native American issue,

but also the, you know, citational justice issue to the trans issue. I think it's all identity politics. And it's kind of interesting that when people, when my talk was deplatformed for the Society for American Archaeology, so many special interest groups in anthropology jumped on the bandwagon and wrote their own letter against me.

So the Black Trowel Collective, who also wrote a supportive letter about the recent cancellation, so they were in favor of our panel being canceled. The queer archaeology group and all sorts of other groups like that. I think that this is in large part a postmodern movement. Basically, and...

I know. I wouldn't consider myself really that, I wouldn't consider myself that intellectual, quite honestly. It's like. What are we? But like my, like I'm, I'm the youngest of four siblings and two of my siblings are also in academia. And like they talk about things that I literally don't understand them okay so because I'm much more kind of a hands-on like you know I like anatomy I like bones I like you know in that sense and so I hadn't really thought about where things were coming from until more recently.

And I would say more recently, like maybe 2018 or so when I started writing the book. And I think that it's postmodern movement that basically argues that there is no truth. There's no facts. That the only thing what matters is your lived experience and the victim's narrative. And so then what you get is you get an emphasis on the importance of people identifying as victims and you create victim groups.

And so I think that, and then when, whatever they say is taken to be, they wouldn't call it truth, but I guess a post-truth truth. Right. Whatever you want to say, right? They want to cloak it in something else, but they're really doing, they're accomplishing exactly what you just laid out with the opposite end result, which is that the only – they're saying, as you put it, the only truth is your lived experience except for when we then tell you that this is the only acceptable lived experience anti-indigenous you're a racist you're a colonialist you know a ghoul you know or even a bitch you know it doesn't matter but you know i mean one of the things i i think is interesting is how personal the attacks get, not only against me, but against people like Frances Widowson, who has challenged the— she's a professor at Mount Royal University who has been fired

in part for challenging the residential school clandestine graves story. So I don't know if you... The what? So basically the Indian residential schools in Canada, they've been using ground penetrating radar to find unmarked graves of children. So this would be like starting a couple hundred years ago to up to the 70s or so, right?

Or the 60s. And Frances Whittleson is a, I believe she's an economist, and she talks about the indigenous, so Native American First Nations in Canada, kind of industry that is also very similar to here, where they get a lot of government perks to try to help them out of their poverty, and also because of the past, and they're considered as their sovereignty issues.

But basically, there's this big hoax that has been going on in Canada, and it has leaked over into the U.S. a little bit, but not nearly as bad, that the areas where there were Indian residential schools, so basically boarding schools for Native Americans, basically that children died here and they were buried and they are unmarked graves. Now, of course, children died in vast numbers in historic times and prehistoric times. I mean, we know that. I mean, child mortality was very high. Marked graves is something fairly new. So usually, you know, a grave marker is fairly new. Sometimes the graves were marked, like in, let's say, you know, early 1900s, late 1800s, early 1900s or so, but they were done with wooden crosses that then deteriorated and, you know.

But the argument for the main problem with the Indian residential school narrative is that it's clandestine graves. So basically children were, sometimes the stories that they were murdered and then buried, or they tried to run away, or they were neglected and died. So it's kind of like this crime, right? And so some anthropologists have been using ground-penetrating radar

to go through these areas to find evidence of graves. Well, ground-penetrating radar will not tell you if there are graves. It will just tell you if something's in the ground. What it is in the ground, you have to dig up to find out what it is, right? You actually have to excavate it. But one of the big sites, the Kamloops site, has like 250 marks that have been designated as graves by the politicians and so forth. So she has exposed some of this scandal, and she and I just recently wrote an article together

talking about these kinds of issues and why ground-penetrating radar is only the first step to determine something, not the last step. A tree root can make you think that something's under there, you know. And she was fired from her position at Mount Royal University, and the attacks on her are also very personal. So it's another example. She's currently fighting to get her job back and I wish her all the best. But it is, you know, people sometimes say, oh, you know, why don't you go elsewhere like Canada? And I'm like, it's not better, it's worse. That is, yeah. I mean, it's a shame that people even have to feel like they're with things because that's where equilibrium is.

And so, for example, if you have academia putting an ivory tower around any loosely defined truth that they decide is real, and then you have people who come in and maybe they're not from academia, but they're smart. And they say, well, wait a minute. We have some evidence that could question that. What happens? The people from the ivory tower shoot spears down at them and tell them to fuck off and that's the end of it, right? But it's not the end of it because then these people start to get mad because they're a human and they react. And so what happens then? Then they try to build more evidence.

And maybe they then build evidence beyond what's actually real evidence and they start to make the opposite mistake from the other end yeah you see what i'm saying and so i constantly am seeing across all different fields that you have the the experts and the renegades right and to me i'm always looking at pieces of what they say and sometimes they both say ridiculous shit that i'm like okay stop right but then other times i'm like okay a little bit of that a little bit of this a little bit of that a little bit of this but it's almost like the world is set up in a way that we can't live in that combination they have to hate each other and fight each other yeah and i do think that that's part you know that that there is that big problem and And like archaeology, interestingly, has a very long history of armchair archaeologists and that we've learned a lot from.

What do you mean we've learned a lot from? Well, a lot of excavations early on were from armchair archaeologists. And so we have sites from those curational materials that are curated from them. But we've also, you know, a lot of early anthropology and archaeology was done by armchair archaeologists who were, for example, doctors. And so they used their evidence, they used their medical experience to understand past diseases. And we have it, it's even from those armchair archaeologists, the medical doctors, you get a whole new group field called paleopathology, this pathology disease, paleo, you know, old. So it turned into something okay. Yeah.

And so, and like if you read some of my own work, when I, so if you look at my academic literature, I have like, I would say, several different veins of research. And one of those veins is understanding diseases of the past, bone diseases of the past. And in order to do that, I oftentimes use a comparative approach with medical literature. Well, this is directly a result of those doctors who spent their weekends, you know, being archaeologists. So medical doctors, right? And so, and actually one of the last studies that I did on the Native American remains, the Ryan Mound, it was a study on a single individual,

so it was like a case study, right? And this individual had a big bump on the back of the head, almost like a golf ball-sized bump on the skull. And me and my co-author were trying to figure out what caused this bump. Usually, if you're looking at violence and somebody hits you in the head, you'll see an indent, not a bump, right? Even though if you think about like cartoons, like they show the rise and the bump, right?

Yeah, that's where my head was going. Well, it turns out that sometimes you will get a bump even from an injury. So this individual had this golf ball-sized bump on the back of the head, and we took an X-ray of the skull, and you could see a hairline fracture where there had been a fracture, which was likely where he was hit on the head, and then this caused likely a hematoma, so like a blood clot. And then this ossified and gave the bump.

Whoa. And we can figure this out by comparing that X-ray to the X-rays in the medical literature. So this is kind of like a marriage of medicine and anthropology. And so with that information, then you can say, well, you know, maybe we're missing a lot of evidence of violence. We know that, for example, when you look at evidence of violence, you know, prehistoric America was full of violence. You don't say. Inter-tribal violence, and they were constantly replacing each other from one site to another. But you don't find as much evidence than, you find a lot of evidence, but you don't

find as much evidence as there likely is because you have four issues. One, it could be that the person died without it affecting the bone, right? So arrowhead goes into soft tissue, the person bleeds out, doesn't leave any mark on the bone. That's one possibility. Two, that it left a mark on the bone, but one, that we didn't expect, like the bump on the head. Three, that the person was injured, survived it, and the bone healed enough to make us not see it. And we sometimes do see that.

And one way to be able to see that more clearly sometimes is with x-ray evidence. So sometimes a bone will look perfectly fine on the outside, but you can see where it had been broken on the inside. And then four is that, you know, sometimes people will have been injured, but we mistake it for injured due to violence, but we mistake it for something else. And vice versa, of course. So we have a pretty good indicator of the level of violence, but we can always get better at determining how much violence there was, just like we can always get better with age estimation and sex determination. And so one of the things is that, you know, moving, this is a moving field, so to speak, that, you know, you can always improve your methods. And some people may say, well, you know, what's the point? These people have been

long dead. Why do we want to know what they lived like? What? I think that, you know, some people would say that and say, therefore, you should bury the bones. It's not, you know, but I think that in some ways it tells a human story, which is something that we all know. And the other thing is that it has practical implications because what we learn in archaeology, we can use in forensics and vice versa. And so it's not just this kind of esoteric field that, you know, a few people are sitting in our leather chairs trying to figure out, you know, but rather that it has real world implications. And I also think that by telling the true story of the past,

and of course that story is always open to being reanalyzed and reexamined as long as you still have the data, and the data are the bones. So I could be wrong. It could be that there were less violence than thought, right? I think that that helps us kind of join and understand each other better. So it's one of the things that's like, you know, we have this image, for example, of looting. When you say, you know, the remains were looted, like, you know, I teach a class in mummies called mummies and I spent a year living in Egypt

and when you talk about many of the mummies the ancient Egyptian mummies were destroyed through looting most people's immediate thought is those evil Europeans, which there were some who engaged in that, and that was bad. But looting goes back all the way to pharaonic times, and we had some of the earliest hieroglyphic writing about looting.

Pharaonic? So the pharaohs, right? Oh, okay. Yeah. So it goes back, you know, thousands of years. And there were times when the priests would be moving mummies to try to prevent looting. And that's one of the reasons why it's sometimes difficult

to determine whether that mummy is really, was that a royal mummy or not? We don't necessarily know because of the reasons why it's sometimes difficult to determine whether that mummy is really a is that was that a royal mummy or not we don't know necessarily know because of the movement so when you reveal that that looting is not just by one person or one type of person or one group of people then you can see well you know what that, you know, this kind of bad behavior is something that's a human nature, not a particular group, and therefore you don't hate a particular group for engaging in that. You figure out how can we convince all humans not to do that. And I think the way to convince all humans not to do things like that,

not to loot, not to destroy remains because they want to, the financial gain, I think the way to do that is to show them how much we can learn by studying them and so that when excavation occurs that it occurs in a way that best preserves the remains and then curate them so that they can be continuously studied. And this is a human story. So I think it's a real shame when you start pointing fingers and saying, well, it's only these people, because it's never only one person,

only one type of people. It's always more complex than that. Yeah, and I think people always throughout at least recent history, the last few hundred years especially, they try to create narratives with ancient civilizations and remains that are found to know you can do stuff where it even gets to people trying to claim claim racial superiority and stuff like that but in reality you know we are an animal we're we're the king of the animal kingdom and as as a full human race there are human sins that we all do yeah time. We all – we are – what is it? The seven deadly sins or whatever? We all have that.

It manifests in different ways across everything. But you can get lost in that if you start trying to separate it out like you said. I got into this asking you about people who have maybe dissenting opinions and you used the phrase armchair archaeologist, which I know what you mean and I've talked to some guys like that as well. But one of the main names now in pop culture is Graham Hancock because he blew up through going on Joe Rogan so much. He's done a big special now on Netflix that was pretty good. I mean, from what I watched and, you know, he's a very fiery guy and I think he's a prime example of someone who gets attacked so hard that then he reacts and he kind of comes back at people. Right. And I understand, you know, I, I wish you wouldn't do that sometimes. Of course. He has attacked me quite um oh he has yeah so you have a personal

back what i don't know him i don't know him but um and um nick has met him um but basically on his website he had a article that was written by by his assistant i I guess, that basically said, oh, you know, well, the academic anthropologists call Graham Hancock a racist, but they're the real racists. And then he goes through, or she goes through, and basically uses my research and example at the deplatformed talk from the Society for American Archaeology as the example.

And so I reached out to him actually very politely, and then I put a comment on to give context, and that was not posted on there. They did not post my comment. He then later, you know, I reached out to him and I said, you know, let's talk about this and, you know, see where the misunderstanding is. And basically he said that he disagrees with me and he thinks that he stands by that article

and if I want to, I can repost, I can send him the material that I put on the comment thing. But I didn't bother. And, yeah. See, that's very disappointing to me because that's committing. He's using the same types of attacks that get used against him against you in that way. Yes. That's wildly hypocritical. Yeah.

And like, I mean, I don't know his work. From what I understand is that he, from what I understand is he uses, he accepts the narrative of the indigenous narratives as evidence and I don't. What do you mean by that? So I think that he takes seriously mythology that they tell as a historical fact, which is kind of funny because one of the things that I'm very criticized for

is that I don't listen to indigenous narratives. So my position is that origin myths, folklore, oral tradition are all poor lines of evidence because there's no written language. And there hasn't, the Native Americans, First Nations, and most of South Americans, they all did not come up with a written language. And so when they tell us things today, we cannot know how far back that story goes. And so there's fairly good evidence from anthropologists like Lynn Custred, who has spoken about paleo-Indians, so remember they're 7,500 years old and older, and linguistics, because modern Native American tribes have argued that their oral stories, their oral tradition, go back thousands of years. And Glenn Custard, who is a linguist, he said reliably oral tradition at the very most would go back maybe, maybe 500 years.

But that would be very generous. And actually more likely 150 or so. So I don't take, like when I hear oral tradition, folklore, I don't take that as serious evidence. I think that, and

that's why I come to some of the conclusions that I do, especially regarding the peopling of the Americas and various other aspects. But, and Graham Hancock takes that evidence more seriously. Ironically, the people who have called me a racist and sometimes criticize me, oftentimes criticize me for not taking oral tradition seriously. And so does he.

And they both call me racist yeah see i i personally that's that's a big that's a tough spot for me when that when these stories come up and we've talked with a lot of different people on this podcast i've had in matt lacroix who's like the ultimate ancient civilizations guy reading all that stuff including like the sumerian tablets and things like that. And then I've had in a Christian apologist, Hugh Ross, who's like the Bible's all real. I've had in physicists like Lawrence Krauss who tell you none of it's real, right? So we're all over the board here. But human nature says that if 20 of us sat in a circle and whispered a story down the line just in the same room at the same time in the same part of history, even if it's only 5%, it changes, right?

Yeah. So no matter what I hear – and all these people disagree with each other, right? But when I hear them talk about ancient stories, I think there could be threads of truth in there. But how the hell am I going to figure out which ones there are? So I have to take it all, not to be a cynic, but I have to take it all with a huge grain of salt because human beings are flawed. They change things. Oral history especially changes.

And that's one of the things that, you know, that I've been very much criticized for, and for exactly thinking that way. Well, you know, the stories will change, and they do. Of course they do. That's why I like the bones, because they are hard evidence. And my interpretation sometimes could be wrong, but then it's there. And whoever comes next, we'll see that same evidence. And then they can come to conclusions from that evidence. So, I mean, that's, that's the beauty of it. It's like, we could have the femur here, thigh bone here, and we all could look at it and come to different conclusions.

And as long as that bone is not buried, it can be studied for decades, and eventually you might get to the right conclusion. But it's not going to change. That bone is a bone. So I think that's what appeals to me about anatomy. And I think the other what appeals to me about anatomy and about... And I think the other thing is, skeletal anatomy in particular,

it is the clearest evidence of evolution that you can come across because there's just so much similarity between one animal and another. And if you were going to design if you're going to design different animals why would you put all the same bones in the same sequence and just change the shape a little bit you know but you know it's it's remarkable like if you know the skeletor main if you know the bones of you know a cat a human a pig you'll see so many similarities and actually forensic anthropologists oftentimes use pigs pig carcasses to do their experimental studies like studies on okay like if you take a knife and stab this pig will it leave a mark on the bone yeah why why why pigs uh because they don't have fur and they're fatty so it's just like us we

don't have fur and we're fatty some more fatty than others yeah for sure i feel like when you're looking at the old bones though they had a they had a better lack of a weight problem back then. I'm sure they did. As opposed to us now. One of the things that I did, one of my areas of research is on arthritis. So degenerative joint disease, right? And what we find if you look at patterns of arthritis is in the past, people had arthritis, like if you're looking at hunter-gatherers or even early agriculturalists in the Americas, you see most of the arthritis is in the upper limb. And in the back, when you have arthritis in the backbones, like the vertebral column,

that's almost always just age-related. You know, they got it earlier than we do now, but the shoulder and elbow have much higher rates of arthritis in hunter-gatherer populations in the Americas than we see now in modern populations. But now we have much more knee arthritis and hip arthritis, which is because we're carrying so much weight. Wow. That's painfully obvious. Yeah. And so like these patterns, you know, you can go from like 3,000 years ago to now and you can see that really it wasn't until very recently that we got heavier. Yeah.

I always think about, you know, you look at where medicine's gone even in the last 50 years, but go at 100 years back, go 150 years back. If someone broke a bone and stuff like that, the types of remedies for that are not the same as they have now. If someone tears a ligament, well, I guess you just have a weak leg for the rest of your life and we see how easily this stuff happens. So as someone on my end, like I've had severe shoulder problems right i've had multiple surgeries on this side i have to get another one on there now i gotta get one on this side too and i'm lucky to be able to have that resource because each time i've done it it gets fixed very

well and then my dumb ass finds a way to hurt it again but then i'm thinking about all the time all these like go back to the hunter gatherers as just said, and there you say they're getting arthritis in their elbows and shoulders because these people are climbing trees and shit, you know, throwing things, throwing. Imagine if you're a hunter-gatherer back then at age 15, you just tear your labrum. Yeah. Now your shoulders lose for the rest of your life. You can't climb stuff anymore. You're biologically indominant compared to the other people around you. You're not as valuable to your tribe because you can't climb stuff anymore. You're biologically indominant compared to the other people around you. You're not as valuable to your tribe because you can't hunt as effectively. Like simple things.

But in the same token, what's beautiful about it is that we have dating back to even Neanderthals evidence that people who were injured were taken care of. How so? were taken care of. And so you have evidence of people who have limbs that were withered away, and that takes a long time. So if I now break something and I can't use that, then that bone is not going to remodel, and the bone loss continues, but it doesn't remodel. And so the bone will get smaller, right, withers away. And it takes quite a long time for that to happen.

So if you see an individual that had that happen, you know that they lived a long time with that injury, and that likely means that they were taken care of. Wow. Especially if you, another example is. Because they that they were taken care of. Wow. Especially if you, another example is. Because they'd be left for dead otherwise. Yeah. Another example is that you'll see sometimes people who have lost all their teeth and their, the bone in their jaw is even resorbed or the tooth sockets are closed, right? This will happen if you lose your teeth.

But it takes a long time. So if you have an individual who has lost all their teeth and their sockets are closed, then they were taken care of in some way, most likely. And so I think that this is a perfect example of humans have been looking after each other as well that's very we don't we don't only fight we sometimes get along yeah yeah and how so i want to get to the fun stuff with you because we've been going through obviously a lot of a lot of things you've had to deal with but what when you talk about the research you've done the stuff

we've mostly gone through today has been a lot of i guess like north american type things you're looking at but have you done research a lot around the world as well on ancient civilizations what would you say the scope is i mainly have done research on a native american remains but i have done a research done research on Quebec prisoners of war from like the 1700s. Oh, wow. The Carthage collection, which is the Byzantine Carthage, the 6th century. And then forensic collections. So the oldest thing I've ever done research on is about 2.5 million-year-old foot bone of what we call a homo habilis. So if you look at human evolution, when you go from the split from apes, the big ape-human split, right?

What approximately one do you think that was? About five million years. And then you have like the little, what we call the australopithecines, like the lucis, right? And then around two and a half million years, you get your first fossils from the genus Homo, so Homo habilis. And habilis means handy in Latin. And so this is also when we see some of the first stone tools made. And so it was thought, and it's still very, many people still link Homo habilis to the first stone tools 2.4 million years ago, 2.5 million years ago. And so Homo habilis, so there's a fossil that is half of a body about called Johnny's Child or Johnny's Boy, depending,

which was discovered in, I'm going to say like maybe early 60s, like maybe 1960 or so, by the famous anthropologist Louis Leakey's son, Jonathan. So it's Johnny's boy. And this remain has a foot that, it has a part of leg, part of arm, hand, and a foot. And the foot looks like it has arthritis. And so one of the reasons why this is interesting is because it's actually the fusion patterns of the... So, like, when we're growing, we have these things between the long bones,

and our toes are included and our feet bones are included in those long bones that helps grow in length so they're called growth plates and then when you stop growing those fuse and if you take an x-ray of these other body parts you sometimes will see what we call an epiphyseal scar or what we also talk about as ghost lines where growth had occurred and so one of the big questions was the skeletal remains that were considered johnny's boy was that only one individual or more than one individual and one of the things is that it's pretty clear that some of the remains belong to a child or not an adult. But the foot has arthritis. And so if the foot has arthritis,

that was not a child. And so what we did was we looked at the x-rays to see these growth lines. And what we found was that the growth pattern suggests that what was previously thought to be evidence of youth, of the foot belonging to a young individual, is actually just these ghost lines, these scars of growing, right? And you don't see it on the surface. You have to take x-ray. And so this this was, so this suggests that there was actually two individuals, an old individual, old as in,

you know, their personal age at death was old, and a young individual. And so this was, you know, quite an interesting study. But the practical purpose of it was that looking at that then can tell you that when you find a foot, for example, at a forensic site, and there's actually quite a few forensic sites where only a foot at a forensic site and you x-ray it and you see these ghost lines that's not telling you that that individual was young and therefore you should not use it for aging and because previously they did they thought oh if you have a ghost line you're you just recently stopped growing but when did they figure out the distinction there how long ago well um that was one actually in my own study we did that so that was like maybe 10 years ago whoa so yeah very cool so and why do people only find a foot so often what's the pattern there um i think that because feet are in shoes that the shoe protects it

there's this there's even like these um stories about feet washing ashore and Australian beaches. And, you know, yeah. So in forensic cases, I think it's because of the shoe. Makes sense. Yeah. But you don't really think about shoes 2.5 million years ago, but I guess. But this would be forensics. So in the ancient things, you'll find it's random.

Oh, okay. So yeah. All right, so there's a distinction there. Okay. Wow, that's a lot. I mean, does it hit you when you're looking at something that's 2.5 million years old? Is there like a weird feeling that comes over your body, like, holy shit? No, I mean, I just think it's fascinating.

Another day at the office. I just love the whole field. And one of the reasons why I'm so, in a way, upset or annoyed, maybe is a better term, with these kind of political identity politics movements to change the field in ways that is not based on the science, is that anthropology is such a great field. I don't want to see it go to waste. Just recently, for example, in California, there's been two laws signed that has basically said that all teaching collections, if they have any Native American remains, are now prohibited for use. What?

That they, too, will be repatriated. Now, if you know anything about teaching collections and anthropology, you can see that this is going to be a nightmare. And basically, it's going to shut down many research, many teaching labs, excuse me. Because when you have, like, in San Jose State University, we have a teaching collection, and the teaching collection is literally hundreds or thousands of bones, many of them fragments, so that when I teach students how to identify what is a human remains, what is human remains, what's non-human remains, what part of the body that is, and so forth, you don't want to just deal with whole bones, because that's not how you would see them in the field, that's not how you'd see them in forensic cases often.

And so these are just a hodgepodge of remains from some from India, like East Indian remains when they had a thriving bone trade going on. Some from medical schools and some from various anthropology sites. Some given to us from people who had it in their remains in the family. So there's no way to say what this bone is Native American and this one is not. When you're dealing with

skeletal remains which are highly fragmented, which are the ones we use to make sure that people are the best osteologists that we can. And this is just... What they're going to do, I'm pretty sure, is say, okay, we don't know which ones are Native Americans and which ones are not, and therefore let's just repatriate all of them.

They're not going to go the other way around. And it's just going to be a huge dent in the field. And one of the interesting things is a society for California archaeology just had put out a letter basically expressing this concern. But they also were like, but that doesn't mean that we're against repatriation. I don't think they see how one led to another and that it was inevitable. It was going to happen. Because once the easy repatriations were done that were clearly linked to tribes,

there were still many collections that could not be linked to tribes and still cannot, and those should be preserved for research. And now those are being attacked. And now the next step is teaching collections. And it's just going to, and of course, as we talked about, x-rays, data, photographs, all of this is going to be off the table. And it's going to be the burial of anthropology. If it were up to you, though, and you could wave a magic wand and be in charge to fix this problem and give hope to the next generation of anthropologists or people going into similar fields that are having similar problems, what's the main actions you would take? What are the main actions you would take what are the main actions you i would

uh repeal or have whoever is in charge repeal repatriation laws i would then um open up all the all the facilities that are holding remains that are still like slotted to be repatriated but are not yet and open those up for research again. And I would hope that it would be my dream that we can bring people into the fold to understand that there's more important things than burial rituals, that it's important to study the remains. In a similar way that we've's no culture of organ donors. And I think that they've done, there's been a very good push in the medical community and so forth about organ donations. And I think that anthropologists could have a similar push to encourage people to consider

that when they have died, that their remains shouldn't be buried, but really should be donated to either a forensic anthropology collection or to science, to anatomy classes or for organ donations, to really change the culture of what we consider with the dead. That would be my dream. And, you know, it's kind of funny, because one of the things that people will often ask me is like, well, what, you know, and oftentimes, they will ask me angrily, but they'll say, well, what if it was your grandmother? Who is? And, you know, I would

have no problem with it. I would have no problem with it if it was my parents. And my parents have, you know, they have put on their will that they want their bodies to go to science or to university lab for anatomy classes. So I think that we need this kind of increase in cultural acceptance of what that there is not only one way to respect the dead, to respect people's families, but basically that one of the ways to create respect is to create a culture of acceptance of that once you are dead, that your remains still have use. Sure. And we can learn so much from them. I might even, and I'll take a slight contrarian view on that and still agree with your premise. Let's say, though, it makes it more personal when you use an example and put yourself in your own shoes with it and say, hey, I'd be okay with this with my parents and grandparents. But let's just say for a second that people who at any point were alive while there's people alive now are off limits.

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Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Highest end of the spectrum, a 200-year or 150, 200-year type gap or something like that. There does need to be a line at some point though where you can study things to learn about cultures that say didn't have an iPhone to store all their data about what went on, right? So if you're talking about – like you've cited examples today.

I think you said the ones in Quebec. You were looking in the 1700s and stuff like that none of those people you don't none of their family now know who they were you know what i mean like there's no personal time and i actually think that that's a good point like in a sense you know what there's a couple things here. One thing is that if there are some examples where there was a clear familial link where repatriation occurred, which I think if it was my family, I wouldn't have done it, but I can understand that. And I think that that's individual differences and, you know, there's still enough of a tie-in and of course one of the most famous cases is of the move bombing um i believe it's philadelphia move bombing of 1985 if i'm not wrong where the um there was the the uh black power yes um group and And the government bombed them to try to get them out,

kind of like a Waco situation. Yes, very similar. They basically, the university had the remains from two of the children who had died, right, been killed. And when the family found out that these remains were in the classroom, they wanted the bones back. They wanted the remains back. And I think that this is, and the mother was still alive, right?

Yeah, that's understandable. And so I can say, you know, I probably wouldn't, but I can understand that. And I think that repatriation was the right move. So I think that there are, you know, another example, which is a little less recent link, but it's still quite a clear link. grandson of Sitting Bull had requested that Sitting Bull's scalp and I believe some artifacts be returned to him as he's the great grandson. And when this story came out, I was like, he looks just like his great-grandfather. My goodness. He's like, you know, looks so much like him. But nevertheless, even though he looks so much like Sitting Bull,

he did take a DNA test, and it showed a familial link. And so he got the artifacts in the scalp. I think that that's another good example where there can be these exceptional cases where even though I would maybe make a different decision, I think that it's a clear enough case that there is a familial link with, you know, that you could make those repatriations and not lose too much. What if you had some sort of parallel world eminent domain situation set up with this? So let me give an example of that because that's not a perfect parallel. But let's say that for the same one you just said, sitting post great grandson. Yeah. You give back.

In this case, the remains are given back. Just for the sake of argument here. He stores some of the artifacts in his home and he buries the remains of his grandfather in his backyard. Obviously, that wouldn't happen, but let's just assume it did. Watch that. The proven familial relatives of important people from the past do have possession of these things and can determine that, hey, it's going to be here and here based on what we say. But the researchers have some sort of eminent domain to say, hey, we're going to come in and we're going to take a look at this. Maybe we're going to excavate the remains today to test for X, Y, and Z. They are still yours. We are not taking ownership of them. We're not taking them back to a lab for longer than, say, three months or something like that, whatever it might be. And they will be returned to your possession when

we're finished. Is there a way to have a system like that that would make sense? I actually think there is a way to do a system like that, but in a less complicated way. Basically, the repatriation and reburial laws like NAGPRA do not require burial. So the tribes could curate the collections, could keep the collections in their own facilities and allow for access to research.

This does happen in some places, and I'm not against that. The only problem is that currently almost all of the tribes who are active in repatriation do not want to engage in research. They do not want to allow others to engage in research. And any research that is done, they want to be able to control what questions are asked and what can be published. And so under these circumstances, that is not doable. It's not feasible.

But if you would say, you know what, we get it. We think that repatriation to the tribe is necessary or is important. And then the tribe would say, well, we understand also that the science is necessary or is important. And then the tribe would say, well, we understand also that the science is necessary and important. Let's come to a conclusion. We'll curate the facility. Then you can apply for access. But that only works if those people really do want to learn about the past

and aren't worried about their oral traditions being challenged. That's where, you know. And so, like, in certain places, and I think Mexico is one of these places, but also in certain areas of Europe, they'll have area curation facilities that are government run that hold many collections and that you can apply to have access to. Okay, so there's some potential routes you could go there. I don't think it will happen in the US. What are you, you had, I'd asked you a while ago on the

podcast about some of the periods that you've studied with Native Americans. But you had said, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, that some of the oldest, say, Native American civilizations date back about 9,000 years. Yes. Is that right? So we have Native American remains that are in the Americas. Some of them are reburied already. I think the oldest ones might have been around between 9,000 and 10,000 years. So there's single individuals most of the time.

So Kennewick Man is like 8,300 years from Kennewick, Washington. And that, he was... Wait, Washington? That's like kind of north. Yeah. Whoa. So one of the suggestions is that they came across, of course, the Bering Land Bridge. But there's also suggestions that they came across the Kelp Highway.

So there's a variety of different routes. I suspect that the Americas was peopled with multiple migrations. From where? And from multiple locations. What places do you think? I do think that Siberia. So they came here by boat? Land and boat. I do think that Siberia, you know, so... So they came here by boat?

Land and boat. So I do think that both. I think it's the travel generations and generations, right? And also, of course, if they're going from Siberia to Alaska, when the Bering Strait was a Bering Bridge, right? So, and then this feeds into, you know, when was the Americas peopled? And that can be a little tricky. There's some evidence that suggests it was very early, like maybe even as early as 25,000

years old. Some say it's much later, like 14,000. And depending on which route you accept will shape the time period too. I really do think that it's actually multiple migrations. There's no reason why there would only be one migration. Once you get going, other people are going to follow you. So, um, and one of the things we see in these paleo Indians, so once again, 7,500 years old and older, is that they don't look like each other. They don't always look like modern Native Americans. So for example, Lucia, who is in Brazil,

who's I think about 12,000 years old, she looked very much like, more like Australian Aborigine in her skeletal features or skull, whereas Spirit Cave, which was in Nevada, about 10,000 years, between 8,500 and 10,000, the timing differs

sometimes depending on what methods used. But it looks much more like what we'd expect a Native American to look like. They look different from each other. Some of them look

different from the present day Native Americans or the after 5,000 years, let's say. And so this really does suggest multiple migrations and replacement. What was the, Alessi, what was the concept with Younger Dryas? I think we talked about this with Matt, but we talked about it with someone else too, where they were saying that the ice sheet covered all of Canada and enough all the way down to at least New York in the US. Yeah. And then how long ago did they say it would have been inhabitable? Because I'm going to ask you about this obviously, but I wanted to see if you remember this or less. No worries if you don't. Yeah, I don't. Basically the argument was – Matt LaCroix was definitely one of the people who talked about this.

But the argument was because of the Younger Dryas and because of that ice sheet, there couldn't have been ancient ancient civilizations in the united states they you know it would have been uninhabitable say like above texas or something like that so if younger drives was approximately 11 600 years ago when you sit here and tell me that you're finding some of these skeletons in like washington 8 8 500 to 10 000 years ago ago or Nevada, something like that. I'm wondering how it was even inhabitable at that point. The ice age ends at around 10,000 years. Like ends, but that's where I get confused. Is that abrupt?

It's not abrupt, but certain areas were less covered with ice than others. So the coast, for example um was not covered with uh ice so like that's one of the reasons why they think that they can follow down the kelp highway and where is that the kelp highway is basically a concept that um the nade that america's was peopled by by boat following along areas where kelp grows or is in the water because kelp feeds so many other animals. And so this would have been a resource-rich area. Do we have like a, like where on the map would that trail have been? It's basically the north, starting like northwest coast and going down the coast.

So like Alaska? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah. So the thing is, the problem is that a lot of these sites would now be underwater because as the ice melted, they changed the coastline.

Mm. So, and like, I'm very much on the fence on when the Americas was actually peopled. You know, so the other thing is that the Ice Age fluctuated, right? So there was highs and lows, you know. And so if you go right before the last glacial maximum, it was still ice age, but it was less. And so some people say, well, the reason why it can be like 25,000 years ago

is because that was before all that ice. And then it increased again. So the fluctuation. Now, there's some evidence to suggest like in New Mexico, there might have been footprints, I believe, in volcanic ash maybe that have been dated or in some kind of preservation that could be dated. That's something like 20,000 years. But the problem is we don't have any skeletal remains or really good artifacts that old. So the artifacts that are very old, not everybody's convinced they're artifacts.

They might be naturally flaked stone, right? I don't know bones very well. And so even fairly, yeah, so I would not be able to tell like if something is naturally flaked or not, unless it's very obvious. But, and I would, you know, I would love if we found like something, a 20,000-year-old skeleton in the Americas. That would be so cool.

Right? That would make us rethink a lot of things. So I do think that the jury is still out. I don't think we can say for sure whether there was early peopling, and like I said, before the last glacial maximum, or whether it was the, they came after that, which would be like right around 10,000. What was the name, you had a name, official name for it,

but what was the name of the remains found in Brazil? Lucia. Okay, and when was that found approximately? How old was she? Well, well no when was she discovered discovered yeah i'm gonna say the 80s okay maybe 90s not that long ago yeah i can't it's definitely after lucy was found lucy the australopithecine was found. Lucy, the Australopithecine, was found in 1974. And she's named after Lucy, so it has to be after that. And where was Lucy? Lucy was the 3.3 million-year-old Australopithecine in Ethiopia, right? Whoa.

So not Homo sapiens, but the group of humans before the genus Homo. So what were the key differences with that group in Homo sapiens? It's hard to say. Some of it is like differences in body size so like we get like once we get to homo erectus which is like a million and a half we get a much taller like you add a foot of height right um the body like the ditch there's a change between like the the shape of the pelvis that is like and lucy it's very broad and like almost like a flower opening up um whereas ours is very bowl shaped um so um there's um and then brain size once you get to about homo erectus you have like a brain size that's about twice the size of the Australopithecines.

So like talking about, so like let's say Lucy's brain size was almost twice the size of that of a small chimpanzee. And then we have the Homo erectus that is about twice the size of Lucy's. Whoa. So. Now, how do you, what's the process to, this is where it gets confusing for me as a layman. What's the process to figure out, for example, we can date those remains 2.5 million years? Because it feels like once you get past, like for me,

you get past a couple hundred years, it's like, damn, isn't it all somewhat similar? So basically we have various ways of testing them, but they almost all revolve around what we call radioactive isotopes. So isotopes are basically like, like carbon is an isotope, like elements that have various forms, like you have carbon 12 and carbon 14. And there are ones that are stable, they don't change, and then they have radioactive ones that change. So carbon changes 12, 14. And so Lucy was dated with potassium argon and argon argon.

And what happened is basically, so like if a volcano erupts, it erupts the isotope. One part of that eruption contains potassium and one part contains argon. And then there's also argon-40 to argon-39. When they switch over, when the radioactive activity occurs and it switches over, so when argon-40 turns to argon-39, That's called a half-life. And it occurs at a fairly constant rate, like a clock. Not 100%, of course, but you know. And so by looking at how much of one element there is compared to the other,

we can determine the age of the material found around the fossil. The only one that actually uses the bones itself, I believe, is carbon dating. And I think that carbon dating can be done back to almost 100,000 years, if I'm not wrong. Whoa. That's pretty far, though. Yeah. Yeah. Actually.

It's only 1, though. Yeah, yeah. Actually, and you know, in a sense, initially, carbon dating was thought to only be able to go back like 20,000. And they've just gotten better at it and improved methods. And, you know, so yeah, I think it can go back quite a bit farther than we had initially thought. When they found Lucy in Ethiopia and dated her, I guess you said it was 1974, right? Did that change our perception on the history of the evolution of humans? Yeah. Or did it fit in what we had already had? She actually was, and I'm going to say she because her name's Lucy,

but not everybody's convinced that Lucy is a female. Oh, no. All right. Let's not start this. Well, in this case, it actually makes sense because we don't know how to determine a male and female with australopithecines because their babies would have had small brains. So their pelvic change, there is no difference in pelvic yet. Really? How does the brain affect well um basically if you give birth to a big brained baby you need a different pelvis than if you don't so if you look at all sorts of animals

many animals the male and female pelvises are the same whoa Whoa, I did not know that. But I'm going to still call her she. We'll accept it here. So she put the focus on the importance of walking upright as opposed to the importance of a big brain. It used to be thought that you need, that the first humans, or the first distinction between humans and apes would be a big brain. But that turns out not to be the case, and the first change really is a different type of locomotion. And what that means is that it is the ability to walk upright that likely led to the big brain as opposed to the other way around.

And now Lucy was not walking like us. She probably still was very good in the trees and walked differently. But she definitely had changed her locomotion compared to the apes. Do we have any evidence whatsoever that can point to potential lingual patterns in communication, or is that impossible? We don't that far back. The first evidence of lingual patterns, I believe, is in a Homo erectus at around 1.8 million. We have a skeleton called Turkana boy that was nearly perfectly preserved from Kenya. And they've looked at both his like, his ribs, and his endocast. So endocast is like a cast of the skull of the sorry of the brain. So you can you can have naturally forming endocast. So like, let's say skull is laying in a way that sediment ends up in there. and then you have this mold of the veins, right?

But you can also create an endocast because those veins still leave patterns on your skull. And so you can make a new endocast by, you look at his endocast, it looks like he had a Broca's region, which is an area of the brain that is specifically tied to language. And not just community Broca, B-R-O-C-A. Yeah, let's pull that up. But not just communication, but language, right? Yes. But then if you look at his rips, you see that he does not have ribs that would suggest that he had as fine control over his breathing as we do.

One of the reasons why we can make so many different sounds is because we can control our breath much better than other animals. And we do that because we can do that because our muscles on our chest are more distinguished. So they're like finer spindles as opposed to one big muscle, right? Yes. And so it doesn't look like he had the same type of muscle distinction that we do. So the question then is, did he still have language, but it was just not as many sounds, you know, so it's kind of up in the air. Now, if you look at Neanderthals, their hyoid bone, and the hyoid is a really interesting bone, because it's the only bone

that doesn't connect to another bone. It actually connects with a really long fibrous tendon from the back of your skull to about your throat area, and it holds your tongue. And the Neanderthal hyoid bone is almost identical to modern humans, and that suggests that his language, their language skills would have been similar to ours. And of course, Neanderthals had quite big brains too. So. A lot there. It's crazy what we're able to use deductive reasoning and also then, you know, like recreating things to be able to build that evidence.

I mean, the science is incredible. That's why it's important that we keep the science going and, you know, not fight over the stupid things. And, you know, there's so much more to learn. And if you think, like, when I started in this field and, you know, I'm old, but not that old um and you know when i started in this field neanderthal dna was just coming out it was like they were just figuring out how to extract neanderthal dna now there's dozens of studies about dna that dating that that, you know, and that has changed how we see Neanderthals and how we see us and

whether we did interbreed or not. And so that's given us a whole nother aspect too. We've, the fossil record has been pushed back another couple million years. There's new species that we didn't know about that teaches us more about human variation. And there's just so much that has been done just in the last, you know, 30 years, that, you know, the next 30 years should be as fantastic, but they won't be if we let politics control what we can study. And it's kind of interesting because anthropologists were at the forefront of challenging creationists and intelligent design and their want for control of textbooks, for example.

And so they were at the forefront of basically saying, you know, intelligent design is not a science and this is why it's not a science and this is why we still have to preserve science. And now they're kind of like thrown in the towel when it comes to creation myths from non-western cultures and that's very disappointing i don't see how it's different i think that whether you believe in the adam and eve story or whether you believe that your tribe came from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, they're both wrong.

And we can use science to help us understand the better, the truer origin, I should say. Yeah, we're so, we have such a recency bias too, like across general culture, meaning like not the experts like you guys where we're thinking about like, oh, wow, yeah, 4,000 years ago, that was forever ago. This planet's God knows how many years old and there's different opinions about that but

you know and then you talk about the human split being five million years ago where they first split off yeah allegedly from from apes i mean that's it's nuts to me how much like even considering where we were then from a capability standpoint at the lower end of the spectrum, how much we've been able to change and how rapidly that's happened. It feels like a long time, but you go outside and you look at – now you can see video because we've had it around long enough from say 1963, right? When Kennedy was killed these people look the same as us they talk a little different they have different accents but it's the same thing and that's 60 years ago because it's such a short snapshot and you're like well that's kind of a long time in our time so does that mean that that things kind of do stay the same and then you start to think about this is where you loop in what darwin figured out with all this stuff and it's like wow some things change and it happens extremely slowly

but then it's like all of a sudden and you're like whoa suddenly you know you find remains and you're like wow we went from i'll mess up the name of it but whatever it was to homo erectus and we just found another one that was still that other thing right that's only 200 years older and you're like wow yeah how'd that happen you know something changed in the environment yeah i think we're constantly during my lifetime at least we're constantly going to be finding things like that and and having to change our opinions on things that we may know right now yeah and actually i think that the trademark of a good scientist is to accept that some things that you held to be true

are not, you found out are not true. And so I think that, say, I thought this, now I see new evidence and I think this. That's a trademark of an open mind and a good scientist, both of which go together. Yeah, when I had Michio Kaku in here. Do you believe in God? Well, I believe in the God of Einstein.

He believed in God, but not the God that intervenes in human affairs. It was the God of order, the god of simplicity and elegance. Einstein was asked the question, did the universe have a choice? Is it unique? So universes, you can create universes in an afternoon, but most of them are unstable. Most of them fall apart. Most of them don't work. Our universe is stable. It works. Everything fits together together and then the question is what set off the bang that's what we do for a living we have the big bang theory up to the point where the universe is going to explode why did it explode we think it was a quantum event and we are here because we are in the universe which decided to explode so einstein said was it all an accident? And he thought, no, it could not have been an accident.

Who sometimes gets some shit because he was one of the inventors of string theory and there's some controversy around that. But, you know, I found him to be so open-minded to many things, despite what some people will try to say about him. I think that's usually just attractors. But I asked him a question that was similar in spirit of like, how are you worried about your life's work being all proven wrong? Or is it more like that's kind of the whole point because we're trying to move things forward to prove the last thing wrong and then eventually get all the way as close to the truth where we can be? And I won't get his exact answer right. But essentially it was much more the latter for him. Like let's get where we need to be. His hero was Albert Einstein and the guy was incredible.

And only – he's been dead what? Like 60 years, something like that? 65 years? Like we're proving things that he talked about wrong. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a weird – science is a weird endeavor because it's not like a sport. There's not this score. Right.

It's not four quarters and at the end if you have 100 points and they have 90, like you win. Right. It's constantly like, okay, well, we figured out gravity 400 years ago. What's next? You know? 400 years ago, what's next? Yeah, you know, it's so I'm the farthest thing from a scientist, but I can imagine the frustration in in fields like you're in where where people do try to box stuff in. That's why I like giving this kind of stuff a platform to talk about it. That's, that's how we make some progress here. Yeah. And you know, I think, I think that the other aspect of this is that it is the data that needs to be driving the field.

You know, so anthropology right now is going under some changes that are not data driven, like what we talked about with the sex and gender issue. And I think that if we return to the data, that's where we'll find answers. And those answers might surprise us, but we need to base it on the data and not just on ideology. Yeah. I forgot to ask you earlier, when you were a kid,

were you always interested in fossils or things like that? Was this a dream of yours to end up where you are? I was always interested in anatomy. And I would say even as a young child, toys that were anatomical models really were fun for me. So I was always, as far back as I can remember, I was interested in anatomy. I think that that's where, you know, this whole love of anthropology does stem from is my love of anatomy first.

Cool. And so when you went to college, at that point, did you have in mind, like, I want to be on the archaeology side? No, I actually, I actually wanted to first, I first thought of being a pathologist. So that's somebody who does autopsies. Yes. And I realized that I wouldn't be very good at it, in part because I'm very sensitive to smells. That's a bad start. And so I was like, no, this is not going to work. And I was very interested in evolution in general as well. And so I felt that physical anthropology, what we sometimes now call biological anthropology,

married those two interests well, anatomy and evolution. And so that's how I kind of entered into it. I can't remember exactly when I declared my major, but I think it was the second year. What about, you know, Darwin's work now is coming up on 200 years old, I guess it's like a 180, something like that. But it seems to me that so much of what he said has not only held up, it's gotten stronger and stronger evidence. Yeah. I think Darwin's a really interesting character. And I've read a lot of his work. I've read autobiographical stuff that he wrote, of course, and biographical stuff that others wrote about him. And I've read his major works.

And he got a lot right. He didn't get everything right. Obviously, he didn't understand genetics. He could have known more about genetics than he had. Greg Armendel, who's considered like the father of genetics, did publish in the time period that Darwin would have been able to read it. So there's overlap. But he was, he had not, he didn't read Mendel's work.

There's, there are stories that one of the reasons why he didn't read Mendel's work is because Darwin hated math and it was math heavy how much of that is true or not it's hard to say um but he got a lot right and I think the reason why he got a lot right is because he was focused on the concrete in the sense of like he was looking at the hard evidence of the bones the fossils and that drove his research as opposed to being more theoretical so I think that he was a very hands-on naturalist, so a study of the natural world. And I think that that's why he got things right. It's interesting that one of his last studies was actually on the earthworm.

So he had published these world-famous books, and he was still doing studies that were as literally down to earth as looking at the biology of an earthworm. He also, of course, his cousin was Francis Galton, who could be said to be the grandfather of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. Also very interesting. And I think Origin of Species is such a great book, and I always had my interest students read a portion of the chapter on anatomy. And one of the things I like about Darwin's work is once you get beyond the fact that he's writing in this different style, because it's

you know, 1858, right? He actually has a really good sense of humor. And he's putting little jokes in there and little anecdotes and it's origin of species was really a popular science book and so it wasn't meant for just the academia just the scholars it was meant for everybody but he has this yeah he talking about like the layout of the skeleton and how there's so much similarity, not only between different animals, but within your body. He says, you know, what kind of creator would have done that? Wasn't he more original, you know, type of thing. And then he has a great example of a scientist who, I think it's von Bayer,

who mislabeled some or forgot to label some embryos and then couldn't tell what animals they were. And so this shows that at our first development, we're all just a bunch of cells. And that's because we have this... At the very beginning, we all have one origin, right? And then we spread out in this kind of bush-like manner. But the way he tells it, it's kind of – there's a sense of humor about it. And so I don't think that people necessarily think of Darwin as funny until you read it.

Yeah, I never thought of that yeah i think another huge not misconception but something we take for granted though and i'll speak for myself a little bit on this too because that's a rabbit hole i really like to go down and read his works i've never done that but you know most of us out there know the term darwin darwinism related to evolution most of us know that know the term Darwin, Darwinism related to evolution. Most of us know that he came up with this theory especially when he was visiting the Galapagos Islands and observing some of the species. But what was – what's the involve fossils of creatures that he was then observing now or in the 1830s and 40s when he was looking at them physically? So basically he was a naturalist. So basically he was studying the nature. on the skeletal and fossil remains of animals in South America, including Galapagos, that were similar to living animals.

And so he said, you know, they're slightly different, but they're similar, suggesting that they came from one another. And these would be animals that if we were looking at their remains, we'd be like, well, this doesn't exist today. Right, right. So extinct species. Yeah. So that's one of the things. The other thing is living animals, how they differ dependent on the environment.

So one of his famous studies was about the beak of the finch. And so he looked at how the mainland finch has kind of a generalized beak. And then if you look at the different islands, they have like some islands, there's like almost like a parrot-like beak on the finches. Some of them are very fine. Right here? Yeah. Is this what we got on the screen? Yeah.

Okay. And so basically, he ties that into the food that was available on the various islands, and that you can take the selection pressure is what the resources, the environment is a selection pressure. say you're at a place where there's only really hard nuts to crack open, then the weaker beaked birds won't survive and they won't pass off their offspring. And the stronger beaked birds will survive and pass on their genes to their offspring. And then over time, you get a greater number of stronger beaked birds. Yeah, we're seeing right now – this is where evolution can scare me, where the rare case is where it happens quickly. But if you look in Africa, because they had such a crisis and continue to have it with poaching, with – I'm going to focus on the elephants right now. Right, right. We are seeing the beautiful African elephant who now, thank God, does have a recovering population due to work of friends of mine like Ryan Tate and other special people over there trying to help with that crisis. But we are seeing so many elephants now actually born without tusks. And this is a phenomenon that really is over like the last 150 years where they've been poached for their ivory and the population

went way down and so you basically have an outward force meaning like in this case evil humans killing these species then force changing the dna of these species by making sure that the ones who aren't targeted i.e the non-tuskers are the more dominant gene in the pool because they're living. And basically, in a sense, it's the non-tusked elephants that would have likely occurred from a mutation, so a genetic mutation, and then it's selected for. So the mutation is random, but it's the environment that then selects for whether that mutation is actually positive or negative. And in the case

of these elephants, then this random mutation that led to some elephants not being tasked was selected for. And so Darwin was able to document that kind of change. And I think that that really gave us a very good idea of how evolution occurs, the importance of the environment, and how to understand that environment-trait interaction. And so there was another person who came up with almost the same theory called Alfred Wallace. And he took a trip on Asia, on the Asianian islands and he came up with almost the same theory um there was a little variation darwin included plants in his theory thought plants worked the same way wallace didn't and um darwin's focus was on within species competition.

So like, let's say you have a hare being chased by a coyote. Darwin's looking at it on the level of the fastest hare is going to get away, and that is the next generation. Wallace looked at it as a between species, like the competition between the hare and the coyote, and that the coyotes would get faster because they were chasing the hares. Now, they're both right, right? It's just kind of a different angle.

And one of the reasons why Darwin gets the credit is he finished his work first, of course. The other thing is he had been working on it for a long time, and he just was hesitant to put it out there in a big way. He'd been putting small things out, but, and we don't know why he was hesitant, whether this was just his perfectionism or because he thought that there was going to be, you know, an attack on him because of his views. We just don't know. There's a lot of theories about it. But when Wallace sent Darwin his draft of this outline of evolution by natural selection, Darwin's friend,

Charles Lyell, he said to Darwin, you've got to publish. Otherwise, Wallace is going to get the credit. And one of the funny things is that right before Darwin publishes his book, both Wallace and Darwin present together, and they present together to the Royal Society about, I think it was in 1858. And so this basically set the scene, and Darwin knew he had to publish, and he does. He publishes, I think, in 1859, if I'm not wrong. So it was close.

We might, if Wallace had just said, you know what, I'm going to keep this to myself and I'm going to publish it. We might be talking about how brilliant Wallace was. Yeah. It's funny how that happens, but they're doing, like you said, they're doing work that meets each other right in the same spot. And,

and in some ways it's not that odd because in some ways, um, it's when it's correct. a lot of times multiple people will find yes yeah yeah absolutely but do you think how has your work throughout your life and the people you studied as well how has it impacted your thoughts on where it all comes from like is there a creator out there yeah i'm not, I'm not religious. I'm not religious at all. And I've never been religious.

I actually, my parents aren't religious. And it's kind of funny. My mother's the youngest of 12. And her father was not religious. And her father's father was not religious. Genetic. So, yeah, there might be some genetics there. But to be clear, though, I don't just mean, like, religious. I mean, we all wonder whether we subscribed to it or not,

where it all came from. Yeah, I think it was just random. I don't think that there was yeah, the random thing from chemical soup that... But it's kind of funny that

I have this kind of atheist background but my mother, this mother, she was kind of wavering like sometimes she was more religious than other times um sometimes it was just because you know it's social right social so um but my mother being the youngest of 12 but she was the only one baptized. Ah, because of that. Wow. That's kind of funny. So, yeah, I kind of take an approach of that.

I think it was random. I don't have any thoughts that there was any plan. But you don't wonder where that chemical soup came from? Because I think you'd be right about that. Yeah, if there's articles on those kind of origins of life things, I read them. But I haven't like sought it out, right? So that's like if there's like a New York Times article or, you know, about something like that, I'd read it out of interest. But I haven't like sought it out.

Gotcha. Kind of interest, but I haven't like sought it out. Gotcha. Kind of like, yeah. Have you looked at any – because I appreciate your approach about being scientific and looking at what we can feel and see. And obviously with – you and I already went through the issue with any ancient cultures, potential oral histories and stuff like that. But the other phenomena everyone talks about now, including in your own household, is the whole UFO thing, which your husband, Nick, who came in here

and outlined it, he... December 1980, over three consecutive nights, this took place at two military bases, somewhere between 50 and 80 miles northeast of London. On the first night of activity, some security police and law enforcement personnel saw strange multicolored lights in the forest. Their first thought was maybe a light aircraft has crashed. We should kind of go out there immediately and investigate. Well, they found out there wasn't an aircraft crash. Nothing like that had been reported, but they did. I actually, I do want to say this about Nick while we're on it. He has a very good,

sober, nuanced view on that stuff. He doesn't go farther than what he was able to read and go through with the evidence he was allowed to see in his seat at the defense ministry in Britain, and he doesn't sit here and scream aliens and everything. I think that's really, really important to have in the conversation.

But one of the big drawbacks on this, and I think he and I talked about it, is that we don't have – at least the public doesn't. We don't have physical evidence of a UFO that landed or something like that. But what we do have is some of these oral histories where, you know, from ancient civilizations, people will talk about some myths, you could say, about attachments to other civilizations or whatever. What I want to, that aren't from this planet, what I want to know is if there's ever been any evidence, even that makes you go, hmm, that you've uncovered of ancient humans that looks like it's something that maybe doesn't match the evolutionary chain perfectly and what you know and and there could be some influence of aliens so to speak never no i'm a i'm very much a skeptic. I make Nick look like a believer.

But yeah, no, I haven't seen anything that would make me think, you know, that there was alien influence on any of the species that we've... I mean, there's definitely some odd species out there, but they can be explained by evolution. And is there, the other question I have for you is, is there any new science or developing science that you're seeing in the way of DNA or genetic coding, perhaps, maybe, and I'm just throwing a word in here or a phrase in here, maybe with the help of AI that's going to severely change how we're able to do historical analysis like what you're doing? I think that DNA is definitely exceedingly important

in understanding human populations. And I think that we've gotten much better at analyzing DNA. Well, I'll start even at extracting DNA, right? Extracting it and analyzing it. I think AI will be able to make that go faster, enabling us to have larger samples to compare. One of the problems right now is that if you have, like, a skeleton that you've extracted the DNA and you want to know what population it's most similar to,

you have the issue that there are many populations that do not give their DNA for research. And so, like, a lot of Native American tribes, for example, don't even want to give their DNA for research. And so a lot of Native American tribes, for example, don't even want to give their DNA. And so what happens when you have a poor comparative sample is that you get these false positives of links because we're all connected. And if you think about it this way if you took my dna and you had um you know uh asian african and um native american and you compared me to it

this might be one i'm more similar to but I'm probably very different from those compared to Central European. But if you don't have that Central European, how can you make the comparison, right? So I think that this is a big problem, is getting people to join in that scientific endeavor of looking at DNA and having a good comparative base. And AI will enable large samples to be analyzed quickly, I think, which is really important. Yeah, and then the next layers to that could get weird

if we get to a point 20 years from now where we have like quantum computing that can start to simulate things quicker that might get some serious serious developments it's crazy how fast in spite of some of the social issues we're having how fast some of the actual underlying science itself continues to move but some of it's scary. But, you know, there should be some very good benefits, especially in fields like yours. Yeah, I actually think that AI is going to be a boon for us, not a detriment. I don't, I'm not worried about AI.

I'm actually think that, you know, it's probably going to be beneficial. And I also think that, and I mean mean it could be completely wrong, of course, it will drive humans to be more creative because we don't want to be replaced by AI. And so we'll have to think differently. And I think that's going to give us some really interesting outcomes. Do you worry about like AGI though, where the machines get to a point where they, they are computing and thinking a lot better than we are. And perhaps I don't want to use like

the word sentient, but they, they get to a point where they're like, well, what the fuck are these humans doing here? No, I'm not worried about it. I hope you're right. I'm with you. I mean I hope you're right. But I do sit up sometimes about that one. I'm not going to lie. But Elizabeth, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming in and sharing about these things that are happening to you. I hope that settles down and you can just focus on the science end of it moving forward. But it's important that you do talk about it and point out the stupidity that you're seeing because you're not going to be the only one that's subjected to that

and we're going to lose people like you in the field if we don't give that a platform. Yeah. I'd like to end with reemphasizing that even with all the technology we have, even with, you know, ways to recreate remains through casts, there still is nothing like the real thing. And if we want to understand humans, human evolution, humans in forensic settings, I don't think that we can do that better than with studying skeletal remains. Well said. All right. And we'll put the links to your Twitter as well as your website

down in the description. You let me know anything else you want down there. I'll put it in. Everyone go check that out. Great. Other than that, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you for watching this episode, guys you haven't already please smash that subscribe button and hit that like button on the video it is a huge huge help to getting our videos into the algorithm on youtube so thank you to everyone who does that and also if you don't already follow me on instagram you can get me at julian dory podcast for daily exclusive clips that we put out from the show or on my personal page at julian d dory the links are in the description below see you guys for the next one