Ologies with Alie Ward - Pyrotechnology (FIREMAKING) with Ellery Frahm

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Grab your fire extinguisher and hang on to your eyebrows, we’re building FIRES today. Now, this is pyrotechnology in the anthropological sense; the kind covered in hair metal concert venue liability insurance will have to wait for another day, no no, these are the kind your ancestors made. Get ready for sharp rocks, hairy jello, sooty caves, glowing coals, iron sparks, burnt feet, wolf skulls, fluffy fungus, molten metal, ember tending and more with Yale anthropologist and pyrotechnologist, Dr. Ellery Frahm. Follow Dr. Frahm at https://twitter.com/elleryfrahm https://www.elleryfrahm.com/ Donations went to: https://www.armeniafund.org/ More links and info at alieward.com/ologies/pyrotechnology Sponsors of Ologies: alieward.com/ologies-sponsors Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Transcripts by Emily White of www.thewordary.com/ Website by https://www.kellyrdwyer.com/Support the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Okay. Can I tell you a secret at the top of the show? Because I'm going to. Okay. So, for the last year and a half, I've been working in Semi-Secret on a Netflix show for Higher Ground, which is a production company owned by Michelle and Barack Obama. And the show I've been working on is called Aida Twist Scientist, and it's an animated show. It's for kids. It's about a girl who's a young scientist and her friends, Iggy and Rosie, and all these experiments they do. And I've been a consultant on it, having to work on it in secret for a long time and helping figure out the science of the experiments they do and some plot lines and suggesting real life scientists. A lot of them, I know through

ologies, you know them also, to interview at the end of each episode. And the entire team was just the best. And I'm so proud of the show. We worked so hard on it for so long and it premieres today, today, September 28th on Netflix. And I'm only telling you this because the creators of the show and the showrunner and the whole team just worked so hard. And I just, I hope you like it. Anyway, Aida Twist Scientist, it's on Netflix now. Okay. On to theology show. It's me. It's your uncle who travels with a scented candle because he gets homesick on work trips. It's Ali Ward back with a crackling smoke and hot episode ofologies. It's all about fire and campfires and embers, heat, warmth. And when did your

ancestors, the ones whose names you're never going to know, the relatives, billions of us have in common? When did they figure out how to use fire? And why? And where did it lead us? So there's a lab at Yale University dedicated to researching this hazy history of what our species has been through. And thisologist is the director of that lab. He's worked on four continents, published papers spanning half a million years of human history. He got his bachelor's studying physics and anthropology at Grinnell College in Iowa, got his master's in PhD in anthropology from the University of Minnesota, and at the Yale Pyrotechnology Lab, also called YPyro. He and his colleagues study how technology and history can be figured

out by tracing our control of heat. But before we light the fuse, let's thank the folks who support at patreon.com slash allergies. You can join them for a dollar a month and submit questions to theologist before we record. Thank you to everyone who rates and subscribes and reviews. I read them all. Here's a little proof. Still smoking. Lacey Freeman's review this week said, no flim flam, it's a freeman fave. As a fellow gross person who likes gross things, please never stop this podcast or cussing. Lacey, you get me. Okay, pyrotechnology, let's do it. Gather round, you naked AP babies and listen to tales about sharp rocks, hairy jello, sooty caves, glowing coals, iron sparks, burnt feet, wolf skulls, fluffy fungus, stomping Oprah,

molten metal, some disaster movie trivia, ember tending and more with anthropologist and pyrotechnologist Dr. Ellery Fromm. Okay, first off, can I get you to pronounce your first and last name and tell me the pronouns you use? Sure, my name is Ellery Fromm, and my pronouns are he, him. That's a great name, by the way, Ellery Fromm. I never have, people don't Google it and end up with the wrong Ellery Fromm. You have SEO optimization down. Yeah, yeah. I never was able to find pencils or name plates or anything like that as a kid. Is it a historical name? No. Well, I mean, you'll see a lot of like British like William Ellery Channing and William Ellery, but my parents literally

just found it in a book. Oh, good. Have you read the book? I mean, there's there's so there's Ellery Queen, the numb de plume for mystery writers. And I realized just recently that after constantly hearing about are you named for Ellery Queen, I've never actually read any of the books, I think they were like radio mysteries, anything. I've never read a thing of it. I think I just kind of resented it as a kid. Okay, I looked up this author, Ellery Queen, and it turns out it was a numb de plume of two writers, cousins who worked on a team under one name. They also went by Barnaby Ross, and they staged public debates as Ellery Queen and Barnaby Ross, two fictitious people, and they kept their faces covered to keep their fake identities a secret, which is so much cooler

than my childhood dream of publishing sappy books under the pseudonym Dixon Ticonderoka. Anyway, this Ellery is not a fiction writer. He's a fact finder. I feel like as a scientist, you're sort of a detective anyway, right? Yeah, yeah. No, we constantly liken ourselves as like Sherlock Holmes, I would think is just extracting every bit of data out. But the alternative, though, is that as the Sherlock Holmes like always found a bad guy, right? And we're like, it's probably this. It depends. It depends on the yeah, a lot of scientists say that their answer for a lot of things starts with, it depends. Which is true. But how long have you been interested in way, way, way back history, paleo history? I think as a kid, I was interested, especially in

astronomy being a very deep field. And doing my PhD work, I was focusing more on the Bronze Age, so like 5,000 years ago. And then I was doing that research in Syria. And this was about the time the Syrian civil war broke out. And so all archaeology there just stopped. But I had colleagues who were working in the Caucasus in what we call the Paleolithic. And they said, you should come here, you'll love it. And obviously, that stuck. Yeah, it kind of cut the bug late, maybe. And your background initially was in physics, right? Yeah, so I took a lot of both physics and anthropology courses in college. I couldn't make the double major work. There were too many labs. But I basically grew up in a physics department.

So my dad is still a technician in a science building at a liberal arts college in Wisconsin. And so I literally grew up in a physics department, like literally riding my big wheel up and down the hallways and being called in when they needed a small person for demos in the lecture hall and stuff like that. So like writing the fire extinguisher repelled tricycle was my specialty. And then you ended up studying fire. That's actually kind of perfect. Yeah. So I mean, it was play. And when I started taking a lot of anthropology and archaeology in college, while doing a physics major, eventually there was just kind of stumbled across the blend between the two. I don't know if this creeps you guys out, but I have known

about your lab and your work for years and have always wanted to do a pyrotechnology episode. Oh, that's fantastic. I'm sure you have to explain to people it is not the study of fireworks and that's absolutely absolutely the thick question I get asked all the time. So you study ancient fireworks and and like no, but that would be within our purview if we were so inclined. So the general idea with pyrotechnology is it's a way of kind of reframing human technology, but you can also lump a lot of human behavior and even human evolution into the control of fire and not just controlling fire, but but greater and greater control and achieving higher and higher temperatures. And so all the way back to, you know, depending on

which sites you're so inclined to believe, you could be talking about a million years ago, all the way up through the 20th century, when really only with the advent of plastics, do we start getting technology that doesn't depend on heat. You know, if you're talking about progressing through ceramics and glass and metals and new metals, it was it was all about about getting hotter forges and controlling how you're altering materials for longer and longer and only when you start coming up with things like Bakelite and causing plastic polymers to form that suddenly you get a trend in technology that now it's about more like, you know, how you control structures. So 3d printing and nanotechnology and stuff like that. But for most of human history,

we were dependent on what temperatures we could attain and how precisely we could control them and for how long we could keep those those temperatures going. Okay, quick side note, the invention of the first polymer plastic Bakelite dates back to the early 1900s. And it was also called artificial amber or polyoxybenzyl methyl and glycolan hydride for short. And from a physics perspective, can we back up and can you explain to me what fire is? Is that it? Is it too hard a question? No, no, no, it's not. So fire is is a chemical reaction. I think it's easier to even think about a spark. And so you might think about a spark being made from from Flint striking a piece of steel,

whether it's kind of an old old fashioned fire starting kit or on a flintlock gun. Flintlock guns, in case you didn't know, came along in the 1600s and relied on a chip of flint striking steel to ignite gunpowder and send a bullet flying with the explosion. So imagine revolutionary war guns or something a pirate would have tucked into their smelly pants. That spark? That's also fire technology, baby. So there's when those those two substances that that flint stone hits the iron rich steel, there's a spark. There's light. There's something that can cause an ignition. That little particle that you see glowing is basically just a tiny little bit of iron atoms

that have been scraped off that steel and are now oxidizing right away. Okay. And that is what a spark is. It's that chemical reaction of oxidation extremely quick. And so that's on a larger scale. That's a lot of what's happening with fire. It's a chemical reaction that is producing energy and gases and you get the heat out of it, you get the light out of it as part of those reactions. But in the simplest form, yeah, that's what it is. It's a chemical reaction. What you typically associate with fire are those photons of light and infrared making something hot. But the chemical reaction, that particular substance undergoing this transformation to ash perhaps is the byproducts of that chemical reaction. But the fire itself is that it's

almost a process rather than a thing. And it occurs in nature, obviously, with lightning, with what? Lava catching things on fire. How else does it occur in nature before we as a species understood how to create it versus control it? Yeah, I mean, you make an important distinction there between fire users and fire producers, right? So that we were probably able to capture fire from like a natural lightning strike, or like you were saying, from something burning ahead of a lava flow. To the point of being able to create it on demand is an important distinction. And of course, that's one of the biggest challenges then to try and investigate in the past is distinguishing was there fire, but we're not convinced this is human related. It's

just evidence of perhaps a forest fire, or that there might have been sediments that were heated on the ground. But there was a lava flow right nearby, and that's what reheated it. So yeah, I would say you captured a lot of it. Certainly lightning is I think what everyone kind of most associates with it. There's even some pictures of early paleo art from like the 50s of Neanderthals using fire. They've started a fire. And to make sure they emphasized that this was related to a lightning strike, the paleo artist in the background has this rainbow. So you get this juxtapose, very brutish looking interpretation, very 50s interpretation of Neanderthals using fire, but then this lovely rainbow in the background, which I think is just this fantastic juxtaposition.

And if we're talking about vintage timelines and confusion, could you put on your anthropologist hat? I don't know if you have a literal one, if it's necessary or not, but can you give us a quick timeline of when as a species we did worship? Like when did we start making fires? When did we start using tools and stuff? I mean, just a quick timeline. Yeah, anthropologists wear scarves. Yeah, yeah. Do you really note it? Perfect. So the earliest essentially stone tools are what we have when we're talking about what the earliest kind of archaeology is. We're going to go with the It Depends. There's debate. The most recent kind of oldest site is what's called Lamequi 3 and what's now Kenya. And it's dated to a little more than 3 million years ago. That's a bit

controversial. But even if you are more conservative and go to the next oldest site, you're still talking about 2.6 million years ago. And that's in Ethiopia. So these are very simple stone tools, very simple. And that you're talking about a flake, a chunk has been knocked off of a larger stone, either on purpose or accidentally at first. But those are the oldest stone tools. There are similarly old kind of cut marks on bone as well and kind of that, you know, more than a million-ish years. So that's how long we've been using stone tools. Potentially 3 million plus years. And if it is 3 million plus years, we're talking about pre-genus Homo, pre that broad umbrella of humanity. So we as a peoplehood Homo date back

roughly two and a half million years before this one ape, the grand papa of taxonomy, Carl Linneas, coined the genus Homo in 1758. So making us all one big posse. And I guess giving all the other apes genus envy. That's so, I should erase that. Jump ahead to what are some of the oldest indicators of fire use. Again, we're still looking in Africa. So there's Wonder Work Cave in South Africa that has some evidence for the presence of fire associated with early humans at about 1 million years ago. Oh, wow. By this time, stone tools are getting a little more advanced, but they're still just kind of like pebbles with a few sharp edges on and chopping. When you get to the next kind of threshold of when you start to get some agreement about where and when fire is

more common, you're talking about maybe half a million to two or 300,000 years. Again, depending on kind of which side of the debate you're on. And by that time, we're talking about, if we're talking 300,000 years ago, we're talking about the human ancestor called the Homo erectus and almost transitioning in places like Europe into early Neanderthals. Okay, so real quick, Neanderthals were human. They're the same Homo genus, but a different species and they were shorter and stockier and they diverged from sapiens at least half a million years ago. And there's evidence that they could create fire 200,000 years ago. They were also super smart and they made art and jewelry and we interbred with them a bunch, which means they

probably smelled okay and were dope to show with. And then you start getting advances, continuing innovations in how the stone is being used to make tools. There are wood tools. Preservation is really bad for wood, you might imagine. There are some spears that are in that timeframe of tens of thousands of years old that have been preserved in Germany because they were trapped in like oil sands. So then we start to get modern humans on the scene about in Eurasia. There are already modern humans in Africa at this time, but at about that 40,000 years ago, you start to get the replacement of or integration or whichever way you want to interpret it, the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans by us and then spreading throughout the rest of

Eurasia. And we don't get things like ceramics until, and if we think about ceramics, we're thinking about pots. That is not until what we call the Neolithic. It's part of the Holocene, so we're talking about after the last Ice Age and that's only within the last say 10,000 years. So if you wish that you had a cheat sheet of the different scene eras, allow me to be that crib note cradled in your sweaty palm. So the Holocene started about 11,000 years ago with a glacial retreat that left behind all these cute little lakes in Minnesota. And in the Holocene, humans started farming things and building stuff. So then what is the Anthropocene? Well, it's a debated term introduced in the early aughts right around the time Gwen Stefani was gluing

rhinestones to her face. And the Anthropocene denotes that this is the time of humanity, as our species is having an impact on the planet and the geological record, what were things like mass extinctions and atom bombs and game shows and a bunch of space toilets now orbiting the galaxy, you know, Chernobyl, things like that that stick around in the record. But yes, the Holocene started 11,650 years ago, give or take, which in earth terms is like yesterday. So when you're talking about ceramics and everything that's followed, ceramic, farming, glass, metal, all this sort of stuff, you're talking about no more than 10,000 years ago. Oh, so recent. Yeah, new on the scene. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But then these

things build too. And this is where, again, kind of the integration of control of heat becomes interesting because you can't say smelt metals without having ceramics to pour them into. They're also integrated as well. You can't get one without the other. And so they all kind of engage on a gear that you need kind of each threshold to happen. Yeah, I mean, I imagine if I were just born a baby in a forest somewhere, there is no way I would be able to take care of myself or figure out any of this. So we're always building on whatever we were left from the last generation, right? Yeah, I mean, there's even a line in one of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxies where the main human character finds himself on a primitive planet that doesn't have

technology. And he thinks like, I am going to roll them like a god. I am, you know, modern human knower of technology that Arthur realized he could barely make himself toast, let alone a toaster. Yeah. So yeah, exactly. You innovate within kind of the zeitgeist around you and build up on what knowledge has existed before. Humans are also precocious too. And we kind of tinker. And that's how there can be multiple places that something like farming can be invented around the world. What exactly do they call that when something's concurrent like that? I forget there's a word for it. Okay, so I looked it up in this phenomenon of concurrent ideation manifests in a sort of cinematic convergent evolution called twin films. So think Armageddon

and Deep Impact, Volcano and Dante's Peak, Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached, The Addams Family and the Monsters, and dueling documentaries about bougie island shit shows, which is a whole different field of fire festival research. There's like a word for it when it comes to like two screenplays being made at the same time. With twins. That's right. It's just sort of like by happenstance. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, I mean, you get that so that, you know, farming can be invented in different places or pottery can be invented in different places. So that's always the challenge too. And where we have to start worrying about how well we know the ages of sites to start answering questions like was the use of fire

invented in one place and then it spread from there, the knowledge of it, not the fire, or were there multiple inventions throughout time that really people just kind of figured this out. And there were kind of multiple nuclei where these sorts of innovations happened. Well, how do you think our ancestors first started to create the fire rather than just control it? Do we think it was just a flint and steel or was it rubbing two sticks together vigorously? Like when I watch naked and afraid, we need to collect a whole lot of wood and hurry. We cannot lose this fire or we're going to be right back where we started. I'm like, how did people figure this out a million years ago? Yeah. So that, again, is a fantastic question. And it's hard to have

the material evidence that as archaeologists, we like to have. I mean, one of the oldest fire-starting kits we have is, again, for most of the times we're talking about fairly recent, but Otsi, the Iceman. So the Bronze Age man who fell into a glacier in the Alps and then was discovered in the 90s, he had a fire-starting kit on him. And so, along with lots of other accoutrements, but he had a piece of pyrite, so iron sulfide, so something that, again, you could free an iron atom from and get a spark. He had plenty of stone tools. And then he also had like some really fluffy fungi that was probably like for starting the fire, for getting it going. And so, probably something like this. I mean, there's been work

done looking at what's called useware or marks from if you were to strike a piece of that pyrite against a stone tool, would it leave a mark, gouge or a scratch? Or if you were doing this on a stone tool, do you see marks on like not the business cutting edge? And so, there's been some work done on what are called Aschulian hand axes or biphases. And they're these lovely, very symmetrical teardrop shaped or pear shaped stone tools that were the height of technology at the time. And if you look on not the cutting edge in a few places, it looks like there might have been kind of like the middle of it was scratched with pyrite. Okay, so if this Franche ancient axe sounds familiar, we touched on them in the Atlatal

episode. And they appeared about one and a half million years ago, and they were in fashion for about a million years. Archeologists think that these really simple teardrop shaped whackers may have played a role in seducing your hairy, great, great, great, great, great grandparents nearly half a million years ago. According to papers like the 1999 study, hand axes, products of sexual selection, which was published in the journal Antiquity. So some of these Aschulian stone axes are carved in a way to feature a fossil right in the center of the axe, pretty much like an ornamental choice, like a bedazzling of some kind. And some axes are so large and unwieldy, they seem to defy any utilitarian function, like a Hummer with expensive rims

in the middle of New York City. So like a flashy car, anthropologists think that these hand axes could have signaled viability as a partner, like this person must have resources and skill, cognitive ability if they're nap and rock. So well, pretty okay eyeballs that function, leading a mate to think that's a sweet axe. And I would definitely like to do the nasty with you. So fast forward to now when horny human apes wear axe body spray and still offer up very carefully faceted rocks as proof of their value as a mate. I mean, have we really even changed that much? Isn't that cute and kind of gross? But yes, from these stones roll in matchmaking to matchmaking. Part of the problem is that pyrite is not really that stable

of a mineral over a great time periods. And so we can break down. And so there's not, to my knowledge, been an instance of from from the Paleolithic of, again, these lovely hand axes being found with with pyrite chunks. But it's that's that's kind of one of the operating, hypotheses of what what could have been the source of heat. Yeah, they weren't going to REI and just getting some waterproof matches. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But what about fire and how it changed the way we evolved? Like, did we develop bigger brains because we started cooking meat? That's that's certainly one of the hypotheses. Yeah. So this

has been argued that going back to the species of early humans called Homo erectus that at like 1.8 million years ago, suddenly our brains started. And again, by our I realize I've called myself a Homo erectus there. But one thing you'll find with that I always have to tell my students is that if I'm talking about Homo erectus or Neanderthals or Denisovans, they're all people to me. Neanderthals are people too, I tell them. But that our direct ancestors, these Homo erectus that that the brains got larger. And again, none of the soft bits have been preserved, right? So when we're saying brains got larger, we're looking at the size of inside the skull. And if some of the people who study bones in much greater detail than I ever have, have suggested that there's

also some structural indications that maybe the intestinal system got a bit different as well. And so the hypothesis was that this change seemed to correlate perhaps with or a potential mechanism for it was the use of fire to cook. There was a book that came out a few years ago that pushed where a primate specialist had hypothesized that fire was even responsible for shifting our even deeper time ancestors back to being daytime instead of nocturnal, that we're diurnal instead. And they kind of expanded our day and it had an effect on the melatonin in our brains and so forth. And again, it's an interesting idea. I don't think I buy it in terms of the mechanisms, but the main thing is is that it shifts fire so far back that there's really no way to even test

whether we were using fire. Then it was just kind of an explanation of maybe fire was responsible for us becoming diurnal. But it's so far back, nobody really knows, because piecing together our history is really like the murkiest prequel of the hangover film franchise. But with, I guess, more dried mud and some isotope tracing, still some tigers though. It can be a campfire story. That's absolutely what you have. There's ideas about the social lives of early humans. And so there was a study that came out again several years ago by a famous anthropologist, Polly Wiesner, who had spent a lot of time among

the San people in the African bush. So talking about Namibia and Botswana and so forth. And these are people who, to some extent, still practice hunting and gathering today. And she observed that when they were gathered around a fire during the day, it was talk about business and subsistence and that sort of thing. But when there was a fire at night, that's when they were shooting the shit and just socializing. And again, that's a really interesting idea. But we're also, we have to be very, very careful when we're extrapolating from modern people who are just as modern as you and I to human ancestors. We can't suggest that what hunter-gatherers operating in a modern world are somehow a snapshot

of the distant past. If it's inspiring us to think about these things, that's great. Have researchers looked into oxytocin levels at all while you're looking at a campfire? Is there something that is comforting innately to us, even though fire is dangerous? I don't know about that specifically. That's a really good question. But yeah, no, I'd agree there is that kind of satisfaction of it as well. Is that something like inherently biological and controlled by hormones is a really good question? Or if it's something we're essentially conditioned to do, would a baby who hasn't been raised around campfires find this comforting or terrifying? Okay, so if you would like some science to explain why you love campfires, I will point you toward

the 2014 paper, Hearth and Campfire Influences on Arterial Blood Pressure, Defraying the Costs of the Social Brain through Fireside Relaxation, which explains, quote, fires involve flickering light, crackling sounds, warmth, and a distinctive smell. For early humans, fire likely extended the day, provided heat, helped with hunting, warded off predators and insects, illuminated dark places, and facilitated cooking. Campfires also may have provided social nexus and relaxation effects that could have enhanced pro-social behavior, end quote. So this study took 226 subjects and measured their blood pressure. And then they randomly put some people in front of a control image, while others got video of a campfire with the sound down, and other subjects got the full

pop and crackle treatment too. So what happened? Researchers found consistent blood pressure decreases in the fire with sound folks, particularly with a longer duration of gazing at the video. And on my website, I have linked to YouTube that offers 12 hours of free eulog action, so you can relax without worrying about a forest fire or having your hair smell like beef jerky. What about the importance of cooking food and avoiding parasites? At some point, did we learn how to boil water or how has fire contributed to our actual living longer? Yeah, no, that's a great question that there is some evidence for boiling as being in kind of like pits in the ground being more of the first instance of cooking in like a pot, you know,

over a campfire. Because again, that's a very recent innovation. In terms of living longer, I mean, in a certain way, evolution doesn't care about it that much. They're like, you make babies or not? Okay, get out of here, you're done. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, so for Neanderthal, you and I are, you know, of a good old age. Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, we're fossils. Can you imagine? They're like, what? Yeah, gray hair. What is it? Yeah, I did have to explain this like just to my students a week or two ago when I showed them replica Neanderthal bones from an old man who was probably around, you know, 45, right? Yeah, exactly. So on a certain way, it doesn't matter in terms of living longer,

but even in terms of like, you know, pest control or something like that in a cave, if you're trying to avoid like getting bit by a bat, you could potentially use fire as a way to clear out bats and mice or something like that from a cave or something like that. So there certainly are potential health aspects that deep in the past that using fire as a tool could have assisted with. Do I think that humans figured out like, if you boil water, it gets rid of the germs? No, I don't think that was at all on anyone's minds. What about your field work? What does that look like? And are you ever gathered around campfire while you're doing research on pyrotechnology? In Armenia, there's definitely a celebration is usually marked with what's called

Horovats, which is like a pit barbecue. So that anytime there's a good reason to celebrate, whether it's the end of the season or it's Tuesday or just whatever, you know, it involves a coal pit and cooking meat over it. So definitely there's that aspect involved in it. What field work can be like? It depends. We kind of move site to site in different years. Sometimes it means spending a month in an Armenian mountain village that's literally the end of the road and has the most spectacular night skies you can imagine. And we have people from all over the world who are specialists in various components. So maybe I'm trying to analyze the stone tools and figure out where they came from while someone else is looking at the tiny mammal bones that might have burrowed

into the site and died. Other people are looking at the sediments, other people are spending all their time digging, other people are doing all the logistics and so forth. So it's a big team that sometimes you can have six different languages being spoken on and you might need to go through two or three people to get the right word from one language to another. You have to get along with people that you're going to hang out with for several weeks. I'm interested in where potential sources of raw stone might have come from as a way to start tracing how people were moving across the landscape. How do you even find those sites? Because I feel like I could just go on a hike right over an old, say, campfire site or stone tool building site and just not even know.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes sites are just visible on the surface and it doesn't mean necessarily that they've always been exposed on the surface. They could have been unburied as material erodes away, whether by water or just by wind, especially in the desert. Other times, if we are looking for very old sites, we try to find exposures on the landscape where we know that they are old. So this is one of the advantages of working in Armenia, is that there are a lot of volcanoes there. Whoa. So Armenia is twice the size of Connecticut, but has 500 volcanoes. What? Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, Armenia. That's amazing. They're not all active, but they have erupted throughout the time periods we're interested in. Yeah, I tell my students, imagine

Connecticut, but with 250 volcanoes. Bananas. Right. So we get these lava flows all over the place and they've also trapped other sediments between them. And so if we can date the lava flows, which is fairly straightforward for geologists to do, then we know what time period we're kind of looking at when we go to certain areas where it's exposed. And so what we like to do is especially go to these gorges that have been cut deep into all these past lava flows. And so we can literally see lava flows sandwiched on top of each other. And sometimes they have sediments between them. Sandwiches, I know. And obviously, if there's sandwich between them, we know that they have to be older than the lava flow on top and younger than the lava flow beneath them. And so we can know

that, okay, whatever is in here, hopefully there's stone tools in there. It's between this 440,000 year old lava flow underneath and between a 200,000 year old lava flow on top. So the idea is not to just go out and hopefully stumble across things, but the more you can find sediments or geological features that you know correspond to certain points in time, the better. And that's why there's exciting things happening in East Africa where there's this continental rift. And so when you're talking about all these interesting finds of human ancestors there, they're working in areas that they know the sediments are X number of years old, rather than just going out randomly. So rather than just hike all over the place and cross their fingers,

pyro technologists go to sites that have rough timelines established and see what's there to get an estimate and then backtrack. So these are time capsules made of hardened lava, revealing how you came to be an animal who uses dental floss and drives a machine now. It's bananas. Is it ever weird for you that you're using things like microscopy and all kinds of like magnetic detection and in a sense using a very controlled source of energy to try to find out how fire was used and how energy was was harnessed in the past? Yeah, all the time, all the time. So I mean, I mean, I mean, two examples of how this crosses your mind is, again, going out into the field, you know, for one of the flights to our media, I had like a middle seat, right? And so I'm grumbling

to myself like, I've got a middle seat, this is going to stink for the rest of this flight. And then I'm like, I'm talking about which seat in a flying machine to take my X-ray gun over the ocean to go study people that lived in caves. Another time kind of occurs how just absurd this is, is again, I work at Yale. So we get these email announcements of all the fantastic things being done on campus. And so there'll be like an announcement of like some new quantum computing advance at Yale or some modeling of COVID vaccine stuff. And I'm like, I studied dead people's trash. But archaeologists really are expert trash diggers, right?

Yeah, yeah, no, that's usually what we're talking about is the trash that people leave behind and how that represents what was done. I mean, you're trying to figure out from trash that has survived and has potentially been moved around by all sorts of geological and natural forces and animals picking through it and all that sort of stuff. What were people doing in the past? Over all of your research, do people ever ask you what is the best way to construct a fire? Is it leaning everything together in a triangle shape or is it like stacking like a log cabin? Yeah, see, everyone, everyone expects me at the party to be like the fire tender, right? Oh, I keep an eye on the fire pit. And naturally, I just usually like pass it

off to my kids, like, yeah, just poke at it a bit. Dr. Fire. Yeah, yeah, or an apprentice. Yeah, yeah, or I'll occasionally say like, you know, I should really have some sort of really cool firing pit in the backyard or something like that. And my wife will be like, why don't you let's get the house painted first. Finish that, finish that job before you start building a kiln in the backyard or something like that. Can I fire away with a lot of questions from a lighting round? Yes, please. From listeners. Okay, oh, we have so many questions. Okay, and just to follow up, what kind of fire you make depends on what you're doing. For long-lasting campfires, the log cabin method might be the best, but for cooking on skewers, roasting stuff on a

stick, you might want to lean logs into each other. But either way, make sure you're observing forest ranger cautions and that you are extinguishing things well before you leave. So listen to the fire ecology episodes for more on that. And before your questions, let's shower a worthy cause with our advertising dollars. So Ellery asked that a donation be made to the Arminianfund.org, which does all kinds of humanitarian aid and infrastructure and sustainability projects and covers health and medical needs in Armenia. And that donation was made possible by sponsors. Okay, your burning questions. Gwyneth Greco wants to know, have any other animals outside of primates developed the ability to create fire?

No, no, we don't have any instances of fire creators. You did have, I think with either, I think it was when you had Gavin Jones on that you talked about the Australian hawks that can spread fire. Yes, yes. Again, more on this in the fire ecology episode and in Karina Newsom's wildlife ecology episodes, because arson birds. Someone needs to make some twin movies about them. And use it kind of for hunting. But yeah, producing fire, no. And that's been one of the ways that we've kind of conceptualized this as something uniquely human, right? So if you go back to like the 1940s, you'll see the, you know, the archaeology books titled like man, the hunter, and obviously other animals hunt. And then it became man again, you know, humankind, not man,

but humankind, the tool user. And then we'd realized like octopi can use tools and crows can use tools. And so, well, now we're the tool maker, but getting very, very specific. And so, but one thing that's still unique to our species is fire production. There is a very good short story written by sci-fi slash fantasy writer Terry Bisson called bears discover fire. And so it's like how screwed humans are when bears discover how to make fire. But yeah, so far we're the only fire producers and really with like the very little exception of those hawks in Australia, the only real documented instance of fire users outside of like training chimps to smoke cigarettes and stuff like that. That's not okay. Well, Ryan Fisher, a patron wrote in and said,

if you haven't yet read the sci-fi short story bears discover fire. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you. Ryan Fisher's on that tip. On point, Ryan. Yes. Avin wrote in what's the best way to start a fire, Doritos, drier lint. What historically did people use as kindling? You mentioned a fluffy fungus. Yeah. Yeah. So when he's sort of like light, fluffy, like wooded plant material or something like that, we'll start because again, going back to your kind of elementary school, the three parts of fire, you need a lot of the oxygen to get to it. Like we were saying with Otsi, it was kind of a this fluffy, but seems to be like a fungus that starts easily. So in case you're ever in a survival situation, look for hoof fungus or a mushroom called King Alfred's cakes. Also known as cramp

balls. They look like balls of coal or kind of like horse poop, but you got to really dry them out. Are you not hungry now? Incinerate your snacks. Doritos are a proven kindling. Just enough oil and dust to sustain your flames. Although I don't know, flaming Cheetos seem like a natural contender. I don't know if anyone's ever gone down that road scientifically. But also, you could bring along some drier lint. You can dig some lint out of your belly crevasse. Or some campers do take a few cotton pads and soak them in either petroleum jelly or hand sanitizer, which is mostly alcohol. And then boom, you just have lighter fluid in a pinch. Our ancestors would be so proud and also confused why we are burning food to make food. Abigail Bishop wants to know,

first time question asker, have there ever been any human civilizations that have not had fire? How do you research who didn't have something? Yeah, this has come up before because again, I kind of controversially referred to humans as obligate fire users in one time. And someone did come back at me and said, well, there's this one missionary or European explorer account on this one island, these people didn't have fire or something like that. And I think it's also been, other people came back and said, no, that's a really dodgy account. Or probably what it meant was they just didn't start fire on demand when the missionary demanded it. So with that one really dodgy, probably kind of racist account. Yeah, there is that no, there's no real good

evidence for human groups that have not had fire. There is a big debate when you start getting to like early humans of did couldn't the endothals start fire? Or were they just fire users, you know, and that, you know, those people would argue that it took modern humans us to be able to be on demand fire users. But once you get to modern humans, we're pretty much solidly in that technology. Well, let's talk caves. Chelsea McCann says, this spillology cave exploring society that I belong to always told us to look up when in new caverns, looking for smoke and soot spots on the roof. And if we found any, we called in the archaeo anthropology team, because it was probably inhabited or visited by indigenous people. Can these soot spots be dated to find out how long ago

the fire in them burned? So the soot potentially, so those probably have a soot probably has carbon in it. And so if we are talking within so your listeners in in the United States or in the Americas, then radiocarbon dating works fine, because radiocarbon dating is good back to 40 or 50,000 years ago. So any archaeological sites that we know of in our uncontroversial in the Americas, radiocarbon dating will work. If you're like, I'm no anthropologist, when was that? Well, scientists think folks cross the land bridge from Siberia to the Alaska area now in the Stone Age, maybe 13,000 years ago. But that's been debated because older sites, one nearly 16,000 years old, another in central Mexico dating back 33,000 years have been discovered. But my point is,

this did not happen in 1492. Nobody discovered shit that year. This land had been populated for millennia. Rebecca Winesettle wants to know if there is a link between humans making campfires and domesticating dogs. Is that a thing? It's kind of a thing. So yeah, dog domestication has been again, one of these interesting issues of when it happened. And was it something that only modern humans did? And it maybe gave them an advantage over Neanderthals and so forth. We're probably into enough of kind of like that fuzzy range of how well sites are dated to be able to know that sort of thing. Definitely. The only thing I can directly speak to in terms of the sites where I worked with my fantastic colleagues is one of them at an upper Paleolithic site. So this is

just a fancy way of saying making stone tools that modern humans make just before the last Ice Age. There was a wolf skull recovered and it didn't have any of the morphology of domestication yet. See a wolf dorsal skull crest, which acts as an anchor point for its gnashing jaw muscles, or the bulbous foreheads of shih tzu mixes, like my dog Gremlin. Her skull probably looks like a soft ball and an angler fish made it. But yes, wolves, not dogs. You can see the Lupinology episode for more on that. There is hearths inside this archaeology word for campfires inside the cave and there was a wolf presence, but not domesticated. This is especially hard to investigate because in certain places wolves and early humans are going to occupy a similar ecological niche

and use caves. So it might be that in one season Neanderthals or modern humans were there and in another season wolves were there using the cave too. So even if we found wolf bones or wolves that looked like they were starting to get domesticated, it can be hard to say that they were there concurrently with the earlier modern humans. Could have been just one after the other. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, or alternating. You know, just every spring the humans were there, every fall the wolves were there or something like that. You don't want to be there at the same time as the wolves. They got sucked into the same time share presentation and now archaeologists are like, I don't know who is here when, pretty much. Exactly. Yeah, same thing with bears or hyenas

are a big thing is that what's pulled into a cave by hyenas, including sometimes Neanderthals and modern and ancient humans can really get blurred. So sometimes a cave might have been occupied overnight by humans. And so the time spans that we're dealing with compared to the reality of how long a particular group might have been in a cave or an open campsite. One of those things we need to keep in mind of the vastly different time spans we're talking about. And do you have a few more minutes to answer a few more questions? Absolutely. Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. That was so late. Literally, there was a marching band practicing across the street for like an hour and a half. No, my students will tell you, I will just talk if you don't stop me.

No, this is great because I have a couple more questions. Yeah, go for it as many as you want. Yay. Okay. So speaking of caves, Natasha Barsh asked, I saw a video of an archaeologist showing how cave paintings were made with the use of firelight and shadows in mind. And there's another thing, today we see cave art with electric lights, but the ancients saw it under flickering candle light. And I think under the light of a flickering flame, it augments the animation effect. Is that flim flam or not? Are there any other ways that early civilizations may have used fire to create art? Oh yeah, this is a great question. Yeah, I mean, pigments can change color when exposed to fire. So these kind of what's called ochre or these iron oxides. So, you know,

they could be made more reddish or yellowish or blackish. So, you know, potentially the colors can change. Certainly, there are a lot of cave paintings beyond where sunlight would ever reach. And so certainly, if they were going to see what they're doing in there, it would have been either, you know, a handheld torch or hearth in the middle or something like that. So, I mean, absolutely, that's the light source that you would have done that within. Now, you know, were they taking this to the level of, you know, Plato's analogy of the cave shadows? I don't, you know, that's maybe not. But certainly, you know, if that's the light source compared to like, you know, the headlamp of a spelunker or something like that, you know, it's worth, you know, interpreting it

in those sorts of that sort of way. And also, there are minerals that can sparkle and stuff like that. So, you know, engage in light and, you know, sparkling as micas can shimmer and stuff like that. So, certainly interplay with light, you know, that I would imagine that would be an important aspect of what they're doing if they're that deep into a cave. I feel like that goes along with one question from Davis Bourne that just says, why does the person across from you always look so attractive? I guess everything's just prettier in firelight. Or the carbon monoxide, one of... That's a good point. Was that ever an issue? Potentially. Probably, they were okay. Again, we're not talking about large groups

necessarily, especially with Neanderthals. Okay, this next one was asked by Coral Taylor, Lauren King, and Nicodemus Coelar. Well, a few people asked about have fire will travel. And Coral Taylor said, I've read that earlier humans would have a fire starter kit, often including a live ember or coal. How do they keep a live ember on their person without burning themselves or their items, but not putting it out? And Lauren King wants to hear about people who have transported fire, how communities have transported fire throughout the ages, and Nicodemus Coelar asked if the advent of fire usage coincided with the expansion of people into areas previously less habitable. Were we on the move because of fire?

Okay, so let's take the first with carrying fire. Yes, that seems to have been a practice that we can see certainly among native peoples of the Americas when Europeans first encountered them is essentially in like a wooden carved, wooden container, again, having some sort of slow burning ember that had just enough oxygen to keep going, but not so much that it's going to flare up and burn everything. So certainly like carrying of coals, think of just kind of a slow burn of charcoal, just being able to be carried in some sort of container or gourd or something like that. Or as the Pecuni people, part of the Blackfoot Confederacy of the Western Plains, devised a buffalo horn expertly stuffed with a genius parfait of moss, hardwood, softwood,

and raw hide that held fire to take from one camp to the next as a symbol of home and continuity. So I will link a video about it on my website as Elder Marvin Weatherwax explains it way better than my travel candle in a weird hotel room, but it's a similar sentiment, perhaps. So that certainly there's definitely evidence amongst modern humans of carrying embers around, absolutely. And then the other question was, is did it make areas more inhabitable? And again, absolutely, I would say this is one of the reasons that fire use can be inferred in some areas, because we're also talking not just about space, but this is deep time. So we're talking multiple, multiple ice ages, right? So we tend to think of like the ice age, 15,000-ish, 20,000-ish years

ago, but there are multiple, multiple glacial cycles. And so especially in Europe, the Anderthals had to had to survive all of these glacial periods. It's one of the reasons we think that they probably at the very least had like furs for blankets or something like that, and perhaps even basic clothing is to be able to survive in these would otherwise be uninhabitable in terms of cold areas. It does pose the challenge, again, if you're up in a mountainous area during an ice age, you have to worry about your fuel source as well. Wood is heavy. So you can't move into an area where it's cold and there's no wood around to burn or something like that. Yeah, it'd be like driving your car somewhere without a gas station or something.

Yeah, exactly. So you have, there's trade-offs to doing it. So the great thing about fire is it keeps you warm and safe to some extent and whatnot, but it's also a lot of work to go get the wood and chop it up as best you can and then get the fire going. And so in the past, one would also kind of play that in mind of what's the easiest thing to do. Yeah. Speaking of things that are not easy, Madeleine wants to know, how the heck do people walk through fire? I don't imagine either one of us know anything about that though, right? Well, see, this is where the physics undergrad degree comes in handy. So we actually learned this in physics class. So basically what's happening is, I hate to say it, but your feet are

sweaty, especially if you are very nervous about having to walk across hot coals. And so literally what's happening is the sweat on your feet is turning into a gas and is hitting the hot coals and you've got this microscopic layer of vaporized sweat, basically steam that's between you and the fire. Oh my gosh. How fast do you have to walk? Do you have to just run across it? That's what it always seems like in the movies. I don't know from personal experience. Listen, I'm not going to drag you into the deep rabbit hole slash fire pit of my research on Tony Robbins seminars that involve walking through hot coals as a way to change your mindset on what's possible. But I will tell you that thousands of people have

walked over glowing embers in parking lots of convention centers as he bellows into a headset mic about destiny. And no, he didn't invent this. It's a religious practice in some parts of the world like Singapore. And yes, sometimes scores of people have minor burns on their feet at his unleash the power within events. And it seems they're becoming more common as time goes on because people stop to take selfies as they fire walk. And that really botches the physics of it. But I will tell you, I could not stop myself from watching Oprah stomp herself over a track of fire nuggets through sheer will and affirmations. But I'm going to hand it to Tony for the addition of a moist patch of lawn that he starts folks on.

Hey, man, if coals lead to goals, you do you. But just you got to step on the wet grass first. Mike Monakowsky wants to know what ancient fire starting method surprised you. For me, it was the fire piston. I don't even know what a fire piston is. But anything surprise you? I mean, when I first heard about the pyrite, I was suspicious because again, going as a camper as a kid, we always had the flint and steel or something like that. And I didn't know if it would even work. My skeptical hat went on there. You'll hear about fire starting ideas, but most are from really dodgy accounts in historical sources or something like that. I haven't encountered anything yet that has made me just slack-jawed.

How about the invention of s'mores? Several of you patrons, Justin So, Maggie Kinney, Jess Swan, and Shmini Thompson, wanted to know, are they a gift from the gods to apologize for periods and farts and stuff? No. I looked into it and s'mores were likely invented by Loretta Scott-Crew in the first ever recipe published in 1927 in a recreational guide titled, quote, Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts. Also, you should know that graham crackers were invented by Sylvester Graham, a devoutly religious Presbyterian who thought that eating vegetables and bland wheat germ crackers was the best way to stop being so fucking horny. So little did he know that a century later, firesides more roasting parties would rise in popularity as places to

meet someone to flirt with. So thank a loner with a boner for your favorite camp witch. Speaking of scrumptious vitals, patron Ethan Patone asks, what's the tastiest thing you have roasted over a campfire? And Balint Novak asked, why toasted things are the best things? And Anna Dewweiger asks, what's the most unique food you've ever roasted over a campfire? Alice in D wants to know if you have any ancient recipes that you have heard of, of cooking over fire that have stuck with you, and why is the Mallard reaction so delicious? I would say something that has stuck with me, again, partly because it did not sound terribly appealing, was, again, one of these instances where it seems like there's essentially kind of like a

bowl-shaped depression carved out of the ground. It was maybe lined with some sort of clay substance, and then water was boiled in it to help get the marrow in the bones to kind of ooze out. And, you know, I picture this as some sort of like ancient, horrible, jello concoction. Just meat jello. Just meat jello, yeah. Yeah, so that has stuck with me as not, yeah. And it's when you occasionally people are, you know, fantasized about, oh, I wish I was a caveman, and I'm like, no, no. Gritty, gritty meat jello. I've seen what they do. Like you enjoy your, enjoy your flight in the middle seat all the more.

Yeah, I mean, if they served you gritty, sandy meat jello on the flight, people would be none too pleased, I imagine. Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of the bones at some of these sites are just really, really broken up to get at that marrow, you know, is a really important food source and really, really, I don't know if it was desirable in the past, perhaps an acquired taste. But yeah, no, not high on my list of recipes. Bone marrow, of course, is full of collagen and fats that can be great for us. We have it as bone broth, fuh, ramen stock, soup, it's delicious. Sand and worms in any of the above and sipping it with my cupped, filthy hands, I'll pass. Let's steer the time machine to an orgy in disco era Miami instead.

Karla Jerez asked, what is an often overseen, not many know about type of effect that fire has had on humans? You have to think about even like, you know, as a means of communication across the landscape with smoke signals around the world and stuff like that. So certainly a way to increase visibility on the landscape, especially if you think about potentially how far apart small groups of hunter-gatherers would have been and how infrequently would they encountered each other. And so, I mean, that's the interest to me because that's, you know, kind of the ultimate sort of questions, you know, that I'm looking at is when you have an innovation with whether it's stone tool technology, whether it's fire technology,

how would that sort of knowledge have spread from one group to another and increasing your visibility on the landscape certainly would have been, you know, one way to more frequently encounter other groups. What were people saying with smoke signals? You ask. I asked the internet and billowing fires were used by cultures all over the world. They still are. You just pop some green wood on a fire to send a white puff into the sky. And while different configurations had different meanings between groups, the general smoke signal parlance is one puff meant attention, two meant all as well, thumbs up, and three puffs of smoke or three fires in alignment. Danger, trouble, someone please come and help me. Zero puffs, communicates, shoot, I ran out of wood.

Can you bring some more wood? Probably. I mean, it's the first text message I'm sure ever sent. Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, think about, you know, again, you're living in a small group, probably just like your extended family. And it's like the holidays all the time. You don't see many other people that often. You definitely want to, you know, find someone else to date and go off and have babies with then, you know, this group that you're constantly with, you're just desperate to find other people and spread your genes around to not your family. Yes. Yes. And hopefully someone who has a better recipe than meat jello. Meat meat jello, yeah. Gritty, gritty meat jello. Amy Shuey, Ashley Butcher, and Ivaly Senches,

all want to know if you employ the saying, I hate white rabbits. Does that ring a bell to you at all? No. Ah, even better. Well, consider this your most valuable archaeological tool. Teach me, teach me. What is it? Apparently, if smoke from a campfire keeps blowing in your face and you say aloud, I hate white rabbits, to stop the smoke, it will stop the smoke from blowing in your direction. I didn't know about it either, but apparently if smoke gets in your eyes, just say aloud, I hate white rabbits. Anyone out there at a campfire, you now know. You have a fix for that or wear goggles, I imagine. P.S., I looked into this and this tradition may have started with First Nation stories

about smoke resembling white rabbits, but if this is a false legend, I'm sorry. I tried my best. Nobody get mad at me. Okay. I have now been doomed to my kids trying this incessantly at the next fire that we are exposed to. So, thanks. You're a welx. You're a welx. And speaking of things that are not the best, smoke getting in your eyes, but as a pyrotechnologist, as a card-carrying Yale researcher who can have a business card as pyrotechnologist, what thing sucks the most about what you do? What is the hardest part of your job? What is the most vexing? Anything you don't like? Anything I don't like. I mean, it's one of the challenges in increasingly scientific

archaeology and anthropology is you do have to go to deans and explain like we're running science labs here. And when they see that, they've been extraordinarily receptive and supportive. But there is that kind of initial reaction of like, oh, you're an archaeologist. You need pencils. And I'm like, no, I need this X-ray gun, two of them. But what's been good is when you can get this sort of technology in people's hands, suddenly they realize like, oh, of course. So, if you can bring, again, the nice thing about analytical tools that we can bring into the field with us, it means we can also carry them to the dean's office and say like, here, try analyzing this stone tool. And by the end, they're like, this is so cool. Absolutely,

you need this. So yeah, so sometimes running an increasingly scientific field in what's traditionally envisioned as a social science instead of a STEM field is probably maybe the biggest challenge of this job, but not insurmountable. It's a fun challenge and people have been really receptive to it. What about the best? What do you love the most about being a pyrotechnologist? I have great students. They keep me on my toes. I always want to do really well by these really smart people who are always bringing me kind of new challenges or questions. And I never quite know what aspect of ancient technology some student is going to latch onto and want help with. So it might be that a student walks in

and like, I want to study Shang Dynasty bronzes. And I'll be like, great, I know nothing about that. But my job is not to know everything. It's to not know things and then figure out how to answer it. And so, you know, then stepping the students through that process of like, here's how we can go about that process to figure this out is a ton of fun. It's a ton of fun. You really are like a detective. Everything's a mystery. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, Sherlock Holmes, you know, he had the luxury of things happening days or weeks in advance. We've got to put a layer of hundreds of thousands of years on top of that and deal with might be this or that. But yeah, I mean, every little bit of evidence we're like

ancient CSI. Usually, you know, our holographic tables don't work as well as on TV. You got to get more funding, man. Yeah. So ask dusty people your burning questions. Because from what I can tell, they really do like being grilled. So to learn more about Ellery's work, his website and his social media is linked in the show notes. So is the Armenian fund.org. There's way more links and info up at alleyward.com slash oligies slash pyrotechnology. That is linked in the show notes. You can follow oligies at oligies on Twitter or Instagram. I am Ali Ward with one L on both oligies merch, everything from hats and totes to masks is available at oligiesmerch.com.

Thank you, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch for managing that. They host the comedy podcast. You are that. Thank you, Erin Talbert for managing the oligies podcast Facebook group. Thank you, Emily White of the Wordery for making transcripts available on our website for free alongside bleeped episodes. Thank you, Caleb Patton for bleeping. Thank you, Kelly Dwyer for making alleyward.com. Thank you, Susan Hale and Noel Delworth for all the oligies behind the scenes work. Thanks, Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas and Stephen Ray Morris for helping with the small angies episodes and lead editor, Jared Sleeper, for putting it all together late into the night as I record this from a remote Canadian hotel on a shoot. Nick Thorburn

wrote the theme music and if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you secrets. This morning on my flight to Canada, I was eating these really good some kind of gluten-free chocolate coconut like granola bars and they were so tasty and I don't know what I was thinking, but I offered the guy next to me one of them. They weren't even individually wrapped and I just had a bag of them and I was like, you know what it is? And he was like, why? No. And I was like, I just thought they're so good. And then I felt crazy and I had to sit there for like two hours like, why did I offer this guy who wasn't even looking in my direction one of these weird oat balls? Why did I think that was a good idea? But once I asked a passenger next to me for a

sour patch kid and he gave me the whole rest of the bag saying I was doing him a favor and I cherished them. So I don't know. You never know. Anyway, bye-bye. Yeah! Look what I have created! I have made fire! I have made fire!