Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Cave Dwellers Work

Episode Date: May 1, 2021

You know the cavemen, a race of human cousins who lived exclusively in caves? They didn’t exist. Sure prehistoric hominids used caves sometimes but they lived in other places too. Luckily the time they spent in caves has given us a glance at their culture thanks to the protective environments of caves. Learn all about it in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you a cave dweller? I have been caving and luckily I went caving before I did this podcast on how cave dwellers work from February 13th, 2014, because I got to tell you, if I had done this podcast first, I probably would not have ventured into that cave. Very

scary stuff down there, everyone. Check it out and beware. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles Devy, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there, so it's Stuff You Should Know. Oh wow. It's a sink. Energetic edition. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. It's cold. I'm energized by the cold. Energized and like just a little. Yeah. So you're not energized is what we're saying. I'm a little energized. Okay. I feel like I am. I'm fine. All right. Why do you say that? Because you sound like you're sleepwalking. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, I thought I was just speaking

fast. Oh, no, no. I thought that's why you were saying that. I was being sarcastic. I'm sorry to everybody who's sitting through this right now. You sound down in the dumps. You all right? Yeah, no, I'm fine. Okay. I'm just, it's the cold. It's a little dreary outside. I think today's the day it finally started to get to me. So you're ready for spring? Yes. Emily's ready for spring. I'm like, it's, you know, it's January. She said no, no, but it's Georgia, so we could have spring in a few weeks. It's true. We kind of had it yesterday. Yeah. You and me and I have been making these little bird feeders like with cookie cutters and shapes and all that stuff. And I've been trying to get the physics of it down to hang them so

that the birds can like land on them. So I incorporate twigs in with these things. So they can spend a little time there? Yeah. And there's this little SOB of a squirrel that has my porch all figured out and keeps like getting these whole bird feeder cakes. Yeah. And I realized like I'm spending a lot of time like trying to thwart this squirrel, figure out the physics of bird feed. I'm like, yeah, I'm ready for spring. Yeah. We have one of those cake holders for birds, but it's really a squirrel feeder. Yeah. And they eat it in like a day. Yeah. This squirrel can eat several cakes. And it makes a mess. Yeah. All right. Cave dwelling. I can't remember. I've asked you before, but I don't know if you've seen it

since I asked you because you hadn't. Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Verna Herzog. No, I watched. You still haven't seen it? Well, I watched like 20 minutes of it this morning just to get the gist. You got the gist in 20 minutes. Well, I can't wait to watch the whole thing though. It's pretty much that. Yeah, but I want to watch it. Oh, yeah, you should. It's like the whole thing's neat from beginning to end. But I mean, like it's a, I think maybe a two hour long documentary on a cave. Yeah. And the cave art. It's phenomenal. Yeah. I know the one in, well, they're both in France, right? Yeah. The one that gets the most press is the Lascaux. Lascaux, which is great. But this one, to me, the art is better. Well, Lascaux gets more press

because it was discovered in 1940. This one that Verna Herzog did a documentary on was discovered in 1994. Yeah. And it's twice as old, like 32,000 year old art. It's amazing. Yeah, it is. And it's all spectacularly preserved. And one of the benefits of discovering Lascaux in 1940 was that when Chauvet cave, the one that was discovered in 94, that's even older, was discovered, we'd already figured out a lot of stuff along the way and how to preserve it. Right. Right. So we could go in there and sort of TCB. Yeah. You need to cut down on the carbon dioxide that people are breathing out. Need to let Verna Herzog in there. Yeah. You need to cut down on flashes, flash photography, because apparently flashes really do degrade. There's something called

photo degradation of especially old pigments. And it's basically like releasing the sunlight over the course of a few milliseconds. That makes sense. That's one flash. But if you add up all the tourists over the years, all of a sudden, you're basically bringing the sunlight artificially into this cave and it's degrading the pigment. So there's also sorts of stuff we learned from Lascaux cave. It's not being applied to Chauvet cave. Yeah. But yes, it is older. It is more awesome. And the very evidence of old cave paintings and all the artifacts and bones that are found in caves would suggest that they're in some distant past of prehistory was a race of hominids that were cave dwelling hominids. They were a race of cave dwellers. Yeah. That must

be correct. Right. Ringo Starr. Yeah. I saw the movie. Caveman. Or was that a documentary? Was it a movie? Yeah. You're thinking of quest for fire. Yeah. Well, those are all great movies, clan of the cave bear. But I was setting you up and you didn't. Well, no. Okay, thanks. Is the answer. They now believe that people through different periods of ancient history have dwelled in caves at times that probably didn't like set up permanent residents in caves. Yeah. And the big pivotal evidence of this is that the people who would have supposedly lived in caves at that time were all nomadic hunter-gatherers. Sure. They wouldn't have been stationary in any kind of dwelling. Yeah. They got to go out and find the meat. Right. So there

was no such thing as a species of hominid that you could say are cavemen. Right. Those were the cavemen. All the other ones just lived. However, most of the people who were alive in what we're talking about, the Paleolithic era, which went back from about two million years ago all the way up to about 10,000 years ago. That's the Paleolithic era. Yeah. They lived in all sorts of different kinds of shelters, caves being one of them. Sure. Yeah. One reason to go into a cave is, obviously, it's going to, and we covered, this is I think our third. Yeah, the cave suite. Cave suite. Yeah. Biospeleology, which is awesome. Spelunking. Yeah. And then this one, cave followers. Who thought that we would do a three-part series on caves ever? Well,

and this covers cave art such that this will probably be it, don't you think? Is there anything else? I can't think of anything. No. Not really. Nick Cave. Maybe we can podcast on him. So some reasons to go into a cave to begin with, obviously, is to protect yourself from the weather. I think it's probably the leading reason. Yeah, it's raining. Let's go inside that room. Yeah, it's not raining in the cave. Yeah. To protect yourself from animals, because if you go back and listen to our biospeleology, only certain animals are in caves. Very few. And not a lot of big nasty man-eaters. Although back then they would have run into cave bears. The clan of the cave bear. I don't know if Sabertooth Tigers were cave dwellers, but I've seen a lot of Flintstone

episodes. And from what I understand, they do. They did go into caves. Of course, you would run into the Proteus Salamander, which you would not want to run into. Remember the three-foot-long Islas Salamander? Do I remember? It's white. Nightmares, like once a week. Yeah. I don't think it'd do anything to you, but man alive. I wouldn't want to see that thing. Like you wake up looking face-to-face with that Islas monster. Yeah. Yeah. But protection from animals, protection from weather. But protection from other people wasn't really a big reason, because this is good to know. I think it kind of got along and helped each other in general. Yeah. There's something called Paleolithic warlessness. Yeah. Like the concept of war, organized war, is apparently only maybe

12 to 16,000, 18,000 maybe years old. I think probably once people started getting comfy is when they started wanting to fight each other. Back then they were just trying to survive. Yeah. Well, there's a whole idea that agriculture and sedentary existence is what led to warfare. I want what that guy's got. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, it led to surpluses, so people fought over surpluses. That makes sense. You're starving over here and they've got all this grain over here, so you go kill all those people and take their grain. We should do a history of war. That'd be good. That would be good. But there were, obviously, there were scraps in the Paleolithic. I mean, it wasn't all like wine and roses.

Yeah. You tried getting along with Ron Livingston. No, that's not his name. Oh, Ron Livingston. Everybody gets along with Ron Livingston. He's from office space, right? Yeah. No, the other guy. Ron Perlman. Yeah. That's a pretty good mess up. There were scraps every now and then, obviously, over territory or food or fire, but it wasn't like, hey, let's go to war with this tribe because we don't like them or we want what they've got. Because I mean, the consensus among anthropologists apparently is that war is relatively recent. It's not that ancient. It's certainly not as ancient as a lot of the cave art we run into. Yeah. 32,000 years. Yep. So you've got shelter

from the elements, protection from animals. Nice steady temperature. That's a big one. Yeah. Because a cave typically is about in the 50s, 50s degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah. Year round. Yeah. So if you are in a cave and you're living there and it's summertime, you are sitting pretty. Oh, yeah. If it's wintertime, depending on where you are, say you're in Northern Europe, you're still sitting pretty. Sure. All you have to do is build a little bit of a fire and hope you don't smoke yourself out. True. And you're in some climate controlled luxury, especially for the Stone Age. Yeah. You know? One reason that everyone didn't live in caves, and this is something I learned when I went on my caving experience, which is

detailed in the speedlunking episode, is that even though there's tons of caves, not a ton of caves are like great to live in. Like a lot of them, you might walk right past because it's just a hole in the ground. You have no idea there's an underground cavern. Right. A lot of them are inaccessible. A lot of them have our active, so it means they have water, which isn't super hospitable. No, an active cave. Yeah, it'll flood. Yeah. You don't want to be in there when it floods. Yeah, they're just not, like generally, they're not like these huge cavernous like, oh, it's a big underground home. Well, plus also, there's a lot of gravel slopes, which if you stand on them, you can fall and die. You learn that pretty quick.

Yeah, there's a cave dweller. Lots of different exits and entrances and shafts and things like that. They can be misleading and confuse you and get you lost to your death. Yeah. Apparently, just a couple of dozen feet, I don't remember. There's the light zone, the twilight zone, and the dark zone. Yeah. And I don't remember where the twilight zone ends and the dark zone begins, but once that dark zone begins, there's no light. Like no light whatsoever. And like you said, you can't just start a bunch of fires because you can die from smoking yourself out. Yeah, you can hit your head on stalactites. That's true. Yeah. So it's not the most common thing to find like a great cave for 10 or 12 people to live in, but when they found them and they

needed them, they would dwell on them. Right. And again, that's one reason or several reasons why people didn't just live in caves all the time, but another reason is because they knew of other ways to live. Yeah. They could stretch animal hides over structures. They built earthen dwellings where they would build like a lean to or something and then pack earth over it, which is another way to control the climate or temperature in that little dwelling. Yeah. And again, they were nomadic. They were following herds of bison and mammoths. Yeah. You know, it's a big, beautiful world too. Let's not forget. Yeah. Like, why would you want to go live in a cave your entire life when you've got the run of the place of planet earth and all

it has to offer? You know, if there was a hominid that could be considered cave dwellers, though, it would probably be the Neanderthals. Yeah. As we understand right now, it wasn't too terribly long ago that we discovered a new species of human ancestor. Well, at least they were contemporary with modern humans, the Denisovans. Oh, who's that? They were, they're a type of hominid that lived in the 30 to 50,000 years ago at the latest, I think maybe. Okay. And there's a cave in Croatia, I believe, where they discovered a molar and they thought, well, no, they discovered a finger bone and they thought it was Neanderthal or human. Okay. And they ran the DNA test and they're like, this is neither. Wow. What is this? So they named it, it's a Denisova cave or Denis

cave, one of the two. And they named this new species of hominid, the Denisovans. And then they looked at the human genome and they're like, oh, were you apparently in her bread with them? Wow. Because we have a little bit of Denisovan in all of us or most of us. Yeah. People who stayed in Africa and didn't disperse like Neanderthals or other modern humans too apparently didn't have the opportunity to mix with Denisovans or Neanderthals. So typically people of European descent, Native American descent, they will have Neanderthal and Denisovan in them. But there's this cave in Croatia has evidence that these Neanderthals, humans and Denisovans possibly shared these caves at the same time. Isn't that crazy to think about? Yeah, they didn't necessarily

sit around a campfire with one another. That's what I picture. But they may have been using the cave within, you know, the same year or something like that, depending on the season. See, I pictured them, you know, making s'mores and saying, how do you get your back so straight? But I mean, think about it, if they were breeding, you know, then maybe it wasn't those caves. Jerry either laughed at that or she's choking on something food. Or both. Perhaps. So yeah, the Neanderthal was all over Europe and during a glacial period. So obviously they got harsh climates. So they might want to poke into a cave every now and then and warm up. And there are a couple of strategies that archaeologists believe were used back then, the circulating mobility and radiating mobility.

And circulating was, and I kind of like this idea, had several temporary camps kind of scattered all over a region and kind of like just having different homes. And you would just go from place to place and live in your little home and hunt and gather. It's the same thing the ultra-wealthy dude today. Exactly. Or radiating mobility was when you had one main camp and you would just go out as far as you could to hunt and gather from that camp. Right, so you had other shelters along the way. I don't know. I thought the radiating mobility was just the one camp and you came and went to that camp every day. That was the difference. I see. Is that right? It's possible. I think that's right. And apparently some of these camps were in fact caves at times.

Right. So they were using caves. For sure. They were doing something else too. They were creating art in these caves. Boy were they. Which has people baffled. Or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you

through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there

is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, cave art. Yeah. And if you have in your mind a cave art is like super primitive,

like, you know, is that a buffalo or is that a giraffe? You should go just Google the cave art in those two caves, especially. Oh, yeah. Calvet. Chauvet. Yeah, one of the things that Herzog talks about that they figured out, if I remember correctly, is that the torchlight, the flickering torchlight, produces movement of these animals. Oh, interesting. And they they're wondering whether that was intentional or not. And they think it probably was intentional because the effect is so pronounced. Yeah, interesting. But it's like legit art and legit talented painters. Yeah. When you look at this stuff, it's pretty amazing. They hadn't discovered perspective yet, so it's all flat, two-dimensional. But first of all, they're creating things in

utter dark by torchlight using earthen pigments like ochre for yellows and oranges, charcoal for black. What was the red one? I think for red, they used iron oxide. Okay. And they used charcoal and manganese for black. They're using very, very primitive brushes in the dictionary sense of the word. Yeah. Or they're early airbrush artists, essentially, because they're blowing this pigment through a tube or just out of their mouth onto the walls. Yeah. And then they're also using their hands and their fingers, but you're right, man. There are some, especially when you take all this into consideration, it makes some of the art that was made just staggering. Yeah, apparently they would use too some of the texture of the cave itself. Like if there was an indentation,

or not an indentation, but what's the opposite of an indentation? A bump. Yeah. If there was a bump that looked like a rhino horn, they would incorporate that as the rhino horn. And all of a sudden, you had, I mean, it's not quite 3D, but it's definitely more than flat. Yeah, right. They're like, it's not perspective, but it's going to have to do. They now have evidence in some of these 30,000-year-old caves of scaffolding that they would use. Oh, I hadn't seen that. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And principles of stenciling, early principles of stenciling. And apparently when Picasso visited Lascaux, he said to his guide, they've invented everything. And he was just blown away. Yeah. Basically like, I'm just copying these early hominids. Right. It's pretty

amazing. It's about right too. Yeah. And actually, I don't know, Picasso's all right, but some of these cave dwelling. They haven't beat. Maybe. Yeah. They didn't look funny. They didn't have one eye. They didn't wear berets. No. So most of the subjects of cave paintings that have been discovered so far, and there could be tons and tons of undiscovered caves. Yeah. Like the one at Chauvet wasn't discovered until 1996, because at some point in the past, a rock fall happened and closed the cave off to view, and it just happened to be discovered by some hikers. Man, can you imagine being the person that discovered that? Yeah, it would have been pretty cool. Amazing. So most of the cave art that has been discovered so far depicts herd animals.

Yeah. A lot of animals. By and large, they're herd animals. They're bison, they're buffalo, they're mammoths, things like that. There's very few images of vegetation. Yeah. Very few images of humans. Yeah. The images of humans there are, they tend to be things like fertility idols, like female fertility idols. Yeah. And there's a theory out there that those were painted by adolescent boys. Oh, really? Yeah. As like basically early club magazine or something like that. Wow. And that may or may not be correct, especially when they found that in France and Spain, a lot, possibly the majority of cave art was done by females they recently discovered. Oh, really? You know the hand ones, hand prints, they figured out recently that most of those are female

hands because of the give away of the sixth finger that only females have. There's an article that I can recommend that actually is what inspired Werner Herzog to make his documentary called First Impressions. It was in the New Yorker in 2008 by Judah Thurman and it's super awesome. And she basically says there's a couple of camps when it comes to cave art experts, those who can't resist advancing a theory about the art, and then those who say there never will be enough evidence to support one. So you're all just sort of making up these theories. Yeah. I think that's healthy that second camp is much healthier because it is all theories. I like the theories though. Yeah. And I don't think we should just be like, we'll never understand these.

So let's not even try. Yeah. I think we should just remember that when we are trying to understand them, they're all just guesses and not even really educated guesses at that. Yeah. I think my theory of why there are animals mostly is because it was super important to their survival. And maybe it was some communication to leave for another person later or to each other maybe. Yeah. There's lots of buffalo in this area. So get to hunting or don't hunt these guys because I just killed a bunch of them by forcing them off a cliff. It was awesome by the way to see, but there's not that many left and we need them to keep breeding. Or I'm an eight-year-old Neanderthal and here's a naked lady. Yeah. Here's a naked buffalo. For your pleasure. Yeah.

There's also lots of theories that these things were supernatural somehow, like they were trying to invoke the animal's spirit for a successful hunt or gain some sort of power by creating an image of the animal. And it could have also just been like, this is what I see in my everyday life and I have this desire to create art. So that's the subject I'm going to make is this animal that I am thinking about a lot because I have to hunt it for sustenance. Yeah. That makes sense. It's a conversion between this innate desire and the everyday life. Right. And that's bison on cave walls. Yeah. Well, some of them are pretty detailed and some are life size. It's like they really took a lot of time. It wasn't something they just dashed off in a matter of hours. And they're

using these torches too. It's not like a modern electric torch known as a flashlight also, but they're like stone torches with like a little divot in the top and some animal fat put in there and then they light the animal fat, which I'm sure in and of itself is quite a task. Sure. But so yeah, there was a lot of effort put into this. Yeah. A lot of detail. Gathering the pigments, I'm sure, wasn't an easy feat, especially if you're doing like a life-size bison. Yeah. How long did it take to gather all that ochre? Sure. It's not a quick thing. And it's not just paintings. They found jewelry and other like engraved bone and ivory and they think they probably engraved wood too, but that obviously wouldn't survive that long. Right.

But they suggest early religious belief in that they think they might have buried people with some of these things. Yeah. So it's like, it's amazing stuff. And unfortunately, when there's no written history, there's a lot of speculation, but it just, I don't know, it's fascinating to me. Well, yeah. And their history has been largely lost. It just happens to be preserved in the caves, but since they weren't just a strictly cave-dwelling society, we're only seeing a portion of their culture. Right. Because the rest of it was in animal skin, shelters, and earthen lean twos that have been totally lost because they were exposed to the elements. Or caves that were flooded out and washed away too. Right. Yeah. Well, that's why

there's only like, well, there's more than that, but the two big daddies, there's only two. No, there's another one. There's one called Altamira in Spain. Yeah. Steely Dan had a song about it, the caves of Altamira. And is it loaded with art? Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. There's plenty more than that. It's just Lesko is the most famous one and then Chauvet is the most recent, most famous one because of Herzog. But there are others. All right. What about troglodytes? We should mention that. That's a great word to call somebody. Yeah. It always reminds me of trilobite. You remember the little weird kind of insect armor plated fossilized insect? No. I'll show you a trilobite. Okay. It was one of the earliest like

footed animals. Scary looking. Really? But that's why I always get the two confused. Truglodyte means cave dweller. Yeah. Literally. Someone who lives in a hole. Or cave. Yeah. Named after, there were apparently some West African tribes that the Greeks came in contact with and they lived in cliff caves and they were called troglodyte or troglodyte. Well, it's a nice insult that you can throw around these days and sound sort of intelligent. Yeah. Instead of calling someone like a D-bag, you'd say he's a troglodyte. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Someone got Jerry too, man. You guys are on the same wavelength today. I guess so. The end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted

Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I guess we can fast forward down to the present day. Yes? Well, modern. Let's not quite go into present day. I think we need to give a shout out to the Anasazi and the Pueblos. Word. Cliff-dwelling peoples from the 12th century-ish of the southwestern United States, who basically showed up and started carving into cliff faces, carving out caves and lived there.

Oh, they built their own caves. Yeah, you should see some of these. Just look up cliff dwellers, US, and you'll see some really neat. They had whole cities carved out into these cliff faces that you could only reach by ladders. That sounds really dangerous. It was, but it was also very well defended and fortified. Yeah, because people just be like, I'm not going up there to fight those guys. Yeah, I'm not climbing that ladder. It's crazy. Can we talk about Mount Hebron? Are we there yet? Yeah. Okay. That's in the West Bank in the Middle East, and a lot of clan of Palestinians live in this

network of caves that have been around for about 100 years that their forefathers built. But of course, because it's in the West Bank, there's some disagreement over who should be there, of course. It's been claimed by Israeli settlers as well, and the army is threatened to remove the people. I don't know what the current state is. I looked it up. I couldn't find it. The last I saw was that they basically designated it a militarized zone, which meant that the Palestinians living there needed to leave. But are they still in there? I don't know. The most recent thing I could find was from 2005. Oh, really? So I don't know. All right. Well, Southern Spain, was that what you were talking about? I don't know if Altamira is in Southern Spain, but it's definitely

in Spain. But there are natural cave dwellings that were carved out into even further cave dwellings in Spain, and have basically been continuously inhabited at one time or another. Another is a large homeless population there, apparently. I mean, Spain's got like 25% unemployment. I'm sure that cave dwelling populations increase proportionately. Wow. Cappadocia in Turkey has an elaborate cave system, and it's not a very friendly place. There's not a lot of vegetation. It's been described as lunar. Have you seen pictures of this? Yeah. It's amazing. It's really amazing. Just the natural landscape itself is amazing. And then if you look closely, you're like, oh, those pockmarks are caves, like homes. Yeah. And these were man-made. These were carved

out for people to live in, which is, I guess we didn't even say. I guess that's the other type of cave. You can either find one or you can make one. Yeah. And by making one, I think anytime you kind of enhance or extend a natural cave to, I would guess that'd be man-made too. Yeah, probably so. But in Cappadocia and Turkey, anchorites, which were early Christians who were hermits, they inhabited these caves and made the first dwellings. And then when the Christians were persecuted, they were joined by a lot more people, and they actually built underground churches that became an underground city. Have you seen these pictures? Uh-uh. Oh, they're amazing. Just the masonry and the artwork that they made of just

hewn from the rock that's still intact today. And apparently it was abandoned and then forgotten for a while, and then rediscovered. But that was pretty neat to find. Well, I got another documentary for you, Like No Place on Earth. Have you seen that one? No. There was a guy in 1993, a caver that was exploring this cave in the Ukraine, and he found like shoes and medicine bottles and things. Wow. And he was like, wait a minute, this isn't like Paleolithic at all. This looks like it was from the 1940s. And it was. And it turns out there was 38 members of different Jewish families hid in this cave during the Holocaust for 511 days. Wow. They lived underground for over a year and a half. And some of these people

are still alive, and they found them. Do they still live in the caves? No, no, no. Okay. No, they lived there for a year and a half during the Holocaust. I got you, yeah. But they had never told their story. They just like kept it a secret. Wow. Because they were like, no one would believe it. Plus also in case they ever needed to go back to the caves. Well, they did go back. They took them back to the caves. No, I'm saying if they ever had to go back to the caves, like you want to keep the cave secret because it worked the first time, you know. But it's pretty powerful and they take some of these survivors back to this cave where they haven't been since the Holocaust. Wow. And they all survived too. Really, really great documentary. That's cool. Yeah, very cool. Like

no place else. Like no place on earth. Okay. Or like no place else. There's also apparently a trend in parts of Europe to buy old man-made cave homes. Is this a thing? And dress them up. I saw this and I was like, really? I didn't double check, but I could see this. Yeah. I mean, this is a grabster, so he's good on his facts. Yeah. Outfitting them with electricity, installing modern plumbing, getting the ventilation system going, and just turning it into a vacation home. Yeah. Putting on tile floor. And there's always the cave home weirdos. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you've seen the shows on HGTV, like, you know, bizarre houses. Right. If you're a green person, you could do a lot worse than build yourself a cave home because the

environmental impact is so much lower. It requires much fewer building materials. If you can deal with very low natural light and not go crazy, then a cave might be suited for you. If you can deal with the damp and moisture, cave might be suited for you. Yeah. And I shouldn't have said weirdos. It's okay. To each their own. But anytime I see those shows of like extreme bizarre homes, you know, this guy made a house out of, like Bob Goulet was on it. Yeah, pretty much. I've never been in, like, there was a cave house near us growing up, actually, that really? Yeah. It was like, you know, it was when they built into the side of, you know, earth. Where? In Stone Mountain. Is it still there? I assume so. Is it built into Stone Mountain? No, no, no, no. Okay. And it was

like kind of the people would go by there and look at it and stuff. And even as a kid, I thought it was kind of dumb. Did you ever know Jack McBrayer when you were younger? Kenneth from 30 Rock? He's from Stone Mountain. Conyers. Oh, really? Yeah. In the show, he's from Stone Mountain. Oh, really? Yeah. One of the other writers for 30 Rock, though, I can't remember his name, is, is, I think, what to read in. Is that right? Cool. But no, I didn't know Jack McBrayer. Gotcha. I wish. You got anything else? Oh, yeah. The last thing, one of the other benefits of a cave home, it's very difficult to break into, which is sad because that is not the reason why they were initially used in the Paleolithic era, but it's a quality point now. That's true.

How far are we? Did you see, God, where was it? That guy that built a house underground? No, I've seen those before. I've seen, like, missile silos converted into homes and things like that. This one was for sale recently. I can't remember who sent it to me, but he basically built it's not like a weird, you know, silo house. It's like a home. He just built underground. Like, when you go down there, he's got paintings of the outside world on all the walls. It was this rich guy who built it, I think, as a, like a shelter in case something bad happened. And so, you know, there's pictures of like rolling fields. And when you're underground, I mean, obviously you can tell it's a painting, but it doesn't feel like some cave. It's like just a

regular house built underground. Well, there's a theory that we're going to end up living underground because eventually, arable cropland will become so valuable that we will basically be forced to inhabit the opposite of skyscrapers that will be going down instead of up because we'll need the land on top for crops. Didn't we do one on why, why don't humans live underground? Oh yeah. Yeah. I guess that could be part four then. I guess so. It's not really a cave. Yeah, that's true. You know, this is the cave suite. All right. So, let's see. You don't have anything else? I got nothing else, sir. If you want to learn more about cave dwellers, you can type cave dwellers into the search bar at howstuffworks.com and I said search bars means it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this, we keep making the same mistake with acceleration. Oh yeah. And I'm tired of it. If we ever say this again, I'm going to like put us both in time out. You'd think Jerry would be paying attention, but I don't know why we keep making this mistake, but in the solar sales episode, we talked about the fact that I think it was you this time said something about the acceleration will kill you or the speed will kill you or something going that fast. Yeah, I'm sure it was me. We got a lot of emails and this was one of the nicer ones. Heads up guys on a few things including on the solar sales. There's been some misunderstanding between speed and acceleration. Common belief is that traveling at high speeds is taxing on the body. Not true. It is the acceleration

and not the speed, which is dangerous. Take as an example, traveling in a car, changing your velocity from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in a very short time, results in a large acceleration. This is where you get that feeling of being crushed into your seat. But once you keep that constant speed, that feeling goes away. Same thing for a plane. Notice when you accelerate on the tarmac, it's pretty intense, but once you're up in the air, you barely feel a thing. Yeah, you think we'd know this. I mean, we've done all sorts of research on the rocket sled tests and acceleration and g-force. Yeah, it's just misspeaking in the moment. We know this. Oh, if I may interrupt for a second. I ran across this designer's euthanasia roller coaster. What? It was basically

this guy designed. It's all conceptual, obviously. It's slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it was designed to kill you. The roller coaster was designed to kill you. To go out with a thrill? Yeah. And he describes at what point you will die and from what? Basically, it's like you are going upside down so fast and the acceleration is so great that it basically keeps your heart from pumping. Wow. And just to make sure you're dead, he added six of those loops. Right. But it starts with this huge hill. I can't remember what it's called. I think if you look up euthanasia roller coaster, this guy's design will come up. It's pretty interesting. Interesting. But it would be from acceleration, not speed. Yeah. Wow, that's a lot of work to put into a killing machine. I would

just draw a length of rope and a sturdy beam. Right. You wouldn't be a successful designer. Probably so. So then he puts it in the context of the solar sail and says only very small accelerations are involved. So human traveling in such a ship would experience minimal forces. So I hope it clears it up a little bit. It definitely did. Keep on rocking it, guys. Thanks a lot. And that is from Ni Raj from Australia slash Mauritius. Ni Raj, thank you. We appreciate that. We will never make that mistake again. I disagree. I'm sure we will. Speed will kill you. Where's Northern Ireland? Great Britain. UK, England. We've been getting that one wrong forever too. Yeah. You know, there's only so much information that human brain can hold everybody and we're trying to fill

it with things like cave dwelling backs and stuff like that. Well, yeah, who was the base player for poison? I can't get rid of that. You know that? Yeah, Bobby Dahl. So there's CeCe, who's the guitarist, Brett Michael. Brett Michael. Bobby Dahl is the guy. He sounds like a 1977 Oriole or something. The drummer was, you remember him, right? No. Ricky Rocket. Oh, wow. Yeah. Now I do. I didn't even like poison. That's what's so funny. Poison was good. Yeah, I wouldn't have been. They were good. Let's see. If you want to know more about poison, I already did that part, didn't I? Sure. If you want to get in touch with us, how about that? Yes. You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an

email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.