Stuff You Should Know - Where Did Human Intelligence Come From?

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

We humans are smart, to be sure, but if we’re so smart then how come we can’t figure how we got so smart in the first place? Think about that! We sure did and we go over some theories in this super interesting episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Find the Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the Brainiac Edition. That's right. I was trying to think of something and I was truly blank. That's very appropriate.

How appropriate. Totally, Chuck. Because we are talking today about human intelligence and the origin of human intelligence and it just seems super stuff you should know for us to not be able to come up with the decent joke, ya know? Well Ed did that for us actually because I did want to shout out, we usually don't mention like section titles and stuff like that that's actually in our notes, but Ed drops, because it's for our eyes, but Ed dropped a Simpsons reference in his section title.

One of the great Simpsons references, Chimpan A to Chimpan Z, so great. That was from the Planet of the Apes musical, right? That's right. I like to think is that as a little gift from Ed to us. Yeah, it definitely was and it was well received too, so thanks, Ed. And the reason Ed created a section called Chimpan A to Chimpan Z is because we're going to talk about the lineage of humanity, like where humans came from and despite that hilarious and clever section title, we did not actually evolve from Chimpan Z, but we do share a common

ancestor from Chimpan Z. So Chimps and humans split off from a shared ancestor about 6 to 8 million years ago. And that really kicked off a long line, very long process of evolution where intelligence started to develop fairly early on. It just was really slow to start and then over time it kind of picked up speed. Yeah, you found this kind of cool statistic. There's a researcher, a writer named Richard Leakey and Richard and I think most people agree they posit that there was what's called a big bang of human culture around the upper

Paleolithic time period where things were, like you said, slow going for so long and things were measured in eras before that very, very slowly over like hundreds of millennia. And then all of a sudden, like 60 to 30,000 years ago or so, things started to really ramp up in terms of innovation and intelligence and just really moving the ball forward to use a football metaphor. And we're talking about clothing and social structure and art and creativity and stuff like that. So it's kind of cool to think and we're going to talk about why that might have happened,

but the fact that that did happen got us on the moon in short order over the last few thousand years. Yeah. It's kind of like if you look at the development of intelligence as a train that's starting from a stop, it starts out with kind of a chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug. And then that upper Paleolithic revolution, the big bang of culture, that's the choo-choo part that really punctuates the whole thing. I was thinking more along the lines of like a Japanese bullet train, but sure.

I don't think we're there quite yet. We still do some really stupid stuff. But we can also create a bullet train. We can, but we just can't be the bullet train intellectually. Oh man. Mind blown. So Chuck, the fact that 30 to 60,000 years ago, there was that upper Paleolithic revolution where humanity just suddenly blossomed into what we recognize today as humanity.

It's really tempting to think that human intelligence just was suddenly born all of a sudden. Like geologically speaking overnight at that time. But that's just not the case. It seems like something definitely happened there, like some wire connected with another wire that really made a big difference. But instead, again, it was this part of this very long line of seemingly random and unconnected events in the history of humanity and I guess our genus Homo that led to that point and actually led to that point today because we're still evolving and developing.

Yeah. I guess if you look at it on a timeline, it looks like a mechanic came along and said, well, here's your problem. You forgot to plug it in. That's right. That's right. You got to plug these two wires together and then you're all set. Yeah.

Totally. So, we like to talk about Homo sapiens in terms of human intelligence for good reason. The Homo sapiens, that is to say us, aka modern humans, evolved about 300,000 years ago. But we are just one of a collection of in this big lovely family called the homonyms. Yeah. Hominins. Hominins, yeah. I think it said ms.

Yeah. So, the hominins are everybody that started off branching from that common ancestor with chimps. That's the hominin line. And humans in our genus Homo, that Homo sapiens are a part of, is just part of that hominin. There are other entirely different genus or genii that make up the hominin line, right? That's right. And we should point out that sapiens actually is taken from the Latin word for knowledge,

so it kind of all makes sense. It does. The whole thing starts out, it seems like, as far back as we can tell. Something again, like somewhere around six or so million years ago, there was a group of hominins called Artepithecus who basically walked upright, but that was essentially the big difference between them and chimpanzees. But as we'll see, that was a really, really big difference, right? Yeah.

I mean, we'll get into this in more detail, but obviously, if you're walking upright, then you have a very important thing at your disposal, which is use of your hands. Right. So then you got Australopithecus and a few other different kinds of branches that kind of branch off. It's a really tangled, convoluted family tree where some kind of led to blind alleys, others lead to others, but they think that Australopithecus was a really big, long-lasting group that was a little more human, definitely more human than Artepithecus.

But not quite as human as the genus Homo, which kicked off all of these different species of human, because we're alive today. We're on planet Earth, living here in 2022, and every single human alive is a member of the same species. So there's different kinds of cats. There's different kinds of fish species. There's different kinds of bird species. There's only one kind of human species, but that wasn't always the case.

There were plenty of different human species. Some living alongside one another for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. That's right. And almost all the hominins use tools, it seems like, and made tools. And for a long time, we thought that that was sort of it, that only the Homo genus was the one who did use tools, which is... And we talk about things like being bipedal and using tools as sort of some of the building blocks of what would become human intelligence. But now we know that there are some older... We found evidence that they used tools

before that, and that's kind of fairly recently, right? Yeah. We wanted to say that toolmaking started sometime after the Homo genus showed up a couple million years ago, but we found even older tools. So it seems like Australopithecus, which again, they're hominins. They're part of the branch that led to us humans, but they're not human in any way, shape, form. So the fact that they're using tools was kind of mind-blowing.

And it also really kind of undermined kind of like what you were saying, like our idea of using tools, like that's a big sign of intelligence, and humans are intelligent. So it's weird to find out that nonhumans were using tools millions of years ago. That's right. Should we move on to the hardware software thing? Yeah. Okay. So tools like fire are not because we found use of fire dating back at least a million

years. So if tools fire hanging out with one another collectively, if these aren't like the indicators that make human intelligence, we've got to like get a little more granular. And fortunately for you and I sitting here today, Chuck, scientists have done that, and they've come up with some really interesting ways of looking at this. Yeah, and it's a bit more of a preamble before we get actually to the intelligence. And I like the way Ed put this, sort of like talking about hardware versus software. They were very intertwined and sort of happening at the same time.

So it's not like one couldn't happen without the other as far as the hardware software thing goes. But if we're looking at hardware and we're talking about changes that made us like better at walking upright, like you can, you all of a sudden just don't stand up and start walking like this happens over a long, long period of time. Our hind legs got longer. The shape of our pelvis changed. There's something called the foreman magnum, which is a hole in the base of the skull,

where the spinal cord and lots of nerves and things passed to like sort of open up those neural pathways and that changed its location. So these literal physical changes are happening over great periods of time in order just to be able to walk upright. Right. And bipedalism, it's like the defining characteristic of hominids, right? There's not really as far as I can tell any other animals that walk upright like by default. So there had to be physiological changes, but they're not entirely certain why we started

walking upright. But the fact that we did and it's lasted for this long means that there was some advantage to it because enough people walking upright were able to pass along their genes. And they think one big theory is that it helped us survive climate change where maybe things got colder and there were less trees. So since we weren't arboreal anymore, we didn't hang out and live and eat in trees. We were able to kind of move around and find different like food sources and different shelters, whereas like our cousins, the chimps were in big trouble.

They were up the proverbial creek. Yeah. And I love that you point out that we were the only ones who walk upright by default because I think we can all agree there's nothing more fun than YouTube videos of like a dog or a cat or something just walking on time legs for some reason. Definitely. And it's the coolest and most fun thing ever. It totally is.

I mean, I'll take like a Jesus lizard running across some water once in a while too. There's nothing wrong with watching that. Is that what those are called? Yeah. I think I saw one of those in Mexico. I hope that that was surprising. Are they not there? I don't know.

I'm just saying I've never seen one in real life, so I'm sure that was surprising to see. I saw a lizard that was walking and it wasn't walking on water, but I think it was one of those kinds that can. I just didn't know the name of it. Had you recently eaten the worm from the bottom of the bottle of mezcal? Very funny. Another thing we should point out is that walking upright is an energy saver. I mean, they've done studies and they found that you use about 25% of the energy rather

than bounding around on all fours like a chimp might or like a chimp does. But to save that energy, to conserve it, our pelvis has had to change shape. Like you mentioned, that was just a consequence of walking upright. The reason it changed shape is when you walk upright, if you're a chimp, your body swings side to side, you have to hold your arms up to balance yourself. That takes a lot of energy. We developed gluteal muscles and other muscles that can cling to a specific shaped and sized pelvis so that we don't have to spend all the energy.

Our muscles are just keeping us much more balanced. One of the consequences of that, of walking upright and our pelvis changing, means that the size of the birth canal afforded by the hole in the pelvis that a child passes through during birth got smaller, a lot smaller. It's really strange to think that the decreasing in size of the birth canal actually was one of the factors that led to an increase in intelligence. We should point out this is just the first of what will be a lovely cascade of theories that we're going to lay on your brains today.

Like you said earlier, there is no one single one. It's kind of when you put all of this stuff together, I think that's sort of the beauty of human intelligence, is it took all of these great things sort of coalescing. But the whole thing with the brain is interesting because the size of the brain is one of nature's kind of controversies. We know that as far as humans go, just because you have a bigger brain doesn't mean that you definitely will be smarter. But there are some correlations across species in nature and in humans, there can be evidence

that a bigger brain means you're more intelligent, but it's not one of those things where it's subtle science where they just say, hey, if you've got a bigger brain, you're going to be smarter. No. And in fact, there's all sorts of evidence in nature that suggests that's not the case because our brain to body size ratio among humans is one to 40. So our brain makes up about one 40th of our body mass, and that's the same ratio that a mouse has.

Mice just, I don't care how you cut it, they're just not as intelligent as humans. But on the other hand, an elephant's brain to body ratio is one to 560, and elephants are super smart. So you can't really find much there that says, you know, there's no direct correlation where it's like the bigger the brain, the more intelligent the being. But there does have to be some minimum amount of brain size because it seems like the connections of the brain, as we'll see, are what really matter. And the more brain tissue you have up to a certain point, the more connections that

can be made. Right, so that brings us back to the birth canal situation. Like you mentioned, you're walking upright, it changes the shape of the pelvis. You have a much smaller birth canal all of a sudden. So evolutionarily speaking, you might think, well, does that mean we're going to have to have babies with tiny, tiny little heads, and therefore tiny, tiny little brains that may not be able to grow very fast because it's enclosed in a skull that's sort of locked down?

Right. But that didn't happen to us. The problem was, we have fontanels and we have this delayed fusing of the skull kind of, you know, closing for good. And so it allows, and it's, you know, it's remarkable still to think about this to me, but it allows that little baby head to squish down to get through the birth canal and get through the vagina and out into the world and stay that way for a while. And it's during that for a while period before that skull completely fuses, that a human

brain really, really grows a lot and chimps don't have that ability. No, a chimp, their skull fuses mostly in the womb and their brain as a consequence grows mostly to what size it's going to reach in the womb. So on the one hand, a chimp baby, you could say is much smarter and much less helpless than a human baby. Oh, for sure. But given enough time, the human baby's going to start to exceed the chimps abilities very quickly.

And it's because our development is delayed. We do a lot of developing outside of the womb and that's afforded by that skull that's not fused for a couple of years after birth. And this was not, there is no intelligent design. So this was not like a good solution or work around. This was just a naturally selected trait for the skull not fusing that was a solution to the smaller birth canal, not to increase intelligence, but the advent of babies being born that didn't have few skulls allowed for the advent of intelligence.

Yeah, a solution to the problem of walking upright, which is really interesting to think about. It also just goes to show nature is not always elegantly simple. Sometimes it's really convoluted and organisms, including us, are held together by duct tape and bubblegum. Right. You know? And that's a good example of it.

I think that's a good time for the break, yay. Yay. And we'll come back and drop some plasticity on your brain right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough 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.

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, 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 Chitikulir 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 second hand 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. And 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. Thanks to the great American settlers. The millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills and you just kind of fell into it. And you know, it's like totally fine. Just another few decades or so and then you can enjoy yourself.

Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say. You could, I don't know, start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love. And maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset, hey, I'm no settler, I'm an explorer, Spreaker.com, that's a S-B-R-E-A-K-E-R. Hustle on over today. So Chuck, this is the point we're about to talk about brain plasticity. This seems to be what, if anything, explains human intelligence and certainly the burst

of intelligence that happened 30 to 60,000 years ago. Yeah. And I think the opening statement to this whole thing is all you got to do is look at the fact that we learn almost everything as humans. Like from the moment we're born, there is some maybe instinctive knowledge. But like you said, like human babies are kind of helpless little dum-dums. And from that point forward, our brains are learning and they're growing and they're capable of learning and they're capable of adapting.

And this all has to do with plasticity. Right. So just if you are familiar, plasticity is the brain's ability to basically rewire and create new connections as new experiences come along. And you can even take old experiences that you experience more than once. And the second and third and fourth time, those neural connections are going to become more sophisticated and more connected than they were before. So our brains are plastic.

They can be molded and shaped kind of like in the rhinoplasty sense of the word. They're not made of plastic. They can be molded and they're molded by the connections that they make. So it's not necessarily that you have a giant brain. It's that you human being have a brain that is really highly capable of creating new connections. And it's those connections that forms the basis of intellect. Yeah. And that really frees up.

Like once you have a brain that's plastic and that can evolve to figure out a problem rather than taking eons and eons to have like a genetically adapt to a solution to a problem. If all of a sudden you have a brain that can figure something out, you do it so much quicker. And that frees you up to do more and learn more. And it creates this feedback loop all of a sudden where the process really, really speeds up. And that's basically what we saw 30 to 60,000 years ago.

Yeah. And the reason, and we're still seeing it today, Chuck. I mean like 30 to 60,000 years ago was a huge burst of creativity and intelligence. But we're still talking about changes that took place over thousands of years. Now we're seeing changes to the human condition in our society that take place over like tens of years. So it still seems to be speeding up and we're still going through the same process. But I guess the best way to think about what you've just described is evolution, which

typically forces changes on us based on environmental conditions goes into the brain. And now it's the brain that's able to change. Like you said, it changes much faster. And that leaves genetic evolution or genetic natural selection to focus on selecting for traits that create more and more intelligence. So it creates that positive feedback loop, like you said, and speeds things up. It's pretty brilliant. So there's been a lot of really interesting research, especially in that it seemed like

the early to mid 1990s about plasticity. There were a couple of researchers named Tubi and Cosmides, great names, and they had a theory basically that human intelligence evolved with all these encapsulated cognitive models. So they did not have the ability to access each other, each of these modules. And each one was very specialized for a very specialized problem or task that was trying to do or problem that was trying to solve. And that's like a language module, a spatial relation module. Here's how to make and use a tool, that kind of a module.

And that all these modules are still around in basically the same form that they were back then because they're on the timeline of humanity that hasn't been a lot of time to undergo any kind of modifications basically. So I disagree with that. I think on speaking about classic evolution, natural selection, that's true, but brain-based evolution and natural selection, like cultural natural selection, I think that that's false. You hear that, Tubi? So the idea about all this is that these modules that we developed over time is like we came

upon new problems in our environments and had to figure out new solutions to them. They started to kind of get cross-referenced here or there. Like you could say, the same ability to follow the sunset, I wish I would have come up with something better. I like that. It can also be used to follow herds of game, right? And so all of a sudden, we now not only just know to follow the sunset if we want to follow the sunset, we also know we can use that same ability to follow game around.

And now all of a sudden our diet expands, that kind of thing. So as these different modules started cross-referencing themselves and got more and more connected, we were able to apply these different things to more and more situations and got more and more intelligent. All right. So that's one sort of grand theory, which I love. Another one that we're going to talk about is, I think, super interesting because some of this stuff is so kind of rudimentary when you just sort of look at it from a macro view,

but when you really stop to think about how important that ended up being, it's fascinating to me. And in this case, we're talking about the fact that one of the sort of side, and again, it's going back to bipedalism, one of the side effects of bipedalism is that we lost our ability with our feet to be able to like hang on to things like chimpanzees do. These boots were all of a sudden made for walking and they weren't made for grabbing. And if they weren't made for grabbing, then you couldn't hang on to mama like a chimp could with hands and feet.

So mama had to hang on to human baby. And mama can't hang on to human baby all the time because mama still has to get things done around the savannah. So what you have to do then is leave that baby somewhere and go do stuff, like go down to the river and do things. And if you leave a baby somewhere, what? You go down to the river and do certain things, do things, you know, unmentionable things. And if you leave that baby, and this is all leading to this statement, if you leave that

baby somewhere, you want to be able to go back and find that baby. And it seems so rudimentary and basic. But that is a huge thing in the development of the early human brain is simply to spatially map and remember like where I have left this child, it's important to go back and get that child and I can do that. Yeah, and then consequently to that, another adaptation seems to have arisen from the same problem, the problem of not being able to cling to the mother anymore. And then also the problem of the baby being otherwise helpless, way more helpless than

a baby chimp, right? So they think that around the same time, babies cries developed, like you don't hear other things necessarily crying like a human baby. And they don't think that babies cried like that until around this time because there was that problem. So even if a mom couldn't remember where she put her baby, she could listen out for the baby crying. And they also think around this time that an urge or desire to soothe the baby from

its crying would have developed, and that it's possible Chuck, and this makes so much awesome sense, that language actually developed out of what's called motherese, that kind of soothing baby talk that calms the baby, that mothers know how to do just naturally, they think that it's possible that that is what formed the basis of language. Yeah, and I'm going to go beyond that even because what I noticed when I had a baby in the house was that even beyond the soothing thing, if you are holding your baby and you have to put your baby down to go wash the dishes or whatever, generally, and I think I speak for most parents, you don't just go set your baby down, go in the other room

and do stuff, you're talking to that baby from the very beginning. And you're saying, all right, let's go over to our little place here, I'll be right back and going to be right here in the other room, that baby doesn't know what you're talking about, obviously, but there just seems to be this evolutionary instinct to say things to it right out of the gate. It's really interesting. It is interesting. And then wrapped up in this also, there's a better example than following the stupid

sunset that I came up with. I love sunsets. But if you can now all of a sudden remember where landmarks are and then way find your way back to a starting point, now you can start to use that to follow game further and further afield and you're expanding your range and you can expand your diet. So that's a really good example of one thing kind of leading to another and all of it being arising from environmental pressures brought on by changes of us. Yeah.

I love it. Me too. This next one is kind of fits in a little bit with the plasticity. I think the idea of the cognitive niche, which is typically figuring out like a solution to a problem, but this theory is that maybe intelligence evolved as a universal adaptation to all kinds of evolutionary pressures that were bearing down. So and Ed has a pretty great example. If you've got an island with a tree that has a certain fruit seed that's really beneficial

for your body, but you can't crack into it, it would take a bird hundreds to thousands or millions of years to develop and evolve to have a beak that can crack that thing open. But if all of a sudden you know how to make a tool, you can just walk over and steal that thing from that dumb bird and just crack it open with the tool. So it's not filling, it's your brain at work and in that case is filling a specific niche, but that's a tool that was also used to kill the animal or chop the wood. Yeah. And that really supports what we were talking about a few minutes ago that once evolution,

once a brain is evolved to a certain amount of intellect, the brain can take care of the organism and natural selection and genetics can kind of take a step back and not have to say like, you know, select for a thicker, hairier chest because we're living in a colder time now because the brain can come up with a way to create a coat, right? So which just kind of takes over evolution from evolution by doing that and that's that cognitive niche. And one of the consequences of it is that there seems to be as things change in our environment, we figure out new ways to solve those.

And then those solutions are inevitably going to create other problems or changes. So then we have to evolve even further intelligence to figure out how to solve these new problems. And you can actually see it's still going on today, Chuck. Like we've evolved a level of intelligence where we can extract petroleum from the earth. We can build machines that run on that petroleum and we can develop science that figures out that burning that petroleum is really, really bad for the climate. So now we've altered our ecosystem enough that we have to evolve intelligence enough to figure out how to get out of this new conundrum that we've created for ourselves based on

our previous intellect. So intellect builds on intellect through environmental pressures that we often bring on ourselves. It seems like the case. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people seem to think of intelligence as only solving problems, but it also creates a lot as well. It's interesting. Yeah, it really is.

I know we were going to skip this section entirely, but I think just for funsies, we should very quickly mention one. The idea is from someone called Terence McKenna, who Ed describes as a postmodern Timothy Leary type, one of these people that advocates for psychedelic drug use, and just very quickly, the idea is that the cavemen were tripping on mushrooms, and that's how intelligence evolved. And I just like mentioning it because I feel like there's almost nothing, no leap in history, that some person hasn't said, like the Enlightenment or whatever, like, oh man, they were just

tripping. Right. They were just super strong. They were like, oh, I'm going to have to dress. I just think it's pretty funny. It is funny, but it does, I mean, like, if you apply it exclusively to the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, where all of a sudden there's like art and jewelry and dancing and all that stuff, it's possible that it was true and based, at least in part, you know?

Yeah, you never know. All right. So I say we take a break and we come back and get down to the nitty gritty of how food might have brought intelligence along. How about that? Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, 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, 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. And 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. 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 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. Here's to the great American settlers. The millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills and you just

kind of fell into it. And you know, it's like totally fine. Just another few decades or so and then you can enjoy yourself. Of course, there is something else you could do. If you got something to say, you could start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love and maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset.

Hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Spreaker.com, that's a S-B-R-E-A-K-E-R. Hustle on over today. By the way, Chuck, I have a theory real quick that the more you say uh or um, the more intelligent you are. Oh boy. That must be a smarty pants.

You know, other more intelligent podcasts cut all that stuff out. Yeah, I guess. Do they? Yeah. I mean, what did I mispronounce in the row episode? I couldn't even substantive. Oh yeah. Yeah.

It's true. Other podcasts would not have left that in. But that's just because- Well, what kind of dummy leaves that in the podcast? They're not as brave or courageous podcasters. Okay. I'll buy that. This next theory I think is super cool because anytime you tie in, um, not just food but

sort of an appreciation for a creature comfort, it really like turns me on and not in that kind of way. In certain ways. Intellectually turns me on. And in this case, we're talking about the fact that we used fire, obviously, and then started cooking food and people that cooked food said, wow, this is really good. And this tastes a whole lot better than that raw meat we've been eating. This charred meat is delicious.

And let's try and do more of this around here. Yeah. And so that would have just them being responding to like a taste preference. And that's it. But it just so happened that that taste preference would have had a really big benefit and a big contribution to the development of intelligence because if you cook meat, you unlock a bunch of nutrients and calories that are otherwise unavailable to you if you just eat it raw. So over time, the people who ate meat would have had more energy and more calories to

contribute to a growing brain, which could have helped the process along if not sped it up. And if you consider the fact that we've definitely seen that taste and smell has responded to evolutionary pressures in that we at some point learned not to eat poop and we learned not to eat rotten food and stuff. And that's, you know, taste and smell. It can have the, you know, it looks like it can have the opposite effect too, where all of a sudden you have a preference for the good and that just happens to work out in

your favor. Yeah. That's one example of one thing leading to another where like, you know, mothers developed an awareness of landmarks and wayfinding and then that led to being able to follow game which expanded our diet, which led to us eating meat, which eventually led to applying controlled fire to that meat, which led to more calories and nutrients available, which led to bigger brain growth, which helped found the growth of intelligence in humans. That's one thing, one totally random, unconnected thing, or even connected, but seemingly unconnected,

just creating us today. It's just so nutso to me. I love it. Yeah. Me too. And the fact that, like, think about this, not only the preference for a charred meat, but the preference for a specific charred meat, because, you know, different stuff tastes different.

It's not like everything tastes like chicken. I know that's the joke. All of a sudden, Tuk Tuk is out there and says, boy, that one thing that we killed yesterday, you guys. I don't know about you, but that was really, really delicious. And we know that that is, we saw that thing three days ago, about 50 miles away. Right. Everyone said, what's a mile?

And he went, well, that doesn't matter right now. But the point is, it was really far away. So all of a sudden, other things are introduced like cooperation, not just wayfinding, but hey, let's all get together, because this is like a three-day journey. And this thing is really big, it tastes so delicious. So it's going to take a few of us to bring this thing down and to process this animal and get this meat ready for cooking. So it just introduces like a cascade.

And it could have all just come from, hey, that tastes really great. Yeah. And so all that hunting and coordinating, all that takes like a lot of intelligence. And not only does it take intelligence to coordinate, it takes intelligence to explain what you're talking about, and it takes intelligence to come up with that plan in the first place. So all of those factors combining are just making humans more and more intelligent with every step. And again, it's not like it's just following this perfect linear progression.

It's just kind of randomly, and the reason that we're intelligent today is because the attempts that didn't work out got selected out. The fact got trimmed along the way. Is it kind of a ruthless way to put it, but it makes sense. And that sort of ties into this other theory of smaller prey. Like when they were hunting large prey species that they eventually, they were hunting and tracking these large animals, and eventually they were driven to extinction. So humans had to start going after smaller things, or I guess hominems had to start going

after smaller things. And the fossil record indicates this. It sort of worked in lockstep with the evolution of human intelligence. So all of a sudden, if you're hunting smaller things, you probably have to be a little bit smarter. You have to be a little bit more coordinated. You have to cooperate a little more. You have to maybe invent new tools, and obviously using a big thing to smash a large thing isn't

the same thing as smashing a small thing, and just simply the fact that they had to do a lot more of it. If you're eating a squirrel as your diet, you're eating a lot of squirrel every day, whereas if you eat a woolly mammoth, that's your food for the month or whatever. Exactly. And that's a really good example of what I was talking about earlier, that cognitive niche where the more sophisticated we get, the more problems we actually generate for ourselves, the more challenges, the more intelligent we have to become.

That's right. And what about this last notion? And then I think this is kind of where it all comes together, right? Yeah. So we have a real urge and a desire to wrap everything up in a neat little package, and we just haven't reached that point yet with human intelligence. But if you step back and look at some of the theories and see how they all kind of fit together, it seems like most or all of them, with the exception of stone date probably,

could be right, but they all have to work together and work with one another, which is great because that level of organization requires intelligence. That's right. But the key to all of this, and I think we talked about the evolution of language on a whole show, right? I think so, yeah. We still don't quite know exactly how that evolved, but we have some ideas like we talked about with the, what'd you call it, mother-in-snow?

Mother-ease. Mother-ease. But all of this became possible because of language. All of this, like you were saying, all of this coordination, all this cooperation, anything that would eventually lead to writing down human history, all of that had to have language. So it seems that all of these sort of theories coalescing around the beginnings of language and eventually the written word is like the key to it all. Yeah, totally.

And one of the other things, because we are so aware that we're intellectually superior not only to all the other animals, at the very least we're intellectually different from the other smart ones, we tend to think of ourselves as the most intellectually evolved or the most successful humans ever. And that's absolutely not the case. I think Homo erectus was around for one and a half million years, and modern humans have only been around for about 300,000 years. So we're definitely not necessarily the pinnacle of evolution just in the amount of time and

success we've had so far. But also, we have a tendency to think like, we're the top and there's nothing coming. And that's not necessarily true either. Like if you look at that acceleration in technology, like some of our ancestors used the same tool for a million and a half years without innovating upon it. They just made that same tool over and over and over again. And then somebody came along who was born and figured out a way to make it better. And that kicked off more and more technology.

And you can see it's picking up faster and faster. But the fact that evolution has jumped from the external world for us to our brains and in turn to our culture, you can make a really good case that we're not necessarily going to physically evolve any longer. We're going to mentally evolve. So it's not certain what humanity's going to look like in the future, but it's probably going to happen. The changes are going to happen a lot faster soon than they have been before.

And we'll all just end up brains in jars, right? Probably. Or uploaded. That's right. Oh, boy. Good luck with that, everybody. That had a very so long sucker to bring to it. You got anything else?

I got nothing else. I love these types of episodes. It's good stuff. Me too. Well, since Chuck and I agreed we'd love this episode, it's time for listener mail. So this is another Appalachian trail. Probably the last one I'll read because Sophie here, a.k.a. Tough Cookie, which was Sophie's trail name, is just a lovely human and we had a nice back

and forth. Sophie and Sophie's sister did a nobo through hike in 2017 and just had some kind of fun things to point out. One of the general rules of trail names is someone else has to give it to you. So I think that's kind of like, if you're a pilot in the military, you're like a maverick in goose. I think people think they named themselves cool names, but my brother-in-law was like, no, no, no, no.

You'd get a name and it's usually not something super cool like maverick. Yeah. If you name yourself, I'm sure that people are going to be way harder on you in the name they actually select for you. Yeah. I don't even know if you're allowed to, I'm not sure. Sophie says that my sister and I cheated a little bit because we gave names to each other a few days in.

I don't think that's cheating. You're still naming someone else. Sure. That's called getting ahead of the curve. We did have some unofficial trail names though that other people would refer to the pair of us as. My favorite was a 60-year-old Kentucky hiker from Maine who told us he referred to us as the Kentucky Wonders, which is pretty fun.

One thing I realized after reading all these AT emails is that it's really kind of fun. People get together and they start off alone and all of a sudden there's a group of 12 people hiking together for weeks at a time. That is the very reason why I will never hike the AT. That sounds like a nightmare to me. You would be the loner hiker. Totally. They'd be like, don't turn your back on that one.

I think your trail name might be Ted Bundy. The trail through West Virginia is actually less than four miles. I heard this from other people too. Not 18, so I think we screwed that up. It's an amazing feeling to go through so quickly psychologically after completing Virginia, which is 500 miles and a quarter of the whole entire trail. There is a four-state challenge that some hikers will attempt to do a 45-mile day to go through the end of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and into Pennsylvania in 24 hours.

It's a lot. Her family hosts a trail magic spot because they live near the trail in Tennessee. They will go out on the weekends and they pack up a bunch of hiker food. They grill burgers and stuff or make pancakes and just feed people on the trail. That is so nice. Then we'll go back home. I think you could be down with that part, right? Sure.

I'd eat a free hamburger. Can I take it to go? I'd be like, why is there mustard on here, but not ketchup? Then finally, during the hike, we would treat ourselves to podcasts for a couple hours when hiking was getting monotonous and wanted to get out of our headsum. Your voices were a frequent companion. Listening to stuff you should know selects these days often had the weird sensation of remembering exactly where I was hiking in the woods when I listened to that episode in 2017.

Come to Kentucky sometime. Check out the Bourbon Distilleries and the Red River Gorge and do a show here. Lexington, I know you'd probably rather go to Louisville or Cincinnati, but Lexington is definitely worth a visit. Sophie sent along a bunch of cool pictures of Sophie and her sister before and after and it's just looked like a really great time. That's awesome. Thanks a lot for that email, Sophie.

That was a great one and agreed, Chuck. That one had to be read for sure. Just stay away from Josh if you see him in the woods. No, I'm harmless. I just don't want to be spoken to. That's all. I want to be left alone. It's too awkward otherwise.

You could just hike with big giant like 1970s headphones as if you're listening to something. That's right. With my head down, sunglasses on and a bag over my head. I love it. If you want to be like Sophie and get in touch with us, you can send us an email. Send it off to StuffPodcasts.iHeartRadio.com. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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. Introducing The Biz Take, your all things music, business and media podcast. Join me, Joe Wasleski and my co-host Colin McKay every Wednesday where we discuss the breaking news changing the music industry and what your favorite artists and creatives are up to.

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