The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind by Kermit Pattison

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind by Kermit Pattison kermitpattison.com A decade in the making, Fossil Men is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body: the first full-length account of the discovery of a startlingly unpredicted human ancestor more than a million years older than Lucy It is the ultimate mystery: where do we come from? In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White uncovered a set of ancient bones in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the resulting skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus—nicknamed “Ardi”—was an astounding 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than the world-famous “Lucy.” The team spent the next 15 years studying the bones in strict secrecy, all while continuing to rack up landmark fossil discoveries in the field and becoming increasingly ensnared in bitter disputes with scientific peers and Ethiopian bureaucrats. When finally revealed to the public, Ardi stunned scientists around the world and challenged a half-century of orthodoxy about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today’s chimpanzee. But the discovery of Ardi wasn’t just a leap forward in understanding the roots of humanity--it was an attack on scientific convention and the leading authorities of human origins, triggering an epic feud about the oldest family skeleton. In Fossil Men, acclaimed journalist Kermit Pattison brings us a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including White, an uncompromising perfectionist whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant whose deep expertise about teeth rivaled anyone on Earth; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist with radical insights into human locomotion; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia’s most senior paleoanthropologist; Don Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy, who had a rancorous falling out with the Ardi team; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paleoanthropology. Based on a half-decade of research in Africa, Europe and North America, Fossil Men is not only a brilliant investigation into the origins of the human lineage, but the oldest of human emotions: curiosity, jealousy, perseverance and wonder. About Kermit Pattison Kermit Pattison is the author of Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind. He lives with his family in Minnesota.

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distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. Today we're going to have a really intelligent discussion with this gentleman. At least he'll be the intelligent one. I'm going to be the idiot listening in. And he has written this most extraordinary book that's going to teach us so much about where our origins come from or where some of our origins might come from the name of the book that he has that's just out is called fossil men the quest for the oldest skeleton and the origins of humankind his name is kermit pattison pattison has written for the new

york times cq inc fast company fossil men is his first book and he lives with his family in Minnesota. Welcome to the show. How are you Kermit? I'm fine. Thank you for having me on the show today. Thank you for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it. This is a really interesting book that you have here. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and order up the book. Yeah, well

the main place to find me is my website. It's KermitPattison.com. And it's K-E-R-M-I-T-P-A-T-T-I-S-O-N.com. So not Patterson. That's the side of the family that can't spell. So KermitPattison.com or I'm on Twitter with the at Kermit Pattison. There you go. Kermit Pattinson. And then the book you can find, of course, on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Harper Collins or all the big book buying websites. It's everywhere, folks. It's everywhere and it

wants to be in your book list. So let's get into this. Fossil Men. What motivated you to write this book, I guess, from the start? Yeah, well, it was motivated by learning about this amazing discovery that was made. And it had been published at that point. But it was not very well known. So the book is centered around the search and discovery of a fossil skeleton. It's the oldest skeleton in the human family. It's nicknamed Arty. It's 4.4 million years old, and it was found in Ethiopia in 1994 and subsequently published in 2009. Now, Arty, the individual, is part of a species called Artypythicus ramidus. That's a mouthful, but the individual they nicknamed Artie. Artie is actually a female.

So a lot of people ask me, well, why do you call this book Fossil Man if it's about this ancient female? Or, you know, what kind of a sexist chauvinist pig am I to use this old language? And the answer is it's actually not. This is an old term used for all human ancestors. It's no longer used anymore because indeed it is a sexist term but the story is about um it's about the skeleton but it's also about the team of scientists who searched and found and then interpreted art and it's part of a big saga of discovery and also you know the dynamics of

science but so why did i get into it i just um uh did not intend to write a book about arty i was at work on a book about some other aspect of human origins but uh and i thought arty would be this little bit of background you know a sentence or two before i got into like the more interesting stuff that subsequently happened in human into like the more interesting stuff that subsequently happened in human origins. But the more I learned about Artie, I got more and more intrigued because it was an incredible discovery story. In terms of the science, the revelations of Artie were overturning or at least challenging a lot of assumptions or kind of conventional wisdom about human origins. So the more I learned, the more I realized that this was sort of a great,

still mostly untold story about the oldest skeleton in the human family. And what's your background or professional status? So like, what do you do that made you, angled you towards these? Yeah, so I am a journalist. I've been a journalist my whole professional life um and i worked for you know newspapers back started in the days before the internet when they were actually written on paper um and then i was in uh newspapers for a while and then i was a freelance magazine writer and business journalist for a time that's what i was doing when i um came upon this story and i was writing for a bunch of different publications i did a lot of writing

for the new york times business section i did some writing for gq or inc magazine fast company but it was not it was not uh certainly not anthropology that i was writing about but i had this interest in this science and uh then just became immersed in it. And I have been immersed in it for the last 10 years about. So Fossilman gives the, I'll let you tell the arc of the story, but it's about this whole journey they go on of discovery and all the different things that they have to deal with in Ethiopia and everything else. Yeah. So the story starts uh in the early 80s when there is a team of people

setting out to start searching in a new project area in ethiopia it's called the afar depression the afar depression is kind of like the northern end of the great rift valley you've probably heard the great rift valley and it exists because that's where the continental plates are separating, and they're drifting apart. And in the middle is created this long valley, this trough. And because of the laws of geology, this is where a lot of fossils are preserved and where a lot of them are subsequently found. And the Afar Depression is a really rich fossil hunting ground. So you probably heard of the famous skeleton Lucy. Lucy was found in 1974 in the same part of the world.

And Lucy was a big discovery in a lot of ways. And this group set out to search an area that they hadn't looked at before. And they had a number of scientific questions, but one of the top priorities was what came before Lucy. Lucy was 3.2 million years old. This team, it's called the Middle Awas Research Project, was going to another area near where Lucy was found, where they knew they would find older fossils because the rocks there were older, basically. And this is the story about that quest. And it actually turned out to be a really long quest because no sooner had they started searching, then Ethiopia banned fossil hunting by foreign scientists. And then Ethiopia was going through this kind of revolutionary period.

There was a lot of violence. There was civil war. It was a really difficult place to work. And indeed, for nine years, these guys were put out of business in Ethiopia. So then finally, in the early 1990s, they go back and they search for a couple of years and they begin finding pieces of teeth and then some other elements of the skeleton. And then, you know, through systematic searching, they finally found the first bones of what turned out to be a skeleton. They didn't know that it was a skeleton at first.

They just find a hand bone and then some other pieces of the skeleton and then sort of do the detective story and figure out where it came from and then found uh the skeleton that's 4.4 million years old and the discovery alone is uh just a major thing because at this age skeletons are really rare uh you know probably a lot of lay people don't appreciate just how rare this stuff is because you know we're always hearing about a fossilist or a fossil that found. Well, when you get really old, like, you know, three, four million years ago or older it's, they're quite hard to find. And I mean, just as a proof of that, you could look at the fact that Artie was found in 1994.

And certainly people have been looking since then, but no one has found an older skeleton. They found older fossils, but they're pieces of other things, like a couple of thigh bones here in Kenya, or a skull in Chad. That stuff is older. It's important. But a complete skeleton is quite rare. This is pretty cool. I mean, I don't remember hearing about arty in the bible which chapter was she in it's it's one of the lost books yeah me and my me and my atheism uh at work um so this is really interesting 4.4 million years ago yeah um so i guess my next question that's probably on the

edge of everyone's mind was already hot like would she have gotten dates on tinder no one knows all we have is the bones so uh you know all the stuff that you'd be interested in chris i'm afraid is did not fossilize it damn it i was thinking about asking already you know i was gonna say when they when you were saying they found a skeleton my usual knee-jerk reaction is whenever i hear that is like i didn't do it i wasn't the one and that's not my shovel she's got big hands so when she slapped you you would really feel it because she's got these big ape ape hands you know i could i don't know there's jokes for that but i'm just not going to leave i'm gonna leave it there but there are some extraordinary things about artie correct and in her makeup and what it tells us about our origins yeah and so the cool thing about Artie, you know, as I said,

is that she was found. And not only was there a skeleton, but Artie had a lot of pieces that were, that are usually not preserved on skeletons and were missing from Lucy, for example, hands. They have a nearly complete hands, nearly complete feet. Now, that might not sound like a big wow to you, but if you're a fossil hunter, a paleoanthropologist or a paleontologist, this is actually a really huge thing because oftentimes the hand, foot bones,

they kind of disappear and you're left with the long bones or something. And Tim bones, they kind of disappear and, you know, you're left with like the long bones or something. And Tim White, who was one of the main figures in this story, he calls hands and feet carnivore hors d'oeuvres. And, you know, that means they're kind of, you know, because when a skeleton dies in this part of the world, then as now, you know, hyenas and the scavengers will come in and sometimes they can reduce a big carcass down to bone splinters in a day. I mean, do you see that now when like a rhino or a hippo dies, you know, the scavengers, the hyenas and then the buzzards and all the little rodents, they all come along and pretty soon there's not much left. And so for something to be left alone, so it has a chance to fossilize them is a pretty rare occurrence but with arty uh somehow she died in such a ways that the hands and feet were preserved along with the pelvis and a lot of

the skull uh so the big revelations were you know you get a glimpse of an ancient hand you know you can start to make hypotheses about how the hand evolved or how the foot evolved or how the pelvis changed or how you know the skull and the brain evolved so there are a lot of revelations in this skeleton because of all the different skeletal elements that are preserved there so does uh what were what were some things that were different when with their you know of how we evolved because you know there's always been that uh thing that we came from apes and of course if you turn on your political tv you can still see them um on tv slinging shit yeah just like the zoo but what were some of the differences uh that were surprising to scientists yeah so i mean everyone knows that we that we

humans evolved from some kind of ape i mean that, that was what Darwin said. Some of us. Yeah, some of us. Okay, if you're a creationist, you don't accept that. But the people who believe in evolutionary biology- I believe them in my neighbors. Accept this. And so the question has been, well, what kind of ape? Is it an ape that looks like a modern ape you see living in Africa today, like a modern chimp or bonobo?

Or is it some other creature we've never seen before and uh arty what around the time arty was found there was a prevailing view uh that said you know that when you find the common ancestor of humans and chips which at that point they point they were thinking the humans and chimps split about five or six million years ago. Now they think the split is older than that, but that was the kind of target split time at that point. A lot of people believe in those days that the closer you got to that split point, you'd find something that's really similar to a modern chimp. And the idea behind there is that humans have evolved a lot, but chimps have sort of remained much more primitive, much more like our common ancestor. And in fact, right around

the time Artie was discovered, Jared Diamond, who's a well-known scholar and thinker and writer, he wrote a book called The Third Chimpanzee. And basically what The Third Chimpanzee means is that there's two species of chimpanzee. There's the common chimp and the bow to bow. And we are so closely related to them that you could almost consider us to be a third chimp. So this was the expectation when Artie was found. And so one big surprise is she's really unlike a chimp in a lot of ways. Certainly she has some ape-like features that are shared with chimps but

she doesn't have big canine teeth like a chimp she doesn't have apparently was not a knuckle walker like a chimp um a lot of other surprises like that and i should tell you like that the first big surprise uh that came with arty was um and this is like right after they discovered her and started cleaning the bones, they discovered that Artie had an opposable toe. And this was a big revelation because, you know, that's really ape-like. And everyone expected that sometime in the deep past, there would be some kind of, you know, that human ancestors had, you you know opposable toes because we came from other primates you know like apes and uh they all have that so we knew it was there somewhere but it in a uh it had never been conclusively shown to any member of the human family well i don't even

had uh no i mean this was a big debate in in the 1980s that's you know lucy didn't have feet of course uh so a lot of this was sort of arguing about stuff that hadn't been discovered yet. And some people were thinking that Lucy probably had an opposable toe and they argued about this, but now it's pretty clear that Lucy's species did not have an opposable toe because more pieces of her, of her species have been found. And in fact, they've even found footprints that were probably left by Lucy's species. And they look actually a lot like human footprints with a foot arch and a toe and a straight line

and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, so Artie had the supposable toe. And then as it subsequently was determined, she also walked upright. So she's this kind of transitional creature who's got the toe for climbing and big hands for climbing but also seems to be walking erect like humans do and that's like a walking erect is a really weird thing for any creature to do and you know one of the great mysteries of humankind is why did we humans start to do this weird weird thing that like played havoc with our posture and

it's you know it's we give up a lot of our climbing ability like why on earth did humans do that well already is a glimpse of an early species that was in you know that transitional stage this is really cool i'm into chicks with opposable uh toes i like that that's my favorite thing that's in my tinder profile actually too yeah looking for um long-term relationship opposable toes um so this is really interesting uh you know uh so it's presumed maybe that we're even older than her um uh by by quite is she officially a homo sapien in this scientific term? No, no, no. She's not. Homo sapiens don't appear until 200, some stuff that's like 300,000 years ago that they're part of our Homo sapiens.

So she's not only a different species, but like a different genus. So there's three main genera, that's basically plural of genus, that exist in the human family. There is Homo, which is us and Neanderthals and some other species. Then before that is another more primitive genus called Australopithecus. And Lucy is part of that. And then older than that is Ardipithecus. And some other people would argue that there's other genus in there that I've not mentioned, but I'm just kind of keeping the story simple here. But anyway, Ardi, it's too early to be Homo sapiens proper.

And so it's something in the human family, but certainly you would not call it Homo sapiens because it's just got too many, it's too far removed in time time and it's too different than us to put in the same species. Did Artie drink Starbucks? Was she into Starbucks coffee? Yeah. You know, that. So you read this great book and there's, and this is actually quite the adventure because they got to deal with the Ethiopian government. Yeah.

They got to deal with, you know with demands being put to the scientists. Is there stories in there of risks to their life or where sometimes there's some security issues? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, this is a big part of the story of the book is what the scientists have to go through to practice this science to find the fossils so uh and this was one of the big surprises to me as a reporter an author is that there was all this backstory so you know it's not like you know people that go to montana to find dinosaurs you know and they can you know they can go and then they can go sleep at a nice hotel and get running water. This is Ethiopia. And there was like civil war going on at the time.

It's an underdeveloped country. And then in the area where they were working in the Afro-Depression, there was actively tribal warfare going on. There's two tribes there. One is the Afar, A-F-A-R. And the other one is the Issa, I-S-S-A. And these are like historical enemies, like Hatfields and McCoys. And at times they would be shooting each other on sight, and they're both pastoral people who, you know, they herd, you know, livestock like goats and cattle, and, you know, will engage in raiding back and forth to steal livestock or

then you know someone gets killed and there's a raid or retribution and i mean this has been going on for for generations um sounds like me and my neighbors yeah exactly that's what that's what i was gonna get to and so when so this is all going on now i told you before that there was this kind of moratorium where scientists couldn't work in this area where they knew there were so many fossils. Well, that's because there was a war going on. And during this time, Ethiopia became a Soviet client state, you know, as part of like the Cold War superpower rivalry between the US.S. and the Soviet Union. So when that happened, the Soviets just sent tons of arms to Ethiopia, you know, AK-47s and all this stuff. And then, you know, a lot of this weaponry filtered down, actually, to the, you know, left the army and the police forces and wound up in the hands of the tribes.

And so it used to be that they would be fighting with old bolt action rifles, you know, from, you know, from World War Two. Well, when these scientists resume work, around the time they found out already, these guys now have AK-47s with 30 round magazines, full auto, and they have got grenade launchers and grenades and so this tribal warfare becomes a lot more dangerous and uh so that's that's what element the scientists had to deal with is that the danger in the field and that's has waxed and waned over the years but it still exists and it certainly existed back then i mean being a scientist probably isn't the most greatest thing when you're dealing with people from an old tribal sort of world that's very Neanderthal.

You're dealing with governments that, you know, like Mobutu or something that are like, you know. Yeah, well, I mean, if you have the right, I mean, yeah, if you have the right mindset, I'm sure it's fascinating. But yeah, you really have to be mindful of security. And some, and so some of the scientists that were working there, I mean, some of these guys are Americans and some of them are Ethiopians who are, you know, trained PhDs who are now have developed the science in their own country. And so they're part of the leaders of this team, but they, you know, they would tell me stories like, well, we go down there and, you know, you had to hire a bunch of local guys to do security, but these guys don't have any sense of like muzzle control there's not much discipline with the weapons so they've got the safeties off on the guns you know they're cramming into cars and

they've got the you know the gun set on fire or you know they've got grenades you know with them and and so they had to sort of work you know constantly remind their so-called guards that really could you please not point your muzzle at the guy sitting across from you in the car? Could you please put your gun on safety? So that's one element that was a surprise to me was the whole security issue in the field. And the other element was in the capital in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a very bureaucratic country. And so the people who wanted to do this work had to get permits from the government.

And that became a very, at times became a really political process with permits being awarded or revoked depending on who you had pleased or displeased in the government. And so that, you know, sometimes the scientists were telling me that, you know, they'd spend weeks, sometimes a month in the Capitol, you know, going from this office to that office, to this office, that office,

you know, begging when this person sends you over to another office, they ping ponging back and forth just to get permission to go into the field. And when you're an academic whose window of availability is short, that's precious time that's being wasted on bureaucratic runaround. So that was another challenge that was occurring throughout this story. So it was not only a scientific detective story about a search and discovery and interpretation about a fossil, but a lot of ways it's sort of a trial, you know, in the field front and the bureaucratic front. And then, you know, the academic front, too.

We haven't talked about sort of the academic tribal wars that go on in the university setting but that that was part of this those include ak-47s as well no no they're not they're not that uh not that direct most of it slow poison so it's an interesting story and and i find it interesting the origins of how old we are um especially when sometimes i see the news and I'm like, we haven't evolved at all. But, you know. No, I wasn't kidding. I mean, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I wasn't kidding when I talked about

the sort of the tribal aspects of academia. I mean, you could, I mean, people say this all the time now in politics, so it probably sounds like a cliche, but people are pretty tribal, whether they're born in the Afar, you know, in a village or whether they're born in this country and, you know, form this tribe or that tribe. But a lot of human behavior is universal.

I've killed a man for research grant money for my scientific experiments. I'm sure that's been somebody. I don't know. So what aspects of the book have we touched on oh expect me to remember so uh it's got a lot of pages i know that yeah it's got a lot of pages well uh well let's talk about okay so who who already was as i mentioned uh it's a skeleton it's 4.4 million years old it's from ethiopia and i told you a little bit about you know she walked upright but yet had this opposable toe for climbing so she's clearly kind of like this hybrid vehicle of pliocene africa where she is spending time on the ground and also up and up in the trees uh small brain so the brain of arty is you know within the range of

what a modern chimp is you know maybe just a little smaller but like kind of in the range of what a modern chimp is, maybe just a little smaller, but kind of in the range of normal for a female chimp. She does not have big fangs like a chimp, which is kind of an interesting thing. When you go deeper into the fossil record, in other words, when you find older and older fossils, the clues that tell you that they're part of the human family become more and more subtle. Now, in contrast, if you find like a Neanderthal that's, let's say, 50,000 years old, there's no doubt that's part of the human family

because it looks so much like you and I. I mean, of course, they're different in some ways that we call them a different species, but there's no one that can say, oh, that's an extinct ape. Well, when you go back four and a half million years ago, the stuff looks more and more primitive. And so the clues that tell you that this is a member of the human family become much more subtle. And one of those clues is the teeth. And chimps and gorillas and all our ape cousins have what they call honing canines. And they are like big fangs that actually will sharpen themselves by rubbing on the teeth beneath them. And they have these for defense and also for fighting with each other, you know, fighting over mates or territory, that sort of thing.

And humans are unique because we don't have those dagger-like fangs. We have a canine tooth that is much more diamond-shaped. And the reduction in canines is something that occurs throughout human evolution. And so Artie had a reduced canine, and her canines were, unlike a chimp, were more diamond-shaped like a human. They're bigger than us. I mean, they're more fang-like, but nothing like a chimp and so that's one of the clues that told told the science is that this was a uh a primitive member of the human family

so that's that's one uh revelation about arty um i'm looking at your if you don't mind me i'm looking at your uh the picture on your website and they're in the middle of the top portion i imagine that there's a skull and there's a jawbone and then i'm seeing all these little what look like teeth are those the things you were talking about uh i i can't see the picture are you looking at like this the skeleton laid out in a black background yeah so yeah this skull when they found it was not a nice neat skull so this is a cheap copy of the art of the skull i mean it's it's not an official copy if you showed this to a scientist like on the arty team they

would be disgusted because it's so it's like a paperweight but anyway it sort of will give you an idea of the size and what it looks like now when they find this stuff it does not look like that it is uh pound you know it's been been subject to like four and a half million years of geological assault. You know, this stuff, you know, before it fossilizes, it might be stepped on by a hippo or whatever. And then it's buried under kilometers, you know, of sediment. And over time, the sediment sort of heaves back and forth so

the bones get really broken up and the skull so tim white who is the scientist from berkeley who was uh part of the team that found already he told me when they got the skull out of the ground it was about like an inch and a half thick so in other words it was like this so that so that was imagine like an eggshell and bam you just smashed it down and that's what happened to the skull you know tim was speculating that maybe a big animal like a hippo or elephant you know stepped on it while it was just lying there maybe there was foul play maybe someone came along with a big right yeah uh so so uh and so that's what you're looking at in that in that photo it's like the shards

and so putting that puzzle back together is part of the detective story and that work was done uh somewhat by tim but also another guy in japan named gen sua who was one of the main characters in the book and that was a really long part of this drama because it was so damaged and had to be put back together uh from so many pieces and the hands are incredible from the picture if you guys go to kermit pattison's site uh.com you can see the picture of the hands of course i'm sure if you order the book you can see the picture of the hands. Of course, I'm sure if you read the book, you can see more of this. The hands are extraordinary in comparison to the skull. The hands actually were

and feet were in relatively good condition. I've got the book here and you can just see a little bit. There's a hand here on the car. That's the skeleton picture, but with the hand blown up. She's got rock fingers yeah those bones were actually relatively well preserved they hadn't been

beaten up the way that the skull had or the pelvis had and so the hand the scientists were able to put it back together and in relatively quick order with just a minimum of restoration and cleaning and uh so the big surprise about the hand was number one that they found any hand i mean its sheer existence was just a big revelation uh and it was a big climbing hand as you'd expect from an ape but again it didn't look quite like a chimp it had the hand proportions were different. There were some aspects of the hand skeleton that suggested that Artie had better manipulative abilities than a chimp. But, yeah, you're right. The hand was an incredible part of the discovery. Yeah, it's really interesting to see how we evolved and where we came from and everything else and how far we've gone.

What are some other aspects we maybe haven't touched on there in the book? Yeah, so I told you about the big surprises. Now, what we haven't talked about is the controversies. They already turned out to be hugely controversial in science, and there are a couple reasons for that. One is one thing that was controversial before they even published the skeleton. And that was the amount of time that it took the team to publish it. So Artie was found in 1994 and it was published in 2009. So there's a 15 year interval there and the reason for that length of time is uh it was a really protracted investigation

to put this thing back together like the skull i told you about or the pelvis or all these other elements um there also uh was a series of parallel or investigations going on because this team after they found already is still going out every year and finding lots of other stuff in some is homo sapiens some is australopithecus they're finding stuff all up and down the timeline of human evolution because their project area covers about six million years and at different time it's basically like a big layer cake right so at different times they're going and they're looking at five million or or three and a half million or 4.4 or whatever. And so they're racking up all these discoveries,

and that is creating this big backlog of work. So that's slowing things down. And this particular team decided that they were not going to publish this thing piecemeal. They were just going to do it all at once. And initially, they thought they'd published the skeleton in five years. Well, it took them like three times that long and there was a lot of impatience in the scientific community about that because you know everyone knew they had the skeleton they were told that this species

represents the roots of humankind but yet people outside weren't allowed to see it and that caused a lot of resentment and then the personalities on the arty team are kind of uh combative uh some of them as you can you know know from the book and you know they didn't just say no but you know said no in a kind of defiant way and this created a huge animosity and you know i should also say point out something about the field. And that is, there's not many people who go out and actually look for fossils. And there's even fewer who actually are successful at doing it. But there's a large group of people who do other things in anthropology, and they depend on the field people to provide the primary data, or at least the primary data about fossils. So there's like this huge audience and this huge demand, and that creates a lot of impatience and pressure on the field teams like this. So by the time Artie was published, this resentment had actually reached a point where I think it, in some cases, kind of poisoned the well,

and some people were just kind of pissed off and ready to find fault with what they published. Okay, so that's one bit of controversy um another is just the sheer surprise that you know already has this combination of features like the opposable toe combined with upright walking and you know no one had really predicted that so there's kind of like the disbelief surprise that comes with it um you know i told you before about the ways that Artie was not like a chimp. Well, when the discovery team published it, they really emphasized it's, you know, not a chimp, not a chimp, unlike a chimp. There is a large group in the scholarly community who study chimps and have

used chimps as models of human ancestors. And when the Artie team kind of came and really forcefully pounded the not a chimp message, that offended some people. And it was, and that I think was, you know, created some controversy. And then another controversy, frankly, is just the question, is Artie really a member of the human family? Or is it some other extinct ape? As I told you before, when you get really old, the things that tell you, the clues that align these animals with us become more and more subtle. And that means that there's some controversy about whether they've

correctly put it in the family tree. So I'd say that was a big point of controversy in the beginning. I think the controversy still exists, but more and more outside scholars have weighed in and said, yeah, actually, this is indeed a primitive member of the human family. They have put it in, they have diagnosed it correctly. And that, I think, has made already more accepted than it was like five years ago. So that's another point of controversy. There is some controversy. Yeah.

Yeah. I could keep going about like, because, you of course people like you know can dance on the head of a pin about this little bit of anatomy so we could keep going about what's controversial like savannah's and and like the method of analysis that the team used but we'll stop there because that gets more and more esoteric we'll let people read the book to find the details on that we'll stop there because that gets more and more esoteric. We'll let people read the book to find the details on that. We'll keep some of it hidden for them. But there you go, folks.

You have the teaser. So is this close to, you know, a lot of people talk about, you know, the missing link sort of thing? Is she the closest thing to a missing link? Yeah, I mean, I've been studying this for about 10 years. I still don't know what the missing link is. I 10 years i still don't know what the missing link is i mean actually what i do know what the missing link is and what the missing link is is an overused cliche uh i mean so i mean all or everything going back in the in the chain of species is a link and you know anything that's not found is missing. So it's kind of overused,

and it's kind of overused to kind of proclaim something to be like the Eureka fossil, like the magic fossil that explains everything. Well, no one fossil is the magic fossil that explains everything. So that's what I'd say about the missing link. It's sort of just an overused cliche that just has the staying power that it will probably be around whatever homo whatever that succeeds homo sapiens.

That phrase will probably be still in existence. But it is already is getting. This is not the missing link, but is an interesting uh scientific question is the uh what they call the lca like the last common ancestor of humans and african apes that's probably a much better term than yeah and then yeah and so actually this is a big scientific question and it actually became a big point of controversy about aboutie. So the last common ancestor of humans and chimps has been kind of like a holy grail of anthropology for a long time.

What did it look like? Can we find it? When did it live? And so Artie, there's some question about when humans and chimps split, but now the split appears to be older than we used to think it was. And some people say six and a half. Some people say 12 million years ago.

There's a lot of open question about that. But when Arty was found, they were thinking it was around five or six million years ago which means that arty is not quite at the split point but it's getting pretty close and can tell you some things about what that common ancestor of humans and african apes looked like so yeah so i think that the cliche the missing link is probably overused but the last common ancestor is an interesting question. And it's a really complex question too. And there's not only like a last common ancestor of humans and chimps, but there's also a last common ancestor of that we have with gorillas, which is somewhat older, a little deeper in the past. And then, and on and on like that. So already,

you know, as I, again, again, was not this LCA, the last common ancestor, but she is kind of informative because she was a lot closer to it than we had ever been before. You know what I'm going to get from this show, on top of all the wonderful intelligence that you share with us in the book, every time i look at my toes i'm gonna be pissed off that i didn't inherit those opposable toes that sounds like that might have been fun like trees and shit think of all you think of all you could do yeah like by my left foot that guy you know i don't know i'm just like i'm every time i see my toes i'm like you guys get the shaft man you guys you guys had opposable toes.

Because I always make fun of my dogs because they can never open doors and shit and get into stuff. Yeah, you guys get screwed in the opposable thumb thing. Someone's mocking them with it. Oh, yeah. Think about that. They could get into like the dog food cabinet and all that other stuff. And they're just looking at me going. Let themselves out for a walk.

Yeah. Which actually kind of would be nice sometimes, but probably not all the time. Because then they escape and I get a call from the pound. But no, this is really brilliant stuff, especially for people like me who study this or people that want to study the origins of where we came from, why we're here, and the motivations of that. Anything we want to touch on before the book, before we go out? Well, I'll just say a word about two things, and that is a plug for doing the work that leads to discovery. And, you know, if you really want to find answers, you really need to go find the answers. And that's not only true, that's obviously true for fossils. I mean, we could sit here and speculate all day

about what the last-count ancestors of human apes looked like, and people could make inferences and use these different models and technologies and methodologies and blah, blah, blah. And those are all useful, worthwhile things to do, but to really test

whether your model or hypothesis is really true, you really need to go find things. And so I think, you know, part of the lesson to me, the enduring lesson of Ardipithecus and a lot of other scientific stories is just the validation of discovery. Because a lot of times the real answers are surprising and they're counterintuitive and you know science you know human origin science a lot of other sciences surprise people again and again because nature is really complex and usually more complex than we can kind of conceive in these supposedly big brains that we have. So that's one thing.

And the other thing is just, I think it is really important for people to remember that science is a long-term endeavor. I mean, another example, this is totally outside the realm of fossils, but there's people, for example, in ornithologists who study finches and have created this incredible body of work about this kind of iconic example of evolution. And there's been a lot of revelations that came with that. Well, you don't get that by going there for one season. You get that by going there year after year after year and letting all this evidence accumulate. And so that's true with, you know, finches, it's true with fossils, I dare say it's true with, you know, some kinds of journalism and writing too. So yeah, so I guess I just a pat on the back to all the people that do that long term work of discovery, you know, people that look at

apes behaviors, you know, and spend years doing that, the people that look for long-term work of discovery, people that look at apes' behaviors and spend years doing that, the people that look for fossils. It's all important work, and the value does aggregate over time. I would agree, and people should study this more and learn more. It seems complex. I think what a lot of people don't get is that science is always a theory, and so it's always evolving. It's never set in cement of like,

this is what we know. There's nothing new. Yeah, it's all a progress report. I mean, yeah, and it's self-correcting. And so, yeah. And what I should have mentioned, like the long-term endeavor, I neglected to mention talk show hosts

with all those other professions. So you're in there too, Chris. There you go. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. You know, I find this extraordinary because I grew up in a religious format you're in there too chris there you go thank you very much thank you very much you know i mean i find this extraordinary because i grew up in a religious format where we were taught that the world was like 2 000 years old and you know artie was running around the garden of eden or something

maybe she was even who knows you know that sort of thing and so i of course learned much differently from from theology uh and uh i'm going to hell, really, with Artie. So there you go. So it's been wonderful to have you on the show. We've learned so much, Kermit. And I believe we're going to learn so much more if people look at the book. Pick up your – or give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, sure.

So the book is Fossil Men. It's published by HarperCollins, the William Morrow imprint of Harper Collins. It's available everywhere. My website is kermitpattison.com and K-E-R-M-I-T-P-A-T-T-I-S-O-N.com. And the book is easy to find if you just Google the title and my name. There you go, guys. Thanks for coming on the show with us, Kermit. We certainly appreciate it. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for, guys. Thanks for coming on the show with us, Kermit. We certainly appreciate it. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Our pleasure. And check out the book, guys. I mean, he wasn't monkeying around. This is 544 pages. Sorry, I had to get that reference in there. It's Fossil Ben, the quest for the oldest skeletons and the origins of humankind. Pick it up, guys. Be sure to give us a like.

Subscribe to us on YouTube.com. Fortunately, I see Chris Foss. Go to thechrisf Humankind. Pick it up, guys. Be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube.com, Fortuna C. Chris Voss. Go to thechrissvossshow.com. Also go to thecvpn.com, subscribe to online podcasts. You can also go over to Goodreads, forward slash Chris Voss, and Facebook.com,

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