The Joe Rogan Experience - #1561 - Kermit Pattison

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

Kermit Pattison is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Fast Company, Runners World, and many other publications. His new book, Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind, is available now. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/fossil-men-kermit-pattison?variant=32117911748642

Welcome. Thanks for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. I'm very, very fascinated by this subject. Well, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. So this is a long journey for you to have written this book and to be involved in this project. Can you talk us through how you got involved in this? Sure. It was completely unintentional. I had started off working on a different book on the evolution of human locomotion and i mean just as an aside humans are weird primates in a lot of ways but one way we're weird is just we we're slow we're weak

but we have this ability to walk and run long distances which is kind of unique so i thought okay i mean i'm not certainly a lot of other people have noted that before, but as far as I was concerned, no one had really written the deep history of that. So I was going to go sort of investigate the anthropology of where this weird human capacity came from. And, you know, so I thought that the early human history like Artie would be this, you know, a little sliver of background before I got to the interesting stuff. But anyway, I started reading the arty papers and they kind of undercut a lot of the things that I had, the research community had taken for granted, or at least challenged them, let's say. And so anyway, I started talking to the people on the arty team and then thinking, oh, tell me about how you found this thing oh that

sounds pretty interesting and then um so i thought okay well maybe already it'll maybe i'll it'll be a page it's more than this little line then you know a little a little more that's five pages actually this is a whole chapter no this is three chapters oh this this is and then at some point after this agonizing time of reappraisal i I said, you know what, this is much better than the actual story I was working on. I mean, this is a discovery that has been announced to the world, but it hasn't really been described in detail. And it's interesting at a whole number of different levels. I mean, there's the anatomy. It's just the exploring the natural history of the human body, literally from head to toe, because the skeleton was so remarkably complete.

They had a skull. They had hands. They had feet. And the hands and feet were almost complete, which is unheard of. I mean, you're lucky to find any skeleton at this age, and to get something that's that complete is really unusual. And so are there other parts of the skeleton, too.

So it sort of became a way to sort of tickle this interest I had in the natural history of the human body and human biology. So that's the science of it. And then the discovery story, the sheer adventure story, was just astounding to me when I started talking to the field crew in particular and hearing about how they, you know, all the challenges in the field. And I'm like, oh, my God, I mean, this is like collision of cultures in the Ethiopian desert. You know, the indigenous Afar people and the highland Ethiopians and then the foreigner, the Americans, the Japanese coming in and all meeting. And the initial meetings were not friendly. I mean, you got guys coming out, FR guys coming out with guns and saying, get the hell out of here. And so that part is fascinating.

And then the drama of discovery and there's bullets flying overhead. And there's this excitement of finding one little piece and another little piece. I mean, anyway, to make a long story short, I kind of stumbled on this. And every time I turned over a rock, there was something interesting. And then it got more interesting once this whole saga kind of moved into the lab. Because, you know, there's this old cliche in the science, and that is, it's not so much what you find, it's what you find out. So in other words, when you find a skeleton or something like that, the truths that it

contains, the scientific revelations aren't immediately evident. You look at the skeletons, oh, that's, I mean, these people spent years studying this thing, measuring, thinking about it. So there was also this other detective story that sort of followed the field. There's a lab detective story that sort of followed the field detective story that went along with it. And then, and of course, when this thing finally was revealed to the world, there was this, again, another clash, you know, the world there was this again another clash you know this time a clash in the world of science in academia about um people taking issue with the interpretation or denying its importance or trying to trying to bury the skeleton again if you will you know with inattention uh and and denial so anyway long story short it just uh you know i didn't set out to do this, but it just sort of dawned on me that this was like a huge scientific saga that was still mostly untold.

We should fill people in on exactly what we're talking about. So we're talking about a skeleton that was discovered that is 1.2 million years older than Lucy. Yeah, the skeleton is, yeah, it's 4.4 million years old. The oldest known human relative. Well, it's the oldest known skeleton. And actually, this is an important distinction I should make. So like I said before, skeletons are rare. This is the oldest skeleton. There are three other members of the human family that are uh older but the thing is they're much more fragmentary they're not anywhere near as complete like there's one another one from ethiopia found by the same team that found the skeleton we're talking about um that's you know

some some teeth you know like a toe bone a few other broken elements of the skeleton. There's another thing, another species called auroran from Kenya, which is about 6 million years old. Again, you know, much more fragmentary, some teeth. I think they've got a couple thigh bones, partial thigh bones. And then there's a skull from Chad called salanthropus that's about 6 million, maybe 7 years old, depending on who's dating, you believe. And that's a very nice skull, but it's a head without body. Right. So anyway, people sometimes get confused by this.

So Artie is indeed the oldest skeleton. It's by far more complete than this other stuff. But there are some fragmentary things that are older. And they all become part of the story too. And what is the scientific controversy? Do you think it's – is it based on real skepticism or is ego involved in this? You're laughing. Ego? It's science? What are you talking about?

It's unfortunate, man. No, no, these are scientists. There's a lot. A lot of ego is involved in science, unfortunately, right? Yeah, there's a lot of egos. There's a lot of disbelief because the skeleton was so surprising in a lot of ways and so contrary to the predictions

that many people in science had made that there was a kind of like a you know a head explode for a lot of people so we should break down those particular things that are different than what was expected right first of all it walked up right yeah so it it walked up right so it's primitive i mean if you saw it you know if we could go back in a time machine and look at it you know this this thing are the species name is artepithecus ramidus that's kind of a mouthful but arty is the the individual skeleton that they found is that's you know the individual like like your joke you're the individual and your species is homo sapiens that's how you think about this artepithecus ramidus you're the individual, and your species is Homo sapiens. That's how you think about this.

Ardic Pythagoras ramidus species, ardi, the individual skeleton. So the interesting revelations with it is it has upright posture, so it, clearly climbing, but it also, you know, appears to be upright, walking with this opposable toe. So it has seemed, you know, everyone knows that sometime deep in the human past, there was some kind of a boreal ancestor, you know, some kind of ape. But, you know, the question has always been, well, what kind of ape? Does it look like a modern ape or does it look like something we've never seen before? And so the surprising thing about Arty is it's actually quite different than the living apes. So it's got the supposable toe, walks upright. Are the proportions – chimps have shorter legs than they have arms

are arty's proportions similar to that uh no arty i mean it's certainly more ape-like than than than than any of us uh but it's uh there's a couple interesting things about its proportion so all the other living apes have longer arms than they do legs but they spend a lot of time climbing that's you know that's you know long arms long and they have you know they're different proportions but they all have that in common they got longer forelimbs than hind limbs already was a big surprise because it actually had longer legs than forelimbs i mean you know it definitely has bigger hands has longer arms than we do, but that was a surprise, at least to me and I think to at least some of the researchers. And I was talking before about these kind of surprises that appear after the fact.

Well, that was one because the bones are broken. These guys on this research team, it's called the Middle Outwash Research Project. They spent a lot of time, you know, reconstructing this and then estimating, you know, what are the lengths of the pieces that are not there, and then, you know, run all kinds of regressions and a lot of calculations and stuff. But so that revelation was sort of a delayed, you know, delayed bombshell, if you will, that it actually had these limb proportions of that were more like a biped. And so ours, our legs are longer. Chimps have longer arms.

So is this like, does it have almost equal length arms and legs? Like Jamie actually just put a photo of it up here, and I'm getting a chance to take a look at it. Oh, it's fascinating. So it has long legs, almost like a person, but longer arms than we do. Yeah, longer arms than we do for sure. I don't remember the exact name, but I think the calculation they did was that legs are – I think the arms – I want to say it's like 90 something percent so it's pretty close to one to one um of uh length but indeed the the arms are uh a bit shorter so the

surprising part was that it didn't walk at all on its knuckles being it that it was that old uh yeah so so the okay so humans are we come from the african apes that's pretty clear from genetics that's been clear for a long time um there are two main groups of african apes there's uh gorillas and there's chimps now within those and chimps also includes this other species you might have heard of called bonobos. And within those, there's like debate about, you know, should we divide them into some subspecies and stuff? But, you know, don't worry about that for now. But anyway, what they all have in common is they knuckle walk. So they got these long fingers.

And when they walk, you know, I mean, they, you know, do this. I mean, if you look at a video sometime, you'll see it. you know i mean they you know do this i mean if you look at a video sometime you'll see it and um you know because our two closest cousins both do that you know there was a perfectly plausible theory that um human ancestors did it well so we evolved from a knuckle walking ancestor i mean there was even a cover story in nature that the title was almost that, you know, humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor. So, yeah, so that was the theory. And then so here with Artie, we have a creature that's, you know, it's not the last common ancestor with the African apes, but it's certainly getting closer. It's getting a big step closer. And the people, you know, the anatomists who specialize in these things say that there's like no hint of knuckle walking. Not only was it not knuckle walking to get around, but also it has no vestige of a knuckle walking ancestry. So in other words, there's no like residual anatomy that would suggest that that it ever yeah so it was bipedal from the very early days

at very very early days of the species evolution well it's it's it's by you know all you know is what you find you know at that at that at that find at that 4.4 million-year-old window. Right. And what comes before that is – Speculation. Yeah. I mean it's – these people that do this, it's intelligent speculation obviously, but mean, there's a debate about just how long ago the last common ancestor of humans and chimps lived. It's probably at least, you know, anywhere from 1.5 million years before Artie to, you know, some estimates put it even further back than that.

it even further back than that so yeah the the there's another school of thought that's kind of emerged that says well it still could be a knuckle walking ancestor you know that gave rise to humans and arty but it just all the stuff it disappeared by the time you got to arty anyway that's that's kind of a counter argument that we can get more into that later i don't want to get too esoteric on you but but it seems so fascinating that it has these really long arms uh but that there's no evidence whatsoever of not only knuckle walking in that species but knuckle walking as an ancestry yeah and that that blew the mind of a lot of people and there's there's a school of thought uh of of critic out there. So this thing was announced in 2009. It surprised a lot of people. When was it discovered?

The skeleton itself was discovered in 1994. And how did they discover it? I can short answer or long? Long. I want to hear the whole thing. Alright, well, I'll take you back to the

beginning of how the whole detective story was framed. If you want me to speed up, just No, no, no. This show's all about just letting you, I want you to have air. So, this group

went to Ethiopia. They started doing this work in – first went on an expedition to Ethiopia in 1981. Specifically for this purpose of looking for fossils and they're actually i mean they found this fossil but they found a lot of other stuff too you know and like all up and down the timeline of human evolution so some some stuff that's like recent and like you know uh in the order of hundreds of thousands of years ago just stuff that's like six you know getting near you know six million years ago these fragments i was talking about earlier. So their research agenda is this broad. It's just like, what can we find about human evolution? But anyway, one of the big burning research questions at the time was

what came before Lucy? Now, you've probably heard about Lucy. Lucy was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. It was discovered by a guy named Don Johanson, an American guy with his assistant, a guy named Tom Gray. They find this thing. It turns out to be a skeleton.

It's 3.2 million years old. It's probably, I think probably the best, it's fair to say it's the best known human ancestor. I mean, people who know nothing else about human origins will at least recognize the name Lucy. And there's a lot of reasons for that, uh, you know, in terms of how it's publicized and, and et cetera, et cetera. I'm sorry to bother you for a second. Pause for a second. Wasn't Lucy also controversial? Yeah, it, it, it's, it's any discovery in this field

is controversial. So these are, uh, these are identity politics, the paleo identity politics of humanity. So there is no easy consensus in this field. So anyway, so Lucy is discovered. She's 3.2 million years old. field um so anyway so lucy is discovered she's 3.2 million years old i mean this this is a huge revelation at the time because she was um uh you know like already a skeleton um and uh you know it took you know the i think the oldest skeleton at that point was a neanderthal which was less than a million years old so this was like a big big deal when they find something this old so anyway you know that thing is studied um there's popular books written about it etc etc

uh from like the 1970s into the early 80s that's the time when lucy was sort of being intensely studied and revealed to the world okay so um meanwhile ethiopia is is going into this period of turmoil. So one of the big elements in this story is the difficulty of doing this kind of work in a place like Ethiopia. So right around the time that Tlusi was discovered, the ancient monarchy of Ethiopia, headed by the last emperor, Haile Selassie, fell. It's like a 2,000-year-old monarchy of Ethiopia headed by the last Emperor Haley salasi fell it's like a 2 000 year old monarchy you know it like traces its roots to biblical times you know and uh you know claims to be the descendants of King Solomon and Queen Sheba you know I mean it's ancient monarchy but it hadn't really modernized and then it was toppled by student activists, the military, this whole kind of coalition that wanted to modernize Ethiopia. Well, what happens is the power is seized by the military.

It becomes a Marxist dictatorship. Ethiopia, this longtime ally of the Americans in the Cold War, shifts to the Soviet bloc. And now it's like a frontier of the Cold War. Suddenly, like, you know, the Americans, the Europeans who were kind of welcomed as foreign researchers before are now viewed with hostility. People are thinking, you know, a U.S. CIA agent, you know. Research kind of shuts down for a number of years because it just becomes too dangerous. Meanwhile, there's like this tribal warfare happening in the desert where they're doing this stuff so it's um but finally in 1981 things have calmed down enough that uh this research team is able to go back and uh they go back and they have acquired

a new project area it's big it's like the size of Rhode Island, you know, and in that project area, there's all kinds of, it's like the layer cake of time, you know, I mean, anthropology depends on geology, okay? So there's like this layer cake of time, you know, where you have, you know, things are, you know, 1 million, 2 million years old, I mean, I'm giving a really simple model here. and this project area is really valuable because it's a sprawling area but they have all these different time periods exposed so in other words there's rocks from you know a million years old there's rocks that are more than you know as old as six million all up and down the timeline of human evolution so these guys go there and they see this place and they say, holy crap, this place is like, it's a goldmine. It's a goldmine like spread out all over all this place.

I mean, and we can learn so much about human evolution if we just spend all these years studying, you know what I think. So then, unfortunately, they spend one season here and just doing kind of reconnaissance to see what's there. Then Ethiopia shuts down again. The government says, basically, puts a halt to research, says, you know, they want to rewrite their antiquities laws so they can better control these foreigners who are coming to look at this stuff. And they say, OK, well, hopefully we'll let you back next year. Anyway, it takes it takes nine years before they can resume research. So finally, this team goes back in 1990 and they're starting to go find things and learn more about this area that they have in their project area.

And finally, in 1992, they find a first tooth of what becomes the species of Ardipithecus. At that point, they're not expecting to find a skeleton, because that's just like hoping you're going to win the lottery tomorrow, right? You buy your tickets, like, yeah, right, yeah, I'm going to win the lottery. Yeah, sure you are. It's like, yeah, right, yeah, I'm going to win the lottery. Yeah, sure you are. So they find a tooth, and then they start finding these pieces and walking kilometers after kilometers, day after day, and then find a few more elements.

And anyway, over a couple of years, they collect enough to realize that this is a new species. This is something different. But at this point, it's just like a few teeth, a few bone fragments and stuff. But anyway, then in 1994, they find the skeleton

and that's kind of an interesting piece too because it's kind of against all odds and I can tell you how that happened if you're interested. Yeah, I'd love to hear it.

Yeah, so anyway, they're walking along and I should introduce some of the characters here. The characters sound like a movie, by the way. The way everybody lays out. Yeah, we haven't talked about the personnel here, but I'll mention some of them. Okay, so one of the guys who starts in 1981 is a young paleoanthropologist. His name is Tim White.

He is an anthropologist from the University of California at Berkeley. He's a guy from the American West. He's a very hard-charging, strong-willed guy. I mean, profane, encyclopedic knowledge. feign, encyclopedic knowledge, and everyone who works with him will tell you that he is probably the most intense fossil hunter who they've ever met.

That's Tim. He would be the star of our movie. He'd be the Harrison Ford character. Yeah, but he would tell you that it's ridiculous to compare him to Harrison Ford because that's complete bullshit. Because he is famously skeptical. He's a relentless killer of ideas. I mean, he's got this encyclopedic knowledge, and he's got hair-trigger bullshit detector, and that's why a lot of people are afraid of him.

Anyway, but he's also very exacting in the field. are afraid of him anyway but he's also very very exacting in the field and um and you know so when they realize that they're in such a dense uh they're starting to you know pick up fossils you know he organizes people to basically crawl you know hands and knees in these areas he lays down like these lanes in the fossil rich areas either you know carve you carve lines in the sand with his little walking stick, or he sometimes will put down ropes. And it's like, Joe, your job is to walk shoulder to shoulder next to whoever. And all 10 of you are just going to crawl this space, hands and knees, and you're going to pick up every damn thing that you see even if you think it's a rock put it in there put it in the can because we're not going

to know for sure until we get back and look at it more closely and and and uh anyway so so he's one guy uh he you know there's a team working underneath um another character in this whole thing is uh one of tim's former students a guy named Burhani Asfa, who is Ethiopian. And he, I mean, there's an interesting backstory with Burhani. He had been a student in the time of the revolution. And like a lot of other students, he was swept up in the whole political reform movement. And like a lot of other students he was horrified to see what happened when the military dictatorship came in he was arrested he

was put in jail he was tortured he was lucky to survive he told me he went into prison on a chain gang with like seven other guys and when he's released two years or excuse me six months later there's only two guys alive. This is a story of that generation. And the suffering that Ethiopia went through at that time is astounding. And most Americans would find it hard to believe. But anyway, he's a member of this crew.

There's a number of other Ethiopian guys. So part of the mission of this team has been you know obviously to find fossils but they sort of made it a dual mission to train africans we can talk more about that later but uh you know if you look at a lot of the old you know uh documentaries about human origins you see people i mean oftentimes they're like a lot of european, you know, Americans. And, you know, Africa is the country

of human origins. But historically, at least, for a long time, Africans were not, they were hardly represented in the ranks of the scientists. But anyway, so this team had made it part of their mission

to train Ethiopians not only to be field crew, but PhD scientists. And Brahane is one of those people. And another guy who actually found the first piece of art, his name is Johannes Haile Selassie. He was trained by Brahane and Tim. So anyway, one of these days, he's out there with this group of people, and they're across and he finds a little bit of bone like a little hand bone second uh i think there's a second metacarpal it's a bone like right here in your hand and it's broken and they say great you know we got a piece and uh so you know and at first you know in this fossil the sandwich everything's broken you know first, you know, in this fossilist image, everything's broken, you know, the isolated tooth here, the little bone fragment there, you know, no one's expecting that if you find

a little piece like that, there's necessarily going to be anything else from that skeleton that you find, because the stuff is just scattered and, you know, came from God, eroded out of God knows where. But anyway, a few days later, they go back, they do the crawl again, they start finding more pieces and then more pieces and then um you know they're sieving which is basically like you know taking dirt and uh shaking it through a screen and then you know seeing what's there and there's of course a lot of rocks and all kinds of crap but they start finding some bones in there and then you know light bulb goes off oh there's multiple elements

of a skeleton here or multiple elements of an individual okay but you know still it's kind of optimistic to think there may be a skeleton but anyway then they're finding piece after piece and then when you start finding multiple pieces then a kind of suspicion grows that there may you may be close to the original uh spot where the skeleton came out of the ground. So anyway, then I'll probably talk too long here. No, no, you're not. But can I stop you for a second? I'm assuming this is all fossilized, right?

Yeah, so this is fossil material. So basically what a fossil is, for people to know, it's basically a bone that has turned to stone. So when stuff sits in the ground for a fossil is, for people to know. It's basically a bone that has turned to stone. So when stuff sits in the ground for a long time, minerals kind of come in and displace the original biological material. So you could have fossil, all kinds

of fossil stuff. I mean, usually they're bones. Here's a question. How long do bones exist as bones before they become fossilized? I actually don't know. That's a question, how long do bones exist as bones before they become fossilized? I actually don't know. That's a good question. And my guess is that it probably varies a lot on the condition, you know, like just the geological condition. And so I don't know, but my guess would be that that answer varies a lot depending on the depositional environment.

So I can't give you a good answer. Jamie will find it, I'm sure. So another question is, is it always that bones become fossilized or is it very specific conditions? Do bones become fossilized or is it very specific conditions? Like, do bones, for the most part, just deteriorate and be eaten of predators you know there's hyenas i mean now and then you know because they they find like you know along with these fossils of things like arty they also find like you know ancient hyenas ancient big cats you know all these things that were like you know eating our our ancestors there right you know so uh and like a lot of these fossils you know have like tooth marks in them and stuff. So something dies. A carcass lands on the ground. Boom.

And it's probably consumed by some big cat or whatever. I mean, one of the really ravaging things are hyenas. They come in in packs, and they have these really powerful jaws, and they can actually chew bones down to splinters. And so now, if something dies, I mean, after a couple days, there could just be splinters left. So it's not like they just kind of clean off the skeleton for you. So anyway, they come in, and then there's this whole kind of chain of other scavengers that move in. I mean, there's a lot of ancient pigs. kind of like chain of other scavengers that move in i mean there's a lot of ancient pigs and believe it or not i mean you may think of like nice little pig as being you know this cute barnyard animal

but actually pigs are uh surprisingly annihilative scavengers i mean they're ruthless they're ruthless we have an answer for you um fossilized uh preserve remains become fossils if they reach an age of about 10,000 years. Okay. So it's 10,000 years, which is not that long at all. It comes off the internet, so we know it's true. What is the source? Nationalgeographic.org I went to for that.

So National Geographic, it's a good source. Yeah, so it's a long time. Yeah, so back to wild pigs. Yeah, wild pigs. Well, that was famously a scene in the movie snatch right you remember that movie um the brad pit movie it's a great uh guy richie uh crime movie the guy keeps pigs because pigs will eat everything they eat the bones they eat everything so when he gets rid of when he murders people he throws them in the pen with the pigs and the pigs eat every part of the body yeah well exactly so there's pigs and then there's you

know like porcupines it's like you know little you know rodents that come in so you know dung beetles i mean so by the time this is like going down through this whole thing so uh by the time there's nothing left to eat there's not much left of this the skeleton and uh so anyway um so that's that's just preserving the bones now there's another thing that has to happen for the fossil you know it has to like be in a depositional environment that will encourage the bone to fossilize and not just degrade you know and you know there's different places that are conducive to that i mean one is like a place where there's like a lake or something, you know, covering it with sediment. And this particular place, they think, was probably an ancient floodplain.

So somewhere near a river where there'd be like overbank flooding every now and then, it would like put on these layers of silt over time, and then the stuff would just be buried in the silt, and then it would fossilize. But anyway, to answer your question, so, you know, you could have like a herd of antelope or whatever, you know, a hundred antelope, and, you know, they'd all meet their ends in various ways. But, you know, none of them could actually be fossilized in the end, you know. So it's a pretty small minority of things that have the courtesy to leave their bones for us. And then so that's one element that makes this thing so hard.

leave their bones for us and then so that's that's one element that makes this thing so hard and then the other one is just you know you have to be if if you are the fossil hunter you know the paleontologist you have to come along at the right time when that fossil is uh coming out of the ground you know so basically this stuff gets buried you know uh you know in our in our layer cake and you know it uh you know other layers stack up and then fossilize it but buried you know uh you know in our in our layer cake and and you know it it uh you know other layers stack up and then fossilize it but then you know they come to the surface again usually by uh geological faulting you know like the or erosion and once the stuff comes to the surface uh some some fossils are like rock and they'll last you know long, long, long, long time. But other stuff like this particular skeleton are actually really chalky.

And I mean, Tim White, the fellow who was sort of guiding this whole operation, says that it was so brittle it could come apart in your hands if you didn't handle it right so they just happen to have the good fortune to kind of show up in this spot when it was coming out of the ground just enough to be found but it hadn't been on the surface for long enough to sort of be degraded and stopped on by stopped on by animals and and you know blown around you know because once the stuff comes to the surface it doesn't it's on a slope right so that and they get these torrential it's it's it's a desert so

don't get a lot of rain but when they do get rains they can be torrential and then that just sends you know everything downstream so they just hit the goldilocks zone in terms of just have happened to be there yeah at the right time yeah and and. And some of that is luck, but it's also, you make your own luck. It's putting yourself in the position to find things, to spot them if they're on the ground, and then to do the detective work to sort of find the original resting place. So Tim White, this guy I mentioned, he's that uh uh the uh paleo anthropologist he you know when they when they found this scatter of stuff on the ground the question is where to come from where's the original in situ site which is kind of what i left off when

i was telling you that story a minute ago because they're founding all these things on the ground so they're planting flags to mark where each one came from and they see a pattern you know converging getting narrower and narrower on this this little hillock and uh you know tim compares it to um uh you know what the gold miners did in california he's from california you know the 49ers where you sort of like see what the pattern is and then sort of follow it up slope to the source and that's what they did and then they start and they start to dig dig in there they found um some bones that were still embedded in the original sediments that tells you like okay now we found the you know the original resting spot of this thing and that's when they start digging and that's you know i mean it's very it's a very slow process i mean it doesn't happen nearly as fast i mean this stretches over days

and weeks but anyway they start digging there and this is when they say holy crap this is like a skeleton so between finding the initial bone in 94 to actually pulling it out of the ground in a skeleton form how much time is this taking uh okay so I think they found the first piece of the skeleton in, I think it was sometime in November of 94. And then, meanwhile, there's all kinds of stuff going on. So they're doing surveys elsewhere because, as I mentioned before, this particular project, they've got stuff, sediments of all kinds of ages, and it's huge. And so, you know, they've got a lot of places to look. So they're not going to start – if you're in this line of work, you don't start digging until you have a pretty good reason to believe there's something there,

because otherwise you're just going to waste your time, and you don't have much time in the field. You've got to pay to sustain these expeditions in the desert. There's people running around with guns. I mean, we haven't talked about this, but there's like this tribal, like literally tribal warfare going on there. And so you don't waste your time digging unless you have a pretty good reason to believe that there's something there. So anyway, they find this first piece in November, and then I think they come back some days later and then start finding these other pieces that I mentioned. And then it was some weeks later before they started digging. weeks it was some weeks later before they started digging um some of that was uh waiting until the there was enough evidence to conf to really strongly indicate that there was something

there and some of that was just juggling the conflicting priorities in the field um and what one of those conflicting priorities is actually they were searching for another what they hoped would be another skeleton quite close to this one, just maybe a couple hundred meters away because they'd found a nice arm bone there the year before and then dug this hole and dug and dug and dug and they dug for years there but never found any more of that creature.

So that's kind of an example of what is not at all an unusual experience where you you got your hopes up you dig and then dang it there's nothing there yeah but in this case there was something there and it was a lot there so uh yeah go ahead was there skepticism that it was all from the same individual uh yeah well that's that is of course unclear when you're starting to dig you know um but you know i think over the days and weeks as they were you know slowly pulling pieces out of this uh excavation site um which is a very slow process i mean they're they're i mean literally working with like um dental tools you know i mean there's a lot of pictures of Tim there chipping away at this, and his students

there are using brushes to brush because you don't want to go in there with a trowel because you're going to destroy something. So over the days and weeks, they discover there's no duplication of parts, which is a strong indication that it might be

one individual. Now, can I stop you again? Are they filming all this so that they can like, so that if there are skeptics, because with anthropologists and paleontologists, there are a lot of skeptics, right? So are they preparing for this and filming every step of the way? Not every step of the way,

but Tim White is a relentless record keeper. And he has this voluminous photo archive, for one. He's also a relentless record keeper. And when the excavation started, as you said, they did set up a video camera on a tripod and train it on the excavation era and just let it roll and this is you know back in the days of uh you know they actually had tick tape yeah i don't know if it's vss or like micro something but anyway so they're they're filming all this stuff so by the time i come along you know many almost 20 years later uh tim lets me see all this stuff and to me this was like an absolute goldmine because i

you know this thing that i would normally have to reconstruct you know after the fact which you know i wouldn't be able to see the conversations that people told me what they said i'd have to greet that with some skepticism because how reliable is this person's memory after 20 years i mean i couldn't really be there in any way but now i have this videotape i'm watching while these guys are digging up these little pieces i'm watching while tim is you know exposing this smile of this ancient you know this ancient member of the of the human family and uh hours and hours of this stuff so i can actually hear you know the excitement and then all the other kind of cross talk the jokes you

know the fact that they're playing the grateful dead in the background or bob margaret you know or listening to the bbc you know all this stuff you know and so uh to me you know, as a reporter, that was like the equivalent of them finding the skeleton. For me, having this trove of records was just such an astounding jackpot for me because it let me be there. Yeah, that's amazing. So how many teeth were intact? Did it have a full smile? The teeth, well, they were in the jawbone. I don't remember.

I shouldn't give you a number because I don't remember. But they pretty much got most of the teeth of this creature. I don't know, maybe not on this one individual. But while this operation went on for years and over the years they collected a lot of fragments from other individuals so i'm sure they they have pretty much all the teeth are pretty close to all the teeth i mean the number of teeth they have is um uh it's i'm it's in the book somewhere i don't remember the number but, but it's well over 100. So with Artie in the skeleton, is this the only example of this particular member of this period in evolution? Or are there other of the similar time frame that they found?

Other individuals or other species? Other individuals. Yeah, so there's a lot of individuals of the species. But again, they're not complete. They find part of a jawbone of another individual. Actually, they found a nice jaw, or part of a jaw, just like a stone's throw away from where arty was found um they found like some foot bone of a bigger member they kind of jokingly nicknamed

bigfoot and they're aging these they're aging these creatures based on the biological material that's around it yeah well this is this is interesting and this this if you read the book this becomes part of the sort of scientific detective story is all the techniques that are that are that are used and for me as a reporter this was actually part of the richness of this story was getting to learn about all these component sciences that go into paleoanthropology and there are a lot of them it's definitely a multidisciplinary field. But one of the most important disciplines, sub-disciplines within this is geology. And the reason is that geology gives you the timeline

to answer the question that you just asked. And so there's different methods of dating. I mean, you can sort of, if you're in the fields, you can begin to make estimates about the age of the sediments based on the other animals that are there like if you know if you find a certain type of pig that you know this particular species of pig between live between this date and that date so that kind of narrows it down um so they call that bio chronology so that's one but the real specific method of dating is uh dating the volcanic ashes and lavas and i could do i can give you like a one minute tutorial

on that if you're yeah okay so as i meant so so basically uh uh you could think think of geology as like a layer cake right so let's just, here are the ancient layers that were laid down like I was describing. Let's just say this one is a million years old. This one's two million. This one's three. This one's four. Okay, so how do you know how old things are? Well, the main method of dating is called radiometric dating.

And so that basically means that they find volcanic ashes and lavas that are – because this is on the edge. In the Great Rift Valley, there's like tons of volcanoes all up and down eastern Africa. And every once in a while, they erupt, and they spew out ashes and lavas, and the stuff settles on the ground. In some cases, I mean, these ash layers are really thick, I mean, like several feet thick. And you think, oh my God, what an apocalyptic eruption that must have been when that happened. But anyway, it's great for the geologists

because they can take these ashes and they take them into the lab and then they can tell basically by the, it's called isotopic dating. And so basically it's just, there's a change in the isotopes of potassium in particular and argon, which are components here. And this stuff decays at a constant rate, which is not affected by temperature or pressure if it's in the earth or whatever. It's just a constant rate.

So this gives you a yardstick to measure how old something is. So they can't figure out the age of the individual bones, but you can figure out the layers of the ashes and lavas that are above it and below it. And that gives you a bracket. And there's literally hundreds of ash and lava layers in this area. And so, and all of these things are been dated over the years, that gives you a timeline. So with this particular skeleton, there's very conveniently an ash in the layer above it

and another one below it. And when they did the dating, they both were calculated to be 4.4 million years old. So that means, I mean, that the area between them was deposited in a pretty short period of time. I mean, you know, this method dating doesn't give you a down to like the year or even, you know, tens of years. So no one knows like just how long that period of time was, but it's probably in the order of, you know, maybe a hundred years, something in the hundreds of years, not long. And for something of this age, something in the hundreds of years. Not long.

And for something of this age, that's actually really precise dating. So to answer your question, it's using volcanic ashes and lavas above and below it to figure out the date of things. And what is the window of possibility? How tightly can they narrow that down? Within a million years? Well, I think it probably depends on the you know i'm not a geologist so i don't want to speak beyond my layer of knowledge here but um with this one they brought it down to 4.4 so i think you know it's that's pretty that's pretty tight yeah and there's there's certainly there's certainly

a margin you know of of uncertainty margin of error in there that they reported. And it's some long number with a lot of decimal points, which I don't remember. But yeah, long story short, that 4.4 is a pretty good date. And for this stuff of this age, it's quite solid. Now, when you have a being like this that's so unusual, it's not like anything they've encountered before with the longer legs and the thumbs on the feet and the whole deal. When they're piecing this together, how do they know exactly where everything goes? How are they absolutely sure how to put this together? When they're putting it together and they're realizing this is so different than what they expected for something of this age what how much of a freak out is happening here

well okay so it's different in some important parts but but then again if you're an expert on skeletons like these guys are it's it's it's different than what they've seen but i mean they know how skeletons go together and you know i mean they can you know tell what's tabulas and yeah you don't get a fever confused with with like you know a thumb phalanx you know so you know they look at this and and and you know i don't have this knowledge but certainly those people do that they can pick up a tooth and they'll say oh yeah this is you know upper right side of the mouth i, the people that know skeletons can do all this mental rotation in their head, and they can often do it from fragments of bone. So it's not the whole tooth, but like a fraction of the tooth, or a fraction of some foot bone.

And to me, that was actually one of the fascinating things about this, And to me, that was actually one of the fascinating things about this is how these people that know their skeletons can read the revelations in the skeletons. Do you know the story of Gigantopithecus, how they discovered that? No. It was an apothecary shop in China. There was an anthropologist who found, I believe he found a tooth. And he was like, what the hell is this? And he realized it was a primate tooth, but it was much larger than anything they'd ever seen before. And then he asked them to, I think it was, I want to say 1920s or 1930s.

And then they, I mean, I don't think they've gotten anything more than some jaw bones and teeth. And they realize it's a bipedal hominid that was somewhere in the neighborhood of eight feet tall well it wouldn't it wouldn't have been a hominid if it was uh so a hominid at least in the old meaning then the meeting has changed but means like a member of the human family which was basically after our split from the chimps now now they call them hominins with an i n at the end the end. So what do you call it? Gigantopithecus, I believe, is a Miocene ape. So it's an ape.

It's a primate. But you wouldn't consider it a member of the human family. It's just one of many weird things from this period they called the Miocene. I fucked the terminology up. But the point I was getting believe me just from looking at a jawbone they can figure out what this thing was and how tall it was is bonkers yeah yeah yeah yeah because the body proportions are i mean they vary somewhat but you can tell a lot from sometimes individual bone. I mean, believe it or not, the head of the femur is often used as kind of a – so the ball and socket joint on your thigh bone is often used, was used in artifices, in fact, to scale different parts.

So they've got this complete skeleton. There's nothing missing from Artie? Well, there are some things missing, yeah. A couple small pieces. other anthropologists he calls them you know carnivore hors d'oeuvres because you know you're lying your carcass is there and like you know the pack of haedas comes in and like you know here's a handout for you know the carnivore they chew off your feet and whatever so uh so it's remarkably complete but there are some pieces missing and there are some pieces that are just present but really damaged like most of the spine is not there. And it sure would be nice to have the spine because you can tell a lot about the design of the creature, the organization of the creature, if you know

how its spinal segments are divided. The pelvis, they have a lot of, but it's pretty distorted by geology. So anyway, and some of the limb bones are fragmentary. So, for example, they don't have a knee joint, which sure would be nice to have because you could – that's like an interesting bit of data to figure out just how this creature was a biped. So anyway, so there are certainly pieces missing, and I'm sure that science would love to have them. Is it already on display? Is there, or at least online, is there a place to view it? No. Well, there are some photographs of it that have been published and you can see it.

So do they lay it out on a table in the form that they think that it came in? Yeah, I mean, and the form that's... To reconstruct the skeletal elements is... It's not terribly hard for these guys to do. I think in one case there might have

been a question about one of the hand bones. You know, like, there was like have been a question about one of the hand bones. There was a phalanx of one of the fingers and there was a question, did it go in this finger or another finger? But for the most part, it's easy for these experts to know where an element goes in the skeleton. So there's pictures of the skeleton laid out not long after discovery. Not in the field, but in the lab.

There's other parts that took a long time, like the skull. I mean, that took more than 10 years to put that together. So the skull came in several fragments, obviously. Yeah. So it looks, you can, some of the pictures were published of it, but like when it came out of the ground, I think it had been like kind of like pounded down, you know,

just by the force of biology. So it was, you know, like, like if you took a pile driver, just, you know, and,

you know, pounded the thing down. And so, um, you know, that was quite fragmentary. And so, uh, they had to reconstruct it.

It was reconstructed by a scientist from Japan named Gen Suwa. Jamie put an image of it up on the screen right now. We're taking a look at it right now. It's fascinating. So it shows like basically like half of it was intact or somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% 40 of it up up at the top of the left side of the head yeah it's amazing yeah i mean it's really cool what you can do so this guy who reconstructed that his name is gensu he's from the university of tokyo museum and he's he's um you know very uh exacting scientist i haven't met him personally but i've met a lot of people

who work with him and they've uh he's a very unassuming guy, but he kind of leaves all of his colleagues in awe because of his acumen. Anyway, he reconstructed that with his team. This is incredible. So it's actually – I said it the wrong way. I'm viewing the left side. It's actually the right side that was reconstructed, but the left side is the actual skull itself, which is a bunch of pieces, but the teeth are remarkably intact. And that was the other part that was fascinating to me, was that it doesn't have canines like a chimp. It has them more like a human being. Well, number one, that's one of the indicators, the strong indicators that tells us that this is something somewhere in the human lineage, number one. Because we have, as you mentioned, canines that are different than most other apes.

Most other primates have these interlocking canines. I mean, like chimps and gorillas are two closest cousins both do that you know the big fangs right and uh they they sharpen themselves you know uh by rubbing against the uh pre-molar the canine rubs against the pre-molar so it's kind of like always keeping your knife sharp right right but humans are unique because we have these things that are not these daggers like fangs you know they are uh diamond shaped so arty's canines are certainly bigger than yours or mine or later members of the human family but it shows that um this what they call canine reduction was already well underway by the time arty lived and actually this is an important point because uh the teeth you know the canines in particular are kind of a diagnostic feature of these early members of the human family

because when you get back in time the things that um the clues that that tell you that this is a member of the human family they become much more subtle because these creatures get more and more ape-like and less and less human-like as you go back in time. So canines are a sort of reliable way, or let's say a reliable indicator to tell you that you're looking at some bit of early humanity here. Does it tell us anything about Artie's diet? Or is it a defensive thing because like when we're looking at gorillas gorillas are they have canines but they're

vegetarians and their canines are for defense right right right i mean yeah this is this is interesting so if you're a gorilla i mean you know they spend a lot of time eating like leaves and stuff and and you know you don't you don't need these big canines to like take out a you know a leaf so this is um you know the sort of uh predominant interpretation is that this is a uh sign of interest species aggression because you know with gorillas for example they uh they they their mating structure is that there's a big alpha male, I'll call him a silverback, and he kind of lords over this harem of females and tends to sire the kids. And there are these bachelor males that will sometimes challenge alpha male and try to take him out. will sometimes challenge alpha male and try to take them out.

So natural selection for the case of gorillas would favor these big, sharp canines and then these big, brute bodies. Male gorillas are quite big, in some cases twice as big as the females. And this is all interpreted as intra-species aggression for mating. interpreted as like inter intra species aggression for mating now humans are interesting because we don't have these big canines and actually this factors into the arty story because one of the uh the main investigators and evolutionary theorists on uh who interpreted already was a fellow named owen lovejoy and he's from kent state university in the united states and he has a theory that um what you're looking at with canine reduction is a social revolution that this is uh monogamy happening basically that that instead of you know some gorilla-like mating structure you know where you have like there's you know the gorilla you know

instead of like the harem or a mating structure like chimps or bonobos, which are more promiscuous, but certainly not monogamous. But he thinks that the canine reduction we see in the human lineage is because there was pair bonding and that the reduction in canines is a sign of reduced aggression in our species. And this was, he believes, like one of the early human major adaptations that sent us on our own way that's got to be a very controversial theory isn't it because there's a lot of paleontologists that think that even with human beings there's a lot of people that think that human beings weren't really monogamous until they figured out whose kids there were right well it's it's it's yeah it's hugely controversial for a whole whole number of reasons but one thing i should clarify is what what the biologists mean about

monogamy so it's it's wrong to kind of understand that in kind of like our modern moralistic way this is not like you know the american family council talking here about monogamy this is monogamy in the way that like so there's a lot of examples of of creatures that do have that are monogamous like birds you know think of like you know mom and dad in the nest uh or you know i think coyotes are i mean there's or gibbons is another um another primate that are monogamous so this is not um unusual in the world of of biology yeah so um so anyway so sometimes people say oh you know that's you know it's you know that's kind of like bringing in some of this moralistic things. It's not that.

It is a legitimate way to describe a baiting strategy that exists in many places in nature. Okay. And there's other theories that have ascribed human sexuality to something more like a chimp. It's promiscuous and especially, as the book mentions, this whole model of a chimp-like ancestor has been prevalent in anthropology for for decades and you know and when one subcategory there is mating strategy and you know there's you know yeah I mean if everyone amuse yourself read about you know just you know sort of theories about you know human mating strategies I mean there's all kinds of ways that people have explained our peculiarities and our sexuality and all that stuff. Now, we're looking at already – we're talking about an animal that predates weapons, correct?

Yeah, as far as we know. So the first stone tools do not appear until – well, certainly by around two and a half, 2.6 million years ago, there's stone tools. There's some things that have been found in Kenya that are older, that are like 3.2 or 3.3. That one is a little controversial, so we'll see how that all shakes out. But anyway, in either case, at least the stone tools are way after already way after lucy so it's possible to use weapons sticks and things along those lines

yeah so that's that's the part we may never know because if there's something like a stick that biodegrades then you know who knows, or throwing a rock. Right. You could – how do we know? The idea would be that they're not hunting with weapons, most likely. No. And actually, surprisingly, weapons arrive pretty late in human origins. arrive pretty late in human origins. The figure's in the book, and I don't want to say it now because I don't remember what it is offhand,

but the early tools are things like choppers and then hand axes, but those are tools for processing food. I mean, the weapons come late. It's kind of interesting that the things that are identifiable weapons are— Like spears and atlatls and stuff like that. Yeah, or particularly like lithic things that leave a—that are stone, that are preserved. Those come pretty late. It's an interesting question about just why weapons were developed and why why we started uh using them so do we know do we have speculation as to what arty's diet was like was arty a herbivore uh yeah so they can they can make some uh determinations based on

a couple lines of evidence um one is the microscopic striations in the teeth. Because when you eat something, whatever you eat leaves kind of like scratches on the surface of the dental material. So they can make some inferences there. Another one is using, this gets kind of complicated, but they can make some inferences about what kind of plant foods they ate based on, there's two kinds of plants, like C3 or C4. And this refers to like two different forms of photosynthesis.

C4 plants tend to be more like open sunny sort of thing c3 plants tend to be you know more shady things i mean this is not an absolute difference but it's an important one but anyway so they can make some inferences there that arty's diet was mostly like c3 things which tends to be things that are in more kind of wooded areas, you know, not the open, you know, food of the grasslands and that sort of thing. I mean, it, it,

it did have some C4 in its diet, but it's mostly C3. But, so mostly vegetables, is this what's believed or do, is it inferred that it's omnivorous? Uh, yeah,

they think it's probably omnivorous. Uh, I've heard some speculation that maybe if they are maybe eating like some bugs and you know yeah stuff like that i mean the interesting thing is like you can you can get this c3 or c4 signature from eating the plant foods directly but you can also get it if you eat another animal that's been eating one of those two things so this kind of moves up through the food chain is there speculation as to like what natural selection benefit there would be for it to stand up like for it to be upright yeah so this actually gets back to that monogamy theory i was telling you about which is you know admittedly quite controversial but so what uh owen lovejoy theorizes and this was presented when

with the the the announcement the series of papers when Artie was finally revealed to the world in 2009. Owen's theory is that monogamy is a mating strategy. And that basically – let's go back to your question. So you're interested in like what they're speculating what speculating or or answering the question why why is this creature erect yes is that what you're yes okay yeah so owens this is kind of interesting uh take on the whole question so this of course you know why did humans stand up right is the million dollar question of human origins i mean darwin tried to answer it you know uh and many many people have tried to answer it there's more

theories than you can shake a stick at you know i mean darwin said okay now people stood up because they were using tools you know to free the hands and other people have said no it's because they were you know trying to minimize sun exposure because they were standing up you know in the hot place you're getting less sun than if you're standing up in a hot place, you're getting less sun than if you're like that. I mean, people have said it's phallic display, believe it or not. I mean, it's all kinds of stuff. Picking fruit, seeing over tall grass.

I mean, you name it, right? But the interesting thing is that most of these theories look for a direct benefit for standing up to some direct evolutionary benefit evolutionary benefit owen's theory is a little different because he doesn't think there is a direct benefit he thinks it's sort of a secondary thing um so just to tell you a little bit more about owen he's kind of an interesting guy he has an interesting history but he um earlier in his career he specialized in biomechanics and actually he was the main um biomechanical analyst uh on the lucy team and like 20 years before arty came along

but anyway his early career he worked with um scientists who designed artificial joints. And so he grew up, you know, as a scientist, with a pretty keen awareness of how biomechanics worked and also what could go wrong with the skeleton. And Owen will tell you that bipedality is a really stupid thing to do from an evolutionary perspective because it makes you slow i mean you know and slow and and um you know if you want to be a fast runner you probably should stay on all fours you know it it you know it's an invitation for for disaster you know because you you know i mean why do we have artificial joints it's because people blow out knees or blow out hips

and you know standing upright also causes these vulnerabilities in your back you know for because of the way the spine is kind of contorted in in with humans so why on earth would this species do this stupid thing you know and why are there eight billion of us here now you know you know if we did this stupid thing. So Owen's theory is that it was actually a sacrifice in locomotion, but what it did do is it gave us this big payoff in reproduction. So he thinks that standing erect was to free the hands that – within the context of these monogamous relationships I was telling you before. So that the males, guys like you and me, became provisioners. So they basically became, the males became partners

in the child rearing, and this increased survivorship. So interesting thing, like other apes are not very involved dads. They become dead, I call them deadbeat dads you know they were and so uh but humans are and usually we have these monogamous relationships so anyway owen's theory is that the bipedality was just a means to an end it it allowed the males to provision and that the uh you know females would be able to spend more time nurturing children. And this was a demographic revolution.

And then the reduction in canines is part of that theory and that this was like a reduction in aggression. So we're not fighting over, who's the alpha male, we're in these monogamous pairs within a troop of primates. And that explains why bipedality appears pretty early in human evolution and why the reduced canines also appears. So anyway, this is Owen's theory. It's quite controversial, and it's without finding things.

Even if you were able to find skeletons know skeletons right you know older than arty it would still be controversial but anyway that's that's the theory is there a compelling competing theory uh there there are lots of competing theories uh probably too many to to mention here i mean i mentioned some uh you know standing ups to see a phallic display you don't hear much about that one anymore. That one's hilarious. That one came shortly after the sexual revolution. That's hilarious.

So we don't know, basically. We don't know. And then some of the stuff, to be honest, from my point of view is may ultimately be unknowable. Does the fact that Artie was basically intact despite being around predators and scavengers and all these different things, and the fact that Artie was walking on hind legs despite the fact that walking on hind legs makes you more vulnerable does does does this signify that it was in some sort of a protected environment or it wasn't at such risk of predation like uh well remember these these things can go you know in terms of escaping predators trees uh you could yeah i mean it can go up a tree and I mean, I'm not, you know, between you and me, I don't have an opposable toe, but if I were out on, you know, out in some dangerous place

in Africa when the sun is going down and, you know, the hyenas were coming out, I would be probably heading up a tree too. And I would recommend you do the same. Yeah, that's the move. Of course, you still have to worry about the big cats. But anyway, so it did have the ability to go into the trees. But yeah, how did these things survive? That's an interesting question. I mean, there are other animals that – monkeys that live there that have the same challenge today. But actually, I'll tell you just a little interesting aside here and sort of the fieldwork part of the detective story. So the fact that they found the skeleton that was remarkably complete was all the more miraculous because of the condition of all the other stuff they were finding until that point.

So Tim White, the main paleoanthropologist on the he's he's very experienced he's been working in africa for a long time and when he looked at the fossil assemblage you know the word that he used was it was ravaged and this was visible to him you know from you know uh from their first days on the site because they're finding all these fragments of things that have clearly been chewed apart and they're instead of finding teeth they're finding pieces of teeth and things that have clearly been chewed apart. And instead of finding teeth, they're finding pieces of teeth and like bones that are chewed to splinters. In some cases, they actually found things

that are etched by digestive acid. So basically what that means is that, you know, it was eaten by some carnivore, you know, passed through the digestive tract and shit out, you know, left in some pile, you know, that then know that then you know degrades but the tooth is still there but they can see they like the the surface has this you know kind of um altered uh the texture to it that tells these people that yeah that's digestive acid at work on this thing. So, you know, because that was like the signature of all this fossil sandwich that they were seeing.

You know, if you're just getting like teeth and like, you know, things that have been, you know, pastured, ejected, tracked for conor and splinters, you know, you're not hoping for a skeleton. You're not going to find a skeleton here. But somehow by,

you know, just by great luck, they did. For some reason, this carcass wound up on the ground, was not demolished by all these predators, and had a chance to fossilize. So that is just remarkably good fortune. Was that one of the reasons why it was treated with so much skepticism? Because, well, I mean, no one doubts the existence of the skeleton.

At least, you know, no one who should. What do they doubt? Well, they doubt. I'm sorry, but there's so many things that are so specific,

like the carbon dating of the upper and lower layers, the fact that you have so many bones, the fact that they're not repeating, the fact that it's clearly some sort of a primate and that you've put all this stuff together and reconstructed the skull. I mean, what is the controversy? The controversy, well, there's a couple of things. I mean, you could talk for a long time about this, but I guess one point of controversy is, is it indeed a member of the human family? And, you know, as I said before, you get further back in time and the things that tell you it's a member of the human family become more subtle, like these canine teeth, for example. The bipedality is another one. But there's a great deal of skepticism in the field about – there's people who I talk to who tell you – who doubt that any of these early species that have been identified as hominins or early members of the human family they doubt that any of them really are or or that's just unknowable so it's kind of like this

this um i don't know almost in some people this this uh uh almost like nihilistic view that you can really ever know that's that's one uh um but but i but i do think that has changed the the the uh validation of arty as a member of the human family the human lineage is um i think there is a growing number of people who are accepting it uh and there's some people with a lot of outside people who have basically endorsed what the research team had said. Whether it's a direct ancestor or one of your extinct aunt and uncle. Maybe it's not your grandfather, but maybe it's your aunt and uncle. We may never know that. So anyway, that's one point of

controversy is it is it in our the human lineage uh another one is um the arguments that the discovery team has made about what it reveals about the last common ancestor of humans and apes and uh you know like for example we were talking before about about this model of a chimp-like common ancestor of humans and and uh african apes and uh you know the the arty team who spent 15 years studying this thing before they announced it to the world they uh believe and strenuously argued that this skeleton shows you that the common ancestor of humans and the african apes was in fact not like a chimp not nowhere near as chimp like as everyone thought because there's no vestige of knuckle walking i mean there's a whole bunch of of things that gets into sort of like some

anatomical very esoteric anatomical stuff so if you if you read the book if you're interested because it gets into to do all that but uh uh so anyway so that's that's part of the controversy uh so um so there there there is a sort of subset of the critics who have come to accept Artie as indeed a member of the human family. So they say, yeah, they're right. They placed it correctly in the human family tree. But they are not yet convinced that it falsifies this idea of a chimp-like ancestor. Their argument would be, well, sure, in the ways that Artie may have still descended from this chimp-like ancestor. Their argument would be, well, sure, in the ways that Artie may have still descended from this chimp-like ancestor, but

it evolved these new adaptations that sort of erase those from its anatomy. So that's one element of controversy. I mean, there's the great thing

about this skeleton, actually, because it is so complete and because it was released with this huge package of a whole series of paper about the hand, the foot, the pelvis, and the skull. There was

a lot of fodder there for debate and disagreement, and that's what's been happening for the last 10 years. Now, when they talk about a chimp ancestor, a chimp-like ancestor, is this just because chimps are around and we know genetically that we're at least closely related to chimps? So it's just presumed? And is it possible that all the way back, like from the beginning, that our ancestors were bipedal? Well, I don't think many people would say.

Well, ancestors of the human lineage. Right. When you look at Artie, Artie is the oldest known full skeleton that we have of our ancestors. If we go back, if we somehow or another found something that was 12 million years old what if that thing was bipedal okay well okay so one one problem is that they split between humans and in and chimps it's probably not that old so if you're at 12 million you're probably somewhere before the huge chimps but i mean there's a lot of like squish time in this so you know and actually i think actually as it happens i think some of the

the estimates that are kind of furthest out are in fact 12 million but you know somewhere between 6 and 12 million where the where humans and chimps split it's kind of and what are they but they do think that once upon a time there was a split between humans and chimps. So if you go back far enough, you'll find a chimp or something like a chimp. Well, you'll find an ancestor of a chimp. The big question is, does it look like a modern chimp? Or does it look like something you've never seen before? Or does it look like something that's sort of a more primitive version of Ardipithecus? I mean, this is the great unknown.

I mean, this is like, of course, another quest for science. So the discovery of Ardipithecus was really a monkey wrench into this whole idea of what we – Yeah. Yeah, so that was what was – one of the things that was quite controversial about it. And we haven't talked much about the discovery team that put this together. But they are, you know, they're very good scholars. They're very good at what they do. But they're also quite provocative.

And which, you know, for me, of course, made them great material. Which, you know, for me, of course, made them great material. But, you know, they don't present the skeleton and say, you know, here's a physical description of the skeleton. Go ahead and make up your own minds. They presented it and it said, here is a, you know, skeleton. And this is why you're wrong and you're wrong and you're wrong and you're right. your eyes so it was it was a provocative uh it was a provocative series of of papers with with some you know stunning revelations but a lot of some people in the research community did not take kindly to the the mode of presentation let's let's say um uh because you know at one point um you know there's there's a there's this huge uh research community that studied chimpanzees

you know either it studied them in the field doing observational studies or studied them in the lab to try to find clues about the origin of human locomotion or anything. I mean, Chimster kind of became this all-purpose model. And so when the Arnie team came along and told them they were all kind of barking up the wrong tree, there was a lot of consternation about that. It's so fascinating to me that there was a time where this thing didn't exist, we didn't know it existed, and that it was only 1994. And that our understanding of where the human species came from relies on these perfect conditions to happen and then someone to come

across this thing at just the right time and that this person has to be a skilled researcher that knows how to handle it and put like our understanding of where we came from as much as we know about you know the internet and space travel and the galaxy it's so crazy to me that we need to piece together our understanding of the history of the human species based on these like perfect scenarios like yeah well that there's a reason why these skeletons are so rare i mean they're hard to find i mean you need the right geological conditions um i mean let's just start with where you find these things um they're you know we're pretty certain that early human origins was in africa okay and i mean that's pretty clear at this point um

and humans were humans were confined to af, as far as we know, until about two million years ago when some of these primitive species started to go out. So, you know, the early stories in Africa. Now, you often hear people say, well, you know, the Great Rift Valley is the cradle of humanity or South Africa is the cradle of humanity or the Eden or whatever. And these places were not necessarily the only places that human ancestors dwell the reason we know about these things is just because these are the countries where the geological conditions favor the preservation of fossils so you know so there's and so and so there's this

whole mythology you know it's sort of about like, this place or that place is like the Eden of humanity or whatever. I mean, a lot of that is just self-promotion, tourist board stuff, sometimes scientists self-promoting. Again, you know, what they should be saying is we're not, you know, the birthplace of humanity, we're the graveyard. But that doesn't have the same, you know, PR appeal, we're the graveyard. But that doesn't have the same PR appeal. We're the graveyard of humanity. But if you look at where fossils are found, like look at a map of Africa, it's a tiny portion of the African continent

has a fossil record. And there's Ethiopia we've talked about, there's Kenya, there's South Africa, there's different geological conditions there that explain, but South Africa things tend to be preserved in caves, tend to be a little, not quite as old as the oldest things from the Rift Valley. But there are a few scatterings of things elsewhere, like in Chad and some other countries, but most of Africa is totally unknown the fossil record and so there could be a large part of the human story of just you know evolutionary biology in general that have just just gone or at least not yet discovered so we you know our windows into the past are like these little pinholes you know and and there you find those things, like in this Afar depression of Ethiopia that I'm talking about, are pretty rare. So you need to have those rare places, and then you also need to have this skill.

And this is not an easy – I mean, I've spent a couple – gone out to the field with this particular group a couple of times. And this is not easy work to do at all. It's not easy to find the stuff, to have the eyes to see it and then to spot it on the ground. And it's also not easy to do just logistically. I mean, like right now, for example, I mean, the work in Ethiopia has kind of come to a standstill because their country is, again, having, you know, some political turmoil. There's fear that it might be heading into civil war. And so that means it's too, you know, a lot of these teams are probably reluctant to go to the field because, you know, because of the danger. because of the danger. And so we're kind of back to a situation like what I was describing earlier,

where it's just too dicey to go into the field. So anyway, so why are there so, and it gets back to the question, why are there so few skeletons? Well, the places where you find it are rare. The logistical challenges are severe. And also the skill level that it takes to find something even if it does exist um is is it that takes a a um it takes a lot of skill i was quite impressed when i went there to see how people could find things because i you know people would find things that i as a lay person walking just could not see you know it just makes you wonder how much we've missed

how much people have stumbled upon where they didn't have that skill or they didn't know what they were looking at or they weren't training they weren't educated in it and they just found some piece of something that probably could have changed the way we look at our history. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's just like, yeah. Amazing. Yeah, I mean, there could be, you know, I mean, somewhere under the surface in Africa, there's all kinds of skeletons and fossils

that could answer all kinds of questions for us. But if it's just buried that far underneath the surface and, you know, some surveyor comes along and walks over it walks over it, there's nothing eroding to the surface yet, it's invisible. Right, and there's so much ground space. There is something eroding. Yeah, yeah. And so it's – yeah, you only know what you can find now since the time of the initial discovery in 1994 there's been a lot of different versions of the human being that have also been discovered like

how many different humans have they discovered now i know it was what is it called denisovans is that what they the name of them is that am saying that right? Yeah, so that is some fragments of bone that are from a cave up in Siberia. And actually, that one's kind of interesting because they were able to get some ancient DNA out of it. So stuff like Artie and Lucy are too old to get DNA out of. All the biological material is gone. uh all the bi biological material is gone but in some of the newer stuff um or younger stuff uh they're um the the uh they can get what they call ancient dna out of them so i mean just as an example um that uh about 10 years ago um some researchers were able to extract some dna from uh some old neanderthal bones and there's been this interesting question you know for decades about whether

neanderthals you know neanderthals are of course of these famous you know fossil species known from uh from europe and from asia and for a long time there had been this debate about whether neanderthals evolved into modern humans there was one school of thought that thought they they did and then another school who thought they called the kind of the out of africa group who believed that a another species of homo sapiens, that's us, you know, arose in Africa and then moved into Europe and Asia and displaced the Neanderthals and basically

either out-competed them or killed them or whatever. Somehow, we showed up, they disappeared. And so, you know, and some of the early DNA studies kind of supported that out-of-Africa deal, that sort of displacement thing. But anyway, about 10 years ago, the people that study ancient DNA were able to start extracting ancient DNA from some Neanderthal bones that had not completely fossilized.

So there was like a little bit of biological material there where they could start to knit together you know these ancient genomes and that science has advanced a lot i mean it's astounding what they're what they're doing now and i don't i shouldn't say too much about it because that's you know i that's not my focus so um so don't don't ask me too many hard questions about that but but anyway so one of the things that that they have discovered was that in fact there was some interbreeding between you know these modern homo sapiens who came out of Africa and went to Europe and Asia um and you know there's some portions of the Neanderthal genome that are still alive or still exist in the genomes of people who are of what they call non-African descent. So basically, the people who left Africa, you know,

interbred at least to a limited degree with Neanderthals. And so there's a little Neanderthal in a lot of us. So that's like a huge, huge revelation. And then there's been many other revelations with ancient DNA. I mean, this Denisovans is another one. So it appears that, anyway, you asked about all these ancient species, and I don't know how many there are now. There's probably a couple dozen members. Really? A couple dozen? Really? There's that many? Yeah, well, that are named. I mean, and this is a controversial thing, too, because it's like, if you are a scientist, you find, let's say, a fossil. And if you name it something new, there's great incentive to name something new because, you know, new species, headlines, you know, and it's interesting. Let's say you find another something that is a species that's already known.

You know, maybe it's just like a variation of that or, you know, slightly older, slightly younger, slightly like, you know, physically different. I mean, you know, ho-hum, who cares? That stuff just doesn't get the same amount of attention. And ho-hum, who cares? That stuff just doesn't get the same amount of attention. So there is a professional bias, I think, toward naming new species. Now, some of this stuff, I mean, there's no question it's a new species. I mean, Ardipithecus is one. There's many other things that have been discovered.

And there's many other things that have been discovered. But, you know, I think the thing that's difficult here is that the whole idea of species is people say, oh, something is a species. But what does that mean? And, you know, in modern humans, for all we like to talk about our diversity, we're actually at least genetically pretty homogenous, you know, compared to other primates. at least genetically, pretty homogenous, you know, compared to other primates. And so I think in the ancient past, there's probably a lot of variation, at least in some species, that's greater than what we see in ourselves now. So, and anyway, and then, so that's part of the problem that creates this debate about whether something is a new species or just another example of something that we already know about and the other thing is that yeah yeah go

ahead i was gonna say um that little guy that they found on the island of flores uh homo floreensis is that what you say yeah yeah this little yeah dwarf like thing yeah was that considered a human yeah well that that's a big that's's, again, another point of debate. I mean there's everyone – I haven't heard anyone doubt that it's a member of the human family, but it's really weird because it has like this – Tiny head. Yeah, people have – there's this phenomenon called island dwarfism where sometimes things like that – Like elephants. Let's say it goes up an island,

the sea levels change, things get small or some things get big. Like reptiles. Yeah. Reptiles get bigger on islands, right? Yeah, like Komodo dragons or whatever. But in this case, this thing got small. And so there's a big debate about what it evolved from

and are there more of these things i mean that's that thing lived as recently as how i mean it wasn't that long ago right wasn't it like 15,000 years ago or something crazy i i don't remember but yeah it is it is it is recent i don't remember the exact number but it's something remarkable frequently recent yeah yeah and certainly what certainly within the life the the lifetime of our species, yeah. Well, it's something where cryptozoology, which is always a weird thing, right? But there's people that believe, I think it's called Orang Pendek. There's a legendary animal in the jungle of Vietnam that is very much like this

Homo floriensis, a very small person, very small hairy little person that lives in the junk. I think it's Vietnam. I'm pretty sure. And they, they think now that, well, Hey, they might be really talking about something that did exist thousands of years ago. Is this a fossil species i i'm not aware it's a legend i think it's it's probably it's probably a lot of it is horseshit but it's

when when they found this homo floriensis i think a lot of the people that were proponents of this uh orang pendek thing they were like well hey that's what we're talking about like this is this is the actual creature a a little small hairy person. Okay. Is this like the Bigfoot of Vietnam? Exactly. But it's a little foot. It's a little tiny guy.

The little foot, yeah. Yeah, but the speculation is that this thing used to be they just thought it was just one of those crazy legends. But now they think, hey, they might have been talking about something that existed in human history like this Homo floriensis did. Yeah, well, maybe it's a mutant from, I don't know, Agent Orange or something. No, I think it's a pretty old story. I think it predates Vietnam.

Yeah. Well, anyway, just a final note on the species, just a little food for thought. So, you know, people bandy around this term species like and people don't really question the category and so the weird thing about species is um we know okay so the one species i mean a lot of definitions in biology one of them it the classic definition of biological species definition and this dates from the 1940s from a guy named Ernst Maher who's a prominent biologist uh a very important historical figure but anyway he defined the species as the group the population that could

breed with each other okay so you can make babies you have the opportunity to make babies you're a species so it's this big inclusive thing right and uh but of course you know a lot of the fossil species you know we don't know who could breed with who we just know what they look like right what's physically different and so you know for a long time i mean so take humans and neanderthals there's been this big debate you, what's the relation between them? Did they interbreed? And so a Neanderthal is something physically different enough to be, you know, categorized as different species, but now the genetics tell us that they were able to, they did interbreed. So now there's like this big problem with like, what is a species? Like,

what do you, you know, and I don't think biology has has at least i mean i'm sure others have different opinions about this and some avoid the question all all all together but that was one thing i wrestled with this book you know it's like people that we have this we're using like language to describe biology but those are two different mediums and sometimes the biology defies the categories of language and the categories of classification and this is this is like a constant theme through well at least in human origin science is that you know when people build these categories and these narratives to construct to sort of hold the facts of what little we know but then you know the body of knowledge expands,

and suddenly your old categories are leaking all over the place. Right. And that's – That's – therein lies the limitations of calling these things humans. Yeah. Well, you could call them humans. You could call them species. I don't know the answer to that, except that we should be, clearly you need language to have, you know, for precision, you know, for science.

I mean, that's absolutely necessary, but you can't be too dogmatic about your categories because nature is not dogmatic. Nature is far more fluid and and dynamic than that and we don't have a complete picture of the exact process from ancient ape to human being in the current form we don't have a no we have a series of snapshots yeah snapshots that we've been lucky enough to capture. And Artipithicus is one. You know, Lucy was one. Homo erectus, you know, Homo naledi, you know, this Denisovans, the little florist thing.

I mean, those are all these snapshots. But, you know, it's not like we have anything like a complete picture. It's not like we have anything like a complete picture. I mean, you can certainly see some trends, some through lines, you know, from the more, you know, primitive things to modern things, you know, becoming more advanced bipeds, the limb proportions changing, you know, the brain, of course, growing. That's a huge storyline in human evolution. But there are a lot of, yeah, all we have are these snapshots that we're lucky enough to get because of just the happenstance of geology and discovery. One other thing about species that I found quite interesting in this whole thing. So you've probably heard about like the tree of life and, you know, the human family tree.

And, you know, I mean, this is an old metaphor. And, but like the tree is kind of having a little trouble right now. Not that we should get rid of it, but it's, you know. So when you have this idea of a tree where everything is splitting into dead ends, you know, when you have this idea of a tree where everything is splitting into dead ends you know it it it leaves these questions when people say like humans and the animals oh which one led to modern humans and it becomes like this either or thing right so when you have all these

species that look different from i'm trying to center my hand in the frame here here we go that it i think it is sometimes led science into false choices where we say, okay, well, the ancestor has to either be this one or that one because, look, there's a split here. And they went their separate ways because that's kind of what the tree metaphor depicts. But actually what ancient DNA is showing you is that things that are actually looking different are actually able you're getting some crossover there and so now your tree is looking a lot a lot less like a tree it's looking more like a web or a lattice sometimes i mean people are using these searching for these other metaphors to kind of convey the complexity of what biology is showing but it's you know it's it's it's a lot more complex than like the simple trees of like you know the species and and and uh anyway just wanted to insert that little word of

caution about the tree i mean the tree is a really powerful metaphor for the diversity of life but when creatures that have recently split you know those branches don't necessarily uh remain isolated from each other they can have some crossover and some interbreeding or hybridization whatever you want to call it that makes it kind of hard to give you nice neat uh through lines from right this species to that species then this is what i was going to get to with all these various species of human or thing all different types of humans that we know of now since 1994 is it possible that that there were that there were multiple different types of creatures like

artepithecus like there's multiple different types of what we call a human being and that they're simultaneously evolving in these different parts of the world in a similar timeline and creating the denisovans and the homo floriensis and homo sapiens and neanderthals and it's all just kind of happening you know you know like at the same time but not along the exact same timeline with the exact same ancestor okay well okay so let's take artepithecus uh um uh because at that point artepithecus is only known at this point as far as as far as i know from ethiopia and one is the middle awash the place where already came from that i was describing earlier and then they've also found um some other artepithecus at a place

called gona which is basically another project area that's adjacent to the Middle Awash. They're basically neighbors. So this is in this one part of Ethiopia. So how widespread was Ardipithecus in Africa? Did it range through the entire continent or was it a regional species um uh i i don't i guess the answer is is unknown um and uh you know for the reasons i mentioned earlier that there's just so little of africa that gives you the windows into the past uh but anyway so but uh there is anotherdipithecus skeleton that's been announced in the last couple of years from Gona. And that one is interesting. So it is – so Ardipithecus, the original Ardi, had this opposable toe. And it walked – when it was upright, it apparently walked with the toe kind of splayed off to the side, kind of like an outrigger.

At this Gona creature, they have something that they're calling a skeleton. I haven't actually seen it. I don't think it's actually been – they've published – they revealed its existence, but I haven't seen a picture of it. And I don't think they've revealed that but i was talking to uh the um uh scientist there's a fellow named scott simpson from case western reserve university and he's a very competent um uh paleoanthropologist and he says that their creature has this toe it's like arty i mean you know there's no doubt they belong to the same species but this one has its toe more more in line with the foot so it's more kind of human-like uh so you know it's still it's still grasping it's about the same age as arty uh

so around it's like 4.4 4.55. So anyway, so the point here is that there is, you know, just as there is in modern species like baboons or whatever, there's different populations or subspecies that sometimes develop different adaptations for whatever reason. And they're quite similar, but you'd get these um variations you know for whatever reason of a local adaptation so how far apart are they from the original arty it's it's uh i i'm not sure it's not it's like maybe 50 miles or with it or within that it's it's it's just down the river that runs through there is called the Awash River, and Gona is the project area that's immediately downstream of the middle Awash where Artie was found.

Is it speculation that they were living in the same specific type of environment? Do they know that? Yeah. There's some difference in environmental interpretation but between the two but but there's there's similar the reason why i ask the reason why i ask have you ever seen uh images of uh indigenous people in the amazon that walk around barefoot and their feet literally start to look like hands they splay out in a very bizarre way i haven't seen those particular pictures but i do know that people that walk around unshod you know so in other words without shoes tend to develop these toes that are more divergent not not opposable like right

a primate but for whatever reason about being a unshod it just gives you, you know, you look at the toe and it's like, it's, it's like visibly separated. Yes. We're looking at a picture of it right now on the screen. We're sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's very strange where it's, it's almost like they're gripping the ground with their toes and the, the toes are very thick and strong because they're, they're constantly walking around barefoot and they, they use their toes and the toe muscles in a way that we don't use them anymore because we're – essentially we're in casts with our shoes.

Yeah. Well, you know what's really interesting about – I mean, we look at like modern adaptations of modern humans in all these different pockets of the world or particularly when you look into all these ancient species, which are even weirder. all these ancient species which are even weirder is you realize there's nothing about our form that's like an end destination there's nothing about our form that is like we know we have arrived at this was you know where primates were going the whole time it's um you know if you want to talk about who are the weird ones it's it's not all these other things it's like the modern humans are weird we got these big heads We got this funny way of walking. We're bald. And we vary so much. Yeah.

And we vary. And then, you know, there's all these kind of myths about why, I mean, God, there's so many myths in the field of human origins. But one of them is you've probably heard about like the divine proportions or like golden ratio that humans were constructed, you know, according to these ratios and the so-called golden ratio. I mean, this is just storytelling. You know, I mean, there's nothing about our proportion. Our proportions are just a function of adaptation. They're a function of evolutionary biology. And, you know, when certain chemicals are released in developmental process that governs how long your limbs grow or your digits or

whatever but there's you know we're just all variations of primate yeah we're just we're just one of them and so yeah, so sometimes you see literature or people positing that, you know, somehow there was something like an end, we've reached some sort of end state or, and I'll tell you, we're not reaching end state. We're just a variation of, you know, creatures that have, that adapt, you know, they take these common elements and adapt them, you know, for a different, for, you know, for different uses. Modern humans, though, we do vary size-wise much more than ancient apes that we find, though, correct? Like we don't, like, for instance, like, you know, Mountain from the Game of Thrones, that enormous giant human being?

That's a human being. I don't. I should confess I am sort of illiterate when it comes to pop culture. Oh, okay. My kids would know. I need to turn to them. He's literally one of the world's strongest men. He's like seven feet plus tall, 300 plus pounds, enormous.

But my point was that like that he exists as a human being. Also, Chris Rock is a human being and he's a very thin, very small man. Like, but there are both human beings. We don't find that when you're looking at things like Neanderthal or you find much more uniformity. Is that correct? Well, no, not necessarily. Actually, in some cases, there's a lot of variation. And I'll give you one good example.

So Lucy, you know, there's this famous fossil. Lucy was – the species is called Australopithecus afarensis, named afarensis after the AFAR, this part of the world that I was describing, the AFAR depression. She was discovered in 1974. She's very petite, probably a female. And I forget how tall she is, but it's like three foot something. And Artie's a female too, correct? Artie's a female. Artie's taller.

Artie's a female. Artie's taller. Artie's, you know, a head taller than Lucy. But anyway, so with Lucy, you know, when her skeleton was found, you know, this was, you know, the only skeleton of that species. They had a lot of other pieces of things, but no skeletons. But there was this assumption that that species was small, or at least the female. That species was small, or at least the female. And now, thanks to some other work that's done in Ethiopia at a place called Oranza Miele, a few years ago, a team announced discovery of another skeleton of Lucy's species. It's a male. It's a lot bigger than Lucy. They call it katanumu, which is an Afar word for big guy.

But it's the same species as lucy but it's it's a big guy you know substantially taller so it sort of falsifies this idea that all lucy's species was was petite so interesting and why is that is that because it's a there's a so-called sexual demorphism of males are bigger than females, or is it just a different population? Or is that just a difference in the normal range within a population, like you have short people and tall people in any population? I don't know what the answer is to that. But they're both mature specimens? Yeah, and they're both attributed to the same species. So anyway, just to give you an example of a paleospecies where there is actually a substantial variation.

How much difference is it between Lucy and this other one? I don't know. Actually, I wish I had looked this up before we talked because I'd love to give you a number. But the big guy is substantially taller and bigger than Lucy. But the skeletons, they have – the anatomy is similar enough so that they are attributed to the same species. Interesting. And they're of similar age. Like Cadenumo, I think, is like 3.6 million years old, and Lucy's, I think, 3.2.

So when we look at humans like the Denisovans, and we consider that to be a different human than Homo sapien or than Neanderthal, do we have any idea how that came about? came about? Well, so, first of all, I should say I don't know much about Denisovans. My understanding is there's not too much skeletally preserved of it. I mean, they have enough bones, they've obviously been able to take... It's a fairly recent

discovery, right? Yeah, it's within the last, I don't know, 10 years or something. So, is your question, like, why do they look so different? Yeah, like, where did they come from? Yeah. I don't know. And I don't think a lot is known about that, about that. Maybe the scientists are studying it at no more than they've published. But I don't know much about it but anyway just the general idea of why do these things look so different um so there's this concept in science that helps explain this and

this is you know some people call it these are all it's speciation it's just like an adaptive radiation of all these things going out and turning into these different species and that's kind of one way to look at it but the way i prefer to look at it is um what the science is what the scientists call uh isolation by distance which sounds like horribly boring i know you're like what the hell does that mean but basically what it means is that things you know spread out and particularly with when humans got the technology you know ancient humans got the technology to basically live in all these different parts of the world they were isolated and then could adapt you know make these local that adaptations which you know make them look make the Neanderthals look different than these sub-saharan Africans for example who were their

contemporaries but yet they're still closely enough related, so when they do come back in contact, as they sometimes do, they can still potentially interbreed. So what the isolation by distance means, it just means that these things spread out enough so that they get local adaptations, like your example from the Amazon or people from the Inuit,

from the northern areas or whatever. It's such a fascinating field of study because you see how they're piecing together this puzzle slowly but surely. And just it's for someone who's impatient like there's you're not going to get the answers to this very quickly but yeah but yeah it's so amazing though yeah but the truth is always so much more interesting than than than the fiction and and and i think i mean so i'm just a journalist, right? So I'm not a scientist. So I should just remind people of that.

But if I were a scientist in this field, you just have this lifetime of material ahead of you. And you just know that the revelations are going to be so fantastic. Like there's, like genomic science. I mean, I know my book is about fossils and that's mostly what I know about. But, you know, genomics, genetics in ancient DNA,

it's an important, you know, cutting edge right now. But anyway, there's a guy, one of the prominent geneticists at Harvard named David Reich. He says, we're just, we're like kindergartners in our knowledge of this stuff at this point. I mean, as advanced as the science is, and as amazing as the breakthroughs have been, they're still only just beginning to understand

like how that genetic code really translates into biology, for example. The code has been transcribed. We now have the 3 billion places in the human genome translates into biology for example you know the code has been transcribed we now you know have you know the three billion you know places in the human genome you know transcribed but what does that mean you know you know what what does the code say and how does that code turn into artepithecus and denisovans and you and me i mean it's that, I mean, there's so many questions waiting to be answered. And yeah, if you're an impatient person, you won't get the big answers maybe in our lifetime

for the big questions. But God, there's so many fascinating questions that are within reach that are being answered. It's endlessly fascinating. within reach that are being answered. It's, it's, you know, endlessly fascinating. As a journalist, when you're writing a book about this, and you have to take a deep dive into all the science behind it, and just the history of it, what is that experience like for you? I mean, it seems like it would be all consuming, because it's such a deep field of study. It was all consumingconsuming for me. I mean, this book took me a lot longer than I ever intended.

What did you intend? Well, people would keep, you know, people would ask. I mean, I had numerous conversations that went like this, right? I'd be talking to some scientists, you know, someone I'd been talking to for a while. I'd say, oh, yeah, what's your timeline? And I'd say, oh, yeah, I'll probably be done any this time next year i mean i was saying that in like 2012. you know here the book is being published you know this this week so um so part of that i mean and this kind of gets to the to the richness of the story that i was telling you about

i mean so i was you know there was this interesting story about this fossil, the oldest skeleton ever found in the human family. So I wanted to understand, like, the full life cycle of that discovery, like how the hunt, the research question was framed in the beginning. And then, you know, how it was found, interpreted, announced to the world, and then all the debate that followed. So that's, you know, I want to follow the life cycle of this whole thing through because to me that's a really interesting story and that there are all these interesting components along the way like you know geology and genomics and um developmental biology and you know the anatomy of all these different parts so uh so anyway yeah that obliged me to sort of learn all these topics uh and so that was just a lot of reading a lot of talking to people i mean i'm so indebted to to a lot of scientists who guided me you know through the geology through

the field work uh through the interpretation of the skeleton um they i mean they provided a service to me personally but they also more importantly importantly, provided a service to public understanding. And I can't say enough how grateful I am to those people. Where do you go from here? I mean, when you spend eight years working on a book about an ancient ancestor to human beings, and then you take a big, deep breath. You do all the publicity work. Where do you go from here? Well, that's a good,

that's a good question. I'll go back into a cave, uh, probably, uh, you know, to write another book. you know,

I, I, it'll be on a different topic for sure. I mean, I, I like, you know, stories that have narrative and I like stories that have depth.

And, you know, this one was quite rewarding. It's quite challenging. I can't spend that long on every book because I'll be dead before I get anywhere. But so anyway, I'm looking at a topic now. It'll be sort of deep history of science.

I have to do a lot of legwork to see if it'll pan out the way i think it is i mean i i yeah i tend to keep things under wraps until i'm know that it's going to be worthwhile to do so um that way i'll keep under wraps but something like that something a big a big a big story with characters and with depth and narrative and you just choose them based on your curiosity like what's intriguing to you yeah well like with artepithecus i didn't really choose it in the sense that like i sort of sat down eight years ago and said okay well what am i going to do i mean as i said i started off on this other road and then it just, over time, this story just sort of appeared in front of me and sort of told me that there's another road here that actually might be more rewarding.

And then, you know, as I kind of went along, I kept having to stop and learn about, you know, the geology and all these component sciences or about Ethiopia. We haven't talked much about that. But, you know, the backdrop of Ethiopia while all this was going on is an important part of the story uh at multiple levels i mean there's the turmoil in the country that makes it difficult to work there um there is the um uh the this sort of uh ascendance of indigenous african scientists from ethiopia entering the science and sort of claiming a place at the table, you know, in a science that has, you know, some colonialist roots. There's all, you know, all these component pieces that took me out

were not visible at the outset, but I just sort of had to delve into them as I waded through this topic. And believe me, there was a lot of pain and suffering that went into this book. I mean, I know parts of it are, you know, sometimes, you know, strike people as maybe hard science, but believe me that there was, like, I could have written and did write in some cases what you might see in like a couple sentences that I tossed off about this or that. There may have been a 10-page draft of that topic or five page or whatever that I needed to write to be able to understand it and then to reduce it, reduce it, reduce it, and then sort of, you know,

reduce it down to just one brick that I could just sort of put in the wall of this story but yeah there was a lot of that and that accounts for why it was such a drawn-out process well congratulations on the completion and uh thank you very much for spending some time with me today i really appreciate it man i really enjoyed it it's it's uh it's it's a great pleasure you have a great show it's eclectic and i'm still you know scratching my head trying to think of uh where i fit in with you know bernie and kanye and all these other guys but i hey you fit in that i i'm interested in what you do you fit in because it's a fascinating subject to me all right well well thank you for uh yeah high five five with the – High five.

It's been a pleasure. Can you hold up a copy of the book behind you? It's right over your shoulder so people can get an image of it. Yeah. So the book is Fossil Men. It's published by HarperCollins, the William Morrow imprint. And it is going to – it's releasedmber 10th all right and this is this is arty's hand right here i think november 10th is today right isn't that today yeah tomorrow yeah well the the day come today's the 9th that we're filming this it'll come out tomorrow on the 10th all right beautiful thank you kermit appreciate it man thank you you guys do a great job thank you thank you take care Thank you, Kermit. Appreciate it, man. It's my pleasure. You guys do a great job. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.