The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - How to Survive an Apocalypse, Teeth with Secrets, Birds Who BBQ

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

Annalee Newitz discusses how to survive an apocalypse while eating good, Rachel talks about birds using spikes as barbecue skewers (and more), and Chelsey gets into sexing skeletons. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Thanks to our sponsors!  Here's a special, (limited time) deal for our listeners to get you started RIGHT NOW, Get 55% off at https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST Find your forever pieces @jennikayne and get 15% off with promo code WEIRDEST at https://jennikayne.com/WEIRDEST #jennikaynepartner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of

popular science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Chelsea B. Coombs. And I'm Annalie Newitz. Annalee, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to tell you all about weird things. Oh my gosh. Thanks so much for coming on. Listeners, I'm sure most of you know, but if you don't, Annalie is a fantastic writer of like science, fact, and fiction and many other things. And they also host an awesome podcast called Our Opinions Are Correct. I would love for you to tell our a little bit more about who you are. Yeah. So as you said, I kind of divide my time between writing science journalism and just making shit up in science fiction. My latest novel is called the terraformers, and it's about

terraforming, just like it says on the label. My latest nonfiction book is called Four Lost Cities, and it's about ancient archaeological discoveries. And I'll be talking a little bit about some of the themes from that book today. And also, yeah, you can catch me every two weeks on Our Opinions Are Correct. It's a podcast about science fiction and society and science. And yeah, it's my co-host, Charlie Jane Anders and I like to do a lot of giggling and a lot of researching. So it's very, I think fans of this podcast would probably enjoy it as well. Absolutely. I completely agree. Well, let's get into it. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the

course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was, except not in a winner or loser type of way anymore, as I have officially decided a few episodes ago. And I will not rewrite the intro. So, sorry. Chelsea, what's your tease? So researchers thought that the remains of this powerful copper age leader were of a man, but a tooth proved otherwise.

Love love a tooth, a tooth caper. Yeah. Yeah. Annalie, what's your tease? My tease is that we now have new evidence from after the end of the end of, the Bronze Age about how people survive an apocalypse and they do it in style with really good cooking material. Oh, that feels like news that I personally can use. So I'm very excited to hear more about that. My tease is that I am going to talk about birds who disrespect authority and

break the law. Love it. Yeah. Same. Chelsea, what do we talk about your tooth find first? Okay. I mean, we love talking about teeth. Teeth, teeth.

Teeth. Teeth. Teeth. Like that tweet. So it's really hard to tell someone's sex from poorly preserved remains. And while archaeologists have often relied on size differences, they see in craniums and pelvises, those parts don't always escape the sands of time. So in 2008, archaeologists came upon a burial chamber in Valenzina, Spain, with an incredible

treasure trove of goods, including an entire African elephants tusk, which was kind of a weird thing to find in Europe during that time, a large ceramic plate with traces of wine and cannabis, a flint dagger, an ivory comb and just one person's remains in it. So clearly this was the burial site of a very important person. I just love how you clarify just one person. It reminds me of like when you make a really big Chinese food order and you're like, I only need one set of utensil. I got my elephant. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's just for me though. I've got it covered. I've got my weed. You know, as long as you got your weed and weed. I get I think it's probably fine. We didn't need. Perfect.

Oh, my God. So this person was obviously really important. And the remains weren't super well preserved and using standard methods that were used for analysis of bodies at the time. The researchers had determined that the remains belonged to a man between 17 to 25 years old who they dubbed the ivory man because he had a giant elephant tusk. You get one elephant tusk, and then that's all anyone talks about. Yeah, that's your whole identity. People are just all about how you're an ivory guy. Right, exactly.

Who knows what other things this person really liked. But since then, there have been some really cool advances in science that make determining human remains sex much easier, and they involve teeth. So there's a protein in our tooth enamel called a melancholym. that comes in different forms based upon the sex chromosome someone has. So there's a form for the X chromosome and a form for the Y chromosome. And it's often preserved pretty well, even in places where, you know, bones are messed up, you know, things are disintegrated, all that kind of stuff. So using this methodology in 2021, archaeologists determined that the ivory man was actually the ivory lady. Yay!

Which is great. Like, I love that we're finally figuring this out. But what's really fascinating is there's this huge sex and gender bias present in all science, right? But in this case, specifically, archaeology. And that's informed our ideas about what prehistoric society was actually like. So it's really easy to assume that an important leader in these early societies was a man, especially when you don't have the scientific means to do so otherwise. And a lot of that has been shaped by the cultural and the political worlds that we live in in the last few centuries since we started analyzing these ancient archaeological finds. Laura Baisas actually originally wrote about this story for Popsai, and she got this amazing quote from one of the researchers, Leonardo Garcia San Juan.

In the ethnographic literature, the leaders of the pre-state societies are, in most cases, male individuals and concepts such as, as big man, chieftoms, and aggrandizers are used to describe these societies. Our study shows that this was not necessarily the case in prehistory. In our view, this implies that we need not only to rethink what has been said for Copper Age Iberia, which is where this particular burial site was, but for the processes that led to social complexity worldwide. And I think that's so great that they actually said that within the study. And there have been a number of different studies recently that have come out that have kind of taken what we thought were kind of like the, you know, sex and gender rules of, you know, the past.

Like there was another study that recently came out that found that, yes, women were also hunters, not just gatherers. So it's really interesting to see that we're kind of reevaluating everything that we thought we knew. and it's great to actually be using scientific evidence to do that. Totally. Love it. Yeah. Well, and I mean, I know that, I mean, like you were saying, sexing skeletons is incredibly difficult and not an exact science. Exactly.

And I don't remember exactly when this happened. I want to say it was in the 80s. But, yeah, like anthropologists and paleontologists started talking about, you know, we have this, like, we're finding more supposedly male skeletons than we should be based on like the number of people that exist at a given time. And when they looked closer, they were like, yeah, anytime it's ambiguous, there's this bias to say it's a male skeleton. And, you know, first of all, like, we won't, we won't go too deep down the rabbit hole of, like, sex isn't actually a binary and gender's all made up.

Right. Exactly. But, like, I think it's, um, it's really interesting to see. researchers, like not just focusing on getting better at doing, like, DNA analysis on old stuff, which is obviously cool and important science, but also being like, and also, what does it mean that, like, so much of our knowledge base was built on the idea that, like, things probably worked the way they did for rich white Europeans in the 1800s, you know, like. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Archaeology has been a lot of projection on the part of mostly white men, especially in the 19th century when the field was actually being developed in Europe and, you know, the idea of archaeology was being invented. And it's interesting because so many of these discoveries have been sitting. around in museums. Like, we just have skeletons in museums, and now people are going back and saying, like, hey, what if we checked out the DNA? Or what if we just examined these bones more closely?

One of the sites that I have written about a lot is the city called Cahokia, which is in southern Illinois. It's an indigenous city. And there was a discovery there in the 60s of a so-called bird man, because he was buried with a bunch of birds. bird imagery, so he became bird man. We have a theme. Yeah, we have a theme here. And so he was buried with all of this incredible, you know, pomp and ceremony, lots of projectile points and shells, blah, blah, blah.

So everybody's like, great. It's obviously, and when I say everybody, the dudes are like, obviously this is a king, right? And they're like, okay, that solves everything. This society had a king, that end. And then about five years ago, the skeleton and all of the other remains, that had been discovered with it were re-examined. Turned out it was actually a man and a woman

whose skeletons had been buried on top of each other and the bones had been intertwingled and also flattened and kind of distorted. And there were actually the bones of some other people in there too. And what now archaeologists believe is that actually it was probably a sacrifice and that the two people sacrificed probably represented something related to springtime or fertility.

There's a lot of stories about, male and female, you know, archetypes that kind of come together in the spring. So now instead of being a king, it turns out maybe this was like a young man and woman who were part of a sacrificial ritual and then buried with a bunch of cool shit because like, you know, that's how you do it when you sacrifice. You have a big party. Yeah, make it nice. Yeah, make it nice, have a barbecue. Like, yeah. So I just, I'm really glad that we're getting so many scientists who are going back to reexamine these old discoveries. It's really changing history.

And I mean, I feel better knowing that my matriarchs back in history were like kick and butt and thrown spears. Yep, exactly. And like the really interesting thing also was they found another, you know, another burial site around the same place that was basically it was women who were two to three generations after this ivory woman. And so they are thinking basically this was a very matriarchal society. You know, they really valued women and the women were the leaders of this society. And another really interesting thing, too, sorry to be like, here's another thing. I'm into it. More badass women?

No, stop. I know. I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So because they didn't find any, like, babies that had been. buried in this kind of like rich style because a lot of societies they do that, you know, a baby is born to a king or a queen and then they, the baby dies and then they bury it with all this opulence. Well, they didn't find that in this archaeological site. So they actually believed that the ivory woman was not, you know, the big leader of this group of people because she was born into it. She was the leader because she had those skills. to be a leader. So that's another really fun little extra sprinkle of goodness that's in this

story. And I really hope that we do go back and look at all of these assumptions we've made in the past and actually think about what they mean and whether they're actually real. I, when I was writing my book, definitely like the whole chapter about porn is like, we simply cannot know if porn as we know it existed because it's all about your intention and how you perceive the object. And we could find so many fallacies from so many parts of history and other sexual body parts as well. And we have and we still have no idea. We have absolutely no idea. Was it religious? Was it a joke? Was it for sexy stuff? Was it purely aesthetic? No idea. And one of my favorite like archaeological biases that I kept finding really great historians and archaeologists talking about when I was researching this stuff is like there always has been and in the past was even more of a drive to like interpret things that were unusual as being really religiously or something.

spiritually significant being like, oh, this must have been a ceremony involving blankly blank. These penises must have been for worship. And maybe they were, but also maybe they were just, maybe people just liked penis art. So yeah, I love, I find it both like maddening and also super interesting how like we can come up with as many stories. as we want to, like, put these puzzle pieces together, and none of them will ever be 100% right. And some of them will be completely wrong. And it's all about just, like, kind of what we've got going on at the time.

And also, they could both be right, you know? Totally, yeah. One person's religious object is another person's dildo. Like, you know, if history teaches us nothing, it's that. Or if history teaches us anything, it's that. Sorry. Yeah. Well, in that too, I mean, I went in our bog butter episode, I talked about how like one of the things researchers were working on is, is like getting away from this idea that there had to be one purpose for putting butter in a bog.

They were like, you got butter, you got bogs. People could put those together for all number of reasons. They probably did. Humans. We're goofy. Yeah. We're always doing weird stuff. All right.

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Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goal. because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about some rebellious birds, some birds sticking it to the man. So researchers at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam have found that anti-bird spikes

are being co-opted for extremely pro-bird purposes. They are showing up as materials in nests. And yes, I can see you both nodding. I know this was such a good news story. And I was like, I know they're both going to have seen it. And I love it so much. I am going to talk about it anyway. So, yeah, basically researchers in the Netherlands, they just published this paper in July.

But they had come across a couple of instances of these anti-bird spike bird nests. and they were like, let's look into this more. And in the course of writing the paper, they found more. And everything about this just delights me. So some background from the paper is that we have seen lots of instances before of birds using human-made materials to build their nests. And specifically using like stuff we would see is kind of scary and harmful to use their nests to build their nests. There are reports of wire nests dating back to 1933. And actually, apparently at the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum, you can see a proudly displayed Corvett nest made of barbed wire.

So go check that out if you haven't. And let's see, there's some pigeon research in the UK. Pigeons have been found breeding on nests made of screws and nails. and in Canada, they have been found to make nests out of drug users syringes. Side note, pigeons, of course, are infamous for building what appear to be terrible nests. They will literally just, like, put a stick on the ground and put an egg next to it, and that's a pigeon nest. It's because they were domesticated and they're basically feral and they like don't do that stuff. But I'm going to link to an amazing article.

Of course, it's amazing, by former weirdest thing guest, Sabrina Imbler, where they talk about kind of in defense of the pigeon nest. And the point of the pigeon nest is just to keep an egg from rolling away. And in a built urban environment, there are more flat surfaces than one might find in the average, you know, sort of tree or hollow. And so, yeah, a couple of syringes might be. give you exactly the bracing you need to keep your egg from teetering down the hallway. So the pigeons are all right. But yeah, there was also one of the researchers involved in the new study, like 25 years ago,

was at an oil refinery in Rotterdam. And he was like there was nothing green here. It was completely just like oil industry, like concrete, toxic air. and he found a nestweed from chicken wire. And he was like, wow, birds are so, they'll adopt to anything. Like, they can really make the best of the built environment. This is the wildest nest I'll ever see. And then he was quoted as saying, it turns out it wasn't,

which brings us back to the anti-bird spikes, which I'll talk more about this in a minute, but like anti-bird spikes as like hostile architecture kind of gross, definitely gross. Yeah. More gross depending on where they are. There have been like some pretty viral anti-bird spikes that were placed on trees because there were cars under those trees and people didn't want birds pooping on the cars.

And it's like that's what the tree is for though. Like that seems like an us problem. And yeah, there have definitely been reports of birds injuring themselves on spikes. However, conversely, the researchers pointed out in this paper, they have also seen peregrine falcons that use anti-bird spikes to, like, put their leftovers on. They like, they use it to like whole bits of food for later. It's a barbecue. It's more like, pretty much. It's a place just for storing the food, right?

So it's kind of drying it out and getting a little rotted. so it has that nice spicy flavor that Peregrine Falcons love. Yeah, that's so awesome. They're like, it's like a skewer. Someone just left it here for us. Yeah, it's like super similar to like what Shrikes have been seen to do on like, you know, various sort of spikes and barbed wire and spines of plants. Listeners, if you don't know what a strike is, I'm not going to get into it.

But they're mean. Nature isn't always nice. But anyway, peregrine falcons don't hunt with anti-bird spikes, but apparently they do see them as a nice kebab shop situation. So moving on to this current study, the researchers were made aware of this nest nearby that was made from these anti-bird spikes. and they could tell upon further investigation that the birds had torn the spikes up themselves. Like they were able to find the place nearby where there had been spikes and they'd been ripped off. And there were bits of like the spike glue on the nest. And these were crows and magpies.

And magpies are known to like put in quite a bit of energy investment into getting their nest materials. So it wasn't totally wild, but still, it was not really what they're expecting. I think when they first saw like, okay, wow, they're using these for their nest. I think their first thought was, they must have found them in a dump somewhere. And then they were like, okay, no, they're harvesting spikes. So in the course of writing this paper, they found their second one, which was a magpie nest. And then during the process of writing it, they were like, okay, we found, another one. And then actually when the paper was in review, one of the reviewers was like,

hey, I have another one for you. Wow. This is now just like a known thing that birds do. And the crows, it's interesting, they use them as like structural support. They might actually, like, the pins are basically helping to, like, secure the twigs together and support the structure of the nest. And that's probably especially helpful on like, a slope. surfaces. So they were like, these spikes might actually be like a really helpful material for

these crows. But the magpie nests are really, really cool because magpies build these like big elaborate domed nests. And it seems like they are using the spikes for their intended purposes. Like they face outward to protect the nest from other birds or, you know, squirrels or what have you. They actually found one outside a hospital in Antwerp that had 165 feet of middle strips and at least 1,500 individual spikes. I will definitely link to some pictures on popside.com slash weird. Yeah, they're pretty magnificent looking. One of the researchers was quoted as saying, like, these are incredible fortresses. They're basically a bunker for birds. My God, it's like the birds are like going to hot topic.

to like make their god nests. Like, I, I love it. Yeah, I just love it. Totally. It was kind of giving me the same energy as like the orcas who are attacking boats. And like, there's an otter who's like stealing surfboards. They're just like, we're just going to start reclaiming all of your weird human pointy shit and use it for our own thing. Yeah.

Yeah. The system, right? Nature is healing. We are the virus. So another paper that came out recently that's getting mentioned a lot in conversation with the bird spike paper is that researchers looked at all of the literature they could find in a bunch of old specimens and found that 176 bird species on every continent except Antarctica had definitely made nests with human trash. So like plastic bags, fishing line, candy wrappers, et cetera. And that's obviously generally not good. We don't want that.

It's a great reminder to like not litter and use less single use stuff. But one thing that I thought was super interesting is that apparently some of that litter can also be helpful. Apparently cigarette butts because they contain nicotine can like repair. tell certain parasites. And plastic films can make for really good insulation. And then like the anti-bird spikes, there are some materials that just can like are really good structural materials for mess. Please don't misunderstand.

It's on the whole bad that birds are using our trash to make nests. There's stuff that can really make them sick. Lots of things that they can choke on or get tangled in. But I do think it's really fascinating that this is not the only instance of them making the best of our trash. And isn't that cool? And apparently plastic and other human-made products are these researchers like tried to figure out where there were any interesting correlations between, you know, what birds were using them more. And where they found the most difference in use was that species with larger different. differences in body size between male and females and ones that build complex domed nests

were both more likely to use human made materials. And they think that hints at the idea that it's about showing off because generally when you have that big difference in size in sexual dimorphism, those species tend to have like a very intense male courtship, real showboaty stuff. So they're like, they might be. looking for, you know, colorful plastics and things like that or, you know, to build these, like, bigger, wilder nests. But there's a lot we don't know. So more research is needed and obviously less trash would be great. And yeah, I did find one last article that I'm going to link to on popside.com slash weird that just like draws some really interesting philosophical

parallels between the sort of hostile architecture that exists to keep unhoused people from settling and being safe in a space or just like keeping anyone from sitting down and enjoying like free public space because how dare that be a thing and this sort of anti-bird architecture because they're getting at the idea that both of them really hinge on this like fallacy of thinking that we should fix problems by kicking some of the organisms out of the space instead of being like what are the problems like okay we're getting a lot of bird poop on the cars can we like cover the cars with something can we get better at washing bird poop off our cars can you know but no we just put spikes

on things so food for thought and uh that's all i have about um bird nests today and birds break in the law, breaking the law. But I love them. I fully support them. I support magpie's rights and magpie's wrongs. And I can't wait to see what they do next. Same. I want to just see them completely redoing urban infrastructure and just like, you know, having way more nests and like just like way more like Corvod. parties. Like, you know, when all of the crows in your neighborhood, like, come and hang out in one area and just, like, yell for half an hour? I love that. I'm always like, what can you invite me? Like, I can make noises, but they always kind of get weird when I start trying to talk back to them.

So I just, I just watch. That makes sense. Yeah. I think they think I'm making fun of them when I try to make a little crow noise because they're all making the noises. And to me, it sounds like I'm able to make that noise, but I'm sure to them, it sounds like I'm like, you know, they're like, what is the stupid monkey doing? God. Oh, man. Yeah. This is kind of like on topic-ish, but once, it was like a few years ago in Brooklyn, we were just walking and someone had disgustingly just left their McDonald's on the, you know, sidewalk. And a crow swooped down, picked up the barbecue sauce container and then took it up to like a light pole and it was very cool because I was like, he likes McDonald's.

Barbecue sauce. Yeah. Love it. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Make every get together chill. This Memorial Day get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus get free delivery at the home. Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer and host and style

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That's my specialty. Okay, so let me set the scene. for you. It's around 1,200 BCE. And this is a time period in the GNC, which is a little branch off of the Mediterranean Sea, where a lot of archaeologists and historians say that there is a very big problem underway. And the problem is that the Bronze Age civilization that had once linked many great cities and palaces all across the Mediterranean, that civilization is, let's say, it's in transition, it's being called into question. And what we see in the remains of great cities like on Crete, the great cities of the great city of Mycenae, which is in Greece,

cities, you know, as far away as Lebanon and Syria, like Urgarit, basically people are burning the cities down. And there's incredible evidence across. the Aegean, across the Mediterranean, that something happened where people were really rejecting whoever was controlling these cities. And there were, there's evidence of battles. In Greece, there were a series of catastrophic earthquakes, kind of unrelated to this, but also adding to the chaos, I'm sure, of that period. So many people refer to this as the Bronze Age collapse. And I and many archaeologists kind of reject that idea that there's really, a thing called a collapse because even as some civilizations are collapsing, others are rising.

And so the paper that I wanted to talk about, which just came out earlier this year, is about that. It's about the civilizations that rise as, you know, these big cities are falling apart. And there's an archaeologist at the University of Toronto named Sarah Murray, whose work I've been following for a while. She wrote a book called The Collapse of the Mycenaean economy, which let me tell you, that is like, it's just what it says on the label. It's all about how did the Bronze Age collapse economically? And for nerds like me, it's very exciting. So Sarah Murray has been working on a new project, which is called Bears, which stands for Bays of East Attica Regional Survey. And what she and her colleagues and students are doing is they've gone to this area,

which today is called Porto Rafti, which is on the East Coast. of Greece. It's kind of a vacation town now. It's southeast of Athens. And it's in this beautiful glimmering bay full of lush islands. And around 1,200, right when all of this shit is going down with all of the Bronze Age cities, suddenly we see all of this occupation of an area that up until that point had basically been hardly occupied at all by any people. And archaeologists have known for a while that there was a cemetery in the area that had a lot of really fancy stuff in the graves, kind of like what Chelsea was describing earlier, how we judge a lot about a group of people based on what they leave behind in their graves. And in this case, these graves are just

full of the kinds of pottery wares, jewelry valuables that are associated with the palatial period of the Bronze Age, this time when the cities were like in full swing and things were not being burned down by angry people. And so that made the archaeologist curious. And they were like, well, okay, so there's this fancy cemetery that suddenly comes up out of nowhere with all this fancy stuff in it. What is what else can we find? So this is the part that I love about this study, other than what they found, which is that they decided to do a non-invasive survey of the entire Bay Area that they could associate with the cemetery. And that means that Sarah Murray and her colleagues basically just walked around on these beautiful hills overlooking this lovely bay and picked stuff up

off the ground. And there is so much material culture left from this like over 3,000 year old community that they were able to gather an incredible variety of pottery, um, tools, lithics, like, and basically reconstruct what was happening in this place. And they, the thing that immediately stuck out to them was, first of all, on two of the islands that are right off the coast, they found lots of evidence that there was a really large pottery production facility. And they were making this very distinctive kind of pottery called White. whiteware, which is just, it's pale in color. It's kind of sandy. It has sort of simple designs on the outside. It was very, very popular at this time, kind of the end of the bronze age, the beginning of

the cool times that this town was part of. And they see that there's all of these like discarded pieces of the pottery everywhere, which suggests people making it and kind of throwing away bad bits. But also all across the Aegean Sea, they see this pottery being used. So people are trading at relatively long distances to get this nice whiteware. But the other thing that they found, and this was the part that I really loved, was that in the area on land in Porto Rafti, where they think this village was, they found tons of cookware that is also reminiscent of this palatial period in the Bronze Age because they're not just using like a pot and a spoon.

they have, you know, a hundred different kinds of very specific implements for cooking, you know, for like pressing things, for grinding things, for stirring things, for like making all different kinds of, like they have griddles and, you know, tripods for different kinds of little pots. And this is the kind of kitchenware that you associate with like a very fancy community. And that was the moment when, um, that was the moment when, um, This group of scholars was like, yeah, we've hit on something really interesting. So this is a village or, you know, maybe a town, which not only has survived this collapse of allegedly this collapse of civilization, but they're thriving. They are entrepreneurial.

They're selling or trading this whiteware. They have a lifestyle that allows them to have griddles, which to me is very exciting as someone who like stuff on the griddle. but also they have all kinds of material possessions that suggest they had a very comfortable life, very unlike a lot of the other areas that we see in this period. So the question is, how did they survive so well? How did they manage to stay connected to these trade networks? Because they're not just exporting whiteware. They're also importing obsidian, which is like a very nice kind of material for knives and other sharp things. They're bringing in other types of pottery from elsewhere. So what makes them so special? So there's a couple of things. I've actually talked to

Sarah Murray before about her work on the collapse of the Mycenaean economy. Very exciting. And she has a hypothesis that is born out from this study as well, which is that the towns that managed to survive were the ones that had good local connections, like a local community that was very robust that allowed small-scale trade with, say, farms, places doing metallurgy, places doing pottery, and they're all interconnected in this area of Greece at that time. But also, even more importantly, this is a period characterized by seafaring trade, which also the Bronze Age was, but it became even more important in this post-Bronze Age period. And they had those two islands off the coast where they were doing their manufacture. So that's another element that may have added to their ability to

survive because they had an easy way to connect with ships that were coming through, an easy trading post. It just was a really geographically lucky area. The other thing is that they had a lot of immigrants. And there's a lot of evidence based on the types of pottery that they're making, the types of art, that there were people living there from Cyprus, which is an island that's, you know, relatively distant from them in the Mediterranean. There's a lot of Cypriot styles in the whiteware. And in fact, that's actually a type of pottery that's kind of associated with Cyprus. And so we're seeing a multicultural community that I think, I mean, we can't.

know where they came from, but it is awfully telling that they suddenly show up right when the great cities of the Bronze Age are being abandoned. So they may have fled from one of these cities. It may have been a group of multicultural pals who really liked to do ceramics. And they were like, okay, fuck this. We're going to go to a new place that's really lovely, that has ocean access, that has all of these elements that we really need. And we're just going to keep going with what we've been doing and they managed to make it. And this village appears to have been active for at least a few generations, probably about 150 years, which at the time would have been like five or six generations of people. And they survived in a way that made them both comfortable

and connected to other towns. And remember, this is a period when people often talk about the sea people. Have you guys heard of the sea people? Like, at the end of the Bronze Age, like a bunch of these cities that are being burned down, like we have records where they're like, oh, and then the sea people came and everything was screwed and they stole our shit

and they burned our things. So it's probably sea people was probably like a racist epithet for a group. And archaeologists think it may have been the Phoenicians. They were a seafaring entrepreneurial people who were traders and probably were not the bad guys, but

they were probably, you know, immigrants who were like associated with bad stuff. And so I think it's very likely that the folks at this town were doing business with the Phoenicians and hanging out with them and we're like, yeah, let's do it. Let's let's keep going. So I think it's a nice lesson for us now as we think about like, you know, we're dealing with all kinds of disasters, political disasters, natural disasters. But, you know, there's always, there's always the possibility of survival, and it's through connection. You know, it's through having a crafts industry, you know, and having a way of helping to trade with other groups. And I just, it's a great, it's a great snapshot of survival at a time when most people were really struggling. Most people in the Mediterranean,

I should say. This is a very localized phenomenon. I love that. I, um, It reminds me of a Google Bordello song, which gives the really prescient advice, think locally, f*** globally. Perfect. I mean, and both. You know, like also, f***g globally if you can. Like, you got some, you know, folks from Cyprus coming on in, you know, like, woohoo. Yeah. I mean, that would have been global at the time for that.

It's true. That's it. Really cosmopolitan little joy. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's so easy to feel like things are collapsing. And I think a lot of times when people look back in history, they're like, and yeah, societies do collapse. So there you go. And it's great to remember that that's a pretty zoomed-in view. of, you know, what happened during those tumultuous periods. And yeah, I love the idea of people

being like, we can make this work. And we have marketable skills and some land by the sea. And what else do you need? Yeah. And I like that it's a counter to this idea that when our cities are abandoned, that we all become like zombies who eat each other's faces. It's like, you know, they didn't have to go out and become cannibals or like hunters or whatever. They're like, no, no, we can like make some really nice pottery and like have really nice dinnerware. And like people will love it. And like people still want nice things, you know, and useful things. And they want tasty food.

To me, that's like a big part of what makes this exciting is that they were like, oh no, I mean, we're going to keep having all the, the, the griddles and all the different like grinders and stuff like we wouldn't get rid of that even though we're not in the city anymore. I can deal with the collapse of the city but I am keeping my griddle. Yeah exactly. And my herb grinder. So. Exactly. Yeah. No. I mean I'm planning on when AI takes my job inevitably. I'm going to I think I'm just going to go off somewhere in a beautiful place by the sea and make pottery. Or like join an archaeological expedition. that is at this place by the sea. We should link to the Bears group in show notes

because on their website they have pictures of their excavation, which is not an excavation. They're literally just taking beautiful hikes on a hill next to the sea. It's a productive animal. Yeah, and picking stuff up, putting it in Ziploc bags. They're like smiling, you know, they're just all hanging out. I know. Best postdoc ever.

Yeah, Sarah Murray, if you're listening, please invite us. on your next amble. Amazing. Well, great stuff today. I love, I feel like there's like a lot of resilience in our stories today. A lot of like subverting expectations.

So good job. Yeah. Great theme today. Annalie, thanks so much for joining us. It was great to have you on. Yeah. Thank you. so much for having me. It was really fun talking with you guys. And remind our listeners where they can

find you and what your latest book is. Sure. So my latest book is called The Terraformers. It is full of actually very accurate science about how you would build an ecosystem. You can find me online at annaleenewitts.com, very original, which has most of my latest stuff. And you can find my podcast anywhere we're fine podcasts are pervade it's called our opinions are correct you can also find it at our opinions are correct.com so yeah the weirdest thing i learned this week is produced by all of our hosts including me rachel thaltman along with jess bodey who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire our theme music is by billy cadden our logo is by katy belloff if you have questions suggestions or weird stories to share tweet us at weirdest underscore thing

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