The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Skateboard Archeology, Dire Wolf Bones, The Great Fear

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

Annalee Newitz joins the show to talk all about how 18th century gossip spread like an actual infectious disease. Plus, Laura delves into how dire wolf bones could help our modern pups, and Rachel talks about the archaeologists who are studying more modern stuff, like skate parks from the 1970s and 1980s. (It's worthwhile!!) Check out Annalee's new science fiction book! https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250357465/automaticnoodle/ 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! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Go check out Mary Roach's new book, ⁠⁠⁠Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://maryroach.net/replaceable.html⁠⁠⁠ Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/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 Thanks to our Sponsors:  Make the switch at https://MINTMOBILE.com/weirdest Visit ⁠https://GrowTherapy.com/WEIRDEST⁠ today to get started.  Go to ⁠https://Quince.com/weirdest⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 Feldman. I'm Laura Bises. I'm Annalie Newitz. Annalie, welcome back to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me.

It's so great to have you. And you're back because you have a new book. And I would love for you to tell our listeners about it. And in fact, I think it's one that you told us a little bit about while you were working on because it was related to your wheeled robot fact. Yes, that is good memory. Yeah. In fact, there is a character in this novel that is a wheeled robot. The book is called Automatic Noodle.

I'm holding it up even though you can't see it here. But it's beautiful and everyone should go. Everyone should check up the cover as well as the contents. Lots of pretty colors on that cover, I might add. Yeah. And so it's a story that's set in the near future. in San Francisco after California has won a war of independence against the United States. And it's just focused on four robots who have gotten some freedom and just want to open a

noodle restaurant. And they're dealing with robophobia. And indeed, one of the characters is a robot with three wheels below her human torso so she can kind of skate around and be badass. So yeah, check it out. People seem to like it. And my main feedback I've gotten on it is that makes people hungry for noodles, which I think is great. And also a good warning to have going in. Right, yeah, be sure that you're ready. Make sure that your noodle access is... Exactly.

Awesome. I literally just started the audiobook and was already charmed and can't wait to listen more. So I know our listeners will enjoy it. Well, let's get into the show. So 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, eating noodles, 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. Laura, what's your tease? Dyerwolves had achy joints. Oh, yeah. Poor babies. Poor babies. Poor giant dogs. Anne Lee, what's your tease?

Rumors before the French Revolution spread just like a disease. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited. I love it. I love mess. I love historical mess. My tease is why archaeologists are digging up a skate park. Ooh.

Yeah. Oh, you'll tell us. I was just going to say, where? Well, I can get started. Ancient Roman one? Right. Is it an ancient Roman skate park? I wish that would also be cool, but this is cool for a different reason.

So if you go to the University of Glasgow's website right now and check out their archaeology research, you'll find a page on Kelvin Wheelies, which does sound like it might be the whimsical nickname of some historical Scottish figure. Called Kelvin Wheaties. But it is, in fact, the name of the country's first skate park, which opened in Kelvin Grove Park back in May of 1978. And this was a state-of-the-art facility for the time. It had bowls. It had a half-pipe. It had a slalom run.

And it cost 100,000 pounds to build. It was a big investment in the city. And they really, like, listened to the needs of the young people who were really into skateboarding. So it was a very cool project. And it actually ended up hosting Scotland's first national skateboarding championship. Amazing. Yeah. And skateboarding was pretty new in 1978, at least in terms of being the, the part of the

popular pastime for young people as we know it to be today. The general consensus is that skateboarding first cropped up as kind of an organic joint effort between various surfers in L.A. in like the late 40s and 50s, there's no one person credited with having invented it because it seems like it was just sort of, sort of the same way that I've talked about how like we can't really pinpoint one origin for baseball because people have hit things with sticks when board forever. Yeah. And so basically you know, surfing is of course an ancient activity that dates back to 480 in Polynesia, but

the modern boom started in 1885. This is me going on a fun fact surfing tangent because it's related to the origin of skateboarding. And I love this shit. But the modern boom in surfing started in 1885,

which to me is surprisingly early. Even given that it's an ancient sport, I still think of like surfing USA as being The beach boys started it, obviously. Yeah, yeah. I don't know where you're getting your facts, but come on. It was Brian Wilson.

So in 1885, three teenage Hawaiian princes took a break. They were going to boarding school in San Mateo, and they went on vacation in Santa Cruz. And apparently they took their custom redwood boards, and they surfed the mouth of the San Lorenzo River, and they, like, blew everybody's minds. Which, like, where's that Disney Channel original movie? move over Johnny Sudami.

And then at the turn of the century, this guy, George Freeth, who was of English and native Hawaiian descent, he became a big advocate for surfing both in Hawaii and being like, we need to bring this back in a big way. And it had never gone away. Like I said, there were princes in 1885 who had surfboards, but he was like, this should be our thing. This is really good. And he started doing exhibitions in California.

And so, yeah, that time at the turn of the time. the centuries when sort of the Americana picture of surfing came to be a thing. And by the 40s and 50s, surfing was popular enough in L.A. that surfers wanted something to do when the waves were bad. So apparently they sort of organically landed on sidewalk surfing on wheeled boards, which were like often full-on scooters. Then they started just kind of like breaking the handles off and just using the wheeled boards. But the first commercial skateboards were made in the 60s, and the first skateboarding magazine came out in 1964.

So this was like the first rush of skateboarding enthusiasm at more than a local level. But it was really a brief thad and the popularity waned pretty quickly. And the reason why is pretty clear when you see why skateboarding took off again in 1972, because that's when someone came up with skateboard wheels made of polyurethane. Up until then, they'd been made of metal or clay. What? Which anyone who's done... Like roller skates.

Yeah. Anyone who's done any kind of skating can tell you that is an unhinged wheel. You don't want to be doing that. Back when I very badly trained in roller derby, like, you put so much thought into the hardness of your wheels. And there's like, I had something called like the speed configuration where it was like grippy wheels. I want to say it was grippy wheels on the. inside and harder wheels on the outside that may be backwards.

But it was all about like maximizing the grip on the track versus your ability to just slip right over the track. And that's with plastic wheels. They're all still plastic. So the idea that people were skateboarding on metal wheels is terrifying to me and explains why up until this point it had been pretty niche. It was, you pretty much had to do it on a flat, even surface if you didn't want to die. And so, yeah, these new wheels came out and it made skateboarding not just like safer and more accessible,

but you could do it in more interesting places and do more interesting stuff with it. And right around this time, something kind of magical happened. Southern California saw a major drought. That's not magical to it of itself. It happens all the time and it's terrible. But it meant that LA was, yeah. It meant that LA was full of empty swimming pools, many of which had these. very curvy designs, which were pretty unique to California at that time, you know, the very

like mod swimming pool, you know, these smooth rounded walls shaped like a kidney bean, much more whimsical than your average American pool. And 99PI has a great episode about this that people should check out if they're interested in learning more. But basically, a group of skaters started dropping into these empty pools and using them as places to skate. And that's where they started developing all of the tricks that are now really ubiquitous parts of skateboarding. Because again, up until very shortly before that point, you kind of had to just skateboard on a flat surface. A skate park would have been just like a roller rink, but for skateboards. And so they really reinvigorated the pastime in the sport.

And a big skateboarding magazine at the time did like a cover feature on them and people are like, whoa, empty pools. What a concept. So skate parks built during this time, they're thought of as the second wave of skate parks internationally, but they really, they were the first to feature the structures that we associate with skate parks, you know, the stuff to skate on instead of just flat surfaces. But a lot of them have been lost to time.

Skateboarding had another dip in popularity in the 80s. Plus, it kind of seems like there was just maybe an oversaturation of skate parks. I read somewhere that by the time, time the 80s came around, there were 400 of them in the U.S., which still was a huge number, but for something that was still as popular as it was, it was still like a niche pastime. It wasn't something that every kid was doing, let alone every American or every Scottish person. So, yeah, there were a ton of skate parks. There were probably too many to sustain.

And then this sort of lost its luster as a cool new hobby you could pick up. And a lot of them just closed down. Kevin Wheely's actually had a competitor that stayed open when it closed in 1983. And that was like a pretty common story. Like there's just there ain't room for both of us in this town. Fast forward to today. And this historic park is almost entirely overgrown with trees and shrubs. There's actually a modern skate park nearby, but it makes no mention of the historical site next door.

Really? Like shocking. Yeah. How dare they deny their health? I know. Yeah. Well, and that gets into like why archaeologists care. But yeah.

Archaeologists from the University of Glasgow are excavating it. They intend to use their toolkit as archaeologists to conduct fieldwork. They're going to excavate. They're going to survey. And then they're also going to do things like interview people and find archival pieces of ephemera. So they're really trying to like put together the story of how important this gate park was. to people in Glasgow and how people used it, you know, what kind of people hung out there.

And if you think it's like cool and silly that they care so much, they're actually not alone. The University College London actually has a skate park heritage research group. The whole the whole point of which is to, yeah. It's amazing. I love that. They like keep tabs on skate parks that are being studied as or preserved as historical sites. and they like advocate for that happening more, especially for this like second wave of 70s skate parks.

And this is all part of a movement called contemporary archaeology, which focuses on remains from the 20th and 21st century. And it's pretty cool. It's a field that arguably traces back to the 70s, but was kind of mocked a lot in its early days and has just started in recent years to really get the respect it deserves. Back in the 70s, this University of Arizona professor in archaeology, he started holding classes at the Tucson Sanitation Division's maintenance yard. He called the class Garbageology or Le Proje de Garbage.

I like the French. Yeah, yeah. And they studied things like, I mean, they studied the trash, just to be clear. They like put on gloves and went blunking in the trash. And they study things like how types and amounts of food waste differed between different socioeconomic groups. They studied how people's self-reported recycling practices compared to their actual behavior. And they actually learned a lot by sorting all this garbage. You know, this professor showed that people wasted more beef during beef shortages, presumably because they were

like buying beef in a panic and then not eating it. He showed that landfills were mostly filled with paper products, not the sorts of waste that tended to get vilified. And he actually wanted to help the U.S. Census Bureau fix its undercount of minorities because he was like, I can use garbage as a really good proxy for population demographics. And you guys are definitely totally off base. And they never came up on it. But, yeah, he started with garbageology. And now lots of people are doing contemporary archaeology. The name itself is like an oxymoron.

It's like jumbo shrimp, kind of. But it is true that even ancient archaeology. just like if you find a trash pile or like a cess pit, that is like the mother load. And like some of the stuff, there was a great study of cess pits in 19th century New York that turned up a bunch of bottles of abortifacians. Yeah. Because women were giving themselves home abortions and then they would toss all the evidence in the toilet. So it's pretty cool to see that that was going on in such a high number of places. Yeah. Yeah. We had a guest a few years ago who is an amateur archaeologist because she and her husband bought a property with a privy pit in Philadelphia, which is a treasure trove.

But yeah, Laura, to your point, contemporary archaeologists would argue that it's not an oxymoron because, you know, archaeology is just about using these particular tools to study humans. And yes, we happen to have focused on ancient humans for most of the history of archaeology. But there's, you know, no reason to not turn those methods onto the more recent past. So they do things like survey and excavation, along with things that are more possible with contemporary archaeology like recording oral histories, you know, looking at photographs and video footage. And, you know, it's really cool because they can find something and then go track down a person who interacted with it and talked to them about it. That's what I was thinking with this. I was like, it's awesome that they have like access to primary sources.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, these people who are really into contemporary archaeology, they say that the reason it's so important is because we sort of think of the recent past as being like not worth investigating in this way. But their work shows that human memory is really short. Like there are so many things that we just forget about. And so that actually, you know, going back within the last century, you can uncover things that were really important to the culture, really important to individual groups of people, really important. really important to most people even, and we just like have forgotten about them and don't talk about them. Examples of stuff contemporary archaeologist study, graffiti, piece walls, and other infrastructural quirks of the troubles in Ireland. A lot of plastic objects, including I saw them on reference to

an ongoing study of these Lego pieces that fell off a container ship in 1997 and still show up on various beaches. Oh. There's also an infamous trove of trashed Atari cartridges that mark a sudden collapse in the video game market in the early 1980s. So it's sort of like a tree ring or an ice core. And a lot of them are the game E.T. Which is like famously the worst game ever. Yes.

It's like there's this level of landfill that's like, oh yeah, that's just all ET. All the ATIC is. And then also, you know, stuff that's not just culturally interesting, but really important right now. Like there are contemporary archaeologists who study migrant trails across the U.S.-Mexico border using, you know, clues like ripped clothing and empty water bottles. There's also an archaeologist who goes to Burning Man to observe the building and dismantling of the community. Because, of course, the one thing about Burning Man that is supposed to never change is that there's, supposed to bring in everything to create the community and then leave no trace. And so she watches that happen and tries to see what vague traces might be left behind. And she does that as a way to help her understand what archaeologists might miss when they're

studying ancient nomadic peoples, which is such a cool idea. So cool. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. That's badass. In looking into this, I realized I actually recently enjoyed an example of contemporary archaeology, even though I don't know if the people behind it would have thought of it that way.

But last year and into the beginning of this year, there was an exhibit at the shed about Luna Luna, which was this spectacular amusement park, all created by artists, including like, Dali, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, like a lot of heavy hitters. And it was opened in 1987 in Hamburg and was hugely popular. was like a big artistic movement. And then a series of very unlucky turns meant that the entirety of the fairground was like packed up in a storage facility in Texas and literally moldered there for 36 years,

like no temperature control, nasty stuff. And somebody figured out that that's where it was and bought it and started trying to put it back together. And when I went to see it at the shed earlier this year, it was amazing. And it was not at all, you know, a functional amusement park, but it was pieced together with physical remains, with reconstructions, with oral history, with random ephemera, like signage and video clips and memos.

And it was really special to see them rebuild the story of this thing that had been incredibly meaningful to these artists and to like thousands of people who attended. that they thought at the time was the beginning of this cultural movement. And then it was purely through like bad luck and timing. It turned out to be a one-off thing. But yeah, it's really having experienced that, like, I completely agree with the contemporary archaeologist that we have a much shorter cultural memory than we think. And it's really important to put time and energy into resurfacing memories from our recent past.

So, yeah, the skateboard park is, we're going to remember it now because they're digging it up. And I love that for them. I love that this took the turn of where, you know, originally it's like, oh, they're digging it up in Scotland, obviously, because there must be a Roman fort or something under it. Nope, it's just they want to study the sky. It's just a half pipe. I love, right. I love that it's not Roman plumbing and it's actually a half pipe. No, that was my first thought when I saw that in line too.

I was like, okay, another another. vuzzles under a thing. I just think it's so interesting that the history of skateboarding is so localized, because I grew up in Southern California in the 80s, and I didn't even know that there was like a moment when people stopped skateboarding. Everybody skateboarded. It was like the home of skateboarding. And like every kid at school skateboarded.

It was like you surfed, you skateboarded. And so I guess the rest of the world, including Scotland, was like, we're done with skateboarding. But we were like, no. There's like dozens of skate parks like in my local area. And like plus, of course, you can just skate on anything you want, you know. But yeah, that's super cool. And also, of course, the history of colonialism lurking behind it. Yeah.

Oh, always. Another great piece of the story. Yeah. It's very cool. Yeah. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com.

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House Stark's sigil and its bone woes, I kind of wanted to start this one with a little bit of an anecdote. And I promise you it pays off. So a few months after I began working here at Popsai, I was working on a story about extinct megafauna in Madagascar. Now, the study was talking about ancient megafauna, you know, giant lemurs, the size of humans and eagles that can lift koalas, things of that nature. Sloths that could poop avocado pits. Pretty much. We're talking giant dinosaur-sized mammals and other things.

Except my brain interpreted that as all of the larger font. as in like all of the animals had gone extinct in Madagascar and I break out into a cold sweat and just start to panic thinking like, wait, isn't this island supposed to be a beacon of biodiversity that's threatened now due to climate change and we need to save it? Where all of those episodes of Jack Hanna's animal adventures and everything and every Attenborough Doc lying to me? What about the DreamWorks movies? Like I was in a sheer panic that I had somehow

missed that all of the animals in Madagascar had gone extinct. Eventually, it calmed down, figured out that while, yes, while the island is struggling due to climate change, as everywhere else in the world is, not every single animal in Madagascar had gone extinct overnight. So, dear listeners, this is the kind of care and anxiety-fueled fact-checking that you can expect from popular science. That panic probably only lasted two minutes, but it obviously was like a terrifying two minutes of just where I was reevaluating every. I had ever read about biology and animals in general. Anyway, back to, you know, not Laura's anxious brain, Laura's more analytical brain.

So yes, Earth used to be home to some animals that were pretty large, not just dinosaurs. We're talking mammals about 20,000 years ago, as Rachel kind of alluded to. There are these giant armadillo relatives that roamed south and North America. There are plated mammals called glyptodonts. Don't check me on the pronunciation. They varied in size from about 661 to over 4,000 pounds, and they were about 5.5 to 11 feet long. By comparison, the average armadillo today is only 30 inches long and 159 pounds. So several times bigger than the armadilloes that you will see today.

Those guys went extinct about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, but not before, serving as an important food source for us. There is a lot of archaeological evidence, some recent evidence found in Florida, I believe, of some serious dilla butchery that was kind of an important food source for some of the humans living here. Even further back, there was an eagle relative with an almost 10-foot wingspan that stalked the skies over southern Australia. This guy lived about 60,000 years ago and is known as Gaff's Powerful Eagle, pretty straightforward name. And its talons were large enough that it could snatch a koala or a small kangaroo. So that's more than a fish.

It's like, all right, take that bald eagle. I mean, kind of along that same like Australia note, there were some giant kangaroos known as Protomimidon that lived about 5 million to 40,000 years ago. They would have been similar to today's modern gray kangaroos, but were a little bit more squat and muscular. And some species were roughly 110 pounds and others were about twice as large as today's kangaroo. Could I have ridden in one of their pouches?

very important question. Very important question. Because I have that anxious fact-checking-filled brain, I'm going to say, let me get confirmed or did I. Can neither confirmed? Big kangaroo. But at least there was a chance that was shot. I'm going to say.

I was like off the table. No, I'm going to say that is probably not off the table, but that's also because I don't want big kangaroo coming after me for. But also could you put like a saddle on it and like ride on it? I mean, think about that. The possibilities are endless. They're really endless here. That's why megafauna is so fun. They're really, the, you know, the possibilities are endless. Like, you know, we think about all of the, all of the wonders on Earth today. There were even more, you know, back long before humans even existed. And obviously not to be left out. Yes, Madagascar was home to early lemurs that were the size of humans. They were about, they weighed out of hundreds. That's so big for a lemur. I knew I believed they were bigger, but like, that's real big.

Can you have an 187 pound lemur about five to five and a half feet tall? Like that's, you know. I want to give it a hug. Like that just sounds so cuddly. I kind of wanted to carry me. I want to ride it like piggyback style kind of along the same line as the saddle. All of the, yeah, I think all of these should be like our mounts in our next D&D game. I like it.

And those giant lemurs, actually, they didn't go extinct. super long ago, about 500 to 2,000 years ago. So they were, you know, they kind of existed around the same time as at least humans. I'm not sure on the island, but on the earth at least. Again, the anxious fact-checking brain is just driving me crazy today or has been forever. So why do we study these giant extinct extinct animals? They can give us really important insights into living animals and eventually help them as they face modern problems. And that first is the mighty dire wolf. So the dire wolves who used to roam the earth about 55,000 to 12,000 years ago may have had

the same bone disease that is plaguing modern cats and dogs today. It's called osteocondrosis, and it's a very common developmental bone disease that impacts joints and vertebrates. Usually it's in domesticated species like house. pets and humans, but because it's harder to study wild species, we can't really necessarily know if a wolf has it quite as easily as, you know, if, you know, Jess's dog Flora has it because Flora is a lot easier to monitor than a wild. But last year, a team of paleontologists identified the signs of osteocondrosis in over 500 limb bones of dire wolves. These dire wolves were dug up at the famous Libreia tar pits in Los Angeles, California. And they lived again.

It's a very California heavy episode. Yeah, good for us. And again, anxious fact-checking brain. We did not talk about that before. We showed up with these. So the California tie-in, purely natural. I brought the California. It's all natural organic California tie-ins.

These dire wolves that they looked at fall into that field. 55,000 to 12,000 years ago range or during the last ice age. Almost 3% of the young adult and juvenile dire wolves that they found showed defects in their knee joints, which tended to be a bit bigger, kind of over like 12 millimeters. And the presence of osteocondrosis among animals also appear to be more common among modern animals and humans. Osteocondrosis is also commonly seen in more highly inbred modern domestic dogs. breeds. So that's where we can gleam a little bit about what may have been going on with

these dire wolves. The high incidence of the disease in the dire wolf bones indicate that their population may have been declining as they march towards their eventual extinction. Fewer animals, fewer mates, higher inbreeding, worse off offspring. They did go, they did, dire wolves did go extinct towards the end of the last ice age. As we know, receding glaciers, major climate shifts killed off the bison and horses that they preyed on. But still, understanding how that may have played into this disease and its history could potentially help treat the dogs suffering with it today. And it does bolster that theory that a reduced gene pool inbreeding can

one hundred can contribute to osteochondrosis in in pets living today. A separate example about a continent away are the cave bears. And with them we're talking food, not bones. Cave bears were one of the European continent's most interesting megafauna. Again, we tend to think of, you know, other regions of the world as having really exciting animals, but Europe was home to two known species of these giant bears that went extinct about 2.6 million to about 11,000 years ago. They weren't, unlike the lemurs, they weren't quite that much bigger than their modern counterparts. They were kind of in that 800 to 2200 pound range or like the size of a Kodiak bear in Alaska or a polar bear,

but they were still pretty big. And we have a lot of their remains to study, so they kind of remain one of those species that we can draw, that we have a lot of data on. In this study that came out pretty recently, a team in Europe examined the bone collagen that was taken from a 40,000-year-old cave bear that was found in Serbia. Now, the reason they took this sample was to reconstruct the bear's diet. The bears were mostly herbivores, unlike a lot of today's bears, which, as we well know, eat salmon and all sorts of other types of meat sources. But they, in addition to being herbivores, they were drawing from a huge range of vegetation from different environments.

They had a very diverse diet, which, as we know for survival, is a huge advantage. because if one food source is drying up, you can still get sustenance from another. So while obviously the major environmental shifts of the ice age going to be too much, their flexible diets may have been an advantage while they were alive and possibly kept them alive a little longer than they may have been had they been so niche focused on what they were eating. Understanding this could help their descendants today, since six of the world's eight bear species do remain vulnerable or endangered.

By using the past as a template, we could develop solutions that will help bears and other threatened animals maybe diversify their food source and just kind of study how they could live a little bit longer through conservation of this vegetation over this one or something like that. An herbivore bear is so cute. I thought that was made up by Winnie the Pooh. It was not.

It was not. It was not. I mean, that was the first thing that kind of jumped out to me with cave bears is like, wait, they were just eating plants? Like, they just wanted a salad. I mean, they were friendship because they were friends. Exactly. So what I kind of like about these types of studies is, you know,

looking at extinct animals for clues is kind of that hopeful darkness all at the same time that I think any of us who are interested in science or scientists kind of face all the time. animals today are obviously facing increasing challenges from human pressures, but some of the answers to how to help them could actually be lurking in their ancestors remain. So it's kind of that, you know, that archaeological or paleontological string theory that like, you know, what made the cave bears go extinct might be something that could possibly help their relatives. Now, please bear with me here. Get out. You're welcome. I'll see myself out. That was great. I know.

I do want to end on a pretty positive note. If you are a fan of fat bear week like I am. Oh, yeah. All right. Apparently the salmon run at Brooks Falls in Alaska is looking great. There have been some videos that have been circulating on the interwebs showing some plentiful pink salmon and bears snacking on them. So we're in for some fat bears. We might have.

Yeah. There's, again, anxious fact-checking brain. Do not quote me. I have not spoken with an actual park ranger on this yet, but we might have some really chunky bears to vote on this fall when the bracket begins. So we got that. The crop of fat bears would be, listen, there's so much bad stuff happening in the world. Like, what a gift.

It would heal the world. I know, just give us some really fat bears. Yeah. And like, yeah. And maybe like just do a little photoshopping with like cute hats on their heads or something. Like, don't use AI. Just old-fashioned Photoshop. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And if you're not familiar with Fat Bear Week, I promise to include information in the show notes. Wonderful. There we go. Okay, we're going to take one more quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. No one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets.

They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going. which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, all you line out the door. Hank makes the pizza.

Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365, co-pilot.com slash work. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Okay, we're back. And Emily, I want to hear some hot gossip. All right. There is nothing better than gossip from the 18th century. It's just, it's one of the best centuries for gossip. So cast your mind back. You're in France. It's the 1780s. The population is getting big. There hasn't been a major plague for like two generations. And there's also been this terrible year in the late 18, in the late 1780s, there was basically a terrible crop. Like people's farms hadn't yielded enough stuff and people were starving. And also there was a

huge, huge gap widening between rich and poor. A lot of the land holdings were in. in the hands of like less than 1% of the population. I don't know if any of that's familiar. Yeah, it's weird. So what if all of the resources in your country were being controlled by a bunch of aristocrats who just inherited it and weren't really doing anything decent with it? But we're mostly keeping it for themselves. And so if you were peasant living on the land, you had to give all your shit to your local lord

or to your local magistrate. And so people were, you know, kind of annoyed. there had been a lot of political dissent against the monarchy in France around this time. We're probably all familiar with some of what was going on. And as the revolution against the aristocracy was ramping up in the 1780s, there was this one moment in 1789 during the summer, basically July and August, when something called the Great Fear swept across France. And depending on which historian you're reading and what their political background is, they'll explain it in a different way. So there's long been debates over what caused the great fear. But the two things we know for sure are there were a bunch of rumors spreading rapidly across France that gangs of armed brigands were coming to steal the tiny remaining amounts of harvest that people had in their larders.

The other thing that was going on is that people were starting to get pissed about landowners. And so these two things kind of came together. And in this brief moment during the Great Fear, a lot of towns and small cities raised militias to fight back against these alleged brigands. And when the brigands didn't show up, they attacked castles. and they attacked the aristocracy and started like killing a mother f***er because they had had enough and because they were scared and they were also righteously angry at this state of affairs. So the two sides of this debate historically have been was this great fear of the fake brigands? Was it just like this emotional outburst like some kind of social contagion or was it actually a political movement that was part of.

of the French Revolution because the great fear ends just a few days after the assembly abolishes all rights of the aristocracy. So it's kind of like it comes right to a halt at this key historical moment. So, okay, we have all these like ideas about what happened. And then a group of physicists and network analysts came along and said, you know what? We actually think we could figure out the answer to this question, and we would do it by using epidemiological models to look at how information about these so-called brigands spread across the country in the great fear. And so they kind of had this hypothesis that, like, well, you know, we could see if it spreads like an epidemic, but first, let's get some data. So luckily, because this is the 18th century, people are keeping a lot of records

of what's going on. And there is like a rise in literacy, not a huge rise, but like people are keeping track of when these rumors come. So they have actually pretty good data on when these rumors are erupting and what the date is. They also crucially have really excellent roadmaps of France during that time. So the roads that people would have taken in a cart or on foot to go from town to town. So that kind of gives you, that gives you your edges and your nodes for kind of an epidemic map because you treat each city as it raises its militia as a node and you treat each road as an edge. And you're like, okay, great. How did these things spread? When did they spread? So they plug all this information into a couple of really common epidemiological models.

Because again, these are network scientists and physicists, right? So they're like, whatever, we don't care about the cultural stuff. We just want the numbers, which is actually in this case, it turns out to be really interesting because they answer a bunch of questions that they hadn't had and then also answer these bigger questions about was it just people acting crazy or was it actually a political protest? I think we can kind of guess what the answer might be. But what they figured out was, first of all, that indeed the rumors did spread almost exactly like a typical. typical infectious disease. They even found that it had an infection rate of like 1.5 per day, which is what we saw under COVID. And so they found a lot of, so let me like run through a couple

of things that are super interesting about what they found. So first of all, they found that these rumors tended to be more infectious in higher population areas, which actually also contradicts previous beliefs, which is that it was infecting people who are really remote and rural and uneducated and that they were like easily duped, right? And it was like, nope, actually, it affects higher population areas where people were more educated. It affected wealthier towns and cities rather than poorer ones. And it affected people who lived in areas where there was a law that said that land owners could only own land that they held a physical paper title to. So there were three ways to own land in France, two of which were like, you have to inherit it

because you're a king and because divine right, blah, blah, blah. Or you inherit it because you're a lord and divine right, et cetera. There were a number of places where it was just like, this is like your land until the title goes away. So in those places, if you had a militia and you attacked the local capital, and you burned the land title, there was actually a good reason to do that, you know, like you don't have to kill anybody, you just burn the land title and like, oh, now the land is ours. Well, that was easy.

So indeed, it tended to break out most in towns with all those things, high education, high population, and also this specific law. Places where people could go, you ever think about how paper burns? Exactly. And also, you ever think about how these landowners, like, they have necks just like everybody else? So that, those were all super interesting. They also were able to make maps showing how the rumors spread and confirming the fact that these rumors sprung up kind of independently in multiple locations.

They tended to spread from north to south, but there were also examples where they spread in a different direction. Also, they found a couple of other things that I thought was. are just kind of funny, which is they figured out how quickly the rumors spread. So they spread on average 45 kilometers a day plus or minus 35 kilometers. There's a wide range of air. Wide range. But the thing that is interesting about that is that a carriage on average travels 110 to 160 kilometers per day, which means that even at its fastest, this rumor is not spreading as fast as a carriage can drive. So people are probably walking or it's like spreading slightly slower

than you might expect if it was like somebody on a horse like screaming, you know, the brigands are coming. The Briggins are coming. Yeah. The other thing they found was that towns got reinfected. So it wasn't as if it kind of spread through and burned out. It was like towns kept getting reinfected with these rumors. And so there wasn't like immunity building up, quote unquote. And so there's no kind of social immunity to rumor. And so looking at all of that information, they then decided to do what really good epidemiologists will do, which is think about confounding factors. Like, it's not just about the disease itself. It's also about the social conditions on the ground, right? And so that's why it's really important that they looked at things like population and also things like wealth disparity, title to the land,

all that stuff. All of those are confounding factors for how the rumors take root. So given all of that, after pondering and considering all of the evidence, they decided that indeed all of the evidence points to, this was not just some kooky outbreak of people wanting to burn things. This wasn't just people having an emotional outburst. People were calculating. They were saying like, hey, you know, we actually have a way to resist that's pretty good. And we have reason to resist. because there's this, yeah, there's wealth disparity. We don't have any food. And, well, we raise this militia. So we might as well just take the castle and burn the land deeds. So the thing that was ultimately kind of cool about this, aside from the fact that like rumors in the 18th century are very exciting.

True. And also it's amazing to have that granularity of data from a particular rumor event, which, you know, we do also have now. when we look at rumors spreading online, right? And one of the things that the researchers were sort of wondering about is like, does this really translate to today where we can see, we can track like, say, rumors about Pizza Gate. You know, we can see where they start. We can see where they're spreading.

We can get the date, time stamp, all that stuff. And they were saying, well, we didn't think that would really work because once you have social media, you know, things are not spreading in this like, I guess, more organic way. as they would in the 18th century where it's like literally like, you know, Jean-Pierre. Yeah, exactly. Jean-Pierre goes to his neighbor and then hops on a horse and kind of walks to the next city and is like, you guys, did you hear about the Briggins? Or did you hear about the land titles? Like, I'm sort of wondering like sidebar. I'm like, is it really true that they

thought there were brigands or was it just that people were raising militias to like attack their local lords? But like, yeah, if the lords asked about what it was up with the militias, they were like, Oh, have you heard there's this huge brigand problem? Yeah, right? Like, it actually sounds like a fantastic protest action where they're just like, oh, yeah, we heard this room. You wouldn't want Briggins to come to your castle. Would you?

Look how great we are. We're like raising this militia to protect all of us, you know, Lord so-and-so. Marquis to whatever. And so Marquis to whatever is like, oh, they're just having this weird emotional reaction. Like, what is the silly emotional thing that the peasants are doing? Meanwhile, the peasants are like, you know, reading, like, philosophical treatises, like, talking about, like, the, you know, the ins and outs of property law and stuff like that. So I wonder if that idea that it was rumors was, in fact, spread by, like, kind of a more conservative view on the French Revolution. Yeah.

But anyway, so to look at the contemporary period using, can we, the question is, can we use epidemiological methods to analyze modern rumors, right? And they said, actually, they were able to access a study of the French riots in 2005, a lot of which did get incited through online organizing and rumors. Again, is it organizing? Is it rumors? You know, hard to say. But the point is that what they found is that when you're talking about localized political events, whether they're happening in a nation or a city, they actually do have the same characteristics

because they're local. As soon as you have something that's like, we are protesting ICE in L.A. Or we are protesting Tesla dealerships specifically. Those are tied to physical locations. So even though the rumors can spread faster than somebody on foot or spread faster than a carriage drawn by horses, a lot of the same principles apply that these stories, this incitement to rebel still kind of travels in a localized way and jumps from city to city. And you can even see this in a common sense way, if you look at political organizing online, where people are like, okay, we're organizing in your local city and like, here's the umbrella organization, but like, contact your people here in San Francisco, which is where I am, where we do have amazing Tesla protests,

and they are very, like, localized. I don't know if you guys know about them, but like, yeah, we're doing a good job, you know. We haven't found the title yet to burn, but we're trying. So I think that that, to me, like, this is just like a great example of A, how we should take gossip seriously and maybe not call it gossip when it's actually political organizing and be like we can use what we've learned from epidemiology to think about how social change happens and especially when that social change is tied to a local place or a geographical place and so yeah and you know good for those guys back in 1789 like coming up with a good way to get the land back from their lords and marquises and I don't know what all the, you know, aristocratic terms are from the French.

This is the thing. They abolished all of them, so we don't have to think about them anymore. Archaeologists and historians can write them down. So, yeah, this was a really fun study, and you can check it out. It just came out. It's in nature, and it's called Epidemiology Models Explain Rumor Spreading during France's Great Fear of 1789. Never has there been a more enticing title. Yeah, I love that.

I obviously it's it's really impressive the level of granularity they got but I I still wish there was more I want to know about like the super spreader I want to know like who is that yeah Suzette who's there we're going to spread the rumor incredible there were like they do isolate out like a couple of regions that were kind of super spreader regions so there were some places where it really took hold quite deeply and they said that one of that the super spreading, of course, always to place in high population areas. So the bigger the city, the more likely it was to spread. And at that time in France, as they were doing like a census survey, they counted any grouping bigger than 2,000 people as a city. So it was pretty much all cities. And that's what they

looked at in this study was anything that was labeled as a city by the French government. Very cool. Well, a great bunch of facts today, like truly. world class. Annalie, it was great to have you back. Would you remind our listeners what your new book is called so they can go devour it? It is called Automatic Noodle. And it's robots and noodles. And actually, it does have a strong component about rumor spreading online.

So if you're interested in that, it's going on in the book. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.

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