Speaker 1: Oh hey, Okay, can I tell you a secret at
Speaker 1: the top of the show, because I'm going to Okay. So,
Speaker 1: for the last year and a half, I've been working
Speaker 1: in semi secret on a Netflix show for Higher Ground,
Speaker 1: which is a production company owned by Michelle and Barack Obama.
Speaker 1: And the show I've been working on is called Ad
Speaker 1: to Twist Scientist, and it's an animated show. It's for kids.
Speaker 1: It's about a girl who's a young scientist and her
Speaker 1: friends Aggy and Rosie and all these experiments they do.
Speaker 1: And I've been a consultant on it, having to work
Speaker 1: on it in secret for a long time and helping
Speaker 1: figure out the science of the experiments they do and
Speaker 1: some plot lines and suggesting real life scientists, a lot
Speaker 1: of them I know through ologies you know them, also
Speaker 1: to interview with the end of each episode, and the
Speaker 1: entire team was just the best. And I'm so proud
Speaker 1: of the show. We worked so hard on it for
Speaker 1: so long and it premieres today today, September twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: on Netflix. And I'm only telling you this because the
Speaker 1: creators of the show and the show runner and the
Speaker 1: whole team just works so hard and I hope you
Speaker 1: like it anyway, which was a scientists It's on Netflix now, Okay,
Speaker 1: onto the Ology show. It's me. It's your uncle who
Speaker 1: travels with a scented candle because he gets homesick on
Speaker 1: work trips. It's Ali Ward back with a kracklin smoke
Speaker 1: and hot episode of Ologies. It's all about fire and
Speaker 1: campfires and embers, heat, warmth And when did your ancestors,
Speaker 1: the ones whose names you're never going to know, the
Speaker 1: relatives billions of us have in common, when did they
Speaker 1: figure out how to use fire? And why and where
Speaker 1: did it lead us? So there's a lab at Yale
Speaker 1: University dedicated to researching this hazy history of what our
Speaker 1: species has been through. And this ologist is the director
Speaker 1: of that lab. He's worked on four continents, published papers
Speaker 1: spanning half a million years of human history. He got
Speaker 1: his bachelor's studying physics and anthropology at Grenell College in Iowa,
Speaker 1: got his master's in PhD in anthropology from the University Minnesota,
Speaker 1: and at the Yale Pyrotechnology Lab, also called Why pyro
Speaker 1: He and his colleague study how technology and history can
Speaker 1: be figured out by tracing our control of heat. But
Speaker 1: before we light the fuse, Let's thank the folks who
Speaker 1: support at patroon dot com slash ologies. You can join
Speaker 1: them for a dollar a month and submit questions to
Speaker 1: the ologists before we record. Thank you to everyone who
Speaker 1: rates and subscribes and reviews. I read them all. Here's
Speaker 1: a little proof still smoking. Lacey Freeman's review this week
Speaker 1: said no flip flam. It's a Freeman fave as a
Speaker 1: fellow gross person who likes gross things. Please never stop
Speaker 1: this podcast. We're cussing, Lacey. You get me, Okay, pyrotechnology,
Speaker 1: let's do it. Gather around you naked ap babies and
Speaker 1: listen to tales about sharp rocks, hairy jello, sootie caves,
Speaker 1: glowing coals, irons, sparks, burnt feet, wolf skulls, fluffy fungus, stomping,
Speaker 1: oprah to metal, some disaster movie trivia, ember tending, and
Speaker 1: more with anthropologist and pyrotechnologist doctor ellery From. Okay, first off,
Speaker 1: can I get you to pronounce your first and last
Speaker 1: name and tell me the pronouns you use?
Speaker 2: Sure my name is ellery From and my pronouns are
Speaker 2: he him.
Speaker 1: That's a great name, by the way, ELLERI From.
Speaker 2: I never have you know, people don't google it and
Speaker 2: end up with the wrong ellery.
Speaker 1: From you have SEO optimization down.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I never was able to like
Speaker 2: find like pencils or name plates or anything like that
Speaker 2: as a kid.
Speaker 1: Is it a historical name?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: I mean well, I mean you'll see a lot of
Speaker 2: like British like William Ellery Channing and William ellery. But
Speaker 2: my parents literally just found it in a book.
Speaker 1: Oh have you read the book?
Speaker 2: I mean, there's there's so, there's Ellery Queen, the numb
Speaker 2: de plume for mystery writers. And I realized just recently that,
Speaker 2: after constantly hearing about are you named for Ellery Queen,
Speaker 2: I've never actually read any of the books, any of
Speaker 2: the I think they were like radio mysteries anything. I've
Speaker 2: never read a thing of it. I think I just
Speaker 2: kind of resented it as a kid.
Speaker 1: Okay, I looked up this author, Ellery Queen, and it
Speaker 1: turns out it was a nom de plume of two writers,
Speaker 1: cousins who worked on a team under one name. They
Speaker 1: also went by Barnaby Ross, and they staged public debates
Speaker 1: as Ellery Queen and Barnaby Ross, two fictitious people, and
Speaker 1: they kept their faces covered to keep their fake identities
Speaker 1: a secret, which is so much cooler than my childhood
Speaker 1: dream of publishing sappy books under the pseudonym Dixon Ticonderoka. Anyway,
Speaker 1: this ellery is not a fiction writer, He's a FactFinder.
Speaker 1: I feel like as a scientist, you're sort of a
Speaker 1: detective anyway, right, Yeah, yeah, No.
Speaker 2: We constantly liken ourselves as like Sherlock Holmes. I would
Speaker 2: think this is just extracting every bit of data out. But
Speaker 2: the alternative, though, is that is that Sherlock Holmes like
Speaker 2: always found the bad guy, right, and we're like, that's
Speaker 2: probably this.
Speaker 1: It depends, It depends on. Yeah, a lot of scientists
Speaker 1: say that their answer for a lot of things starts
Speaker 1: with it depends.
Speaker 2: Which is true.
Speaker 1: But how long have you been interested in way, way,
Speaker 1: way back history paleo history.
Speaker 2: I think I was as a kid. I was interested
Speaker 2: especially in like astronomy, being a very deep field, and
Speaker 2: doing my PhD work, I was focusing more on the
Speaker 2: Bronze Age, so like five thousand years ago, and then
Speaker 2: I was doing that research in Syria, and this was
Speaker 2: about the time the Syrian Civil War broke out and
Speaker 2: so all archaeology there just stopped. But I had colleagues
Speaker 2: who were working in the Caucuses in what we call
Speaker 2: the Paleolithic, and they said you should come here, you'll
Speaker 2: love it. And obviously that stuck. Yeah it kin cut
Speaker 2: the bug late maybe.
Speaker 1: And your background initially was in physics, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I took a lot of both physics and
Speaker 2: anthropology courses in college. I couldn't make the double major
Speaker 2: work there were too many labs. But I basically grew
Speaker 2: up in a physics department. So my dad is still
Speaker 2: a technician in a science building at a liberal arts
Speaker 2: college in Wisconsin, and so I literally grew up in
Speaker 2: a physics department, like literally riding my big wheel up
Speaker 2: and down the hallways and being called in when they
Speaker 2: needed a small person for demos in the lecture hall
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. So like writing the fire extinguisher
Speaker 2: propelled tricycle was my specialty.
Speaker 1: And then you ended up studying fire. That's actually kind
Speaker 1: of nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I mean it was play. And when I
Speaker 2: started taking a lot of anthropology and archaeology in college
Speaker 2: while doing a physics major, eventually there was just kind
Speaker 2: of stumbled across the blend between the two.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this creeps you guys out, but
Speaker 1: I have known about your lab and your work for years,
Speaker 1: and I have always wanted to do a pyrotechnology episode.
Speaker 2: Oh that's fantastic.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you have to explain to people it is
Speaker 1: not the study of fireworks, And it's.
Speaker 3: Absolutely absolutely the question I get asked all the time,
Speaker 3: So you study ancient fireworks and like, no, but that
Speaker 3: would be within our purview if we were so inclined.
Speaker 2: So the general idea with pyrotechnology is it's a way
Speaker 2: of kind of reframing human technology. But you can also
Speaker 2: lump a lot of human behavior and even human evolution
Speaker 2: into the control of fire, and not just controlling fire,
Speaker 2: but greater and greater control and achieving higher and higher temperatures,
Speaker 2: and so all the way back to you know, depending
Speaker 2: on which sites are so inclined to believe, you could
Speaker 2: be talking about a million years ago all the way
Speaker 2: up through the twentieth century, when really only with the
Speaker 2: advent of plastics plastics do we start getting technology that
Speaker 2: doesn't depend on heat. You know, if you're talking about
Speaker 2: progressing through ceramics and glass and metals and new metals,
Speaker 2: it was all about about getting hotter forges and controlling
Speaker 2: how you're altering materials for longer and life longer. And
Speaker 2: only when you start coming up with things like bakeolite
Speaker 2: and causing plastic polymers to form, that suddenly you get
Speaker 2: a trend in technology that now it's about more like
Speaker 2: how you control structures, so three D printing in nanotechnology
Speaker 2: and stuff like that. But for most of human history
Speaker 2: we were dependent on what temperatures we could attain and
Speaker 2: how precisely we could control them and for how long
Speaker 2: we could keep those temperatures going.
Speaker 1: Okay, quick side note, the invention of the first polymer
Speaker 1: plastic bake light dates back to the early nineteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and it was also called artificial amber or polyoxybenzyl methyl
Speaker 1: and glycoalin hydride for short. And from a physics perspective,
Speaker 1: can we back up and can you explain to me
Speaker 1: what fire is? Is Is it too hard a question?
Speaker 2: No? No, no, it's not so. Fire is a chemical reaction.
Speaker 2: I think it's easier to even think about a spark,
Speaker 2: and so you might think about a spark being made
Speaker 2: from from flint striking a piece of steel, whether it's
Speaker 2: kind of an old old fashioned fire starting kit or
Speaker 2: on flintlock gun.
Speaker 1: Flintlock guns in case you didn't know, came along in
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds and relied on a chip of flint
Speaker 1: striking steel to ignite gunpowder and send a bullet flying
Speaker 1: with the explosion. So imagine revolutionary war guns or something
Speaker 1: a pirate would have tucked into their smelly pants. That spark.
Speaker 1: That's also fire technology.
Speaker 2: Baby. So there's when those those two substances that that
Speaker 2: flint stone hits the iron rich steel, there's a spark,
Speaker 2: there's light, there's something that can cause an ignition. That
Speaker 2: little particle that you see glowing is basically just a
Speaker 2: tiny little bit of iron atoms that have been scraped
Speaker 2: off that steel and are now oxidizing right away, Okay,
Speaker 2: And that is what a spark is. It's that chemical
Speaker 2: reaction of oxidation extremely quick, and so that's on a
Speaker 2: larger scale, that's a lot of what's happening with fire.
Speaker 2: It's a chemical reaction that is producing energy and gases
Speaker 2: and you get the heat out of it, you get
Speaker 2: the light out of it as part of those those reactions.
Speaker 2: But in the simplest formula, that's what it is. It's
Speaker 2: a chemical reaction. What you typically associate with fire are
Speaker 2: those those photons of light and infrared making something hot.
Speaker 2: But the chemical reaction, that particular substance undergoing this transformation
Speaker 2: to ash perhaps is the byproducts of that chemical reaction,
Speaker 2: but the fire itself is that it's almost a process
Speaker 2: rather than a thing.
Speaker 1: And it occurs in nature obviously lightning with what lava
Speaker 1: catching things on fire? How else does it occur in
Speaker 1: nature before we as a species understood how to create
Speaker 1: it versus control it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you make an important distinction there between
Speaker 2: fire users and fire producers, right, so that we were
Speaker 2: probably able to capture fire from like a natural lightning
Speaker 2: strike or like you're saying, from something burning ahead of
Speaker 2: a lava flow, to the point of being able to
Speaker 2: create it on demand is an important distinction, and of
Speaker 2: course that's one of the biggest challenges then to try
Speaker 2: and investigate in the past is distinguishing was there fire,
Speaker 2: But we're not convinced this is human related. It's just
Speaker 2: evidence of perhaps a forest fire or that there might
Speaker 2: have been sentiments that were heated on the ground. But
Speaker 2: you know, there was a lava flow right nearby and
Speaker 2: that's what reheated it. So yeah, I would I would
Speaker 2: say you captured a lot of it. Certainly lightning is
Speaker 2: I think what everyone kind of most associates with it.
Speaker 2: There's even some pictures of kind of early paleo art
Speaker 2: from like the fifties of Neanderthals using fire. They've started
Speaker 2: a fire and to make sure they emphasized that this
Speaker 2: was related to a lightning strike. The pale artist in
Speaker 2: the background has this rainbow, so you get this juxtapose,
Speaker 2: you know, very brutish looking interpretation, very fifties interpretation of
Speaker 2: Neanderthals using fire, but then this lovely rainbow of the background,
Speaker 2: which I think is just this fantastic juxtaposition.
Speaker 1: And if we're talking about kind of vintage timelines and confusion,
Speaker 1: could you put on your anthropologists hat. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you have a literal one, if it's necessary or not,
Speaker 1: but can you give us a quick timeline of when
Speaker 1: as a species we did wash it? Like when did
Speaker 1: we start making fires? When did we start using tools
Speaker 1: and stuff? I mean, just a quick timeline.
Speaker 2: Yeah, anthropologists wear scarbs, Okay, yeah yeah, but yees. So
Speaker 2: the earliest essentially stone tools are what we have. When
Speaker 2: we're talking about what the earliest kind of archaeology is,
Speaker 2: we're going to go with it, it depends. There's debate.
Speaker 2: The most recent kind of oldest site is what's called
Speaker 2: lamech We three and what's now Kenya, and it's dated
Speaker 2: to a little more than three million years ago. That's
Speaker 2: a bit controversial, but even if you are more conservative
Speaker 2: and go to the next oldest site, you're still talking
Speaker 2: about two point six million years ago, and that's in Ethiopia.
Speaker 2: So these are very simple stone tools, very simple, and
Speaker 2: that you're talking about a flake, a chunk has been
Speaker 2: knocked off of a larger stone, either on purpose or
Speaker 2: accidentally at first. But those are the oldest stone tools.
Speaker 2: There are similarly old kind of cut marks on bone
Speaker 2: as well and kind of that you know, more than
Speaker 2: a million ish years. So that's how long we've been
Speaker 2: using stone tools. Wow, potentially three million plus years. And
Speaker 2: if it is three million plus years, we're talking about
Speaker 2: pre genus Homo, pre that broad umbrella of humanity, So.
Speaker 1: We as a peoplehood Homo date back roughly two and
Speaker 1: a half million years before this one ape. The Grandpapa
Speaker 1: of taxonomy, Carl Lnius, coined the genus Homo in seventeen
Speaker 1: fifty eight, so making us all one big posse and
Speaker 1: I guess, giving all the other apes genus envy. That's
Speaker 1: so I should erase.
Speaker 2: That jump ahead to what are some of the oldest
Speaker 2: indicators of fire use. Again, we're still looking in Africa.
Speaker 2: So there's Wonderwork cave in South Africa that has some
Speaker 2: evidence for the presence of fire associated with early humans
Speaker 2: at about one million years ago. Wow, by this time,
Speaker 2: some tools are getting a little more advanced, but there's
Speaker 2: still just kind of like pebbles with a few sharp
Speaker 2: edges on and chopping. When you get to the next
Speaker 2: kind of threshold of when you start to get some
Speaker 2: agreement about where and when fire is more common, you're
Speaker 2: talking about maybe half a million to two or three
Speaker 2: hundred thousand years again depending on kind of which side
Speaker 2: of the debate you're on. And by that time we're
Speaker 2: talking about we're talking three hundred thousand years ago, we're
Speaker 2: talking about the human ancestor called Homo erectus and almost
Speaker 2: transitioning in places like Europe into early Neanderthals.
Speaker 1: Okay, so real quick. Neanderthals were human. They're the same
Speaker 1: homogeneous but a different species, and they were shorter and
Speaker 1: stock here, and they diverged from sapiens at least half
Speaker 1: a million years ago, and there's evidence that they could
Speaker 1: create fire two hundred thousand years ago. They were also
Speaker 1: super smart, and they made art and jewelry, and we
Speaker 1: interbred with them a bunch, which means they probably smelled okay,
Speaker 1: and we're doped to chill.
Speaker 2: With And then you start getting advances, continuing innovations in
Speaker 2: how the stone is being used to make tools. There
Speaker 2: are wood tools. Preservation is really bad for wood. You
Speaker 2: might imagine. There are some some spears that are in
Speaker 2: that timeframe of tens of thousands of years old that
Speaker 2: have been preserved in Germany because they were trapped in
Speaker 2: like oil sands. So then we start to get modern
Speaker 2: humans on the scene about in Eurasia. They're already modern
Speaker 2: humans in Africa at this time, but at about that
Speaker 2: forty thousand years ago, you start to get the replacement
Speaker 2: of or integration, or whichever way you want to interpret it,
Speaker 2: the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans by us, and
Speaker 2: then spreading throughout the rest of Eurasia. And we don't
Speaker 2: get things like ceramics until and if you think about ceramics,
Speaker 2: were thinking about pots. That is not until what we
Speaker 2: call the Neolithic. It's part of the Holocene, so we're
Speaker 2: talking about after the Last Ice Age, and that's only
Speaker 2: within the last say, ten thousand years.
Speaker 1: So if you wish that you had a cheat sheet
Speaker 1: of the different scene eras, allow me to be that
Speaker 1: krypnoe cradled in your sweaty palm. So the Holocene started
Speaker 1: about eleven thousand years ago with a glacial retreat left
Speaker 1: behind all these cute little lakes in Minnesota. And in
Speaker 1: the Holocene humans started farming things and building stuff. So
Speaker 1: then what is the enthropo scene. Well, it's a debated
Speaker 1: term introduced in the early aughts, right around the time
Speaker 1: Gwen Stefani was gluing rhinestones to her face, and the
Speaker 1: enthroposcene denotes that this is the time of humanity, as
Speaker 1: our species is having an impact on the planet and
Speaker 1: the geological record, what with things like mass extinctions and
Speaker 1: atom bombs and game shows and a bunch of space
Speaker 1: toilets now orbiting the galaxy, you know, chernobyl things like
Speaker 1: that that stick around in the record. But yes, the
Speaker 1: Holocene started eleven six hundred and fifty years ago, give
Speaker 1: or take, which in Earth terms is like yesterday.
Speaker 2: So when you're talking about ceramics and everything that's followed,
Speaker 2: ceramic farming, glass metal, all this sort of stuff you're
Speaker 2: talking about more than ten thousand years.
Speaker 1: Ago, Oh so recent. Yeah she knew on the scene.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Yeah, absolutely. But then these things build too because
Speaker 2: and this is where again kind of the integration of
Speaker 2: control of heat becomes interesting, because you can't say, smelt
Speaker 2: metals without having ceramics to pour them into.
Speaker 1: Ah hah.
Speaker 2: They're also they're also integrated as well. You can't you
Speaker 2: kind of can't get one without the other, and so
Speaker 2: they all kind of engage like on a gear that
Speaker 2: you need. You need kind of each threshold to happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I imagine if I were just born
Speaker 1: a baby in a forest somewhere, there is no way
Speaker 1: I would be able to take care of myself or
Speaker 1: figure out any of this. So we're always building on
Speaker 1: whatever we were left from the last generation, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean there's even a line in one of the
Speaker 2: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxies where the main human character
Speaker 2: finds himself on a primitive planet that doesn't have technology,
Speaker 2: and he thinks, like, I am going to rule them
Speaker 2: like a god. I am you know, modern human knower
Speaker 2: of technology that Arthur realized he could he could barely
Speaker 2: make himself toast, let alone a toaster. Yeah, so yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: You innovate within kind of the zeitgeist around you and
Speaker 2: build up on what knowledge has existed before. Humans are
Speaker 2: also precocious too, and we kind of tinker, and that's
Speaker 2: how there can be multiple places that something like farming
Speaker 2: can be invented around the world.
Speaker 1: What exactly do they call that? When something's concurrent like that?
Speaker 1: I forget there's a word for it. Okay, So I
Speaker 1: looked it up. And this phenomenon of concurrent ideation manifests
Speaker 1: in a sort of cinematic convergent evolution called twin films.
Speaker 1: So think Armageddon and Deep Impact Volcano and Dante's Peak,
Speaker 1: Friends with Benefits and no Strings attached, the Atoms fan
Speaker 1: in the Monsters, and dueling documentaries about bougie Island shit shows,
Speaker 1: which is a whole different field of fire festival research.
Speaker 1: There's like a word for it when it comes to
Speaker 1: like two screenplays being made at the same time. With twins,
Speaker 1: it's just sort of like what happens dance exactly exactly.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean you get that so that you know,
Speaker 2: farming can be invented in different places, or pottery can
Speaker 2: be invented in different places. So that's always the challenge too,
Speaker 2: and where we have to start worrying about how well
Speaker 2: we know the ages of sites to start answering questions
Speaker 2: like was the use of fire invented in one place
Speaker 2: and then it's spread from there the knowledge of it
Speaker 2: not the fire, or where there multiple inventions throughout time
Speaker 2: that that really people just kind of figure this out
Speaker 2: and there were kind of multiple nuclei where where these
Speaker 2: sorts of innovations happened.
Speaker 1: Well, how do you think our ancestors first started to
Speaker 1: create the fire rather than just control it? Do you
Speaker 1: think it was just a flint and steel or was
Speaker 1: it rubbing two sticks together vigorously? Like when I watch
Speaker 1: Naked and Afraid, we.
Speaker 2: Need to collect a whole lot of wood in a hurry.
Speaker 2: We cannot lose this fire or we're going to be
Speaker 2: right back where we started.
Speaker 1: I'm like, how did people figure this out a million
Speaker 1: years ago?
Speaker 2: Yeah? So that again is a fantastic question, and it's
Speaker 2: it's hard to have the material evidence that as archaeologists
Speaker 2: we like to have. I mean, one of the oldest
Speaker 2: fire starting kits we have is again for most of
Speaker 2: the times we're talking about fairly recent but obviosly the
Speaker 2: ice Man, so the Bronze Age man who fell into
Speaker 2: a glacier in the Alps and then was discovered in
Speaker 2: the nineties. He had a fire starting kit on him
Speaker 2: and so along with lots of other accoutremont. But he
Speaker 2: had a piece of pyrite, so iron sulfide, so something
Speaker 2: that again you could free in an iron atom from
Speaker 2: and get a spark. He had plenty of stone tools,
Speaker 2: and then he also had like some really fluffy fungi
Speaker 2: that was probably like for starting the fire, for getting
Speaker 2: it going, and so probably something like this. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's been work done looking at it's called you swear
Speaker 2: or marx from if you were to strike a piece
Speaker 2: of that that pyrite against a stone tool, would it
Speaker 2: leave a mark, gouge or a scratch? Or if you
Speaker 2: were doing this on a stone tool, do you see
Speaker 2: marks on like not the business cutting edge? Right? And
Speaker 2: so there's been some work done on what are called
Speaker 2: a Shuelian hand axes or byfaces, and they're these lovely,
Speaker 2: very symmetrical tear drop shaped or pear shaped stone tools
Speaker 2: that were the height of technology at the time. And
Speaker 2: if you look on not the cutting edge in a
Speaker 2: few places, it looks like there might have been kind
Speaker 2: of like the middle of it was scratched with pyrite.
Speaker 1: Okay, So if this French ancient axe sounds familiar, we
Speaker 1: touched on them in the at Lattal episode and they
Speaker 1: appeared about one and a half million years ago, and
Speaker 1: they were in fashion for about a million years. Archaeologists
Speaker 1: think that these really simple tear dropped shape whackers may
Speaker 1: have played a role in seducing your hairy great great
Speaker 1: great great great grandparents nearly half a million years ago,
Speaker 1: according to papers like the nineteen ninety nine study hand
Speaker 1: Axes Products of sexual Selection, which was published in the
Speaker 1: journal Antiquity. So some of these Ashulian stone axes are
Speaker 1: carved in a way to feature a fossil right in
Speaker 1: the center of the axe, pretty much like an ornamental choice,
Speaker 1: like a bedazzling of some kind. And some axes are
Speaker 1: so large and unwieldy they seem to defy any utilitarian function,
Speaker 1: like a hummer with expensive rims in the middle of
Speaker 1: New York City, So like a flashy car. Anthropologists think
Speaker 1: that these hand axes could have signaled viability as a partner,
Speaker 1: like this person must have resources and skill cognitive ability
Speaker 1: of their nap and rock so well pretty okay eyeballs,
Speaker 1: you know that function leading a mate to think that's
Speaker 1: a sweet axe and I would definitely like to do
Speaker 1: the nasty with you. So fast forward to now when
Speaker 1: horny human apes wear acts, body spray and still offer
Speaker 1: up very carefully faceted rocks as proof of their value
Speaker 1: as a mate. I mean, have we really even changed
Speaker 1: that much? It isn't that cute and kind of gross,
Speaker 1: but yes, from these stones roll in matchmaking to match making.
Speaker 2: Part of the problem is that pyrite is not really
Speaker 2: that stable of a mineral over a great time periods,
Speaker 2: and so it can break down. And so there's not,
Speaker 2: to my knowledge, been an instance of from from the
Speaker 2: Paleolithic of again these lovely hand axes being found with
Speaker 2: with pyrite chunks. But it's that's that's kind of one
Speaker 2: of the operating hypotheses of what could have been the
Speaker 2: source of heat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they weren't going to ARII and just getting some
Speaker 1: waterproof matches.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But what about fire and how it changed the
Speaker 1: way we evolved, Like did we develop bigger brains because
Speaker 1: we started cooking meat?
Speaker 2: That's that's certainly one of the hypotheses. Yeah, so this
Speaker 2: has been argued that going back to the species of
Speaker 2: early humans called homoerectus, that at like one point eight
Speaker 2: million years ago, suddenly our brains started and again by
Speaker 2: our I I realized I've called myself a homo erectus there.
Speaker 2: But one thing you'll find with that I always have
Speaker 2: to tell my students is that if I'm talking about
Speaker 2: Homorectus or Neanderthals or Dennis Sovins, they're all people to me.
Speaker 2: So the Enderthals are people too, I tell them, But
Speaker 2: that our direct ancestors, these homoerectus, that the brains got larger,
Speaker 2: and again none of the soft bits have been preserved, right,
Speaker 2: So when we're saying brains got larger, we're looking at
Speaker 2: the size of inside the skull. And if some of
Speaker 2: the people who study bones and much greater detail than
Speaker 2: I ever have, you know, have have suggested that, you know,
Speaker 2: there's also some structural indications that maybe the intestinal system
Speaker 2: got a bit different as well, And so the hypothesis
Speaker 2: was that this change seemed to correlate perhaps with or
Speaker 2: a potential mechanism for it was the use of fire
Speaker 2: to cook. There was a book that came out a
Speaker 2: few years ago that put where a primate specialist head
Speaker 2: hypothesized that fire was even responsible for shifting our even
Speaker 2: deeper time ancestors back to being daytime instead of nocturnal,
Speaker 2: that we're diurnal instead, and they kind of expanded our
Speaker 2: day and it had an effect on the melatonin in
Speaker 2: our brains and so forth. And again it's an interesting idea.
Speaker 2: I don't think I buy it in terms of the mechanisms,
Speaker 2: but the main thing is that it shifts fire so
Speaker 2: far back that there's really no way to even test
Speaker 2: whether we were using fire. Then it is just kind
Speaker 2: of an explanation of maybe fire was responsible for us
Speaker 2: becoming diurnal, but it's.
Speaker 1: So far back nobody really knows. Because piecing together our
Speaker 1: history is really like the murkiest prequel of the Hangover
Speaker 1: film franchise, but with I guess more dried mud and
Speaker 1: some isotope tracing still some tigers.
Speaker 2: Though it can be a campfire story that's absolutely what
Speaker 2: you have. There's ideas about the social lives of early humans.
Speaker 2: And so there was a study that came out again
Speaker 2: several years ago by a famous anthropologist, Polly Weisner, who
Speaker 2: had spent a lot of time among the San people
Speaker 2: in the African bush so talking about Namibia, in Botswana
Speaker 2: and so forth, and these are people who, to some
Speaker 2: make sense, still practice hunting and gathering today. And she
Speaker 2: observed that when they were gathered around a fire during
Speaker 2: the day, it was talk about business and you know,
Speaker 2: subsistence and that sort of thing. But when there was
Speaker 2: a fire at night, that's when they were shooting the
Speaker 2: shit and just socializing. Right, And again that's a really
Speaker 2: interesting idea. But we're also we have to be very
Speaker 2: very careful when we're extrapolating from modern people who are
Speaker 2: just as modern as you and I, to human ancestors.
Speaker 2: We can't suggest that what hunter gatherers operating in a
Speaker 2: modern world are somehow a snapshot of the distant past. Right.
Speaker 2: If it's inspiring us to think about these things, that's great.
Speaker 1: Have researchers looked into like oxytocin levels at all while
Speaker 1: you're looking at a campfire? Is there something that is
Speaker 1: comforting innately to us? Even though fire is dangerous.
Speaker 2: I don't know about that specifically. That's a really good question,
Speaker 2: but yeah, no, I'd agree there is that kind of
Speaker 2: satisfaction of it as well. Is that something like inherently
Speaker 2: biological and controlled by hormones is a really good question?
Speaker 2: Or if it's if it's something we're essentially conditioned to
Speaker 2: do you know what a baby who hasn't been raised,
Speaker 2: you know, within around campfires find discomforting or terrifying it.
Speaker 1: Okay, So if you would like some science to explain
Speaker 1: why you love campfires, I will point you toward the
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen paper Hearth and Campfire Influences on arterial blood pressure,
Speaker 1: the costs of the social brain through fireside relaxation, which
Speaker 1: explains quote. Fires involve flickering light, crackling sounds, warmth, and
Speaker 1: a distinctive smell. For early humans, fire likely extended the day,
Speaker 1: provided heat, helped with hunting, warded off predators and insects,
Speaker 1: illuminated dark places, and facilitated cooking. Campfires also may have
Speaker 1: provided social nexus and relaxation effects. They could have enhanced
Speaker 1: pro social behavior end quote. So this study took two
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty six subjects and measured their blood pressure,
Speaker 1: and then they randomly put some people in front of
Speaker 1: a control image while others got video of a campfire
Speaker 1: with the sound down, and other subjects got the full
Speaker 1: pop and crackle treatment too. So what happened? Researchers found
Speaker 1: consistent blood pressure decreases in the fire with sound folks,
Speaker 1: particularly with a longer duration of gazing at the video
Speaker 1: and on my website, I have linked to YouTube that
Speaker 1: offers twelve hours of free mule log action, so you
Speaker 1: can relax without worrying about a forest fire or having
Speaker 1: your hair smell like beef jerky. What about the importance
Speaker 1: of cooking food and avoiding parasites? At some point, did
Speaker 1: we learned how to boil water or how has fire
Speaker 1: contributed to our actual living longer?
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's a great question that there is some
Speaker 2: evidence for boiling as being in kind of like pits
Speaker 2: in the ground, being more of the first instance of
Speaker 2: cooking in like a pot, you know, over a campfire.
Speaker 2: Because again that's a very recent innovation in terms of
Speaker 2: living longer. I mean, in a certain way, evolution doesn't
Speaker 2: care about it that much.
Speaker 1: They're like, you make babies or not. Okay, get out
Speaker 1: of here. You're done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And I mean, so Forderthal you and I
Speaker 2: are you know, of a good age? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh god, oh we're fossils. Can you imagine they're like, what? Yeah,
Speaker 1: gray hair? What is it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I did have to explain this, like just to
Speaker 2: my students a week or two ago, when I showed
Speaker 2: them replica Neanderthal bones from an old man who was
Speaker 2: probably around you know, forty five, right, yeah exactly. So
Speaker 2: so on a certain way, it doesn't matter in terms
Speaker 2: of living longer, but even in terms of like, you know,
Speaker 2: pest control or something like that in a cave, if
Speaker 2: you're trying to avoid like getting bit by a bat,
Speaker 2: you could potentially use fire as a way to clear
Speaker 2: out bats and mice or something like that from a
Speaker 2: cave or something like that. So there certainly are potential
Speaker 2: health aspects that deep in the past that using fire
Speaker 2: as a tool could could have assisted with. Do I
Speaker 2: think that humans figured out like if you boil water
Speaker 2: it gets rid of the germs? No, I don't think
Speaker 2: that was at all on anyone's mind.
Speaker 1: What about your field work, what does that look like?
Speaker 1: And are you ever gathered around campfire while you're doing
Speaker 1: research on pyrotechnology.
Speaker 2: In Armenia, there's definitely a celebration is usually marked with
Speaker 2: what's called horovats, which is like a pit barbecue, so
Speaker 2: that anytime there's a good reason to celebrate, whether it's
Speaker 2: the end of the season, or it's Tuesday or just whatever,
Speaker 2: you know, it involves a coal pit in cooking meat
Speaker 2: over it, So definitely there's that aspect involved in it.
Speaker 2: What field work can be like, it depends. We kind
Speaker 2: of move site to site in different years. Sometimes it
Speaker 2: means spending a month in an Armenian mountain village that's
Speaker 2: literally the end of the road and has the most
Speaker 2: spectacular night skies you can imagine. And we have people
Speaker 2: from all over the world who are secialists in various components.
Speaker 2: So maybe I'm trying to analyze the stone tools and
Speaker 2: figure out where they came from, while someone else is
Speaker 2: looking at the tiny mammal bones that might have burrowed
Speaker 2: into the site and died. Other people are looking at
Speaker 2: the sentiments. Other people are spending all their time digging,
Speaker 2: other people are doing all the logistics and so forth.
Speaker 2: So it's a big team that sometimes you can have
Speaker 2: six different languages being spoken on and you might need
Speaker 2: to go through two or three people to get the
Speaker 2: right word from one language to another. You have to
Speaker 2: get along with people that you're going to hang out
Speaker 2: with for several weeks. I'm interested in where potential sources
Speaker 2: of raw stone might have come from as a way
Speaker 2: to start tracing how people were moving across the landscape.
Speaker 1: How do you even find those sites? Because I feel
Speaker 1: like I could just go on a hike right over
Speaker 1: an old, say campfire site or stone tool building site
Speaker 1: and just not even know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, sometimes sites are just visible on the surface,
Speaker 2: and it doesn't mean necessarily that they've always been exposed
Speaker 2: on the surface. They could have been unburied as material
Speaker 2: erodes away, whether by water or just by wind, especially
Speaker 2: in the desert. Other times, if we are looking for
Speaker 2: very old sites, we try to find exposures on the
Speaker 2: landscape where we know that they are old. So this
Speaker 2: is one of the advantages of working in Armenia is
Speaker 2: that there are a lot of volcanoes there. Whoa so
Speaker 2: Armenia is it's twice the size of Connecticut but has
Speaker 2: five hundred volcanoes. Yeah, yeah, that.
Speaker 1: God, Armenia.
Speaker 2: That's they're not all active, but they have erupted throughout
Speaker 2: the time periods were interested in. Yeah, I tell my students,
Speaker 2: imagine Connecticut but with two hundred and fifty volcanoes bananas, right,
Speaker 2: So we get these lava flows all over the place,
Speaker 2: and they've also trapped other sediments between them. And so
Speaker 2: if we can date the lava flows, which is fairly
Speaker 2: straightforward for geologists to do, then we know what time
Speaker 2: period we're kind of looking at when we go to
Speaker 2: certain areas where it's exposed. And so what we like
Speaker 2: to do is especially go to these gorges that have
Speaker 2: been cut deep into all these past lava flows, and
Speaker 2: so we can literally see lava flows sandwiched on top
Speaker 2: of each other, and sometimes they have sediments between them, sandwiches,
Speaker 2: I know. And if you see I there's sandwich between them,
Speaker 2: we know that they have to be older than the
Speaker 2: lava flow on top and younger than the lava flow
Speaker 2: beneath them. And so we can know that, Okay, whatever
Speaker 2: is in here, hopefully there's stone tools in there, it's
Speaker 2: between this four hundred and forty thousand year old lava
Speaker 2: flow underneath and between a two hundred thousand year old
Speaker 2: lava flow on top. So the idea is to is yeah,
Speaker 2: not to just go out and hopefully stumble across the things.
Speaker 2: But the more you can find sediments or geological features
Speaker 2: that you know correspond to certain points in time, the better.
Speaker 2: And that's why there's exciting things happening in East Africa
Speaker 2: where there's this continental rift. And so when you're talking
Speaker 2: about all these interesting finds of human ancestors there, they're
Speaker 2: working in areas that they know the sediments are X
Speaker 2: number of years old, rather than just you know, going
Speaker 2: out randomly, So rather than.
Speaker 1: Just hike all over the place and cross their fingers,
Speaker 1: pyrotechnologists go to sites that have rough timelines established and
Speaker 1: see what's there to get an estimate and then backtrack.
Speaker 1: So these are time capsules made of hardened lava, revealing
Speaker 1: how you came to be an animal who uses dental
Speaker 1: loss and drives a machine. Now it's been asked, is
Speaker 1: it ever weird for you that you're using things like
Speaker 1: microscopy and all kinds of like magnetic detection and it
Speaker 1: in a sense using a very controlled source of energy
Speaker 1: to try to find out how fire was used and
Speaker 1: how energy was was harnessed in the past.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all the time, all the time. So I mean,
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean two examples of how this crosses
Speaker 2: your mind is again going out into the field. You know,
Speaker 2: for one of the flights to our media, I had
Speaker 2: like a middle seat, right, and so I'm grumbling to myself,
Speaker 2: like I've got a middle seat. This is gonna stink
Speaker 2: for the rest of this flight. And then I'm like,
Speaker 2: I'm I'm talking about which seat in a flying machine?
Speaker 1: Yeah, to go to take.
Speaker 2: My X ray gun over the ocean to go study
Speaker 2: people that lived in caves. Yeah, another time kind of occurs.
Speaker 2: How just absurd this is is again, I work at Yale,
Speaker 2: so we get these email announcements of all the fantastic
Speaker 2: things being done on campus, and so there'll be like
Speaker 2: an announcement of like some new Wantum computing advance at
Speaker 2: Yale or some modeling of COVID vaccine stuff, And I'm like,
Speaker 2: I study dead people's.
Speaker 1: Trash, you know, But archaeologists really are expert trash diggers, right, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, That's usually what we're talking about is the trash
Speaker 2: that people leave behind and how that represents what was done.
Speaker 2: I mean, you're trying to figure out from trash that
Speaker 2: has survived and has potentially been moved around by all
Speaker 2: sorts of geological and natural forces and animals picking through
Speaker 2: it and all that sort of stuff. What were people
Speaker 2: doing in the past.
Speaker 1: Over all of your research, do people ever ask you
Speaker 1: what is the best way to construct a fire? Is
Speaker 1: it leaning everything together in a triangle shape or is
Speaker 1: it like stacking like a log cabin?
Speaker 2: Yeah? See, everyone everyone expects me at the party to
Speaker 2: be like the fire tender, right, like keep an eye
Speaker 2: on the fire pit, and naturally I just usually like
Speaker 2: pass it off to my kids, like yeah, just poke
Speaker 2: at it a bit.
Speaker 1: Doctor fire yeah yeah, an apprentice.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. Or I'll occasionally say, like, you know, I
Speaker 2: should really have you know, some sort of really cool
Speaker 2: firing pit in the backyard or something like that, and
Speaker 2: my wife will be like, why don't you let's get
Speaker 2: the house painted first. I finish that, finish that job
Speaker 2: before you start building a kiln in the backyard, or
Speaker 2: right like that.
Speaker 1: Can I fire away with a lot of questions from
Speaker 1: a lightning around yes? Please from listeners? Okay, oh, we
Speaker 1: have so many questions. Okay, And just to follow up,
Speaker 1: what kind of fire you make depends on what you're
Speaker 1: doing for long lasting campfires. The log cabin method might
Speaker 1: be the best, but for cooking on skewers roasting stuff
Speaker 1: on a stick, you might want to lean logs into
Speaker 1: each other. But either way, make sure you're observing forest
Speaker 1: ranger cautions and that you are extinguishing things well before
Speaker 1: you leave. So listen to the Fire Ecology episodes for
Speaker 1: more on that. And before your questions, let's shower a
Speaker 1: worthy cause with our advertising dollars. So Ellery asked that
Speaker 1: a donation be made to the Armenianfund dot org, which
Speaker 1: does all kinds of humanitarian aid and infrastructure and sustainability
Speaker 1: projects and covers health and medical needs in Armenia, and
Speaker 1: that donation was made possible by sponsors. Okay, you're burning questions.
Speaker 1: Gwyneth Greco wants to know have any other animals outside
Speaker 1: of primates developed the ability to create fire?
Speaker 2: No, no, we don't have any instances of fire creators.
Speaker 2: You did have, I think with either. I think it
Speaker 2: was when you had Gavin Jones on that you talked
Speaker 2: about the Australian hawks that can spread fire. Yes.
Speaker 1: Again, more on this in the Fire Ecology episode and
Speaker 1: in Karina Newsom's Wildlife Ecology episodes because arson birds, someone
Speaker 1: needs to make some twin movies about them and.
Speaker 2: Use it kind of for hunting. But yeah, producing fire, no,
Speaker 2: And that's been one of the ways that we've kind
Speaker 2: of conceptualized this as something uniquely human. Right, So, if
Speaker 2: you go back to like the nineteen forties, you'll see
Speaker 2: the you know, the archaeology books titled like man the
Speaker 2: Hunter and obviously other animals hunt, and then it became
Speaker 2: man again, you know, humankind, not man, but humankind the
Speaker 2: tool user. And then we realized, like octopy, I can
Speaker 2: use tools, and crows can use tools, and so well,
Speaker 2: now we're the tool maker and getting very very specific
Speaker 2: and so, but one thing that is still unique to
Speaker 2: our species is fire production. There is a very good
Speaker 2: short story written by sci fi slash fantasy writer Terry
Speaker 2: Bisson called Bears Discover Fire and so it's like how
Speaker 2: screwed humans are when bears discover how to make fire?
Speaker 2: But yeah, so far we're the only fire producers. And really,
Speaker 2: with like the very little exception of those hawks in Australia,
Speaker 2: the only real documented instance of fire users outside of
Speaker 2: like training chips to smoke cigarettes and stuff like.
Speaker 1: That, that's not okay. Well, Ryan Fisher Patron wrote in
Speaker 1: and said, if you haven't yet read the sci fi
Speaker 1: short story Bears Discover.
Speaker 2: Fire exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: Thank you Ryan Fisher's on that tip. On point, Ryan
Speaker 1: yes Evan wrote in what's the best way to start
Speaker 1: a fire? Dorito's dryer lint? What historically did people use
Speaker 1: as kindling? You mentioned a fluffy fungus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So any sort of any sort of like
Speaker 2: light fluffy, like wooded plant material or something like that.
Speaker 2: Well we'll start because, again going back to your kind
Speaker 2: of elementary school, the three parts of fire, you need,
Speaker 2: you need a lot of the oxygen to get to it.
Speaker 2: Like we were saying with Asia, it was it was
Speaker 2: kind of a fluffy, but seems to be like a
Speaker 2: fungus that would start easily.
Speaker 1: So in case you're ever in a survival situation, look
Speaker 1: for hoof fungus or a mushroom called King Alfred's cakes,
Speaker 1: also known as cramp balls. They look like balls of
Speaker 1: coal or kind of like horse boop, but you got
Speaker 1: to really dry them out. Are you not hungry?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: Incinerate your snacks. Doritos are a proven kindling, just enough
Speaker 1: oil and dust to sustain your flames. Although I don't know,
Speaker 1: flaming cheetos seem like a natural contender. I don't know
Speaker 1: if anyone's ever gone down that road scientifically. But also
Speaker 1: you could bring along some dryer lint. You can dig
Speaker 1: some lint out of your belly crevasse, or some campers
Speaker 1: do take a few cotton pads and soak them in
Speaker 1: either petroleum jelly or hand sanitizer which is mostly alcohol,
Speaker 1: and then boom, you just have lighter fluid in a pinch.
Speaker 1: Our ancestors would be so proud and also confused why
Speaker 1: we are burning food to make food. Abigail Bishop wants
Speaker 1: to know first time question, asker, have there ever been
Speaker 1: any human civilizations that have not had fire? How do
Speaker 1: you research who didn't have something?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this has come up before because again I kind
Speaker 2: of controversially referred to to humans as obligate fire users
Speaker 2: in one time, and someone did come back at me
Speaker 2: and said like, well, there was this one missionary or
Speaker 2: European explorer account on this one island these people didn't
Speaker 2: have fire or something like that, and I think it's
Speaker 2: also been you know, other people came back and said like, no,
Speaker 2: that's a really dodgy account or probably what it meant
Speaker 2: was they just didn't start fire like on demand when
Speaker 2: the missionary demanded it. So you know, with that like
Speaker 2: one really dodgy, probably kind of racist account. Yeah, there
Speaker 2: was no there's no real good evidence for human groups
Speaker 2: that have not had fire. There is a big debate
Speaker 2: when you start getting to like early humans of di
Speaker 2: couldn't Deanderthals start fire or were they just fire users?
Speaker 2: You know, and that you know, those people would argue
Speaker 2: that it took modern humans us to be able to
Speaker 2: be on demand fire users. But once do you get
Speaker 2: to modern humans were pretty much solidly in that technology.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk caves. Chelsea McCann says, this spilology cave
Speaker 1: exploring society that I belonged to always told us to
Speaker 1: look up when in new caverns looking for smoke and
Speaker 1: foot spots on the roof, and if we found any,
Speaker 1: we called in the archaeoanthropology team because it was probably
Speaker 1: inhabited or visited by indigenous people. Can these foot spots
Speaker 1: be dated to find out how long ago the fire
Speaker 1: in them burned?
Speaker 2: So this sold potentially so those probably have probably has
Speaker 2: carbon in it. And so if we are talking within
Speaker 2: so your listeners in the United States or in the Americas,
Speaker 2: then radiocarbon dating works fine because carbon dating is good
Speaker 2: back to forty or fifty thousand years ago, so any
Speaker 2: archaeological sites that we know of it are uncontroversial. In
Speaker 2: the America's radiocarbon dating will work.
Speaker 1: If you're like, I'm no anthropologist. When was that well,
Speaker 1: scientists think folks crossed the land bridge from Siberia to
Speaker 1: the Alaska area now in the Stone Age, maybe thirteen
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, but that's been debated because older sites,
Speaker 1: one nearly sixteen thousand years old, another in central Mexico
Speaker 1: dating back thirty three thousand years have been discovered. But
Speaker 1: my point is this did not happen in fourteen ninety two.
Speaker 1: Nobody discovered shit that year. This land had been populated
Speaker 1: for millennia. Rebecca Weinsettele wants to know if there is
Speaker 1: a link between humans making campfires and domesticating dogs.
Speaker 2: Is that a thing that it's kind of a thing.
Speaker 2: So yeah, dog domestication has been again one of these
Speaker 2: interesting issues of when it happened and was it something
Speaker 2: that only modern humans did and it maybe gave them
Speaker 2: an advantage over Neanderthals. And so forth. We're probably into
Speaker 2: enough of kind of like that fuzzy range of how
Speaker 2: well sites are dated to be able to know that
Speaker 2: sort of thing. Definitely. The only thing I can directly
Speaker 2: speak to in terms of the sites where are worked
Speaker 2: with my fantastic colleagues is that one of them at
Speaker 2: an upper Paleolithic site. So this is just a fancy
Speaker 2: way of saying making stone tools that modern humans make.
Speaker 2: Just before the Last Ice Age, there was a wolf
Speaker 2: skull recovered and it didn't have any of the morphology
Speaker 2: of domestication yet.
Speaker 1: See a wolf's dorsal skull crest which acts as an
Speaker 1: anchor point for its gnashing jaw muscles or the bulbous forehead.
Speaker 1: So shitsoo mixes like my dog gremlin. Her skull probably
Speaker 1: looks like a softball and an angler fish made it.
Speaker 1: But yes, wolves not dogs. You can see the Lupinology
Speaker 1: episode for more on that.
Speaker 2: There was hearths inside this, you know, the archaeology word
Speaker 2: for campfires inside the cave, and there was you know,
Speaker 2: a wolf presence that but not domesticated. This is especially
Speaker 2: hard to investigate because in certain places wolves and humans
Speaker 2: early humans are going to occupy a similar ecological niche
Speaker 2: and use caves. So it might be that in one
Speaker 2: season Neanderthals or modern humans were there, and in another
Speaker 2: season wolves were there using the cave too. So even
Speaker 2: if we found wolf bones or wolves that looked like
Speaker 2: they were starting to get domesticated, it can be hard
Speaker 2: to say that they were there concurrently with the earlier modern.
Speaker 1: Humans could have been just one after the other, yeah.
Speaker 2: Exactly, yeah, or alternating, you know, just ever spring the
Speaker 2: humans were there, every fall, the wolves were there, or
Speaker 2: something like that. You don't want to be there at
Speaker 2: the same time as the wolves.
Speaker 1: They got sucked into the same time share presentation, and
Speaker 1: now archaeologists are like, I don't know who is here
Speaker 1: when pretty much exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The same thing with like bears or hyenas are
Speaker 2: a big thing is that you know what's pulled into
Speaker 2: a cave by hyenas, including sometimes like Neanderthals and modern
Speaker 2: and ancient humans can can really get get blurred. So
Speaker 2: sometimes a cave might have been occupied, like for like
Speaker 2: overnight by humans, right, And so the time spans that
Speaker 2: we're dealing with compared to like the reality of how
Speaker 2: long a particular group might have been in a cave
Speaker 2: or an open campsite, one of those things we need
Speaker 2: to keep in mind of the vastly different time spans
Speaker 2: were talking about.
Speaker 1: And do you have a few more minutes to answer
Speaker 1: a few more absolutely? Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: That was so late. Literally there was a marching band
Speaker 1: practicing across the street for like an hour and a half.
Speaker 2: So I know my students will tell you. I will,
Speaker 2: I will just talk if you don't know.
Speaker 1: This is great because I have a couple more questions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, go for it as many as many as you want.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay. So, speaking of caves, Natasha barsh asked I
Speaker 1: saw a video of an archaeologist showing how cave paintings
Speaker 1: were made with the use of fire, light and shadows
Speaker 1: in mind, and.
Speaker 4: There's another thing. Today we see cave all with electric lights,
Speaker 4: but the ancient saw it under flickering tangle lights. And
Speaker 4: I think under the light of a flickering flame, it's
Speaker 4: all immense. The animation effect.
Speaker 1: Is that flim flam or not. Are there any other
Speaker 1: ways that early civilizations may have used fire to create art?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, this is this is a great question. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, pigments can change color, when exposed to fire.
Speaker 2: So these kind of what's called ochre or these iron oxides,
Speaker 2: so you know, they can be made more reddish or
Speaker 2: yellowish or blackish, so you know, potentially the colors can change. Certainly,
Speaker 2: there are a lot of cave paintings beyond where sun
Speaker 2: light would would ever reach, and so certainly, if if
Speaker 2: they were going to see what they were doing in there,
Speaker 2: it would have been either you know, a handheld torch
Speaker 2: or hearth in the middle or something like that. So
Speaker 2: I mean, absolutely that's the light source that you would
Speaker 2: have done that within. Now you know, were they taking
Speaker 2: this to the level of you know, Plato's analogy of
Speaker 2: the cave shadows, I don't you know, that's maybe not,
Speaker 2: but certainly, you know that's the If that's the light
Speaker 2: source compared to like, you know, the headlamp of a
Speaker 2: speed lunker or something like that, you know, it's worth
Speaker 2: you know, interpreting it in those sorts of that sort
Speaker 2: of way. And and also there are minerals that can
Speaker 2: can sparkle and stuff like that, you know, engage in
Speaker 2: light and you know sparkling, and some micas can can
Speaker 2: shimmer and stuff like that. So certainly interplay with with light.
Speaker 2: You know that I would imagine that would be an
Speaker 2: important aspect of what they're doing if they're that deep
Speaker 2: into a cave.
Speaker 1: M I feel like that goes along with one question
Speaker 1: from Davis Bourne that just says, why does the person
Speaker 1: across from you always look so attractive? I guess everything's
Speaker 1: just prettier in firelight.
Speaker 2: Or the carbon monoxide one of.
Speaker 1: That's the point. Was that ever an issue?
Speaker 2: Potentially? Probably they were Okay, Again, we're not talking about
Speaker 2: large groups necessarily, especially with Neanderthals.
Speaker 1: Okay. This next one was asked by Coral Taylor, Lauren King,
Speaker 1: and Nico damus Koela Well. A few people asked about
Speaker 1: have fire will travel and Coral Taylor said, I've read
Speaker 1: that earlier humans would have a fire starter kit, often
Speaker 1: including a live ember or coal. How do they keep
Speaker 1: a live ember on their person without burning themselves or
Speaker 1: their items but not putting it out? And Lauren King
Speaker 1: wants to hear about people have transported fire, how communities
Speaker 1: have transported fire throughout the ages, And Nico Damus Koelar
Speaker 1: asked if the advent of fire usage coincided with the
Speaker 1: expansion of people into areas previously less habitable. Were we
Speaker 1: on the move because of fire?
Speaker 2: Okay? So yeah, so let's say the first with carrying fire, Yes, there,
Speaker 2: that seems to have been a practice that we can
Speaker 2: see certainly among native peoples of the Americas when Europeans
Speaker 2: first encountered them. Is being essentially in like a wooden
Speaker 2: carved wooden container, again having some sort of slow burning
Speaker 2: ember that had just enough oxygen to keep going, but
Speaker 2: not so much that's going to flare up and burn everything.
Speaker 2: So certainly like carrying of coals, you know, think of
Speaker 2: just kind of a slow burn of charcoal just being
Speaker 2: able to be carried in some sort of container or
Speaker 2: gourd or something like that.
Speaker 1: Or as the Pecuni people, part of the Blackfoot Confederacy
Speaker 1: of the Western Plains, devised a buffalo horn expertly stuffed
Speaker 1: with a genius parfait of moss, hardwood, soft wood, and
Speaker 1: raw hide that held fire to take from one camp
Speaker 1: to the next as a symbol of home and continuity.
Speaker 1: So I will link a video about it on my website.
Speaker 1: As Elder Marvin Weatherwax explains it way better than my
Speaker 1: travel candle in a weird hotel room. But it's a
Speaker 1: similar sentiment perhaps.
Speaker 2: So that certainly there's definitely evans amongst modern humans of
Speaker 2: carrying embers around. Absolutely. And then the other question was
Speaker 2: is did it make areas more inhabitable? And again absolutely,
Speaker 2: I would say this is one of the reasons that
Speaker 2: fire use can be inferred in some areas. Because we're
Speaker 2: also talking not just about space, but this is deep time.
Speaker 2: So we're talking multiple multiple ice ages, right, So we
Speaker 2: tend to think of like the ice Age fifteen thousand,
Speaker 2: twenty thousand dish years ago, but there are multiple multiple
Speaker 2: glacial cycles and so especially in Europe, the Andanderthals had
Speaker 2: to had to survive all of these glacial periods. It's
Speaker 2: one of the reasons we think that they probably at
Speaker 2: the very least had like furs for blankets or something
Speaker 2: like that, and perhaps even basic clothing is to be
Speaker 2: able to survive in these these would otherwise be uninhabitable
Speaker 2: in terms of cold areas. It does, you know, pose
Speaker 2: the challenge again, if you're you're up in a mountainous
Speaker 2: area during an ice age, you have to worry about
Speaker 2: your fuel source as well. You know, wood is heavy, Yeah,
Speaker 2: so you can't move into an area where it's cold
Speaker 2: and there's no wood around to burn or something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it'd be like driving your car somewhere within a
Speaker 1: gas station or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly as you have. There's trade offs to doing it.
Speaker 2: So the great thing about fire is it keeps you
Speaker 2: warm and you know, safe to some extent and whatnot.
Speaker 2: But it's also a lot of work to go get
Speaker 2: the wood and chop it up as best you can
Speaker 2: and then you know, get the fire going. And so
Speaker 2: in the past one would also you know, kind of
Speaker 2: play play that in in mind of what's what's the
Speaker 2: easiest thing to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, speaking of things that are not easy, Madeline wants
Speaker 1: to know how the heck do people walk through fire.
Speaker 1: I don't imagine either one of us know anything about
Speaker 1: that though, right.
Speaker 2: Well, see this is where the physics undergrad degree comes
Speaker 2: in handy. So so we actually we actually learned this
Speaker 2: in physics clots.
Speaker 1: So, oh my god.
Speaker 2: Basically, what's happening is, I hate to say, your feet
Speaker 2: are sweaty, especially if you are very nervous about having
Speaker 2: to walk across coals, and so literally what's happening is
Speaker 2: the sweat on your feet is turning into a gas
Speaker 2: that is hitting the hot coals, and you've got this
Speaker 2: microscopic layer of vaporized sweat basically steam, that's that's between
Speaker 2: you and the fire.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, how fast you have to walk? Do
Speaker 1: you have to just run across it?
Speaker 2: That's what it always seems like in the movies. Ye,
Speaker 2: I don't know from personal experience.
Speaker 1: Listen, I'm not going to drag you into the deep
Speaker 1: rabbit hole slash fire pit of my research on Tony
Speaker 1: Robbins seminars that involve walking through hot coals as a
Speaker 1: way to change your mindset on what's possible. But I
Speaker 1: will tell you that thousands of people have walked over
Speaker 1: glowing embers in parking lots of convention centers as he
Speaker 1: bellows into a headset mic about destiny. And no, he
Speaker 1: didn't invent this. It's a religious practice in some parts
Speaker 1: of the world like Singapore. And yes, sometimes scores of
Speaker 1: people have minor burns on their feet at his unleash
Speaker 1: the power within events, And it seems they're becoming more
Speaker 1: common as time goes on because people stop to take
Speaker 1: selfies as they fire walk, and that really botches the
Speaker 1: physics of it. But I will tell you I could
Speaker 1: not stop myself from watching Oprah stomp her self over
Speaker 1: a track of fire nuggets through sheer will and affirmations.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to hand it to Tony for the
Speaker 1: addition of a moist patch of lawn that he starts
Speaker 1: folks on.
Speaker 2: Still, I want you making them a storm. Yes, I
Speaker 2: want to do three th.
Speaker 1: Storm of us. Yes, yes, as hard and storm as
Speaker 1: you can't. Hey, man, if Cole's lead to goals, you
Speaker 1: do you, but just you gotta step on the wet
Speaker 1: grass first. Mike Monikowski wants to know what ancient fires
Speaker 1: starting method surprised you. For me, it was the fire piston.
Speaker 1: I don't even know what a fire piston is, but
Speaker 1: anything surprise you.
Speaker 2: I will. I also, I mean, when I first heard
Speaker 2: about the pyrite, I was suspicious because again, I you know,
Speaker 2: going as a you know, a camper as a kid,
Speaker 2: there was we always had the flint and steel or
Speaker 2: something like that, and I didn't know if it would
Speaker 2: it would work. My skeptical hat went on there. But
Speaker 2: you'll hear about fire starting ideas, but you know, most
Speaker 2: are like from like really dodgy accounts in historical sources
Speaker 2: or something like that. I haven't encountered anything yet that
Speaker 2: is that has made me just slack job.
Speaker 1: How about the invention of s'mores? Several of you patrons,
Speaker 1: justin So, Maggie Kinney, Jess Swan, and Shimittie Thompson wanted
Speaker 1: to know. Are they a gift from the gods to
Speaker 1: apologize for periods and farts and stuff?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: I looked into it, and s'mores were likely invented by
Speaker 1: Loretta Scott Crewe in the first ever recipe published in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty seven and a recreational guide titled quote Tramping
Speaker 1: and Trailing with the Girl Scouts. Also, you should know
Speaker 1: that Graham crackers were invented by Sylvester Graham, a devoutly
Speaker 1: religious Presbyterian who thought that eating vegetables and bland wheat
Speaker 1: germ crackers was the best way to stop being so
Speaker 1: fucking horny. So little did he know that a century later,
Speaker 1: firesides more roasting parties would rise in popularity as places
Speaker 1: to meet someone to flirt with. So thank a loner
Speaker 1: with a boner for your favorite camp witch. Speaking of
Speaker 1: scrumptious victuals, patron Ethan Potone asks, what's the tastiest thing
Speaker 1: you have roasted? Over a campfire, and Belin Novak asked
Speaker 1: why toasted things are the best things? And Anna Doweiger asks,
Speaker 1: what's the most unique food you've ever roasted over a campfire?
Speaker 1: Alison d wants to know if you have any ancient
Speaker 1: recipes that you have heard of of cooking over fire
Speaker 1: that have stuck with you, and why is the Malleard
Speaker 1: reaction so delicious.
Speaker 2: I would say something that has stuck with me again
Speaker 2: partly because it did not sound terribly appealing, was again
Speaker 2: one of these instances where it seems like there's essentially
Speaker 2: kind of like a bowl shaped depression carved out of
Speaker 2: the ground. It was maybe lined with some sort of
Speaker 2: clay substance, and then then water was boiled in it
Speaker 2: to help get the marrow in the bones to kind
Speaker 2: of ooze out. And you know, I picture this as
Speaker 2: some sort of like ancient horrible jello concoction, just meat jello,
Speaker 2: just meet jello. Yeah. Yeah, So that that has stuck
Speaker 2: with me as as as not. Yeah. Yeah, it's and
Speaker 2: it's when you occasionally people are you know, fantasized about,
Speaker 2: oh I wish I was a cave man, and I'm like, no, no, meat.
Speaker 2: I've seen what they do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you're enjoy your enjoy your flight in the
Speaker 1: middle seat all the more. Yeah, knowing if they served you,
Speaker 1: if they served you gritty sandy meat jello on the flight,
Speaker 1: it would people would be none too pleased, I imagine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean a lot of the bones at
Speaker 2: some of these sites are just really really broken up
Speaker 2: to get at that marrow. You know, it's a really
Speaker 2: important food source and really really I don't know if
Speaker 2: it was desirable in the past. Perhaps an acquired taste,
Speaker 2: but yeah, no, not high on my list of recipes.
Speaker 1: Bone marrow, of course, is full of collagen and fats
Speaker 1: that can be great for us. We have it as
Speaker 1: bone broth, fuh ramen stock soup. It's delicious, sand and
Speaker 1: worms in any of the above and sipping it with
Speaker 1: my cupped, filthy hands, I'll pass. Let's steer the time
Speaker 1: machine to an orgy and disco era Miami instead. Carl
Speaker 1: Ndrez asked what isn't often overseen? Not many know about
Speaker 1: type of effect that fire has had on humans.
Speaker 2: You have to think about even, like, you know, as
Speaker 2: a means of communication across the landscape, with smoke signals
Speaker 2: around the world and stuff like that. So certainly a
Speaker 2: way to increase visibility on the landscape, especially if you
Speaker 2: think about potentially how far apart small groups of hunter
Speaker 2: gatherers would have been and how infrequently they encountered each other.
Speaker 2: And so I mean, that's the interest to me because
Speaker 2: that's you know, kind of the ultimate sort of questions
Speaker 2: you know, that I'm looking at is when you have
Speaker 2: an innovation with whether it's stone tool technology, whether it's
Speaker 2: fire technology, how would that sort of knowledge have spread
Speaker 2: from one group to another? And increasing your visibility on
Speaker 2: the landscape certainly would have been, you know, one way
Speaker 2: to more frequently encounter other groups.
Speaker 1: What were people saying with smoke signals? You ask I
Speaker 1: asked the internet, and billowing fires were used by cultures
Speaker 1: all over the world. They still are. You just pop
Speaker 1: some green wood on a fire, to say, and a
Speaker 1: white puff into the sky. And while different configurations had
Speaker 1: different meanings between groups, the general smoke signal parlance is
Speaker 1: one puff meant attention, two meant all as well, thumbs up,
Speaker 1: and three puffs of smoke or three fires in alignment
Speaker 1: danger trouble, someone please come and help me. Zero puffs
Speaker 1: communicates shoot. I ran out of wood. Can you bring
Speaker 1: some more wood? Probably? I mean it's the first text
Speaker 1: message I'm sure ever sent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean think about you know again, you're
Speaker 2: living in a small group, probably just like your extended family,
Speaker 2: and it's like the holidays all the time. You don't
Speaker 2: see many other people that often. You definitely want to,
Speaker 2: you know, find someone else to date and go off
Speaker 2: and have babies with. Then you know this group that
Speaker 2: you're constantly with, You're just desperate to find other people
Speaker 2: and spread your jeans around to not your family.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, and hopefully someone who has a better recipe
Speaker 1: than gritty gritty meat jello, Amy Shuey, Ashley Butcher and
Speaker 1: IVALI sentchez all. Want to know if you employ the
Speaker 1: saying I hate white rabbits, does that ring a bell
Speaker 1: to you at all?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: Even better, Well, consider this your most valuable archaeological tool.
Speaker 2: Teach me, teach me what? What? What is it? What
Speaker 2: is it?
Speaker 1: Apparently, if smoke from a campfire keeps blowing in your
Speaker 1: face and you say aloud I hate white rabbits to
Speaker 1: stop the smoke, it will stop the smoke from blowing
Speaker 1: in your direction. I didn't know about it either, but
Speaker 1: apparently if smoke gets in your eyes, just say aloud,
Speaker 1: I hate white rabbits. Anyone out there at a campfire,
Speaker 1: you now know you have you have a fix for
Speaker 1: that or where goggles? I imagine? Ps I looked into
Speaker 1: this and this tradition may have started with First Nation
Speaker 1: stories about smoke resembling white rabbits. But if this is
Speaker 1: a false legend, I'm sorry. I tried my best. No money,
Speaker 1: get mad at me. Okay, I have now.
Speaker 2: Been doomed to my kids trying this incessantly at the
Speaker 2: next fire that we are exposed to do.
Speaker 1: So thanks, you're welks. You're welks and speaking of things
Speaker 1: that are not the best. Smoke getting in your eyes.
Speaker 1: But as a pyrotechnologist, as a card carrying Yale researcher
Speaker 1: who can have a business card, this is pyrotechnologist. What
Speaker 1: things sucks the most about what you do? What is
Speaker 1: the hardest part of your job? What is the most vexing?
Speaker 1: Anything you don't like?
Speaker 2: Anything I don't like? I mean, it's one of the
Speaker 2: challenges in you know, increasingly scientific archaeology and anthropology is
Speaker 2: you do have to go to deans and explain, like
Speaker 2: we're running science labs here and when they see that
Speaker 2: they're they've been extraordinarily receptive and supportive. But there is
Speaker 2: that kind of initial reaction of like, oh, you're an archaeologist,
Speaker 2: you need pencils, and and I'm like, no, I need
Speaker 2: you know this like X ray gun two of them.
Speaker 2: But what's what's been good is is when you can
Speaker 2: get these this sort of technology in people's hands, suddenly
Speaker 2: they realize like, oh, of course, so you know if
Speaker 2: you can bring again the nice thing about analytical tools
Speaker 2: that we can bring into the field with us, it
Speaker 2: means we can also carry them to you know, the
Speaker 2: dean's office and say like here, try analyzing this stone tool.
Speaker 2: And by the end they're like, this is so cool.
Speaker 2: Absolutely you need this. So yeah. So sometimes, you know,
Speaker 2: running an increasingly scientific field in what's traditionally envisioned as
Speaker 2: a social science instead of a stem field, it's probably
Speaker 2: maybe the biggest challenge of this job, but not insurmountable,
Speaker 2: you know, it's it's a it's a fun challenge and
Speaker 2: people have been really receptive to it.
Speaker 1: What about the best What do you love the most
Speaker 1: about being a pyrotechnologist.
Speaker 2: I have great students. They keep me on my toes.
Speaker 2: I always want to do really well by these really
Speaker 2: smart people who are always bringing me kind of new
Speaker 2: challenges or questions. And you know, I never quite know
Speaker 2: what aspect of ancient technology some student is going to
Speaker 2: latch onto and want help with. So it might be
Speaker 2: that a student walks in and like, I want to
Speaker 2: study Shung Dynasty Bronze is and I'll be like, great,
Speaker 2: I know nothing about that. But my job is not
Speaker 2: to know everything. It's to not know things and then
Speaker 2: figure out how to answer it. And so, you know,
Speaker 2: then stepping the students through that process of like here's
Speaker 2: how we can go about that process to figure this
Speaker 2: out is a ton of fun. It's a ton of fun.
Speaker 1: You really well are like a detective. Everything's a mystery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean Sherlock Holmes, you know, he
Speaker 2: had the luxury of things happening days or weeks in advance.
Speaker 2: We've got to put a layer of hundreds of thousands
Speaker 2: of years on top of that and deal with it.
Speaker 2: Might be this or that, but but yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: every little bit of evidence were like ancient CSI usually,
Speaker 2: you know, our holographic tables don't work as well as
Speaker 2: on TV.
Speaker 1: You gotta get more funding, man.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So ask Dusty people your burning questions because from what
Speaker 1: I can tell, they really do like being grilled. So
Speaker 1: to learn more about Ellerie's work, his website and his
Speaker 1: social media is linked in the show notes. So is
Speaker 1: the Armenianfund dot org. There's way more links in info
Speaker 1: up at aliward dot com, slash Ologi slash Pyrotechnology that
Speaker 1: is linked in the show notes. You can follow Ologies
Speaker 1: at ologies on Twitter or Instagram. I am Ali Ward
Speaker 1: with one L on both Ologies merch everything from hats
Speaker 1: and toats to masks is available at ologiesmarch dot com.
Speaker 1: Thank you Shannon Feldt as Bonnie Dutch for managing that
Speaker 1: they host the comedy podcast You Are That. Thank you
Speaker 1: Aaron Talbert for managing the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank
Speaker 1: you Emily White of the Wordery for making transcripts available
Speaker 1: on our website for free alongside bleeped episodes. Thank you
Speaker 1: Caleb Patten for leaping. Thank you Kelly Dwyer for making
Speaker 1: aliwar dot com. Thank you Susan Hale and Noel Dilworth
Speaker 1: for all the ologies behind the scenes work. Thanks Zeke
Speaker 1: Rodriguez Thomas and Stephen Ray Morris for helping with asmologies episodes,
Speaker 1: and lead editor Jared Sleeper for putting it all together
Speaker 1: late into the night as I record this from a
Speaker 1: remote Canadian hotel on a shoot. Nick Thorburn wrote the
Speaker 1: theme music and if you stick around and till the
Speaker 1: end of the episode, I tell you secrets. And this morning,
Speaker 1: on my flight to Canada, I was eating these really good,
Speaker 1: like some kind of gluten free chocolate coconut like oh,
Speaker 1: granola bars, and they were so tasty, and I don't
Speaker 1: know what I was thinking, but I offered the guy
Speaker 1: next to be one of them, like they weren't even
Speaker 1: individually wrapped, and I just like had a bag of them,
Speaker 1: and I was like, you know what this is? And
Speaker 1: he was like why no, And I was like I
Speaker 1: just thought they're so good. And then I felt crazy
Speaker 1: and I had to sit there for like two hours,
Speaker 1: like why did I offer this guy who wasn't even
Speaker 1: looking in my direction one of these weird oat balls?
Speaker 1: Why did I think that was a good idea? But
Speaker 1: once I asked the passenger next to me for a hour,
Speaker 1: patch kid, and he gave me the whole rest of
Speaker 1: the bag, saying I was doing him a favor and
Speaker 1: I cherished them. So I don't know. You never know anyway,
Speaker 1: Bye bye pacadermatology, hommeiology, crypto zoology, lithology, Yeah, numinology, meteorology
Speaker 1: and pathology, nathology, zereology, elinology.
Speaker 2: Ye, look what I afraid that I have had fire?
Speaker 2: Ut have that fire