Welcome to this evening's classic episode.Folks, have you ever been to a bog?Matt, Noel, have you guys ever been to a bog?A bog standard bog?
Not the bathroom.No, no, the biome.Ah, yes, of course.No, I have not, but I am quite fond of bog men.
I've found myself in a bog a couple of times.I don't make no Nevermind to me, Matt.
Shout out to our buddy West Givens in 1982, Titusville, Georgia.Our story takes place.
A guy named Steve finds this skull amid the debris of a job site, and it turns out that he just may have discovered one of the oldest grave sites in all of the United States.
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events.You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.A production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.
Welcome back to the show, my name is Matt.Noel is on an adventure.
They call me Ben.We are joined, as always, with our super producer team.Our good buddy Mission Control is on an adventure as well.Perhaps he will tell us about it if he returns safe.
In the meantime, we're joined again with our friends Maya and Seth, both of whom, by the way, spent their respective first days at work. listening to one of our shows and decided to stay on, so thanks for staying.
I mean, they kind of have to, right?That's part of the job, but still, we're glad you're here.
Yeah, and you guys doing all right?Thumbs up, thumbs down?All right.Got some enthusiastic thumbs up.What about you, Matt?How are you?What's going on?
Oh, thumbs decidedly sideways. No, I'm just kidding.No, it's great.We just launched Insomniac, the Monster Presents Insomniac show that we've been working on for a long time.So I'm really excited about that.
And, um, I wanted to ask you, by the way, we haven't talked about it at length, but you just got back from LA on your own adventure.
Yes, that's true.That's true.First, I'd like to shout out to Insomniac.
I'd like to emphasize that is hosted by my longtime friend, your longtime friend as well, a collaborator, my ride or die, Scott Benjamin, who will be appearing on this show very soon, hopefully, if we can get him to work us into his busy schedule.
Yeah, it might even happen before this episode comes out.Who knows?Who knows?
Time is a wonky, controversial thing.So if we assume that time still works the way it did when we recorded this podcast, yes, I was previously in Los Angeles.I was there for a thing called AlienCon.
And I was asked to go there through some friends of ours, fellow podcasters here in our network, Brent and John, who host Hysteria 51.
Long-time listeners will remember them from their previous appearances on this very show, Stuff They Don't Want You to Know.
And I heard you ran into some of the big names in the extraterrestrial world.
Yeah, it was weird, man.I'm not going to lie.It was a trip that became a trip.English is strange, but you get what I'm saying.Yeah, so Giorgio Tsoukalos was there.The guy who is responsible for the fire in the sky story was there.
There were some other big names, some of whom maybe most familiar to people who are already very into the ufology or UFO sighting community.
Eric von Daniken, yes, that's right.Chariots of the Gods.Mm-hmm.Mm-hmm.That is probably one of the biggest ones for me.William Shatner was there.I'm not sure if he was aware that he was there or knew where he was, but he was definitely there.
This is a convention that Seems to take place Numerous cities throughout throughout the year.
There's another one coming up soon in Dallas But we went to check it out to represent our show to do a panel on UFOs and podcasting and then through a series of strange
circumstances, I ended up hosting the costume contest, which was a lot of fun and there were some great costumes.But probably one of the best things there was the ability to meet some of our fellow podcasters.
So I'd like to recommend one podcast I listened to by a guy named Chris Cogswell.It's called the Mad Scientist Podcast.Chris Cogswell is a longtime vet of the UFO community.He's got his stripes, but not just in the world of ufology.
He also has his stripes in the academic towers, the ivory ones.You remember those, Matt.He has a PhD in material science.And so he spends a lot of time looking at the hard science and data behind reports of anomalous
things in the sky or your favorite things in the water, UFOs and USOs alike.
Maybe we'll have them on the show one day, but if you are interested in looking more into the hard science rather than the anecdotes that are so ubiquitous in the world of UFO reporting, then we would highly recommend the Mad Scientist podcast.
Dude, Chris Cogswell has a PhD in chemical engineering with a focus on nanomaterials for absorption and separations.
Oh yeah, what?I know, whoosh, right?And here's the thing, Matt, he's the nicest guy and he's incredibly knowledgeable, so I'd love to get him on the show to talk about the cases that he feels
have the most sand, the cases that he feels are the most compelling.But yep, that was Los Angeles.Almost wish I had stayed because it is here in Atlanta, Georgia, where we record the podcast.It is the weather is best described as tepid soup.
Yeah, that's right.Yeah, running into what do we call it a soaking wet blanket that is 100 degrees and you're just walking into the blanket at all times when you're moving forward.
and it clings to your skin everywhere.
And then the mosquitoes arrive.Yes, yes, right on cue.So if you're listening to this and you are in the southeast of the United States, good luck. And as they say on Michelin web, remain indoors.
Remain calm and indoors.Yes.Very good.
Tell us about your adventures.How has the weather changed over time, maybe over the year or since you were a wee tyke of your own.
You don't have to wait for the whole podcast and forget you can pause and you can call us now to let us know what you think.
Yes, but make sure you pull over before you do so. If you're driving.Yes, yeah, this is not a YOLO moment.Now it is.Now it is.Yep, right now is a YOLO moment.Now it's gone.So too bad.I hope you caught a hold of that while it occurred.
Now you're cursed to live many times.That's correct.So what do you say, Ben?Let's give him the phone number.We are 1-833-STDWYTK.Seriously, leave a message.We will see it.
Somebody, I'm not going to name names, Jennifer, left eight messages last night.Eight consecutive messages starting around 11 o'clock p.m.
That's great.So it sounds like we have another call-in show in the future.
Yeah, there's a whole episode of Just Jennifer, like, addressing Jennifer's concerns.
Should we call it Just Jennifer?
Yeah, it's Just Jennifer.
Jennifer, I hope that you are okay with those messages being mentioned on air.If not, this is your time to let us know at the number Matt and I already repeated.
So we're talking a little bit about the future, but today's episode is largely centered on the past. William Faulkner, the author, not just some guy, William Faulkner was fond of saying the past isn't dead.It isn't even past.
And that's something that's come up on this show before.Because while it might sound like one of those clever glib quips that people say on a late night talk show, there is serious grit to this notion.
The discipline that we call history is not some pursuit of static set in stone events.It's an attempted understanding.The discipline instead is at its best a conversation between the present and the past, between the living and the dead.
History is alive and like all living things, history appears to change over time simply because of our understanding of it.And I know this sounds abstract, but the effects are concrete and they are very real.
Research has proven things that were once considered myths or legends were indeed real people, places and events.
This is not 100% consistent, but this happens frequently enough that we can, as a species, surmise that we have no real standing upon which to base our confidence. in the story of humanity or the story of the planet in a lot of ways.
Yeah, besides the best efforts of archaeologists and historians who are attempting to track all that stuff down, again, it's just the best version that we know at this moment.
Right, right, which is how all science should work.
So examples that are going to be very familiar to a lot of us long-time listeners out there, the coelacanth, that's living history that was for a long time considered extinct, for a long time considered a cryptid, very well known to the people who had lived in the area for thousands and thousands of years.
But then Western people found it and said, oh, we rediscovered this once extinct creature.
Yeah, again, to the knowledge of the people who keep the records, it was gone.
Right.That's very important distinction.And then the other famous example we often cite would be the city of Troy, which is the perfect example.Until fairly recently, you know, in the past few hundred years, Troy was considered a myth.
entirely made up thing.There were people who were creating huge academic research initiatives on Troy as a metaphor for something.Or what was Troy a code name for or whatever.It turns out there was a real city of Troy.
This guy was not a professional archaeologist found it.People didn't believe them for a while. Because of course, we'd all decided Troy was made up.
That's right.And as we're going to find out a little later today in this episode, another find that was not initially discovered by any kind of archaeologist or someone going out to study it, it was just stumbled upon.
And similarly, we just found a story coming out of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where there was a brand new palace that was discovered because of drought that was occurring in a reservoir there.
Yeah, at the Mosul Dam Reservoir on the banks of the Tigris River.As we were coming in to record today, we learned about this.Maya, Seth, did you guys hear about this? Okay.So there's a palace.It's almost 3,500 years old.
We never would have found it except for the drought that dramatically lowered water levels.It appears to be a palace from the Mitanni Empire, which is one of the least researched empires of the ancient Near East. We had no idea it existed.
We're not sure, we as a species, not us recording, we're not sure when it went to ruin, how it ended up underwater in this dam, and we don't know exactly what we will learn about this.
This is interesting because this is where archaeology and folklore may come to collaborate, kind of have an Avengers assemble thing, you know, happening just like in a Marvel movie, because this is where some folklorist and anthropologist may be able
to glean some knowledge or leads from oral history, which I think it's downplayed a lot, but it leads us to some important things, you know.
Oh, definitely.And not to get away from that too much, but one of the coolest things that was found there were these 10 clay tablets that actually had cuneiform
written on them that were still preserved after being underwater for that long, which was somewhat surprising to me.
But again, as we're going to learn in this episode, water and certain types of water have a way of preserving like the pH balance of the water.
What else is like inside that water as far as plant life and material go can preserve the heck out of things.
We also learned some very gross things about Florida.Just climate-wise, not a statement about the state nor the people living there.And if you're listening, thanks for tuning in.This may be news to you.
In today's episode, you see, we are going to explore a bizarre example of hidden history, one not in the Middle East.Instead, it's going to be in the, comparatively speaking, the backyard of the West, right?
Our tale begins on an ordinary Florida day near the intersection of Interstate 95 and State Road 50.This is fairly close to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.In the 1980s, this intersection is the sort of place you drive by without a second look.
especially if you're in the sweltering days of summer, because we have to remember the air turns to soup in Florida too.
Yeah, it's just, it's a huge interstate and a state road.Okay, great.
Maybe there's a gas station.
Not really a photo opportunity.If you drove by on the right day in 1982, You might note the construction occurring as crews work to clear the nearby land and build what would later become the Wendover Farms subdivision.
You might even, if you're slow enough, your eyes are sharp and you're on the lookout for some reason, if you're a very alert driver, you might even see a backhoe operator named Steve Vanderjagt, who was working to clear out an area around a nearby pond.
Yeah.He was just on his backhoe doing everything he was supposed to be doing, clearing out part of the, again, it's kind of a bog.This pond that we're talking about is, it's swampy, swampy.It's just that, that kind of Florida.
It reminds me of the Everglades a little bit, but it's, it's a little different.So anyway, he's just going, he's using his backhoe and, oh, you know what?This would be, this would be a perfect Florida man story.
This would be a perfect Florida man story.Yeah. Let's give it a try.Florida man's backhoe stumbles upon ancient skull.
There we go.I also like attributing the action to the backhoe because it sounds as if he just left it running.Yeah, exactly.So it's true.In 1982, Steve found what, while he was cleaning stuff out, he saw what he thought was maybe a round brown rock.
And a rock would be unusual in this terrain.So he stops working.He starts digging through the muck and the mud and the swampy stuff that you were mentioning, Matt.The mucky muck.The mucky muck.That's the technical term.And he picks up this object.
He makes his way over and he picks it up, wipes off some of the stuff.You can't see it, folks, but I'm miming his actions here.And then he turns around this object, this smooth, round rock.
to find two equally round, empty eye sockets staring back at him.And that's when Steve realizes this is not a rock, this is a skull.And he's not an expert, but it looks pretty old.
Well, yeah, it does.It looks a little old, but again, who knows how old it is.
So imagine you're Steve and you find a skull while you're working, you have to call the police and report finding a skull because there's a possibility that this may be, you know, a homicide or a missing person or something to that effect.
So that was exactly what he did.And then they continued looking because they're still working in this area.It's not like you just immediately stop. all the construction there because of a skull.
You definitely pause for a moment, again, call the police, and then maybe keep going.But they started finding a lot more skulls, a lot more bones, again, inside the bucket of the backhoe where he was working.
Right.The site supervisor is the first person that Steve contacts and they say, okay, is this a murder?We have to call the police.And then they look in the bucket of Steve's backhoe and they find more skulls.
So he had apparently been digging up some remains before he was aware of it.And when they realized they were looking at multiple bodies, they immediately knew something was up.
Now this is where two things could have happened, and it all depends on a fellow named Jim Swan.Jim Swan was the developer of the subdivision, and he could do one of two things.He could, like many unscrupulous developers, just pay off the crew,
suppress the news of the find and carry over with the construction of Wendover Farms.And that is, you know, like that's a plot point in the horror film Poltergeist, right?Well, debatably, the horror themed family film Poltergeist.There you go.
Yes.Building on top of an ancient burial ground of sorts.
Right.And that that only enters fiction because that has really happened in multiple instances, not just here in the US, but many places abroad.
Jim, for one reason or another, hopefully because he's a decent human being, maybe because he's afraid of legal action.We don't know.Jim decides to halt all the work, just like you were talking about, Matt.He says, OK, this is not a pause.
We're stopping everything.Shut it down.We have to contact the experts.We have to determine the provenance of these bones.More importantly, I have to figure out what we do next.
I've got millions sunk in the subdivision, probably, at this point, you know.I was hoping that I could, you know, construct it and not go bankrupt.
But maybe there's another way here.There's something else to do.So he immediately reaches out to Florida State University to see if there's anyone on staff there that can come over and help assist identifying these bones.
And they speak to Dr. Glenn Doran, D-O-R-A-N, And again, he's a staff member of the Florida State University, an archaeologist.
He shows up on the scene and initially he's looking at these bones and he's thinking, oh, wow, these are preserved pretty well.They are old.I can tell they're old.
And one of the first things he sees are the teeth and he notices that they've been ground down, naturally ground down just through wear and tear, not the way, you know, if someone was going to physically injure you and hurt your teeth or something.
Trevor Burrus, J.D.: Or filing them or anything.Jason Kuznicki, Ph.D.
: Yeah, it was just natural wear and tear on the teeth. to the point where he realized that from an archaeologist standpoint, these must be thousands of years old or at least that's what he believes.
Right.He surmised initially from his own just on the scene assessment that these bones were from a Native American population, according to him, due primarily to the dentation and due to what he thought that told him about the age.
So he said these are perhaps a thousand years old.He arranged for carbon dating test.This was financed by Swan and Swan's company, EKS Corporation, and they were shocked by the results.What were those results?
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Okay, now when we left you, we were talking about Duran and the carbon dating tests that were going to be done on the bones and the teeth and everything that were found there at the Windover site. And there's the company EKS Corporation.
They are doing this, this carbon dating, and they were shocked when they realized the bones were indeed more than a thousand years old.In fact, the human remains uncovered at this site were somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 years old.
That makes them 3,200 years older than King Tutankhamen. and 2,000 years older than the Great Pyramids of Giza themselves in Egypt.
It's incredible to imagine in Florida bones of this age were found and then carbon dated to show that yes, in fact, they are that old.
And these were also modern human beings.This was not one of the early mixtapes of humanity like Neanderthal or something like that.Erectus.Right, right, right, exactly.7,000 and 8,000 years old.This is on the east coast of Florida.
Everything that is commonly accepted about the spread of the human species argues that the human species by and large arrived at North and South America, what we call those two continents today, by crossing the Bering land bridge over what is now the Bering Strait.
And that, in case anyone's not familiar, that is in the But the most opposite corner of the continent that one could imagine, it is in the far, far, far northwest.And Cape Canaveral, far, far southeast.So what's going on?
They spent two years trying to dig this up.Overall, there were three archaeological digs conducted there between 1984 and 1986. They ended up finding more than 200 distinct intact burials.And you'll hear a couple of different numbers thrown around.
One will be they found more than 200 burials.One will be like they found more than 168 bodies.And part of that is because of the extreme length of time that these folks were literally, poor choice of words on my part, bogged down.
Things shift, the bones may get jumbled, but the weird thing is that despite being in there for almost 10,000 years, the better part of 10,000 years, the bodies have been ritualistically buried and with maybe a few exceptions, they were all placed in the same position.
They were in a fetal position, lying on their left side, their heads were pointed west and their faces up to the north.In some cases, the necks were broken to get this.
God, we don't know why we can we can we can speculate at best that this shows us some sort of belief in the afterlife and ritualistic burial.
The deceased were also wrapped in what archaeologists believe is the oldest existing woven fabric in the world, which is, you know, when you think of the oldest thing in the world, you think of something in Africa and in the fertile crescent somewhere near the
Right, or maybe, yeah, or maybe Middle East, right?Think of something on that continent or in the Middle East.You don't really think, and it's not a ding, again, on Florida, but you don't think, oh, yeah, Florida, that's where it is.
Yeah.The oldest fabric ever in Florida.In my mind, it would just be an old beach towel, the first one that was ever used, you know, created in like Myrtle Beach or Daytona Beach or something.
Wouldn't it be amazing if it also had a ancient drawing of a cartoon mouse.
But the mouse is probably better.
No, no, it's fine.Let's find both of them.Let's just write this.Let's just write this story.It just says salt life on it.It just says salt life.We'll write this story.We'll bury it somewhere.Yeah.And thousands of years from now.
A Florida man will discover it with his backhoe. Boom, full circle.Well, that's our show, folks.Thanks for tuning in.I think we did some meaningful work today.Yeah, we did find that there were grave goods, though.That's what they're called.
Yeah.And it's not even the most odd thing that was found here, this oldest fabric, because It's the way that this stuff was used and it's puzzling to me.
Help me understand this a little better, Ben, because my understanding is that the bodies were actually submerged into the water on purpose using some piece of technology, essentially, like a tool of some sort.
Yeah.So, they were buried in this fetal position with certain body parts corresponding to certain directions.And then branches would be lashed together over them to create a tripod.Yeah.
Which kept the bodies in that fetal position from floating up and to prevent them from floating to the top of that tripod. They had this woven fabric is essentially functioning as a funeral shroud.
And a wooden stake would be hammered in or somehow thrust through the fabric of the shroud, which I'm just calling it a shroud, into the bed of the pond so that they would
they being the bodies would not float up to the top of the wooden formation that was keeping them submerged.And the reason they had to do this is because
But when the body would decompose, it would begin to float because it would begin to fill with gas and air.
The practical step here is that it ultimately protects the bodies from the many, many scavengers in the area, mostly animals, but there would probably be some grave robbers understandably as well.
And it kept them in that intended, again, very purposeful position.
Yeah.Seems like a ritualistic, perhaps religious position. Man, that to me is fascinating.Just the concept that that long ago you would...
Again, maybe this is that thing we always talk about when we discuss European settlers going to parts of Africa and discovering these ancient ruins and they think, oh, there's no way that they could have an understanding about the certain geometry here or this or that, that like terrible belief, the institutionalized racism that has occurred over all those years.
I worry that I'm having a little bit of that when I'm trying to imagine, you know, people 8,000 years ago creating an underwater burial almost to preserve the bodies.
Maybe perhaps they had no understanding that they were actually preserving the bodies by doing this, but that's in fact what they were doing, using all of these tools and mechanisms.I mean, it's baffling and it's also really, really cool.
Right, yeah.The institutionalized racism that has to a great degree stifled scientific progress for centuries.
It's still alive and well in a lot of places and sometimes unintentional, I would argue.I saw a little bit of that at AlienCon, to be candid with you.But you're right here.
Generally speaking, when people inter or get rid of the bodies of their dead and their loved ones or even their hated ones, The thing is that you don't want to see him forever, especially if you love someone or they're meaningful to your life.
You want to help them into the afterlife.That's the way it's usually phrased.And that'll be like by burial.Maybe in some parts of the world, there will be a.
You'll be consumed by carnivorous birds, which I think is sky burial is probably the coolest.Cremation, right?Things like that.The idea is that you don't want them to come back.You don't want to see
If their software is gone, you don't want to be haunted by their hardware, which is why it's such an ancient psyop to take the bodies of dead enemies and display them where their living can see them.
But then others want to preserve the body as much as they can because the belief is that that body will have to come back.
Right.Yeah.And to certain rules, right?So that's why we have the preservation of organs in some societies.
And also when we go into a secular world, a lot of times there's this interpretation or I would say this assumption that burial rituals are all religiously based, which is not the case.
I mean, think about all the time spent embalming linen, you know, in the days of the USSR. It was not really a religion, but it took the place of a religion because it was a symbol, you know?
Lennon, not linen.In my head, I heard a linen.
Oh, yes.Sorry.L-E-N-I-N.Perhaps my Tennessee accent.
It was linen and linen in Lennon.Yes. In Leningrad.That's right.Yeah.All right.We solved the case.But we're saying all this to give maybe a little bit more anthropological perspective.
One of the most important points you made, Matt, that we shouldn't skip over is whether or not the people who were interring folks this way knew it, what they ended up doing was preserving the bodies of their loved ones.
for thousands and thousands of years because the peat bog is an anaerobic environment, which means that a lot of the rules of decomposition, which are air and oxygen dependent, will not play out the same way.
Also, the fact that it's a peat bog means that there's a pH balance that's tremendously conducive to preserving things.
Yeah.And there's not a lot, you know, if it's in the ocean or something or somewhere that has a current, there's not a lot of physical movement occurring there.
And the biggest variable is the rising and lowering of the water essentially in these places depending on drought or the amount of rain.And that pH balance too, man. Oh God, it's so cool to me.Okay, so... It feels purposeful, right?
To find something with all those factors.
Like we've been doing this for so long, we know that this is the place to bury people and this is how we will do it.As though it's been 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 years.At least the practice, right?And the site itself, as we'll come to find,
was active for a very, very long time before it was forgotten and almost became the non-consensual foundation of a suburb.
We know that the environment of Florida was very challenging, remains very challenging for preservation and we can explore that in a little bit.Right now let's talk about the life of the people who lived in this prehistoric time.
About half of the remains found at Wendover, again that's anywhere from 168 to 200 something people, were children.Not all, the oldest people found in the site were around 60 years old.
unlike the human remains found in European bogs, you know, you might think of something in like Ireland or Scotland or something. Unlike those remains, the bodies in Florida were only skeletons.There was no flesh on the bones.
And again, a lot of that has to do with the climate of Florida.
I was going to say, yeah, the temperature is going to make a big difference there.
And as you get closer to the equator, you will see increasingly inhospitable environments for preservation.But also, think of how rare these places are.
If you go back a few centuries when there was much more forest land and jungle land in the world, those ecosystems, those biomes are hungry.They eat things.They're still eating cities.
I think a lot of us would be surprised at how much maintenance goes on into just keeping even what you think of as a metropolis alive from one year to the next.
Yeah.Can you imagine in Atlanta if we didn't have a kudzu team going out there every day working their tails off?
I love the kudzu, man.I think about it a lot and how quickly it would grow.Yeah.I'm just kidding.
I don't think there's an official Atlanta kudzu team. Maybe there is.If you work for the official Atlanta Kudzu, what do we call it?Kudzu task force?Yeah, let us know.
There's got to be one.I mean, yeah, there are definitely ongoing wars.Kudzu is an excellent example.There are ongoing efforts to prevent the spread of kudzu, which is technically an invasive species, right?Yeah.But adapted amazingly well.
So, we know a little bit about what these people's lives were like, but the same environment of Florida, which makes it so difficult to preserve bodies or buildings, let alone books and so on, also teaches us about how they were buried.
Because despite the fact that there was no flesh on the bones, about half of the skulls, 90, 91 or so, contained brain matter.
It's pretty gruesome, but it also means that they were buried within, at the very most, at the very upper limit, they were in the pond, interred within 48 hours of expiring.
Because if they were out in the Florida environment any time after that, their brain would have liquefied.Because that's what Florida does to dead people. It's true.
We also got to look at their stomach contents.Right.And that's tricky because you're saying, well, there's no flesh.
Yeah, we're approximating because it looked like it was digested.We learned that for one corpse, they had been eating primarily fish.
And berries and the ground down teeth that you mentioned earlier, Matt, show us similar to – it's a thing Egyptologists have found before as well.
In places where people live around a lot of sand, the sand gets into your food and it naturally grits down your teeth. They didn't have cavities.
They didn't have cavities.Well, and you have to imagine it's only over a span of 60 years and there's absolutely, you know, no dental work being done.There's nothing, there's no way to help clean or fix your teeth when things are going wrong.
And that sand just takes it out quickly.
Yeah.We also know that even though their lives were very difficult, they were also very caring with their community.
And this is a big thing that maybe doesn't occur to a lot of people when we think of ancient societies, but one of the huge leaping points or one of the huge breakthroughs, a watershed moment
in evolution was the idea of caring for the injured and the dead, which is something higher cognition entities do.So, not necessarily just mammals, you know what I mean?There are some birds that will care for the injured.
And of course, their cetaceans are still mammals, but who knows, maybe there's an octopus, Uh, hospital.Yeah, maybe.
But I see exactly what you're saying.
In an organized humanoid society, a human society, taking care of someone who's incapacitated, who cannot contribute to, you know, the wealth, essentially the health and wealth of your tribe, your group, then, you know, for a certain time, there's no reason to have
that person besides to, you know, keep them around because you love them, right?Or you care about them.Or because you're a decent, savior creature.
Well, yeah, but if you think about it from the most basic needs of a human, like a singular human as well as a group of humans, it's a, that's a choice that what you're saying is it only comes along
with the higher cognition, the really thinking about essentially good, like doing good.
Well, I would say also, this is going to sound very cold, biologically speaking, an individual human has zero value.Unless something can reproduce asexually, an individual of any species has zero value in terms of the big picture.
So a group – things that can care for one another in groups may lose a couple checkers games but they will win the chess game.Right?So we do know that they were playing this chess game, right?
We found several examples of people who would have died quite quickly and probably quite painfully had they not have folks caring for them.And this again is a huge hallmark of what we would call modern humanity.
Yeah, there's an older woman and she was perhaps around 50 years old.It's kind of an estimation there.But she showed signs of having broken bones, like several of them, to the point where this person is not going to survive if it's 8,000 years ago.
But she did for a while at least while she was being taken care of.The fractures occurred several years before she died.So that's how you know somebody was doing a lot for this person.
And it really means that there are other villagers, other humans around her that helped her even, even when she could no longer contribute.And that's really what we're saying.
There was another body of a 15 year old boy, at least again, an estimated 15 year old boy that showed he was a victim of spina bifida, which is something intense to encounter in modern day with modern day medicine.
You can only imagine what it was like then.
Right.Spina bifida is a birth defect that occurs when the cord of your spine and your actual spine don't form properly.
It used to be considered a pediatric illness, even relatively recently, meaning that if you survive into adulthood, you would just still continue to see your pediatric doctor. This kid made it to 15, so he was well on his way to becoming an adult.
They also saw various different tools.Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking things is that every single child that was buried there was buried with a couple of toys. How much more human can you get?
We have to ask ourselves, okay, these are people, but who were these people?Where did they come from and how did they get there?How, perhaps even more importantly, did they become lost to time for more than 7,000 years?
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Here's where it gets crazy.
First, this was not a mass grave, just a place where bodies were thrown just because someone had died and it was done.We've already established that these bodies are placed there on purpose and in a way that it is meaningful.It's not a massacre.
It didn't all die at the same time.
And we also know that this is likely not a matter of some kind of sacrifice, some kind of ritual that was done to put these people out of their misery or for worship of some other deity or being or something like that.
Trevor Burrus And we know this because of the way in which they were interred and because of the – The nature of ritualistic human sacrifice usually indicates – or usually is predicated upon a similar method of death.
So someone is ritualistically strangled by the Thuggee cult or someone has – is vivisected, right, somewhere in Mesoamerica or something.
This, or in the case of bogs in Europe, someone has their throat cut and then they're tied up, tossed in a bog, right?This doesn't seem to be the case here.
One of the reasons, one of the biggest here's where it gets crazy moments in this Wendover investigation, which has again been going on since the early 1980s, not 1880s as far as we know, hinges on the concept of DNA.
And this goes back a little bit to what you were talking about, Matt.
You will hear some folks including members of academia here in 2019 arguing that the DNA tests conducted on the remains indicated that these people were descended from Europeans rather than the far eastern – the far eastern groups that migrated out of Siberia, right?
Or through Siberia.This would be a huge discovery. But the question is, is it true?First, we have to remember the only way they could find anything close enough to try to analyze would be that brain matter.The marrow is probably long gone.
And the DNA's rate of decay makes it a lot like, forget trying to find a needle in a haystack, it's trying to find a lottery ticket in a haystack and hoping that it wins.
Well, yeah, and you have to find multiple lottery tickets because you can't just test one subject and say, oh, this whole group of people, they're definitely European.
Right.And in the past, people have been way too quick to do that.There's a geneticist named Joseph Lorenz from the Coriell Institute for Medical Research.
He was searching for DNA markers that he thought were typical of Native Americans and the DNA samples taken from the bones of five different people in Wendover. So they did – let me correct myself there.
They did find at least something in the bones they could use.He didn't find what he was looking for.He did not find those common markers he thought would be extant. And so he compared the Wendover DNA results he had to present European populations.
And this is what he said.I went back to the screen and looked at the sequences again.The first person's DNA, it looked European.When I looked at the second one, it looked European.
When I looked at the third, the fourth and the fifth, it was slightly different from the first two, but they looked European.
So there are three common presumptions that are inherent and intrinsic in every interpretation of the Wendover DNA.The first is the assumption that one combination of DNA haplogroups typifies all Native American populations.It's demonstrably untrue.
There's been well-documented Polynesian DNA material found in skeletons in Northwest Mexico as well as Southern California.There are early populations of South America that also don't necessarily fit that assumption.
Also, there are no DNA text markers for a lot of indigenous people in Southeastern US.The research wasn't quite there at the time.
And then there's the Yuchi group, which has consistently stated, again, in folklore and the importance of oral storytelling, that their ancestors crossed the Atlantic to the Savannah River.
These are, you'll hear them called the oldest indigenous peoples in the southeast.Their migration legend states that they found evidence of an earlier people who had lived in the Savannah River basin before them.
I think it's clutching at straws because that's anecdotal, you know what I mean?But that doesn't mean there's not a grain of truth to it.
And this whole DNA exploration is where things get so sticky because for some more conspiratorially minded people, this was seen as a goldmine.It was proof that there could be some previously unidentified migration patterns in ancient human history.
It's true.There are.We're going to find more as we learn more about the expansion of the species.But I don't know.There's a thing that used a lot of Weasley word language that we found describing this.And we've got a quote here.
Yes.This comes from About Archaeology.
Although scientists believed they had retrieved DNA from the fairly intact brain matter recovered from some of the human burials, subsequent research has shown that the mtDNA lineages reported are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations studied to date.
Further attempts to retrieve more DNA have failed, and an amplification study has shown that there is no analyzable DNA left at the Wendover burials.
So, let's unpack this quickly.What this shows is that scientists did at one point get some DNA material from one or more of the brains.Definitely more, one would hope.
And they found that the mitochondrial DNA lineage reported didn't match what we knew about other Native American populations, right?So, then they said,
We've tried, or other people have tried, to grab more DNA material, and they can't get it, and we think there's no more left, so we shot our shot, basically.Shot our shot, and we got more questions than answers.
However, this thing we just read from about archaeology, well, several people take exception to this, including someone, a researcher named Gary Carson, and we have a quote from him.
Yeah.Yeah.He unpacks this stuff and he says, I've read this particular passage two or three times and it's a masterpiece of hand waving and misdirection.He's a little steamed about it.Yeah.That last part was me.
The article makes it sound like DNA wasn't discovered after all, but it goes on to say that MTA DNA lineages were discovered.
That's mitochondrial DNA and subsequently analyzed, but then dismisses the analysis because it doesn't match the expected results.
specifically because it didn't connect the Wendover Bog People with other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations.
In other words, according to Gary, the DNA results couldn't be accurate because they didn't show that the Bog People were Native Americans.
So he's not necessarily arguing some secret migration from some hitherto unmentioned land, but he is saying that
these people may be committing one of the big sins of critical thinking, which is throwing out stuff that doesn't fit your preconceived notion.There's a facial reconstruction project that you can see.
Google Wendover Woman online, and they don't appear European, but a lot of facial reconstruction like that is interpretive, right?I mean, we didn't know dinosaurs had feathers.
We didn't.Forever.But we figured it out because somebody just decided one day that they had feathers.That's honestly what happened.
I was like, dude, these guys got feathers.
That was you.It was me.I should have been on that call.
When I grew up, dinosaurs were just all green or brown or gray.
Yeah.Eighties kids dinosaurs are green, brown, gray.Maybe a little tan, light brown, but now they're just multicolored.They got feathers.I don't believe it.I'm just kidding.I think it's wonderful what we're learning.
Paleontologists teach us awesome things.
Are you against it?No, I love it.You think there should be a bright line between Pokemon and dinosaurs?No.Is that what you're saying?
No.I choose you, Pachycephalosaurus.
Great.So there are other opinions here, one that argues – one that bases its argument on the timeline.
So time estimates for the arrival of certain genomes or genetic material are 12,000, 36,000 years ago depending on the number of assumed founders and this supports the conclusion that people harboring this haplogroup,
this weird one that sticks out, right?We're among the original founders of Native American populations.
To date, haplogroup X, as this guy William Houseworth is calling it, has not been unambiguously identified in Asia, which would have been the origin point.
And to this author raises the possibility that some of these Native American founding populations had ancestors somewhere else.So ultimately came to what we recognize as Florida today through some other migration pattern.
As the internet likes to say, big if true.Big if true.Big if true.But is it true?
At this point, it seems experts are still debating the origin of the ancient Wendover population and occasionally, if you read closely, accusing one another of having an agenda, which is not at all unusual.
Yeah, I mean, that's pretty darn common when it comes to things like this.
And it's an important debate.It's one we should treat with extreme seriousness primarily because of the point you raised, Matt, which is a fundamental point that is all too often skipped over.
The human species has a long, long, incredibly unfortunate history of institutionalized racism. Attempting to shoehorn insert favorite group here into so many things from pyramids to the ruins of empires to the creation of civilization.
You know what I mean?And this is not just a practice of one sect of people from one part of the world, nor is it the practice of one discipline.
Trevor Burrus And just to take it back to AlienCon, we see it perpetuated there, where if Europeans of some sort didn't have anything to do with this, well then it must be aliens making all of these ancient sites.
Peter Van Doren And to – in the defense of people who will make those arguments, typically nowadays they're not just arguing something based on that.They'll also say Stonehenge, how could ancient people have made that?Look at those.They're big.
That's the biggest rock I ever saw. It's true.I'm not quoting, I'm paraphrasing.
It's true.It's just something we cannot stress enough that is – it's highly important and remember it when you read things about this stuff.
It leads us almost full circle here, Matt, because what we're talking about is underestimating ancient people. which we should never do.These are modern human beings.
Humanity is slowly evolving but people thousands of years ago were as smart and as capable of invention and ingenuity as people are today. this is where it gets us to a weird spot.
And this is maybe where we end today's conversation to hear from you folks.
If, you know, if we accept that it's absolutely true that ancient peoples could, through their own ingenuity and their own MacGyver-ness, build things like Stonehenge, like pyramids, like Catalhoyuk and so on,
Doesn't that mean we also need to be open to the idea that that same ingenuity could be applied to migration and travel?
Absolutely.Especially over water.
Especially over water. and that's our classic episode for this evening.
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