Speaker 1: I cannot wait to begin our exodus from this gray country,
Speaker 1: said Asthma. Yes, my Matmor. The people of Teneratic death too, seriously.
Speaker 1: There's no room for the bailful arts here, and truth
Speaker 1: be told, they do not deserve our necromatic skills. I
Speaker 1: concur and agree wholeheartedly. If the people here insist on
Speaker 1: taking such a sacred stance on expiration, then fine. Good
Speaker 1: luck talking to the dead and raising skeletons from the
Speaker 1: grave without us around. Indeed, I wish them luck too
Speaker 1: in the completion of the canal project without our splendid
Speaker 1: bone golumns to do the heavy lifting. Yes, they lack vision,
Speaker 1: I shall not miss them, Yes, good bones, though strong
Speaker 1: dairy industry here, I will miss the calcium well, yes,
Speaker 1: but but but our destination will first of all be
Speaker 1: free of their hyper religious nonsense, and it is filled
Speaker 1: with the remains as well, For sinsor is populated exclusively
Speaker 1: by the bones and mummies of a people ten centuries dead. No,
Speaker 1: at more, we shall build such an empire of necromancy. Oh. Yes,
Speaker 1: flying buttresses made from actual ixia and coxyges, a vast
Speaker 1: amphitheater of gladiators reanimated mummies serving us delicacies on silver trays,
Speaker 1: skull goblets of wine and all to the music of
Speaker 1: piping bone flutes, or a public bathwork made entirely of
Speaker 1: Maxillayan mandibles, twin thrones crafted of coiling vertebrae, Hell to
Speaker 1: our powers of bones. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
Speaker 1: The production of My Heart Radio. Hey, are you welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb,
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. I I know today's
Speaker 1: episode at you in a necromantic adventure mood. So you
Speaker 1: dove into the old Clark Ashton Smith, didn't you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I saw that we were going to be doing
Speaker 1: an episode titled The Bone Palace about novel uses for
Speaker 1: bones throughout human and to a certain extent, animal history,
Speaker 1: my mind instantly went to necromancers, and so I instantly
Speaker 1: thought of Clark Ashton Smith's excellent little short story, The
Speaker 1: Empire of the Necromancers, And so the cold open we
Speaker 1: began with that little skit. It was basically a riff
Speaker 1: on on that particular tail and the characters in it,
Speaker 1: in which we find a couple of necromancers packing up
Speaker 1: shop leaving of the city in the world of the
Speaker 1: living in order to set up like a decadent necromantic
Speaker 1: playground in the desert. You know, you think that they
Speaker 1: would need to stay at least around some of the
Speaker 1: living to do business, right, Like, you can't just like
Speaker 1: be a necromancer inside a pyramid, Like there's a lot
Speaker 1: to work with, but nobody to work for, right, I mean?
Speaker 1: And yeah, and then when you actually get into necromancy
Speaker 1: as it's treated in a lot of fantasy, you know,
Speaker 1: it's about not only death but life. It's about the
Speaker 1: cross of between the two. And so I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of these tales. A lot of Clark
Speaker 1: Ashton Smith's tales are at once very you know, very
Speaker 1: deep and exotic feeling. You know, they have this this
Speaker 1: dark otherworldliness to them, and yet there's often a little
Speaker 1: cheekiness as well. There's a sort of strange humor to them.
Speaker 1: And I think that's that's evident in his original story, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, if you want to read it out there,
Speaker 1: you can find it online for free at Eldric Dark
Speaker 1: dot com. I believe they have all of Clark Ashton
Speaker 1: Smith's writings assembled there well, so obviously a palace made
Speaker 1: out of bones, a bone building, would be a necromancer's dream.
Speaker 1: But it's hard to imagine such a place existing in reality,
Speaker 1: or at least it would have been for me a
Speaker 1: few days ago. But now maybe, um, maybe that should
Speaker 1: not be so hard to imagine, because I want to
Speaker 1: start off today by going on a voyage of the
Speaker 1: mind's eye to to venture into the prehistoric past. Will
Speaker 1: you come with me, Robert, let us go to a
Speaker 1: place that is almost a necromantic kingdom. Uh. It's a
Speaker 1: place that is today in southwestern Russia. This would be
Speaker 1: about five hundred kilometers south of Moscow, uh, close to
Speaker 1: the banks of the Don River, near the modern day
Speaker 1: city of Voronesh. And today this area is is basically
Speaker 1: kind of a fertile region of prairie type ecosystems, relatively
Speaker 1: moderate continental climate. It's a major center of agriculture in
Speaker 1: modern Russia. Actually, I think they grow staple crops like
Speaker 1: sugar beets and potatoes, and they do animal agriculture as
Speaker 1: well there. But twenty thousand years ago there was still
Speaker 1: an ice age ruling the planet, and especially these northern
Speaker 1: realms of the planet. The most recent ice Age, known
Speaker 1: scientifically is the Last Glacial Period or l g P,
Speaker 1: lasted from more than a hundred thousand years ago I
Speaker 1: think maybe roughly like a hundred and twenty thousand years
Speaker 1: ago or so to roughly twelve thousand years ago, and
Speaker 1: this was the last great glaciation of the broader Pleistocene Age,
Speaker 1: which began more like two and a half million years ago.
Speaker 1: So the Pleistocene Age has featured this back and forth
Speaker 1: pattern over over geological time, this pattern of repeated glaciation
Speaker 1: events where for thousands of years at a time, the
Speaker 1: world will grow cold and the polar ice caps will
Speaker 1: creep down over the map towards the equator, like this
Speaker 1: sort of slow paint drip of frozen death. And then
Speaker 1: these glacial periods will be followed by warmer interglacial periods,
Speaker 1: sort of like with the one we think we're in
Speaker 1: right now, where the ice sheets retreat back toward the
Speaker 1: polls and complex life pours back into these ice paved
Speaker 1: landscapes that are left behind. Now, of course this sounds
Speaker 1: very apocalyptic, but again remember that these changes happen over
Speaker 1: like many thousands of years, so you know, generally humans
Speaker 1: and animals have have time to sort of adapt in
Speaker 1: migrate back and forth to adjust their lives to the
Speaker 1: changing climates. The interglacial period that we're in right now
Speaker 1: is known as the Holocene epoch, and since it began
Speaker 1: more than ten thousand years ago, this relatively warm Holocene
Speaker 1: includes all of recorded human history. Think about that. We
Speaker 1: have no surviving literature at all with firsthand accounts of
Speaker 1: what these little ice ages were like, but there absolutely
Speaker 1: were humans around at the time. There were humans, humans
Speaker 1: like us, crawling the earth during these frozen periods. Homo
Speaker 1: sapiens actually came to exist during the Pleistocene ilbe at
Speaker 1: first in warmer equatorial regions, but they soon began to
Speaker 1: spread all over the planet. We've we've talked about the
Speaker 1: spread of humans in recent episodes, even too far reaches
Speaker 1: in the north where the end would be ever howling,
Speaker 1: and this this menace of ice loomed. Yeah, I believe
Speaker 1: we've also talked about how the Neanderthal is u is
Speaker 1: perhaps more ideally suited for this sort of cold weather environment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the Neanderthal will will come up a bit in
Speaker 1: this episode. But so Homo sapiens and Neanderthals both actually
Speaker 1: eventually spread to this general region the Russian Plain. This
Speaker 1: area in like southwest Russia and Ukraine uh and more
Speaker 1: specifically this area I mentioned earlier, that's, you know, a
Speaker 1: few hundred kilometers south of modern day Moscow along the
Speaker 1: banks of the Dawn. So the last glacial period would
Speaker 1: have reached its most bitter cold in this place between
Speaker 1: about twenty three thousand and eighteen thousand years ago. The
Speaker 1: summers then would have been very short and very cool.
Speaker 1: Winters would be long and freezing, and at that time
Speaker 1: winter in this place would have averaged about negative twenty
Speaker 1: degrees celsius or about negative four degrees fahrenheit, and that's
Speaker 1: before wind chill is taken into account, and it would
Speaker 1: have been windy. So if you try to picture it,
Speaker 1: this region of the Russian plane at the time would
Speaker 1: have been a freezing step landscape, just a bit south
Speaker 1: of the ice sheets that reached down from the polar
Speaker 1: regions and covered much of North America, Europe and Asia
Speaker 1: at times. These glaciers, it's kind of hard to imagine this,
Speaker 1: but they were sometimes between three and four kilometers thick,
Speaker 1: or more than two miles. So just imagine a mountain
Speaker 1: sheet of ice reaching down from the top of the
Speaker 1: world down into the continents into totally inhabited regions today,
Speaker 1: and there were people who lived here at this time.
Speaker 1: The archaeological record indicates that most humans left this region
Speaker 1: of southwest Russia during the harshest climate period of this
Speaker 1: Ice Age, you know, the like between twenty three thousand
Speaker 1: and eighteen thousand years ago. And of course that's probably
Speaker 1: because first of all, it's so cold, but as a
Speaker 1: response to the cold, it's also because you know, most
Speaker 1: food and fuel sources would have disappeared. Uh. In the
Speaker 1: words of a study that we're going to cite in
Speaker 1: a minute, this was quote a period of intense cold
Speaker 1: when similar latitudes in Europe were already abandoned, but here
Speaker 1: some people stayed and survived. I find myself wanting to
Speaker 1: hear a Bruce Springsteen song about living in this environment,
Speaker 1: you know, after after other folks have have gone on
Speaker 1: and left for warmer climates, and you're you're just digging
Speaker 1: in and trying to make life work in this harsh environment.
Speaker 1: The wind's healing in this cold town, and I can
Speaker 1: hear you, uh, And in fact it will it'll get
Speaker 1: even more real relevant because this town also rips the
Speaker 1: bones from your back. Um. So I'm trying to imagine
Speaker 1: the people who lived in the shadow of this gigantic glacier.
Speaker 1: And I'm rem ended, of course, of that great line
Speaker 1: from literature that we come back to on the show
Speaker 1: from time to time. It's John Gardner's description of the
Speaker 1: monster Grendel in his reimagining of the Beowulf legend, when
Speaker 1: he calls him uh a shadow shooter, an earth rim roamer,
Speaker 1: walker of the world's weird wall uh. And that's that's
Speaker 1: so lovely because it's it's first of all, just great imagery,
Speaker 1: but it also actually uses poetic devices that appear in
Speaker 1: the original Beowulf epic. Uh, the devices of alliteration, which
Speaker 1: is there in Beowulf, you know, repeating sounds at the
Speaker 1: beginning of words, and this weird way of forming metaphors
Speaker 1: known as kinning, where you you sort of like combine
Speaker 1: words into into a new compound. One example, often in
Speaker 1: translation in Beowulf would be calling the seas the whale roads.
Speaker 1: But for me, the the Beowulf comparison doesn't stop there,
Speaker 1: because when I think of people trying to survive in
Speaker 1: this world, I get this kind of similar feeling of
Speaker 1: horror and mystery that invoked by the story of Beowulf.
Speaker 1: More generally like this small band of humans gathering around
Speaker 1: a fire set against the backdrop of this vast, frosty
Speaker 1: wilderness full of darkness and monsters. Uh. And in reality,
Speaker 1: of course, this wouldn't have been monster monsters, but maybe
Speaker 1: desperate predators and scavengers that are also trying to eke
Speaker 1: out a survival alongside you at the edge of the world.
Speaker 1: And this in these utterly unforgiving elements, I mean truly
Speaker 1: a time when you would you wouldn't have to create Grendel,
Speaker 1: because Grindel like organisms uh still roamed this region. I mean,
Speaker 1: of course, one of the most astonishing creatures to roam
Speaker 1: this region at the time would have been the great,
Speaker 1: the powerful, the wooly mammoth. But also to compare it
Speaker 1: to Beowulf again, uh, the wooly mammoth is interesting. But
Speaker 1: because as great, as powerful, as terrifying an animal as
Speaker 1: this is, if you were to you know, come in
Speaker 1: come into combat with one, it ultimately did form the
Speaker 1: prey a diet of many of the humans who or
Speaker 1: maybe all of the humans who lived in this place
Speaker 1: at the time. So you know, they became the bailwolf.
Speaker 1: They went out to kill the monster. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: when you had the tools and the skills, uh to
Speaker 1: actually bring these creatures down. They were such such such
Speaker 1: a wealth of resources exactly. And that's really getting us
Speaker 1: to the heart of the issue here. So there's another
Speaker 1: way this historical situation gives these real life flashes of
Speaker 1: grin daly and horror. And this is the real reason
Speaker 1: I brought up these Ice Age hunter gatherers. Archaeologists have
Speaker 1: uncovered evidence in about seventy different places so far that
Speaker 1: the prehistoric peoples of this region of Ice Age Russia
Speaker 1: and Ukraine and the Russian Plane, they built buildings out
Speaker 1: of bones, especially out of the skulls, skeletons, and tusks
Speaker 1: of the wooly mammoth. Now, most often the structures take
Speaker 1: the form of large bone circles, and if you're trying
Speaker 1: to picture this, you can look it up with some
Speaker 1: terms I'll give you in a minute. Um. But it's
Speaker 1: as if the builders were stacking up ring shaped walls
Speaker 1: around a central chamber, except the walls are made out
Speaker 1: of wooly mammoth skeletons. There are no detectable roofs left
Speaker 1: or you know that would cover up these walls if
Speaker 1: there were ever any roofs. There are just the circular
Speaker 1: or oval shaped walls of bone. Dating methods reveal that
Speaker 1: humans were building these bone rings maybe from like twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand years ago up until about twelve thousand years
Speaker 1: ago in the region. And uh and the wooly mammoth
Speaker 1: went extinct in this region about ten thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: so the numbers could have been dwindling at the time
Speaker 1: that these buildings went out of fashion. And the amazing
Speaker 1: mystery is that so these ancient hunter gatherer humans were
Speaker 1: building these ring shaped structures out of mammoth bones. And
Speaker 1: archaeologists are not in agreement about what these bones circles
Speaker 1: were for. Yeah, because if you try and picture one
Speaker 1: in your mind, I mean, for for me anyway, it
Speaker 1: sounds it sounds regal, it sounds a bit sacred, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's made from the bones of this uh,
Speaker 1: this this organism that you've grown to depend on. But
Speaker 1: but then again, you could also wonder is it just
Speaker 1: is it just a material resources issue? Is it like
Speaker 1: if I started building uh, like like little houses and
Speaker 1: forts out of the leftover Amazon boxes that I have
Speaker 1: accumulating in my house. Well, I mean, I think you
Speaker 1: might have more options overall than we're available to the
Speaker 1: people of the Russian Plane at this time. But I
Speaker 1: think you are absolutely on the right track there, Robert,
Speaker 1: I mean, as as best we can guess. So maybe
Speaker 1: we should take a break and then when we come back,
Speaker 1: we can talk about a new study just from the
Speaker 1: past month about the oldest and largest of these structures
Speaker 1: built by modern humans. Alright, we're back, Okay, So we've
Speaker 1: been talking about the idea that all throughout this place
Speaker 1: known as the Russian Plain, in this area of eastern Europe,
Speaker 1: in like southwest Russia and Ukraine, there are at least
Speaker 1: like seventy locations that archaeologists have found where Ice Age
Speaker 1: hunter gatherers built buildings out of bones. Now, I want
Speaker 1: to be fair, we called this episode the Bone Palace.
Speaker 1: These are not gigantic, elaborate buildings, they're not castles. But
Speaker 1: it is pretty amazing to see people, especially people who
Speaker 1: we did not believe had any kind of settled existence, uh,
Speaker 1: building structures out of wooly mammoth bones. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: for the time period, I think this is like a cathedral.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, in terms of like what else
Speaker 1: could we possibly compare it to that that humans, especially
Speaker 1: in that region were constructing. Uh, that we're building in
Speaker 1: one place, Yeah, exactly. Um So I want to go
Speaker 1: back to a more specific place within this region I
Speaker 1: mentioned it earlier on. Remember that specific place about five
Speaker 1: hundred kilometers south of Moscow, near the modern day city
Speaker 1: of Voronesh. That this site is known to archaeologists as
Speaker 1: Kostenky eleven. And since the mid twentieth century, archaeologists have
Speaker 1: known about a couple of smaller structures built out of
Speaker 1: mammoth bones at this location. But just a few years back,
Speaker 1: around fourteen, I've seen both years sited, excavation began on
Speaker 1: a newly discovered bone circle there. And this new bone
Speaker 1: circle at Costinky eleven dates back more than twenty thousand years.
Speaker 1: Radio carbon dating of some of the elements here it
Speaker 1: pushes its construction possibly back to about twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: years before the present. Uh So, twenty five thousand years
Speaker 1: is the number that a lot of news reports have cited.
Speaker 1: This bone circle is more than twelve point five meters
Speaker 1: in diameter, which is about forty one ft wide. Uh,
Speaker 1: and in the present structure when it was found, was
Speaker 1: buried about a foot beneath the surface before being unearthed.
Speaker 1: But the researchers think that this ring wall of bones
Speaker 1: was probably about twenty inches or about fifty centimeters high
Speaker 1: before it collapsed many thousands of years ago, so the
Speaker 1: bone wall would have come up, you know, more than
Speaker 1: a foot and a half off the ground or so.
Speaker 1: Now here's where things start getting really weird. How many
Speaker 1: mammoths do you think went into the construction of this building?
Speaker 1: You might think, oh, well, you know, a mammoth's big.
Speaker 1: You could probably build a building with one or two
Speaker 1: mammoth's right, Well, I mean it is a big, big animal.
Speaker 1: But then when then you start thinking about, okay, which
Speaker 1: of the bones are actually useful? Uh? You know, which
Speaker 1: ones are going to be actually large enough or long
Speaker 1: enough to be supportive? Like it's still the creature is
Speaker 1: only going to have so many ribs, right or which
Speaker 1: bones have you not used for other purposes? Another possibility?
Speaker 1: That's right, because this is going to be a very
Speaker 1: utilitarian culture, right, You're gonna have to if that bone
Speaker 1: is better used for scraping hides or you know, aiding
Speaker 1: in the the actual mission of acquiring and processing other
Speaker 1: mammoths for your survival. Uh it doesn't make as much
Speaker 1: sense at least without like really significant religious uh um
Speaker 1: underpinnings to use it in the construction of this mysterious structure.
Speaker 1: Or I mean so well, actually, I'm not gonna spoil it.
Speaker 1: There's another possible use for the bones here that that
Speaker 1: I want to get to in just a little bit.
Speaker 1: I'll leave that a tantalizing mystery for now. But so,
Speaker 1: how many wooly mammoths here? This structure was built out
Speaker 1: of the bones of more than sixty wooly mammoths, and
Speaker 1: this is indicated by the by the fact that there
Speaker 1: were sixty four individual mammoth skulls used in construction, as
Speaker 1: well as many other types of bones, including lower jaws, longbones, vertebrae,
Speaker 1: and tusks. Uh. And while mammoth bones made up the
Speaker 1: bulk of the building materials, there were also a small
Speaker 1: number of bones from reindeer, horses, as bears and foxes
Speaker 1: like the red fox and the Arctic fox. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the circle today it sits on an east facing slope,
Speaker 1: sort of an incline, a slight incline of about six degrees,
Speaker 1: and curiously, the bones make up a continuous wall with
Speaker 1: no apparent door or entry way. Well, that that makes
Speaker 1: me think that it's either it's either less of a
Speaker 1: building and more of just a sheer structure, almost like
Speaker 1: a piece of public art, or it's it's something that
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to come out of. And in that case,
Speaker 1: it makes me think it might be a tomb. Well,
Speaker 1: we find no evidence that it's a human tomb because
Speaker 1: there are no human remains inside it. So so we
Speaker 1: could mark that one off, though that might not be
Speaker 1: totally off the mark. In terms of the possibilities for
Speaker 1: ritual significance, we we don't know, and but we'll discuss
Speaker 1: those possibilities as we go on. Um So, this find
Speaker 1: was described in a paper published in the journal Antiquity.
Speaker 1: It was out just this past month by Alexander J. E. Friar,
Speaker 1: David G. Barrasford Jones, Alexander E. Doodon, E. Katerina M.
Speaker 1: Kona Cova, John F. Hoffeker, and Clive Gamble, and it
Speaker 1: was called the Chronology and Function of a new circular
Speaker 1: mammoth bone structure at Kostenky eleven and so this new
Speaker 1: circle they found, the one we've been talking about, is
Speaker 1: now believed to be both the oldest and the largest
Speaker 1: bone structure yet discovered that was built by Homo sapiens.
Speaker 1: It's at least a thousand years older than the other
Speaker 1: mammoth bone structures of Eastern Europe. Uh. And as a
Speaker 1: side note, when I had to qualify built by Homo sapiens,
Speaker 1: that's because I was actually reading reports of a single
Speaker 1: possibly older bone structure, uh maybe more than forty thousand
Speaker 1: years old at a site called Malativa one in Ukraine.
Speaker 1: But this one is believed to have been built by
Speaker 1: Neanderthals and not Homo sapiens, which either way is very interesting.
Speaker 1: Interesting to see Homo sapiens and Neanderthals participating in extremely
Speaker 1: similar cultures of proto construction out of bones, like before
Speaker 1: long before a settled agricultural life evolved, which is when
Speaker 1: we normally think of people, you know, building buildings and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So it makes me wonder where the
Speaker 1: Homo sapiens copying the Neanderthals? Yeah yeah, or or are
Speaker 1: we just talking about two intelligent species, uh coming to
Speaker 1: the same conclusions based on the materials available, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that that could be something there too, because we might
Speaker 1: not be when we're trying to understand what the heck
Speaker 1: was going on here, Why would you build a little
Speaker 1: the circular buildings out of bones. Maybe we're just not
Speaker 1: imagining how what their material limitations in life were. So
Speaker 1: the excavation of this new site, it took about three years.
Speaker 1: It included experts from University of Exeter, from Cambridge, from
Speaker 1: the Kostinky State Museum Preserve, and from the University of
Speaker 1: Colorado Boulder in the University of Southampton. And it was
Speaker 1: done using a technique called flotation, and that's where you
Speaker 1: apply water to dig site in order to kind of
Speaker 1: sieve out archaeologically significant material to remove it from the sediment. So,
Speaker 1: as we go on to discuss a little bit more
Speaker 1: about this finding and what makes it so interesting, I
Speaker 1: want to keep a couple of main questions in mind.
Speaker 1: First of all, again, remember the utterly harsh, you know,
Speaker 1: reality of of surviving in this place during the last
Speaker 1: glacial maximum, especially the worst part of it from like
Speaker 1: you know, twenty three thousand years ago or so to
Speaker 1: about eighteen thousand years ago. Uh, you know, would have
Speaker 1: been so cold and so unforgiving and resources would have
Speaker 1: been pretty scarce. Why would people come to or stay
Speaker 1: in this place at all? And then yeah, like if
Speaker 1: it's a place of seasonal return, then like it would
Speaker 1: there would have to be some some advantage there. Like
Speaker 1: he's often been brought up before that the nomadic people's
Speaker 1: would have regularly returned to, say a hot spring at
Speaker 1: geothermal spring, which has an obvious advantage for your survival.
Speaker 1: But in this case, we can we find anything that
Speaker 1: obvious us Yeah, and then the other thing, of course,
Speaker 1: would be Okay, we know people were coming here, what
Speaker 1: on earth was this little bone palace for? Why would
Speaker 1: you go to the trouble of making this thing? Uh? So,
Speaker 1: first I want to focus on what the research on
Speaker 1: this this new bone circle found, and then we can
Speaker 1: move to the what was it for? Question? Okay, So
Speaker 1: first of all, what did the research find? So usually
Speaker 1: these mammoth bone buildings made by the Stone Age humans
Speaker 1: are surrounded by a number of big pits, and this
Speaker 1: new find at Kostinky eleven is no exception. Um, there
Speaker 1: were several large pits around it, but again we don't
Speaker 1: know what these pits were for. It could be storage,
Speaker 1: it could be places to dumperberry trash. It could be
Speaker 1: a type of quarry that maybe mud or other building
Speaker 1: material was sourced from. I read about the possibility. We
Speaker 1: don't know, but maybe mud was used to patch the
Speaker 1: places in between the bones in the structure. Possibly, we
Speaker 1: don't know. Um that would make sense. Next thing, mammoth
Speaker 1: meat was cooked here. That's not very surprising, but okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have some evidence that they were cooking mammoth at
Speaker 1: this bone structure. Here, things start getting weird. They also
Speaker 1: found burned mammoth bones, and you might think, well, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, that's that's evidence of cooking. But no, we
Speaker 1: don't mean burned like that. These burned mammoth bones were
Speaker 1: actually used as fuel for the fire itself, and that
Speaker 1: this is not the only site like this by any means.
Speaker 1: Evidence of this is found at other Paleolithic bone ring
Speaker 1: sites throughout Eastern Europe. The people here burned bones to
Speaker 1: have fire, and you absolutely can do that. You can
Speaker 1: burn mammoth bones as fuel due to pockets of fat
Speaker 1: inside the bones that render and catch flame as the
Speaker 1: bone heats up. You know, I'd never thought of that.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, the mammoth is going to produce dung,
Speaker 1: which you know, once collected, could be used as fuel
Speaker 1: for five But I didn't even think about their bones
Speaker 1: being used as fuel. Now, one thing we should definitely
Speaker 1: acknowledge here is that bones burn differently than wood does.
Speaker 1: There's a different quality to the fire. The bones are
Speaker 1: are greasy, and the fire they produce would be sort
Speaker 1: of inconsistent and it would generally put out more light
Speaker 1: and less heat than a wood fire. Uh. One of
Speaker 1: the authors on this paper, David Barretsford Jones, who's an
Speaker 1: environmental archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, was speaking to
Speaker 1: I think it was the New York Times, it was
Speaker 1: speaking to some publication. He said that a fire that
Speaker 1: was powered by the fuel of mammoth bones quote, won't
Speaker 1: produce a nice good fire for roasting your mammoth meat on.
Speaker 1: So the bone based fire is not going to be
Speaker 1: very good for cooking more light than and less heat.
Speaker 1: So what was the fire for, Well, we can come
Speaker 1: back to that later. Now. They also found about four
Speaker 1: hundred pieces of charcoal from wood fires, and this was
Speaker 1: charcoal from the would have conifer trees like spruce and
Speaker 1: shine and larch. And here's another one where you might
Speaker 1: at first say, huh, well, that doesn't seem very unusual,
Speaker 1: But this actually is very interesting and even maybe revolutionary
Speaker 1: here because the previous widely held assumption was that this
Speaker 1: place and time would have been an utterly barren, nearly
Speaker 1: completely treeless step and consequently it was thought that the
Speaker 1: burning of bones by the humans of this area was
Speaker 1: out of total necessity. There was no wood to burn
Speaker 1: at all, so they had to burn bones as the
Speaker 1: only possible fuel. But the charcoal at this new side
Speaker 1: at Kostinky eleven shows would was burned, meaning there were
Speaker 1: at least some trees. Now this does not at all
Speaker 1: mean you should imagine the landscape at this time full
Speaker 1: of thriving forests, uh, The authors suggest, maybe more like
Speaker 1: it would be a place where, uh, there are a
Speaker 1: few trees here and there, barely surviving against the ice. Uh.
Speaker 1: Speaking to the to the newspaper Herrets, the lead author,
Speaker 1: Alexander Pryor said, quote, the growth ring widths in the
Speaker 1: charcoal we recovered are mostly very narrow, suggesting that trees
Speaker 1: were clinging on at the edge of their tolerance limits.
Speaker 1: Summers would have been cool and relatively short, while winters
Speaker 1: were long and bitterly cold. The climate was also very arid,
Speaker 1: so trees would have clung on in sheltered parts of
Speaker 1: the landscape, perhaps in river valleys, away from the wind
Speaker 1: and where moisture was available. Huh. And of course in
Speaker 1: all of this we have to we have to weigh
Speaker 1: the fact that if you were to come across some
Speaker 1: some trees, some would um there would be other potential
Speaker 1: uses for it that would compete with your you know,
Speaker 1: necessity to burn it. I don't know in the case
Speaker 1: that these might be uh, some very pitiful trees, perhaps
Speaker 1: they really didn't have any other purpose but to be burned.
Speaker 1: But again, coming down to just sort of the utalitarian
Speaker 1: reality their harsh lives, you could well imagine them coming
Speaker 1: across a small tree and realizing, you know, this, this
Speaker 1: would make a much better spear or or some other
Speaker 1: kind of tool as opposed to being just thrown into
Speaker 1: the fire. But then again, the fire is survival as well.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, it sounds like it becomes kind
Speaker 1: of a difficult balancing acted to figure out exactly how
Speaker 1: your fuel economy is going to work. Oh, I think
Speaker 1: there is a lot to indicate actually that when they
Speaker 1: make you know the these these hunter gatherers make the
Speaker 1: utilitarian calculus. They very much do probably prioritize the burning
Speaker 1: of wood over the use of wood for tools, at
Speaker 1: least in many cases. Um because again, you know, the
Speaker 1: wood really creates a high quality fire, and the mammoth bones,
Speaker 1: you can get fire out of them, but it's not
Speaker 1: a good fire. It's not like a wood fire. Right.
Speaker 1: But then those mammoths, you're not just giving those bones away.
Speaker 1: You gotta get them yourselves, and you're gonna need tools
Speaker 1: to do it. That's true. So one other interesting thing
Speaker 1: about the findings about you know that they're actually work.
Speaker 1: Are some trees here at the time Against previous assumptions.
Speaker 1: The fact that there was some small number of scrawny
Speaker 1: trees surviving here could be the very reason that this
Speaker 1: place remained inhabited when other sites at the same latitude
Speaker 1: were abandoned by humans during the Ice Age. Remember that
Speaker 1: question we're asking, like, why would people be here at all?
Speaker 1: To quote from the study quote, the presence of conifer
Speaker 1: trees near Kostinky, perhaps located in low lying, moist and
Speaker 1: sheltered areas in the ravines near to the site, would
Speaker 1: have been an important resource that attracted hunter gatherers to
Speaker 1: the area during the glacial period. So it's entirely possible
Speaker 1: that this latitude of northerly wasteland is is has mostly
Speaker 1: just been completely abandoned by humans. But here's a place
Speaker 1: where the human hunter gatherers can get a foothold this
Speaker 1: far north because there are a few trees that they
Speaker 1: can harvest and make fires with. I mean, I remember fire,
Speaker 1: it's our secret weapon. It's like the thing that that is.
Speaker 1: It changes the game in terms of what types of
Speaker 1: climates are habitable and what types of of prey we
Speaker 1: can hunt and stuff like that. Yeah, we've discussed that
Speaker 1: in the on the show in the past when we
Speaker 1: talked about a world before fire, and then on Invention
Speaker 1: we discussed fire technologies and just how truly game changing
Speaker 1: they were. Now a couple of other findings about it
Speaker 1: before we moved to the what was this for question?
Speaker 1: Along the same lines as the charcoal, they found a
Speaker 1: few vegetables. Interesting. Good for them. Yeah, because we might
Speaker 1: have assumed that mammoth hunters roaming the furthest reaches of
Speaker 1: habitable land during the last glacial maximum, we're pretty much
Speaker 1: limited to a diet of mammoth meat. But there are
Speaker 1: remains of plant based foods at this new bone circle.
Speaker 1: And these plant based foods include plant matter associated with
Speaker 1: edible roots and tubers, which which I've seen compared to
Speaker 1: modern crops like parsona, carrots, and potatoes. So along with
Speaker 1: your mammoth meat, maybe you're getting a few carrots in there,
Speaker 1: maybe you're having some mashed taters or something, probably not
Speaker 1: mashed taters, at least some kind of tator thing. Well,
Speaker 1: this is excellent. I'm gonna pass this on to our
Speaker 1: new potential sponsors, Mammoth Meals. What they're offering is a
Speaker 1: is an authentic ice age diet of cloned that grown
Speaker 1: Willie mammoth meat, uh thrown in there with some parsnips,
Speaker 1: carrots and a few you know, random scavenge tubers and
Speaker 1: you just you you heat those up in your house.
Speaker 1: You don't have to cook them on mammoth bones, but
Speaker 1: it is recommended if you want the just the proper
Speaker 1: uh you know, the proper texture and the proper uh
Speaker 1: you know, flavoring to the meat, use our promo code
Speaker 1: Bone Palace. Uh. Yeah. And I want to be clear
Speaker 1: just so I'm not confusing anybody. Uh the parsnips, carrots
Speaker 1: and potatoes thing, that's like a point of comparison of
Speaker 1: what these roots would be like. Like, we know that
Speaker 1: potatoes were not grown in this place at this time,
Speaker 1: so you know, like they wouldn't have been actually potatoes,
Speaker 1: but similar types of foods, right, I mean if they
Speaker 1: had anything like a carrot. I've often seen it pointed
Speaker 1: out that you know, in in in this age and
Speaker 1: other ages of the human gathering, like a carrot would
Speaker 1: be the equivalent of us finding like a cheesecake, you know,
Speaker 1: or or or a giant bag of skittles. Yeah, just
Speaker 1: like the maximum sweet Next time you're eating a carrot,
Speaker 1: think about that. Think about what it would be to
Speaker 1: live in a world where this was maximum sweetness. Are
Speaker 1: in our mouth is just ruined. Now we eat a
Speaker 1: carrot and it's like, oh yeah, I mean our mouths
Speaker 1: are ruined on more than one count because of this, uh,
Speaker 1: this unbalanced sugar economy. Yes, yeah um. But also so
Speaker 1: in addition to the signs of there being some kind
Speaker 1: of roots and tuber based foods, there were also remains
Speaker 1: of charred seeds, though it's not clear if these seeds
Speaker 1: were brought here by humans. Um One more thing this
Speaker 1: ties into a previous episode. There were some light signs
Speaker 1: of napping, not napping like sleeping, but napping with a
Speaker 1: k This is what we talked about with Dietrich Stout
Speaker 1: on our episode about stone age technology. It is a
Speaker 1: method of constructing stone tools by striking stones together to
Speaker 1: shear a target stone off and form a sharp edge.
Speaker 1: And the evidence included here would be like stone flakes
Speaker 1: and chips that would be a byproduct of the manufacture
Speaker 1: of stone tools. We find stuff like this at the
Speaker 1: places where stone age people lived. They were they were
Speaker 1: manufacturing tools a lot, and they needed these tools to survive,
Speaker 1: so you'd find all these signs the waste products of
Speaker 1: the the the you know, sharp flake manufacturer process. But
Speaker 1: then again, people were building stone tools here, but it
Speaker 1: looks like there was also much less manufacture of stone
Speaker 1: tools here then there would usually be at at other
Speaker 1: sites where people lived more or less permanently during this period.
Speaker 1: This has been taken as evidence this site was not
Speaker 1: occupied for very long, or maybe it was only occupied
Speaker 1: it very contained times throughout the year, because if people
Speaker 1: had been living here on a more permanent basis, you
Speaker 1: would expect to find way more signs of them making tools.
Speaker 1: So we can basically see this is the kind of
Speaker 1: like stonework detry, this that would have been left in
Speaker 1: the wake of of these people. And uh, and therefore
Speaker 1: it can indicate just how long they were staying in
Speaker 1: the area. All right, let's take one more break, but
Speaker 1: when we come back, we will continue to discuss the
Speaker 1: mystery of this ice age bone palace. Thank thank alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. Alright, So we're asking the question what was
Speaker 1: this ice age bone palace for? Remember, it's the circle
Speaker 1: of bones. It's more than forty ft in diameter. It
Speaker 1: would have been, you know, at least like one and
Speaker 1: a half feet tall off the ground at the time
Speaker 1: it was built. Made entirely out of mammoth bones, made
Speaker 1: out of more than sixty mammoth bones. We should stop
Speaker 1: to stress again how weird this is. Why would hunter
Speaker 1: gatherers living in the northernmost habitable reaches of eastern Europe
Speaker 1: during the Pleistocene build a structure like this or you know,
Speaker 1: not just this structure, build these many structures like this. Uh.
Speaker 1: First of all, evidence tells us that they usually lived
Speaker 1: nomadic lifestyles, they would travel to follow available food resources
Speaker 1: like herds of prey animals, or follow other resources. They
Speaker 1: didn't generally build permanent structures to live in. So if
Speaker 1: you're just assuming, well, this is probably some kind of house,
Speaker 1: I mean, that is possible, and we'll discuss that possibility.
Speaker 1: But that from first glance, that is kind of counterintuitive,
Speaker 1: right because you you wouldn't be living here year round.
Speaker 1: This would be a place of seasonal return at best.
Speaker 1: But beyond that, think about the quality and quantity of
Speaker 1: effort required to build a structure like this. The bones
Speaker 1: in this building came from again more than sixty different mammoths.
Speaker 1: Think about how this literally had to be put together.
Speaker 1: Other mammoth bones are huge. They are extremely heavy, especially
Speaker 1: when they're fresh, right like when they're you know, they
Speaker 1: still got all the moisture and fat in them before
Speaker 1: they decay and become more porous. These bones would have
Speaker 1: been like heavy stones to move around. The people either
Speaker 1: had to scavenge these bones from dead mammoths that they found,
Speaker 1: or they would have to kill the mammoths themselves, and
Speaker 1: then they would have to carry them back to this
Speaker 1: prehistoric construction site. So to quote the lead author, Alexander Pryor,
Speaker 1: and if I didn't mention this earlier, he's an archaeologist
Speaker 1: at the University of Exeter in England. He was speaking
Speaker 1: to Nicholas St. Fleur of The New York Times. Quote.
Speaker 1: The sheer number of bones that are Paleolithic ancestors had
Speaker 1: sourced from somewhere and brought to this particular location to
Speaker 1: build this monument is really quite staggering. It does boggle
Speaker 1: the mind. I've seen some articles sort of in a
Speaker 1: cheeky way, calling this site bone hinge, and I think
Speaker 1: the comparison it has a few merits. Right, this would
Speaker 1: be a massive project of sourcing tons of dead mammoths
Speaker 1: and getting their crushingly heavy remains to this very spot.
Speaker 1: Plus one imagines. Okay, first of all, certainly for their
Speaker 1: mammoth kills, they are processing the carcass in order to
Speaker 1: get the meat, you know, other materials from the body
Speaker 1: that it might be using for various uh um, you know, tools, clothing, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But you're probably gonna have to do additional processing of
Speaker 1: the bones. I mean, unless you're just putting uh you know, meaty,
Speaker 1: half rotten, uh you know, flesh clad bones up there
Speaker 1: on the structure. I'm imagining they're they're going to further
Speaker 1: um uh, you know, put the bones in order before
Speaker 1: batting them to the construction. So just a lot of work, Robert,
Speaker 1: You've got some surprises coming to you before we move
Speaker 1: Oh boy, this is gonna be fun before we move on.
Speaker 1: I just realized came into my head. Did you watch
Speaker 1: I think you should leave the Tim Robinson Show? Yes?
Speaker 1: I did. Could you stop while we were preparing for
Speaker 1: this episode with singing the bones are their houses and
Speaker 1: so are the worms? I forgot about that one. Oh man,
Speaker 1: it's one of the best. We sing that song a
Speaker 1: lot in our house. I would sing it here, but
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: you get bone cheese over. I don't know. That's a
Speaker 1: that's a very very weird and entertaining show. I really
Speaker 1: like the one about the two plumbers. Oh I like
Speaker 1: that too. Yeah, you're not part of the turbo team
Speaker 1: and okay, okay. So it's coming back to the question
Speaker 1: of like archaeologists now trying to figure out what the
Speaker 1: heck was were these bone circles for, especially this big one.
Speaker 1: Um So, the most obvious answer one that we already
Speaker 1: hinted at is well, maybe it's a dwelling. This is
Speaker 1: this is a bone house with two cats in the yard, etcetera.
Speaker 1: This one, it's difficult to totally rule it out, and
Speaker 1: many other smaller bone circles found throughout Estern Europe have
Speaker 1: been assumed to be shelters or dwellings of some kind
Speaker 1: for humans. I was reading an article about the study
Speaker 1: in Harets and it pointed out that of the about
Speaker 1: seventy mammoth bone structures found in Eastern Europe, some are
Speaker 1: all on their own, but others are grouped in arrangements
Speaker 1: of up to like six in the same place. Remember,
Speaker 1: at this site there were two other ones already known
Speaker 1: about smaller ones, so this would be three and roughly
Speaker 1: the same area. And this suggests maybe these are some
Speaker 1: kind of proto village, right uh that we don't know
Speaker 1: yet if they were occupied at the same time as
Speaker 1: each other, but usually they were close to rivers, which
Speaker 1: would make sense for an actual settlement. So it's hard
Speaker 1: to completely rule out the possibility that this was some
Speaker 1: type of shelter structure for humans to get inside and
Speaker 1: live in. But prior the lead author on the study,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about, and the other authors really do
Speaker 1: not seem to think that this place was a dwelling,
Speaker 1: certainly not a permanent dwelling, maybe a seasonal dwelling of
Speaker 1: some kind. But there are there are a few reasons
Speaker 1: that they think argue against the idea that this was
Speaker 1: a house for people to live in. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: Prior just argues that it's hard to imagine how an
Speaker 1: area the size of this circle the most recent find
Speaker 1: would have been roofed. Think about it. This is a
Speaker 1: forty one ft wide circular wall, not very tall, made
Speaker 1: out of bones, with no signs of interior support structures.
Speaker 1: What would the roof be made out of? And how
Speaker 1: would it stay up? And why is there no sign
Speaker 1: of any roofing left? Now, Yeah, that is a great
Speaker 1: question that I didn't I didn't initially think to ask
Speaker 1: if if it's going to be a proper dwelling, it
Speaker 1: has to have a roof and it's and what are
Speaker 1: you gonna make it out of? I mean, it can't
Speaker 1: really depend on these heavy bones so much. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: maybe hide comes to mind. Uh, yeah, that would materials,
Speaker 1: but we already touched on how scarce those were likely
Speaker 1: to be Yeah, I mean, hides were the thing that
Speaker 1: kind of coming to my mind. But still it would
Speaker 1: be hard to imagine exactly how that worked on a
Speaker 1: structure this big, like uh, how the remains lie today.
Speaker 1: I've seen this pointed out. It doesn't necessarily tell us
Speaker 1: what they looked like when they were in use, because
Speaker 1: it's possible that maybe these structures were more sort of
Speaker 1: conical with spaces between the bones patched in with mud
Speaker 1: um and you know, perhaps they were somehow kind of
Speaker 1: like tps maybe like they could have had hides up
Speaker 1: on the top somehow, but we we just don't know.
Speaker 1: But also here's another reason to think that it's kind
Speaker 1: of unlikely that this was a dwelling, uh, this one
Speaker 1: in particular. This is prior speaking to George Dvorski of
Speaker 1: Gizmoto quote. Some of the bones that make up the
Speaker 1: ring were found inarticulation, for example, groups of vertebrae, indicating
Speaker 1: that at least some of the bones still had cartilage
Speaker 1: and fat attached when they were added to the pile.
Speaker 1: This would have been ellie and would have attracted scavengers,
Speaker 1: including wolves and foxes, which is not great if this
Speaker 1: was a dwelling. Yeah that does sound this is an understatement,
Speaker 1: not great. Uh yeah, do not mistake like this is
Speaker 1: a stone age building made out of mammoth bones. But
Speaker 1: not just clean, dry bones. These were bones with soft
Speaker 1: tissue still clinging to them, not just like individual vertebrae,
Speaker 1: but like parts of a wooly mammoth's intact spinal cord, etcetera. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe they would just living foul. I have to consider
Speaker 1: that possibility. But yeah, try to imagine living there, Like
Speaker 1: in the warmer months when the thaw came, this bone
Speaker 1: castle would reek of death. It would attract carnivores, it
Speaker 1: would attract scavengers. Uh you know, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: why not build an outhouse out of cotton candy and
Speaker 1: maple syrup. Just yeah, this is the one that I
Speaker 1: can't stop thinking about. So it's not just a palace
Speaker 1: made out of bones, but palace of of bones with
Speaker 1: a good bit of meat and cartilage and stuff still
Speaker 1: stuck on there. Now here's the next argument against it
Speaker 1: being a dwelling. Remember how I mentioned that the evidence
Speaker 1: of stone tool manufacture the site was relatively light. This
Speaker 1: is also taken as evidence against it being a permanent
Speaker 1: or long inhabited dwelling. If anybody lived here, they were
Speaker 1: either not making stone tools at a normal rate, or
Speaker 1: they did not live here very long or very frequently. Uh.
Speaker 1: It seems the authors here think it more likely that
Speaker 1: if it was used as a shelter for humans, it
Speaker 1: was only used seasonally or temporarily for a short time,
Speaker 1: which would be kind of hard to understand for a
Speaker 1: structure that so much intense work would have gone into
Speaker 1: making sixty dead mammoth's bones transported from wherever they got
Speaker 1: them to this place. I don't know. I mean, you
Speaker 1: can perhaps imagine it was some kind of shelter against
Speaker 1: the cold, may be used in the worst parts of winter. Um.
Speaker 1: But if so, I mean, a good question to counter
Speaker 1: that is, why would it be built out of mammoth bones? Again,
Speaker 1: maybe this is just an issue of pure necessity. Like again,
Speaker 1: you imagine the landscape. The mammoth bones might have literally
Speaker 1: been the only thing available aside from scarce. Would supplies
Speaker 1: from a few clumps of scrawny trees clinging on for
Speaker 1: dear life, and the wood from those trees would have
Speaker 1: been more valuable for starting fires than for building with.
Speaker 1: So the bones are all you've got the only thing
Speaker 1: you can build with. And I should mention that despite
Speaker 1: the authors here not seeming to favor the dwelling hypothesis,
Speaker 1: I was looking at a New York Times article that
Speaker 1: cites Paul Pettit and archaeologists from Durham University in England,
Speaker 1: and Pettit does not rule out the idea that this
Speaker 1: structure was a dwelling of some kind, probably some kind
Speaker 1: of shelter to protect against the cold in the in
Speaker 1: the winter. So uh, not all archaeologists would would disfavor
Speaker 1: the dwelling hypothesis. And I guess in all of this too,
Speaker 1: like we keep coming back to very utilitarian uh explanations
Speaker 1: for what was being done here, and I think that's
Speaker 1: ultimately the direction to lean into. But but we we
Speaker 1: have we have very little idea what additional say religious significance,
Speaker 1: uh these sites might have had, right, I mean, I
Speaker 1: mean just just spitball in here. But like if if
Speaker 1: you're building a shelter, uh to aide you in the winter,
Speaker 1: if there is an additional idea that somehow say this,
Speaker 1: you know, the spirits of these of these great creatures
Speaker 1: was somehow in the bones. You know, if there was
Speaker 1: some like added you know, not enough to really make
Speaker 1: a difference obviously in survival, but just some added idea
Speaker 1: of why this place would be a good shelter. Uh,
Speaker 1: it could conceivably have had some sort of impact on it.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing, well, yeah, that's another possibility, is that maybe
Speaker 1: it just had some kind of religious or ritual significance.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's some kind of shrine to the gods or
Speaker 1: or shrine to the kill I mean, that wouldn't be unique. It's,
Speaker 1: you know, a shrine made out of wooly mammoth's in
Speaker 1: honor of wooly mammoth's. That's possible. Um. And since one
Speaker 1: of the ideas raised in that Herretts article I mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier was that since there were traces of food found there,
Speaker 1: not just mammoth meat, but like vegetables and other things,
Speaker 1: and traces of fire, you can't rule out the idea
Speaker 1: that this could have been something like a feast site,
Speaker 1: a place where special ritual cooking and eating took place,
Speaker 1: but not a place that people lived permanently. And again
Speaker 1: it's hard to rule that out. Maybe, but I often
Speaker 1: find that in archaeology it seems like ritual or religious
Speaker 1: significance tends to be the explanation given when you see
Speaker 1: ancient people expending a lot of effort on something and
Speaker 1: you can't figure out what else it's for. You know,
Speaker 1: the logic goes something like big investment plus no apparent
Speaker 1: utilitarian purpose equals religion. And like the Pyramids zone, basically,
Speaker 1: when we get into something like that which clearly has
Speaker 1: no practical real world um use but has a you know,
Speaker 1: tremendous importance within a like a spiritual, supernatural view of
Speaker 1: the world, then again I think sometimes maybe that under
Speaker 1: cells uh it's it's under imaginative about what practical real
Speaker 1: world uses could be. Because take the example of the Pyramids. Okay,
Speaker 1: you look at that, you say, there is you know,
Speaker 1: obviously these were built for religious reasons, because you couldn't
Speaker 1: possibly imagine a practical reason for making structures of the size,
Speaker 1: spending this amount of money and all that. On one hand,
Speaker 1: you would say, well, yeah, the pyramids clearly do have
Speaker 1: religious implications. They have stuff to do with the idea
Speaker 1: of uh, you know, the royal deity of of the
Speaker 1: pharaohs and the afterlife in in the Egyptian religion and
Speaker 1: all that. But I can also come up with a
Speaker 1: list of what I think are probably practical considerations that
Speaker 1: went into the construction of the pyramids. For example, uh,
Speaker 1: the the pharaoh protecting his own power by demonstrating his greatness,
Speaker 1: you know that, like the pyramids could be a essentially
Speaker 1: a warning sign to potential rebels or invaders and like,
Speaker 1: look how great I am. You don't want to challenge me?
Speaker 1: And and in that way, like it's it can be
Speaker 1: kind of hard to imagine what the cultural signaling could
Speaker 1: have been for ancient projects because we just don't know
Speaker 1: what the culture was like, right, Like you could imagine
Speaker 1: and again we don't have any direct evidence of this,
Speaker 1: but you could imagine maybe something like that is going
Speaker 1: on with mammoth bone structures. Maybe the people who built
Speaker 1: them it could have had some religious significance. It could
Speaker 1: have been just people sending some kind of signal to
Speaker 1: other people or something. Yeah, And I mean, plus it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's difficult to imagine like the the ins
Speaker 1: and outs of a of the society that would have
Speaker 1: depended so much upon the regular acquisition and then processing
Speaker 1: of these large highs, like they would have been working
Speaker 1: who had been working with the with mammoth bodies, you know,
Speaker 1: so much would be so much just significance placed on them.
Speaker 1: You know, you wonder like what sort of ideas would
Speaker 1: grow out of that, Like how would you view the
Speaker 1: bones of these creatures? Uh, yeah, it's it's it's fascinating
Speaker 1: to try to imagine. Um. But but yeah, certainly to
Speaker 1: your point, even something that has that is essentially a
Speaker 1: religious structure is going to it's it's not going to
Speaker 1: exist outside of our world. It's still going to uh
Speaker 1: you know service say something like a make work project.
Speaker 1: It's going to serve as a as a as a
Speaker 1: symbol of power, a symbol of of royal or even
Speaker 1: divine um, uh, you know association. Yeah, there's there are
Speaker 1: a number of ways that could factor into into the
Speaker 1: maintenance of once power structure. Yeah. Yeah, my imagination is
Speaker 1: actually running wild now that we're talking about this. I
Speaker 1: hadn't really thought about this aspect before we started recording today. Um,
Speaker 1: what if these bones structures? Again, I want to be
Speaker 1: very clear, there's no direc at evidence of this, and
Speaker 1: we're just imagining. What if these these bone circles were
Speaker 1: something more like you know, the Arc de triomp for
Speaker 1: the pyramids or something they were made to like impress
Speaker 1: somebody to show off. Look at all these mammoths I killed.
Speaker 1: Look what a glorious hunter king I am. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: look how favored we are by uh, the hunt or
Speaker 1: whatever supernatural powers might lie beyond the hunt. What if
Speaker 1: it was a signaling thing for this area where there
Speaker 1: was some pretty unique resource of as far as these
Speaker 1: northern latitudes go. Maybe you wanted to scare other potential
Speaker 1: hunter gatherers who could be coming in the area to
Speaker 1: try to get your scraggly trees or access to your
Speaker 1: water source or something like that. Yeah, maybe it's like saying, hey,
Speaker 1: other wandering humans, you're venturing into a zone where people
Speaker 1: are capable of bringing down this many mammoths. Maybe you
Speaker 1: don't want to mess with us. Yeah, So again, just speculation,
Speaker 1: but it I do think it's it's important to recognize that, like,
Speaker 1: our imagination is limited in understand why ancient people's did things,
Speaker 1: especially when like we don't know much about their culture
Speaker 1: and what kinds of social and what kinds of broader
Speaker 1: social relationships and pressures they had. But I want to
Speaker 1: come back to one final hypothesis about the role of
Speaker 1: this place of this bone structure, and this one is
Speaker 1: more directly utilitarian. This one is more directly about how
Speaker 1: to survive in the landscape. And this this hypothesis is
Speaker 1: that it's basically a type of storehouse for food. And
Speaker 1: this seems to be the the idea that the researchers themselves,
Speaker 1: including prior that I get the feeling that they kind
Speaker 1: of favor, and the team is looking into evidence of
Speaker 1: this possibility in their ongoing work. But basically, the idea
Speaker 1: is that this bone circle, and perhaps others too, would
Speaker 1: have been used as a place to store meat and
Speaker 1: other foods. Now, normally we associate food storage with the
Speaker 1: advent of agriculture, right, but there's some hints that perhaps
Speaker 1: some no men attic pre agricultural hunter gatherers found ways
Speaker 1: to store excess food and uh, you can imagine a
Speaker 1: need for this, right, Like a dead mammoth generates a
Speaker 1: lot of meat I dare say, more than it's possible
Speaker 1: to eat before it starts to spoil. And people at
Speaker 1: this time didn't have all the options that we do
Speaker 1: for food preservation. But it's possible that these people figured
Speaker 1: out that after a mammoth kill, they could butcher the
Speaker 1: animal and store its meat in a structure like this,
Speaker 1: maybe buried down in the permafrost, to save it for
Speaker 1: meager times later when food was scarce. All right, now
Speaker 1: you're talking. So if it's if it's in the you
Speaker 1: bury in the earth, you keep it cool. You just
Speaker 1: need you need to make sure that nothing else digs
Speaker 1: it up. You might you need to cap that and
Speaker 1: of course we know from various funeral traditions throughout the world,
Speaker 1: like one way to do that is cap it off
Speaker 1: with a big stone. But if you don't have a
Speaker 1: big stone, what what are you gonna do? Right? Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a possibility. Maybe the bones are a barrier to
Speaker 1: protect these buried stores of food that are down in
Speaker 1: the permafrost. So if this really was a storehouse for food,
Speaker 1: that would show that these hunter gatherers didn't just follow
Speaker 1: animal herds for their immediate food needs, but instead actually
Speaker 1: planned for the future by storing resources and known locations
Speaker 1: that they could find an access later. Uh. And again
Speaker 1: remember all the evidence of bones burned as fuel within
Speaker 1: this bone building. Well that that sort of fits as
Speaker 1: well at least maybe Remember burning bones do not put
Speaker 1: out very even heat, but they do put out a
Speaker 1: lot of light. And uh, and I've seen cited in
Speaker 1: several sources that the authors here kind of speculate what
Speaker 1: if the fires from the burned bones here were to
Speaker 1: produce light to work by so that hunters after a
Speaker 1: mammoth gill could work long into the dark night to
Speaker 1: quickly process and strip the meat from the mammoth bones
Speaker 1: before wolves and other scy avengers arrived in order to
Speaker 1: get it stored away. Yeah, yeah, I like that idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you only you only have have so much time.
Speaker 1: It's just gonna draw attention. One last idea about how
Speaker 1: and why these structures were put together that the lead
Speaker 1: author prior suggests, quote one possibility is that the mammoths
Speaker 1: and humans could have come to the area on mass
Speaker 1: because it had a natural spring that would have provided
Speaker 1: unfrozen liquid water throughout the winter, rare in this period
Speaker 1: of extreme cold. So that that gets back to your
Speaker 1: idea of like, you know, people, you know, why would
Speaker 1: people go to a region that's just frozen and very
Speaker 1: barren and resources are scarce. What if you can access
Speaker 1: water here and in the surrounding landscape it's all going
Speaker 1: to be frozen. We don't know this, but this is
Speaker 1: another possibility to imagine. Anyway, it looks like due to time,
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna have to cap the first part
Speaker 1: of our exploration of of bone palaces and bone construction
Speaker 1: right here. But man, this subject really gets my blood
Speaker 1: pump and I get so excited about these mysteries, like
Speaker 1: what were these people doing? What was this for? I
Speaker 1: don't know that. This is the kind of thing I
Speaker 1: love thinking about. Yeah, I mean it forces you to
Speaker 1: sort of strip down the human condition and human culture
Speaker 1: to its uh, to its bare bones, and imagine what
Speaker 1: something like this would would, would would serve, what purpose
Speaker 1: it would serve. Uh. Yeah, So we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: cap it here. We're gonna cap this episode off with
Speaker 1: a nice uh construction of mammoth remains. But then we're
Speaker 1: going and we're gonna leave. But then we're gonna come
Speaker 1: back and we're going to record a second episode where
Speaker 1: we'll discuss more about the use of bone technology and
Speaker 1: human history and also how some of you know, various
Speaker 1: animals engage with the remains of other creatures. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you would like to check out other episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to blow your mind. You can find the show
Speaker 1: wherever you find your podcasts and wherever that happens to be.
Speaker 1: Make sure that you rate, review, and subscribe. That really
Speaker 1: helps us out in the long run. If you go
Speaker 1: to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that will
Speaker 1: shoot you over to the I heart listing for our show.
Speaker 1: Oh another thing, Uh, you might have noticed or heard
Speaker 1: us mentioned this already, but we've been regularly putting out
Speaker 1: playlists every week. It's like a playlist of ten past
Speaker 1: episodes and uh, we're you know, this is something that
Speaker 1: the company wrote, rolled out and we decided to have
Speaker 1: some fun with it, try and pick out some some
Speaker 1: topics that would be engaging and you know, maybe even
Speaker 1: distracting in these challenging times. So we hope you enjoyed them.
Speaker 1: And if if you're not enjoying it, well, I hope
Speaker 1: it's not too much of an inconvenience. I hope it's
Speaker 1: both an inconvenience and you're enjoying them. That's true. It
Speaker 1: can be both things. A lot of things, a lot
Speaker 1: of aspects of life can be both things in these
Speaker 1: challenging times. Okay, so here's thanks as always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer Seth Nicholis Johnson, who is going to
Speaker 1: great lengths to keep the show sounding great for you
Speaker 1: out there, even despite our you know, changing recording situations.
Speaker 1: So y'all please show your appreciation for SETH. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, or just to say hi, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact at stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listening to your favorite shows.