Speaker 1: Welcome to you stuff you should know from house stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Josh Clark, and there's Child's to w Chuck Bryant and
Speaker 1: Jerry's over there, so it's stuff you should know. Wow,
Speaker 1: it's the same energetic edition a little bit. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's cold. I'm energized by the cold, energized and like
Speaker 1: just a little. So you're not energized, that's what we're saying.
Speaker 1: I'm a little energized. I feel like I'm fine. All right.
Speaker 1: Why do you say that because he's I'm like, you're sleepwalking.
Speaker 1: Oh really yeah? Oh I thought I was just speaking fast.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, I thought that's why you're that's being sarcastic.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to everybody who's sitting through this right now.
Speaker 1: I'm down in the dumps. You are right, Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I'm fine, Okay, I'm just it's the cold. It's a
Speaker 1: little dreary outside of Today's the day it finally started
Speaker 1: to get to me. So you're ready for spring? Yes, um,
Speaker 1: Emily is ready for spring. I'm like, it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's January. She s no, No, but it's Georgia. So
Speaker 1: we could have spring in a few weeks, so it's true.
Speaker 1: We kind of had it yesterday. Um you mean. And
Speaker 1: I have been making these little bird feeders like with
Speaker 1: cookie cutters and shapes and all that stuff. I've been
Speaker 1: trying to get the physics of it down to hang
Speaker 1: them so that the birds can like land on them there,
Speaker 1: so I incorporate twigs and these things can spend a
Speaker 1: little time there. Yeah, And there's this, um, a little
Speaker 1: s ob of a squirrel that has my porch all
Speaker 1: figured out and keeps like getting these whole bird feeder cakes.
Speaker 1: And I realized, like I'm spending a lot of time
Speaker 1: like trying to thwart this squirrel figure out the physics
Speaker 1: of bird feed and I'm like, yeah, I'm ready for spring. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We have one of those cake holders for birds, but
Speaker 1: it's really a squirrel feeder. Yeah, and they eat it
Speaker 1: in like a day. Yeah. This this squirrel can eat
Speaker 1: several cakes and a mess. Yeah, all right. Cave Dwelling,
Speaker 1: I can't remember I've I've asked you before, but I
Speaker 1: don't know if you seen it. Um since I asked you,
Speaker 1: because you hadn't. Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzel, No,
Speaker 1: I watched, well, I watched like twenty minutes of it
Speaker 1: this morning just to get the gist. You got the
Speaker 1: gist in twenty minutes. Well, I can't wait to watch
Speaker 1: the whole thing though. It's pretty much that. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I want to watch it. We Oh, yeah, you should.
Speaker 1: It's neat. The whole thing's neat from beginning to end.
Speaker 1: But I mean, like it's a I think maybe a
Speaker 1: two hour long documentary on a cave. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: cave art it's a phenomenal yeah, I know, the one
Speaker 1: in uh well, they're both in France, right, Yeah. The
Speaker 1: one that gets the most press is the Lasco, which
Speaker 1: is great, but this one, to me, the art is better. Well,
Speaker 1: Alasco gets more pressed because it was discovered in nineteen forty.
Speaker 1: This one that weren't Herzog did a documentary, was discovered
Speaker 1: in old year old art. It's amazing, yeah it is,
Speaker 1: and it's all spectacularly preserved. One of the benefits of
Speaker 1: discovering Lasco in ninety was that when Chauves Cave, the
Speaker 1: one that was discovered in ninety four, it's even older,
Speaker 1: was discovered, we'd already figured out a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: along the way and how to preserve it, so we
Speaker 1: could go in there and sort of, Yeah, you need
Speaker 1: to cut down in the carbon dioxide that people are
Speaker 1: breathing out herzog in there. Um, you need to cut
Speaker 1: down on flashes flash photography, because apparently flashes really do degrade.
Speaker 1: There's something called photo degradation of especially old pigments, um,
Speaker 1: and it's basically like releasing the sunlight over the course
Speaker 1: of a few milliseconds. That's one flash. But if you
Speaker 1: add up all the tourists over the years, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, you're basically bringing the sunlight artificially into this
Speaker 1: cave and it's degrading the pigment. So there's also sorts
Speaker 1: of stuff we learned from Lascu cave. It's not being
Speaker 1: applied to Chouvet cave. Um. But yes, it is older,
Speaker 1: it is more awesome, and the very evidence of old
Speaker 1: cave paintings and all the artifacts and bones that are
Speaker 1: found in case would suggest that there, in some distant
Speaker 1: past of prehistory was a race of hominids that were
Speaker 1: cave dwelling hominids. They were a race of cave dwellers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that must be correct, right, Ringo Star. Yeah, I saw
Speaker 1: the movie Caveman or was that a documentary? It's in
Speaker 1: a movie. Yeah, you're thinking of quests for fire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well those are all great movies. Plan at the Cave Bear.
Speaker 1: But well I was setting you up and you you didn't. Well,
Speaker 1: no is the answer. Um. They now believe that uh,
Speaker 1: people through different periods of ancient history have dwelled in
Speaker 1: caves at times that probably didn't like set up permanent
Speaker 1: residents in caves. Yeah. And the big pivotal evidence of
Speaker 1: this is that the people who would have supposedly lived
Speaker 1: in caves at that time were all nomadic hunter gatherers.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't have been stationary for in any kind of
Speaker 1: dwell Yeah. They gotta go out and find the meat, right,
Speaker 1: So there was no such thing as a species of
Speaker 1: hominid that you could say our cavemen. Those were the caveman.
Speaker 1: All the other ones just lived. However, most of the
Speaker 1: people who are alive in what we're talking about the
Speaker 1: Paleolithic era, which went back from about two million years
Speaker 1: ago all the way up to about ten thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: that's the Paleolithic era, um were they lived in all
Speaker 1: sorts of different kinds of shelters, caves, being one of them. Sure. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: One reason to go into a cave is obviously it's
Speaker 1: gonna and we've covered this is I think our third
Speaker 1: Yeah the cave Sweet Cave Sweet Yeah. Bio speleology, which
Speaker 1: is awesome, spelunking, yeah uh. And then this one cave
Speaker 1: cave followers who thought that we would do the three
Speaker 1: part series on caves ever well, and this covers cave
Speaker 1: arts such that this will probably be it, don't you
Speaker 1: think is there anything else? I can't think anything. No,
Speaker 1: not really, Nick Cave. Maybe we can find test on him. Um.
Speaker 1: So some reasons to go into a cave to begin with, obviously,
Speaker 1: is to protect yourself from the weather. I think it's
Speaker 1: probably the leading. It's raining, let's go inside that room,
Speaker 1: it's not raining in the cave. Um to protect yourself
Speaker 1: from animals, because if you go back and listen to
Speaker 1: our biospeleology, only certain animals are in caves, and not
Speaker 1: a lot of like you know, big nasty man eaters,
Speaker 1: although back then they would have run in the cave
Speaker 1: bears the plane at the cave bear. I don't know
Speaker 1: sabretooth tigers were cave dwellers, but I've seen a lot
Speaker 1: of Flintstone episodes, and from what I understand they do,
Speaker 1: they did go into caves. Of course, you would run
Speaker 1: into the proteus salamander, which you would not want to
Speaker 1: run into. Remember the three ft long eyelis salamander. White
Speaker 1: nightmares like once a week. Yeah, I don't think you
Speaker 1: do anything to you but man alive. Yeah, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to see that thing, Like you wake up looking
Speaker 1: face to face with that eels monster. Yeah. Yeah, but um,
Speaker 1: protection from animals, protection from weather, but protection from other
Speaker 1: peepe wasn't really a big reason. Because this is good
Speaker 1: to know. I think I kind of got along and
Speaker 1: help each other in general. Yeah, there's something called paleolithic warlessness,
Speaker 1: like the concept of war organized war is apparently only
Speaker 1: maybe twelve to sixteen thousand, eighteen thousand maybe years old.
Speaker 1: I think probably once people started getting comfy as when
Speaker 1: they started wanting to fight each other. Back then they
Speaker 1: were just trying to survive. Yeah. You know, well, there's
Speaker 1: a whole idea that agriculture and sedentary existence is what
Speaker 1: led to warfare. What that exactly? Yeah, yeah, basically, and
Speaker 1: it led to surpluses, so people fared over surplus you're
Speaker 1: starving over here, and they've got all this green over here,
Speaker 1: so you go kill all those people and take the green.
Speaker 1: We should do a history of war. That'd be good. Well,
Speaker 1: that would be good. But there were obviously there were
Speaker 1: scraps in the Paleolithic. I mean, it wasn't all like
Speaker 1: one in Roses. You tried getting along with Ron Livingston.
Speaker 1: Now it's not his name. Oh let me, everybody gets
Speaker 1: along with Ron Livingston. He's from office space, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know the other guy. Yeah, Um, that's a pretty
Speaker 1: good mess up. There were scraps every now and then,
Speaker 1: like obviously over you know, territory or food or fire.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't like, hey, let's go to war with
Speaker 1: this tribe, but we don't like them or we want
Speaker 1: what they've got, because I mean, the consensus among anthropologists
Speaker 1: apparently is that wars relatively recent. It's not that ancient.
Speaker 1: It's certainly not as ancient as a lot of the
Speaker 1: cave are we run into. Yeah years, so, um, you've
Speaker 1: got shelter from the elements, protection from animals, um n,
Speaker 1: steady temperature. That's a big one. Yeah, Because the cave
Speaker 1: typically is about in the fifties fifties degrees fahrenheight. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So if you are in a cave and you're living
Speaker 1: there in its summertime, you are sitting pretty If it's
Speaker 1: winter time, depending on where you are, So you're in
Speaker 1: northern you're up, You're still sitting pretty sure. All you
Speaker 1: have to do is build a little bit of a
Speaker 1: fire and I hope you don't smoke yourself out, and
Speaker 1: you are you're you're in some climate controlled luxury, especially
Speaker 1: for the Stone Age. Yeah, you know. Uh, one reason
Speaker 1: that everyone didn't live in caves, and this is something
Speaker 1: I learned when I went on my caving experience, which
Speaker 1: is detailed in the speed Lunking episode, is that even
Speaker 1: though there's tons of caves, not a ton of caves
Speaker 1: are like great to live in. Like a lot of
Speaker 1: them you might walk right past because it's just a
Speaker 1: hole in the ground. You have no idea there's an
Speaker 1: underground cavern. A lot of them are inaccessible. Um, a
Speaker 1: lot of them have our active so that means they
Speaker 1: have water, which isn't super hospitable inactive cave. Yeah, it'll flood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want to be in there when it flood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're just not like generally they're not like these huge
Speaker 1: cavernous like, oh, it's a big underground home. Well. Plus,
Speaker 1: also there's a lot of gravel slopes, which if you
Speaker 1: stand on them you can fall and die. You learn
Speaker 1: that pretty quick. Yeah, there's lots of different exits and
Speaker 1: entrances and shafts and things like that. They can be
Speaker 1: misleading and confuse you and from dark get you lost
Speaker 1: to your death. Yeah, apparently just a couple of dozen feet.
Speaker 1: I don't remember. There's the light zone, the twilight zone
Speaker 1: in the dark zone, and I don't remember where the
Speaker 1: twilight zone ends in the dark zone begins. But once
Speaker 1: that dark zone begins, there's no light, like no light.
Speaker 1: And like you said, you can't just start a bunch
Speaker 1: of fires because you can die from smoking yourself out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can hit your head on stalag tights. That's true.
Speaker 1: So it's not the most common thing to find like
Speaker 1: a great cave for ten or twelve people to live in,
Speaker 1: but when they found them and they needed them, they
Speaker 1: would dwell in them, right and um. Again, that's one reason,
Speaker 1: for several reasons why people didn't just live in caves
Speaker 1: all the time. But another reason is because they knew
Speaker 1: of other ways to live. They could um stretch animal
Speaker 1: hides over structures. They built earth and dwellings where they
Speaker 1: would build like a lean to or something and then
Speaker 1: pack earth over it, which is another way to control
Speaker 1: the climate or temperature in that little dwelling. And again
Speaker 1: they were nomadic. They were following herds of bison and
Speaker 1: mammoths and um, you know, it's a big, beautiful world too,
Speaker 1: Let's not forget. Yeah, like, why would you want to
Speaker 1: go live in a cave your entire life when you've
Speaker 1: got the run of the place of planet Earth and
Speaker 1: all it has to offer. You know, if there was
Speaker 1: a hominid uh that could be considered cave dwellers, though
Speaker 1: it would probably be the Neanderthals. As we understand right now,
Speaker 1: it wasn't too terribly long ago that we discovered a
Speaker 1: new species of um human ancestor well, at least they
Speaker 1: were contemporary with modern humans. Uh, the dennis Ovans. Oh
Speaker 1: who is that? Um? They they were there type of
Speaker 1: Hamainid that lived in the thirty fifty thousand years ago
Speaker 1: at the latest, I think maybe. And um, there's a
Speaker 1: cave in Croatia I believe where they discovered a moler
Speaker 1: and they thought, well, no, they discovered a fingerbone and
Speaker 1: they thought it was Neanderthal or human, and they ran
Speaker 1: the DNA tests and they're like, uh, this is neither.
Speaker 1: What is this? So they named it it's a Dennisova
Speaker 1: cave or dennis cave, one of the two. And they
Speaker 1: named this new species of hominid A the dennis Ovans.
Speaker 1: And then they looked at the human genome and they're like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: apparently in are bred with them because we have a
Speaker 1: little bit of Dennis Ovan and all of us for
Speaker 1: most of us. Yeah, people who um stayed in Africa
Speaker 1: and didn't disperse like Neanderthals or other modern humans too,
Speaker 1: apparently didn't have the opportunity to mix with Denisovans or Neanderthals.
Speaker 1: So typically people of European descent Native American descent, they
Speaker 1: will have um Neanderthal and Denisovan in them. But there's
Speaker 1: this cave in Croatia has evidence that these Neanderthals, humans
Speaker 1: and dennis Ovans possibly shared these caves at the same time.
Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy they did. Yeah, they didn't necessarily sit
Speaker 1: around a camp fire with one another, but they they
Speaker 1: may have been using the cave within you know, the
Speaker 1: same year or something like that, depending on the season.
Speaker 1: Pictured them making s'mores and say, how do you get
Speaker 1: your backs so straight? But I mean think about it.
Speaker 1: If they were breeding, you know, then maybe it wasn't
Speaker 1: those caves. Jerry either laughed at that or she's choking
Speaker 1: on something food or both perhaps. Uh So, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Neanderthal was um all over Europe and during a glacial period,
Speaker 1: so obviously they got harsh climates, so they might want
Speaker 1: to poke into a cave every now and then and
Speaker 1: warm up. Um. And there are a couple of strategies
Speaker 1: that archaeologists believe we're used back then, the circulating mobility
Speaker 1: and radiating mobility, and circulating was um. And I kind
Speaker 1: of like this idea is had several temporary camps kind
Speaker 1: of scattered all over a region, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: like just having different homes and you would just go
Speaker 1: from place to place and live in your little home
Speaker 1: and hunt and gather. Uh or it's the same thing
Speaker 1: the ultra wealthy dude today exactly. Or radiating mobility is
Speaker 1: when you had one main camp and you would just
Speaker 1: go out as far as you could to hunt and gather.
Speaker 1: From that camp, right, so you had other shelters along
Speaker 1: the way. I don't know. I thought the radiating mobility
Speaker 1: was just the one camp and you came and went
Speaker 1: to that camp every day and that was the difference.
Speaker 1: Is that right? It's possible. I think that's right. Um.
Speaker 1: And apparently some of these camps were in fact caves
Speaker 1: at times, so they were using caves for sure. They
Speaker 1: were um doing something else too. Uh they were creating,
Speaker 1: aren't in these caves? Boy were they? Which has people
Speaker 1: um baffled as to exactly what was going on? What's
Speaker 1: the deal, what the heck is all this for? But
Speaker 1: before we get into that, you want to, um, you
Speaker 1: want to take a message break alright, cave art and
Speaker 1: if you have in your mind a cave art is
Speaker 1: like super primitive, like you know, is that a buffalo
Speaker 1: or is that a giraffe? You should go just google
Speaker 1: the cave art in those two caves especially oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Calvett Calvet. Yeah. One of the things that Herzog talks
Speaker 1: about that they figured out, if I remember correctly, is
Speaker 1: that the torchlight, the flickering torchlight, produces movement of these animals.
Speaker 1: And um, they think they're they're wondering whether that was
Speaker 1: like intentional or not, and they think it probably was
Speaker 1: intentional before they make a little movie. Interesting, but it's
Speaker 1: like legit art and legit talented painters. Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: look at this this stuff, it's pretty amazing. They hadn't
Speaker 1: discovered um perspective yet, so it's all flat two dimensions
Speaker 1: but um. First of all, they're creating these things in
Speaker 1: utter dark by torchlight. Yeah, using earthen pigments like ochre
Speaker 1: for yellows and oranges, um, charcoal, charcoal for black was
Speaker 1: the red one. I think for red they used iron
Speaker 1: oxide and they use charcoal and manganese for black. They're
Speaker 1: using very very primitive brushes in the dictionary sense of
Speaker 1: the word. Yeah, or there early airbrush artists essentially, because
Speaker 1: they're blowing this pigment through a h a tube tube
Speaker 1: or just out of their mouth right onto the walls. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then they're also using their hands in their fingers.
Speaker 1: But you're right, man, there are some especially when you
Speaker 1: take all of this in to consideration, Yeah, it makes
Speaker 1: some of the art that was made just staggering. Apparently
Speaker 1: they would use to some of the uh texture of
Speaker 1: the cave itself, if there was an indentation or not
Speaker 1: an indentation, but what stops have been indentation. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: there was a bump that looked like a rhino horn,
Speaker 1: they would incorporate that as the rhino horn. And all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you had I mean it's not quite
Speaker 1: three D, but it's definitely more than flat. Yeah. Right,
Speaker 1: you know they're like, it's not perspective, but it's gonna
Speaker 1: have to do. Uh. They now have evidence in some
Speaker 1: of these thirty thousand year old caves of scaffolding that
Speaker 1: they would use. I hadn't seen that. Yeah, it's pretty
Speaker 1: cool and um principles of stenciling, early principles of stinciling.
Speaker 1: And apparently when uh Picasso visited lescal he said to
Speaker 1: his guide, they've invented everything, and he was just like
Speaker 1: blown away, like I'm just copying these early hominids. It's
Speaker 1: pretty amazing. It's about right too. Yeah, and actually I
Speaker 1: don't know Picasso's all right, but some of these cavell
Speaker 1: they haven't beat maybe. Yeah, they didn't look funny, they
Speaker 1: didn't have one eye, and they didn't wear burraiths. Um.
Speaker 1: So most of the subjects of cave paintings that have
Speaker 1: been discovered so far, and there could be tons and
Speaker 1: tons of undiscovered caves like the one at Chauve wasn't
Speaker 1: discovered until because at some point in the past a
Speaker 1: rock fall happened and closed the cave off to view
Speaker 1: and was just happened to be discovered by some hikers. Man,
Speaker 1: can you imagine being the person that discovered that. It
Speaker 1: would have been pretty cool. Um. So, most of the
Speaker 1: cave art that has been discovered so far, it depicts
Speaker 1: hert animals. Yeah, animals by and large. There herd animals
Speaker 1: are bison, their buffalo there, um, mammoths, things like that. Um,
Speaker 1: there's very few images of vegetation, very few images of humans.
Speaker 1: The images of humans there are tend to be things
Speaker 1: like fertility idols like Yeah, and there's a theory out
Speaker 1: there that those were painted by adolescent boys. Yeah, as
Speaker 1: like basically early you know, club magazine or something. And uh,
Speaker 1: that may or may not be correct, especially when they
Speaker 1: found that in France and Spain a lot and possibly
Speaker 1: the majority of cave art was done by females. They
Speaker 1: recently discovered you know, the hand ones, handprints. They figured
Speaker 1: out recently that most of those are female hands because
Speaker 1: of the they they give away of the sixth finger
Speaker 1: that only females that. Um, there's an article that I
Speaker 1: can recommend that actually is what inspired Berner Hertzog to
Speaker 1: make his documentary called First Impressions. Uh. It was in
Speaker 1: The New Yorker in two thousand eight by Judith Thurman,
Speaker 1: and it's super awesome and uh, she basically says there's
Speaker 1: a couple of camps when it comes to cave art experts. Ah,
Speaker 1: those who can't resist advancing a theory about the art,
Speaker 1: and then those who say there never will be enough
Speaker 1: evidence to support one, so you're all just sort of
Speaker 1: making up these theories. Yeah. I think that's healthy. That
Speaker 1: second camp is much healthier because it is all theories.
Speaker 1: But I like the theories, so yeah, And I don't
Speaker 1: think we should just be like, we'll never understand that,
Speaker 1: so let's not even try. Yeah. I think we should
Speaker 1: just remember that when we are trying to understand them,
Speaker 1: they're all just guesses, and not even really educated guesses
Speaker 1: at that. Yeah. I think my theory of why there
Speaker 1: are animals mostly is because it was super important to
Speaker 1: their survival and maybe it was you know, uh, some
Speaker 1: communication to leave for another person later or to each other. Maybe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be there's lots of buffalo in this area,
Speaker 1: so get to hunting, or don't hunt these guys because
Speaker 1: I just killed a bunch of them by forcing them
Speaker 1: off a cliff. It was awesome, by the way, to see,
Speaker 1: but there's not that many left and we need them
Speaker 1: to keep reading. Or I'm an eight year old the
Speaker 1: interthal and yeah, here's an make a buffalo for your pleasure. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's also lots of theories that these things were um
Speaker 1: supernatural somehow, like they were trying to invoke the animal
Speaker 1: spirit for a successful hunt or gain some sort of
Speaker 1: power by creating an image of the animal um. And
Speaker 1: it could have also just been like, this is what
Speaker 1: I see in my everyday life, and I have this
Speaker 1: desire to create art. So that's that's the subject I'm
Speaker 1: gonna make. Is this animal that I am thinking about
Speaker 1: a lot because I have to hunt it for sustenance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes a conversion between this innate desire and the
Speaker 1: everyday life. And that's bison on cave walls. Well, some
Speaker 1: of them are pretty detailed, and uh, some are life size.
Speaker 1: It's like they really took a lot of time. It
Speaker 1: wasn't something they just dashed off in a matter of hours.
Speaker 1: And they're using these torches too, are not like it's
Speaker 1: not like a modern electric torch known as a flashlight also,
Speaker 1: but um, they're like stone torches with like a little
Speaker 1: divid in the top. It's some animal fat put in
Speaker 1: there and then they light the animal fat, which I'm
Speaker 1: sure in and of itself is quite a task. Um.
Speaker 1: But so yeah, there was there was a lot of
Speaker 1: effort put into this, a lot of detail. Gathering the pigments,
Speaker 1: I'm sure wasn't an easy feat, especially if you're doing
Speaker 1: like a life size bison. How long did it take
Speaker 1: to gather all that? Ochre Sure it's not a quick thing.
Speaker 1: And it's not just paintings. They found a jewelry and
Speaker 1: other like engrave bone and ivory, and they think they
Speaker 1: probably engraved wood too, but that obviously wouldn't survive that long.
Speaker 1: But um, they suggest early religious belief and that they
Speaker 1: think they might have buried people with some of these things. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: like it's amazing stuff. And unfortunately when there's no written history,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of speculation. But it just I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating to me. Well, yeah, you know, and their
Speaker 1: their history has been largely lost. It just happens to
Speaker 1: be preserved in the caves. But since they weren't just
Speaker 1: as strictly cave dwelling society, we're only seeing a portion
Speaker 1: of their culture because the rest of it was in
Speaker 1: animal skin shelters and earthen lean twos that have been
Speaker 1: totally lost because they were exposed to the elements the
Speaker 1: caves that were flooded out and washed away too. So yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's why there's only like, well, there's more than that,
Speaker 1: but the two big daddies, there's only two. No, there's
Speaker 1: another one. There's one called Altamira in Spain. It's steely.
Speaker 1: Dan had a song about it, the Caves of Altamira,
Speaker 1: And is it loaded with art? Okay, yeah, there's there's
Speaker 1: plenty more than that, it's just less Go is the
Speaker 1: most famous one, and then Chauve is the most recent,
Speaker 1: most famous one because I heard but there are others. Um,
Speaker 1: what about chocolodytes. We should mention that that's a great
Speaker 1: word to call somebody. It always reminds me of trilobite.
Speaker 1: Remember the little weird kind of insect armor plated fossilized insect.
Speaker 1: I'll show you a trilobite. Okay. It was one of
Speaker 1: the earliest like footed animals. Scary looking really, but that's
Speaker 1: what I always get the too confused chocolate. It means
Speaker 1: cave dweller, literally someone who lives in a hole or
Speaker 1: cave named after There are apparently some West African tribes
Speaker 1: that the Greeks came in contact with, and they lived
Speaker 1: in cliff caves, and they were called trocolate, eye t
Speaker 1: or trogoled. Well, it's a nice insult you can throw
Speaker 1: around these days and sounds sort of intelligent. Instead of
Speaker 1: calling someone like a d bag, he'd say he's a trocolodyte,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, and one got Jerry too. Man, you
Speaker 1: guys are on the same way today. I guess, uh so,
Speaker 1: I guess we can fast forward down to the present day. Yes,
Speaker 1: well modern, let's not quite go into present day. I
Speaker 1: think we need to give a shout out to the
Speaker 1: Anasazi and the Pueblos word cliff dwelling people's from the
Speaker 1: twelfth century Ish of the outhwestern United States, who basically
Speaker 1: showed up and started carving into cliff faces, carving out
Speaker 1: caves and lived there they built their own caves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you should see some of these. Look up, like just
Speaker 1: look up cliff dwellers US and you'll see some really
Speaker 1: neat They had, like whole cities like carved out into
Speaker 1: these these cliff faces that you could only reach by ladders.
Speaker 1: That sounds really dangerous it was, but it was also
Speaker 1: very well defended and stified. Yeah, because people just be like,
Speaker 1: I'm not going up there to fight those guys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not climbing that ladder. It's crazy. Um, can we
Speaker 1: talk about Mountain Mountain Hebron? Are we there yet? Yeah? Okay. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's in the West Bank in the Middle East, and
Speaker 1: a lot of clan of Palestinians live in this network
Speaker 1: of caves that have been around for about a hundred
Speaker 1: years that their forefathers built. And uh, but of course,
Speaker 1: because it's in the West Bank, there's uh, some disagreement
Speaker 1: over who should be there. Of course, it's been claimed
Speaker 1: by Israeli settlers as well, and the army has threatened
Speaker 1: to remove the people. I don't know what the current
Speaker 1: state is. I looked it up, I couldn't find it.
Speaker 1: Last I saw is that they basically designated it a
Speaker 1: militarized zone, which meant that the Palestinians living there needed
Speaker 1: to leave. But are they still in there? I don't know.
Speaker 1: The most recent thing I can find from two thousand five,
Speaker 1: so I don't know. Al right, Well, southern Spain, was
Speaker 1: that what you were talking about. I don't know if
Speaker 1: Faltemyer's in southern Spain, but there's it's definitely in Spain.
Speaker 1: But there are like a natural cliff or cave dwellings
Speaker 1: that were carved out into even further Cave dwellings in
Speaker 1: Spain and um have basically been continuously inhabited at one
Speaker 1: time or another. Now there's a large homeless population there apparently,
Speaker 1: I mean, Spain's got unemployment. I'm sure that the cave
Speaker 1: dwelling populations increased proportionately. Uh Cappadocia. Cappadocia uh in Turkey
Speaker 1: has an elaborate cave system and it's not a very
Speaker 1: friendly place. There's not a lot of vegetation that's been
Speaker 1: described as lunar and this. Yeah, it's amazing, it's really amazing.
Speaker 1: Just the natural landscape itself is amazing. And then if
Speaker 1: you look closely, you're like, oh, those pock marks are
Speaker 1: caves like homes. Yeah, and these were man made. These
Speaker 1: are carved out for people to live in, which is um,
Speaker 1: I guess we didn't even say. I guess that's the
Speaker 1: other type of cave. You neither find one or you
Speaker 1: can make one. But yeah, and by making one, I
Speaker 1: think anytime you kind of enhance or extend a natural
Speaker 1: cave to that's that would account. I would guess that'd
Speaker 1: be man made too. Yeah, probably so. But the en
Speaker 1: Cappadocia and Turkey um anchor Rights, which were early Christians
Speaker 1: who were hermits. Yeah, um, they inhabited these caves and
Speaker 1: and made the first dwellings. And then when the Christians
Speaker 1: were persecuted, they were joined by a lot more people
Speaker 1: and they actually built um underground churches that became an
Speaker 1: underground city. Have you seen these pictures? Oh, they're amazing,
Speaker 1: just the masonry and the artwork that they made of
Speaker 1: just hewn from the rock. That's still intact today. And
Speaker 1: apparently it was abandoned and then forgotten for a while
Speaker 1: and then rediscovered. Not but that was pretty neat to find. Well,
Speaker 1: I got another documentary for you, um, like no place
Speaker 1: on earth have you seen that one? Uh? There was
Speaker 1: a guy a caver that UM was exploring this cave
Speaker 1: in the Ukraine and he found like shoes and medicine
Speaker 1: bottles and things, and he was like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: this isn't like paleolithic at all. This looks like it
Speaker 1: was from the nineteen forties. And it was. And it
Speaker 1: turns out there was. Um thirty eight members of different
Speaker 1: Jewish families hid in this cave during the Holocaust for
Speaker 1: uh five hundred and eleven days. They lived underground for
Speaker 1: over a year and a half. And uh some of
Speaker 1: these people still alive and they found them. They still
Speaker 1: live in the caves. No, no, no, no, they lived
Speaker 1: there for a year and a half. I got in
Speaker 1: the Holocaust, Um, but there they had never told their story.
Speaker 1: They just like kept it a secret because they were like,
Speaker 1: no one would believe it. Plus also in case they
Speaker 1: ever needed to go back to the cave, Well they
Speaker 1: did go back. They took him back to the caves. No,
Speaker 1: I'm saying if they ever had to go back to
Speaker 1: the cave, like you want to keep the cave secret,
Speaker 1: because they weren't the first time, you know, but um,
Speaker 1: it's pretty powerful and they take some of these survivors
Speaker 1: back to this cave or they haven't been since the
Speaker 1: Holocaust and they all survived to um really really great documentary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty cool, like no place self like like no place
Speaker 1: on Earth, well, like no place selves. Um. There's also
Speaker 1: apparently a trend in parts of Europe to buy old
Speaker 1: man made cave homes and dress him up. I saw
Speaker 1: this and I was like, I didn't double check, but
Speaker 1: I could see this. Yeah, I mean this is a grabster,
Speaker 1: so's he's good on his facts. Outfitting them with electric city, um,
Speaker 1: installing modern plumbing, uh, getting the ventilation system going, and
Speaker 1: just turning it into a vacation home. Yeah, putting down
Speaker 1: tile floor. And there's always the cave home weirdos. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean if you're TV like, you know bizarre houses.
Speaker 1: If you're a green person, yeah, you could do a
Speaker 1: lot worse than build yourself a cave home because the
Speaker 1: environmental impact is so much lower. It requires much fewer
Speaker 1: building materials. Um. If you can deal with very low
Speaker 1: natural light and not go crazy, then a cave might
Speaker 1: be suited for you. If you can deal with the
Speaker 1: damp and moisture, cave might be suited for you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I shouldn't have said weirdos. It's ok to eat
Speaker 1: the room. But anytime I see those shows of like
Speaker 1: extreme bizarre homes, you just shoot the TV. I made
Speaker 1: a house out of like Bob Goolay was on it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much. Um, I've never been in like there was
Speaker 1: a cave house near us growing up. Actually that really? Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was like you know, it was when they built
Speaker 1: into the side of you know Earth where in Stone
Speaker 1: Mountain is it's still there? I assume, so is it
Speaker 1: built into Stone Mountain? No? No, no, no, Um. And
Speaker 1: it was like kind of the people go by there
Speaker 1: and look at it and stuff, and I, even as
Speaker 1: a kid, I thought it was kind of dumb. Did
Speaker 1: you ever know Jack mcbreer when you were younger? Kenneth
Speaker 1: from UM thirty Rock, he's from Stone Mountain Conyers? Oh
Speaker 1: really yeah in the show he's from Stone Mountain. UM.
Speaker 1: One of the other writers for thirty Rock, though I
Speaker 1: can't remember his name is I think what you read
Speaker 1: in is that right? But no, Hun didn't know jackne Prayer, which, uh,
Speaker 1: you got anything else? Oh? Yeah? The last thing. One
Speaker 1: of the other benefits of UM cave home it's very
Speaker 1: difficult to break into, which is sad because that is
Speaker 1: not the reason why they were initially used in Paleolithic Carrott.
Speaker 1: But it's a it's a quality point. Now this true.
Speaker 1: How far God, where was it that guy that built
Speaker 1: a house underground? No, I've seen those before. I've seemed
Speaker 1: like missile silos converted into homes and things like that.
Speaker 1: This one was for sale recently. I can't remember who
Speaker 1: sent it to me, but he basically built It's not
Speaker 1: like a weird, you know, silo house. It's like a home.
Speaker 1: He just built underground. Like when you go down there,
Speaker 1: he's got paintings of the outside world on all the walls.
Speaker 1: It was this rich guy who built it. I think
Speaker 1: as a like a shelter in case something bad happened,
Speaker 1: and so you know, there's pictures of like rolling fields
Speaker 1: and when you're underground, I mean, obviously you can tell
Speaker 1: it's a painting, but it doesn't feel like some cave.
Speaker 1: It's like just a regular house built underground. Well, there's
Speaker 1: a theory that we're going to end up living underground
Speaker 1: because eventually arable crop lay and will become so valuable
Speaker 1: that we will, uh we'll all have we will basically
Speaker 1: be forced to inhabit, the opposite of sky scrapers. They
Speaker 1: will be going down instead of up because we'll need
Speaker 1: the land end up on top for crops. Didn't we
Speaker 1: do one on why why don't humans live underground? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I guess that could be part four? Then I guess
Speaker 1: so it's not really a cave. Yeah, that's true. You
Speaker 1: know this is the cave suite. All right, So let's
Speaker 1: see you don't have anything else. I got nothing else.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about cave dwellers, you
Speaker 1: can type cave dwellers into the search part how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot Com. And I said search parts means it's
Speaker 1: time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this. We keep
Speaker 1: making the same mistake with acceleration. Oh yeah, and I'm
Speaker 1: tired of it. If we ever say this again, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna like put us both in time out. Do you
Speaker 1: think Jerry would be paying attention? But I don't know
Speaker 1: why we keep making this mistake. But in the Solar
Speaker 1: Sales episode we talked about In fact, I think it
Speaker 1: was you this time said something about acceleration will kill you,
Speaker 1: or the speed will kill you, or something going that fast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was. We got a lot of emails,
Speaker 1: and this was one of the nicer ones. Heads up
Speaker 1: guys on a few things, including on the solar sales.
Speaker 1: There's been some misunderstanding between speed and acceleration. Common belief
Speaker 1: is it traveling at high speed is taxing on the body.
Speaker 1: Not true. It is the acceleration and not the speed
Speaker 1: which is dangerous. Take as an example, traveling in a car.
Speaker 1: Changing your velocity from zero to a hundred kilometers per
Speaker 1: hour a very short time results in a large acceleration.
Speaker 1: This is where you get that feeling of being crushed
Speaker 1: into your seat. But once you keep that constant speed,
Speaker 1: that feeling goes away. The same thing for a plane.
Speaker 1: Notice when you accelerate on the tarmac, it's pretty intense,
Speaker 1: but once you're up in the air, you'd barely feel
Speaker 1: a thing. Yeah you think we'd know this. I mean
Speaker 1: we've done sort of research on the rockets led an acceleration,
Speaker 1: and it's just misspeaking in the moment we know this. Oh,
Speaker 1: if I'm in a rupt for a second, I ran
Speaker 1: across this designer's euthanasia roller coaster. What um it was
Speaker 1: basically this guy design It's all conceptual. Obviously, it's slightly
Speaker 1: tongue in cheek. But it was designed to kill you,
Speaker 1: like the roller coaster was designed to kill you and
Speaker 1: to go out with a thrill. Yeah, and he he
Speaker 1: describes like what like at what point you will die
Speaker 1: and from what Basically it's like you are going upside
Speaker 1: down so fast. The acceleration is so great that it
Speaker 1: basically like keeps your heart from pumping. Wow. Um, and
Speaker 1: just to make sure you're dead, he added, like six
Speaker 1: of those loops, but it starts with this huge hill.
Speaker 1: I can't remember what it's called. I think if you
Speaker 1: look up uthan Asia roller coaster, this this guy's design
Speaker 1: will come up. It's pretty interesting. Interesting, but it would
Speaker 1: be from acceleration, not speed. Wow, that's a lot of
Speaker 1: work to put into a killing machine. I would just
Speaker 1: draw a length of rope and a sturdy beam, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be a successful designer probably so. Uh So.
Speaker 1: Then he puts it in the context of the solar
Speaker 1: sale um and says only very small accelerations are involved,
Speaker 1: so human traveling in such a ship would experience minimal forces.
Speaker 1: So I hope it clears it up a little bit.
Speaker 1: Definitely rocking at guys, and that from knee Raj from
Speaker 1: Australia slash Mauritius ni Raj. Thank you you appreciate that
Speaker 1: we will never make that mistake again. I disagree. I'm
Speaker 1: sure we will speed ull kill you. Where's Northern Ireland,
Speaker 1: Great Britain, k England. We've been getting that one wrong
Speaker 1: forever too. Yeah. You know, there's only so much information
Speaker 1: that human brain can hold, everybody, and we're trying to
Speaker 1: fill it with things like cave dwelling facts and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, and who was the bass player for Poison?
Speaker 1: I can't get rid of that? Do you know that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Bobby Doll, So there's cc It was a guitarist, Brett Michael,
Speaker 1: Brett Michael. Bobby Doll is the guy. He sounds like
Speaker 1: a V seven oriole or something to the drummer. Was
Speaker 1: you remember him right? No? Ricky Rockett? Oh wow? Yeah.
Speaker 1: I I didn't even like poison. That's what's so funny.
Speaker 1: Poison was good. I wouldn't have they were good. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's see if you want to know more about poison already,
Speaker 1: that part didn't I sure. If you want to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us, how about that. You can tweet
Speaker 1: to us at s y s K podcast. You can
Speaker 1: join us on Facebook dot com slash that We Should Know.
Speaker 1: You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
Speaker 1: Discovery dot com. You can check out our very fun
Speaker 1: and entertaining home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
Speaker 1: dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
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