Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Noman.
Speaker 3: They call be Bed. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Andrew the try Force Howard. Most importantly, you
Speaker 3: are you. You are here that makes this the stuff
Speaker 3: they don't want you to know. And fellow Cryptid fans,
Speaker 3: friends and neighbors, we have something special for you this evening.
Speaker 3: I think we're all excited about this. I hope that's
Speaker 3: the case. We all love a Cryptid episode, right, Can we.
Speaker 4: Talk about in the past? We had too, because this
Speaker 4: seems like a question that would obviously come up Cryptid
Speaker 4: like fighting games or sort of Pokemon style or Magic
Speaker 4: the Gathering style card games. I feel like one came up.
Speaker 3: There are characters that occur in there, there are I
Speaker 3: feel like that You're right, there has to be one,
Speaker 3: because we know there are a couple of deity fighting games.
Speaker 3: We talked about that previously, and we know there are
Speaker 3: crypto zoological characters that occur in like Magic, the Gathering,
Speaker 3: and so on.
Speaker 4: There's a game on Steam called Beasts of Mystery. Have
Speaker 4: you ever wondered what it would be like to see
Speaker 4: Mothman fight the flat Woods Monster? Well now you can
Speaker 4: find out in Beasts of Mystery, the cryptid fighting game
Speaker 4: with hand drawn animation and approachable gameplay inspired by the
Speaker 4: greatest fighting games of past and present.
Speaker 3: What a time to be alive? What a time? May
Speaker 3: twenty third, twenty twenty five. As we record this, we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about one cryptid that may not be
Speaker 3: a Beast of Mystery and may not be familiar to
Speaker 3: a lot of us in the West. Our exploration takes
Speaker 3: us far far from our home base of the Atlanta
Speaker 3: metro area to the rugged, mountainous and forbidding interior of
Speaker 3: the Hubei Province in China. Also in the research here,
Speaker 3: I don't know about you, guys. I learned a new word.
Speaker 3: We've got a local sparkling water company here called Montane.
Speaker 3: Did you guys know Montane's an actual word. I thought
Speaker 3: it was like a car name, like you made up
Speaker 3: something that sounded like a real thing.
Speaker 4: I guess it just sounds like a sort of like
Speaker 4: a crooner from the fifties. You know, Johnny Montane.
Speaker 2: Sounds like Fontaine to me. That's just something I'm familiar with. Yeah,
Speaker 2: our buddy bre mm hmm.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that would be Debri right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and our buddy pre the famous runner, right, wasn't
Speaker 4: that Prefontaine?
Speaker 3: Oh? Okay, comes and Montane. Just for any etymology, nerds
Speaker 3: is a word that, weirdly, I don't think we had
Speaker 3: encountered before. I didn't know was a real word. It
Speaker 3: means of growing in were inhabiting mountain areas. Nice, that
Speaker 3: makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's what you know. Really,
Speaker 3: it's my fault for not having a good vocabulary. That
Speaker 3: was like this Sparkling Water company just made up a
Speaker 3: BS word.
Speaker 4: Anyway, Man, I got to call you back for being
Speaker 4: self deprecating. There to a fault. You have the best
Speaker 4: vocabulary at anybody that I know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you have a bad vocabulary, But I don't
Speaker 2: know what I am, I'm speaking dumb ass, not at all.
Speaker 4: Can I really quickly just say this beast of mystery game?
Speaker 4: Not to harp on it too. It looks like it
Speaker 4: was created an MS paint, so that that alone is
Speaker 4: worth the price of admission.
Speaker 3: Do check it out. It looks ridiculous. Oh, and Triforce
Speaker 3: points out there are a couple of Japanese role playing
Speaker 3: games with Yo Kai. I am in dude, Yo Kai
Speaker 3: are amazing.
Speaker 4: Well, the guy we're talking about today is a little
Speaker 4: bit Yo Kai esque, though it's not from Japan, it
Speaker 4: is from China, but it has that mythical quality, right.
Speaker 3: Oh, one hundred percent. Yeah. For thousands and thousands of years,
Speaker 3: local rural populations in Hubay have have been or whubey
Speaker 3: have been convinced they share the land with something not
Speaker 3: quite ape, not quite human, you quite skunk, not quite skunk,
Speaker 3: not quite swamp, not quite abominable. Uh yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: huge thing. We've all heard of bigfoot, We've heard of
Speaker 3: the abominable snowman. But what about the yarn And by
Speaker 3: the way, what the heck is yarn fever? Uh yeah,
Speaker 3: We're gonna pause for a second check in with our
Speaker 3: medical experts to make sure we're still inoculated. Here are
Speaker 3: the facts when we talk about bigfoot. And we've run
Speaker 3: into this so often over the years. We continually see
Speaker 3: this strange, near ubiquitous, ancient myth about something that inevitably
Speaker 3: translates to either wild men or hairy men.
Speaker 4: And one of my favorite Bigfoot superpowers I guess that
Speaker 4: he would be able to use in a fighting game
Speaker 4: is this idea that he can teleport and that he
Speaker 4: can sort of fold time and space. And maybe that
Speaker 4: accounts for some of the proliferation of these types of creatures,
Speaker 4: you know, globally speaking.
Speaker 3: Interesting and that's something our our, our good friend David
Speaker 3: Bikera remarked about briefly when we interviewed him. How long
Speaker 3: ago was that lo those many years ago?
Speaker 4: And what is it called, guys Operation Bigfoot their expedition expedition,
Speaker 4: But it very much is that, and I know we
Speaker 4: harp on it every time, but like it has the
Speaker 4: quality level to build the quality of like a really
Speaker 4: rat Disney Universal Studios type exhibit. It is pretty badass.
Speaker 4: If you find yourself in the North Georgia Mountains, do
Speaker 4: give it a check.
Speaker 3: Ry day of it. Yeah, yeah, cherry log near LJ
Speaker 3: and make a day of it. Because it's also right
Speaker 3: up the road from a place where you can rent
Speaker 3: a tank, which our accounting department did not allow us
Speaker 3: to do. Deny, Yes, I'm not going to let go
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, And just to the point of the number
Speaker 2: of hairy man wild man stories that exist even within
Speaker 2: the US and the different varieties of it. We had
Speaker 2: another person we ended up speaking to that makes this
Speaker 2: thing called map in black. You can check it out.
Speaker 2: All of us have a copy now at this point
Speaker 2: and it shows well, it's not for me, it's from
Speaker 2: a listener.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you got us the maps. Thank you.
Speaker 2: Well, he sent us the maps. But the concept here
Speaker 2: is that there are spread across just the United States.
Speaker 2: I think, I want to say, around five or six
Speaker 2: varieties of this specific form of cryptid just here in
Speaker 2: the US, and then you look globally, it just there's
Speaker 2: so many more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, proliferates. That's a great point too. I remember seeing
Speaker 3: that map and thinking, you know, this is somewhat similar
Speaker 3: to regional variations of squirrels right or where, you know,
Speaker 3: And if it's a natural organism that makes sense living
Speaker 3: in the same place over vast swalls of time. It's
Speaker 3: weird because everything we find when we look into historical
Speaker 3: strangeness is that no matter how different a given culture
Speaker 3: may be or when that culture occurs, they share surprising commonalities,
Speaker 3: Like every single human civilization throughout history has at one
Speaker 3: point managed to predict the passage of the seasons, and
Speaker 3: they have all attempted to explain the movements of the
Speaker 3: heavens in relation to the Earth. But the other really
Speaker 3: strange thing is this weird myth that continues in the
Speaker 3: modern day. Like you said, Matt, we call it bigfoot.
Speaker 3: Regional variations here would be swamp ape, skunk ape, the
Speaker 3: Irali from native culture and so on. You can find
Speaker 3: ancient petroglyph depicting hairy people and then the entire lore
Speaker 3: about them, and this dates back, you know, thousands of years.
Speaker 3: You also to that point again, you hear legends about
Speaker 3: this and other parts of the world, often remote mountainous
Speaker 3: wildernesses right or stretches of forest cover. Russia had a lot,
Speaker 3: or the Soviet Union, I should say, had a lot
Speaker 3: of research into this, as did pre communist Russia. And
Speaker 3: then you'll hear about the Yeti, the snowman, and of
Speaker 3: course in China the Yarin. But they're all again, they're
Speaker 3: all variations on the same idea that Homo sapien shares
Speaker 3: earth with some reclusive, enigmatic, oddly intelligent species of something
Speaker 3: that looks a little like a human, a little bit
Speaker 3: like an ape. And I think, or I would posit
Speaker 3: guys that in some of our previous explorations, we found
Speaker 3: a really good answer for some of these common legends,
Speaker 3: not just bigfoot stuff, but things like trolls or orcs
Speaker 3: or goblins or hobbits, and they were kind of kissing
Speaker 3: cousins to the humans.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this extends into the modern day, this legacy
Speaker 4: of ancient hominids and remains in the form of trace
Speaker 4: amounts of DNA that's found in some modern humans. Unfortunately,
Speaker 4: not those actual facts hobbits that you mentioned ben Homofluoresciensis,
Speaker 4: though we don't. I don't think there are like, you know,
Speaker 4: tolkien Esque hobbits. You know, they have their own little
Speaker 4: hobbit holes and don't like their china to be yeah,
Speaker 4: don't like their their plates to be chipped and crabs yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We haven't found the Bilbo Baggins yet,
Speaker 3: but I love the point you're making there. In all
Speaker 3: the so called hobbits of Southeast Asia, along with the
Speaker 3: Denisovans you mentioned the poor Neanderthal. Further current science theorizes
Speaker 3: humanity may discover yet more evidence of these ancient home
Speaker 3: sapient hominid interactions and maybe even hidden somewhere in human
Speaker 3: DNA remnant lines of other hominid groups. We don't know.
Speaker 3: That's the pickle of it. And if you're a scientist,
Speaker 3: that's either very exciting or very frustrating. If you're a
Speaker 3: team of hapless podcasters, that's amazing, because that's an episode
Speaker 3: if we find one for sure. So with all this
Speaker 3: in mind, folks, we have proven that things close to
Speaker 3: human existed at the same time as modern Homo sapiens,
Speaker 3: and we also have solid proof through as you said,
Speaker 3: old DNA evidence that these groups interacted. So there's this
Speaker 3: compelling argument that at least some of these bigfoot myths
Speaker 3: could be based on oral history about genuine encounters with
Speaker 3: these things not quite Homo sapien. I don't know what
Speaker 3: do you guys think.
Speaker 4: Oh, just a quick shout out to you yourself, mister
Speaker 4: Ben Bollen. You gifted both Matt Frederick and myself a
Speaker 4: lovely graphic novel version of the book Sapiens. Credible illustrated volume.
Speaker 4: I think it's part one of this book, but it
Speaker 4: is absolutely fantastic. I haven't made my way all the
Speaker 4: way through it yet, but it talks a lot about
Speaker 4: these Dennis Ovins and some of these early hominives and
Speaker 4: beautifully illustrates what that world might have looked like.
Speaker 3: Oh man, you've all Noah Harari, what a guy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what a cool project to translate to visuals.
Speaker 3: In that way. Agreed. Agreed, man, Ah that guys. I
Speaker 3: love the way he writes. So, as any fan of
Speaker 3: the History Channel can assure you, there is no shortage
Speaker 3: of attempts to document Bigfoot or even to capture a
Speaker 3: living specimen. We don't want to sound hyperbolic, but to date,
Speaker 3: as far as modern science is concerned, all of these
Speaker 3: attempts have failed, every single one. Even the expeditions that
Speaker 3: found you know, the purported yetty scalp. Later testing proved
Speaker 3: I think it was from like a mountain goat or
Speaker 3: something of that nature. Yeah. Still it's important, you know,
Speaker 3: we have to remember that even when science fails to
Speaker 3: find the thing it's looking for, it has at least
Speaker 3: provide a value by establishing that thing does not exist.
Speaker 3: But what if we're looking at the wrong place. What
Speaker 3: if the real Bigfoot is not in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 3: but instead, what if it's half a world away, deep
Speaker 3: into the interior of China. Unlike Western science's overall dismissal
Speaker 3: of Bigfoot, China seriously scientifically investigated this creature's existence and
Speaker 3: it became a social phenomenon. It became like a good
Speaker 3: version of a moral panic hit the zeitgeist.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is kind of like that concept that we
Speaker 4: talked about with Yeah, correct, Yeah, the opposite of paranoia,
Speaker 4: which is pro noia. The I guess it is inherently misinformed.
Speaker 4: The other people are trying to help you. I don't
Speaker 4: know if that in misinformed aspect is key to it,
Speaker 4: but man, I love the idea of a positive moral panic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a moral euphoria, a moral panic.
Speaker 4: We're doing a good job with this panic morally.
Speaker 3: So let's get into it. Now. Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 3: This is the story of the Yarin. It's a weird word.
Speaker 3: In translation, you would spell it y e r e n.
Speaker 3: People are going to throw, you know, little diacritics at
Speaker 3: different points or little accent marks, but it roughly translates
Speaker 3: to savage or wild man and Mandarin, so it'd be
Speaker 3: like Jillian or Cantonese sweat Gin suasion. We should go
Speaker 3: ahead I think and say, or at least I have
Speaker 3: to say, we are not native Mandarin speakers. We don't
Speaker 3: speak the dialects that we are going to be approaching
Speaker 3: in part of this. So please bear with us. And
Speaker 3: if we're what about this guys, if we're not sure
Speaker 3: about our pronunciation, maybe we just spell the word yeah.
Speaker 4: And I will also defer to Ben because you have
Speaker 4: done some studies of the language. All I've done is
Speaker 4: seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Speaker 3: Which is you know they make you watch that when
Speaker 3: you study Chinese.
Speaker 4: Well, if I'm not mistaken, I do remember that being
Speaker 4: the first time that was like identified as this is
Speaker 4: like a dialect, a particular dialect of Mandarin that was
Speaker 4: used in that film, at least in my experience. But
Speaker 4: I'm also joking. Ben, you really do have kind of
Speaker 4: expertise and studied time on this stuff. So but we
Speaker 4: will do our level best.
Speaker 3: As always, it's too kain noel, and got to be honest,
Speaker 3: as anybody who studied Chinese knows, they really string you
Speaker 3: along with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. They make you watch
Speaker 3: it early and they strongly imply that you'll learn how
Speaker 3: to run and jump from tree tops.
Speaker 4: Secretly though, guys, they used wires.
Speaker 3: That's the word on the street, and that's why I
Speaker 3: got a B plus instead of any movie though.
Speaker 4: In that fricking soundtrack with Yo Yo ma, oh my god,
Speaker 4: excellent stuff.
Speaker 3: It's amazing, you know. It's this thing. The Erin is
Speaker 3: often referred to as sort of the Chinese version of
Speaker 3: the Tibetan. YETI kind of like how the skunk Ape
Speaker 3: or swamp ape might be referred to as the insert
Speaker 3: region x here version of the Bigfoot.
Speaker 2: It's interesting that it's that just Okay, So I don't
Speaker 2: know much about this as well, but I do know
Speaker 2: that it is we're basically talking about a forested area.
Speaker 2: Is it an area? Do we know if it is
Speaker 2: covered in snow? Often? It seems just from its latitude
Speaker 2: that it maybe isn't covered in snow.
Speaker 3: Right exactly. It's a much more hospitable region to wildlife
Speaker 3: than say Everest or the upper reaches of the Himalayas.
Speaker 3: It's the shinong Jia Forestry District. I messed up to
Speaker 3: tone there. If you had to pick a spot for
Speaker 3: the Chinese Bigfoot, this would be peak real estate. Okay,
Speaker 3: it's free real estate. It's like about the more than
Speaker 3: one thousand, two hundred square miles of mountainous forest right
Speaker 3: just approaching the timber line. Right, it's which makes it
Speaker 3: technically montane. There we go, and it's the elevation is
Speaker 3: pretty high, about six thousand, five hundred to six nine
Speaker 3: hundred feet up. Okay, yeah, so it's like it's a
Speaker 3: pretty dope spot if you're looking for a creature like this.
Speaker 2: Well, it does make sense. Then why the YETI would
Speaker 2: be the comparison there because of it must get highly
Speaker 2: cold there at times, simply because of the elevation, which
Speaker 2: is why you may see it as more of a
Speaker 2: snow creature than a you know, the way we'd imagine
Speaker 2: a big foot, which is very much just a forest boy,
Speaker 2: you know, just in the tree line, in the trees,
Speaker 2: not with the you know, the even the coloring of
Speaker 2: the fur, if there is fur.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Also reminds me of
Speaker 3: the various I can't remember the specific cards in magic
Speaker 3: the gathering, but the various troll uh specializations. Right, aren't
Speaker 3: there different kinds of trolls? I might be thinking of something.
Speaker 4: You've got your bridge trolls, you got your your your
Speaker 4: your your mal trolls. Yeah, what are the ones with
Speaker 4: the funny hair and the jewels in their belly?
Speaker 3: Buttons?
Speaker 4: Troll dolls, that's the one.
Speaker 3: You got, your doll?
Speaker 4: Trolls is a smurf A kind of troll.
Speaker 3: A smurf is more akin to a smaller for spirit,
Speaker 3: maybe like a brownie and gnome.
Speaker 4: Do you know what they call the smurfs in Germany?
Speaker 3: What do they call the smurfs in Germany? And I
Speaker 3: like that that's not true. Why does everything sound so
Speaker 3: aggressive in that language? I'm so prejudiced? All right, sorry,
Speaker 3: but uh, this this area, Yeah, I'm thinking in terms of,
Speaker 3: you know again, regional variations like with squirrels or whatever,
Speaker 3: geographic variations. I'm thinking it would make sense, to your point, Matt,
Speaker 3: for a very similar kind of animal to adapt to
Speaker 3: different environmental pressures. And this forest we're talking about is
Speaker 3: one of the most biodiverse areas in the nation. It's
Speaker 3: home to tons of rare species with pretty great names.
Speaker 4: Correct per our Pals over at Onesco in their Delightful
Speaker 4: World Heritage sites. The area in question here is already
Speaker 4: home to tons of actual facts. To quote Lauren Vogel,
Speaker 4: bum identifiable species like the Chinese giant salamander, the golden
Speaker 4: or Sichuan snubnosed monkey.
Speaker 3: I don't like him.
Speaker 4: He's two snubnosed, so snobby. What's up with that? Why's
Speaker 4: he got his nose turned up like?
Speaker 3: And also there's the clouded leopard.
Speaker 4: Not what makes it clouded? Is it just something about
Speaker 4: its pattern?
Speaker 3: No, it's it's just it's sketchy and it has a
Speaker 3: bad memory.
Speaker 4: Got it the cloud We've also got the much less
Speaker 4: remarkable common leopard, which I don't know why that even
Speaker 4: made the list, to be.
Speaker 3: Honest, guys, it's crazy because they're I don't know, to
Speaker 3: the point about slightly different regions. It's not Neither of
Speaker 3: these are the same as the snow leopard, right, So
Speaker 3: it feels like there's a gradiation or gradation there from
Speaker 3: common to cloud it to snow. I don't know anyway.
Speaker 2: It's also just something to note there there are dangerous
Speaker 2: species in these forests, right that you should be aware
Speaker 2: of if you're going to be trekking out there looking
Speaker 2: for stuff. And also there are things like the Chinese
Speaker 2: giant salamander that don't seem real. It doesn't seem like
Speaker 2: a salamander should get that large if you've seen pictures
Speaker 2: of it. I remember watching a video way back in
Speaker 2: the day of one of the largest salamanders ever, you know,
Speaker 2: in captivity or was caught, and these things are huge.
Speaker 2: It looks like the size of a dog. But it
Speaker 2: is a salamander.
Speaker 4: So it's not just a clever name.
Speaker 3: No, no, no. They are actually giant and harrison to
Speaker 3: the vast majority of salamanders. And they're kind of cool man.
Speaker 3: I'll be honest. They're no Asian black bear, because those
Speaker 3: guys are hanging out in this area as well. It's
Speaker 3: just important for us to establish the biodiversity here. It's
Speaker 3: another point to the argument for the real estate right,
Speaker 3: especially in a country that is rapidly industrialized over such
Speaker 3: a short span of time. You know, often in the West,
Speaker 3: when you see pictures of China, you see pictures of
Speaker 3: these crazy factories, right, these huge works of human beings.
Speaker 3: Or you see a picture of a panda in the
Speaker 3: middle of nowhere that is just doing its best to
Speaker 3: figure out how to eat bamboo.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we're going to look in a little lonely.
Speaker 4: I'm not gonna lie. He's a panda, friend.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, and pop hube Providence into your maps Google like, yeah,
Speaker 2: but yeah, pop pop it into your maps app and
Speaker 2: just look at the spaces between the civilization talking about
Speaker 2: that the way the expansion is occurring, right, and you
Speaker 2: can really see exactly what Benn is saying. There are
Speaker 2: still extremely remote areas here where there's just humans are
Speaker 2: not there.
Speaker 3: M yeah, even in even in such a populous country.
Speaker 3: You know, the population of China is huge, but it's
Speaker 3: quite unevenly distributed, so such that you know, you think
Speaker 3: most Americans live in cities or urban areas, You're absolutely right,
Speaker 3: but that is exacerbated in China so much so that
Speaker 3: the current government has some hard laws about who can
Speaker 3: move where and when and why you have to get
Speaker 3: a license to do so.
Speaker 2: And do you know what's in the eastern side of
Speaker 2: Hubay Province.
Speaker 3: What's in the eastern side of Hubei Province?
Speaker 2: Wuhan?
Speaker 3: I got you all in Czech yea famous Muhan clan.
Speaker 3: And I still true, I still am so flummoxed by
Speaker 3: I rememberer when uh when wu Ha came out, not Wuhan.
Speaker 3: And when Wuha came out, I was texting with some
Speaker 3: fellow hip hop heads, and this was I. I had
Speaker 3: not searched the lyrics myself, and I thought when he
Speaker 3: was saying I thought he was saying stuff like I've
Speaker 3: got that eggnog shit that makes you sweat your neck.
Speaker 3: Who haw, I've got you all in check. And I
Speaker 3: thought it was c Z E C H.
Speaker 4: And I'm certain this has come up before, I remembering.
Speaker 3: Not to tell the same story twice. But you know,
Speaker 3: I hated. I hated for it that myth to be
Speaker 3: busted because I love the idea that New York slang
Speaker 3: was just that extreme and wild, and it still is
Speaker 3: very colorful and wild, it sure is. And what on
Speaker 3: earth is a flip mode squad? I've never fully.
Speaker 4: Wrapped my head around that you haven't flipped No, well never, No,
Speaker 4: I am loyal. I would slip them. So that's drop
Speaker 4: a dime on no one.
Speaker 3: So the reason we're pretty especially that this economy, but
Speaker 3: the reason we're we're already we're bringing up the idea
Speaker 3: of busting the myth is because in our conversations with
Speaker 3: some of our friends who have searched for Bigfoot or
Speaker 3: other cryptids, you get the feeling at times that maybe
Speaker 3: they don't want to find the thing. Maybe it's more
Speaker 3: about the journey, and so maybe I should have never
Speaker 3: checked on those buster rhyme lyrics and kept the mystery alive.
Speaker 3: But even without the hunt for a creature called a
Speaker 3: cryptid like the yarin, this area has been a hotbed
Speaker 3: for scientific inquiry. From eighteen eighty four to eighteen eighty
Speaker 3: nine alone, scientists found five hundred news more than five
Speaker 3: hundred new species of plant. It was kind of like
Speaker 3: that older movie with Sean Connery in the Amazon Medicine Man.
Speaker 4: Where dude, that was not a good movie.
Speaker 3: It was not a good movie. The previce was that
Speaker 3: he is like, he's the guy who is an outsider,
Speaker 3: but he knows the jungle. He discovers these new species
Speaker 3: and he's like fighting big Pharma or something like that.
Speaker 4: And I believe the love interest is Elaine Brocco, doctor
Speaker 4: Melfi from the Sopranos.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: And of course you know Goodfellows as well.
Speaker 3: Ah. So we know that people have been searching this area.
Speaker 3: They've found strange animals already, they've found things that were
Speaker 3: not known to exist in the larger scientific record, and
Speaker 3: as we record today, there are perhaps there are certainly
Speaker 3: more plants and perhaps even animals that are still out
Speaker 3: there waiting to be discovered. Before we continue, we've got
Speaker 3: to point out that we're getting a lot of this
Speaker 3: information on the erin from one of the best academic
Speaker 3: Western sources out there. It's a book called The People's
Speaker 3: Peaking Man, Popular Science and Human Identity in twentieth century China,
Speaker 3: written by Sigrid Schmolzer. And this was probably name I
Speaker 3: know right. This was published in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: So as the world of this kind of literature goes,
Speaker 3: and as world of cryptozoology goes, it's kind of recent.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not a breathless yellow journalism headline.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, But we've also found a bunch of sources
Speaker 2: from the late nineties up into pretty recently twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four where there are active discussions of the search for
Speaker 2: this specific cryptid through all of that time span.
Speaker 3: Yes, very much so. And so deep do these searches
Speaker 3: go that it would be impossible for us to name
Speaker 3: every single expedition in this episode alone, but we'll we'll
Speaker 3: take you through several of the possibilities here as we
Speaker 3: get to the search. As a matter of fact, maybe
Speaker 3: now that we've done some intros for our sources, we
Speaker 3: pause for a word from our sponsors and then dive in.
Speaker 3: All right, Mountain, Mama, take me home, countrys Country. The
Speaker 3: cat returns, and so we returned to Cigared Schmalzer, who
Speaker 3: traces the Chinese search for the Gharran from the days
Speaker 3: of ancient folklore to the discovery of something called the
Speaker 3: Peking Man. And we've all heard about the peking Man,
Speaker 3: which was for a long time considered a legend until
Speaker 3: it was discovered or hard evidence like fossils were discovered
Speaker 3: in the nineteen twenties. It's kind of homo erectus, correct.
Speaker 4: The peking Man was a prominent symbol of bringing science
Speaker 4: to the people. That's kind of cool as a post
Speaker 4: revolutionary bit of kind of positive communist propaganda, wouldn't you say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Because we know that during the Communist Revolution, the
Speaker 3: new government was seeking to reframe popular narratives. Right, this
Speaker 3: is the people's move This is a world wherein the
Speaker 3: history of humankind is a history of progress through labor,
Speaker 3: through secular learning. This is not a result of divine intervention,
Speaker 3: ghost spirits, or the supernatural.
Speaker 4: That's interesting, So sort of an imposed enlightenment and a
Speaker 4: mandated step away from the religious towards the secular.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I like imposed enlightenment. That's a that's a
Speaker 3: really great term for this because we see, you know,
Speaker 3: even now in Chinese authorities have a bad reaction to
Speaker 3: films with ghosts in them, things like that.
Speaker 4: You know, Ben, I was thinking about this when looking
Speaker 4: through your research dot com before we went on the air,
Speaker 4: and it occurred to me that a lot of American
Speaker 4: films when they get Chinese releases, they have to be
Speaker 4: recut almost entirely to remove mentions of the supernatural.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which we discussed in our previous episode.
Speaker 4: I thought, yeah, doesn't isn't that a sort of aligned
Speaker 4: with that shift?
Speaker 3: One hundred percent, dude, one hundred percent. And so as
Speaker 3: this government is seeking to undermine religion to move people
Speaker 3: away from previous superstitions, they also want to champion socialism
Speaker 3: and advanced science. So if you go to chapter seven
Speaker 3: of Schmalzer's work in specific, you get this fascinating anecdote
Speaker 3: that tells us how this phase of urine fervor urine fever,
Speaker 3: I should say, and scientific investigation begins to say, you're
Speaker 3: in fever. It's yeah, yeah, funny. Yeah. Well, if you
Speaker 3: like terrible puns, you're in luck. Yeah. Well, let's let's
Speaker 3: share the story, guys, like, how how did this go
Speaker 3: from a thing of legend and folklore to a rush
Speaker 3: of scientific investigation.
Speaker 2: Well, so let's begin with just the peaking man at least,
Speaker 2: reconstructions of some of the shards of the peaking man's
Speaker 2: skull and pieces of the peaking man's skull were thought
Speaker 2: to be Homo rectus, so a version of human before
Speaker 2: we the version of us. And there are a couple
Speaker 2: of professors there in nineteen fifty six that are checking
Speaker 2: it out. It's the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Natural
Speaker 2: History Museum. They're looking at this reconstruction of the peaking
Speaker 2: Man's skull, and one of them made a little statement.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's professors Mao Guangyan and Wang Ziatlin. And Mao
Speaker 3: is looking at this stuff. These guys are both att
Speaker 3: at professors, as you said, And he hears his colleague
Speaker 3: Wang say this, Yonren, I've seen it before. Ed. Mao says, basically,
Speaker 3: what is wrong with you? Are your nerves all right?
Speaker 3: Do you have a fever? Bro? Peeking mad is a
Speaker 3: human ancestor from five hundred thousand years ago. How could
Speaker 3: you have seen one living with your own eyes?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, he's already talking about the fever. The Wang
Speaker 4: goes on to explain that back in nineteen forty, while
Speaker 4: on safari or on an expedition for the Yellow River
Speaker 4: Water Control Committee, he and others in his group came
Speaker 4: across this sort of half ape, half human, chimera hybrid
Speaker 4: kind of creature who had been shot dead by indigenous
Speaker 4: folks or folks local to that area. So let's keep
Speaker 4: in mind that these aren't just too you know, crotchety, old,
Speaker 4: get off my lawn type dudes shooting the breeze, you know,
Speaker 4: at the local coffee shop, t shop, you know, passing
Speaker 4: around tall tales, spinning yarns. No, these are experts in
Speaker 4: their fields, vetted professors, and their conversation at the museum
Speaker 4: launched and other like minded colleagues into you guessed it
Speaker 4: that you're in full blown You're in fever.
Speaker 2: Yellow River. You're in fever. Come on, guys, what's going
Speaker 2: on here?
Speaker 3: Think about it. Picture us as Charlie Day by the
Speaker 3: red string board and think about it.
Speaker 2: But it does make sense, right, Okay, So if one
Speaker 2: of these Vetta professors says, hey, I've seen this thing before.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, I have this specific instance where I
Speaker 2: saw something very much like this dead like a version
Speaker 2: of it. Now, it would make you, as a professor,
Speaker 2: want to go check that out, because my god, guys,
Speaker 2: if there are versions of humanity that still exist somewhere,
Speaker 2: deep in a cave system, deep in a forest system,
Speaker 2: somewhere that's hidden, a population that is specifically attempting to
Speaker 2: hide from all of the stuff outside of their world,
Speaker 2: then we it would be awesome to find it. Right,
Speaker 2: You're at least as a professor, you're going to get
Speaker 2: some grants off of that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Sorry, don't mean to make it about money, but yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Mean it is. It's about money. It's about the things
Speaker 3: beyond money, like prestige and legacy. Right, And this is
Speaker 3: I think this is a fantastic point because it also
Speaker 3: incorporates some incredibly important social context. Now had probably heard
Speaker 3: stories like this fourth or fifth hand from rural populations,
Speaker 3: but even at the time when all people were supposed
Speaker 3: to be equal under the Party, there was a ton
Speaker 3: of prejudice from urban elites against rural people. The phrase
Speaker 3: translates to stuff like country bumpkin. You know. So they
Speaker 3: had all these stereotypes about people who lived outside of
Speaker 3: the cities. This doesn't have that stereotype apply. It's a
Speaker 3: respected colleague, right, Well, we've both been to school, etc.
Speaker 3: We have quote unquote seeing the world or read about it.
Speaker 3: And because of this we see the origins of yarn fever.
Speaker 3: Now it doesn't take off right away. It's a bit artsy,
Speaker 3: like if you've ever met an academic in Williamsburg or Brooklyn,
Speaker 3: you know it's a bit rarefied air. The nineteen fifties
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties, you see these relatively comparatively small scale research
Speaker 3: efforts on yerin documenting historical records, maybe sending a few expeditions.
Speaker 3: And these occur thanks to the work of Mao in particular,
Speaker 3: again not Mao Zedong different now, and then there are
Speaker 3: other Chinese scientists who kind of wu tang in on this,
Speaker 3: namely folks from what's called the Institute of Vertebrae, Palaeotology
Speaker 3: and paleo Anthropology or IVPPP. See not gonna let you
Speaker 3: down right PPT. For about two decades after that museum conversation,
Speaker 3: the idea that we could leverage science to learn more
Speaker 3: about this. It was restricted to some rural communities and
Speaker 3: intellectuals who were at that time frankly considered eccentric, and
Speaker 3: maw was a one a man army. For a minute,
Speaker 3: he was looking at possible relations between the YearIn stories
Speaker 3: and legends of the Yetti. He was looking at fossil
Speaker 3: records of apes and hominids. He was doing some bone
Speaker 3: comparison modern humans. And the further he went, even starting
Speaker 3: so skeptically, the further he went, the more convinced he
Speaker 3: was that he was on to something.
Speaker 4: So in the closing years of the cultural revolution in China,
Speaker 4: which was kind of a big deal and not quite
Speaker 4: as cool as it sounds, guys, Right, doesn't it sound
Speaker 4: like a positive thing, like a really positive sea change,
Speaker 4: But it was very much an iron fisted grasp over culture,
Speaker 4: and that was the revolution in question, right, Ben.
Speaker 3: Yes, sir, that's right.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: The idea is that we can get rid of all
Speaker 3: the beliefs of the past.
Speaker 4: We need to embrace cleaners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, clean clean house will remake the foundations of the house.
Speaker 3: It's very A lot of people died, right, and a
Speaker 3: lot and there you know, the idea of human rights
Speaker 3: is something that gets thrown out the window.
Speaker 4: Oh there's just so many good little things about communism.
Speaker 4: No one's just figured out how to do it well.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, socialism maybe more so.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's crazy how it starts off with good
Speaker 4: intentions and inevitably becomes a totalitarian dictatorship wherein anybody who
Speaker 4: is different is squashed.
Speaker 3: And what makes the YearIn is such an electric, galvanizing
Speaker 3: subject of interest in research. It happens because of the
Speaker 3: social context in which this exploration occurs. It goes down
Speaker 3: to really three major factors. I don't know if we
Speaker 3: want to walk through these briefly, but I think they
Speaker 3: tell us about the story.
Speaker 4: So at this point, some of these extreme, very aggressive
Speaker 4: political campaigns that sort of typified the beginning of the
Speaker 4: cultural revolution, we're starting to die down. So people were
Speaker 4: starting to be a little less afraid of the consequences
Speaker 4: of associating themselves with things that were identified as superstitious.
Speaker 4: This started to be perhaps a little bit of a
Speaker 4: sense of maybe things were going to improve, perhaps or
Speaker 4: that I don't know, people were a little less terrified
Speaker 4: of stepping out and owning these you know, past beliefs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, kind of like pilots and military aviation professionals reporting
Speaker 3: strange stuff in the sky. Once one person is coming
Speaker 3: out and talking about it and not getting punished, other
Speaker 3: people feel less hesitant to.
Speaker 4: Do specially especially now that we even have government acknowledgment
Speaker 4: of some of those things to some degree. It feels
Speaker 4: like it does open the.
Speaker 3: Floodgates, and then so people are less hesitant to talk
Speaker 3: about this. That's right. Second, a lot of Western writing
Speaker 3: is newly available where scientists in China we can't wait
Speaker 3: to read and translate this stuff. We have received a
Speaker 3: directive right to push forward with science. And while we're
Speaker 3: reading this stuff, we find loads of reports from our neighbors,
Speaker 3: to the North Russia Soviet Union on their version of
Speaker 3: this kind of cryptid We see a lot of stuff
Speaker 3: about Yeti and Bigfoot, because that stuff was already in
Speaker 3: those other cultural zeitgeist. It was already getting written about
Speaker 3: a lot. So people are therefore more likely to read
Speaker 3: about things related to this. And then what do we
Speaker 3: do when we read about something happening somewhere else, We
Speaker 3: immediately try to connect it to something closer to home.
Speaker 3: And that's what occurred.
Speaker 2: We talked about it in a couple of our primary
Speaker 2: Bigfoot episodes about signings in the US were occurring back
Speaker 2: in the eighteen hundreds, right with logging camps, Like way
Speaker 2: back in the day, people were seeing stuff stuff, Harry,
Speaker 2: wild guys out there in the forest as the forests
Speaker 2: are being chopped down. And you can only imagine that
Speaker 2: if those stories had been around for so long. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're it's exactly right, Ben. You want to find the
Speaker 2: ones that are out near you if there are these things.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, exactly, especially when you see those The reports
Speaker 3: grow more vague the further back we go in history.
Speaker 3: But now you start, you're one of these Chinese scientists, researchers,
Speaker 3: you start reading about indigenous people's stories right in the Americas,
Speaker 3: in North America, on that continent specifically, and then you
Speaker 3: start saying, hang on a tick I remember. Because you're
Speaker 3: unreasonably British, You're like, hey, got a tick I remember? These? Uh,
Speaker 3: these stories kind of beat for beat, go with the
Speaker 3: stories we ignored from all those country bumpkins, all those peasants.
Speaker 3: What if they were onto something They can't figure it out,
Speaker 3: But me a learned man, well, tally ho, they said,
Speaker 3: in right, and so now because like the point you made,
Speaker 3: it's easier to publish things without being arrested, right, without
Speaker 3: being a target of a political campaign. Now people are
Speaker 3: able to publish more easily, and there is a proliferation
Speaker 3: therefore of popular science and science fiction. And the Errant
Speaker 3: is the perfect subject for this. It touches evolution, it
Speaker 3: touches the identity of the wild and the urban, It
Speaker 3: touches what it means to be a modern human and
Speaker 3: the importance of science. So these three factors can buy
Speaker 3: and they make a feedback loop, an ouroboros of interest
Speaker 3: and reading and publishing that begins to consume itself and grow,
Speaker 3: which is not how consuming oneself works. We're going to
Speaker 3: leave that analogy. It's been a weird week for all
Speaker 3: of us. We'll pause for word from our sponsors, and
Speaker 3: then we'll get to the hunt, because there are some
Speaker 3: human characters in this story just as important as the
Speaker 3: Yarin itself.
Speaker 2: And we've returned. Let's get to the actual physical attempt
Speaker 2: to find a urin, and we are jumping to a
Speaker 2: gentleman named Li Jian. This is an historian. He's working
Speaker 2: as the vice secretary of a propaganda department in this
Speaker 2: area that we talked about, Shenungia.
Speaker 3: Oh and think about it. Propaganda, just gonna point that out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, Propaganda, which it's information that seeks to sway
Speaker 2: somebody to whoever's writing it or whoever's controlling the writings
Speaker 2: way of thinking. So propaganda guy vice secretary in the
Speaker 2: same area where this Shenania forest is. He began collecting
Speaker 2: all kinds of reports from people who had been out
Speaker 2: in the forested area who had said, hey, hey, I
Speaker 2: saw something that I can't explain. I believe it's one
Speaker 2: of these urine things. We think local villagers here, locals
Speaker 2: that have been seeing this four years, going all the
Speaker 2: way back to nineteen forty five. He this person Lee
Speaker 2: gained the nickname the Minister of Urine.
Speaker 3: Y Yeah, yeah, king himself sorry y e ri e yes.
Speaker 3: And so in nineteen seventy six, the stuff he's collected,
Speaker 3: it gets the attention of a guy. He's a professor
Speaker 3: of evolutionary theory in East China Normal University. His name
Speaker 3: is Liu min Shuang, and he goes on to become
Speaker 3: the most prolific writer about yurin in China, and again
Speaker 3: he's a professor, so he gets a nickname as well,
Speaker 3: the Professor of Urine. I do think, if we're going
Speaker 3: with the pea puns, Minister of Urine is probably a
Speaker 3: better name. Professor of Urine feels weird, even though we
Speaker 3: know urologists or a real thing. Anyway, Other scientists, including
Speaker 3: those from the IVPP, jump on board, and Schmalzer says
Speaker 3: there are teams of scientists and technicians, local officials and
Speaker 3: rural people who have had eyewitness accounts. They start tracking
Speaker 3: the yeh in earnest. They get dozens of reports, they
Speaker 3: find footprints, even a few alleged hair samples, and by
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy seven, scientists are publishing articles about this in
Speaker 3: popular science magazines, but also they're publishing serious scientific research.
Speaker 3: These are where you see magazines like Scientific Experiment and
Speaker 3: an outfit called Fossils, which is the publication of IVPP,
Speaker 3: And then general interest magazines and newspapers start carrying stories
Speaker 3: about the investigation referencing this other stuff. This is a
Speaker 3: huge win because unlike other Western papers, the Chinese experts
Speaker 3: aren't really debunking the erin. They're taking a different approach,
Speaker 3: and intellectuals experts stem. Experts in other fields are hopping
Speaker 3: into the game, and there are government officials, there are
Speaker 3: professional writers who are working on this. If you want
Speaker 3: to be a cool party member or party official, why
Speaker 3: not make a little peace of the erin for your
Speaker 3: local paper and they'll be like, oh, deputy vice subprime
Speaker 3: assistant to the subprime deputy actual, he gets it. I
Speaker 3: wish I could vote, I'd vote for him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And just reminder, the IVPP as the Institute of
Speaker 2: Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.
Speaker 4: So let's go into some of the inclusions of this
Speaker 4: kind of lore, I guess is the appropriate term here,
Speaker 4: into popular culture and into literature. So since it was
Speaker 4: the social trend as much as it was a scientific trend,
Speaker 4: there's not much of a surprise that year and fever
Speaker 4: started to expand beyond nonfiction and into the world of
Speaker 4: literary fiction. Plays were written, novels, poems. There's lines between
Speaker 4: genres was being crossed just as much as the line
Speaker 4: between science and kind of zeitgeisty pop culture was being crossed. Maybe,
Speaker 4: if not crossed, then certainly blurred.
Speaker 2: It feels a little bit like the propaganda thing is working.
Speaker 3: Exactly and you have to wonder too about motivation. We
Speaker 3: have not spoken with these scientists directly, by the way,
Speaker 3: many of them have passed away, but the science does continue,
Speaker 3: imperfect as it may be, there are legitimate, good faith inquiries.
Speaker 3: In nineteen eighty one, the newly minted Chinese Anthropological Society
Speaker 3: has their first get together, right, and in that get
Speaker 3: together they endorse the establishment of the Chinese Yarin Investigative
Speaker 3: Research Association. This is a level of official approval that
Speaker 3: simply had not existed in the Western world for things
Speaker 3: like Bigfoot or in the United States in particular. And
Speaker 3: this association grows to have hundreds and hundreds of members,
Speaker 3: and the majority of these members are legit scientists, and
Speaker 3: the goal to find the Yarin still exists in step
Speaker 3: with the goal to push science over fantasy. So they're
Speaker 3: saying the Yarin is an organism, a living thing, right
Speaker 3: that eats, sleeps, and shits and reproduces. It is not
Speaker 3: MP's obviously, and is not a legend, a ghost or
Speaker 3: a spirit. So this means that Yarin fever also becomes
Speaker 3: socially powerful for people. They can challenge these once sacracainct
Speaker 3: cognitive institutions like the hard belief in God. They can
Speaker 3: also kind of ask themselves what the yerin tells them
Speaker 3: about themselves. It's a really rapidly industrializing nation. It's in
Speaker 3: a deep I don't want to call it an identity crisis,
Speaker 3: but it's in an interrogation of its own national identity.
Speaker 3: So now the Urin is representing an opportunity to ask
Speaker 3: questions about the line between man and animal science, superstition.
Speaker 3: People are reading about the Yurin and they're saying, what
Speaker 3: does it mean for me to be a human today?
Speaker 3: So it hits the zeitgeist perfectly. It's a bullseye, you know.
Speaker 3: And then we have to get to the We have
Speaker 3: to say it. I don't love to say it because
Speaker 3: I think we're having a fun time with this exploration.
Speaker 3: But did they ever actually find one? No?
Speaker 4: Do they ever?
Speaker 3: Not that we know of, Not that we know of.
Speaker 3: I love a world where maybe they did find a yarin.
Speaker 3: It was far more intelligent than they assumed, and it
Speaker 3: gave him some like rousing al Pacino ted Lasso's speech,
Speaker 3: and they said, okay, we'll keep your secret. But as
Speaker 3: far as we know, that didn't happen either. The theories
Speaker 3: are increasingly scientifically based the idea that it could maybe
Speaker 3: have been descended from Gigantopithecus. Maw believed that was documented
Speaker 3: in old Imperial era writing. He definitely didn't think it
Speaker 3: was supernatural stuff. We know that people became increasingly, i
Speaker 3: would say, first more secular and the more skeptical as
Speaker 3: time went on. There's the idea. I thought we'd love
Speaker 3: this one. In nineteen seventy nine, a scholar named Seang
Speaker 3: Yu Cheng started advancing this idea that's already familiar to
Speaker 3: Western cryptozoology, and he basically said, look, the people who
Speaker 3: are giving us all these eyewitness reports, they're not experts,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean, they're not themselves bylogists or
Speaker 3: botanist or what have you. They may have seen something
Speaker 3: and then they mistook it for an extraordinary creature because
Speaker 3: of the circumstances. I feel like that's a little dismissive, because,
Speaker 3: as we know, when you grow up and spend your
Speaker 3: entire life in a specific area of the world, a
Speaker 3: specific you know, a stretch of woods, you get to
Speaker 3: know those woods pretty well, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it reminds me of I'm going to bring
Speaker 2: it back to Department of Truth one more time.
Speaker 3: Guys.
Speaker 2: It reminds me of this concept of once you believe
Speaker 2: hard enough in something or what Once enough people believe
Speaker 2: in something, it kind of becomes more true. And I'm
Speaker 2: not saying that it creates a yurine out there, but
Speaker 2: now that the popular culture has swelled to a point
Speaker 2: where it feels as though it could be a thing
Speaker 2: out there lurking in the woods, you are probably more
Speaker 2: likely to mistake something that's far out in the distance
Speaker 2: or a certain sound that you're not familiar with it,
Speaker 2: even if you are familiar with the woods as like
Speaker 2: possibly this other thing right right.
Speaker 3: It's the pattern you're primed to accept at that point.
Speaker 2: I feel like that's a strong thing in all cultures
Speaker 2: when there is a tale of something like this that
Speaker 2: might be lurking out there.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent, I'll see you on that. And add
Speaker 3: another factor that should be considered, which is that imagine
Speaker 3: you're growing up in a non wealthy, rural part of China.
Speaker 3: The urban and intellectual elites have historically just talks so
Speaker 3: much spack about you and been rude and dismissive, and
Speaker 3: now all of a sudden you have the opportunity to
Speaker 3: be an expert on a thing the errand therefore becomes
Speaker 3: a possible means of income. Right, I'm a guide now
Speaker 3: in an expedition, and perhaps more importantly than the money, now,
Speaker 3: people who did not respect me are listening to me.
Speaker 3: So if I have therefore a yearn story, then I
Speaker 3: have raised to some degree my social status. That's that's
Speaker 3: just a sad part of human dynamics. Right. We also know,
Speaker 3: all right, this guy we mentioned, Shang, he said, yeah,
Speaker 3: I said, untrained observers might be mistaken, and he pointed
Speaker 3: to one of our favorite examples. It's just how Western
Speaker 3: science eventually proved mermaids were probably just marine mammals cited
Speaker 3: by extremely horny, desperately lonely sailors to the point about
Speaker 3: primed to see a pattern. You know what I mean.
Speaker 3: I mean, you think a man, it is ugly man,
Speaker 3: but spend eight months at sea and then check back in.
Speaker 2: Or don't just don't.
Speaker 3: You could always write us, You could write us.
Speaker 4: I think mandates have a certain kind of uncanny beauty
Speaker 4: to them personally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're coming from, you know, a very anthrocentric aspect.
Speaker 3: You know, they probably think we're ugly as sin, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, or then we're way too hairy and you're.
Speaker 3: Way too hairy weird for yourself. I'm just hairy enough.
Speaker 3: So these later scholars will also we're talking about this
Speaker 3: a little bit off air. Later scholars, especially Western ones,
Speaker 3: like writing in twenty twenty one. In more recent years,
Speaker 3: they'll often posit that the myth of the rain is
Speaker 3: based on early encounters in Central and western China with
Speaker 3: more Semitic or European people who would tend to have
Speaker 3: more facial hair, would definitely speak unknown languages and maybe
Speaker 3: a real shock to see him in the woods. But
Speaker 3: then the question becomes, why were they naked?
Speaker 2: That's the way to be.
Speaker 4: It is the natural state.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not kidding. Boys, if you saw me just out
Speaker 2: naked in the woods in my natural state before I
Speaker 2: found manscaped, would not know what to think.
Speaker 4: An ad not an ad.
Speaker 3: So uh, yeah, we're actually not working with manscape. We're
Speaker 3: now working with yarinescapes. There we go, which is which,
Speaker 3: how far do we want to go into this? No,
Speaker 3: because it's the opposite of manscape. It's a thing you
Speaker 3: rub on and it just like creates strips of hair
Speaker 3: where you rub it so that you can cover yourself
Speaker 3: in hair, which is you, guys, listen to this episode
Speaker 3: years in the in the future, it's going to be
Speaker 3: pressing it. You're welcome erinescaped fifteen percent off.
Speaker 2: If you can come up with that, whoever you are
Speaker 2: listening to that, and you just had a light bulb
Speaker 2: go off, you would make billions of dollars.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're not saying fifteen percent off when you order.
Speaker 3: We're saying, if you come up with it, fifteen percent
Speaker 3: for us. Yeah, expliration, you can pay us in big
Speaker 3: foot hair. The So anyway, we know this social content
Speaker 3: of China. It helps create this craze, but it also
Speaker 3: complicates it because China is attempting to explain things through
Speaker 3: a very localized perspective. We mentioned embracing the concept of evolution,
Speaker 3: but I don't know if every Western knows this. There's
Speaker 3: a popular belief in China that is sometimes accepted as
Speaker 3: hard science that modern humans did not originate on the
Speaker 3: African continent, that instead they originated in China and then
Speaker 3: spread from there. So the erin was used to justify
Speaker 3: that by some authors.
Speaker 2: We'll see that's very interesting, and there's something I wanted
Speaker 2: to bring up here. I think there's a good place
Speaker 2: to do it. Recently, Popular Mechanics wrote a story about footprints,
Speaker 2: a very specific set of footprints from a tetrapod. So
Speaker 2: that's just a four legged creature that theoretically where they
Speaker 2: found it. When they found it within the fossil record,
Speaker 2: it pushes back the development of a type of humanity, right,
Speaker 2: not necessarily Homo erectus or Homo sapien, but way far back.
Speaker 2: It pushes forward the development of tetrapods by forty million
Speaker 2: years potentially, which means we really could have some of
Speaker 2: our stuff way way wrong. I mean only because what
Speaker 2: we know is what we've found of us far and
Speaker 2: maybe we just haven't found those things, including all of
Speaker 2: these missing links, right, including all of the time scales
Speaker 2: and timelines that are mysterious to us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that's a salient point. That's why
Speaker 3: it's also interesting to go back and revisit these episodes.
Speaker 3: As more investigation continues, we're continually learning, by we, I
Speaker 3: mean modern society human and not. We're continually learning that
Speaker 3: the timeline is a little bit longer than people thought
Speaker 3: it was. And that's why lost civilizations are also another
Speaker 3: fascinating exploit. We still don't know what caused the Bronze
Speaker 3: Age collapse. We have no idea. Somewhere along the line,
Speaker 3: things just screwed up, and we still don't know so
Speaker 3: many things about what, when, and where breakthroughs and evolution occurred.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and by the way, that forty million years
Speaker 2: thing makes me think about the I can't remember the
Speaker 2: name of the theory. The theory that there was potentially
Speaker 2: another advanced civilization.
Speaker 3: That was hilary and hypothesis siluriing that.
Speaker 2: Was potentially not based in ape human intelligence and advancement,
Speaker 2: but in maybe reptilian advancement or something other.
Speaker 3: And that is spot on with that, folks. We do
Speaker 3: have an episode on that wall. We went through a
Speaker 3: phase with that one. I remember it and the research.
Speaker 3: The researchers there phrase that as a thought experiment. They
Speaker 3: make such a compelling argument for that conspiracy. We also
Speaker 3: know that the Erin fever has largely faded, but it's
Speaker 3: still got a significant mark on society. The IVPP their
Speaker 3: magazine Fossils. A little while back they decided to stop
Speaker 3: publishing papers about the Erin because none of the expeditions
Speaker 3: produced any solid proof. But then after that they did
Speaker 3: a poll in their magazine, and the poll had some
Speaker 3: surprising results. These are all Chinese nationals who get pulled.
Speaker 3: Thirty two percent of the people in the poll say
Speaker 3: they don't believe the Erin ever existed. We got something
Speaker 3: wrong in the folklore. Twenty three percent say I think
Speaker 3: it was around at some point, and like so many
Speaker 3: other animals, it went extinct. And then seventeen percent, almost
Speaker 3: twenty percent of the people that they asked, they said, yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know, man, it might be like I've never
Speaker 3: been to that forest. I've never seen a giant salamander,
Speaker 3: but I have Google, you know, I could. I could
Speaker 3: see it, Like, it's not impossible. And so all of
Speaker 3: this means that the Yarin is still kind of retreated
Speaker 3: to the position of fringe science, similar to that of
Speaker 3: the Western Bigfoot. But the weirdest thing is, as we
Speaker 3: record Friday, May twenty third, the search continues today. What
Speaker 3: do we think, guys, do we want to give an
Speaker 3: absolute yes no on Yerin? Do we want to pull ourselves?
Speaker 3: I'm gonna say maybe no.
Speaker 4: I think it's might be a no for me, Doug,
Speaker 4: maybe a no for no.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm jumping over to China Daily real quick reading a
Speaker 2: little article here about nature observers and how the job
Speaker 2: postings in twenty twenty four in July lists that one
Speaker 2: of the things you need to be a nature observer
Speaker 2: is to have the capability of outrunning urine. So I mean, hey,
Speaker 2: come on, I.
Speaker 3: Mean, no matter how you want to punt it, it's
Speaker 3: always good. It's always a good idea outrun. Now, don't
Speaker 3: let the urine run on you less it is. Is
Speaker 3: it matt from your sense when you're reading that, Is
Speaker 3: that meant to be like fun satirical or does it
Speaker 3: feel like okay, okay.
Speaker 2: I'm being fun and satirical about it. I think I
Speaker 2: think if you destroy like you, if you go to
Speaker 2: the absolute position of this is hogwashing, dumb, and we
Speaker 2: shouldn't think about it. I think that it defeats the
Speaker 2: point of it, which is just like it's a way
Speaker 2: to get people out in the woods.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's important.
Speaker 2: Humans plus woods equals probably a cooler civilization just because
Speaker 2: and when you hang out in nature like that, you
Speaker 2: see things a little differently.
Speaker 3: I think it has hard physicological effects on the human
Speaker 3: as well, like beneficial effects. I would say, all we
Speaker 3: need to caveat that with is humans hanging out in
Speaker 3: the woods without destroying the woods. A that's cool, you
Speaker 3: know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, only you can prevent forest fires and urine attacks.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, so go camping. That's one of our takeaways.
Speaker 4: In order for urineto attack, doesn't it always kind of
Speaker 4: require a slight downhill slope. That's the only way that
Speaker 4: it can, you know, advance.
Speaker 2: It depends on the pressure of the system, I think.
Speaker 3: And you're talking about city urine.
Speaker 4: That's right, you're talking about country urine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, we brought the prejudice back. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: good question. This is the last note we always like
Speaker 3: to end on with cryptid episodes. Humanity, as you hear
Speaker 3: this is reaching one of the most profound periods in history.
Speaker 3: As humans continue to encroach into wild areas, and as
Speaker 3: surveillance technology has more and more sophisticated breakthroughs year over year,
Speaker 3: civilization is now more than ever, thank you, Fox News,
Speaker 3: likely to find undiscovered animals, and there's a ticking clock
Speaker 3: on this. There's a time window because those animals, those
Speaker 3: same organisms are now more than likely going extinct and compare.
Speaker 3: We're in the middle of what is called the sixth
Speaker 3: Great Mass Extinction, so we want to hear from you, folks.
Speaker 3: Tell us about the Erran, tell us if you've seen
Speaker 3: a bigfoot or some hominid cryptid, and tell us what
Speaker 3: if any creatures you think may be discovered in the
Speaker 3: coming decades. We're gonna call it evening. We're off to
Speaker 3: octivigate and do our bigfoot hoots that thing. Remember that
Speaker 3: while we're practicing our bigfoot accent. We'd love to hear
Speaker 3: from you. You can give us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3: You can call us on the phone. You can find
Speaker 3: us on the lines.
Speaker 4: It's right. You can find us in the handle Conspiracy Stuff,
Speaker 4: where we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group here's
Speaker 4: where it gets crazy. On x FKA, Twitter, and on
Speaker 4: YouTube where we have tons of video content for your
Speaker 4: perusing enjoyment. On Instagram and TikTok. On the other hand,
Speaker 4: we're Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2: We have a phone number. It is one eight three
Speaker 2: three std WYTK. We need you to call in. We're
Speaker 2: running low on voicemails. You gotta call in. Do you
Speaker 2: have a thought? Call in? It's one eight three three
Speaker 2: std WYTK call that number, leave a voicemail. You got
Speaker 2: three minutes, give yourself a cool nickname, and say whatever
Speaker 2: you'd like do. Let us know within the message if
Speaker 2: we can use your name and message on the air.
Speaker 2: If you got more to say, they can fit in
Speaker 2: three minutes. Or you want to type something out send
Speaker 2: I don't know pictures, links, anything, Why not instead send
Speaker 2: us an email.
Speaker 3: We are the entities that read every piece of correspondence
Speaker 3: we receive. Be well aware. Yeah, it's unafraid. Sometimes the
Speaker 3: void writes back. As a matter of fact, we'll be
Speaker 3: following up with some correspondents for several of you just
Speaker 3: after these next recordings. So join us out here in
Speaker 3: the dark, and please, please please tell us your favorite
Speaker 3: CRYPTI tell us the stories. We love them. They make
Speaker 3: our evenings. Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff they Don't Want you to Know is a production
Speaker 2: of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.