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