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Shipworms, Head Lice, and Cracking Skulls - TAS 207
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It’s a news episode again! This week we talk about a shipwreck from the 1800s that washed up on the shore in Massachusetts in the US. Then we head over to the other side of the world and see what was so important it had to be written on a comb. And finally, we look at some experimental archaeology that cracked some skulls with ancient stone tools.
Links
- Wreck of ship lost to storm 139 years ago washes up on Massachusetts beach
- Scientists Translate the Oldest Sentence Written in the First Alphabet
- Scientists smash skulls with Stone Age weapons to solve ancient murders, video shows
- Unraveling Neolithic sharp-blunt cranial trauma: Experimental approach through synthetic analogues
Contact
- Chris Webster chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Rachel Roden rachel@unraveleddesigns.com RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 207
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast. Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, Episode 207.
00:00:20
Speaker
On today's show we talk about shipworms, head lice, and cracking skulls. Let's dig a little deeper into your brain with that, I don't know what kind of weapon we used, but we'll find out in the third segment. Not shipworms though. Oh yeah, not with shipworms, that's gross. Nope. Nope. Welcome to the show everybody. Rachel, how's it going?
00:00:43
Speaker
It's good. This feels weird cause we missed a week. So I'm like, man. Yeah. I hope you guys enjoyed that episode last week. It was really fun hearing the episode that I recorded with Paul because it's some really cool stuff they're doing out there. Yeah, definitely. And we had been talking about like maybe having Paul on the podcast and then when you got sick, it just was perfect to just, you know, play your conversation with him. That's, I wasn't there, but that's fine. I didn't need to be there.
00:01:08
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm still getting over a little bit of a cough, so you won't know it, but I might be doing some heavy editing on this today. Yeah, whenever the finger comes up at me across the desk, I know that means to stop talking so that you can cough. Yeah, the first finger. Other fingers mean other things. Wait, oh, I don't know what you're... No, gross, don't do that. Anyway, we are just our little life update that we like to do. We're down here in Mexico still, and we actually decided to stay another month. We did.
00:01:36
Speaker
very affordable here and it's beautiful and I guess it's like snowmageddon up north of here or something so like we don't need to do that. When you see a dusting of snow on the Hollywood sign you know it's time to not go north again. Yeah right nope no thank you.
The Warren Sawyer Shipwreck Discovery
00:01:50
Speaker
Anyway, we've got a handful of news articles to talk about this week, and the first one is from Newsweek's Tech and Science Division, published on February 16th, and it's called Wreck of Ship Lost to Storm 139 years ago, washes up on a Massachusetts beach. And I'm just thinking, how does a wreck from X number of years ago not wash up on a Massachusetts beach every year?
00:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know what? It probably does. I feel like we have covered a lot of uncovered wrecks. But this one I wanted to talk about because this isn't the first fragments from this boat that have washed up here. There was actually some fragments back in December or two and we kind of missed covering the story back then when it came out because we were doing other things. And so I thought this would be a good moment to talk about it because it's a cool wreck.
00:02:38
Speaker
Yeah. And in the article, they actually have a pretty cool video right at the top of the page there that's kind of showing the wreck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really neat. So basically there's these wooden boat fragments. They appear on this beach in Nantucket and Dave Robinson, who is head of the Massachusetts board of underwater archeological resources. He has confirmed that it was likely a section of the renowned ship that wrecked nearby the Warren Sawyer.
00:03:04
Speaker
I mean, how does he know that? Does it say in the article? I can't remember. Um, it doesn't say however, because those fragments had washed up back in December too. I think they've already done some research here and whatever pieces these were, were very obviously part of that same wreck is what I understand anyway. Yeah. So the Warren Sawyer, it was a schooner that wrecked on the Maya comet beach in December of 1884.
00:03:29
Speaker
It was blown off course by severe winds while it was traveling from New Orleans to Boston. And it was carrying a whole bunch of tea, right? No, that would be a century earlier. No, this one was carrying a cotton. This one was carrying a cargo of cotton and scrap iron. And I'm like, thank God scrap iron on a boat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure it was very heavy.
00:03:53
Speaker
Displaced by the cotton, though, I guess. The cotton gets real heavy, too, when you get a whole pile of it. Think about a stack of fabric that gets heavy. Anyway, the ship was destroyed, obviously, and the cargo was lost, but silver lining, I suppose, is that the crew all made it ashore alive, so it's not one of those kind of tragic wrecks.
00:04:14
Speaker
Yeah. And I don't know if anybody's ever read Moby Dick. I read it a few years ago, actually. Yeah. Actually, it's probably closer to like eight or nine years ago at this point. I said that was a while ago. Yeah. Usually when we lived up in Sparks, I think, Nevada. But anyway, Herman Melville based his book, Moby Dick, on the Nantucket whaling industry, which anybody who's read that would be obvious. And that was all dominant during this time period. Yeah. So there's just a lot of boat activity going on in this area for sure at that time period. Yeah.
00:04:41
Speaker
So the fragments have been very well preserved so far. And this is the main reason why I thought it would be fun to cover this story because it's like, why are some ships really well preserved and why are others just like husks that you can't even find
Preservation of Shipwreck Artifacts
00:04:56
Speaker
anything of that fall apart?
00:04:57
Speaker
One reason why a ship might be well preserved and is the case in this particular situation is that after it sank, it was quickly covered in sediment on the bottom of the ocean. And that layer of soil sediment, I guess sediment when it's in the ocean, is what allowed it to be preserved and just kind of stay there. And it's almost the same condition it was when it sank. So that's really cool.
00:05:26
Speaker
I don't know, fortunate thing about shipwrecks is they often happen in storms and storms are turbulent times. And the closer you are to shallower waters, I guess the shallower water that you're in, the more that sediment is being turned up by the tumultuousness of the ocean and the currents that are being created. And yeah, it'll just, it'll, it's probably a little loose down there anyway. And then when it's all just being tossed around and after the storm settles, it gets, you just buried. Yeah. Yeah.
00:05:53
Speaker
And what happens, this I thought was so cool, what happens if you're not, if the ship sinks and it's not covered in sediment, is there are certain little critters that will get in there and start eating. Always a little critter. I know, there's always a critter. So there's these things called pteridoworms.
00:06:10
Speaker
And they just think that timber is delicious. And they just get in there and start eating it. And if you see a picture of wood that's been under water that has those little wavy lines in it, that's from these worms boring their way in and just eating their way through the wood.
00:06:27
Speaker
If you at this point do not think evolution is an actual biological process, just think about the fact that whatever substance has been created, including things we've made like plastic, there are organisms that will eat and digest plastic. Little small tiny microorganisms that have been maybe even developed, I'm not really sure.
00:06:46
Speaker
And yeah, they will just eat anything that you want. And there's, I mean, bacteria that eats poop. There's bacteria and organisms to eat wood. I just heard last night around the campfire that somebody has discovered and or is developing this little larvae of something that eats goat heads. If you don't know what goat head is, it's a tiny little sticky thing.
00:07:09
Speaker
that is prickly and gets in your feet in certain parts of the United States and probably Mexico and other places of the world. But there's this thing that eats them and we'll just break them down. And I'm like, okay, what are we growing that's eating goat heads? What are we propagating there? So anyway, there's something to eat everything.
00:07:27
Speaker
There is something to eat everything for sure. It's actually a big concern with this because in all archeology, because again, there is something to eat, anything. And you have to, you have to think about that when it comes to preservation, you know, when you take it out of that environment, is there something else that's going to think it's delicious? So when you take it out of whatever protective environment it's in now,
00:07:48
Speaker
How are you going to protect that? And they have to inject wood beams and ship and stuff with certain materials in order to preserve them because the minute they expose them to the open air, they start to degrade. Yeah, they start degrading for sure. And then there's other stuff that we'll think is delicious. Yeah, it's like there's always something that will come after a ship that has sunk.
00:08:06
Speaker
If it's underwater and it's not buried in sediment, these shipworms are going to eat it. Once it's exposed to the air, the air is going to degrade it. So there's always something that is trying to decompose the ship. So archaeologists definitely have to act fast in these scenarios in order to learn what we can from them before they're gone.
00:08:25
Speaker
And in fact, this article is little about the ship and mostly about ship eating worms. It really is. But they are very interesting because like we really dodged a bullet with this wreck in particular because, you know, had it been not as well buried in sediments and then these shipworms, the Toretto nevalis would have, you know, eaten them.
00:08:46
Speaker
They're like these little, it's actually, they call them worms, but they're actually like a little clam species that just sort of bore their way in there and eat. This is disgusting too. They can grow up to 20 inches long and they will completely devour anything in the water made of wood. And that can include ship hulls, sunken ships, docks, piers, seawalls, anything, anything. A big pile of nope.
00:09:11
Speaker
Yeah, I know, it's so crazy. And as you can imagine, these were particularly devastating in the era where everything was made of wood, you know, like pre-1900s-ish, that everything was wood back then, you know? Yeah. Of course, the British Royal Navy wasn't going to have any of it. That wasn't sophisticated enough for them, that worms were eating their ships. No, no, they couldn't have that. So they tried covering their hulls in copper, or at least strategically covering them in copper to protect them.
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think that worked to some extent, but of course it's not perfect either, because you know what? You put metal in water and what happens? It rusts. It rusts, or there's underwater bacteria that will eat that. So there's just so much to eat, ships. You talk about moving onto a boat someday, and I'm like, the ocean is just constantly trying to destroy your boat. That's all it wants to do, is destroy the boat.
00:10:03
Speaker
Fiberglass, however, is one of the few things that there's almost nothing will eat that, which kind of makes you think about your own life living on fiberglass. But either way, yeah.
00:10:15
Speaker
Anyway, so all that's to say is that there's a lot of things that want to eat the wood. So we've got this great preservation because of the sediment. And like you said before, it's the shifting ocean floor and storm surges will bury the ship, but then it's also what exposes the ship. And then the waves push it to shore, obviously, once it is uncovered, because if it's not buried and anchored to the bottom, then it's just going to roll on in.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, and if we don't get to it quickly, it can start decomposing, like we said earlier. Once it gets exposed to the air, it's no longer, so to speak, protected by water. I mean, water will degrade it in its own way, and probably over time, it'll just be gone anyway. But it's much quicker when it gets exposed to the air. Yeah, when it starts drying out. That's when it goes.
00:10:59
Speaker
And not only that, but it will start warping and deforming and you won't see its kind of original shape anymore. Not that it necessarily has its original shape in the water either because it will kind of inflate and balloon up as it gets waterlogged, but still. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in this case, experts were contacted very quickly and also they knew what ship they were dealing with too because of the previous fragments that had washed up. So in this case, you know, conservation efforts were able to begin quickly and they knew
00:11:28
Speaker
I mean, it really is just like piles of wood. So like in the end, I'm not really sure how much they can learn from that, but at least whatever they could learn, they started it quickly and they got it done. It's not always the case when a ship is washed ashore, a shipwreck, and then it's not found right away. Like in that case, you're going to lose that time. So.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, the cool thing is, you know, when they recover this wood, they can start to get an idea of the age of the wood, at least when it was cut down. Yeah. Using dendrochronology because we have really good dendrochronological records around the world that people have put together these lists. And essentially, if we haven't talked about this in a while, dendrochronology is the science of essentially counting tree rings.
00:12:06
Speaker
And not only counting tree rings, but looking at the thickness of the tree rings to, you know, sort of match it up with other climatological cycles. So if you have a really thick tree ring, it was a good year for growth on that tree. So whatever that means for that tree and its environment, you can kind of match that up with other climatological data, you know, lake course sediments, stuff like that.
00:12:25
Speaker
But once you get this profile, you can look at this log. Now that's just when it was cut. There's nothing saying it didn't sit in a shipyard for 30 years and not get used on an actual boat. But at least we can say when it was cut, which should be pretty close to when the ship was built. Yeah. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. And also where too, right? Because you've got different species of wood. So if you have, in this case they knew which ship it was, but if you have a shipwreck that washes up and you have
00:12:50
Speaker
zero idea where it is, where it came from, when it is, any of that. You use the dendrochronology not only for the dating, but also for the, at least where the wood species is from, which might help you narrow in on which ship it is, because we have, I think we have fairly decent records of what ships wrecked when, because merchants, you know, they did a good job of tracking what happened with their boats.
00:13:13
Speaker
Also like the armies or Navy and stuff too would would be doing a good job of tracking what saying can win and where so you can Yeah, our brains just want to keep a log when it comes to boats
Dendrochronology and Historical Analysis
00:13:23
Speaker
for whatever reason I mean even even people that live privately on sailboats and things like that. I mean they always keep a log Mm-hmm. It's like you don't keep a log. I don't keep a log in the RV I mean I do when we travel. Yeah, yeah taxes than anything But it's it's crazy
00:13:38
Speaker
Yeah, we always seem to have pretty good information about what ship it could be. And then you can narrow it down from there. So between the log, the dendrochronology, you can start to untangle where this ship came from, much like our next article untangles the alphabet. We'll be back in a minute. Welcome back to the Archaeology Show, episode 207. We're talking about some news articles today. And this next one is a real head scratcher.
00:14:08
Speaker
I did not see that coming! How did that happen? I'm about to take a sip of coffee. I almost spit it. Oh my God. Go ahead and sip your coffee. It's from Smithsonian Magazine, published on actually November 10th, so it's not actually from this month or this week, but it was still pretty interesting. We've been seeing it for a couple weeks now and just wanted to talk about it. Scientists translate the oldest
00:14:31
Speaker
sentence written in the first alphabet and it's inscribed on a Canaanite comb and the words reveal a struggle with headlights.
Ancient Lice Problem on Canaanite Comb
00:14:41
Speaker
Oh my gosh. So yeah, it's a tiny ivory comb. The words read, may this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard. I know that sounds awful. I know.
00:14:52
Speaker
Anytime you're like, oh, I want to be so it would be so romantic to just go back in time to these time periods and like Yeah, you better you're gonna poop in a hole There's no water you'll have to drink beer all the time yeah, and you'll have headlights
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah. It doesn't sound great in some ways. I don't know how we survived it as people. I just remember like, I'm sure you had this experience too. I think everybody did as a kid where like somebody in your classroom got lice and then like everybody had to like go through like the lice check and we had like vinegar shampoo and stuff that we had to use. It was so gross. I've been through the lice checks, but I don't ever remember getting it.
00:15:33
Speaker
No, I never got it. I never did either. It was just, it became like a thing that you had to check because somebody in your classroom had it and it spreads so easily. Is that still a thing in school? I don't even know. I don't know. I don't have kids. Yeah. I don't know if kids still get lice or not, but yeah. I mean, it's not like our hygiene was so poor in the eighties. No, I know. It's not that much different. So like where would it have gone? Right. Right. Yeah. I don't know.
00:15:57
Speaker
The language, like we said, is in Canaanite, and the Canaanites were a group that lived in modern-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine from approximately 3500 to 1150 BCE. Yeah, the comb was found in 2016 from Israeli archaeological sites.
00:16:15
Speaker
La-kish. La-kish. La-kish. Or La-chish. I don't know if you pronounce the C-H. L-A-C-H-I-S-H. Yeah. The letters were actually overlooked because they look like, I mean, honestly, you can see it because you know there's letters. Yeah. Yeah, but it looks like just scratches on there that are kind of random, but they were overlooked until they were taking photos in 2021 and then saw them while zooming in. Yeah. It probably had better light and they could use the shadow to really pick out what they were seeing. Yeah.
00:16:41
Speaker
There are clusters of Canaanite letters that have been found on other artifacts like pottery, sherds, and projectile points, but this is the first time an actual complete sentence has been found. And that is important because the Canaanite alphabet is one of the earliest ones. It was developed approximately 3,800 years ago, and it became the foundation for ancient Greek and Latin. Yeah. The cone measures less than 1.5 inches wide and one inch high. I'm guessing there's a lot more to it.
00:17:08
Speaker
And this is just a fragment. Well, I don't know. You can, if you look at the pictures, it looks like edges. I think it was just a small, it was meant for picking out lights. It wasn't necessarily meant for detangling, I think, right? Yeah. It's just making my head scratch. Yeah. My head itch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's made of ivory, which made it a little more valuable import to the area because they didn't have like a ready source of ivory. Of course, that was back when
00:17:33
Speaker
we would just take ivory off the faces of animals and use it for our own purposes. Yes. But I don't think there's any animal, there's no elephants or anything that in that area. So I think it would have definitely been an import or a trade situation that got the comb or at least not ones with tusks. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. On one side of the comb, it has six thick teeth that were probably used for like not untangling. Also, you know, maybe it was used as an actual comb then because that, you know, I mean, only one inch, but I guess maybe that's enough to get your beard untangled or whatever.
00:18:03
Speaker
And then on the other side of the comb it has 14 finer teeth. So it was a double-sided situation going on for all of your lice and detangling needs. Yeah, the odd thing when you look at the picture is I didn't actually notice until we read that it had six teeth, six thick teeth, because that's on the top of the photograph in the article and
00:18:24
Speaker
I'm going to say it just looks like little stubs. Yeah. And I don't know if they have other examples to this to confirm that those really were longer, longer things. And that's, or is that just conjecture to say that these were longer pieces over here because they look like the ones down here, but thicker. Well, like what else would those stubs be though? Yeah, I don't know. I guess it could be part of decoration maybe, but it based on how equally they're, they're sorted out. And there's a couple of them in the picture. You can see they really are like,
00:18:50
Speaker
like little stumps coming up off the top. So it would make the most sense that they were thicker teeth on that side, but yeah, they are gone. They're mostly broken off. So you can't really say for sure what was going on there. Yeah. Interesting thing is you can carbon date ivory because it's organic. Yeah. You know, it's a, it doesn't seem like it. It seems like feels like rock, but it's definitely organic. It's like teeth basically, but not really. It's not the same thing as teeth. No, but it's like a similar, similar substance. But that failed for whatever reason.
00:19:20
Speaker
But the site it was found on, other dates were found that range from 1700 to 1550 BCE. I'm kind of surprised with the development of language in this area being well before that, that this is the first time we've found like a complete sentence in that language. Yeah, totally. That's just mind boggling to me. Why don't we have other examples of that?
00:19:38
Speaker
Yeah. Well, maybe they, whatever they were putting the sentences on is probably something that doesn't preserve, right? So we just don't have the things with inscriptions. Well, they were carving stuff and all kinds of things. I mean, they have an ivory carved comb here. It's just, uh, it's crazy. And well, you know, the thing is this was found six years ago. So what other kind of stuff is sitting in a box somewhere that has writing on it that's older or, or from the same time period. And we just don't know anything about it.
00:20:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's the thing that we talk about all the time that you don't know to look for something until you know to look for it, right? And this sort of inscription that is really hard to see and might not look like inscription until you get a microscope on it or a really zoomed in lens, then it's worth a reevaluation of any artifacts that might have this kind of thing on them.
00:20:24
Speaker
But then again, who would have thought a comb would have an inscription on it? That is such a strange artifact to have words on it and yet here it is. So you really never know what you're going to find. And this is definitely like a really, really special, special artifact. I'm not, I don't usually, and we try to be careful about not like revering artifacts, right? Because artifacts are just this tiny little piece of the culture that they represent. And what you should be trying to do is learn about and understand the culture that they come from and not just
00:20:54
Speaker
hypervalue the things that they made. But in this case, it is such a really special artifact that it is worth valuing and also
Innovative Technologies in Archaeology
00:21:05
Speaker
learning from. So it's cool. I just imagine a future where we've got intelligent,
00:21:09
Speaker
nimble-fingered robots, basically. Because robots are coming around. There's robots in every industry just about in one way, shape or another. And I just imagine unleashing an army of robots into a lab or an archive, basically, and just having them go through and clean and just reanalyze. They could probably have eyes that could do photogrammetry and they could just do a thing and upload it as they're doing it and just
00:21:36
Speaker
all the things we're going to learn in these freaking museum collections that were collected even, you know, a few years ago to decades and decades and decades ago. And who knows what's lurking in our own collections already.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's another thing that we've talked about before in our own experience with archaeology is that there's like the whole drudgery aspect of it, where you're just like wading through piles of artifacts and data trying to make sense out of it. But if you can have AI or robots or whatever come in and do that first pass for you so that you miss that
00:22:09
Speaker
soul crushing thing where you have to sit in a lab and look at artifacts all day long. And most of them are nothing. Most of them are nothing. But if AI could do that first pass for you, you don't have to do it. It would be great. And there's any number of grad students and undergrads and work study students that would be happy just getting a meager paycheck to sit in a lab and just reanalyze stuff. But there really is no time or budget for any of that. And honestly, if I had to do it, I would probably want to smash my skull in with an ancient weapon.
00:22:44
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, episode 207. And as I mentioned, we're going to talk about smashing skulls. Yes. Smashing skulls and ancient murders. So this is the true crime version of the podcast. And yeah, and it really kind of is, right? It's the true ancient crime. We've talked about doing like a true crime podcast about ancient murders and things like that. This will be a perfect article to talk about in that case. Although it's not like a specific murder like you're used to in real true crime podcasts.
00:23:05
Speaker
We'll talk about that on the other side of the break.
00:23:14
Speaker
That's usually what they talk about is, oh, when, you know, young Jennifer was murdered. Let's talk about that. Right. But this is a little bit different. And that's how an archaeology true crime podcast would have to be in most cases, because if we know who was murdered, chances are we like know who did it. Yeah. And we know how it happened. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're famous. Right.
00:23:34
Speaker
Most of the potential murders that we would talk about or we've actually probably found in the field because one of the first projects we worked on together, there were a lot of human remains and I have no doubt that some of those people could have been murdered. They could have been. But we would just never really know that unless there was real evidence for it, which is what the point of this article is. Actually for this one, we found the original
00:23:57
Speaker
publication. So you can look at the journal article. And then also the one we're talking about is from the Kansas City Star, February 25th, 2023. And it's called Scientists Smash Skulls with Stone Age Weapons to Solve Ancient Murders.
Reconstructing Ancient Murders with Replicas
00:24:08
Speaker
Yeah. So this is a little bit of a experimental archaeology kind of a situation too, in a way that I have never heard of it being used before. Yeah, for sure.
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah. The data set they were using is from an archeological site that goes back to 2006 when a mass grave was found by archeologists in Germany and contained 26 individuals that had signs of extreme trauma, extreme trauma, not just like to their heads either, but like to other parts of their whole bodies. Yeah. And the graves date to about 7,000 years ago. It was called the Talheim death pit.
00:24:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's not ominous at all. No, I know. And like you said, the bodies were just smashed, legs broken, and yeah, probably tortured, right? It must have been tortured. I mean, listen, 7,000 years ago, if I'm with my family and I'm coming across the German countryside and I'm like, let's go to the Telheim death pit. I'm like, why would we go there? We're just going to get our heads smashed in. No, that's obviously not the old name of it. Right. Yeah.
00:25:08
Speaker
Again, 7,000 years ago, this was during the Middle Neolithic or Stone Age, and that time period started around 10,000 years ago. It's a really long time period. And it shows the type of violence that was apparently common in that area because we have... This is not the first example of this. It's just a mass grave, which I don't know how many mass graves there are, but there's definitely evidence of pretty severe violence in the past with some other graves. And it's interesting because it's kind of like, why? Because
00:25:37
Speaker
If you're a conquering tribe or group or whatever coming into an area and you feel the need to murder all of the people so that you can claim that territory for yourself, okay, fine. I'm sure that happened. But why the torture aspect of it? What would you be getting out of that? Why would that happen? And it may not have been... I don't know if torture is the right word, to be honest with you. I think it was just...
00:26:00
Speaker
I think it was extreme violence that looks like it was torture but it was yeah and then you get somebody on your knees you've already hit once you're gonna hit them one more time to take them out right so I don't know why it's so hard for me to understand why I don't know why the people back then were so angry but
00:26:16
Speaker
I mean, you are talking about people that came out of the last Ice Age, and they came out of the last Ice Age with very few resources, trying to figure out how to survive. Now, that was a few thousand years before this, but as they're coming out of that 7,000 years ago, the environment's changing, the animals are changing, everything is in constant flux.
00:26:38
Speaker
Historically, I mean, from the day to day, it probably didn't look like that to them. But it seemed like for thousands of years, it was probably a constant struggle for resources and trying to figure that out. And you just start to probably just get real angry at people who want your food. And violence just becomes a part of your daily life, I suppose. That's just how it was. Yeah. It is hard from a modern mindset to understand why, but it probably was all down to resources, right?
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah, so this study wanted to figure out exactly how they were killed and what weapons were used, right? Because you can see smashed skulls, but what does that mean? Do they use rock? Do they fall down a cliff? Like what happened, right? Yeah. So they created similar stone tools, including an axe with a maple handle and a stone of serpentine rock, it's called. We've seen serpentine actually in Nevada, I think. Oh, have we? OK. And it's a kind of chert, similar to flint, they call it. Flint is a kind of chert that's over common in Europe. In Europe. There's flint here, too, in the United States.
00:27:37
Speaker
Yeah, Flint is the kind of stuff that is on the end of a hammer strike for an old style of gun. Yeah, because it would make a spark basically, right? Yeah. The second weapon was based on a different murder victim from Spain found in 1999. That victim was killed using a stone ad, which is basically a big pointed rock sharpened and then tied to a stick.
00:27:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's kind of like what you see in the movies, right? That's what cavemen are running around with? Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, pretty much the Tomahawk style sort of. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, the reason they went to this other site in Spain is because they wanted something that was definitive. They knew that that dude was killed with this type of a tool, so they knew what that looked like. And those types of tools were available in Germany at this time as well, not what became Germany, the Neolithic Germany area.
00:28:25
Speaker
So they wanted to have, not necessarily a control, but kind of a control, you know, to see what was going on here. So they ended up creating skulls out of polyurethane, gelatin and rubber skin. They were very realistic and would exhibit the same like fracture mechanics. That real bone would basically. Yeah. And then the scientists basically just started taking swings at them.
00:28:47
Speaker
Did they make, so they made actual skulls. So they were shaped like human skulls and everything, like all the same pieces, all of that. And then just raged on them. Oh man, that, I feel like that would be hard to do too. I mean, all in the name of science I suppose, but geez. I know, they said the skulls crunched when smashed and left behind telltale signs. Yeah, I'm sure they did. Each tool would
00:29:09
Speaker
would interact with the skull in a different way. And since they had the rubberized portion on there, that represented the skin. Because you really need the skin around the skull to understand how it's going to fracture. Because the skin can not only hold it together, but possibly cause a glance off and cause different kinds of things to happen. Yeah, definitely.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah, a different tool or weapon, I guess, in this case, would interact with that in a different way. And some would be more effective than others. Incidentally, that's how forensic anthropologists and physical anthropologists can look at a skull. And when they see damage to a skull, they can look at it and figure out whether it happened while the person was still alive or after death. Because like you said, if it's just a skull that has decomposed just down to the bone and then damage happens to it,
00:29:58
Speaker
falls off of a cliff, or a mountain lion drags it around. That kind of damage is totally different from what it looks like when there's skin still on the body. And even somebody's still alive, that's just very different damage. So that's a very important key thing to recreate in this experimental archaeology. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:30:17
Speaker
They found that the axes and ads were very similar in what they do to the skulls, but there were some very definable characteristics that made them look different. Basically, the similarity ended where they both smashed skulls open, but how they do it was different. And one of the cool things is they ultimately determined that the German victims were likely killed with something that looked like an ad because of the shape of the injury.
00:30:42
Speaker
And the other thing is the ads is a very heavy rock, very big rock that's very pointed. And because it's so pointed, you can also kind of tell the direction the blow came from. So would it have been a pointed rock on a stick where the point is in line with the stick or would it have been like perpendicular? Still a chopping motion.
00:31:02
Speaker
OK, OK, so kind of like an axe the way it's mounted on there with the point coming off of it at a 90 degree angle. Right. OK, got it. Yeah. So in fact, they have pictures in the actual article. OK. If you look at the journal article, yeah, the journal article's open access. You can actually download the PDF. But they show these trials where they're trying to smash at these, I guess, these kind of round things that aren't really skulls. But you can see the handle that they had and then the thing affixed to it. So they were both like an axe type of chopping thing. OK.
00:31:31
Speaker
Yeah. So again, Tomahawk is Native American, but it's kind of the thing that comes to my mind because that's short handle with the thing on the end of it, you know? So it's very similar. And I'm sure, I mean, that's a, that's just a similar like extension of your arm. And I imagine cultures all over the planet develop something like that. Oh, for sure. Slightly different versions of it, slightly different pointy things, but yeah, definitely. It's an easy thing to imagine doing. Yeah.
00:31:56
Speaker
Well, the cool thing about the ads damage showing the direction of the attack is that they were also able to reconstruct how some of the victims were killed. So that's pretty cool. I would imagine you'd be able to tell stuff like, you know, if somebody is told to get on their knees and they were chopped from the top of the head, that's hard to do when someone's standing up. It's true. Yeah. Then again, could you do that if somebody would like lunged at you and were bent forward and then you hit them on the top of the head with the axe? Maybe. Yeah, I don't know.
00:32:22
Speaker
But I bet there's I bet there's a slightly different angle to all of that. And if you have the right preservation, you can probably tell that depending on, you know, how well it's preserved, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Well, take a look at the pictures. It's really good. It's really interesting how these different things left different.
00:32:38
Speaker
holes and different shapes of holes. And I guess they they I was wrong. They really didn't make skulls. I thought they had they made these round representations of skulls because they really just wanted to see how the bone reacted on their skin. Yeah. Right. So that actually it feels so much better to me because like doing experimental archaeology on exploding things that look like actual human skulls like the like mental trauma of that would be hard. So I'm kind of glad they didn't look actually like skulls. Right. Right. Yeah.
00:33:08
Speaker
So anyway, pretty cool research study and just shows you that, you know, it's not just about smashing heads and taking names, but they really did some some good graphics on here and analyzed how each thing did. And they tried to hit these in the same way with the same tool, you know. And I mean, you're probably not doing it with the adrenaline rush of a, you know, a stone age man more than likely that is just going to come down on you with all its force. Yeah.
00:33:35
Speaker
But that being said, you may not need that to be able to tell the different shapes of things. Yeah, true. True, true. Really cool study. Anyway, since this kind of trauma is common in this area, they hope to shed light on other discoveries that have been made and maybe reanalyze some other collections and say, oh yeah, it was this that did it. So that's pretty cool. That is really neat. Well, that's pretty much all we have for today. And besides, we really don't have time anymore because it's Saturday in Mexico and we're going to go tequila tasting.
00:34:05
Speaker
You know, that's what you do. That is the plan for the afternoon. Yep. All right. Well, with that, I guess we will see you guys next week. Bye.
00:34:20
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:34:43
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.