Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 229: A License to be Curious with 'Fossil Men' author Kermit Pattison
139 Plays4 years ago
Being a journalist gave Kermit Pattison the license to be curious. He is the author of Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind. It is published by William Morrow.
Keep the conversation going on social media @CNFPod and be sure to head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to sign up for the monthly newsletter.
Recommended
Transcript
Writers House Pittsburgh Residency
00:00:00
Speaker
All right, CNFers, before we get started, a special call out to journalists and non-fiction writers who could use some extra support in these unpredictable times. Writers House Pittsburgh is accepting applications for a six-month residency starting as early as January.
00:00:21
Speaker
2021. The writer's house is a physical home and long-term residency seeking to provide housing stability, mentorship and community when you need it most. I don't know why I'm reading this so aggressive but maybe I just like it a lot. Head over to writershousepittsburgh.org
00:00:41
Speaker
to learn more. Applications will close on November 30th. That's like in two weeks. Get on it, man. I just follow my curiosity and think, oh, that looks interesting.
00:00:56
Speaker
I wonder how that works. I wonder how that came to be. I wonder how, uh, what are the stories behind this stuff?
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:01:05
Speaker
That's Kermit Pattison. CNF-ers, right? Maybe, maybe you know, maybe you didn't. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Maybe you know, maybe you didn't. Hey, hey. And this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
00:01:23
Speaker
I just love when that distortion kicks in. I mean, I can't hear it right now because that goes in in post, but I know it's there. I know you're banging that head of yours. Oh yeah, that's right. This is the show where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. You're going to want to keep that conversation going on the social media networks at CNF pod.
00:01:45
Speaker
and head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to subscribe to the monthly CNF and newsletter. If you're on the list, you'll get reading recommendations, podcast news, you'll be entered into book raffles, that's pretty rad, and you automatically get
00:02:01
Speaker
a ticket to the CNFN monthly happy hour. We had a fun little cohort the last time, and I'd love to see it continue. The newsletter is the first of the month, no spam, can't beat it.
Podcast Visibility and Reviews
00:02:18
Speaker
Also, you know reviews for the show or social proof for the wayward CNF-er?
00:02:24
Speaker
Reviews on Apple Podcasts help a great deal. I don't think it makes the show get any more visible, but if the, like I said, the wayward CNFers come by, like, oh, that show's got like a lot, I'll check that out, right?
00:02:39
Speaker
That's the social proof aspect of it. But if you don't want to do that, you could always email me one, creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com and I'll read it on the air and I can use it in promotional material. So there's ways you can contribute if going through the whole Apple thing is a bit overwhelming or frustrating because, you know, Apple, Apple can be frustrating.
00:03:06
Speaker
Alright, enough of that, enough of that housekeeping.
Kermit Pattison on 'Fossil Men'
00:03:10
Speaker
Kermit Pattison is here. He's the author of Fossil Men, The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton in the Origins of Humankind. It's published by William Morrow.
00:03:22
Speaker
It's a sprawling tale of the arty skeleton, R-D-A-R-D-I, and then it's like, I think arty-pithicus? Anyway, I'll spare you the pithicus. It's about paleoanthropology and the toxic rivalries among scientists. It's got all the goods, man. It's a dense topic that Kermit de-denses. He de-densifies it. It's a word. Look it up.
00:03:52
Speaker
Don't look it up. You have that to look forward to as well as my parting riff. At the end of the show, I'll warn you with this. There was an odd kind of ratchety click sound that was coming off of Kermit's audio.
00:04:08
Speaker
It's not that annoying. It only crops up from time to time, so be forewarned. I'm sorry for that. Maybe the wire of his headset was rubbing against something. I don't know. I need to get better about when I hear weird shit like that to just be like, oh, I'm hearing something weird coming off of you. Let's hit pause and try to fix it, because, of course, you might be listening and be like,
00:04:34
Speaker
Yo, what are you some some bush league some bush league podcaster? Get out of here. Also, I am back. I'm back in the fray.
Podcast Return and Republishing Plans
00:04:47
Speaker
After my hall pass of editing me out of last week's show with Annie Duke, I figure I need to be there as like a river guide might
00:04:57
Speaker
You need to be in the raft going down the Colorado River. Pete Croato, who's written this great book, called out from Hangtime to Primetime about the NBA. He's going to be on the show in December. He came on the show four years ago and he's got this book out.
00:05:17
Speaker
He and I had a nice exchange over Twitter DMs about the topic and he convinced me that I should still be in the show. So I might even republish that episode with my buttery voice and be done with this infidelity, if you will, of skipping out on my show to go somewhere else. Baby, I can change. Will you take me back? Oh boy.
Kermit's Writing Passion and Influences
00:05:46
Speaker
here's Kermit Riff. Yeah, I guess that goes back pretty young with me. So, I mean, there was a couple episodes in school, elementary school, that I can point to when
00:06:16
Speaker
A teacher said, oh, you are good at this, or you're good at telling stories. Maybe you should be a writer someday. Maybe they said that to everybody, but it did sort of plant a seed in me. And then one time, I guess the real
00:06:33
Speaker
closest thing to a formative experience was probably when I was in ninth grade and I got this electric typewriter. And this is the age before computers, right? So back in those days, the image of a writer was someone clacking away on the old manual typewriter. But I got an electric typewriter. This was thrilling. So I just set myself up in my room and just started typing things because of the novelty of this machine.
00:07:02
Speaker
sit there and type away and something would come out, even with my really bad typing skills, would come out looking almost professional. So I would write stories, I would write parodies, fake news stories, short stories, poems, and by the end of ninth grade, I had this pile
00:07:29
Speaker
of things that I called the gonzo papers. Like one of the things that I was really into in those days was the Hunter S. Thompson, no fear of loathing Las Vegas. So at this shameless emulation, I called this thing the gonzo papers. So at different points in life, it's occurred to me maybe to do something else, but never so, the temptation has never been so great that I've actually done something else.
00:07:58
Speaker
yeah what what were or what did those temptations look like as your uh... a potential escape hatchet yeah well uh... i thought for a while in college of maybe being an academic uh... probably would have been history or something close to that uh... so that was one the you know like a lot of people in journalism you know that temptation of law school uh... always
00:08:27
Speaker
sort of loomed as an escape, like a parachute. You put that on and jump out the journalism plane and hopefully have a better salary and more secure life. So that was another. At different points, I've taken on writing jobs, but things that were more
00:08:50
Speaker
you know, corporate writing jobs, things I did just to earn a living. And I've done that, you know, a number of times over the years. You know, I haven't been tempted by any of those things for quite a while. So what continued to be the draw to journalism in this kind of reporting and true storytelling?
00:09:11
Speaker
It's just a matter of wanting to work on things that mattered to me. I mean, to me, the most frustrating jobs have been where I felt like I was doing something pointless, like something that was just throwing coal into some furnace that didn't really do any good to the world or was just going through the motions of something for no particular purpose. And I've had, frankly, some journalism jobs that have
00:09:41
Speaker
fall into that category and I did not like them. So the thing that always has been my guide star has just been work on problems that matter and things that are interesting and things that keep you engaged. Find a way to create some added value either by uncovering something no one has seen before or telling it in a better way or
00:10:12
Speaker
something you know to add something new to the story. And you mentioned Hunter Thompson of course a moment ago aside from from him who are some of those North Star writers who you looked up to and you're like a man maybe I can do what they're doing.
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, well, okay. He has not remained a guide star. He was the person who was kind of like the bad boy, a rock star figure who appealed to the 13-year-old me in the black t-shirts who kind of just got over Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, then moved to Hunter S. Thompson. But I remember reading that book and thinking it was just such an absurd premise of these guys going to these
00:10:58
Speaker
conventions of law enforcement officers and interacting with them. It just seemed so ludicrous and fun. That book grabbed me just because it made journalism and writing look so much more fun than anything I had encountered in school up until that point.
00:11:27
Speaker
So who would the others be? Well, that was one. Certainly when I got older, the Woodward, Bernstein, all the presidents, man, I read that when I was, I think between high school and college. And it's not a, you wouldn't call it literature by anything. I mean, it's kind of a page turner. It was probably written on deadline, but it's such a great,
00:11:51
Speaker
and momentous story about a true detective story of these two reporters. So that was my first window into the life of a reporter. And so that one captured my imagination. Later, Tom Wolfe. Yeah, I don't know if you remember this, but in like the 1980s, right around the time that he was writing Bonfire the Vanities, he was writing at least one or maybe more than one manifestos of
00:12:19
Speaker
what journalism could be, and I remember him talking about how too many writers were just breathing the same stale air and needed to get out and do what Dickens did, you know, as to report on their time. So that struck a chord in me and made journalism seem like something
00:12:38
Speaker
was worth doing and it could be a vocation where you reported on things in a deep way where you were writing more of, not just about like the events, a series of events, but opening a window into a time.
Journey into Journalism
00:12:55
Speaker
And that certainly intrigued me.
00:12:59
Speaker
And I love to at the very start of the acknowledgments you write that nobody in their right mind takes on a project like this. My only excuse for starting is that I was naive. My only explanation for finishing is that I had a lot of help. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of help. I mean, the help is just it's what your what your sources do. I mean, and there were hundreds of those people, but
00:13:24
Speaker
You know, years of just asking questions, well, what does this mean? What does that mean? What does bone look like when the first time you saw it? I mean, on and on and on like that. So that's one. You know, all the people that listen to me talk about all this stuff. So yeah, certainly this would be a difficult book to write. Well, for me, it would have been impossible to write without that help.
00:13:49
Speaker
And over the course of your career as a reporter and writing features, what was embedded in your training over the years that gave you the assuredness and confidence that you could tackle a subject that is big and sprawling in the best possible way as fossil men was? Yeah. Well, I don't really have much training, to be honest with you. I mean, my training is mostly self-taught.
00:14:17
Speaker
I majored in history, so I didn't have a journalism background. I mean, I did a little work for the student paper, but not much. And then when I graduated from college, I thought, OK, well, I'd like to be a writer. I knew I wanted to write books someday, but you don't come out at 22 and say, OK, I'm going to write Fossil Man or whatever. The kind of conventional path was you go work for a small
00:14:40
Speaker
papers somewhere, you make your mistakes, you learn all, learn about interviewing, et cetera, et cetera, covering the local school board or the mosquito debate district or whatever. So I sent letters all around the country to Oregon, to Washington, to California, to Florida, to New England, to the Midwest, to all these papers and saying, hi, I'm so and so.
00:15:10
Speaker
I'd like to come and work for you and put in the clips. And by the way, this is back before the internet, right? So to contact all these people, I had to call them up, say hello. Who's your managing editor? Can I speak to that person? And then a lot of those phone calls don't go anywhere. They'll say, ha ha, we haven't hired anyone in years or we're in a big recession or whatever. But anyway, I found a couple.
00:15:34
Speaker
places to apply to. And anyway, wound up at this little paper in Key West, Florida. I don't know if you know Key West, but it's this bizarre place down at the end of US1. You just follow US1 south, and it just dead ends into Key West. And it's this bizarre place, which is a small island that's packed full of tourists and southern bubbas. And it's a gay mecca, and it's a military town, and it's full of Cuban exiles.
00:16:05
Speaker
all simmering in the heat. It's actually, oddly enough, sort of known as a writer's mecca too, like Ernest Hemingway at a house there, and Tennessee Williams lived there, and there's a whole long list of people who wound up in Key West. So they wound up working for this little paper there, and that was sort of my first experience with daily journalism and covering all kinds of bizarre stories because it was such a bizarre place.
00:16:32
Speaker
So I worked there for a year and then went to a succession of other papers in California, then Minnesota.
00:16:42
Speaker
And, you know, you mentioned interviewing earlier and you're kind of building the toolbox of the skills that it takes to be a reporter. You know, interviewing is always one of, like, probably, you know, my favorite part of the process, even though I have a little anxiety around it sometimes. But I wonder with you, like, what did you really latch onto as the thing that you felt best at that you were the most sort of alive for, if that makes any sense?
Story Selection and Scientific Narratives
00:17:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, I, from the beginning, I actually knew that I want to write books and I thought, well, this journalism stuff, it's valuable experience. This is what people do. This is like what Hemingway did. I mean, back in the old days, this is just what one did to sort of cut their teeth. But when I wrote these letters that I was telling you about, you know, to
00:17:27
Speaker
all these newspapers, you know, Dear Managing Editor, I am a 22-year-old, so I want to come work for the newspaper. And I distinctly remember in a lot of these letters saying, oh, by the way, someday I'm going to write books. And I'm sure that, you know, that someone at Managing Editor, you know, is like,
00:17:43
Speaker
Yeah, right, kid. Or what do I care what you're going to do in 30 years? Or yeah, I'm sure you're going to write the great American novel too, or whatever. But I remember putting this line in all these letters. So I guess at that point, it was important enough to me to articulate that as part of my manifesto, my mission statement to all these potential employers. I saw it as the training ground to write books eventually.
00:18:12
Speaker
And then why write books or why do journalism? It was just a way to be curious. It was licensed to be curious about the world and to create something of value. I mean, that's the simplest way I could put it. It's just, yeah, licensed to be curious and licensed to create
00:18:37
Speaker
And how do you go about curating your story ideas and vet out the kind of stories that really appeal to your tastes so you can dive in with all your rigor and curiosity, as you say? Yeah, well, I don't know if I have a good system. I mean, if I had a good system, this book would not have taken as long, you know, 10 years. So, you know, I've had a few interviews with like science
00:19:05
Speaker
podcasts or writing podcasts like yours. But the one category of things that are conspicuously absent and will always be conspicuously absent are time management websites. I will never be on the getting things done or the time efficiency or the seven habits of effective people podcasts.
00:19:28
Speaker
For me, it's a lot about trial and error. It's what seems interesting to me. I never look at a problem and think, oh, what will sell? Or, gee, how do I capture whatever trend is afoot in the world? For me, it's always, what's interesting to me? And I am, I mean, just pathetically out of sync with, like,
00:19:59
Speaker
pop culture. I mean, my kids make fun of me because I'll say, you know, they'll mention some name and I'll say, who's that? And they say, well, how could you not know that's a character on Game of Thrones or that's, you know, something from Breaking Bad or whatever. So I am really not attuned to like trans. I just follow my curiosity and think, oh, that looks interesting.
00:20:27
Speaker
I wonder how that works. I wonder how that came to be. I wonder what are the stories behind this stuff. I think scientists have the same curiosity. They can find great fascination just by
00:20:47
Speaker
examining things in great detail and things that might look sort of arcane or just like numbingly tedious to a lay person. If you have a body of knowledge and that minutia is endlessly fascinating.
00:21:08
Speaker
And, yeah, there's something I love, and this is definitely akin to what scientists are about, especially when they drill down on a certain discipline, is that I love that single-minded focus that certain people have, whether that be, you know, paleoanthropology or, you know, ballerinas or bodybuilders or whoever it is. I love those kind of people, and they are endlessly fascinating to me of just the degree of focus they have.
00:21:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I totally agree. And I also am drawn to people who would do what they do, whether or not anyone is watching. I mean, if they get a claim, yeah, that's nice. But, you know, people are really drawn to what they who really feel a passion would do it.
00:21:54
Speaker
and complete anonymity. And I kind of admire that, that sort of integrity, that sort of single-minded focus where those people are focused on not the recognition, not the acclaim, not any of those things, but just the sheer joy of discovery. Yeah, like the work itself is its own reward. Yeah, yeah.
00:22:24
Speaker
As a reporter and a writer, what are some things that you identify, Kermit, that maybe you kind of struggle with? Yeah. Well, okay. So I've only written one book. So this is, you know, my sample is, you know, and equals one. So it's a pretty, you know, maybe after I've written more books, I'll have a better answer. But for me, the big challenge in this
00:22:49
Speaker
with this book was the synthesis of all the material into a narrative. So I got into this. And by the way, I had no idea, as I said in the acknowledgments, I had no idea what I was getting into. I just thought, well, this here is old skeleton. I mean, this is kind of interesting. You know, I actually started off writing, intending to write a different book. And this thing, you know, this art story just sort of
00:23:15
Speaker
welled up underneath me and sort of became increasingly hard to ignore. And then to the point where I abandoned my initial topic and said, now this arty story is much more interesting because it has the characters and all this interesting anatomy and all this interesting backstory and et cetera, et cetera. Without derailing you too much, what was the original book that got derailed by the arty narrative?
00:23:41
Speaker
Yeah, so I set out to write a, it was anthropology, I set out to write sort of the deep history of human endurance or the deep history of like where humans got this unusual ability to run and walk long distances.
00:24:00
Speaker
And, you know, because we are kind of unusual among primates. We're slow and we're weak and all that stuff. But, you know, but we have this sort of prodigious ability, at least compared to our cousin apes, to do things like run marathons. Yeah.
00:24:15
Speaker
And so I was just curious where that came from. You know, I was a rudder and ski and cross country skier. So I just thought, okay, this is kind of like the deep, the natural history of human endurance. And so that's what I intended to work on, thinking that, you know, this Artie Lucy stuff would be just a little background material and that it just kept mushrooming and mushrooming.
00:24:36
Speaker
Oh, it's more, it goes from a page to five pages. Oh, gee, okay, maybe it's a whole chapter. Oh, no, it's a couple chapters. And then finally it was laid down. This is actually much more interesting than the book I was starting off to do. But to get back to your earlier question about what was the hard part, to me, I was finding all these interesting topics within this story. I mean, some of them were natural history of the human body, which is, you know, my original,
00:25:06
Speaker
interest. And with Artie, you know, because the skeleton was so complete, it was the natural history of all these different body parts, the hand, the foot, the skull. And I mean, this, you know, stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. But then there was all this other interesting stuff, like the backstories of the characters, the history of Ethiopia, you know, sort of in turmoil during this whole search for the skeleton and then the interpretation of the skeleton, you know, the trials that like a generation of these
00:25:36
Speaker
this first generation of Ethiopian scientists had gone through the dynamics of scientific communities or the rivalries, the paradigms, different schools of thought who were either competing or just fundamentally unable to communicate with each other. This gets into the whole history of science and the philosophy of science and things. There are all these silos here that I would go down and I found all the minutiae and the history and
00:26:05
Speaker
you know, endlessly fascinating. But at a certain point, I had to come up out of a silo and communicate to the reader who's totally uninitiated and all that stuff. So, you know, that 10 page memo that I wrote, the 10 page backgrounder on radiometric dating is just not going to
00:26:29
Speaker
It's not going to work in this book. It's going to leave the reader glazed eyed or 10 pages on developmental biology or all these things. I had to figure out how to take all the stuff that I found so fascinating, but lighten it up and sprinkle it throughout a
00:26:49
Speaker
narrative about humans on this quest. So to me, that was the hard part. It was how to learn all this stuff, where I could communicate, where I could have conversations with the scientists, the specialists who were doing it, but then kind of step away from
00:27:14
Speaker
that level of engagement and summarize it for the lady reader. That was the hard part of this whole book. That was 90% of the trials was figuring out how to do that.
00:27:30
Speaker
I love the moment in the book too where Owen Lovejoy is just, I forget exactly what he's referring to when he's writing about it. It's about a lot of the pelvic bones of various primates and homonyms too. I sat down to write the first chapter and lost my mind. Yeah, that's very Owen by the way.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, that just got me thinking about the scope of his work, the scope of the discipline, and of course the scope of you trying to write this book as well. Yeah, well, yeah. And yeah, I mean, he had this same, well, he had a similar problem where the science is so complicated. And sometimes as you look at it and try to summarize the story, the act of summarizing it, trying to capture it, you realize, oh, I didn't
00:28:21
Speaker
have it right. By crystallizing your thought into writing, sometimes the stuff stares you back in the face.
00:28:31
Speaker
and basically teaches you something that you hadn't quite articulated to yourself. And that, you know, happened again and again with me. So I struggled a lot with that. And, you know, some early drafts were kind of a bit too textbook-y. And at one point I, there's this great piece in the Atlantic about three years ago written by
00:28:54
Speaker
I think it's Thomas Ricks. Yeah, I think it's Thomas Ricks, where he wrote about writing this book about Orwell and Churchill, and his own struggles with it. And he turns it in, and his editor sends it back and says, no, this is no good. You have it. You've failed in this draft. And he writes about his trials in doing that. But he had one line in there where he's quoting what his editor told him and that was,
00:29:21
Speaker
If you would only defer to the narrative, you could get away with murder. And I think what he means by that is like, you can tell us all this other stuff, but
00:29:33
Speaker
You need to maintain the story, the human story here. Anyway, I wrote that. I read this when I was in the darkest night of mid-passage across this ocean where I couldn't see either shore. I wrote that on a post-it and stuck it right above my desk. It's still there three years later. I'm looking at it right now. If you'd only defer to the narrative, you could get away with murder.
00:29:57
Speaker
That's incredible. That metaphor that you say about not being able to see either shore. I love asking people, once you get into the ugly middle of these things, it's too far to turn back and you can't quite see the lighthouse on the shore where you need to go. It's like, how do you get yourself through? And it sounds like that cracked the code for you, just deferring to the narrative.
00:30:25
Speaker
Yeah, deferring to the narrative, but for me, a hard part was unlearning, in a sense, what I knew. I mean, you need to keep the information because that's all you're reporting and that's what gives a book value. But you have to learn as much as you can, but then imagine the reader who knows nothing.
00:30:49
Speaker
And so to me, writing and reporting and writing these books, it's basically, if I had to summarize it, I'd say as follows. It's learn as much about your topic as you possibly can. Read everything, talk to everyone. And then when it comes time to write it, figure out what 98% of it you're going to leave out. And that is hard because you don't.
00:31:20
Speaker
to me, and this is probably true of anyone who immerses themselves on a topic, it's all interesting. And so in a way you become sort of numb to what a lay person would find interesting. And so you have to,
00:31:42
Speaker
sort of inhabit the mind of, you have to accumulate all this knowledge, but then try to step outside yourself and imagine the mind of someone who is like the old you, the someone who knows nothing. And what about all this stuff that you found would that person find interesting? What 2% of this, you know, huge body of knowledge that you have is the part that's worth telling that curious, but uninformed person.
00:32:10
Speaker
What killed you to leave out of this book? Yeah, let's see. Oh, that's a good question. There were, well, there's some things that that I would love to have put in, but I just couldn't find the sources, you know, like, you know, an episode or, you know, there was maybe like a body of papers that were closed off, you know, that never like an archive that was never opened up.
00:32:39
Speaker
You know, in some cases I pass over, there's no one thing, but in a lot of cases I pass over something really likely, you know, or else it just like touch on the natural history of the spine or the foot. And I would think, you know, if I could only just tell you all this other interesting stuff I learned, oh boy, you know, that was like, I put so much time into doing that. And gee, wouldn't it be great just to keep you here for 10 pages to tell you all about
00:33:07
Speaker
you know, you know, radiometric dating or whatever. But, you know, some of that stuff kind of killed me to leave out. But I think in the end, it was it was merciful on the reader that that I that we did. Yeah, I never thought I'd be so enraptured by like Ospironium sesamoid. Ospironium. Yeah. Yeah.
00:33:32
Speaker
I was like, this is, that was incredible. Just trying to put myself in the heads of the scientists and looking at the bones and the fact that this one particular tendon in the foot usually threads through this bone and then in, I guess in more, I guess for lack of a better term, advanced hominins, it goes over the bone or something. Am I getting that right?
00:33:56
Speaker
So basically, this is very much seeing this through Owen Lovejoy's eyes. But Owen is a guy who thinks very deeply about anatomy. That's one little detail, and you could say it's a trivial detail.
00:34:18
Speaker
You know, to Owen, that little trivial detail was indicative of a larger design of the animal. So that's why he found it was a significant detail. But yeah, in that case, it's a little sesamoid, which is a little bone that's embedded within a tendon. I mean, like your kneecap is a sesamoid. That's the big one in the body. Most of them are like these things that are the size of peas or lentils. And there's one on the side of the foot called the ospirodium, which Owen kind of latched on to because
00:34:45
Speaker
Artie apparently had this little feature and as do humans, but the modern species of African apes, you know, chimps and gorillas did not and kept looking at a diagram or see it. But anyway, he inferred a lot from that. But, you know, I mean, so that was just a good example of kind of going down a silo. The natural history of the foot is just endlessly fascinating and the foot
00:35:12
Speaker
You know, we don't talk about it much because it's kind of like the lowy foot, right? I mean, people would much rather talk about the human brain or the hand because they're this sort of capture our imagination more. But the foot is actually as distinctly human as the brain. And it's this weird contraption that doesn't exist anywhere else in the animal kingdom. So, yeah, Artie was an opportunity to talk about the foot and how naturalists, you know, anatomists have tried to understand it over
00:35:41
Speaker
over the generations and that little story about the Sesemoi just became a little anecdote, a little micro revelation with Arty that I could build the story of the foot around.
00:35:58
Speaker
And you're right, too, that paleoanthropology is the aggregation of broken remains to compose a mosaic of the past. And in your reporting and embedding yourself with these scientists, what impressed you most about the way they were able to be so deductive with almost like limited evidence? But to them, I guess it's a lot of evidence. But to us, it's like, how are they piecing together this history?
00:36:25
Speaker
Yes, so what I was trying to do with this book was show the science at work from the ground up.
Piecing Together History and Evolutionary Models
00:36:35
Speaker
Literally, boots on the ground when these guys are in a fossil field, walking, and how they find things, how they excavate things, and then clean them, interpret it, et cetera, et cetera.
00:36:48
Speaker
So you could look at this book as sort of like following the life cycle of a major discovery from search to discovery to reconstruction to interpretation and then you know the big really fractious debate that followed. So yeah to me it was just the simplest way to do that was just to tell a story from beginning to like
00:37:13
Speaker
When the search begins, what are they searching for? Why? And then how do they find it? And then how do they then find the truth? How do they find the data, the science, these broken remains? And how do they turn that into knowledge? And how do they do that? Well, you know, people who study this, well, just as one example
00:37:39
Speaker
Like, say you find a little tooth or a bone. I mean, humans and apes, African apes like chimps or gorillas, I mean, we're certainly different. But on the other hand, there's certain designs that we all have that haven't, if you zoom way out, look at the aggregate, it hasn't changed that much. So if you find a little bone and
00:38:05
Speaker
That's a foot bone. They know exactly where to put it, the skeleton. They have a pretty good idea of how it compares in size to other species or other known examples of the species or that species. So because these experts have so much knowledge, they can put really isolated fragments, or in some cases like broken
00:38:34
Speaker
fragments into a context where even those broken pieces are quite revealing. And that is
00:38:46
Speaker
the province of the expert where they can see things because they have this vast storehouse of knowledge that they can look at, let's say, a bone and say, oh, that is different than anything else we've seen. Yeah, I mean, one example is in the book where Tim White is cleaning this foot bone right after he comes out of the field. And they've found the arti skeleton, but they've just been
00:39:15
Speaker
up to that point, worried about excavating it, just get it out of the ground, safely back to the lab, and then we can interpret it. But he's short on time. He's got to catch a plane out of Ethiopia in a few hours so he cleans this one bone in the foot and discovers that the bare time that he has, just a few hours before leaving, he only has time to uncover
00:39:39
Speaker
a very small portion of this thing, but he uncovers just enough to say, oh, it's got the rounded sort of cylindrical joint that suggests this animal had a grasping toe. So again, he's got so much contextual knowledge that little details can actually speak volumes.
00:40:03
Speaker
And I studied biology in college. And even getting into evolutionary biology, the notion of the common ancestor was always something that kind of confused me back then, because the trees themselves kind of feel like, oh, there is this one little common ancestor, and then it branches off. And it's, of course, extinct. It's left behind.
00:40:30
Speaker
But there was always a bit of a foggy picture for me, and this book kind of clarifies that up. The evolutionary bases of various trees are more like bushes instead of branches. I wonder if maybe you can explain that, maybe how you got your head around it. Yeah, well, there's a couple things to say about that. One is that...
00:40:50
Speaker
whether you prescribe to an idea of a bush or a tree, both those are very imperfect metaphors. And I think no matter what plant metaphor you pick, that metaphor maybe oversimplifies the biology a little bit, which I'll explain in a second. The tree throughout this whole book
00:41:14
Speaker
illuminating the family tree was kind of like the quest. And of course they want to get back to the split point of humans and chimpanzees. One of the tricky things about writing this book is that their notion of when that split occurred
00:41:32
Speaker
changed. So in a sense, the ground of science was kind of shifting underneath them because when this story began, people were thinking like the last common ancestry, the so-called LCA of chimps and humans lived maybe like five billion years ago, six billion years ago. And when these guys were searching for
00:41:55
Speaker
you know, what later became Otopithecus, there are, you know, like four and a half billion years. So, you know, they have a reason to think they're getting pretty close to that split. Well, over the course of this book, you see that molecular biology, as it is advancing, you know, they're kind of revising the split times and the split goes deeper into the past, number one. And then molecular biology is revealing that splits are not these decisive moments in time where like,
00:42:23
Speaker
one species says, okay, you know, chimp, we're the humans, we're going this way, you guys are going that way, bye. And there's like something that happens in a one generation with a decisive split. I mean, what really happens, you have all these populations and some kind of drift away, you know, and isolate and maybe evolve, you know, so these biological distinctions, but then they come back in context. So you have these populations that are kind of drifting apart
00:42:53
Speaker
but then sometimes like remixing. So this split can be a really slow and protracted process, which makes it really hard to identify a precise split time or a precise last-colon ancestor. I mean, this stuff is still fairly
00:43:15
Speaker
controversial. So not everyone agrees with that. But I think there's a growing awareness that splitting is a messy and protracted process. So that's number one. And then the second thing is this whole idea of a family tree. If you look at a tree diagram, the branches in the splits, like between humans and chimps, for example, it's always depicted
00:43:44
Speaker
at least in the traditional tree, as a clear separation at a certain point in time. But because of the dynamics I was describing a minute ago, where you have things splitting and then remixing, those branches sometimes come together, which is unlike any tree or bush. And so now a lot of people in science are looking at other metaphors like
00:44:08
Speaker
maybe it's like a lattice or a mesh as opposed to a tree. Eventually when the things become so different that they decisively split like as humans and ships eventually did, then the tree diagram holds. But during the early time of that splitting, it's much messier than that. And so the tree or bush, I think sometimes that metaphor makes people
00:44:35
Speaker
Yeah, maybe oversimplify the nature of speciation.
00:44:40
Speaker
Yeah, I love the, I don't know if this was, you quoting someone or you wrote this, but it was like mixtures all the way down, which was kind of, it's like a slurry for a while, for millions of years maybe, and then eventually there are gonna be dominant populations that have distinct morphological properties that allow them to possibly out-survive some of that mixture, and then that's where we see the big divergence.
00:45:08
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's endlessly fascinating, but way more complicated than every species either led directly to us or was a dead end, which is, I think, sometimes how people have...
00:45:24
Speaker
interpreted the family tree in the past. And so this sort of dogmatic adherence to a simple tree diagram I think made some people make false choices. So you find two species. They look different. So they say, oh, well, which one is the ancestor of humans and which one is a dead end?
00:45:44
Speaker
You know, both could have, you know, theoretically be ancestors to modern humans, but they just diverge. They're different populations. Or neither one. I mean, we don't, in most cases, you might never know. But yeah, so I think that the tree may be the sort of too rigid adherence to this tree model, maybe
00:46:08
Speaker
made people a little more didactic than they really should be. So anyway, that was another thing that was tricky about this book, is that the whole notion of the tree, which has been sort of this central metaphor of evolutionary biology for hundreds of years now,
00:46:35
Speaker
We need to look at that tree a little differently than we did back in the old days.
Tim White's Contributions and Controversy
00:46:41
Speaker
And speaking of dogmatic adherence, your central figure is being Tim White, who is just a larger-than-life personality in this book. Talk a little bit about him and what it was like to shadow him, report on him, and maybe not be subsumed by the personality of Tim White.
00:47:01
Speaker
Yeah, so Tim is, yeah, obviously he's a central figure in this book. Tim, I mean, he was, I mean, as you probably know, he's a strong figure. He could be kind of volatile sometimes, but- And a purist. Yeah, and a purist, and he has, you know, very-
00:47:19
Speaker
strong views about the right or wrong way to do things and what's ethically right and very defensive of his scientific mission. As I was, being so interested in anatomy or all these different aspects of the science, you could not ask for a better person just to sit down beside and talk about these things because this guy
00:47:47
Speaker
lives his science so deeply. For example, he wrote a book called Human Osteology that's been through several editions and it's a textbook about the skeleton. He's written other books about cannibalism or post-mortem mutilation.
00:48:05
Speaker
He's a guy who has this kind of like 360 degree immersion in all the aspects of his science. And there's a lot of aspects of the science. I mean, it's anatomy, it's geology, it's local relations with the Afar clans and the place that you're working and on and on and on and on like that. Tim is kind of
00:48:28
Speaker
at the hub of it all and sort of tirelessly, you know, actually put it doing, you know, quality assurance, you know. But he, you know, typical conversation with Tim is I would just, you know, call him up or, you know, sit down with him and we'd start talking. And next thing I know would be like two or three hours later.
00:48:56
Speaker
I mean, the time would just fly because I'd say, well, tell me about when you were cleaning that video. What was that like? What it looked like when it came out of the ground? When you were cleaning it, how much could you see? How did you clean it?
00:49:13
Speaker
all about the minutiae. I mean, again, it's the people who are like him who have this fascination with this stuff. This is the bread and butter of their science, to talk about the grain by grain cleating of this stuff. You take it off each little bit of matrix or this or that.
00:49:35
Speaker
Yeah, so I engage them a lot at that level. I haven't mentioned this, but at a certain point, I've been talking to Tim for a while. He let me look at his video archive, because being a relentless documentarian, he has photographs of everything and notes, field notes on everything. And during the excavation of Artie, they
00:49:59
Speaker
set up this video camera, a tripod, and pointed it at the excavation area and then just kept it rolling all day. And they did this for documentation of the find. But when I looked at it, this was gold to me because I could hear the dialogue when they're finding things. I could see what people were doing. I could hear Tim muttering to himself or hear his assistant saying, the whole thing is there.
00:50:30
Speaker
If you had been there, it's a very slow drama because, you know, the excavation just goes on for days and weeks. And, you know, all this stuff would have been forgotten. No one would have bothered to write down, you know, so-and-so said the whole thing is there or Tim saying, you know, you can't take shortcuts at this site. But I could hear that. I could see it. And that allowed me to basically present a
00:50:58
Speaker
a count of this seed as if I had been standing there the whole time. There's a moment too where you quote Owen Lovejoy and it made me think of Tim and he's pretty rigid and certainly abrasive in the community and in a bit of a lightning rod. But Lovejoy said that science progresses with the death of each faculty member.
00:51:23
Speaker
Yeah, and that just struck me as like I bet there are a lot of people who are just kind of waiting out Tim so they can kind of advance You know their their narrative or their put their spin on this history That's been so dominated by Tim and his colleagues for decades. Yeah when Tim goes Yeah, people might realize how much they miss the people that actually go and find this stuff because
00:51:48
Speaker
You know, the one thing that struck me about this science, I mean, there's no doubt Tim is a, you know, he's a polarizing figure. And there's people who will follow Tim to the end of the Earth and have, you know, followed him there because he's so devoted to the mission and good at what he does. But, you know, there's a large number of people that just find him to be
00:52:13
Speaker
you know, abrasive or hurt their feelings once or they find them to be, you know, whatever. But the qualities that make him abrasive also made, allowed him to excel in an environment where it would have been really easy to fail.
00:52:36
Speaker
And at several points throughout my reporting of the story, I'd sort of step back. Look at all the trials that this team went through. They're getting shot at by the local people more than once. They get their permit taken away by the Antiquities Administration because they piss off the wrong people or they lose their funding. They're getting badmouthed by professional rivals. All these things that happened that
00:53:06
Speaker
could have torpedoed that and sunk this whole operation. But every time, they survived. And numerous times, I just sort of step back and say, God, I'm just amazed these guys are still in business because a less determined, less relentless group of people would have just, like,
00:53:30
Speaker
said, you know what, to hell with it. This is too difficult. It's too hard. It's too dangerous. It's too much of a thankless job. I'm just going to go dig dinosaurs in Montana or go teach at my comfortable college job and live a happy, conflicted life. And that'll be good enough. But these guys didn't do that. These guys felt this drive to go find this stuff and survive one.
00:53:59
Speaker
your fatal, I mean for the team, fatal encounter after another. So yeah, those things that make Tim and some of his colleagues controversial are I think the same qualities also enabled him to survive in an environment where there's no shortage of things that could put you out of business.
00:54:26
Speaker
And as we kind of bring this airliner down, a question I always like to ask people towards the end of these conversations is kind of like this library for the end of the world or a book show for the apocalypse, you know, these books that you need to keep with you in your pack.
Essential Books and Self-Critique
00:54:41
Speaker
Yeah, you're right. You know, it's a good thing to ask a person who has been thinking about extinction for the last few years. So yeah, go ahead.
00:54:50
Speaker
Yeah, so that said, I'd love to hear what are some of these key books for you that you return to over and over again that you would put in your backpack in place of vital rations? Yeah, so I don't know. They're not all books that I return to over and over again, but they're things that maybe I would grab if I had to jump into the escape pod or whatever.
00:55:16
Speaker
I think I take something like the Norton Anthology of poetry. Since we're packing light, poetry carries the most meaning per word and a good poem is so evocative and so mysterious where you could keep rereading it and recontemplating it and seeing new meaning, like all the ways of looking at the Wallace Stevens Blackbird or whatever.
00:55:41
Speaker
It just seems like a poem would just let you ponder the same text over and over again and get something new out of it. So that's one. Maybe something, you know, by John Lecai for two reasons. One is I just enjoy him as a writer, the way he plots his stories and, you know, characters struggling with like the moral ambiguity of the mission and the clash between the human characters and the geopolitical forces.
00:56:09
Speaker
That's part of that selection. The other one is just pure personal inspiration. The guy is nearly 90 years old now. He's still thriving. He's still in his prime and writing about much younger people and contemporary events. And so that would inspire me to remain productive into old age, maybe outlast whatever the disaster is that set me into this bunker or desert island in the first place.
00:56:38
Speaker
OK, so that's two. Number three, Charles Dickens, Complete Works. And to be honest, I haven't read much Dickens and I feel guilty about it. So this is more of a.
00:56:51
Speaker
can't something to catch up on since I'm going to be isolated here. The complete works is 15 volumes. Is that cheating? For the five volumes? No, that's good. You found the loophole. I like it. OK. And then this, the next one, I feel.
00:57:09
Speaker
little sheepers saying this. I take a long copy of Fossil Man, my book, and it may sound like self-promotion, but actually it's just the opposite. It's an opportunity for self-criticism. It's like, with the advantage of hindsight, and I read it again and say, oh yeah, I could have deleted that scene or done this differently or that differently. Self-flagellate yourself into the apocalypse. Self-flagellation, yeah. But also, it's sort of like, you know, every
00:57:35
Speaker
What you read as a line or a word, to me, it's like the remembrance of things past where you take a little bite of something and it just brings back all this memory. And so to me, it's almost like an album, but mostly it's an album of memories. But mostly I take that just to figure out how I can do it better next time.
00:58:02
Speaker
So that's four. I got one more. I guess the last one would be a blank journal. Just filling it up would keep me busy and have to have something. I had to process the experience and synthesize whatever I'd been reading and all those other books. And your post-apocalyptic memoir. Yeah. And then if it really is the end of the world, it's you know, that's important history and someone has to document it. So I volunteer.
00:58:31
Speaker
I love it. Oh, that's great. Well, Kermit, it was great talking to you. Congrats on the book. It's an incredible book and an incredible testament to the work you put in as a writer and reporter. So I commend you on the work, and thank you for the work, and thanks for coming on the podcast.
Podcast Reflection and Listener Engagement
00:58:46
Speaker
Oh, it's my pleasure, and I really love this podcast, and I've learned so much from listening to the other people you've had on, so I'm just flattered to be among them. So thank you very much.
00:59:04
Speaker
Yay you. Yay you.
00:59:06
Speaker
Don't stop yet. Thanks for listening. I gotta say, it doesn't get old. This thing we do, right? It doesn't get old. Gotta say thanks to Kermit for the time. He had great things to say about the podcast at large, you know, after we were, you know, done recording. And I'm grateful for those kind words. It kind of validates the enterprise, puts a little fuel in the tank, because, you know, we run on fumes sometimes here. And yeah, nice. Thank you.
00:59:37
Speaker
Kind words go a long way. So consider leaving written review in Apple Podcasts or emailing me a review that I can read on air and use for that promotional material for when I court sponsors and the like. Also being, don't forget, if you're like out of shape and you feel like garbage and you want someone to hold you accountable, you hire a trainer, right?
01:00:02
Speaker
Same thing for your writing. If you're ready to level up, give me a call. And we'll have a dialogue and we'll see if I can help you get where you want to go. Alright? We'll think about that. Think of a stew on that. So, today was a day, man. It was a day.
01:00:21
Speaker
I can barely breathe because I ran some hills, you know, sprinted some hills. I ran them with Hank, the dog, and it's because of Hank that I'm particularly gassed. And like where my windpipe is all raspy and where I just, it hurts. It burns, baby.
01:00:39
Speaker
and he was just fast enough going up the hills that I could keep pace with him up the hill. But then I realized I was running way faster up these hills than I normally would because he was pacing me like a damn rabbit around a Greyhound track. I almost threw up like 40 times and we only did six hills so that's like eight bars. Is that even the right math?
01:01:02
Speaker
The six go into 40? I don't think it does. I think it goes like 6.8 into 40, but whatever. It was quite a bit of near barfing and you gotta push that extreme, man. Gotta get swole. I've been following a lot of these CrossFit athletes and I gotta say the men and the women, they're just like so damn sexy and ripped, like all of them.
Motivation and Physical Fitness
01:01:27
Speaker
The women who are jacked out of their minds,
01:01:30
Speaker
I don't find it unattractive like a lot of other douchebags out there who might say they're like too masculinely built. I don't think so. I just I find it inspiring and it's uh and I can say that the dudes are hot too. Whatever. I can say it. I'm like I gotta push myself to that extreme you know. Like I'm not saying do CrossFit or anything. I have my own my own jam I can do.
01:01:54
Speaker
But say what you will about CrossFitters. The ones who are the pros and the ones who are like the pros, they're just damn sexy and I love the devotion. I love the devotion to a craft and that craft is their athleticism and their bodies. It's good stuff. I'm inspired by it.
01:02:16
Speaker
I know that when I'm in decent shape, when I'm throwing iron around, I feel a whole lot more confident. Stand taller. Speak more clearly. Comport myself with assuredness. I'm not a naturally confident person, as you know. If you've been around the block, if you've been around the CNF and block,
01:02:35
Speaker
You know that I am my number one rain cloud. I rain the shit down on me. And I've come to realize that it's I'm the only one who's really saying all this bullshit. And I don't want to say it anymore. That's why I kind of gave up on the if you can't do interview thing at the end. But in any case,
01:03:00
Speaker
When my skin feels tighter, when my clothes fit better, when I'm throwing up a lot of weight, when I'm running up hills, I do have more confidence and it bleeds into other areas of my life. And I like to think that if I'm a little more confident and a little more generous with my attitude, that it might even help you if you're listening to this at this point.
01:03:21
Speaker
You might even sound a bit better, maybe even a little more present than I already am during the show. A bit more engaged and alive and inspiring, at least in terms of the intention I'm giving to the guest, and maybe that can bleed over to your work, because you know I make the show for you, I make it for me, but of course, I make it for you. Well, there's a bunch of shit I bet you didn't care to know, but now you do if you stuck around.
01:03:50
Speaker
All right, here's something you're really going to want to know, though.
First Audio Magazine Launch
01:03:53
Speaker
The audio mag on isolation, the first one from CNF Pod and a a wing of Exit 3 Media. A little bit on that later. It's finally done. It's finished. Finally. It came out great. I plan on publishing it as soon as I set up the Patreon page for the podcast, something I've dragged my feet on for probably two years. So yeah, get out your wallets. I'm passing the dish, man.
01:04:21
Speaker
the first audio mac is going to be always be free for all but the next ones will only go out to patrons i'm drawing up my tears the patreon thing will hopefully put a little juice in the treasury so maybe i can pay writers uh... even just a small stipend if they're accepted you know we believe in that
01:04:42
Speaker
and also just to subsidize this operation a bit while offering you some really cool shit. Coaching, editing, shout outs, links to your website, ad free content. Most of it is by and large ad free but sometimes I have sponsors and I think I might land some more in the future so you might want to be ad free so you can get more of this right man.
01:05:06
Speaker
The show will always be free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. I can tell you that off the bat. So you know what? That's going to be it for this week. So do me this favor. Stay cool, CNFers. Stay cool forever. See ya.