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Our Ruined Lives with Bernie Taylor - Ep 14
403 Plays6 years ago
On this episode of A Life in Ruins Podcast, we chat with Bernie Taylor. Bernie is an independent author who explores what he describes as “the mythological connections and biological knowledge among prehistoric peoples”. We have a spirited and civil conversation about some of Bernie’s theories.
Resources from Bernie Taylor
- Skoglund, Pontus et al. 2015 Ancient Wolf Genome Reveals an Early Divergence of Domestic Dog Ancestors and Admixture into High-Latitude Breeds. In Current Biology (25), 1-5
- Wang, G., Zhai, W., Yang, H. et al.
- 2013 The genomics of selection in dogs and the parallel evolution between dogs and humans. Nat Commun 4, 1860. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2814
- Bernie Taylor’s video on dogs.
A Life in Ruins Resources
- Introduction to Archaeology (like seriously, basic level what it is we do) Kelly, Robert L., Thomas, Davis H. 2016 Archaeology. 7th Edition. Cengage Learning. https://www.amazon.com/Archaeology-Robert-L-Kelly/dp/130567040X
- Dog Domestication Savolainen, Peter, Ya-ping Zhang, Jing Luo, Joakim Lundeberg and Thomas Leitner 2002, Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs. Science 298(5598):1610-1613.
- David’s Paper
- https://www.academia.edu/32510329/On_the_Origin_of_our_Favorite_Subspecies_The_Biological_Implications_of_Dog_Domestication_on_Modern_Humans
- David’s TedEd Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_KWmzLObQ4&t=123s
- Domestication Syndrome Video
- Native American Religions Gill, Sam 2004 Native American Religions: An Introduction (Religious Life in History) 2nd Edition. Cengage Learning.
- Michael, Nicky
- 2019 Turtle Island: An Introduction to Indigenous Studies. Cognella Academic Publishing.
- Interpreting Rock Art Blundell, Geoffrey, Christopher Chippindale, and Benjamin Smith (editors) 2011 Seeing and knowing: understanding rock art with and without ethnography. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
- Brady, Liam M (editor)
- 2016 Relating to rock art in the contemporary world: navigating symbolism, meaning, and significance. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.
- Conkey, Margaret W. (editor)
- 1997 Beyond Art: Pleistocene Image and Symbol. California Academy of Science, San Francisco, CA.
- McDonald, Jo and Peter Veth (editors)
- 2012 A Companion to Rock Art. Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex UK.
- Schaafsma, Polly
- 2013 Images and Power: Rock Art and Ethics. Anthropology and Ethics. Springer-Verlag, New York.
- Smith, Benjamin (editor)
- 2012 Working with rock art: recording, presenting and understanding rock art using indigenous knowledge. Wits University Press, Johannesburg.
- Tomaskova, Silvia
- 2013 Wayward Shamans: The Prehistory of an Idea. University of California Press, Berkley.
Contact Links
- Bernie Taylor’s Website: http://beforeorion.com
- Bernie’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDrHjYiL5e8fbgbHoPUAREg/playlists
- Bernie’s Instagram: @beforeorion
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hey there, listeners. Carlton here from Life in the Room's podcast. Just to let you guys know, we have a lot of subjects that we talk about on this episode that you're probably not familiar with. So to make things easier, we've added resources on our Instagram account as well as our website for you to follow along.
00:00:19
Speaker
So we have the picture that Bernie Taylor talks about, as well as a bunch of different resources. His, like his website before Ryan and as well as his books, as well as other resources that you can use to follow along with the episode in your free time.
Introduction of Episode 14 and Guest Bernie Taylor
00:00:31
Speaker
So please, please, please, please, please.
00:00:34
Speaker
Be a scientific citizen and do your research just so you can have a more critical idea of what you're listening to and how to interpret it for yourselves. Don't just listen to me, David and Connor. Don't just listen to Mr. Taylor, but listen to both perspectives and do your own research.
Mythological Connections and Prehistoric Knowledge
00:00:50
Speaker
Well, thank you guys and I hope you enjoy the episode. Later.
00:01:04
Speaker
Welcome to episode 14 of a Life in Ruins podcast. I'm your host, Carlton Gover, and I'm joined by my co-host, Connor Jonnan and David Howe. Tonight's guest is author, Bernie Taylor. Bernie Taylor is an independent author who explores what he describes as the mythological connections and biological knowledge among prehistoric peoples. His books include Biological Time, published in 2004, and Before Orion, Finding the Face of the Hero in 2017.
00:01:29
Speaker
Through his writing, Bernie suggests that the El Castillo Cave in Spain contains fundamental pieces in the human journey to self-realization, the foundation of written language, and a record of biological knowledge that irrevocably impacted some of the artistic styles, religious practices, and stories that are still with us.
00:01:49
Speaker
Bernie found David through David's public outreach, and the two began to talk about their mutual interest in dogs. Bernie believes there are images of domestic dogs in El Castillo Cave. After some discussion, Bernie asked to continue this conversation on the podcast, and we are continuing that discussion
Cave Art Interpretation and Expert Perspectives
00:02:04
Speaker
today. Thank you for joining us, Bernie. How are you doing this evening? Well, I'm doing great. Thank you guys for having this show. We're going to have a good time tonight, explore some different ideas.
00:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So can you start by giving, we gave a kind of an introduction to who you are. Can you give us a background to see who you are? Absolutely, sure. So I come, so I live in Oregon, Portland, Oregon, out in the metro area. Been out here for more than 20, maybe 25 years, originally from the East Coast. I have a, what you want to know is I have a social sciences background.
00:02:33
Speaker
which makes me, I would say, moderately qualified to look at Pele the cave art. I believe that the most qualified people to do this are from the humanities. Interesting, right? So if you walk into a Pele the cave, and if you walk in, it's uncovered, and you can see with the naked eye,
00:02:54
Speaker
You're looking at it from perspective as an artist, which is the humanities, perhaps as a, so Picasso walked into the caves and he has most quotes in world history about the cave art. You could walk in as Joseph Campbell did, who came out and said, these are myths, because this is an organization of the characters. Some people have walked in and said, we see astronomical patterns.
00:03:14
Speaker
Archaeology is very good at dating cave art and exploring, let's say, the depths and the artifacts to tell us the history of the timeline. But the other areas, the humanities, are what's most strongest, because the humanities, I would also include social sciences in terms of psychology, they bring out, what did people think about?
00:03:43
Speaker
What do people look at the cables and recognize that we see today? What do they feel about that we feel today? So these are all I would describe as non-scientific, hard science studies. These are the next step forwards. So how did I get into this? About 13 years ago, I wrote Biological Time, which was about
00:04:03
Speaker
chronobiology, how do plants and animals time themselves? And I worked in conjunction with Oregon Fish and Wildlife, but we're looking at the concept of salmon. Salmon in the Pacific Northwest
Chronobiology and Cave Art Timing
00:04:12
Speaker
run earlier later from one year to the next, about a one month window. But what's unique about them is that they all run earlier late together. So they either follow one smart salmon or some other mechanism. And up and down the entire Oregon-Washington coast, they actually run earlier late the same together.
00:04:29
Speaker
So we explored that concept, did field research, went out and collected data, all that sort of stuff. And we came up with a methodology that you could predict the salmon timing within a day or two, whereas previously, you couldn't predict it all within a month or so. And I gave presentations to academic conferences, universities, fish and wildlife agencies, the tribes. That was really important. One of the Columbia Basin tribes spoke before all the tribal councils. Native Americans crying. And someone said to me,
00:04:59
Speaker
that if this mechanism of the timing of the salmon, which also applies to deer, elk and other animals,
00:05:07
Speaker
is apparent today, perhaps it was in our distant past. And someone, that same person said, you should go look at the images in the pelletic caves of France. And so I looked at images from Atlas Co. 17,000 years ago, and lo and behold, the timing of the animals was exactly the same as the Native American calendars, and biologically how these animals tie themselves to a chronobiology biology clock. Hey, can you start? Well, how can you tell that in the archaeological record?
00:05:36
Speaker
on these cave paintings? Good question. So there's in the Lascaux Cave, there's a huge red deer. Some people say it's a megalosterous, could be either one. Under the megalosterous red deer, there's a box and there's 13 dots leading to the box. In Native American traditions, they hunted around the full moon.
00:05:59
Speaker
They hunted around the full moon because the animals grouped together when there's more light. It has nothing to do with the gravitationals and tides or anything like that. It's entirely due to the animals are up and about at night because the lights are on. The natural lights are on. So the animals grouped together. They also rut together around the full moon because it brings the animals together. And that's in Native American calendars for deer and elk across our country.
00:06:26
Speaker
Now, the key thing is that it's always around the full moon because that's what they draw together. Whereas around the new moon, the dark nights, they're spaced out. And so how people around the world count is they start the lunar count within the cycle. So start with that first crescent moon, they count from 13 to the full moon.
00:06:47
Speaker
It's called the ecclesiastical full moon. And it's just how everybody counts the moon. It's the easiest way to do it. And well, this pattern of 13 is not just under that megalosus red deer, but it's under other large animals, ibex, this other deer, endless co-cave. But it's also depicted in, how should I say, Native American cave art or wall art in the Pacific Northwest.
00:07:13
Speaker
and in their own calendars. So we have a biological phenomenon, or actually bioactivity, that is the same timing mechanism as these red deer. And what's unique about this red deer is it's blowing kind of like a circular pattern in front of its mouth, and its neck is up, and it has a full rack. So it's full antlers. So it's a rutting scene where this red deer is bugling in the morning to call in the cows.
00:07:40
Speaker
So we can not just a time it as a just a any month of the year or a nation of the year, but it's an actual biological activity within a season of the year. And it's exactly how Native Americans timed their hunts as well as the running of the deer.
00:07:58
Speaker
These caves are periodically reoccupied by multiple people through hundreds, you know, up to hundreds of thousands of years. How do you take that into account? Thousands of years, thousands of years, yeah. 10 to 20 thousand years. How do you take that into account that these things are first connected and second, how they're not a product of multiple times being there?
00:08:19
Speaker
Well, actually there are, well, there's multiple caves. And what you're asking now is a, you're asking an archeology question. So how the archeologists determine the timing, they actually can't time when people are in the caves, they can time when the images were made. It's a different concept. So the way they time someone's a cave, you look at layers of soil. But the images are timed differently.
00:08:45
Speaker
And so the most common method,
Significance of Red in Cave Art
00:08:49
Speaker
let's call it the state of the art method for dating cave art now, is that most of these panels are limestone walls. And when the limestone percolates out, it puts calcium carbonate. When the calcium carbonate goes on top of the cave image, you can say is at least as old as that excretion of the calcium carbonate, which is datable using uranium method.
00:09:10
Speaker
So that it could be a day older or it could be 10,000 years older. And you recently last week came out and is a science or nature about the Indonesian cave art at being about 43 years ago, years ago as nature and that was time with the same method. So it was at least 43,000 years ago. Now, what the author of that study knew is that there's cave art in in Spain at the El Castillo Mountain that was dated to 40,000 years ago.
00:09:40
Speaker
At a minimum age, that could be a day older than the one in Indonesia. So this whole having found this concept of the oldest cave art is really a minimum dating. And so that's right. And so that's it. And so archaeologists, what they try to do is have multiple multiple data points on a wall. And if if they're with it, you know, if they're fairly close to each other, they'll say that we're
00:10:07
Speaker
And this is pretty good to be about 40,000 years ago. So that's an archaeology question. And that technique came out about six years ago, seven years ago. And what they did, the archaeologists did in Europe, is they went around and they kind of tested everybody's ideas of what people thought the ages were. And there were winners and losers on this one.
00:10:31
Speaker
And so the so-called losers who didn't have as old as people thought it was, so the archaeologists thought it was, they haven't changed their papers yet on Wikipedia and so on. But it's a game of who's the oldest. But the oldest is really a, it's a speculative, it's good data, but it's a speculative data point.
00:10:51
Speaker
Right. And I'd like just to like real quick add a couple things. Other dating techniques include dating charcoal in these caves, which are evidence of human behavior. That's a big one because the uranium method, the standard deviations are larger because the half-life of uranium is much broader than
00:11:11
Speaker
carbon. One thing that I find interesting, so like Lascaux Caves, 12,000 years old in France, and you're
Animistic Beliefs and Mythological Stories
00:11:18
Speaker
using historic hunting methodologies of American Indian tribes in the United States to help inform what's going on. Not all the tribes that are found in their historic ranges are traditionally prehistorically from these ranges.
00:11:33
Speaker
Well, none of the Native Americans would be from the Lascaux region, because Native Americans were- Exactly. They're not even from France 24,000 years ago. So Lascaux was 17,000 years ago. So the Native Americans didn't change. People in Siberia didn't change. Actually, Native Americans may have had changes. People in Siberia may have had changes, as the people in Palethic, the MacNelling people in Spain and France. But the animals didn't change.
00:12:00
Speaker
So observation of the animals doesn't change. And so the red deer and the megaloceros rutted in their same own biological timing through that whole period. Right, as most animals do, that is usually coincided with spring and fall. And I honestly find it fascinating, because really it's not much of a question of the data.
00:12:25
Speaker
it's really a question of how we interpret these. And this is what you bring up with the humanities, that the humanities might be able to help understand these things. And unfortunately, in terms of academia, we get
00:12:41
Speaker
we hold ourselves and put our feet down in these certain camps. But when it comes to things like art and cave art, none of us were around then, no one that we know was around then. So we're trying to use our modern day interpretations to help inform us of prehistoric mental spaces and how they thought. And that's the interesting part of this whole dynamic, because fundamentally everyone agrees on the dates, they agree,
00:13:10
Speaker
relatively what these things represent, because these aren't canon images, these are paintings. So fundamentally, that's why we're excited to have you on the show. It's that you offer these very interesting perspectives that are based in a different paradigm than what we usually associate ourselves with or are familiar to.
00:13:32
Speaker
So that's where I started. That was biological time and I did the conference route and taught classes and so on, actually guest lecture classes. And then I put it down for 10 years and I came back and I was going to do kind of an upgrade, just write a paper about what I had noticed since other cave art had been dated to older time.
00:13:53
Speaker
And I started looking at the El Castillo Cave in the so-called Gallagher disc, which had been put about 34,000 years ago with this new Uranium series dating. And I started counting the red discs in the same way as I did at Lascaux and other caves in Europe. And I just sat back in the chair once and I said, oh my God, that looks like an elephant.
00:14:12
Speaker
And so the ear and the trunks. For the audience listening, I would Google right now, if you can, El Castillo Cave in Spain, so you can see the images that we're talking about. Exactly. Yeah, it's a gallery of disks, El Castillo Cave. And above the elephant, what appeared to be an elephant, I actually thought I was kind of making this up. It looked like a lion.
00:14:35
Speaker
And I said, okay, wait a second. Now this lion didn't have, it apparently didn't have, it had a mane, whereas the other images of lions in Europe, they were bald of sorts, they didn't have manes.
00:14:48
Speaker
And then there's some other unusual characters. So I reached out to someone from my distant past. I'm 55 now, my mid-20s. I lived in Beijing, China. And I, a mutual friend back then I met George Schaller. And George Schaller is the world's foremost field wildlife biologist. And he's the mentor of Jane Goodall and everybody else.
00:15:11
Speaker
So I went, so I contacted George, completely out of the blues, mid 80s
Animals and Symbols in Cave Art
00:15:15
Speaker
now. And I said, George, I'm looking at these images. This is the time period. This one appears to me. Is this an elephant? And is this a lion? And he kind of looked it all over and he said, well, it could be an elephant. He said, well, it could also be a woolly mammoth. He said, I don't, you know,
00:15:33
Speaker
what a woolly, both juveniles and adults look like. And so we went back and forth. And then as we're doing that, other animals started popping out.
00:15:43
Speaker
Are these animals popping out in the sense that they've been painted on or is this natural formations in the rock art? Cause I'm going to be honest, that that's what I see. So if you, so if you look at the, yeah, yeah, that's so if you look at the panel, it's a, you see two thirds of it is white limestone with red and black on top. The natural state of that panel should be all the dark matter that you see in the top third.
00:16:10
Speaker
OK, so what they did was they took off the let's call the brown matter and then they they literally I don't want to say etched out, but they they and I want to see Chisley because they didn't have chisels. Right. But they they scraped out layers of it. So you're like in the gallery. This is the Pedro Swar image that you can see.
00:16:30
Speaker
Sure. It's actually it should be like multi-dimensional. And a lot of those lines that you see are actually multiple layers. So everything below the brown is entirely fabricated. OK, so by either. Oh, I see. I see what you're talking about. They did this at Chauvet Cave with the panels. They scrape off the top limestone. And the Chauvet Cave is a panel of dots, the red dots.
00:16:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's the same thing. Exactly. And by the way, the show, but I didn't put the show vacate the panel dots in the book, but it has a similar themes to what you're looking at on this. Now, you're talking about El Castillo. So right. So we're back to El Castillo, gallery of desk. And so everything, so everything, everything white should not be white.
00:17:15
Speaker
it was scraped off to become the limestone that you see. It's not its natural state. Are there other studies that... So you said earlier, one of our questions was, have you been to this cave yourself? I have not been. I've seen the images in and around. I've seen all the images from the cave and I've seen the ones on both sides of this. So as soon as you leave that white area, you're in brown. So the natural state is the brownish material.
00:17:40
Speaker
And did you get this notion that these images were carved out of the natural rock from a paper or was this your summation from this picture? I had no knowledge prior to seeing the elephant that there was anything but red discs on that wall.
00:18:02
Speaker
At that time, I had no knowledge. I've since come to find other documentation from the past that people had seen, had been here, they'd seen the images, but I had no knowledge of it. So I contacted George. So this is- So no published studies. There were no published studies. Well, there was one in 18-
00:18:22
Speaker
Sixteen hundred or so. And but the so I had no I had no knowledge. So contacting George Schaller is like asking Tiger Woods, how's my stroke? And Tiger could say to you, you know, you got some potential or you maybe should try, you know, miniature golf. And so I took a huge risk going to George and George, you know, he scratched his head and says, kind of looks like an elephant.
00:18:47
Speaker
Well, after probably 30 animals later, and hundreds of emails going back and forth, we resolved that it wasn't elephants, but we actually couldn't decide what it was either a European elephant, because there were elephants at that time in Europe, or an African elephant. We couldn't decide that. But we found other animals that were from Europe and
00:19:10
Speaker
in Africa and marine animals. And at that time, my, my, and I'll, you know, reveal this, like my understanding of Pleistocene megaphone in Europe or, you know, their demographics is not as good as it is for North America. But were there still mammoths running around that area during that time? Yeah, there were mammoths. Now, the difference now, George and I, we went back and forth in this and he, I showed him a picture of a mammoth and the mammoths had like that hump tent.
00:19:35
Speaker
And there's actually four images of elephants on that panel, and they all have flat heads like an African elephant. The Pacific elephant, or Asian elephant, I should say, has a humped head, something like a woolly mammoth. So then George asked me, well, I don't know what a, maybe it could be a juvenile woolly mammoth. And so we found the image of the baby Luba out of Siberia, and lo and behold, juvenile woolly mammoths have a humped head just like an adult one. And so we still weren't completely
00:20:05
Speaker
He wasn't completely decided. And it wasn't until later that we found many more animals. We're going to stop you there. We're going to end this first session. And we can continue on in the second. Sure. Just as a time management thing. So yeah, this has been episode 14 of Life in Ruins with Bernie Taylor. We'll catch you on the far side. And we're back to segment two with Bernie Taylor of episode 14 of a Life in Ruins podcast. All right, so yeah, where do we want to kick back off, guys?
00:20:34
Speaker
Red disks. All right. Let's talk about red disks. And these are the red disks in El Castillo cave. Or are we also going to be talking about another cave as well? We can actually talk about, well, primarily the El Castillo tape, we're going to talk about red in general. Because that's the essence of it all. Now, would you agree that the red disks of El Castillo are a date to about 40,000 based on the U-series dating?
00:20:59
Speaker
So the U-Series is running at 34,000 for the gallery of discs and around 40,000 for the panel of hands, which is a different chamber. And this, you made a YouTube video about red in general on your YouTube channel before Orion.
Animal Domestication and Cave Art
00:21:18
Speaker
Yeah, so it's about a minute long. So for our viewers or listeners, sorry, you guys should check out this YouTube video so that way you guys get a more of a background of what we're talking about. It's only a minute long. So, okay, the color red.
00:21:28
Speaker
So go. So earlier I said that I was looking at the cave image, pages for his image. That's widely available. You can find it. And I was counting the red disk just like everybody else. How many were there? What do they what do they mean? All that sort of stuff. Because that was when the when this the recent the dating Uranium series dating came out that pushed out the steel back to 40,000 years ago. The big story was what is the red disk mean?
00:21:51
Speaker
And so I was counting red discs, just like everybody else. And I went back a little further into my studies. In the past, I thought about red. And there was, Nicholas Tinbergen won a Nobel Prize, or shared a Nobel Prize for his work in the study of instinct.
00:22:10
Speaker
And Tinbergen had a three-spine stickleback tank, a tank with three-spine ticklebacks near his window. And every day that a red delivery truck came by and stopped outside the windows, the sticklebacks went into a defensive posture. And Tinbergen theorized that since the sticklebacks and fish in general are brainstem dominated, it was an instinctual reaction that not just fish should respond to, but we do as well.
00:22:38
Speaker
So when you drive down the highway, no one stops for a blue sign or a green sign because it blends into our natural world. We stop for that red sign. It's naturally alerting to us in the same way as a stickleback. If you drive your main strip, the main strip in your town, what do you see that's red? Stoplights, stop signs. I see a lot of yellow. Yellow, too. The other end of the spectrum. You see McDonald's. You see Burger King. You see Dairy Queen.
00:23:08
Speaker
So Madison Avenue picked up on the red a long time ago, and they're using it to trigger our brains at the most basic level to say, look at me, stop, get a burger. You're from Long Island, Bernie? I'm from originally, yes, Babylon area. Okay. I'm from Iceland. Cool. I think you mentioned Madison Avenue. I was like, oh, he's from New York too. But yeah, it's so the,
00:23:33
Speaker
It's at the most basic level. So the red disc, I believe, part of it was a test. Can you see beyond the red disc? Can you see the forest through the trees? And it wasn't, I was, like everybody else, I was counting the red disc. And that's why I didn't see literally the elephant in the room. And so George and I, we continued down finding all these animals. And on one end of the panel, let's say to the viewer's left,
00:23:57
Speaker
There's a giraffe. And on the viewer's right, there's a horse. And these are both on the viewer's right. There's also an Iberian lynx and some other European animals. Those are animals that were distinctly from the two different continents, Africa and Europe. And in between those, we found marine animals. There's a seal. There's a dolphin. There's a
00:24:18
Speaker
or whale, crab. And this is from your identification, right? Just want to make sure that we're- Yes, from our identification. Okay, okay. And people go to my webpage before ryan.com, you can see, people can see for themselves. And I also want to like backtrack a little bit and then say that these are, these red discs, they're originally made out of ochre, is that correct? Yeah, they're made of red ochre, yes. Okay, okay. Just so our viewers understand that.
00:24:42
Speaker
The next time you guys are flipping through a paleo, the cave art book, and you see red discs, take a deeper look, because that's the test. I'm trying to look. It's a paleolithic. So we're talking about like European paleolithic. So it's our discussion today. Pass 40,000.
00:24:58
Speaker
Yeah. So, okay. And is that, are we confining that to like, cause most of this talk so far has been, is European rock art. So we're looking at the European paleolithic, 12,000 and beyond. Okay. So, and then also that just for the listeners, like Ochre is, is a naturally recurring, it's not a, it's, is it a mineral? Basically it's like degraded iron. Yeah, it's hematite degraded and it's easy to make paint out of. And you see Ochre used globally. Yes. In a spiritual context. You can find it.
00:25:27
Speaker
Yes, that's it. And that's amazing. So why around the world, I don't believe it's just a brain-sent dominant reaction why we were attracted to the rare ochre. I believe that at a deeper point in time, we used it spiritually. And I'm not a spiritual person, but we come from a spiritual source. And that's what makes us interesting, is that we're now going back so far deep in time.
00:25:53
Speaker
What do you mean by that? I'm not a spiritual person. What do you mean by like? We come from a spiritual sauce. Yeah. What do you mean by that? So people prior to five, 6,000 years ago were animistic.
00:26:09
Speaker
People that they believe that the mountains were gods. They believe that the wind had a voice. They believe that they could talk to animals and the animals would talk to them. So an animus would be very similar to Native Americans when we arrived.
00:26:25
Speaker
And so if you look at Native American literature or folklore or myth, you'll find that people interacted with the animals, they spoke with the animals, listened to the animals. And before people arrived, the animals talked with each other. And so that's the spiritual source that we all come from. And we still carry it within us. You know, have any of you guys ever said, you know, someone is as smart as an owl?
00:26:50
Speaker
Well, in Pawnee beliefs, owls are the devil, so we don't use that in my household. I get what you're saying. It's important to realize that, especially with American Indian beliefs, there's over 562 tribes and more state tribes. It's easy to talk about these things homogeneously, and there's still differences in which they conduct their own spiritual ceremonies. The comment that I had is when
00:27:19
Speaker
people still, you know, it's not necessarily talking. And this is coming from my point of view, the way that I've been told, it's not necessarily talking, but that animals communicate, not necessarily in a voice context, but their behaviors communicate
00:27:31
Speaker
events that are going on in time and space. So like you said, like when an elk is running or when the bears start to get fatter, you know, fall's coming. So in that kind of context, how animals are communicating and how people can, understanding animal behavior, can use those interpretations to help inform them of environmental conditions. That is exactly true. And that is my observation with Native Americans, Pacific Northwest.
00:27:59
Speaker
So it's communicating with maybe listening to or watching the behavior of the animal. And there's typically a myth associated with that that might say explain how it all came to be if the myth still exists. But yeah, that's really cool. Thank you for putting that in there. So we go back this far in time, 36,000 years ago, and if we have African animals, we're not just talking about Europe, we're talking about at least Western North Africa.
00:28:29
Speaker
And we're finding at this point, let's say a common spiritual source, because people in Indonesia could have come out of, they definitely went through North Africa, and they could have intersected with people that were in Western North Africa. And so what we're finding is, for the first time, is these, let's call it spiritual characters that connect, possibly connect to who we are today.
00:28:58
Speaker
Did any of you guys study Joseph Campbell when you're in high school or college? All right. I had a 2.33 repeating GPA in high school. I didn't do a goddamn thing. Okay. So Joseph Campbell was the easy one. Okay. And what Joseph Campbell said is that there is a, there's a common myth because he says people, Joseph Campbell said people all around the world fundamentally tell the same story of a hero that goes on his journey.
00:29:22
Speaker
And if you somehow kidnapped somebody from China who had never knew nothing about Western literature and brought and told them the story of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, the Chinese person would say, you know, that sounds a lot like Journey to the West because there's common elements in these stories. And that's what Joseph Campbell recognized. And he said, Joseph Campbell said two things could have happened. One is that this story is so deep in time that we all intersect with it or
00:29:49
Speaker
that it was dispersed sort of a hyper dispersion more recently in time in the, let's say, 5,000, 6,000 years ago. That's what Joseph Campbell said. And that is one hypothesis. And there's another hypothesis that came out of a Swiss icon, I know it's Carl Jung. And Jung said is that we have common archetypes. So in an image, if you see a woman in distress, you recognize she's in distress and you feel for her.
00:30:15
Speaker
If you see a, you know, a teacher, a man speaking to the ear of a young boy, as we find in this gallery of this image, you associate the teacher in the apprentice. So these are the old, and these are archetypal characters. So you're saying that you saw this in, not El Castillo, it's in a different place specifically? Sorry, I just need to contextualize. Yeah, actually. So on the gallery of discs, we have the teacher in the apprentice, which is
00:30:42
Speaker
It's down to, from the viewer's side, it'd be down to the viewer's
Influence of Joseph Campbell and Myth Interpretation
00:30:45
Speaker
right. Yeah, the bottom right and the L. Costello. It's the most common image that I use in my videos and my presentations. It jumps out. And by the way, I find that same motif in other caves.
00:30:58
Speaker
What caves are those? The Gorham's cave, the Gorham matching has one, as well as the Chauvet panel of dots. And yeah, okay. It's at the top. It's at the top, but yeah, it's not in the book because I didn't get permission to use that image for the book. Sure. Um, when you meet with other archeologists and other, I guess humanities, um, researchers, what, what is their general reception of this art? Well, the, they're amazed and they're not amazed that it's there, but they're amazed that we can go that
00:31:28
Speaker
It pushes back mythology. So prior to my work, the oldest myth of time was the Epic of Gilgamesh, 4,500 years ago, dug up in the sands of Iraq. And Gilgamesh had all the same fundamental problems that we had. That's written myth, right? He was an awesome myth.
00:31:45
Speaker
Okay, that's written exactly written. Yeah, so in due respect to the Pawnee, okay, I so that's that is written myth. So that's that's only what we can actually date versus since time Memorial. Okay. I believe that the Native American myths are much older than the Epic Guild in Michigan. So the
00:32:02
Speaker
So good point. So Gilgamesh, people had looked at Gilgamesh and said, well, that's that early story. And psychologically, we haven't changed since then. So now they can see the images. And it pushes back the concept of the story of the hero's journey, the teacher and the apprentice and these other characters. It says that we had this same story going back at least 34,000 years ago. Therefore,
00:32:27
Speaker
The psychology of man hasn't changed very much, which makes sense. And this is a big thumbs up for Native Americans. So the common, let's say, anthropological DNA point where you're now is people are in Beringia about 24,000 years ago. And somewhere 15,000 to 16,000 years ago, they started migrating down to the lower North America, something like that. And so if people weren't in Beringia 24,000 years ago,
00:32:56
Speaker
Well, that is of a earlier date than let's go at 17,000 years ago. So if Native Americans can have that fundamentally the same structure of the myth is what Joseph Campbell said, then it dates back so far in time before let's
Reflections on Bernie's Insights and Archaeology
00:33:14
Speaker
go. Therefore, everybody should have the same, these fundamental myth structure. And this proves out Joseph Campbell pushing it back
00:33:22
Speaker
Let's say 20, beyond the 22,000 years of go of Beringia to 34,000 years ago. And so the question is then asked. This is really humanity's question. And psychology, why do we have the common myth? Is the myth in us? And when the archetypal characters are found, is the myth evoked? Or what Joseph Campbell said, we carry down the same myth story from early in time. So what did the point he's saying? That's the question.
00:33:52
Speaker
Where's the myth come from? Is the myth within us or was the myth passed down? I think it's passed down. Yeah, I mean, it's it's interesting because I mean, like also like the the Pawnee populations, Native American populations that we know of today really started forming around 1500 at the end of the medieval global warming period. So before that, we're not quite sure how their populations were structured, but also like, you know, it's not unheard of for humans to
00:34:20
Speaker
to develop technologies and stories independently from one another. We see that with the bow and arrow. American Indians did not come across Beringia with it. The bow and arrow in Europe and North America, they're developed independently from one another. So it's not necessarily unheard of that there's these fundamental
00:34:41
Speaker
evolutions in terms of human technology and technology itself just being an expression of human psychology or human mental templates. It's fascinating and it just comes back to what we talked about in that first section. It's like these concepts because there's no
00:34:59
Speaker
Evidence in the sense of there's no material remains left behind, right? It's not like arrowheads or the paintings. That's what's interesting about these topics. It's like they're abstract. And in archaeology, we've seen a shift towards looking at these more with the post-percessual paradigm in our field, where more abstract ideas are being investigated. And the traditional Binfordian techniques of archaeology
00:35:29
Speaker
being labeled as processual. So, yeah, it's like really. You know, we can all talk about these things, but it's also like it's fascinating. It honestly is fascinating. So you asked earlier, asked the question, what do people of humanities think when they see these images? And they say it's fascinating because they we have an actual journey. We can see that we have a character that starts in Iberian pen. So we have a water
00:35:55
Speaker
Water area we have this marine animals and we have african animals So he goes from it goes from ibran peninsula the northern part of spain across the stretch of bralta to africa and back again to retell the story and So in one video you said you saw that there were giraffes in this in this cave art, too
00:36:14
Speaker
Yes, you should be able to see the head of the draft without me outlining it for you. If you look to your left, the far left center, it looks like a deer. The head is on its side. I have images in my presentations which show the draft. It's actually two drafts.
00:36:33
Speaker
There's a mother giraffe, and then there's a juvenile, which wraps its head around the mother's neck. And the red disc at that part of the panel become the molten pattern of the mother giraffe. Is there any zoological evidence or I guess paleontological evidence of giraffes in Spain? Not that time period now. So in the hundreds of thousands of years ago, there were giraffes, but not, you know, in tens of thousands of years from the point that this was made.
00:37:02
Speaker
the dog question, we don't have much time left, but which cave is it that you said you saw these images of domestic dogs? So the question is that word domestic is big, okay? Sure. So this is what, I'm gonna point to two studies. One study was in 2012 by a Chinese group and they said that 32,000 years ago, they were indigenous dogs and they were wolves.
00:37:30
Speaker
based on the DNA analysis. Is it sloveling at all, I think? It was a Chinese group. So it was a greater Chinese base. It was 2012. And then 2015, the Skolin paper, which looked at the Tamar wolf out of Siberia, that wolf was about 34,000 years ago. And he said that roughly, at least around 30,000 years ago, there were wolves and there were ducks. This was, I believe,
00:37:56
Speaker
I believe that we domesticated dogs, not wolves, because the Skollgan story DNA suggests that dogs and gray wolves come from a common canid, which was not a gray wolf.
00:38:12
Speaker
So we didn't know what it is DNA that was the DNA that was dated was it was mitochondrial DNA, correct? And mitochondrial DNA itself, like there's issues with it. Recently, there was a paper published that we talked about in one of our previous podcasts about the dogs on Instagram. That was that same mitochondrial
Community Engagement and Podcast Reflections
00:38:27
Speaker
DNA used
00:38:29
Speaker
on horses in the Americas was used to try to prove that horses had always been into the Americas. So like mitochondria dinae is absolutely a great resource. However, we all should know that these are bread crumbs and not the whole loaf. So it's fascinating. And right before we get back to the talk about dogs, I want to just suggest like for you, Bernie, for cross-cultural comparisons and myths, I highly recommend it's called Tolkien and Pawnee Land.
00:38:56
Speaker
It's an argument about comparing Tolkien's story of the Middle Earth with Pawnee mythology. And then also, you should look into the Sami as a cultural comparison to what we see in Europe. Spell Swami, spell Swami, spell that word. I think it's like S-A-M-I. Yes, the Sami of people in Northern Europe, yes.
00:39:19
Speaker
Yes, and they're indigenous populations that have continued hunting and gathering practices since the introduction. So definitely looking at those guys, I think that'd be more valuable to look at them than possibly other indigenous groups because they're the descendants of the indigenous groups that lived in Europe. So just something that I wanted to mention, but back to the dog. Okay, so the question comes down to, were
00:39:45
Speaker
Do dogs and wolves separately exist or were dogs bred from wolves? So I think with the Scotland paper, what it's saying is that there's a descendant population, like dogs are an offshoot of ancient wolf populations. And it's not necessarily to say that dogs in the sense that we know them existed. It's just those wolves that were more predisposed to being familiar around humans and less aggressive.
00:40:15
Speaker
That line is what descended into dogs, and that's why they were domesticatable.
00:40:19
Speaker
Is that something you would agree with? So heating, I don't think he went into what made them domesticatable. And there's, I read your paper, your 2012 paper. Can you just talk about the different lines? Yeah, there's five, you had five, well, you had five different hypotheses, you outlined five different hypotheses, how dogs came to be. Sure, that was a summary of others. A summary, yeah. And they're all good, they're all good. But if we have five hypotheses about how dogs came to be,
00:40:47
Speaker
maybe they're all right, well actually maybe one of them are right or maybe two are right, but we're still asking that question. And I think the Chinese study that came out in 2012, it said there were indigenous dogs and there were wolves at the same time, that indigenous dogs then were then domesticated versus the wolves being domesticated. It starts asking questions about could there have been dogs before? Could dogs have evolved
00:41:13
Speaker
I should say could an animal have evolved separately from a wolf that became a dog? I don't know if that paper exactly says that but it again says that there are different lines of there's still gray wolves that exist just like there are British people that still exist and as Americans like we used to be British in the way and domestic dogs are an offshoot of those wolves that have now descended down into
00:41:39
Speaker
If that makes sense. So what we have in the images is about, so let's say 34,000 years ago, we have canyons with ears down.
00:41:51
Speaker
and with canids with ears up. And in the modern world, we look at- This is from the panels that you're talking about. The panels, yeah. And in our modern world, we look at dogs, wild dogs, I should say not wild dogs, but wolves have ears up, right? And there are dogs that are domesticated with ears up and they're domesticated with the ears down.
00:42:12
Speaker
And so did that that that down your domestic down your dogs come as a result of us domesticating them or did it come out result of something that the dogs did naturally in the wild? And of course, there's the silver fox, the silver fox. Right. And which so what they were doing in Russia or Siberia is they were they were trying to breed out foxes that were more tame in the kennel. So then
00:42:40
Speaker
wreck the fur. And among a small segment of the population, they found that the puppies for three months, some of them had ears down. And so they postulated that if the ears down might have been a result of taking out the
00:42:59
Speaker
say, the aggressiveness of the... Sure. What you're describing is domestication syndrome. Correct. And when an animal, this is what the study shows, is that when things are selected for decreased aggression in their traits, their ears stem to flop down more due to neural crest cells that don't
00:43:18
Speaker
put strength into the cartilage that make them flop down. It also makes their coat spotty and it makes their, like they bark and they have like larger puppy, like neotenous traits into their adulthood. So that's what that study shows. So, but it was only for three months. That's really important.
00:43:33
Speaker
There's only the puppies for three months. I just saw one of the researchers actually came to Boulder a month or two ago and talked to us about this study. So it was like, it was out of Moscow during the Soviet Union. And it's at a, as you, as you mentioned, it's basically a Fox breeding facility for fur. However, they got permission to control a sub segment of the Fox population. I think they were able to keep max 700 that were specifically meant for this study. And it took
00:44:01
Speaker
I think like 40 something years for most of the domestic trades to appear. Well, not domestic trades per se, but they were non aggressive. You have to say really non aggressive.
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah, so first came the non-aggressive towards humans, as they selectively chose the foxes. So they basically got rid of the foxes that were aggressive towards humans. And I think one of the more fascinating pieces of that study was they were concerned if the mother's behavior towards humans
00:44:32
Speaker
was relayed onto the puppies, so what they did, and this is, you know, you can only do this in Russia, was they opened up pregnant tame fox and a pregnant wild fox
00:44:44
Speaker
and they took three embryos from each and placed them in the opposite mother, zipped them back up, let them have their puppies, and even still, regardless of which mother they had, they still had the traits of their mother, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. So David, how many years and how many thousands of dollars do you need to test this hypothesis on wolves? The ears up and ears down.
00:45:08
Speaker
I would love to do that. I guess what's, what's crowdfunded money. Yeah. 40, 40 years in a gulag in Russia. Yeah. And the entire economy of the Soviet union. But, um, yeah, that'd be an interesting study to do. And what I, it's interesting. And you mentioned the thing about like the, after a couple of months, it changes.
00:45:27
Speaker
The Fox experiment's a recent thing with selected controlled breeding. So when this happens over thousands of years, upwards of 30,000 to, you know, 25 to 15,000 years is what we wanted to talk conservatively. Um, that gives time for these traits to be in bread and persistently. And that's the dogs that we have today. So to say that they were floppy ear dogs back in the day,
00:45:52
Speaker
and painted into, into cave art. Uh, I don't know how, what the dates are in that. 34,000, 34,000. That's in so close ones range. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I wanted to clarify that. And those are, those are images you drew, right?
00:46:08
Speaker
No, they're not. Actually, I didn't draw them. So the images exist in the wall. I recognize. Yeah. And then I outlay. And what I always do, I'm very careful about this, is that I always give the original image to compare to. And if you look at most of the K-Bark books that predate, let's say, 30 years ago, you'll see a lot of drawings of dogs
00:46:27
Speaker
or actually not dogs, drawings of Pele the Cave images, because that pre-date, you know, good color photography and so on, digital photography. And they'll show you what the archeologists or the interpreter believed them to be. In fact, I'd say 80% of the Pele the Cave record is of people's interpretations, either drawings, and they don't show a digital image next to it for the viewer to compare. So I offer both. What about the scope?
00:46:54
Speaker
So Lascaux was Raspoli Dez book probably 25 years ago. Good digital photography.
00:47:03
Speaker
And the Chauvet won by Jean-Claude, very good digital photography. But when you go to, actually, but you go to other caves, it's like a large inventory of the paleo, the cave images, the decisions were made a very long time ago. And they were made by the Abby, B-R-U-I-E-L. And Abby meaning a Catholic priest. And what he did was, he actually went down the caves and he drew what he saw.
00:47:33
Speaker
And so many of the things that we make based on the public record are an individual's interpretation with very old technology. But yeah, let's go, very good. These are all pictures. Yeah, there's all these pictures right now. All public available. So you're saying- All public available, yep. Yeah, yeah. Before Ryan and Kyle go to the web page.
00:47:54
Speaker
No, I'm just asking. It's all there. So you're saying that our interpretations come from this one person, but these things are available online for everyone to see nowadays. And I'm just confused by that, so.
00:48:08
Speaker
Yeah, if you go to Wikipedia and you start looking up the caves and you see drawings, that was made by, most of those were made by the Abbey 60 years ago, the drawings. Yeah. We are definitely over time. This has been, Bernie, this has been great. Like, thank you for coming on, on the podcast.
00:48:27
Speaker
Do you want, do you have anything that you need to plug for our listeners? What do you want them to go to? Oh, beforearion.com webpage. I use hashtag beforearion for everything. I give a lot of presentations. I mostly related to archaeoastronomy and I also do some Picasso Heroes journey type of stuff as well. Always welcome to Skype or video converts in and you know, it's a
00:48:51
Speaker
It's been an extraordinary experience, and I love the conversation. And if you guys ever want to get out on some non-archeology podcasts to talk about your stuff, I can hook you up. Wow, dude, I'm down. I'm totally down. I like talking. Well, we like to ask our listeners every episode, if you could live your life in ruins. Well, I guess in your case, Bernie, if you could live your life in the paleolithic rock art caves, would you do it again?
00:49:22
Speaker
No, you know, I like Costco. I like the freezer. I do love Costco. That's my most adult thing about me. I like Netflix. I'm good. Yeah. All right. Well, all right. Before Orion.com. Is that where they can go? Before Orion.com. All right. Well, Bernie, thanks again for being on here. Good stuff.
00:49:44
Speaker
Welcome back to segment three of the Life in Ruins podcast. Bernie will not be joining us for this segment because we have some announcements. So just for our listeners, that was a great interview. Suggest, if you listen to Dr. Anderson's episode that came out, episode 11, he mentions, read his stuff, read other people's stuff, and then make decisions on your own. Use your brain. I think he has some interesting points.
00:50:13
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think we will certainly leave links in our show notes to his pages just to, so it's easier for you guys to, as listeners, get in and see where he's coming from. Because by no means are we predicated on the stance that we're just not going to listen to people who we don't agree with. We want our listeners to know other content that's out there, but it's your responsibility to look into it. So if you find what he says is fascinating, I certainly do.
00:50:40
Speaker
read his work, read his arguments, and then also read the people that he doesn't agree with. And then make your own decision. Don't let people just tell you what to think. So that's your guys' responsibility. I'm wrong all the time. So don't listen to me, ever. But I mean, I cite stuff. Well, clearly not, David, because you have about, what, 10,000 followers on ethnocynology now? So people clearly like what you're posting.
00:51:04
Speaker
Yeah. Um, I actually did just, uh, hit a milestone. It's actually the only new year's resolution I've ever hit in my life. And this is like, it was such a weird feeling. Uh, do you guys mind if I like dish real quick? Yeah. So just also for listeners, we're recording on December 16th. You guys are listening to dismiss January. Um, so this David recently hit this, um, yeah, dude, go into it. Yeah. So
00:51:27
Speaker
I don't really hit goals ever. Cause like, you know, that's lame half the time, but I was like, you know what? Like I really want to do the science outreach thing. I want to make sure I'm doing this right. And I was like, if I just hit 10,000 followers by the end of the year, like I'll have done something that like I wanted to accomplish. And like I did it like in December, but I like, I didn't expect it to happen this soon. But anyway, it's like on Instagram, 10,000 is like when you get like a creator account and it's when like,
00:51:55
Speaker
Facebook realizes like your money making potential. You can swipe up, right? I haven't made any money yet. Just so everyone knows. Yeah, you can swipe up in your stories. I do want to clarify. I have not made any money. I don't make anybody lose money doing this pretty much. It's just, I genuinely want to get the information out there.
00:52:11
Speaker
And I do try to cite it all. Um, if it's just an opinion, I usually there's no citation near it. So just like, keep that in mind. But anyway, I just wanted to thank everyone that listens to this podcast, first of all. And then also by extent, people who follow me on Instagram, maybe that's how you found us, uh, really appreciate it. You guys like wanting to know more things and interacting with me is like, genuinely one of the
00:52:35
Speaker
best sources of happiness in my life, which kind of sucks because I don't want to base my happiness off Instagram, but it's the thought of the education and people reaching out to me. I've explained evolution to people through my Instagram that hadn't really thought about it in such a way before, and that really means a lot to me, just being able to teach.
00:52:55
Speaker
Uh, yeah, anyway, sorry, I'm, I'm ranting here, but like it really means a lot. And, uh, I think a lot of you guys probably come from there, uh, to this podcast. So, uh, thank you and behalf of Carlton counter too. I believe they'd probably agree.
00:53:09
Speaker
Uh, thanks for just being curious and wanting to listen to more about the, you know, history and prehistory through archeology. Yeah, absolutely, man. And I, I want to say, and I bet Carlton will agree with us. Um, we're super proud of you, man. I mean, you work hard to maintain this channel, to maintain these posts and it's, it's a lot of work and a lot of people don't see this behind the scenes, how much work you put into that. So you've definitely earned it, man. Coming from me. Yeah, absolutely.
00:53:36
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. And like for our listeners, like David puts in his fucking research and he often asks other people to make sure he's saying what is correct is what he's saying on there is correct. So, you know, this isn't just him sitting alone in his bedroom, like thinking of this stuff, like he's actually putting the research into these posts. And he's oftentimes last me and Connor, you know, just word choices and just basic, basic grammatical shit. Things are culture.
00:54:03
Speaker
Yeah, I spilled popes instead of tying the poles on the Travoix. You tie the popes to the dog's back. I missed that. Put that on blast for about two hours. First sentence. I really appreciate it. Especially hearing it from you guys. It's like, it means a lot. It's weird not being in academia and just like having an actual job.
00:54:26
Speaker
Um, there's like that weird pressure of like not being a success, uh, in like some ways, but then like, cause like your, your, your initial success is like being a PhD, being Ross Keller on friends, you know, like, but he wasn't successful in any way.
00:54:41
Speaker
Um, doing this is what I wanted to do, what I would do with a PhD anyway. And instead of just talking to a classroom of 30 undergrads, I'm talking to officially 10,000.7 people on a Facebook owned company. So yay. Now time to get the life and romance pod to 10,000.
00:55:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's next. You just got to quit that job. Now that you hit 10,000 F now, now you just got to stop. Do you guys have, speaking of podcast, do you guys have anything to say about, you know, the new year? And like, I think this is our first new year's podcast. So like what? Maybe second. Either way. I guess I just, so yesterday I turned in my last final for my third semester of a
00:55:33
Speaker
peeing in a PhD program at an R1 institution, which is great. Yeah, I don't know. I actually got a sleep-in today. I'm usually in my office by like six o'clock in the morning most days, to be honest. Really? Yeah, I'm up at five most days, and I get everything packed the night before, and I'm in my office at six, so that way I have time to get shit done I need to before emails start coming in around nine o'clock.
00:56:00
Speaker
That's impressive, man. So yeah, I don't know. It's I don't know. I think my mental health is like a year ago today.
00:56:11
Speaker
I was not in a good place. And as you guys know, even before I went to Ukraine, I was still struggling a lot. And I think I kind of had a realization the other day that I'm doing much better. I realize it, that I'm pretty fucking phenomenal in many of things. That's awesome, man.
00:56:32
Speaker
I know 2020 going forward, we got this continuing. I'm starting to get emails actually about the Ukraine trip that I mentioned back in episode six. People are actually starting to hit me up about it. That student at Radford that listens to us actually Instagram messaged me this morning asking. I was like, you need a field school and then we'll talk. I told him to start looking into travel grants just in case we don't get the grant we're looking for to fund us to go.
00:57:01
Speaker
I know that's cool. People know us. I know at the Nebraska State Archaeological Society or whatever, they know of our podcast and they talk about it. And I don't know. I think it's just a confluence of things at the end of this year that's been great. It's awesome. I really enjoyed, you know, my personal take on this, like I really enjoyed this podcast. It gives me, you know, as a CRM archaeologist, you kind of fade away from academia periodically. And this gives me that that foot in this academic world.
00:57:31
Speaker
and gets me excited about archaeology again because it's hard to stay excited sometimes when you're when you're making maps ad nauseam for months on end so and i you know i was in the same way as carlton i've been gone through some up and down emotional well-being and he's you guys have really helped me through that and i i super appreciate you guys i super appreciate listeners for
00:57:54
Speaker
rating us, reviewing us, talking to us, engaging with us. You guys, you guys made this 2019 just fantastic, honestly. Yeah. Connor's getting married this year. Oh, he is. A life of his wedding. Live stream.
00:58:13
Speaker
Um, uh, one, one last thing for anyone who like is still here, Caleb, uh, Stefan, I think you're on there. Um, oh, Hey, Stefan, you're awesome, man. We really appreciate what you're doing. And we're really excited to have you on here soon. Hey, you're spinning. Got Stefan in his YouTube videos. It's like his thing. He puts a little lav mic on a plastic spoon. It's.
00:58:36
Speaker
Frankly, it's adorable and I love it, but it's the funniest thing every time it's on there. I'm going to start doing that. But anyway. Well, our pollister has done a, his name is Stefan Milo. We haven't had him on the podcast yet. He will be, he produces some great content and we've, and he's, most of the people we know on social media are because of David and ethnosynology. So actually like a lot of the guests we've had, like that we don't know personally, it's, it's, it's David.
00:59:01
Speaker
just the, the fixer. No, Chris is the fixer. I'm just the, uh, the networking New York person. Uh, I don't know what the polite word for that is, but, um, for, for the, for those of you who listened to the podcast, we really appreciate it. Uh, we get DMS all the time from you guys. We like on the podcast, Instagram and our Instagram, and we just got put on a list of Carlton. What was it? The
00:59:27
Speaker
Top 10 of a science podcast. Yeah, it's like you don't listen to. And then it's like parentheses yet. So we got put on that list as number nine. And we are also like, I love the, can I read the description? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Hold on. Let me, let me pull it up. So you say what you need to say. I'm going to pull this up.
00:59:45
Speaker
Oh, I was going to say, uh, with what Bernie was talking about earlier today, the hero's journey thing with Joseph Campbell, super interesting topic. I really, I'm glad he brought that up. Um, a lot of like mythologies in the world, like Luke Skywalker or, um, you know, he was mentioning Gilgamesh, they're all these like common themes. And if you don't know that if you read Joseph Campbell's work, like you'll see that theme in a lot of like, at least Western literature and Eastern literature as well. Super dope, not relevant to anything we were saying. What's up, Stefan. We love you, Caleb.
01:00:14
Speaker
Uh, why I brought that up is I'm about to go see Star Wars, uh, the rise of Skywalker on, uh, the 20th. And here's, here's the thing, guys, just because we're podcasting, anybody who doesn't like the new Star Wars movies, like shoot me a DM. Let's talk it out, man. It's still, it's still Star Wars. You're still Disney still making money off you, whether you hate her or love it. You're still writing Disney on the internet.
01:00:37
Speaker
I'm just ranting here, Carlton, you all was done. I love the new Star Wars. What else can I say? All right, I'm done talking. So it's 10 Science Podcasts. You haven't heard of parentheses yet, exclamation point by Stephanie Fucchio, I think. Anyways, so there's 10 of these on here. Our podcast art is in the center of this post. I fucking love it. We are ranked as number nine, a life in ruins podcast. And this is what the description reads.
01:01:03
Speaker
We have spent quite a bit of time above ground so far in this list, so let's go underground with the help of this archaeological trio. Former classmates from the University of Wyoming, Carlton Gober, voila, Connor Jahnen and David Howe dig into this topic with vigor and humor. In fact, this science podcast almost deserves a comedy category. It's that funny. They are all clearly confident, intelligent and very good friends as their archaeological jargon and friendly but teasing banter suggests.
01:01:32
Speaker
And yet we can easily learn heaps about the field through there. And they say ridiculous stories. A perfect starting episode is episode six. Eat, dig, love a summer in the Ukraine. It will ruin you. Out of all the episodes, it's like that one where I'm screaming about jewel pods and arguing with Connor about duck effigies.
01:01:55
Speaker
Like that's what she's telling people to go listen to. That is by far my least favorite one because I am just sleep deprived. I am angry. Like I'm just, I am. Oh God. So yeah. And she found us through, we had to make a Twitter recently. It's at life in ruins pod. And we only did it for Dr. Anderson, who is episode 11 because. He's got this crazy following and we were like, Oh, Sharon, do we tweet us?
01:02:24
Speaker
So we'll do that. And he just retweeted us. He didn't make a post. It fakes Dr. Anderson. And so he made it for that. But it just happened to coincide with this author looking up things. And she saw the retweet from Dr. Anderson and went out of her way to listen. Didn't even listen to his episode. Listen to fucking eat, pray, dig, Ukraine.
01:02:47
Speaker
My mom listened to that one. Mom, I know you're listening right now. Sorry, I'm throwing you right under the bus, directly under the big yellow school bus. But she's like, you guys curse too much in that one. And I'm like, well, we curse. She said we curse too much and we're unprofessional, which I mean, we are. That's like our thing. But mom, I made a list. Not that kind of list. I made this list.
01:03:08
Speaker
And I love how like, cause like the episode that recorded directly before this, so episode 13, the real episode 13, we recorded just before this episode because we're going out for break. So we've done like three hours of fucking podcasting today. And even Chris, he doesn't cost on any of his podcasts, but because we have that explicit label, I noticed like he was costing a lot. He can't do this on his own shows. All right. Well, what's,
01:03:38
Speaker
Bernie was an adult. No, Bernie was great. That was a great interview. For our listeners, we almost thought we were going to interview him. We had a brief email dialogue to make sure we knew what we were talking about.
01:03:54
Speaker
you know, Bernie has some interesting ideas that don't, as I think I was our listeners though, you wouldn't expect us to have him on, but he reached out to us. Yeah. And we didn't want to silence him. We were like, let's, let's talk about it. Like we've actually put a lot of research into his episodes. Like David with the dog stuff, we were looking up caves, like we were looking up all this other stuff. Cause we're like,
01:04:12
Speaker
we need to have a conversation with him where we can actually like talk with him and like, you know, yeah, just to make sure that we knew what he was talking about and that we could offer other ideas or, you know, just engage with him. So we put a lot of time into those first two segments. Yeah. Yeah. I'm ready. All right. This is episode 14. Finally. Right. We there. We there. I don't know why I said that. Anyway, the torso shorts. Is that what that means? Nope. Matt's new 14.
01:04:43
Speaker
Oh, right. What is shorts? Uh, Pandora's Cortos. Yeah. I was thinking of the Cortos. Fuck. I used to say Gordo, but yeah. Soy stupido.
01:04:55
Speaker
Okay, boys, I'm done. At the end of this episode, I don't think any of us, I thought you listened to this one. You don't speak Spanish, that's what I meant. So it would not work. Do you speak Japanese? No. Oh yeah. So fun fact. Oh, here's our last little tidbit for the end of the year episode. Chris, I'm sorry. We're so over on this one. I'm so sorry.
01:05:20
Speaker
Connor thought, or Carlton thought, that when I said Etorre, or Etorre, he thought I was saying Hatori, as in Hatori Hanzo from Kill Bill. And I did not know that Etorre, who lives in Italy, northern Italy, listens to our podcast. He speaks very good English, actually better than I do. And in the email, he's actually making our new podcast, which is amazing, by the way. And in the email signature of his, he said greetings from Japan.
01:05:48
Speaker
And I was at work and died. Because that means not only is he funny as hell, he listened to the whole podcast and heard us just butcher his name and nationality. He heard me say, eating a spaghetti. Yeah, see, not a good look, man. We can't do that. Oh my God. Yeah, so.
01:06:11
Speaker
Thank you, Bernie. Thank you, everyone. Connor, thank you. Thank you both for being on here. Yeah, man. Thank you and everything that we do. Yeah. This is great. We don't record. Fuck you. Fuck you. When do we record again? We don't record again until like January. Oh, I'm off the hook, dude. I'm watching Star Wars like eight times.
01:06:29
Speaker
I know. I know, dude. I'm watching it with my person. She's never seen Star Wars, so I got fucking like, what, 10? Probably like 16 hours worth of Star Wars to watch with her before we see that. Do the machete order if she's never seen it. Yeah, I know. That's what I was planning on to be like. How does this rogue- Have they had a rogue and
01:06:54
Speaker
Rogue, the whatever, Star Wars, Rogue, one, and a Solo, have they added those yet? On Disney Plus? They're on Netflix, both of those. No, I know that been turned into like the order that you're supposed to watch Star Wars. Oh yeah, so Machete Order, if you do it this way, it's the order for getting the correct rise and fall of Anakin, which is like the, you know, the saga. You watch A New Hope, and you watch The Empire Strikes Back, and you find out that he's the father, or Vader is. And then you go back and watch episode two and three, you negate one, because why?
01:07:22
Speaker
And then you watch right there, you can watch Rogue One, and then you can watch Solo, and then you watch Return of the Jedi. But the actual order is four, five, two, three, and then six. Six picks the whole hero's journey of Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker, and it comes to a poetic end. But I guess not, because now the Emperor is back a lot. I interrupted. Sorry, I love Star Wars. We are actually over our third segment now. Carlton, I'm done. Finish it off.
01:07:50
Speaker
Sweet. So, uh, kind of, well, we asked Bernie if he'd, I don't think he got the joke, but yeah, I think he answered. Well, he likes Costco. I like Costco. Um, yeah, I guess that's wow. Yep. That's episode 14. Jesus. It feels like we've been doing this a lot longer, but we started recording back in, in March is when we first recorded April. No, we recorded in April, right?
01:08:15
Speaker
Yeah, we had to record it in April. The podcast didn't come out until May because I was I had a no, dude. Why? Because I remember I had to write. I was writing my car. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just kidding. OK. I'm putting three minutes in the end there. And I think I think we're over. I've talked enough to take us out. Peace.
01:08:45
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archeologists in from the cold and feed them beer.
01:09:00
Speaker
So this time, instead of a shitty Connor joke, we're going to get some funny podcast writing from Robby Slovak at Robby Slovak, R O B B Y S L O W I K on Twitter. He writes, I'm going to read some of his latest podcast themed erotica.
01:09:20
Speaker
I slowly remove your blue apron. I see you're not wearing any me-undies. And I reach for your Squarespace. Oh my god. None of those people. Oh my god. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Mark Carter. All right, everybody. We're, thanks. We're out.
01:10:01
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. 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.