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Ethnocynology and the Apocalypse - Ethno 04
452 Plays27 days ago
In this episode of Ethnocynology with David Ian Howe, David gives an introduction to an idea he’s had for a while to discuss and explore the anthropological themes of apocalyptic fiction.
Apocalypse stories are often set in a bleak world, telling bleak stories. Yet they are fundamentally always HUMAN stories, using a bleak world to explore questions regarding philosophy, morality, and above all…what it means to be human.
But in these stories, the philosophical aspects of what it means to be human are often explored. Yet I think a reason we are so addicted to these stories is that we have a yearning to explore the lives of our past, zoological selves. It’s hard to write a story about the Paleolithic…the set design, the languages, the limited world restricted by the fear of shitty animation (mammoths, ice age fauna). Yet in [post apocalypse stories, we explore the world before civilization, by exploring the world after it. It’s far easier to portray English speaking humans behaving zoologically in the ruins outside of Boston, than it is a period piece set in Paleolithic France with proto-dene-Caucasian subtitles.
We yearn to live in a world without our modern complexities and burdens (last march of the Ents).
If you don’t believe me, think of how much money we spend on hiking, camping, and traveling to areas to spend a day, let alone a week a year outside? Then we must ask for PTO. We must pay for gas, or a plane ticket, or even a campsite – we literally pay to sleep in nature (albeit I don’t mind bc the money goes to keeping the area natural).
So in stories like the Last of US, I Am Legend, and Station Eleven, we explore stories In what I would call the Organic Apocalypse. A world reclaimed by nature, where the earth very much alive, green, and returned to it’s natural state, rid of the disease of humans.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 4 of Ethnocynology with David Ian Howe. I'm your host, David Ian
COVID-19 Diagnosis and Dogs in Apocalypse Movies
00:00:19
Speaker
Howe. I think that's you can figure that out. I have wanted to talk about this topic for a long time on my YouTube or on Instagram or something, but just haven't gotten around to it. And because I recently Tested very positive for Covid. I have probably announced the time to do it. I have Covid and I'm going to talk about dogs and apocalypse movies or at least just the preamble to it so we can do some further episodes about that later on. But yeah, I'm currently affected by what was a pandemic. I don't think it's a pandemic anymore. I'll check the CDC information on that one. If they're right or wrong, I don't know anymore.
Connection Between Dogs and Humans in Apocalyptic Anthropology
00:00:55
Speaker
OK.
00:00:56
Speaker
So yeah, COVID is it's a COVID virus. It's the 19th one, I think. I think that's how that works and I have it. So without further ado, I want to talk about something that I find interesting and that is anthropology in the apocalypse. And also there is ethnocynology in the apocalypse as well because dogs and people go hand in hand even when the world ends.
00:01:18
Speaker
And before the world begins, I guess, if you want to call civilization the beginning of the world, then put that in air quotes. Putting civilization in air quotes and the beginning of the world in air quotes. Why don't we just put all of it in quotes?
00:01:29
Speaker
Okay, so in apocalypse movies, first, what is the apocalypse? I believe it's Greek for lifting of the veil, if I remember correctly, which is why the movie Apokolipto is called that, which isn't, I guess it is technically about the apocalypse of the indigenous Americans, which is rather bleak now that I think of it.
00:01:49
Speaker
You're learning things with me as we speak. It's called lifting of the veil because like you're you're peeling away the curtain of like what once was. So, ah you know the earth before you know it fails.
Nuclear Apocalypse and Hunter-Gatherer Parallels
00:02:00
Speaker
And in most apocalypse movies, I think when we think of apocalypse, we think of nuclear holocaust or like nuclear winter, things like fallout or things like, I guess the book of Eli was one of those, the road.
00:02:12
Speaker
your classic 50s and 60s nuclear scare, communist, red scare kind of apocalypses. And that's where like the big ones come from. It's like there's just a nuclear wasteland and a nuclear fallout where people are scavenging the landscape for any food or any resources they can, which when you think about it is very similar to how hunter-gatherers live. They scavenge the land and look for resources and any resources, they any food, any resources they can find. Because again, know i'll I'll pull this back to the last two episodes, the first two.
Human Evolution Compared to Other Animals
00:02:51
Speaker
Humans are zoological beings. We have to adhere to the laws of zoology, biology, and physics. We need food. We need food and energy. We need energy to reproduce. I got some pushback for this already. You don't have to reproduce like just sexually. like Humans reproduce socially. That's like what culture is. That's our adaptation in the world. And chimpanzees do it too. Dogs and wolves, to an extent, teach culture. Orcas do it right now too. They're teaching each other how to hunt hunt ships in the Strait of Gibraltar, which is pretty crazy.
00:03:21
Speaker
But you're you're you're reproducing social ideas and concepts ah socially and you' you're reproducing those by teaching them and passing them down to the next generation. So, of course, humans have to sexually reproduce like we're animals. That's how we continue as a species, but we also have to do that you know, culturally. So there's that too. But there's several books and movies I'd like to talk about in this. And this will be the preamble episode to like many down the line. We don't have to do them all in a row because obviously we'll talk about dogs. But like I can do part one or part two to this like later on down the road. And one of the books would be The Road, Cormac McCarthy.
00:03:59
Speaker
So, I wrote a little intro here. Humans in ah the anatomically modern sense have been, and you know, existed for over 200,000 years and they were a fascination with the past, but we also have a fascination with the future. And I always kind of think about this in terms of like why Bigfoot and aliens are always so, you know,
00:04:20
Speaker
on the forefront of pseudoscience or cryptozoology. And everyone's always like, do you believe in big do you believe in aliens? So we have but a fascination with Bigfoot and we have a fascination with aliens. And here's my my reason for
Human Fascination with Bigfoot and Aliens
00:04:33
Speaker
this. And I don't think I'm like too wrong in this. Obviously I could be.
00:04:36
Speaker
but Bigfoot is big and hairy and elusive, right? That's what humans used to be. Big and hairy, lived in the woods and they're cryptic and we don't see them anymore and we have this like, ooh, you're afraid of what we used to be, right? Bigfoot is the de-evolution of humans. He's something in between ape and man. but Whereas aliens, if you think of like the classic, the grays with the big little gray aliens or green aliens with the big huge eyes,
00:05:04
Speaker
That's like humans in the future. We're evolved a little further. We have big eyes. We have huge heads. We hairless like it's opposite of ape. It's like in the future. So we're scared of it in that sense because it's not us. And we're scared of Bigfoot in the past because it's not us. It's not where we are now.
00:05:20
Speaker
And I think aliens are a little more scary because it's like, well, they're smarter than us and they can travel and they face travel. They can, I almost said FaceTime. They're smarter than us and they can space travel and clearly their technology is more advanced. So they're kind of spooky. So we create these stories of like, oh, I was abducted. And, you know, they were like, they did, they probed you or whatever like the classic thing is.
00:05:40
Speaker
And like they're doing scientific experiments on you. And if you were to think about, what does a chimpanzee see when they look at a human? They see a big hairless chimpanzee with huge eyes. And sometimes they take you and they probe you, whether you're awake or asleep. And not just you know like probing it in and the traditional sense, probing as in like you just needles or like taking your temperature or like just poking you with sticks, like seeing you know how you react to things and stuff like that. and I think that's the the human like why we're aliens and Bigfoot is such a big thing. It's like, we fear what we are not, right? yeah
Philosophical Questions in Apocalypse Stories
00:06:16
Speaker
We fear it we're not. and i think apocalypse is the we're Our fascination with the apocalypse is for that reason too.
00:06:22
Speaker
They're often, apocalypse stories are often set in a bleak world telling bleak stories. They're always a fundamentally human story, and they use that bleak world to explore questions regarding philosophy, morality, and above all, what it means to be human.
00:06:37
Speaker
and It's like, I think a reason we're addicted to these stories is that we have a yearning to explore the lives of our past, like what we're not now in the terms of the Bigfoot and the alien thing. We want to know what we were like when we were like a Bigfoot like thing, right? But we can't. The closest thing we can do is archaeology with that. And I think.
00:06:57
Speaker
or is i We have a learning to explore life's physiological cells and it's hard to write a story about the Paleolithic because it it always comes off as cheesy like 10,000 BC or it looks like Clan of the Cave Bear or something just goofy because we don't know. You don't know the intricacies of what went on in the Neanderthals head. You know, you don't know the intricacies of what the social dynamics were between ancient you know Homo sapiens or even Homo erectus or Homericaster or something like that. So it will always come off as cheesy. And I guess the closest thing you have is like Native Americans or like tribes in Papua New Guinea or Aboriginal Australians like understanding them, but those societies are largely
00:07:34
Speaker
influenced and tainted by modern societies that, you know, have colonized or encouraged upon them. So you can't fully understand what they were like without Europeans or, you know, East Asians watching them. And we want to explore that, but it's hard to write a story about the Paleolithic, the set design, the languages, and the limited world restricted by, you know, fear of shitty animation. Like I just said, mammoths, ISH fauna always look crappy sometimes. It's just hard to do that. But the thing is, and I say stories, you can explore the world before civilization, but in apocalypse stories, you can explore the world before civilization by exploring the world after it, I think is quite interesting.
Humans in Post-Apocalyptic vs Prehistoric Eras
00:08:13
Speaker
It's far easier to portray English-speaking humans behaving zoologically in the world outside of ruined Boston 35 years from now than it is to like hear English-speaking humans are like, che should i in like ancient UK 15,000 years ago, you know, with proto-Dené Caucasian subtitles at the bottom.
00:08:33
Speaker
There's always going to be someone like, that's not the language they spoke. that but there Like you can't have that, but you can have 28 days later where it does take place in modern Britain, which I think has already taken place now in the timeline of the story. You have people that live in England that you know live in the apocalypse and that would make more sense.
00:08:52
Speaker
And I talked with Tristan Boyle about this too. We're going to do an episode about this here soon on I think this show is that an apocalypse story being one of my favorite is called Horizon Zero Dawn. It's a PlayStation game that's now a computer game. And it takes place in the post-post apocalypse, which is an interesting concept in itself. That's its whole episode. But he pointed out to me that like things like Fallout and a lot of end of the world stories take place in America because of that, like,
00:09:22
Speaker
a lot of them have to do with that rugged individualism that like America, I don't want to say propagandizes, but it's just like what America is. We're all just very like individualistic people that have dreams and desires and that makes for a good apocalypse story because like it's your ability, your survival and your, your will to live is determined by like your, your self determination and things like that. And I found that interesting that like, I think he's born in Northern Ireland, he lives in Scotland now. It's just like, you know, they're just still like kind of,
00:09:51
Speaker
Yeah, America's got better culture. Like you're not culture, but better movies, better, you know, things like that. Even the apocalypse is American, which is the point of fallout.
Commercialization of the Apocalypse
00:10:01
Speaker
Cause I think and if you watch the fallout show, like one of the biggest lines that hit me was like the end of the world is a product. Like even it, like I don't want to get too into the weeds of fallout cause that's part of this, but, and I keep saying into the weeds and every one of these episodes, I realized I cut that out so many times this time. I'm going to try to come up with a different word into the seaweed.
00:10:21
Speaker
One of the things in Fallout was that the end of the world is a product and ah the point of Fallout was that there's these Fallout shelters and then there's people that live in like the wasteland after the nuclear apocalypse that's up top.
00:10:34
Speaker
And the whole thing, it's just like, it's lawless, but the people that live in these bunkers are set in this like utopian society that was like this pre-planned thing of how to like repopulate the earth. But it turns out it was just for rich people to hide from the inevitable chaos that ensues on the the surface of the all the planets where there's like people called ghouls and there's like gangs and there's paramilitary groups and there's just like thieves and robbers and things like that, exactly what you would think of in a Wild West society post-apocalypse, put a pin in the Wild West thing. But the the end of the world being a product meeting that like the world is ending, how do we make money off of this? And these people in Fallout like made this big like thing of like,
00:11:16
Speaker
selling fallout shelters to rich people. like They knew the world was going to end. I think in the show, they like they made the world end, I think, or maybe that's one of the games i'm confusing it. but Yeah, it's a product. So I just digressed from the main the main thing about this, but I was talking about the apocalypse, and like it's easier to do show human behaviors eulogically and anthropologically in that sense. In the hunter-gatherer sense, it's easier to see that in a post-apocalyptic setting than it is in a paleolithic setting, especially in cinema.
00:11:46
Speaker
So if you don't believe me, think of how much we spend on hiking, on camping, on traveling to areas that we spend just a day sometimes, let alone for a week or sometimes a year outside. And then we got to ask for paid time off.
Organic vs Nuclear Apocalypse
00:12:00
Speaker
We got to pay for gas. We got to pay for a plane ticket. And you even got to pay for a campsite to sleep outside sometimes. You have to pay to sleep outside.
00:12:08
Speaker
ah We pay to sleep in nature. I'll be it. I don't mind that sometimes because the money does go to keeping the area clean and natural and, you know, but yeah especially in the Smokies where I've camped a bunch. Like, you want those bear hooks. You want to put your stuff up at the tree. And your campsite does pay for that. But in stories like The Last of Us or I Am Legend and Station 11, which Station 11 is a beautiful story I would love to get into. but We explore stories in that I would call like the organic apocalypse. Horizon Zero Dawn.
00:12:37
Speaker
Well, that's kind of it's different. It's organic and it's not. I want to go with The Last of Us, I Am Legend, and Station 11. We explore stories in what I would call the organic apocalypse, a world reclaimed by nature where the Earth very much is alive, it's green, and it's returned to its natural state. Rid of the disease of humans, I would say, is like what makes that ah interesting uh if you've seen the last of us it's a story in which like fungus takes over the planet something i'd never seen before like there is usually a virus or it's usually nuclear or it's like some kind of zombie thing
00:13:12
Speaker
And this one, it's like a fungus, which again is fungi creep me out because there's the kingdom of Animalia. And then there's like the kingdom of plants, plantae or whatever it's called, like plants and animals. And then the fungi are its own thing. You always kind of think of mushrooms and fungus as plants, but they're not. They're their own thing that's in between a plant and a human. It's creepy. So someone took this story, Naughty Dog Studios,
00:13:37
Speaker
took this idea and what if like a cordyceps fungus that infects those ants in Indonesia or somewhere out in the the East Asian jungles, it like latches onto your brain and starts to control your muscles and your movements and things like that because it makes these ants climb to the top of blades of grass so that the spore will bust out of the ant's head and the wind will pick it up and blow the spores.
00:13:59
Speaker
It's terrifying and it takes over there. It doesn't take over their brain. It takes over their body. So it makes their body move, but they're very much alive in that body, which is creepy. When The Last of Us, that takes over the whole planet. It takes over humans. So people become like this like fungi. There's like different stages. There's clickers that like like they use like echolocation to hear and see because the fungus takes over their face. And then there's bloaters, which are just like ones that have been fungus for years since the outbreak. i you know There's way more we can talk about there, but point is the world is green again and you spend a lot of the game and the TV show starts out in Boston where you're like exploring the ruins of like what used to be Boston, but it's reclaimed by the jungle or reclaimed by nature, which I think is cool. And the organic apocalypse with them is the nuclear apocalypse, which I will talk to you after the break. We'll be right back.
00:14:55
Speaker
And we're back. I just left off talking about the organic apocalypse in which, you know, the world is reclaimed by nature, where the Earth is very much alive, green, and returned to its natural state. But in other stories, and ah I want to tangent about The Last of Us, but I am legend is the same way. Rabies takes over the planet or some kind of like 28 days later, rabies takes over the planet or that it was called RAGED. It was called the RAGE virus and they gave it to chimps and it looked like some kind of rabies-like thing, makes you want to bite other people. I am Legend is very similar. It's kind of like a vampire virus of like biting people, but it was made as as a cure for cancer and they not worked out. But again, New York City, London in 20 days later is only 20 days later, so it's not nature hasn't really reclaimed everything, but you can see signs of it already. I am Legend, it's only been
00:15:42
Speaker
I think five years or three years since the outbreak. I don't recall either way. You can see Times Square is like full of deer. which was isn't the case, you know, now. Anyway, the organic apocalypse retakes back nature, but in the nuclear apocalypse, which you can see in the road or the book of Eli or a boy and his dog, it is kind of the more morbid apocalypse where it's like our actions were in an organic apocalypse. It's like nature is sick of our actions and that retakes over the planet and erases it of humans and just reclaims it naturally. The nuclear apocalypse is like,
00:16:17
Speaker
We done goofed and we've destroyed not only all the people, but we just heard the planet as well. And there's like, it's just bleak. The book of Eli is a beautiful story in that sense. They don't show you what happened, but you know, there's a nuclear fallout of some sort. And then what's up? The boy and his dog is after world war three.
00:16:38
Speaker
And that's the original story in which it has a dog in the apocalypse, which is what made Fallout, the writers of Fallout, start that. And then also, I Am Legend is clearly based off of that, too, though a boy and his dog is very problematic to watch now. I think we mentioned that in the second episode. It's very, uh...
00:16:55
Speaker
It's very dated if you were to watch it. But in those stories, it's like we're dealing with not only the fallout of civilization, but also the biome of the planet and also just humans have like lost their way and like civilization, you know, defaults back to, especially in the book of Eli, like in in Fallout as well, a Wild West like situation. Because if you really do think about it, the last time before You know, modern electricity cars and like trains and stuff all over the place was like when the West was being tamed. So like wild wild West area because there was electricity, but not a lot. Not as much as we have now, like there's light bulbs and stuff and telegraphs. But like right before that, you have people that are still wearing like.
00:17:44
Speaker
jeans and t-shirts and, or not t-shirts, but you know what I'm trying to say. Like the Wild West is like, you could say from like 1800 to maybe 1911. Like the start of World War I is when the Wild West ends. So like what people were looking and wearing in 1911, I would say. And some of us have, you know, great grandparents that lived through that time. Mine are dead, but I'm assuming yours are too, if they were born in 1911.
Narratives of Survival in 'The Road' and 'The Last of Us'
00:18:10
Speaker
Let's see, so here's the last of us. A lot of these stories, The Road also has a dog. The Road is extremely bleak. It's Cormac McCarthy. Just saying that means you know it's bleak, but it's about a father and a son. There's no chapters in the book or anything. It's just stream of consciousness talking. Well, it's it's a narrative, but the boy and the man is like all it says. And it's them trying to, so this is a nuclear fallout somewhere outside of Knoxville, Tennessee is like usually where his books take place.
00:18:39
Speaker
Morality in a world with no morals. He's trying to teach his son morals where there's just like this cannibalism and there's like just absolute barbarity everywhere. No food. Nothing's growing. All the animals are dead. And it's like a story of survival, but also trust and education and cannibalism and the complex roles of father and son. There's some religious undertones to it in that sense. The power of memory and nostalgia, I would say takes a big one in that in the road.
00:19:08
Speaker
and the power of hope and how hope can like guide you and like keep you through like times like this and that's a I wrote that those points out in for the road here but that kind of applies to all these apocalypse stories like in in a world that's like a super bummer like you need to have some kind of moral compass in the book of Eli obviously that becomes religion I think it's it's a great place serious black Gary Oldman. He wants the Bible but in a Wild West like town to be able to control people. He wants to use the Bible to
00:19:43
Speaker
you know, brainwash people into believing what he has to say and control them, which is, I mean, you boil it down to it. That's what religion does, you know, albeit not a malicious scale. But in this and that story, he wants to use it as that. But Eli, who is played by Denzel Washington, I believe, is like a moral person and doesn't want him to use it for those reasons, which is, you know, good. The last of us is but Loss and then barbarism also has a lot of fascism in it like what happens with fascism I think in Last of Us It's called Fedra a federal emergency disaster relief agency, which is just supposed to be FEMA FEMA takes over the world as like a fascist dictator government, which I think is very interesting It's ah it's ah it's another neat thing about that story in addition to the fungus being the reason for the the end of the world and then i ah ideological
00:20:31
Speaker
wars. There's like the fireflies, which is a rebellious group that wants to take over and supplant the fascism, fascist group of Fedra. But Fedra is like, no, you need order and control to keep these people safe. And they have kept people safe for 20 years in these quarantine zones by being fascists. So it's It's kind of up to you, but then there's ideological. The ending of the story is a very, like, a moral conundrum. Like, would you have done what Joel did or not? I don't want to spoil that for you if you haven't seen it, but if you have seen it, do let me know what you think about. Was Joel right? The main thing and that you can read this in the back of the store, the back of the DVD or, you know, whatever. The opponents are Pedro Pascal, who plays Joel in the show, loses his daughter on the very first day of the outbreak and and loses his
00:21:18
Speaker
He loses his life essentially and he's just like a hard man with no feelings and becomes like this vicious killer in order to survive. But then he's presented with Ellie who is immune to the fungus. Like she has been bit before but didn't turn. So of course they're trying to take her across.
00:21:37
Speaker
the country to get her somewhere safe. He's like a smuggler and you know over over time she becomes he doesn't want to interact with her because he misses his daughter and doesn't want to get attached to her, but of course he does.
00:21:50
Speaker
And then I can talk about the dogs here in a second, but one other one I want to talk about, and this is the, that was again, the green apocalypse, Book of Elias and like a nuclear apocalypse. Station 11 is one of the most beautiful stories I've ever seen. I didn't read the book. My friend Connor did. My mom told me about the show and it's so unique. It's on HBO. It's called Station 11. I highly recommend you watch it because I'm going to make an episode or two on this. It is.
00:22:17
Speaker
COVID takes out the world. And this was written before COVID. I mean, the the main pandemic of COVID, COVID obviously existed before that, but COVID-19, a flu takes out 95% of the world population. And like the next day, like what do you do? And it's not like a, it's not like a bleak wild Western apocalypse. It's not like a bleak zombie apocalypse. It's not nuclear. It's an organic apocalypse. It's just like, what if you walked outside tomorrow and 95% of the people on earth were dead?
00:22:46
Speaker
like What do you do? and The whole story revolves around this bay like traveling band of entertainers that travel around the Great Lakes to different places doing Shakespeare plays and musicals and things like that. and the whole like It just seems so goofy at first. and like The main girl in the story was in a Shakespeare play in Chicago as a kid.
00:23:10
Speaker
And on outbreak day, she like hangs out with this guy who like was like, who's this poor little girl just like by herself here? Like, let me, you know, help her help her get home. And then she ends up waiting out the pandemic in his apartment with her, his brother's apartment. And it's like a very cute and sad story at the same time. But anyway, they travel the The great lakes like giving place to people and like these different societies and it's interesting how these people survived in an airport and they made it like this big quarantine zone with its own culture and they build a museum and they build.
00:23:43
Speaker
There's like a school there and stuff, but then there's also this cult of people outside who follow this like book, a comic book, which is what the whole story's about. And they follow it like a religion, and he has a cult of all of these children that like worship him. They're not gonna worship him, but they listen to what he has to say. It's very good. It's just very good. And all the characters intertwine in their past, and it's kind of lost in that sense, the past and the present. You're like, oh, they did meet back then.
00:24:11
Speaker
kind of stuff like that, but it's a very cute story, but the main thing, and it just, it, like, sad. Every time, I watch it three times now, and every time I watch it, I have cried, because it's just so good, but it's about, not so much people are what matter in the, but because in The Last of Us, it's about finding people, like, and letting yourself but be vulnerable, and like, letting people in your life, and like, loving them, are finding people, and like, how, you know, relationships keep you alive.
00:24:37
Speaker
The and I Am Legend, it's about him and his dog, which I'll get into in one sec. But in in Station 11, it's about art. It's why humans need art. And this is like a, I know I wanted to talk about dogs, but this is equally as important to humanity as like, you can't live without art. You have to have some kind of like guiding, whether that is religion or whether that is something, you have to be able to like laugh and enjoy something.
00:25:04
Speaker
And just the absurdity of a traveling band of Shakespearean actors in the apocalypse going around the Great Lakes like in a big caravan full of like floats and vans and horse-drawn fucking ah like station wagons. It's so odd, but it's so good. And it's called Station 11. It's on HBO. I highly recommendroman highly recommend watching it. There are wolves in it.
00:25:29
Speaker
But I Am Legend, I'll end here, and i let me talk about this. I wanted to talk about a boy and his dog, Black Mirror. There's an episode called Metalhead about dogs. The Book of Eli. Finch, I didn't even mention Finch. That's on Apple TV. Highly recommend that one. It's ah Tom Hanks on Apple TV. A man is dying, and he's he's building a robot to be able to take care of his dog when he's gone. I Am Legend, obviously. Mad Max, one of them has a dog in it.
00:25:55
Speaker
Station 11, The Last of Us, and The Road. There's several other stories that I would like to talk about, but i can really but you know I can't plan to do all of these as episodes, but maybe I'll talk about a few in in one. but I Am Legend being the number one apocalypse movie that I remember seeing when I was younger, goes in high school, when that came out. and I was like, wow, this is so good. like The ending is really good, always makes me tear up. and It's not even meant to be sad. It's just like, I guess it is.
00:26:22
Speaker
But it's just a very melancholic sad movie, but there's also hope in it because Robert Neville, Will Smith is the only man alive.
Survival Tactics in 'I Am Legend'
00:26:31
Speaker
He's still in Manhattan and he was a virologist and somehow he's immune. I don't, you know, whatever. And he's trying to find a cure for this, like called the k Crippen virus, which is when They tried to cure, can Dr. Alice Crippen tried to cure cancer and of course failed and turned everybody into zombies and killed everybody. But he's trying to do this and he he spends the entire beginning of the movie going door to door, building the building in Manhattan with a map, literally optimally foraging, like a hunter-gatherer looking for food. And he sends his dog in to make sure there's no one in there and the dog will bark and come in back to him.
00:27:07
Speaker
or indicate back saying, like, you know, no one's here, coast is clear. And part of the movie, it wouldn't work without the dog because you'd have to have him narrating over top of it. And it just makes more sense because you can't have the last man on earth.
00:27:21
Speaker
be with somebody else. Like that's not the last man on earth anymore. It's like the last two people on earth, which doesn't sell as well. It's the last man on earth with a dog. And then you're heavily invested in this dog because you don't want it to die. You don't want it to get hurt. How is a dog immune? How is yada yada? All of that. So maybe we'll start the first one off with I Am Legend. I need to wrap here. but Yeah, so what I want to take away is there's the apocalypse always has you're able to explore anthropological themes in an apocalyptic story like The Walking Dead for sure, because it's people in group dynamics, you can't accurately show the Paleolithic because it's always going to be make believe in fantasy.
00:27:59
Speaker
because you can't make it that accurate. No one understands the Paleolithic quite as much as archaeologists do, so you can't sell it as well. But the closest thing to that is the after the world ends is the apocalypse, where it's a world we are familiar with that is not flipped upside down, where you can still speak modern English, you can still have, you know, think back on the times of like, your when we had iPods and stuff like that, and explore human morality, humanity, human love and affection, human friendships, and then humanity itself, like the questions of what it means to be human in the future in that sense. You can look at it zoologically, you can look at people.
00:28:36
Speaker
optimally foraging on a landscape. You can look at people when they're hunter-gatherers by themselves. They seem to do just fine, but when there's like in 28 days later or in Walking Dead, once you find people that have a set place they live in and they're dug in and they're growing food there and have a surplus of food, they ah usually become assholes and they attack other people because they want their resources and stuff too, which is very you know akin to the Neolithic.
00:29:01
Speaker
but Anyway, you can divide these two into the organic apocalypse where the world is reclaimed by nature and humans are still stuck in it, like in the the mix of that. And then you can one but you can say the artificial apocalypse or the nuclear apocalypse, atomic apocalypse, there you go, where we've destroyed the world and we've destroyed humanity. So we have to deal with the fallout of both of that. And I mentioned fallout, there you go.
00:29:25
Speaker
So yeah, and then a lot of these stories as a dog. And I want to explore these stories for the anthropological themes of it, but the fact that they have dogs in it too is very funny to me because it's like no one really thinks about that as... I don't think people find it as interesting as I do. Like they just always throw a dog into it. And maybe it's just a trope and it's a cinematic thing at this point to just like, yeah, throw a dog into it because it's an homage to the other ones. but like Those stories work so well because a dog makes sense in stories like this. So anyway, I'm going to call it there. Let me know which one you want me to start with. Shoot me a DM or whatever. Or if not, I'll start with I Am Legend. Or if you have any objections, let me know. but
00:30:02
Speaker
Yeah,
Closing and Engagement with Audience
00:30:03
Speaker
sorry about the COVID. I hope I'll be better next time. I think next week I'm going to be with Dr. Elise Cannon, who is Australian, and she got her PhD in classics and does like classical Greek and Roman dog stuff, so we can talk about that. Please rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. I think you can do so on Spotify now. Don't quote me on that. It's easily something I can look up.
00:30:26
Speaker
please subscribe to the YouTube, David and Hal, youtube dot.com slash David and Hal, subscribe to the APN. And as always, you can buy my merchandise on my website, davidandhal.com slash store. And yeah, I'll see you next Saturday. All right, bye.
00:30:42
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.