00:00:00 Speaker 1: Oh hey, everybody, Episode ninety one, coming right at you. Me and Phil Bozeman, Montana. It's coal snow, it's almost Christmas, but we're still having a good time. We hope you are too. This episode is full of stuff. Some of it is good, some of it is negative. That is because we're reviewing their reaction to episode eighty nine with Caroline Finney, where we talked about hunting while black in America. It's a that was a conversation that you should have listened to. Will stop now if you haven't, then we're back. Well, we're gonna read some of your reaction, the good and the bad, because we are a fair trade podcast. Fair trade doesn't close. That's close. We're gonna go with it for fair Trade Podcast. We got to that. We got a Nonza Sharp moment for you. We got some other random things that we're going to clean up. Eric Hall returns with the podcast, and I went to the Smithsonian phil to look at some bones and stuff. I'm jealous, Yeah, you are jealous. I learned everything there used to know about Paley anthropology over a wonderful visit with Brianna Pobner at the Pisonian. So that's the interview portion of the show. All right, enjoy Episode ninety one. I guess I grew up on an older road appared to the medals. I always did what I told until I found out that my brand new closed a game second hand from the rich kids next door. And I grew up fast. I guess I grew up. I mean, there are a thousand things inside of my head I wish I ain't seen, and now I just wanted to a real bad dream or being like I'm coming apart of the scene. But thank you Jack Daniel listening. Hey everybody, episode number ninety one. What's up? And what's up Phil? Oh? Not much, just getting into the Christmas spirit here the Meat Eater office. I know we're uh, we just sang a little what would you call that twelve days of what? Well, I don't want to spoil it. Oh that's not sport, but we can't give a little tease. We're planning a big Meat Eater a holiday Christmas extravaganza podcast episodes, so we were just recording a little something for that that people will be hearing soon. Do you have any Christmas traditions? So just the pretty standard I'm not I'm not really into Christmas. I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm not really into Christmas. Oh I love it. I felt I always feel like it's just more work for everybody. It's more work, it's more money. Thanksgiving you can just relax, like all you do is eat and relax and watch football and then go hunt. And I love the lights that love the smells of the food of Christmas. You're a real sap for it, aren't I'm a sucker. All right, Well, um, we're gonna move through the year. Now we have to make a special a THHD announcement. This is more kind of blocking and tackling, a little clean up here. I have I said, I think a couple episodes ago, or maybe the last episode Phil, that I'm having a child. Yes, you are just having it. I will be there. Um, So we're you know, as you to let you guys know what's coming in the future. We're gonna do some best of podcasts in the month of January while I rear my my new son, hopefully if all goes well. Yes, so I'm gonna leave Phil with a lot of my favorite moments from the last ninety some episodes of th HC. Now you are very welcome to contribute to the Best of. So if you have a favorite interview, a favorite moment of the podcast, I can think of a few right now. I can think of Wyman Men's are crashing a plane. I can think of Barry Gilbert trying to leave the podcast studio. Are gonna make again? Of course I will. I can think of Cam Haynes loving The Bachelor, Steve Ronellan, Game of Thrones. I can think of a lot of moments that I want to include in the Best of th HC coming up here in January. But we're gonna need you to your input as well. Let's so send it into th HC. It's the media dot com. If you have something for the best of, and do your favorite and the subject line just put the best of. So I don't know, because there's a lot of emails coming in, I want to make sure I catch as many of them humanly possible, Right Phil, Yeah, I just want I'm I'm moving when I'm transitioning now, I just say, right, Phil, and then and I say now and we when we move on. Now, we're gonna move on to some of your emails. And we had listen, we did a controversial podcast. Phil Uh, some people think so apparently, yeah, like four of them. Well, it's a strong contingent of people. But we did receive episode eighty nine, uh, that we did with Carolyn Finney, and we knew we've said it in the podcast. We knew that there would be some people that were how you say, triggered by that, Philip. Turns out there were a few, and and I imagine that we should say we'll give voice to some of the negativity here. But many of you wrote in with positive comments. Many of you wrote in um auding us for kind of expanding the conversation. And I would just like to say that in my six months that I have been here, it has been my favorite episode that you have done so far. Damn. And that's Phil the engineer talking. Uh. He's he's listened to a lot. The poor guy has to listen to and edit and put sounds in all these podcasts from the Meat Eater Crew. Uh, and so he's listened to a lot. I I I thought listening back to it. I wanted to listen back to it because I knew I wasn't gonna get the whole thing right even putting it out, I knew there was gonna do some things about that I'd want to change. But Caroline is is a super reasonable person and just wanted to speak her mind, and all I wanted to do is allow her to do that. UM. And so I think we we achieved that, and we achieved, you know, at least touching up some things that we can all think about from the perspective of Caroline and people that that think like Carolyn thinks. And so that's all that conversation was really about. UM. So to highlight to first, we'll highlight the positive, philm would you like to do that first? Or negative? Which one would you like to do? I don't know. That's a great question. I'm trying to think. Should we get it out of the way the negative first? I kind of want to I would like to hear positive. Actually it's positive. So I want to say. His name's Beano or beno b e n n oh. Garwood rode in. We had a little bit of back and forth. He said, Ben and Phil, I'm sure you're about to endure an avalanche of bullshit. Given the subject matter of episode eighty nine, given the polarizing nature of the subject of race, it seems inevitable that people on both sides of the conversation will find reason to make noises in your direction. In my view, you are to be congratulated and thanked for taking this on openness of mind, a desire to understand the other. Quotation marks, self restraint, inclusiveness, tolerance. All of these things are needed to sew up the ever growing divide in our nation. But first and foremost, the indispensable character trait needed is courage. Your willingness to take hard subjects, even if it means courting controversy, is courageous and admirable. This subject, and many others, are fraught with potential misunderstandings. I understand those who shy away from them, but we have to talk to each other, listen to each other, and risk offense if we are to move forward, are in any direction at all? Skipping a skipping ahead here. It's a long email, But being a middle aged white male, I'm often confronted with concepts and ideas I've held that exists in something of a microcosm of my own experience. As of late, I've often not had the courage to engage in potentially sticky conversations for fear of betraying my own ignorance and causing offense where none was intended. This is somewhat a resolve of being in the midst of a personal, political, and social shift, probably the consequence of ching up one middle age. But at the end of the day, it's been much about not having energy for or interest in becoming engaged in debate with people with whom I disagree. This is also evidence of a certain level of miss and therapy inching into my mindset Episode eight nine, confront of Me head on. In the best of ways pretty well stated Benno couldn't have I'm ben oh too. I guess a lot of ways he couldn't have have put my thoughts codified or collected my thoughts better in that email. I do really feel that these things are important because they're difficult, and the fact I'm not gonna pat myself on the back for having difficult conversations. Why have a podcast, We're just gonna talk about things that aren't um contentious or difficult. That's my feeling. But I think we can all learn from learn from what Benno was saying, and learn from what Caroline is saying, and that we can expand not only horizons, but the way we think, the way we moved through the world, and how open we are too new ideas, not only within hunting but in life. So that's just what I think, and I'll continue to think that, and we'll continue to reflect that on th h C and forward. Now there's always another side, isn't there, Phil? Yeah? There is, which is you know, some people would say that's a good thing. I got this democracy and a long awaited return of mm hmm. Phil is going to read a mean comment in regards to the episode eight nine, Take It Away, Phil One star title Hunting and Social Justice. My Lord Ben seems to be on a mission to give voice to just about anyone who hates hunting or the majority of hunters. His latest podcast featured a woman who attacked American history with absolutely no pushback from Little Ben be average sized. Somehow You're Hunting Club isn't okay? Oh wait, hold on, he's think this might be a type of somehow how You're Hunting Club isn't okay if it happens to be made up of white guys. Okay, I think I know what he's trying to say. He's either too weak to have these conversations or he's actually subversive. Either way, he's not someone we should be paying attention to. Oh my god, let's take a moment to reflect on whatever that was, and we're back on some things considered. Um, I would just like to say that if you actually listen to the episode, there wasn't Caroline could not have been more warm, friendly, excited to have a conversation with you. There was no arguing. I don't think anything controversial was actually said in the episode. What people consider controversial is that we are talking. Is that, Yeah, you gave a voice to someone who is just introducing ideas that maybe the typical hunting audience hasn't explored before. Listen. I can see it from the side of she's talking about history as as if it as if it weighs more on her present and her future than maybe I think about it. But she made the point she made. She said what she said. This is a studied and intellectual person who has published and and has great opinions on something she's experienced. Personally, I haven't experienced this ship. I don't know anything about what it is to be a black female or have black parents who grew up as caretakers of an a state. I have no idea about that. And the Hunting Collective is very much about learning about perspectives that allow us to understand who we are and why we do the things that we do. So, um, we're going to continue it. His comment that I think he was referring to, he said, I have featured a woman who attacked American history. Um, just I'm he's probably referring to the fact that you had a brief conversation about how John Yere and tr had some racist, um you know, leanings in their writings, which is just a fact. That's just a fact. Is attacking American history. I'm not attacking American history, That's what I'm saying. There used to be slaves in America. How dare you attack Americans so many good things? Something someone wrote to me and said, how can we pick out things in history? How can we pick through history like that as we have to? Yeah, I don't like slavery, I like parades. I that you have to look at it with a pragmatic eye. You cannot say all of history is history. All of history informs who we are right now and what we do, and even the ugly stuff that we don't want to talk about stuff. Our institution not attacking America by legislations. We took this land from from people and killed them. That is a fact. Another fact I can. I can both recognize that, not be angered by it in one way or the other, and try to let it inform the way I moved through this world. And so the few I would say it was positive percent positive, but orobviously the few people that are upset, it's worth addressing that because that's going to happen in these things because obviously, if you listen to what Caroline saying, she said, I appreciate what John Muir did for naturalism and environmentalism. I appreciate the work that he did, but there's this thing we have to acknowledge, which is some prejudices that he clearly helped. Yeah, and it colors the way that she might view the outdoor spaces in the present. Just like she's not ignoring all the good he did, we can ignore the bad he did. And so that's where we get to. We could probably go on all day and preach about that, but I will say thanks for listening, and for those who just don't want to hear that. In a hunting podcast. I understand. I get it. I've said this before on this podcast. I get it that sometimes you don't want to be presented with heavy stuff and that's why, Um we try to make fun sometimes that while we're doing it. So that's that's that. Moving on to something that we really need to talk to Phil about. It's a big issue. Oh, it's a big issue. Alias tore hiding. I don't even know how to say his name because he's written in before. He wrote an email and it's entitled Ranella is a poaching s o B. And that got me. I was like defending a whoa, what bring it? But he says I couldn't help. But notice, sneaky Steve has been sliding Phil into podcast more and more lately. Seems like he's been trying to nab your prize show, Pony. I think I think giving Phil his own statement to ensure his loyalty was a cunning move on your part. Just make sure Ronella doesn't let him design assure or something. And he goes on but it's his cheers alies. Yeah, what do you gotta say there? Phil? I think I think Steve just he does he does the same thing that you do where when he doesn't know how to transition, he just he looks around the room and thinks, Okay, who haven't we heard from? And he sees me sitting across the table, and he goes, what do you think about that? Phil? It's it's the same question every time, blanket and Um every time, I'm like deer in the headlights and I try to think of something to say. But then you don't have to worry. Um, Steve has never let me talk about Star Wars on his podcast. Or That's why I did that, because I I knew at some point it would come down to it where you had to choose between me and that guy. And uh no, I don't think. I don't think, Phil, there's no poaching happening. Um, choose wisely. This train is headed out of the station. You're either on it or you're off it. Okay, got it. Make a decision right now. I'm worried. I don't. I can't in the way my pros and comes like a public declaration of your loyalty. Uh, I forgot something that I want to play. Eric Hall, our friend Eric Hall. Can I say that he's our favorite listener? Yes, I'm saying it he's our favorite listener. No offense to any of the other listeners out there, but Eric Hall is our favorite and it's not even close. I might invite him to come to my house for Christmas. Yeah, I probably won't show up. Big shouts to Eric. Yeah he or you're the best. Uh don't get a big head about this, but we like you a lot. He he did send multiple recordings in recently about some things. But we're gonna play you know, Seas Gonna or Steve oh boy, the Phil is gonna do a little compilation of Eric's thoughts for you here being Eric here again if you wonna get tired, mate, and both just finished episode number eight nine. Dr Peenie. Thank you've both done a good job. Good conversation. UH enjoyed it. Uh to say I'm out of head if you though this past year off the go for black guys, African American. Uh talk to him by hunting shooting. We're going to uh set up a time he's wanting to come up and shoot one of many kind of different styles. Tyson runs the shotguns I have, they're gonna hook cut up. Never shot a gun before, so I think that'll be good outing for him, good outing for me. Uh another guy he's not interested in shooting or hunting, but as your enjoys the there meat. So H think y'all done a good job on the podcast to enjoy the conversation there. And I think we definitely need to get to be more inclusive in the hunting so far as African Americans hunting, women hunting. Looking forward to number nine, Yeah, have good Thanksgiving, yeah being I just have to say, is Eric Allgan the juror feeling uncomfortable and in bottomore or parks the bottomore she probably more founded than in reality than Dr Any or Duncan. I'll not feeling comfortable on public land because white guys are hunting you. You can run into policeman in Baltimore, black whole, white and the ft, you don't go. Don't go here, don't go any places. You're probably not gonna run into a park ranger or uh National Force ranger that's gonna tell black person it don't go here because so and so happened. But those police that will tell you don't go a certain place in Baltimore lates and on your fact. That's just the way I feel like that anyway, Eric kind of like to say about Baltimore. About the podcast, I like it, I like the guy. Um. I don't know that he's wrong about the Baltimore point, but we'll leave that to where it is and listen. We'll probably come back to this race and hunting conversation again, so just be prepared for that. Who knows where we will go, but we'll go somewhere as we're moving along here. Phil Blake McGee wrote in. He said, Ben, after listening to your podcasts, I pulled our state hunting group in Oklahoma. He pulled them about the young man we talked about in Tennessee who kills a possible record buck put on YouTube. Was not wearing orange obviously, he was hunting with a rifle. The kids awesome, very respectful praises to God and the landowner. What should the game warns do since the dealer was harvested illegally. So he put that out to his Facebook group. I don't know how many people are in it, but he did get a lot of answers by it, looks of it. He gave two options stiff warning, confiscate the kill, and a hefty fine. That's what Blake McGee gave to his Oklahoma Hunting and Fishing group. But there one looks like on the facebooks. What do you think? What do you think? One stiff warning or confiscate the kill. I'm gonna say that stiff warning one. I guess it was a landslide four ninety four to tw seven. If you voted, it would have been a twenty eight, right, Yeah, I would have. I would have voted. Boy again, if I had to vote, just don't listen to me on this one. But if I had to vote, I would vote for confiscate to kill. See I are Originally, I think in the recording I came out as saying, man, I think stiff warning is probably fine, and then but the more. But then after I heard you argue that, I think I came down. Yeah. I think an example has to be made somewhere. I think you draw the line when you're putting it on the internet. I just think that if if a game warn't I said this in the in the earlier podcast, I think when if a game warden would have walked up on the guy dragging the deer out with no orange anywhere to be seen, you'd be like, hey, man, where's your orange. I forgot it in the truck. Oh okay, Well let's have a conversation about this. I don't want to see this happen again. Go on about your day. But when you edit it, make a conscious decision to put that in the video. You breaking the law of video if you bringing lamp and put it on the internet knowing I'm sure that it's going to get a lot of attention, and hoping that it does get a lot of attention, because you don't put things on the internet hoping no one sees them. And so I'm I'm in the confiscate that he'll have to find still but um Blake McGhee and his group stiff warning, which I'm okay with two I'm very I don't want to get in it for a minute. That's one of those send your emails to me wishy washy bullshit things that people do. Uh So we're gonna move on from that and we're going to get to the work sharp not to sharp moment, play the jingle film not so sharp moment, so you don't have to, okay, Phil. This one is is from Jared Michael Moon. Three easy names to pronounce. He's he's a U s Army major. I believe given what he says here, and he starts by saying classification unclassified. Here we go. Not a short moment, he says, I'm an adult onset hunter. As a child, I shot squirrels and rabbits, but only picked up big game hunting three years ago after moving to Michigan. Given Michigan's draconian rifle hunting laws, I decided to start bow hunting. I balanced my lack of available mentors by spending free every free moment on state hunting land or at my local archer shop, shooting hundreds of arrows a day. I can become obsessed with new activities, which often include spending much more money than I should, both of which can annoy my generally reasonable and loving wife. I calmed her by waxing poetic about providing family with meat in our newly purchased deep freezer. However, much like most new unsupervised hunters, I spent the first season cold tired, without any dear to bring home. Determined as I was, I continued to seize every opportunity to be in the woods. In the following year, I turkey hunted unsuccessfully and unsuccessfully squirrel and rabbit hunted, coyote hunted unsuccessfully. I went on two D I Y L hunting trips to Oregon and Colorado, also unsuccessfully, and I scouted every inch of public land around Ann Arbor, Michigan. In that year of effort, I accomplished two things. I learned how stupid I had been in my first deer season, and I really he really put He put like twenty l's in there, really piste off my wife being gone as much as I was. I had something Phil you probably don't know about yet. When you're I never leave home when you're when when you're a hunter, it's a balance between pissing off your wife and going hunting. So when it came to my second deer season, I felt prepared to finally arrow a deer and show my wife the fruits of my efforts. Unfortunately, the season started very slow, and to my and to my wife, it seemed like more of the same. I knew, however, that I can just make it happen, then I would be vindicated. Finally, my moment came. I was sitting in a blind a bit of state land in the freezing cold late archery season, when a brown ghost began to cross my path the twenty yards. I'm visualizing many things. I'm visualizing like low fog, the brown ghost. It's maybe something like you hear some some birds in the background. My son Offen has brown ghosts and his diaper. The dough moved slowly, stopping every few steps, presenting perfect broadside shot opportunities. I could taste the meat already. Once the doe stopped in my preferred shooting lane, up began my shot routine. Steady grip, tight low front shoulder, slow draw to my anchor point, sticky glove fingers steadying the arrow shaft. As I drew back pop punk smack flock, so I wrote it. My finger created so much friction that the shaft that my eighty pound bow pop the knock off the arrow. In my surprise, I triggered the release, firing thing but a knock at a confused dough, and subsequently punched myself square in the eye and cut my cheek on the freshly d knocked arrow. I couldn't help but laugh at my stupidity, while the doe seemingly smiled at a moron. It would not be the only time that I saw that look from a female. That evening, my wife smirked at me as I walked back in the door with nothing but a black eye and a mountain of shame. She confronted me in the traditional fashion by mocking me and telling her mother. We now live in Kansas City, and needless to say, I have changed my archery shot routine, which I'm happy to report helped me to take down my first big game animal, a barren ground caribou. But alas, my wife still likes to tell our friends about my not so sharp moment every time she jokingly complains about me spending too much time in the woods. Happy hunting Jared, He'll play the jingle not a sharp moment. So if you don't have boy, fill that, that's us. All will only happen to an archery hunter. Although you get scoped with a rifle if you ever ever tried. So you're gonna be a new hunter here real soon, my friends. And I'm listening to this story and I'm just picturing this happening to me. Yeah, like immediately, I'm picturing myself protecting you because you're part of this podcast, You're loyal. I'm gonna protect you like a baby bird. All right, I won't let you get hurt by the gun of the fine I picked your podcast perfect. All right, enjoy the interview with Brianna Popner from the Swithsonian. I guess I grew up on an alder row. Hey, Briana, how are you? I'm good? Thanks? How are you? Oh, I'm great. It's good to be I'm like behind the scenes of the Sithsonian right now, welcome to back in the special hallways. Yeah, you guys, ever feel kind of like Indiana Jones or maybe somebody really somebody even cooler than India a little bit, definitely scientist, Yes, cooler than Indiana Jones. I would say, so good. That's how we're gonna market you cooler than Indiana Jones. Awesome, I want a T shirt that says that Indiana Jones two point. Oh. Um, You've done a lot of things that are cooler than Indiana. But first let's explain. I think we could maybe start by explaining what paleo anthropology actually is. Sure, So, I'm a paleo anthropologist, and that means that I study people in the past. Um. I'm particularly interested in the diets of people in the past. They're kind of food gathering behaviors, UM, looking at the evidence for the kinds of foods that they ate, and specifically I'm interested in meat eating in human prehistory. Yeah, so in human prehistory meat eating. We all, I think, know that this is a very important turning point in our humanity and our evolution. But why of all all the fields of study that you could have gotten personally, why how did you get here? Why did you get here? Sure that's a loaded one, but that's it. No, it's good question. So I I decided early on in my career that I wasn't really interested in studying the human fossils themselves. There just weren't enough of them, and there seemed to be UM, a lot of kind of big egos fighting over small numbers of fossils. UM. But I you know, to me, what something eats is so fundamental to everything about it. UM. But I do really like bones, and so I decided I wanted to study animal bones with evidence for butchery on them, and that that could give me a window into like a really direct window into early human behavior. Yeah, we've talked about early human behavior in this podcast. Before You'll go back over the summer, we talked to William von Hippel about this subject, and as we're talking about it, it struck me that I wanted to get in more of the mechanics of how we're making these large assumptions that we're making. And as you were just telling me and the elevator a little bit earlier, a lot of this stuff is abstract because it happens over millions of years um and it's it's it would almost be impossible for us to be precise with this kind of evidence. So can you just kind of set sent a place in time, like when did meat eating become important for us outside of hunting? But like when when was the first evidence that meat eating was there and it was becoming important to us as a species. So that's a that's actually a hard question to answer in some sense. So it seems to have been a process by which meat eating became important. So the earliest right now claims of butchery marks on animal fossils, which is kind of the real smoking gun evidence for meat eating in the past, comes from um a couple of fossils that are three point four million years old from a site called Tekika in Ethiopia. Um After that, there's some evidence starting um about two point six million years ago two point five million years ago, also sites in Ethiopia. Slightly later sites UM in places like Kenya and Tanzania. But it seems like really up until about two million years ago that meat eating was probably a pretty opportunistic and infrequent thing that UM early humans did. I should actually qualify that and say meat eating from large animals. So it's very likely that at the absolute beginning of the branching of the human family tree, the split from the brand that lead to modern chimpanzees, who are closest living relative UM, even those earliest ancestors probably eat meat in the sense of small animals, things like maybe lizards, birds, rodents, um, other things that they may not have needed tools to be able to actually get into. But the fossil evidence for butchery from large animals starts somewhere between about two and a half and three and a half million years ago. By two million years ago, um I was involved in some research outside called Kanjera South in western Kenya UM and there we have evidence for early humans bringing animals to a central place to butcher them over and over again. So by this point there's a little bit of a turning where like, okay, this this behavior is becoming a little bit more important. Um. And then it kind of ramps up from there where we start seeing more frequent evidence of butchery of many different animals in one place. So you can can you just we've again talked about this before in the podcast, but you can put us in a place in time. Yeah, three point four million years ago, we like, I like three points something that's a hundred thousand UM. Put us a place time. We're in Africa. What do we look like? You know, during these first evidences as they arrive, what do we look like? What are we doing? How are we living? Yeah? Good questions right right? Our ancestors and you know, kind of our our early relatives. So by let's say, let's take three and a half or three million years ago in Africa. So the predominant species was around is one called Australopithecus afarensis or Africanus maybe later in time in southern Africa. And so these are um, early humans that are maybe three and a half feet tall if you're female, maybe five ft tall if you're male. Um, they walked upright on two legs. They were by peetle um all species on the human family tree were by Peotle. They probably didn't walk exactly like we did. They retain some adaptations in their upper body to climb trees, so they probably spent some time in the trees getting food, getting away from predators, um, maybe sleeping in the trees at night to be safe. Um. But what they didn't have that later species had, at least that we can find in the archaeological record, is any kind of hunting technology. They made tools out of stone. They could use those tools to butcher animals, to break open their bones to get at marrow inside or brains, um. But they didn't have things like spears or bows and arrows. So part of the interesting question around when did um early humans become really competent hunters is when can we see the archaeological evidence for those tools in the archaeological record. We don't see that till about half a million years ago. Meat eating might go back three and a half million years ago. UM. So one thing I'm really interested in our questions around how might scavenging have been a prominent part of our evolutionary history. Yeah, so let's talk about that, because I think we just went down and looked at the Hall of Origins here this Masonian that's something that you're there's a video of you in there, like, uh, there's a lot of things going on there. But I think one of the key understandings is, you know, how long were we scavengers? And then when did we habituate this stuff? When did we start to understand how to use the tools, how to hunt, how to affect the world that wasn't right in front of our our feet? So how long did you feel like that scavenging happened prior to that jump? Um? Because I know that's a big jump. Yeah. So well, the interesting thing is I'm not sure that it was. I don't necessarily think that like first there was a scavenging phase and then there was a hunting phase. I mean even modern forage or scavenge today. So the Hods in Tanzania sometimes get a high proportion of the meat that they eat from scavenging from lions UM. And I think in some sense of scavenging gets this bad rap as something that's like lesser than from hunting. But you know, scavenging UM often means that you don't come into close contact with predators UM. If you're passive scavenging and wait till they're done. You don't have to hunt the animals yourself. It's like free food. A more efficient way. Yeah, yeah, and maybe a less risk anyway. And so um, but I do think that scavenging was probably the predominant way that early humans got meat from large animals, the ones that they couldn't collect or gatherer or you know, kind of hunt with their hands, um, for a long period of time, probably you know, at least a million or two million years. I think that scavenging was a big important part of our evolutionary history. Yeah, and during this time, Like I think something that we're always trying to pinpoint and talk about is how we developed as humans because of our intake of meat. And we were talking about this before. There's like the beginning, and then there's when it becomes popularized or when we can find evidence that it was going on in a larger scale that may be affected a larger population. So when you're thinking of our our diets at this point, where scavengers were omnivorous or eating whatever we can to survive, or at least our ancestors are doing that, how much is meat helping to aid evolution? At this point when we don't really have evidence that it's a on a mass scale, or there's large like we're taking down large um unglits and eating it or whatever it might be. That's an awesome question, and I think it's actually really hard to answer of of how even if meat eating was a small component of our dietary history at that point in time, how important might it have been. So I read an interesting paper a little while ago from researchers who studied chimpanzee hunting UM and it was UM. They they proposed something called the thes um the meat scrap hypothesis, is that even scraps of meat for chimpanzees would have been so important nutritionally for certain components of you know, um, macronutrients and other things in their diet that UM. They that it would have been important enough that even infrequent hunting and meat eating of the monkeys and other small animals that chimpsee UM, that it would have been worth it, and that that would have been a drive force for hunting UM in chimpanzees. And so I think that we can't necessarily equate the frequency of meat eating to its importance in our evolutionary history. Um, And that's a way of me saying I don't know the answer to that question is, but it's a really good question. Well, you say, and I was reading some of your work and we were just talking about this evolution is about benefits and costs. Right, So as as meat is introduced to the diet and scavengers are pulling, you know, pieces of flesh off already consume zebra like whatever is left, they're starting to see whether they don't realize that, but they're starting to feel the benefits of that. And would that propel them forward? Like the cost of getting the meat is well below the benefits of the nutrient dense flesh that they're then eating, right, And is that what propelled it forward? I think so, I mean, and I think potentially, you know, um, basically like a new kind of resource. Oh, well, these are you know, it's it's a resource that is, like you said, nutrient dense. It has a lot of protein um, not as much with wild animals, but it would have had some fat um, particularly the marrow in bones. And so I think that you know, protein and fat are two things that are real hard to come across in African savannah. Ecosystem. So I think even occasional meat eating might have been important from a nutritional perspective, and then that changed our behavior. You know, maybe people were uh, you know, early humans were going out and actually actively scavenging more often, and um maybe you know, maybe that eventually led to hunting. So we could go, I could go forever. But do you feel like, um, I read another thing that you were writing that over the course of six million years our brain is increased, the size of our brain, especially neo cortex. But but in in in the case of this, when did you know we have we know, okay, we gotta we gotta just of brain growth, like what percentage are we once we in this period of time and scavenger like where are we and how much do we have left to go? So the interesting thing is that there there's a hypothesis called the expensive tissue hypothesis that um is trying to link um the expansion of brain size over human evolutionary history with meat eating and so um our brains are incredibly energetically expensive. They take up about two percent of our body weight. They use of our energy at rest. If you're a baby or a kid, six of your energy goes so like maintaining and growing your brain so um, high cost in terms of energy and so um. This hypothesis originally proposed that the way that evolutionary, from an evolutionary perspective, brain size could increase is by decreasing some other kind of energetically expensive tissue in the body. While that other energetically expensive tissue is gut tissue. And so the idea was that once people started early humans started incorporating meat into their diet um, they could decrease I mean, this is not quite how evolution works. Is not like they decided to decrease their gut tissue, but there was kind of a decreased um selection pressure for having long guts to be able to digest plant foods um, and that that released a constraint on the evolution of brain size. And there would have been other selection pressure, probably from a social perspective um, for for growing larger brains. The problem so that that was I I you know, I remember reading about that hypothesis as undergrad and thinking this is great. This probably explains a lot of you know, the link between maybe meat eating in brain growth um or brain expansion through time. The problem is that the timing doesn't work anymore. So the earliest evidence for meat eating, as we've talked about, is somewhere between two and a half and three and a half million years ago. But the big increase in brain size in our evolutionary history compared to body size. So as body size is slowly increasing, brain size is slowly increasing. But this big jump in brain size happens at about a million years ago, and that's long after um use we see even more significant meat eating in prehistory, so that um, you know, now there's an idea that ma be it was cooking that actually kind of you know, was related to that big brain size increase. Maybe maybe a lot of maybes, and a lot of maybes. My world is full of maybes, and that's all right, um you know, as a scientist, what I'm trying to do is kind of rule out some of the maybes and get a little bit closer to what, um, what we think we know when we were talking about this earlier. This is maybe jumping ahead and where I wanted to go. But like I've I first became interested this years and years ago. I was writing an article about the Paleo died and as a hunter, whether I want to play into this or whether I want to step back from it, Like whereas a hunter, Yeah, I get it, I'm eating. I'm doing the paleo thing, but only because I like hunting and I like the meat that I get. Um. And I started to read and from a lot of the dietitians and some of the practitioners of the paleo diet, these synthesized or like really boiled down numbers, you know, a hundred thousand generations of this, and I started to pair at that because it was very convenient, like, oh these not well, look at that, this proves that hunting is awesome. I never really looked into it. And then when you start to really break down what you do, you have room filled rooms filled with books and fossils and skulls and and all this stuff that that comes out to say, like what percentage of this do we actually know? And there's no way given whatever percentage you might put on and I don't know if you want to put a number on it, it depend on what the question is. In a sense, like you know, um, one of the things that I will often say is that we can know maybe some points in time in which we can see the earliest evidence for something or when it becomes more common. I can't tell you what proportion of you know, early human diets three million years ago were meat as opposed to plant. Nobody can tell you that. If they tell you that, I would, Um, I would talk to somebody else. Yeah, the practitioners. There's a documentary I just watched called Game Changers where they're in they're saying, there's an anthropologist in there saying, well, it's not exactly humans and meat. They only, it's not exactly what you think it is. And if you if you go talk to a paleo dietitian or somebody who's who's um out there shouting about the paleo diet, they're going to tell you that meat is essential and this is this is how we came to be who we are, and you have to They answered, got to be somewhere in the middle of that. It is. So I think it's somewhere in the middle of that. Yes, I study meat eating in human evolution. I don't necessarily think it was like the most important dietary transition in our evolutionary history. Um. And I think you know, it's interesting. There's an idea that when modern humans first migrated into Europe and Western Asia, there was another species called neandertals living there, and so um. One thing that we see is that Neanderthals were actually excellent hunters. They were great at taking down big ice age animals. They probably were the most meat eating of our evolutionary cousins. Um. And when modern humans first migrated into Europe, is an idea that actually they may have out competed the neandertals, not by eating more meat, but by actually increasing their dietary breadth so they would eat like smaller animals. They would eat things like snails, they would after things like turtles, and so um. Maybe it's actually our dietary flexibility that makes us so successful. Yeah, And are like if you look, if you listen to all the dietitians out there, and you're thinking about, like where does eating meat sit? I think the smart ones, at least ones that I've listened to, are saying like, there's an omnivorous where omnivorous? We are definitely omnivores. We are not, you know, naturally carnivores. That we're also late not naturally herbivorous, like we are we are square omnivors. Yeah, and and how do we When I was reading another thing you read that said that, because I want to make people think that I know the stuff without rating it from you, I don't. What did you say? There was eighteen species on our evolutionary tree at least at least and you guys have you? I saw you had a little timeline in the in your office there that I looked at that timeline. And what struck me isn't what I think straight in front of timelines everywhere there's a guy, there's a guy at the top. So you're tracking in this graph, I'm looking at seven million years into the past, and there's eighteen plus species on the evolutionary tree that eventually came to seven billion whatever the number is of humans on this earth. One species left just as Yeah, And so if you're talking about like, where does this all come to ahead, it's that it's that there's some other species you can study that are now gone totally extinct or not. What the hell did we do? Exactly? What did we do that was different? And you know, it's interesting. Another thing that strikes me about and so this is a bar graph, sort of a bar chart of the fossil evidence of different early human species. One thing that always strikes me is that most of the time there was more than one kind of human walk in the earth, and so it wasn't just that, you know, there's this march of man of sort of one species evolving into another into another. They were probably doing different things in the past. Some of them might have been eating more meat, some of them might have been eating more plants, some of them might have been eating a lot of insects. And so I think there's there's kind of aum. You know, when people talk about what was the paleo diet, I'm like, what, like, at what time, in what place? By what people um? And so I think, you know, um again, versatility and kind of flexibility is probably actually what led modern humans to um dominate the planet. The domination, and that's why I think that's the question that we really have to ask, not whether the whether eating meat accelerated our brain growth and shrunk our gut size to to where we could be to where we are today. We know it played some It played as well as hunting plates, because that was how we got that all this played some role in our domination. As we'll say from from an evolutionary perspective, there's a lot of us on the planet. I mean, there's only one species of human. That's not such a great you know strategy from an evolutionary sense, though, Yeah, we have our owned monoculture, and so the question then becomes, you know, why why did we Why did we above all others? Right? And then how do we trace that back and continue? Because that's why kind of stretches over millions of years, and how at each step in this this process, you haven't broken down by millions of years here, like each million year, how did we over each one of those eighteen species? How did we move forward and they die off? Yeah? So the so the why questions are the hardest to answer in the past. And I mean our species only evolved three hundred thousand years ago, so most of the time during our during you know, human evolutionary history writ large, we were actually not on the planet. We also aren't the longest lived of the species on our family tree. So home erectus um, you know, takes the prize for that. It was around I don't know, probably nine times longer, maybe eight times longer than our species um. You know. I hope we end up surviving that long if we don't screw it up. Um. But so, but I think I think that is exactly the question. What led us to, um, maybe outcompete other species that we were living alongside. There has been some interesting articles that I've read recently. Let's say it's actually maybe it's just a little bit of a difference in our productive rate, Like maybe it's just we had one or two more kids per family, and that was the way that we were able to outcompete neandertals for instance. Um. You know, I often get asked like why did neandertals go extinct? Why did any of these species go extinct? And I will turn on and say, why are species going extinct today? Um? You know, they're probably multiple components. Obviously humans are a part of it for most of them. Um. But whether it was you know, um, changing climates that led to their preferred food and the areas where they like to live disappeared. Whether it was also competition with modern humans for the same resources, whether it was you know, maybe the cooperative um nature of modern human and having kind of extended trade networks, and maybe it was that maybe it was that we were able to kind of out cooperate them. That's another idea. Yeah, there's and there's a lot. I mean, you gave I talked that I was. I was watching just called like human evolution over yeah maybe no, no, it's not for us. And it started to touch on um I want to eventually get back to the timeline, but I found this like interesting. Started touch on contraception and c sections and the pelvic forms of a chimpanzee versus a human, like all these interesting things. Points and evolution where our bodies and our brains have evolved to to some certain stimuli or some certain way of being, and then we change that pretty quickly via technology or some kind of some other sort of change, and it dractually impacts our own evolution. And so give us a I don't know how you even start that conversation you just said, but well, so, I mean, you know, one thing, one thing that's important to think about is that humans are amazing and altering our own environment, and so we do that on an incredibly large scale with our planet. We do that in a small scale, both sort of from a biological and a social perspective. So but but the question of the title of the talk is human evolution over absolutely not. And so I think you know, from the perspective of the things out there that can kill us, um, they are less often times today large predators, but they are things like tiny microbes. And so the selection pressures that are happening in modern humans today honestly are mostly along the lines of health and disease, because you know what, a lot of people still die from infectious disease. A lot of people still die from you know, um uh, you know, um, cardiovascular disease, and so adaptations and changes that um help people avoid that or that that makes some people more likely to survive that those are really important. And that's where evolution is happening. And as we get through this, I mean you even brought up, oh, well, there was some sort of virus that was discovered onto some like permafrost, some ice, like what if what if something melts and some human ending virus is coming now they know exact so well. And you know, I was actually reading yesterday about um, you know, sadly there are as the Arctic is melting, there are archaeological sites that are basically being thought and there's this evidence that's being destroyed now, um, and so there's some great partnerships that's totally off topic between um like archaeological archaeologists and First Nations peoples in Northern Canada to like go and rescue this heritage. Um So. But yeah, I mean if if an ancient virus you know, that has been frozen in the perma frost for thousands of years, um basically gets reactivated. I don't know. Maybe we should go to Mars, that's right. I've seen the movies exactly. You're like Indiana Jones will probably send you up there, That's right and figure it out. It's a cool hat. Um. We should return to the actually okay, yes, timeline of what I was hoping to get to you. But there's two things or talking about scavenging, but there's two things I think that are important here. You can tell me in which order, tools and fire. Yeah so, um, at least in the order that we see in the archaeogo record, tools definitely came first. Um So. The earliest technology goes back to right now about three point three million years um stone tools from a site called Low Mequi in Kenya. Um. And then kind of like the evidence for butchery, we also see a little bit of a gap in um. Stone tool technology picks up again around two and a half million years ago. UM and so, but the earliest stone tool technology called um, well there's a little maqui in. But the old want technology that lasted for over a million years is basically, you take a roundish rock, you um, hit an angular rock with it, and you knock off a stone flake. So the tool is that stone flake which has a sharp edge. It allows you to you know, butcher animals, cut wood, sharpen a stick, um, do all kinds of you know, maybe pounding tools for processing plants. It allows you to just do all kinds of things that you couldn't do before. It also allows you to start processing your food outside of your mouth. So at the same time that we see the origin of stone tool technology, we see in one branch of our evolutionary story, the one that led to us, we see a decrease in the size and strength of the jaws and teeth because basically people are processing food outside of their mounds a little bit more. Yeah, and you would imagine if I have a tool here and I have a really tough piece of meat, exactly pound on a little bit, make a little softer make it so you don't have to spend I mean, chimpanzee is our closest living relatives, spend inordinate amount of time just chewing, and for us not to have to do that, we can spend time doing other things, even our earlier ancestors who were eating meat and plants. Yeah, and from there, and you were showing me some of the early tools, and people think like tools, No, it's just a chunk of rock that has a certain shape that can be used for a certain thing. And to look at him there, that's not impressive at all to our our modern minds, but it's something that going from kind of the modern idea of what a tool is, these things were just when you're showing to me, like, oh, that's a nice right, And so I mean they don't look impressive, but you know, whether they were cooler than iPhones is they were more important to our evolutionary history. I mean, the ability to use tools to make other tools, to use tools to modify your environment, to use tools to get food. It was just transformative. Yeah. And and we go probably what at least a million or so years with tools without fire, right, Oh, absolutely, actually longer than that, So that right, now that I think the earliest solid evidence for UM controlled use of fire comes from about a million years ago. Some people want to push it back to about a million and a half, but certainly, you know, people are eating meat, they're using tools long before we have good evidence for cooking. That said, I think the evidence for cooking is a little harder to find. So it may be that people were maybe sporadically using fire but longer before that. But you know, I can only go with the evidence that we have. So based on that evidence that we have, when do you really start to line up fire tools, scavenging, all the things we're doing to get meat with our brains exploding and growing to start this, you know, really you would raced. But this movement towards UM yes, so interesting. So Homeorectus is a species that evolved just a little after one point nine million years ago and lasted up until a little less than a hundred fifty thousand years ago. So sometime during that species evolutionary history that we see earliest fire a million years ago. You know, UM technology as well before then, UM meat eating as well before then. But also the biggest increase in brain size compared to body size is also at about a million years ago, so there was potentially, at least with the evidence that we have now, something happening around that time that may have, you know, caused some significant changes in the biology and behavior of that species. That species is probably sort of our our um great grandparents species or grandparents species. So um, right now, from the fossil evidence that we have, it looked like Homeorectus in Africa evolved into a species called Homo Heidelbergensis um, and that species populations in Africa evolved into us evolved into Homo sapiens. So they were an important part of our revolutionary history. And then that when when we look at you know, if if I'm looking at kind of like the line graph of of brain growth and where in that does that things does it spike or does it so that the sort of the big inflection point is at a million years ago, so it's slowly going up with body size kind of at the same rate between six million years ago and a million years ago, and then all of a sudden you get this, you get this kind of big uptick and so you get, um, a big increase in brain size starting at about a million years ago. So by that time, homeorectus body size was already a kind of basically modern human body size and shape. So you get the body size and shape is the is, the gut, the large intestine, everything kind of already it is. And so the you know, the guts of homeorectus is much more not like a gut of chimpanzee, which has kind of a like a cone shaped gut, but more like a narrower, barrel shaped gut like we have at this point. Um, how long have you have we been eating meat? Um? At least a million and a half years, potentially two and a half a million years. How long have we been hunting at this point? Ah, that's a good question. So um m, I I'm really conservative about how long we've been hunting in the sense that I want to see the technology that that to me absolutely screams we are definitely hunting. The oldest um spear points that we see in the archaeological record are about half a million years old, so they're from a site called Katupan in South Africa, and the end of those spear points have impact damage on them. We know that those things were used to, like you know, to to hunt with. UM. So I think it's very possible that hunting with wooden tools, hunting with other tools that haven't been found happened before then. But but I like in my timeline half a million years ago is definitely something I can feel comfortable with. That's way that's more conservative i've heard in the past. Here at one point, I think one point six million. Well, well, so it's interesting. I mean, some of the research I did for my PhD was studying fossils from a site called Coopy for it in northern Kenya, and so I was looking at butchery marks on the animal fossils from a couple of excavations up there. And at that point this is for sure homeorectus, and they the homeorectus, looked like they were getting access to the best parts of animals. They were butchering big animals. They were getting like you know, they were have butchery marks on the ribs where usually evisceration happens by the predators first, they're not scavenging those. They have butchery marks on the media's parts of bones. I wouldn't necessarily call that hunting. I call that early access there. Somehow, I don't think they're taking those animals down, but I think they're getting there soon after they die. So I think that's a nuance that would maybe, you know, maybe that's why I wouldn't call that hunting. Yeah, animal exactly are they're chasing a predator off of a kill, you know, or exactly or you know they're you know, maybe they're using rocks or something to knock down these big animals. I don't know how they do that, but maybe they could. Um. But yeah, so I think they're they are getting early access to these animals and they're able to sort of control the carcasses, um not have predators come in and chase them off. And so this all kind of comes to a head with the question that I know you'll be like, well, I'm working on it. I'm here every day. I'm working on it. That the the acceleration or that like kind of maybe the Bell curve and brain growth, however you want to describe it. There's our diet are like our social leaps that we're making forward, Like we're developing tools and now we're eating cooked meat and all these things that are happening within this kind of like five thousand year span. Right. If we're saying you can put evidence of hunting at five years, evidence of fire like maybe eight hundred thousand years million, and then the brain grows out a million. What's happening in this in this kind of very important five or thousand years because prior to that we're really talking about million years here, million years there. Now we're talking about a shorter period of time in which we can really analyze what's going down. Yeah, So it's a good question. And and whether all of these different things are coming together at the same time or not, whether there are other factors that are important, like maybe there's increased slow increases in population size at this point. Um, you know, starting almost two million years ago, early humans are migrating out of Africa into Asia, so you know, there may have been a component of encountering new environments, new plants, new animals that they could potentially eat. Um. So I think it's I think there were there. There's even more factors to think about than even the ones we've been talking about. Is there How do you guys when you're when you're looking at this in your daily I think we should get to exactly how you look at bones and and how you're coming up A lot of this, but in your day to day work, how are you moving these ideas forward? How you learning more? Yeah? So there's there's a couple of things. One is that we can go dig up more fossils that have butchery marks. I think that's hugely important and it's a fun thing to do. We can go back and re study collections where people haven't actually looked at them for butchery marks yet. So I'm doing some of that as well. Um. We can also do ex butchery experiments. Um, so we can make replica stone tools, like the kinds of tools that early humans used. We can use them to butcher animals, and we can, like scientists do, we can change variable and see how that changes an outcome. So I have done butchery experiments on deer where we are changing the kind of rock that the tools are made from, or we're changing actually the expertise of the butcher or we is an expert butcher butchering your animal, or is a novice butcher butchering your animal? What does that mean for where the cut marks end up? What does that mean for how many cut marks there are? Can we look at something like expertise in the fossil record? I was actually really excited about that experiment, and it turned out that there was not no statistical difference between the butchery marks made by the expert and the novice butcher. Um. I can tell you in a moner sense, there would be well, yes, And you know, I was surprised because as watching I, I UM worked with a wonderful grad student from the UK named Charlie Higson on this project. It was his master's project, and he was the novice butcher. He was a vegetarian and had not butchered anything before. UM, and he was really um game, he was great, UM, but he didn't know what the heck he was doing when he started off. And but interestingly, over the course of a couple of hours is actually this was a butchering domestic pigs. Um, he kind of figured it out. And so kind of watching him figure out, Oh, I can actually like put my hand under a muscle and pull it off, and I can figure out where the muscle insertion points aren't cut there instead of just like whacking away aimlessly. So UM, that's that That's seems to me is very natural, like blunt dissection of you know, the back leg of a deer. It's like look at the muscle groups, look where the lines of sinew and and tissue are, and pull him apart and just cut away the connective and then to go um. I imagine that that our early st ancestors were looking at the same kind of thing like well, and especially if this is if they were spending a lot of their time hunting and eating these animals. And if you know, if we if our knife dolls, we just go sharpen it. And so you know, if you have stone tools that you're working on, you can sharpen them in a sense. But they may have been even more interested in kind of protecting the edges of their stone tools and not letting them get dull or maybe not, because there were stone tools all over the place, So maybe I don't know. Yeah, I mean there's lots of there's lots of claims out there, the paleo diet claims and all the things we've kind of talked about, and we were discussing earlier kind of the polls of this, which is the vegan folks or vegetarian folks were trying to disassociate the importance of meat or trying to lessen it a little bit and trying to move away from eating meat, and then you have the paleo diet. Folks are trying to over dramatize or over specialize our diets and say that we ate large amounts of meat. I've read a lot of what you say about this, But what do you think about that? Did we did our ancestors eat such large amounts of meat that accelerated brain growth and then brains got figured and we and then hunting and that made us human, right, and then hunting helped us develop socially, help us develop a ways of communicating with each other, helped us develop hierarchies and things that never were there before. So where do you stand on all of that? So you know, I am not an end member type person. I am the middle of the ground type person, mostly because I think, you know, when I look at the evidence that we have, I'm like, I don't actually think we have enough evidence to look at things like the proportion of meat in the diet and how important it was it was there? Um I. The other thing is that you know people who want to say, like the paleo diet was this? Okay, again, what paleo diet? What people who were talking about let's look at people today. I mean, you know, modern even just modern forgers, eat incredibly varied diets, depending on where they live, what's in season, what's in front of them, UM. And so I don't think we can characterize any kind of ideal ancestral diet in you know, during whatever time in which early humans were kind of living in harmony with their environment. I think there's this real tendency to romanticize the past UM in that sense that said, I mean, you know, there there are commentaries about kind of modern industrial farming that I think are really important to pay attention to. And so I think if the if if UM conversations about how we should be eating UM are also starting with what's best for our health and the health of the planet, that's really important. But I think, you know, picking and choosing from some evidence from the past and saying, oh, well, because our ancestors in X, that's the way we should live. Maybe not necessarily. Yeah, And as during that time, when we're talking about you know, eighth years, two years, our environments become unpredictable. We change landscapes, we were moving around the world, and environments have always been unpredictable. Climates have always been changing. There was no sort of stable state at which we should um kind of hark and to go back to. So I think we have to be you know, in some sense it is realistic about diets today um and sustainability UM. But I also think that we you know, there there there wasn't some idyllic point in the past that that we should strive to go back to. So, especially because there were different kinds of early humans around. Like I said, there were Neanderthals who probably ate more meat than any other species. They're extinct. Um, you know, do we want to emulate that? I mean, I'm being a little bit. I'm joking a little bit, but you know, we should think about that. And I've been looking into this a lot recently, and it just it comes back to being omnivorous and like also being practical and pragmatic about what we're saying here, because you always read this and then it becomes dogma, right, it becomes something that we all meat is bad, cholesterol is bad. You know, the vegan diet is great, Let's eat all meat. There was a guy who had autoimmune disease and get cured by only eating meat. So therefore, it's good for everybody. I mean. The other thing is that moderny, you know, we are incredibly you know, we have we have sort of low genetic diversity, surprisingly for modern humans. But we're we're different people and so um, depending on our kind of you know, areas of origin and our ancestry, we have different adaptations and different mutations to be able to digest different kinds of food. So I think we also have to keep that in mind as we think about not prescribing kind of a single diet for every human on the planet. I also think, you know, there's a component of this. I do research in a lot of foreign countries, and I think the idea of like asking people to exclude certain, you know, types of food from their diet because it's health there is maybe just unrealistic to folks living in a lot of places in the world. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of this is some first world that absolutely absolutely Yeah, a lot of things that issue a first world But do you feel tracing back our ancestry. I would love to believe that hunting was this giant lead forward and like number one on the list of evolutionary drivers. But there's also agriculture there's also domestication of animals that that happened more like twelve thousand years ago rather than so there is I mean, obviously, we know that hunting has been a part of our humanity for longer than some of these other things. We don't be agriculture in domestication, agree that hunting. Hunting has been part of our evolutionary history from for much longer than agriculture and investication. Agriculture and domestication unfortunately, probably had a bigger impact on our evolutionary history. And I say unfortunately because that impact wasn't always positive um, neither for us nor for the planet UM. And the fact that we rely most of us rely on so few highly domesticated foods is not necessarily like a really good strategy um from you know, from you know, economic and And it strikes me if you laid out how we currently eat our current American diet, how the food comes to our plates, how gos in our mouth, how nutrient dense it is or isn't in this case, if you laid that out devoid of all the other factors of where we are in our our evolution, you say, well, that's not the right way to do it. There's no way that that's right based on everything that we know. Yeah, and and I mean I think you know, but but one benefit that we have in the US is that we have a lot of us, not all of us, have a lot of food choices. And so I think that you know, the ability to think, um, figure out what our priorities are for modern diets and make good choices, we were pretty privileged in this country to be able to do that a lot of us, not all of us. Would it be Would it be accurate to say then that that this kind of story of the evolution of our meat eating in and of our diet is about choices, Like the more that we learn we were able to choose, I think that's a that's a great way to put it. And and sometimes I one of my biggest frustrations with sort of the paleo diet movement is that a lot of it is about excluding food like don't eat you know, legumes or starchy vegetables or dairy or you know this because our ancestors didn't eat it. I'm thinking really, because I don't think a million years ago somebody would have looked at food that would have been edible and wet. No, I'm not going to eat that. I mean, you know, if you really you just eat around everything. Yeah, exactly, I'll eat that exactly. And that's maybe we'll start. We can start a new thing called just like the choice diet, where you're just going choices, eat all the food your choices, eat whatever is in front of you. And that just goes back to where this argument is really just based on our one our intellectual ability now, but our our ability to have these choices and look around and be able to say I would like to only eat vegetables exactly, and I you know, I mean, and I joke about that sometimes, but I think some of this is about, well, you know, our ancestors didn't eat X, y Z, they didn't eat grains, they didn't eat this, and and you know we have not had enough time to adapt to those foods. And to that, I say, uh, um, so there's really good evidence, I mean, humans can evolve pretty quickly. Um. The fact that about a third of us on the planet today can digest lactose or milk sugar as an adult. My favorite example of human evolution. You know, around seven thousand years ago, not a single person on the planet could digest milk after the age of you know, two or three, which is kind of when traditional weaning is. I just heard about this for the first time, like two weeks. I'm like, why are we talking about this? I I think this is hugely important and so you know, and there were multiple different mutations in multiple populations of UM people who basically domesticated dairy animals UM, and that caused the ability to a humans to digest milk as adults. Milk is a great resource. It has protein, it has fat, it is a clean liquid. If you're moving into a new environment and you maybe all your crops fail, but you can still drink milk um. So, and there's also evidence that people have UM there are some populations that have been eating a higher starch diet that actually have genetic adaptations to be able to digest starch better. So the idea that like modern humans, oh, we can't you know, there's this mismatch and we haven't had enough time to adapt to eating these foods. I think it's hogwash. Yeah, well I think it is too. And the people are always they want to have the prescription right, they want to tell you exactly, eat this and this and this, and you will be healthy. I mean, if you watch the Game Changers documentary, it would seem as if it's not not as if it was seem as if they were saying basically, the meat is poison. That is that is what they are there. They never say it out right. Yeah. Interesting. All the evidence presented is like meat is bad for you, meat is you know. I there's examples of I I went vegetarian, I went vegan and I got better erections, and I it fixed my joints and it did this and that. Like wow, I mean there's all you know, there's lots of anecdotal evidence in all kinds of directions, and I think, you know, part of what's tough about making, um, you know, wide sweeping statements about nutrition is that a lot of the studies have been done with small numbers of people. A lot of them are self reporting studies. UM. You. I think it would be tough to be a nutritionist today because of all the like anecdotal evidence out there and and even the good scientific evidence UM sometimes can be contradictory because I think people are complex, um and where our bodies are not always going to respond in the same way. I mean, again you know, caveat. I'm not a nutritionist, um, but I do think that the idea that like there is one end all be all that will fix all of your problems, all of your health issues. I mean, the other thing that I will often say, if you know, people are asking me, which they shouldn't necessarily for dietary advice, is that like, what are your priorities? Is your Are you trying to eat for cardiovascular health? Are you trying to eat for longevity, or you're trying to eat because you have a like autoimmune issue or your So you know, how can there possibly be one diet that you know it is good for everybody? Well, I'm part of like to go to that point. Part of the reason why we're sitting here and part of the reason why it's relevant because people have subscribed ancestral diets as waste for us to get healthy and try to trace these lineages and ways that are really just dis genuous, and you know, hogwash is a good way to put it. You can always tell in somebody's full of ship. Yeah, you can always tell when somebody's full of shit, when they're when they're taking a very complex topic and trying to boil it down to something that's digestible in whether it's fact or in this case, an actual diet um. That's how I first started sniffing around the paleo dim Like wait a minute, so you're telling me there's no this doesn't seem like you thought this out at all, you know, And I think, yes, there's something to be able to kind of um, you know, break down complicated ideas and present them in a simple way. But I think doing it in a way that's like ignoring evidence or being disingenuous is like, that's not cool, and that's it's happening. It's happening a lot um and a lot of places, but especially with our food, because people want to be the prescribers, not the informers. And like, there's no, there's nothing about what you do here the Swithsonian or science or research that is biased. I mean, like you're you're flying to Kenya unearthing bones or watching we should talk about some of the things that you've done in that base, watching hyenas and lines take down zebras and then going collecting the bones later and examining them um for for for like the predatory behavior around this bones so you can then compare it to ancestral things that we find, fossils that we find. It's like that is that is just scientifics It's asking a question, it's looking for evidence. I mean, like I said before, you know, I did I did this butcher experiment looking to see I had a prediction that expertise of the butcher would have had some influence on you know, different variables of cut mark. That was incorrect. Um. And so you know that's still important to research and to publish and say like Nope, maybe we have to ask a different question. And so I think a big part of being a scientist, especially a scientist who studies the past, is trying to figure out what questions can you ask that you can actually find evidence for um. And then if you you know, whatever your answer is, your answer is interesting. So I think, you know, there's this idea that science drop they're trying to like prove their theory or their hypothesis. No, we're trying to just figure out, um, get a better version of what actually happened in the past. Version, right. And there's like modeling of behavior that goes on which just to say I work for three years on something that I found out it wasn't even worthy of six months or a month. But I did find out that I was wrong. And here's why exactly. I had a whole like, pardon my you know. One of my big dissertation questions was I I was UM. I thought that you could be able to tell the species of carnivore based on the size of tooth market make um, based on the size of tooth marks that it makes. And so because I work in Africa, the carnivores that I was studying were mostly lions, Hyena's leopards, cheetahs, um, jackals, things like that. And it turns out that that doesn't work. Um. It turns out that big carnivores will make big tooth marks, but um and small tooth marks, and the small carnivores make the small tooth mark. So maybe you can say something about a carnivore body size based on tooth marks, but I cannot look at an individual tooth mark and tell you who made it. Yeah, that was disappointing. UM, Yeah, I could you know? Um? And actually there was another research team that, as I was doing my dissertation, did a similar study and published that. And I was like Okay, yes, we're done, Like we found the same thing. So but the answer to the question, even if it's no, is important exactly, And I think that that's that's something that's that's really crucial to remember. And so Okay, that doesn't work. That means that we have to look at it in a different way or ask a slightly different right, So you're just eliminating that line of thinking so you can move on to them and then eventually you make an important discovery. You don't just like read a couple of books and look at a couple of things ago. Here's hey, here's the answer to everything. I got it exactly, And so that's I think why that's all of this. Well, so that's why what you do is is particularly interesting to me. And maybe it's a little bit sad because it's like it's just modeling behavior that we don't see in a lot of our popular culture. Well, you know, it's interesting. I think there's I'm I'm I'm getting really interested in so of science communication and public agent with science. And one of the things that that I see a lot is that people are skeptical of science, are uncomfortable about science because you know, they think that scientists change our minds all the time because one study says this, in another study says this, um, And for for people that feel much more comfortable with like, I want the answer and I want it not to change, that is unfortunately not how science works. Science builds on prior evidence. We investigate something, we find something different, maybe than other researchers have before. But as someone who studies human evolution, sort of the the major grand narrative don't tend to change that much. Um, you know, we know that like chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. We know that humans have been evolving for six million years. We know that you know, um, bipedalism came before tool use, came before increasing brain size, A lot of that stuff, like those milestones, um, the order of those miles. So we may shift the like exact date of when we see the earliest or latest evidence of something. We may add a species to the human family tree, but it doesn't like, it doesn't mean that everything we ever knew has sort of been turned on its head by one new discovery. Yeah, that's it builds on itself, right, And it totally makes sense to me, and I think we should talk about what you're not just super interested. You spent a lot of time look at the bones, but he didn't come up like as a bone enthusiast, right, you were like, you know what I like to do, Right, I'm just gonna stare at bones all day? So no, I mean, and I you know, I'm the questions that I'm interested in. I really want to know what people were doing in the past. I want to know what they were eating. I want to know where they were living. I want to know, like you know, I mean, I wanted a lot of things. I probably can't like what you know, what choices were they making and what factors were involved in those choices. But but again, what are the questions that I can ask that I can find evidence for? And so the questions that I'm interested are mostly around bones um or at least bones are the evidence that I can use to find the answers to most of those questions. Yeah, it's some means to an end. As I was thinking Aboubra bone, I'm like, why yeah, but that those bones are means to the end, like they're getting you along lines of answering. There's questions and so I guess to kind of wrap to try to wrap this up. We'll never be able to do that, but that's what that's what we were talking about earlier. If you want to, if I wanted to like extract and not distill this all down, we probably have to talk for like about ten podcasts worth. But I think to try to to wrap this up. You know, we've touched upon a lot of things, but important questions I think to a lot of people listening to this is like, where is meat eating sit on the importance of human evolution? Where does hunting sit then as a as a means of of getting that meat? Um? Because there's been a lot of wild claims about that. So we've kind of addressed that as much as I think we probably could. But what is what's the future of your work? Where can we go from here? What you know? How can we get better answer to these questions? Or how can we answer new questions like what are you focus? Yeah, so so again a couple of things. I'm I'm still um studying fossil collections to look for butchery marks on them. Um. And so when we have big collections that have butchery marks, we can look at things like, well, what animals are people butchering, and what animals were they not butchering, and what habitats for those animals living in and what can that tell us about what kind of habitats early humans were hanging out in. So I'm still going to continue to study fossil collections, still going to continue to UM do research doing butchery experiments UM to see if I can sort of refine some of our understanding about butchery behavior. UM. I'm I'm working now with a colleague of mine, Jennifer Parkinson, who works at UM University of San Diego, and we're studying a fossil collection in Texas that is has been interpreted as the remains of a saber tooth den So you know, I can study. I love working in the modern world. I am still do research in a place called a pet did a conservancy in central Kenya, and UM, you know, watching predators eat things and trying to understand all those patterns. But there are predators that were around in the past when early humans were eating meat that aren't around today, like saber tooth, and so the only way we're going to understand what it looks like when saber tooth chew on bones and maybe what it looks like when early humans are scavenging from saber tooth or to look at the remains of saber tooth dat um fossils. And so that's another kind of avenue that I'm interested in, Like can I'm still interested in trying to figure out can we can we document different chewing patterns left by different predators. It was a question I asked in my dissertation, you know, almost twenty years ago. It's a question I'm still asking and I'm where I'm still trying to refine those models. And how much during your time you do is how many years? Uh, you know, at least twenty years years? Yeah? Um, how much has yeah we go back twenty years ago. How much has what we know now changed in twenty years? Yeah? So so it's changed. Well, I was gonna say it's changed a lot in the sense that there's been a lot more evidence at it. So we have more sites at up butchery marks. We actually have better techniques for capturing things like the sizes and shapes of butchery marks and carnivore tooth marks. So you know, when I was doing my dissertation, I would make an impression of a tooth mark. I would measure it with a set of calipers, and I would give you a linear measurement. And now people are using like sophisticated high powered microscopes to get a three D shape of those carnivore tooth marks, and they're starting to be able to distinguish between different species. That's awesome. So we can use new tools and techniques, we can go back and look at the same fossil evidence. UM and so I I UM had the privilege of actually doing a pilot um study looking at early human fossils. I was interested in saying, like, well, early humans, if they're encountering carnivores more later in our prehistory, they're probably gonna actually have carnivore bite marks on them. UM. So I studied some early human fossils at the National Museums of Kenya, expecting to find carnivore bite marks, finding none of those, um, maybe finding some marks from other humans. So, UM, you know, can we look at things like cannibalism in our evolutionary history? You can have do you have to stay tuned for that one next time? People a little bit of dark How is cannibalism worked into our human evolution? Now, all this is to me personally, very interesting and like I said, with many of the topics we cover, this one especially, it goes in crazy directions as you start to relate this to who we are, what we are, why we do what we do. I mean, they're just I have like ten lengths of things I read that you've written and other people have written, and then it just becomes a big conversation. So thanks for being a part of that conversation. Thanks for fighting man. Yeah, and I'm gonna go sneak around the Smithsonian. Don't tell anybody I'm gonna I'm gonna follow you that I can't. I can't. I don't want you to become part of the collection, you know, stumble into the wrong. Yeah, I'll be a skeleton in the closet somewhere. You've got a lot of skeletons, a lot of heads. You feel like people The most we could tell people if you if you've never been the Smithsonian, what are you doing with your life? I have been here since I was a kid. Come visit us. You were a big part of putting together the Hall of Origin, which is almost ten years old. Please come visit us. It's still fresh and new and exciting. Yeah, if you want to get kind of like some real thought out distillation of what we're talking about here, it is there. I have some content we just took from from there, and I'll post it up when we post this, so you can kind of see some of that pictures, some video of Brianna talking. But come to see this, bring your kids. Like, I know, you've done a lot of work with teachers on how to educate on human evolution and things like that, so dive in at at your leisure, so please do all right, Thanks Brianna, You're welcome. Thank you. I guess I grew up on a row. That's it. That's all. Thanks to Brianna, Thanks to Phil as always, Thanks to all of you for writing in, for listening, for talking to us, for for a lot of you have really good writers, and a lot of you are really thoughtful talented folks. I am. I'm challenged by it as a writer. Um. One thing you need to do, of all the things you might need to do this holiday season is watch the Back forty now if you haven't. If you don't what the Back forty is, go to Meteator's YouTube channel, find the Back forty and watch from episode one to five. We've done five episodes over this fall, and we just launched episode six yesterday, so you gotta get over there and watch it. Mark Kenyon killed the Wide eight while I was on the property in Michigan with him. It was one of the coolest things I've ever been a part of. I am pretty damn happy with the final product of this episode. We worked a lot, We worked hard on it, so I hope you watch the episode six on Meteor YouTube channel of the Back forty and then we have two more episodes left in the year, so there's episode seven and eight upcoming where we'll find out more about this buck that Mark Kenyon shot and what's happening on the property. I think they're out there shooting the last episode right now, which is episode eight and featuring our friend Ryan kelleyam So stick around for all of that on the Meat Mediator YouTube channel and you'll be watching Back forty. Uh. That's all I got. We got again. I want to we want to reiterate we're doing the best of th HC. We got four shows to fill. Phil There's gonna be a lot of work, so we need your help. T at the media dot Com let us know your favorite moments, your favorite interviews, your favorite people, your favorite jokes, whatever else that you want us to highlight, and we will do it in the coming weeks and months here at th HC. Enjoy your the rest of your week and we'll see you next time. Because I can't go a week without doing run went wrong, drinking in Heaven? Don't sitting at the boss would stop the rong roof feeling like in all on our barros shoes all tell me what is that? H

Save this episode