A Paleontology Of The Future

22:28Michael Stevens:Yeah, yeah. And we'll be back in a moment with more.

22:42This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins?

22:54Michael Stevens:In over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve, like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. and when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible. Indeed it did by a vaccine and it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90 % lower than expected in women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the UK.

23:29This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with.

23:32Michael Stevens:For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science.

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26:16Michael Stevens:Okay, we're back and there's more. The Venus of Tan-Tan did not look like it just kind of naturally wound up there. And so here's a great word, manuport. Oh, I love it. Manuport is like the word manuscript. Okay. Manuscript means handwritten. Manuport means hand carried. Love it. And so a manuport is something that we find that has not been technologically altered or made by humans. But it's in the wrong place. But it's in the wrong place. Oh, I love these. Same with the Venus of Tantan. It might have been that an early hominid, could have been homo sapien, saw it, said, that's a cool rock, picked it up, carried it with them, showed it to their friends.

27:00Michael Stevens:Maybe they did some extra scraping to like really accentuate the human form that they saw in it. And then they lost it. And then we found it later. It's out of place. So it's a manuport. But whether or not it's just a manuport or if it's actually an artifact because it was made is an unknown question. But let me bring up an even cooler manuport. I'm absolutely here for this. This is you're talking my language. OK, so this is cooler. Sorry, did you say rocks, Michael? Yes, I will have a long conversation about rocks. Thank you. This is my favorite. It's called the Makapanskot Pebble. And it was discovered in the 1920s.

27:38Michael Stevens:But based on where it was found, it's been dated to nearly three million years ago. What? Yes. Wait, is that when it was formed? No, that's when it was laid on the ground. Right, because it's found amongst other sediments. That's right. It's been found amongst other sediments and other layers have piled up on top of it for almost 3 million years. To be precise, I don't know how they've dated this to this degree, but it's 2.95 million years ago it was left on the ground and lost. Where is this again? This was discovered in South Africa in the 1920s. Right. And for those of you who are watching, this is what it looks like.

28:19Michael Stevens:For those of you listening, it looks like a pebble that happens to have three little divots cut in it, like the holes in a bowling ball. Looks like a face. It looks like a face. It looks like a face. It looks like a really crude skeleton. Yeah, it does look like a bit of a skull, doesn't it? Mm-hmm. But it's been studied really intensively, and there's just no evidence at all that this was carved by a creature. And I say creature because there were no Homo sapiens three million years ago. This would have been, in fact, in the same sediment, like nearby, they found skeletons of Australopithecus specimens.

29:01Michael Stevens:That's like an early hominid before humans as Homo sapiens evolved. OK, this becomes almost certainly a manuport, almost certainly an instance of, oh, let me also clarify that it's made of jasperite. And the nearest jasperite that you could even find is at least 32 kilometers away from where it was found. I love this so much. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So it's hard to believe anything but the story that three million years ago, an Australopithecus, an early hominid animal that no longer exists, that probably walked upright. We don't even know. All we know is that a creature of that age, of that era, found that rock and for some reason carried it for dozens of kilometers.

29:49Michael Stevens:probably because they thought, guys, this kind of looks like a face, right? Oh my gosh, that is the coolest, coolest thing. It's really cool. And because it is so old, it also gives us a peek at what might be at least a bridge into the first abstract symbolic thought that hominids ever had. Because maybe this creature thought it was worth holding on to because it had the face inside it. Because basically the creature did the Jesus in the toast thing and was like, that's pretty cool. Exactly. The Jesus in the toast thing, the pareidolia thing. Now, animals fall for this all the time. I mean, you can put a cucumber behind a cat and if it turns and looks, it'll think it's a snake at first often and jump.

30:34Michael Stevens:Right. This is this is like not new. But to look at a rock and go, hey, that's kind of like our faces. And then to pick it up and carry it with you is a different sort of behavior. Raccoons and birds, they love interesting things. They like shiny things. I mean, look, I've got a dog who has had a branch that they were obsessed with, you know, that they really particularly wanted to keep and take home. That's right. And I think there's a lot of things they love about that stick, but I don't think that it abstractly resembles a prototypical geometric shape that they're used to, like their own face.

31:09And maybe, maybe it's, this is just a coincidence. Maybe just the fact that these marks on it that have this face-like structure is just a total fluke. But it does seem extremely unusual that you would have this artifact that had been carried so far in an era where so few creatures could do it. And it not be because of what it looked like.

31:32Michael Stevens:Yeah. And I want to be careful. Your dog might actually look at that stick that he loves or she. She. That she loves and go, you remind me of my mother. but probably not. But I'm open to that possibility. But there are a lot of other reasons why a dog would carry a stick around. They love chewing on sticks. But there aren't a lot of other reasons to carry this stone around for so long. So it could be evidence that as early as 3 million years ago, hominids were starting to think and see and categorize in these ever-increasingly abstract ways. Do you know what? I think that's my favorite story you've ever told me.

32:09Oh, really? I really, really, really love that. I really love that.

32:12Michael Stevens:Macca Pond's got pebble. It blew my mind when I read about it. It's geology and anthropology and the wonder of humanity and our existence and where we came from and our ancestors. But there's something also that just really connects us. We're all sort of the same, right? All creatures are like, hey, look at this cool thing. Isn't it awesome? And then the idea that there's this one physical object that has had this journey that then has been found. and now all of us are like, wow, what is this? There's something so alien and yet so comforting about it. I want to eventually get into talking about space archaeology.

32:50Michael Stevens:Just before... Go on, sorry. No, go ahead. Well, I don't know. I think... This better be important. This better be good. The thing I often think about is that this idea that we are so locked into that every single parcel of land within a nation has titles, deeds, ownership. I mean, this really wasn't always the case. No, no, and it doesn't have to be the case. And it doesn't have to be. And it's sort of, if you think about in nature, it doesn't make any sense that you would have hard, distinct boundaries between landscapes that say, this is mine and this is yours. Animals are certainly territorial.

33:36Michael Stevens:Sure. But humans have constructed a giant edifice of ritual and law and enforcement around this concept of ownership. And it's incredibly intricate. And unlike other animals, humans also do things pretty differently because, like, a wolf pack might claim their territory, right, and defend it or whatever. But they don't ask questions that we can like, well, wait a second. If this is our territory, how far down does it go and how far up? Are those birds in our territory? They don't. They don't ask that. But people ask us all the time. I think we've actually been emailed this question quite a few times.

34:16Michael Stevens:OK. Like, OK, so I own my land. But like how far up into the sky does my claim go and how far down? When a plane goes over my house, do I own it? That's right. Does it need to pay me rent? Does it? Yeah. Can I can I charge them for the few seconds that they were over my property or the or the fraction of a second? And you can't. There was an ancient like Latin phrase and I'm not going to even try to pronounce it. But the phrase meant whoever owns the soil owns everything up to heaven and down to hell. And that just made sense to them. But of course, they had that saying before the invention of airplanes, before the discovery of oil, before it was recognized that deposits of certain metal ores would be valuable as a separate right to sell or give to others.

35:09Michael Stevens:And so today, how high above your land and how down below it you own is either very legislated based on where you live or not at all because it just doesn't come up. Right. People will say things like, well, do I own like three miles below me? Sure. Why not? It's never it's never going to come up. Yeah. Like what are you going to do with land three miles below your house with like the rocks down there? How are you going to get at them? You have the right to them, perhaps, but you don't have the right to bring in the heavy machinery required to do a super deep borehole down below your ground because of all kinds of regulations and ordinances.

35:52Michael Stevens:So you just can't ever get to it. You just can't get to it. Okay, but then the oil one is a really interesting example because what if there's an oil field that goes underneath your house? Do you have a right? Do you have a claim over that portion? Again, it depends on where you live. In most places in Texas, you don't. They make it very clear that you own the surface rights to your property. And that's because there's a lot of oil there and they thought about this and they've already sold all the rights to any oil found in this area to certain companies or individuals. So if you find oil, you probably found someone else's oil.

36:24Michael Stevens:And that can be very annoying. And then when it comes to the airspace above your land, the Supreme Court in the United States actually had to say something about this because people were complaining about airplanes. And by people, I mean, at first it was farmers that airplanes were flying too low over their land. And the Supreme Court was like, here's the problem. Like, I know it's been this thing for a long time that you own everything up to heaven above your land. I mean, it's in Latin for goodness sake. It's in Latin. You know, it's very persuasive, but it's just not reasonable anymore. Like we cannot allow all landowners to constantly be leasing out their airspace to every single airplane that might have to fly over.

37:09Michael Stevens:And so the answer in most jurisdictions is that you own the area above your land up to a height of reasonable use. What is that, though? What is reasonable use? It depends on what you're doing. Like you cannot build a structure of a certain height because of different zoning restrictions. Here's what I'm thinking, though. Let's say I've got a neighbor that I really intensely dislike. I'm talking about this in my sort of, you know, London townhouse. Okay. Can I build a really, really, really, really, really tall ladder? Okay. On my land above my house, and then a platform that goes over the top of their house that just blocks out the sun so they don't get any sun?

37:48Michael Stevens:No, you probably can't. I'm sure there are regulations on what sorts of structures you can build on your land. Okay, new idea. Can I get a hot air balloon and permanently hover above their house? Well, you've got to have a license to operate a hot air balloon because other people could be harmed by mistakes that you made or accidents caused by your operation of a hot air balloon. So what I'm getting at is that if you say you own the airspace above your home, but also airplanes can fly over it, then what does it really mean to say you own it? Because there are already laws against all the different ways we can imagine using that space.

38:25Michael Stevens:Same with the space down below. Now, that does bring up some pretty fun questions like, all right, all right, but who owns the center of the Earth? Right. Because also, actually, if you think about the surface and going down to the center, if you peel it off in shells, they get smaller and smaller as you go down. Yeah. So there's more and more claims on. That's right. So the wedges of land on the surface, they just come to a point at the center. Teeny, teeny tiny in the center. So someone made a joke once that like near the center of the earth, like everyone's your neighbor. It's true. And so, again, there hasn't been a lot of official judicial rulings on this because it never comes up.

39:06Michael Stevens:Right. But there's good stuff down there. There's good stuff down there. Really good stuff down there. I mean, to put this into perspective, the Earth is what's the radius of the Earth? It's 6 ,371 kilometers on average. On average. I was going to say there's definitely. Let's be precise here. Excuse me. Which axis are we measuring here? But all that matters is 6 ,000 is a really big number. And that's the distance from the surface of the Earth to the center. The deepest anyone has ever dug is not 6 ,000, not 1 ,000, but 12. 12? 12 kilometers is the depth of the Kola super deep borehole. What?

39:49Michael Stevens:Which the Russians dug. That's nothing. It's nothing. It's only a third of the way through the crust. It's like not even close to the next part, the mantle, that we all learn about in school. And like we haven't even gotten halfway there. This is really destroying my plans to dig all the way through and have a bungee jump system. Yes. That you just bounce back and forth forever. The borehole that they dug, I think a lot of the reason they did it was it was a sort of inverse space race. See how far you can go. Yeah. And can we beat the Americans at it? because America had tried something like this and they gave up.

40:26And so the Russians were like, well, we didn't beat them to the moon,

40:30Michael Stevens:but we can beat them to the mantle. How hard could it be? How hard could it be? Turns out terribly hard and surprisingly hard and frighteningly hard. Go on. Here's what they did. So they start digging, right? And they just are going to dig and they get deeper and deeper. And they don't really know what to expect. Like one hypothesis was that there's not going to be any water after a certain depth because the ground will become too densely packed for even water to permeate. Too much pressure. But they kept finding water, like liquid water, way deeper than any scientist at the time thought was possible.

41:03Like pools of water? Or are we talking about just sort of soaked into the porousness of the rock?

41:08Michael Stevens:I actually don't know. I don't think they found underwater ponds, but it was wet. Also, they figured that down there, you know, beyond 10 kilometers down, The temperature could be above boiling, like 100 Celsius to 12 Fahrenheit. Gosh, that is hot. Yeah, they expected it to be hot, but it was hotter than they'd expected. Instead of being about 100, it was like 180 Celsius, like 365, like hot roasting potato temperature. Whoa. Down 12 kilometers below the earth. Gosh. And we still don't know why it was so much hotter than expected. Yeah. Obviously, the first thing you go to is hell is real. and they were getting close.

41:53Michael Stevens:I feel like that's the only sensible explanation. So they stopped. Like they just stopped. And not because they were scared because at that pressure and heat, the stone, the rock that they were drilling through stopped acting like stone and acts like plastic. And the drag, like the grip that the material had on the drill bit just made it not, it didn't work. I also want to know, for 12 kilometers down, did they have like stages where it's like you start off with a really big borehole and then you have a slightly smaller one and then a slightly smaller one or are you just like is it just a one 12 kilometer long drill bit it's it's just oh no they don't have a 12 kilometer long drill bit but they i don't know how you drill a hole that deep right i don't know actually um but i have always wondered like where are these 12 kilometer long drill bits i think they they have shafts coming through they've got shafts that i'm sure are like segmented and they'll drill until it's at the bottom and they have to like pull it up and they'll only pull up to like a joint and then they'll separate at the joint, add in another section and then go down.

42:57Michael Stevens:So you're not having to pull the whole thing out every time. Yeah, that makes sense. I actually went on Jimmy Kimmel to talk about this borehole. This exact borehole. I mentioned it in a video and then someone from his team called up and they were like, Jimmy wants you to talk about big holes. I can do that Jimmy and I played I played up the heat thing a bunch on the on the show I was like it was hotter than they expected and they stopped but I didn't I didn't explain that it was because of the material properties of the stone it wasn't because like a demon came out or anything what you're saying is we get the extended we get the director's cut version that you did not give that's right this is the extended director's cut of my Jimmy Kimmel appearance okay so I wanted to say when was this by the way the borehole the cola super deep borehole was completed in 1989, reaching just a little over 12 kilometers in depth.

43:48I mean, if you if you turn that into a super seller, you know, you could have swimming pools down there. You could have cinema rooms down there, ballrooms down there.

43:57Michael Stevens:It's it's really narrow. It's like this. It's like you couldn't really even fit your head down it. Yeah. OK. Swimming pool for ants. A swimming pool for ants. That's right. But it's a swimming pool for no one right now, because you know what they did? Tell me. They just welded a lid over it. What? Yep. So there's like a little, like smaller than a manhole because this is a thin borehole and they've just welded it over and you can't even like drop things down it. Okay, but if you did, if you did open it up and just like drop something down it, it'd be like, listen for 12 kilometers before it hits the bottom.

44:34Michael Stevens:How long would that take, I wonder? It's a very simple calculation. You know, I think people falling down wells, by the way, It used to be a quite common occurrence. And it doesn't happen like it should anymore. Times are just getting worse. Sometimes I think we forget to be grateful about the society that we live in now. But falling down a well is not something that we continually have to get in with. That's right. Like kids today are all on their phones. Back in my day, they were falling down wells like God intended. Yeah. I mean, look, wells just they're great. But I think that even when I was a kid, there was baby Jessica who fell down a well and was rescued.

45:12Michael Stevens:Who's baby Jessica? Oh, my gosh. You're so not American. I know. What gave it away? Look it up, guys. It's a heroic story. Since then, I think just municipal water supply to rural areas has made wells a lot less prevalent and a lot less, therefore, dangerous. All the same, though, the cola borehole. Super deep borehole. Super deep borehole. Give it credit. It's almost certainly full of water now. Probably, right? A boiling at the bottom. Ooh, maybe it's a bit of a geezer. A bit of, you mean a geyser? Is that how you guys pronounce geyser? A geyser. A geyser. It's a word with double meaning. A bit of a geyser.

45:53Michael Stevens:Right, but geyser also means like an old person. A geyser is definitely male. Somebody who would enjoy football and drinking pints of beer. That's so different. In America, a geezer is a really old person. Is it? Oh, look at those geezers. And it's like some people who can barely walk. Oh. Yeah. It's sort of like a bit of a wide boy, you know? No, I don't. Someone who probably enjoys betting. That's what a geezer is to you. Bit of a geezer. Or it's a spout of water from geothermal heat. Yeah, because that's what happens there, right? Is that you have a really long crack that runs down or a hole that runs down, uh i mean nowhere near as far as the super deep borehole but if you get like a crack that appears uh so not just vertically but horizontally where you get superheated water oh like a kettle like a natural kettle right and then the pressure difference can mean that that will sort of uh need to release as it builds up the pressure builds up and it releases and then you end up these like no spouts of water you get them in iceland a lot for example yeah uh and you call it a geyser and i call it a geyser yeah i actually feel it might be an icelandic word because i don't live that far away from yellowstone national park oh yeah of course where you've got old faithful i think they're called geysers because the first english speakers to see one were like hey what's that and some dude was like ah that's just the old faithful guy and then he realized it was his superior and goes sir that's called a belabored pun i i enjoy that i enjoy that geyser It is an Icelandic word.

47:28And you do say geyser in British English. I didn't just make it up. I'm sure you didn't. Yeah, it is a hot spring in southwestern Iceland called geyser. Geyser. Old Norse means to gush.

47:40Michael Stevens:So the word geyser for the natural phenomenon comes from the Icelandic geyser. Can I tell you the Americanism, the American word that annoys me the absolute most? Yeah. Entrees to mean main course. Yeah, I know. That is so annoying. I know. That has been a huge point of confusion for my daughter because she sees on a menu entree. And my wife considers that the appetizer. Which is, in France, it's the starter. As it should be because the word is like the introduction, the entrance, the entree. But then in America, I don't know why, but I'm sure there's a good reason why. Now it means your main course.

48:23Michael Stevens:It does. And so my daughter hears from my wife that it means appetizer and then from me doing the etymology that it means the beginning. And then we're like, but disregard what we've said, because actually it means the main course. There was once when I was filming in Northern California with the Yurok tribe with some indigenous Americans talking about ownership of land. I mean, the whole idea of land being kind of cut up into parcels that are owned by individual people is something that just didn't make any sense at all. Yeah. The indigenous Americans. and it's still ongoing fights about exactly that.

48:56And I was there filming with them about a story around a river and the ownership of the river. Anyway, I got on really well with this chief. He was really amazing. And as we were chatting, I mentioned to him how annoying I found the entree thing. And I sort of said to him, you know what? I think the worst thing about Americans, the worst thing about Americans is that they do this, right? Is that this is what they do. and his response was okay oh really okay the worst thing the worst thing the worst thing of all that's the thing that annoys you the absolute most everything else they've done to the tribe that you're here to pales in comparison comparison this entree business right but hear me out though because here's my argument because i think what's clearly happened there is that they've sort of taken a bit of French culture, yeah, taken it for their own and not paid any respect for the origin of where it came from.

49:52So it's the same thing. Thin end of the wedge, Michael. Yeah.

49:55Michael Stevens:My goodness. I found another manuport. You got to show it to me. Because it's really good. Okay, 300 ,000 years ago. Okay. Also Morocco. Oh, oh, I know what it is. I know what it is. Good. It's the... Cuttlefish. Yeah, the air food cuttlefish. Yes. Were you just looking them up or did you already know about it? No, I'm just looking it up. Okay, so I didn't know if this would be appropriate for the podcast, but yes. Do you want to tell us about it? Sure, I can tell you. So this is, it's a cuttlefish fossil and... Well, it's part of a cuttlefish fossil. Okay, but it was found at a site near the towns of Erfurt and Rosani in eastern Morocco, found among a dense cluster of stone tools, right?

50:44So really early humans. No evidence of carving or shaping have been detected. Cutterfish fossils are not native to this region at all. So it has been moved. It has definitely been manuported. And the reason why this one is quite famous is because it looks very phallic, shall we say.

51:04Michael Stevens:So much so that Wikipedia doesn't even have an image of it on there. Right. So I had to Google it. And as soon as I Googled it, everyone eating breakfast around me was like this guy. Honestly, I couldn't believe it. You could not have this up on your screen at work. No. And so you can you can clearly see why a prehistoric like earliest homo sapien possible. 300 ,000 years ago is about when our species emerged, saw that and was like, guys, oh, my gosh, you got to show this to Sarah. And they like carry it around forever. It's a big joke. And it's a cuttlefish fossil that suddenly appears in Morocco very far from where it originated.

51:45This makes me, I cannot tell you how happy this makes me. Isn't it?

51:48Michael Stevens:It's like something that we share that hasn't changed in us for millennia. 300 ,000 year old dick jokes. Yeah. Absolutely amazing. And so what would you say is going on here? Because I don't think there's an experience that non-human animals have that's like this. We know that birds and raccoons and they all love curious, shiny things. Sure. But they don't hold them on, pass them around. As far as we know, especially for reasons that are so abstracted away, they might think it's curious because it's shiny. But they don't go, this looks like, remember that one time, Ted, when your pants fell down?

52:23Michael Stevens:And then it's like a whole running gag their whole lives and through generations. But that's what these manuports represent. That's what they are. That's what they are. Absolutely amazing. Tell you what this makes me wonder, though. is like, in 300 ,000 years' time, what are the things that are going to be left? What are the things that people are going to see where they infer how we are and how, you know, our own character and the things that we find funny and the things that we find amusing? Exactly. And that's why I started with Tranquility Base because we are still living in constantly what will be archaeological sites for the future.

53:03Michael Stevens:And increasingly, these significant, like super significant human archaeological sites will not even be on Earth. And so being mindful of how we preserve them is a great gift that we can give to people in the future. When Hector Station was being used in Antarctica, they didn't think like, hey, this is a great way for us to preserve Victorian industry. They just abandoned it and it's kind of falling apart and rusted. But we can say no one touch Tranquility Base. No one touch the Perseverance rovers. And we can leave the curiosity, leave it there. We're going to eventually make it an exhibit right in situ, right where it is.

53:46Michael Stevens:And this isn't just like a little like poetic dream of mine. It's happening now. And it makes me so happy. So there's a group out of Chapman University and USC out of Southern California, and they're running a program or they ran a program for many years, very recently, just in the last three or four years. And the program was called the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment or Square. Oh, you academics. I know. I know. But here's what they did. They said, guys, the International Space Station is this whole new kind of human settlement where there are people who live there and they have to work with completely different variables.

54:24Michael Stevens:There is gravity. There's no G. There's no G. There's no weight. And we're just kind of like updating it all the time and new people come in and leave. And like we need to remember how early space livers lived. So they made little taped squares, quadrangles all over the ISS. And like every few minutes or every few hours, the astronauts would take a picture of that square, everything that was in that taped square. They didn't pose it. These weren't posed photos. This was just like, oh, I got to take that photo of the table. And they would do it. And so you learn by looking at these like, oh, that's how often they use frosting.

55:06Michael Stevens:And hey, what was that? oh, that's a thing that they were doing as this joke one day. And you tell the story very candidly, very fly on the wall, about human culture in the 2020s in outer space. And it's preserved better than what probably would be left to people in the future if we didn't take photos like that. Absolutely. Otherwise, it just ends up being erased by what comes immediately after it. That's right. Yeah, that's it. I guess we're looking back in the past at these tiny little fragments, these like whispers of what went before. And it's only by actively and proactively making the choice to try and preserve what we have that we're leaving anything for the future.

55:48Michael Stevens:I know. And just like these Australopithecuses left us a funny face-shaped rock and it shows us their transition from like ape thinking to hominid thinking. who knows what we're doing that in three million years will give evidence, important evidence of how we were changing from, say, a meat consciousness to an expanded or shrunk digital consciousness. Right. And these are things that we take for granted. But preserving them, whether they be here on Earth or elsewhere, is, I think, not just a responsibility we have, but a really fun thing to do. Well, one way for you guys to preserve your love for this podcast is to like and subscribe, basically.

56:36Michael Stevens:That's a very good point. This is the archaeology. Do you want people in the future to not know whether you were subscribed to The Rest is Science? Could your legacy live with that kind of embarrassment? Look, you need to do your part for humanity, okay? And it's very simple. Do your bit. Or, as ever, you can send us an email to therestisscience at goldhanger.com. And we will see you next time. We certainly will. Thank you.

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