August 16, 2016 • 50 mins
It was only 11000 years ago that the last true woolly mammoths died out, close enough to the modern age that humans lived alongside them. But were humans the cause of mammoths' sudden extinction or was climate change to blame?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Frondhouse Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:28):
I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's
Jerry over there. So this is Stuff you should Know
before you started. I want to say best of luck
to mind. You means wonderful, great best friends Brandon and Laurel,
who are at this moment in the delivery room blow
Laurel's water broke. They're expecting their firstborn child. Wow. So
(00:51):
by the time this releases, it will be like six
years old. Yeah, pretty much, because we we have a
six year Yeah, so good luck guys. It's great. Yeah.
You should tell him that personally so they actually hear this.
I recorded it. That's enough. They'll give what they get
and be happy with it. Yeah. You you uh excited
(01:14):
about willy mammoths? I am you? Are you not? I
think it's I think they're wonderful, wily anything plus also
like a wooly mammoth. They were. They were sweet, good natured.
They could take a joke at their own expense, but
they weren't self deprecating. They just you know, had a
good sense of humor. Yeah, anything related to an elephant,
(01:37):
okay in my book, Yeah, I agreed. I have a
very big love for that animal. Well, it's a big animal,
deserves a lot of love, and they're just wonderful in
every way that they grieve over their dead. Oh God,
there's this one story about Domini. I believe it's the
name of the elephant that um. I think he or
(01:59):
she was a zoo and had like a best friend,
and the best friend died and this elephant could not
get over it, and she died of I think the
zoo keepers like, she died of a broken heart. You
can't take that she she grieved herself to death. Um.
And I think the story is even more tragic than that.
I'm not doing it justice, but just go go research
Domini the elephant d A m A N. I You're like, whatever,
(02:21):
it's kind of funny, right, he'll tickle your ribs. I
don't know if I did it justice. Did it come
across as funny stupid elephant? Well, you know what's even
cuter than a wooly mammoth? Oh yeah, Well, what's cuter
than an elephant is an elephant with hair. So that's
a wily mammoth, okay, or a mastodon, as we'll talk
(02:43):
about a little bit. Those are different, totally different. Yeah,
but they have hair. Not as much, yeah, but they
have hair. Yeah, but you wouldn't look at it and
be like, oh, that's wooly. You just be like, that's
kind of hairy, yeah, stubborly. But the only thing cuter
than a hairy elephant is a tiny hairry elephant. And
there was a place, well there still is a place
(03:04):
called Wrangel Island and they don't have them anymore. But
at one point, not too long ago, in the grand
scheme of you know, the history of everything, right, uh,
the Wrangel Island mammoths roamed the earth. And they are
how tall are they? Like human height? Right at the shoulder?
(03:26):
They were four to six ft tall. Oh man, So yeah,
it's like a mini wooly mammoth, give me one. And
they were directly descended from the wooly mammoths they just
ended up on this island, and the island is pretty good.
Size is the size of Delaware from what I understand.
But that's small enough. But that's small enough, well for
an island, you know, but it's small enough that that
(03:46):
they became dwarf. They went under that. Um what's that
process called where a population lands on an island and
it immediately begins to diminish in size. I don't know,
I haven't heard of that island fever, something weird like that.
Because they wanted to ride the roller coasters on the way,
you'd have to be bigger. Maybe they were scared of
roller coasters, That's what I meant. They're like, we're getting
(04:07):
out of here and we're gonna shrink, so we couldn't
possibly go on a roller coaster. But they butchered that one.
They were around for you, butcher them like a Wrangel
Island wooly mammoth. So they were around, uh until about
three thousand years ago, something like thirty years ago. I
think they were the last of their kind. Were on
(04:29):
Wrangle Island in six b C. And dude, by that time,
the pyramids were already a thousand years old. Like people,
they shared territory with people, but most I shouldn't say most,
A lot of the wooly mammoths, especially the ones that
lived at the end of the Place of Steem place
to scene. That's a tough one to say that scene,
(04:51):
is it not. Yes, I think that's right, but I
always want to like take continents and switch them around
and shuffle it up. Well, you're an anarchist, yeah, especially
with words. Um, I even hate the word anarchists. You
call it anarchist. Yeah, yeah, but uh, I mean that
threw me off. Sorry, Yeah, man, what was I saying? Oh? Yeah,
(05:15):
they did coexist with humans. Yeah, Like it's the one
thing the flint Stones were right about. When you see
a big willy mammoth in Fred flint Stone, that was
entirely possible that the dinosaurs, the Brnos source all that
stuff just fantasy. And if that wily mammoth on the
flint Stones was used to watch a car or some
other household chore, completely real, right. Yeah. They were very
(05:40):
helpful in addition to having a great sense of humor.
They would help you out around the house. That was
one of my favorite parts of The flint Stones. I
remember when I was a kid watching that and just
being so tickled every time a bird's beak was used
to play a record, and they were always just like
so willingly, like just tilt me down and I'll play
your record. Yeah, I love that stuff. And then every
(06:00):
once in a a while but they would thank the animal
and the animal be like oh man, most of the days.
So the Wrangel Island mammoths for around until about years ago, um,
and they survived the extinction of the rest of the
mammoths about four thousand years earlier. Right, Yeah, And if
(06:20):
we're talking, like if you look at the dinosaurs, they
left us sixty five million years ago, So this is
all very recent stuff. Like people hunted wooly mammoths and
ate them and use their bones and tusks and wore
their skin, I imagine, and uh not worshiped well we
(06:40):
don't really know for sure, but at least revered them
enough to put them in their cave art. Uh. So
this is all kind of really cool stuff to me.
We know a lot about them compared to a lot
of other extinct species, right, but where they went remains
a mystery a bit. Yeah, I mean it's definitely not definitive,
and there's a lot of theories. But there's really they
melted remember that one? Yeah, what was that from? It
(07:06):
was from one of our earlier podcasts. That was my
personal theory on like where like the proto humans one
or something. I don't even know they melted. Yeah, I
forgot all about that. That's an old one. And not
only that, my friend, but um, we have they have
like relatives, distant cousins still roaming the earth today because
(07:26):
if you look at the African bush and the African
forest elephants and the Asian elephant actually the closest, it's
very close. Yeah not, I mean it's close and distant.
If that makes sense, It doesn't. How do you mean? Well,
I mean it's close enough to say it's the closest relative.
(07:47):
But they're still distant cousins. You know, they don't have
the hair or the high sloping back or the curly
tusk right or yeah with the finger like grippers. Yeah yeah, um,
but they're still pretty close close enough that some mad
scientists are like Wickham resurrect wooly Mammoth's using the Asian
elephant because we have DNA right like when they found
(08:09):
and they have found a lot of these carcasses. Some
some of them really intact. I mean enough, like there's
brain and bone and blood and uh yeah, basically the
whole thing. It's just the slightly mummified so there's like
water loss. Other than that, it's all there. Like there's
one called um man this is tough word to say,
(08:31):
and there's another another continent Switchero. My brain wants to
pull liuba it means love in Russian. Was just a
little guy, yeah, the little baby. Yeah, this was not
a miniature. It was actually a calf right, It was
a baby baby wooly mammoth um. I think maybe like
a month old or something like that. But it was
(08:52):
still die. Yeah. And and then in lifness would have
weighed about um a hundred a hundred kilos or two
pounds now a hundred pounds fifty kilos. That's missing half
of its um weight and water while it was alive
when you'd want to pick it up and now now
(09:12):
you just kind of patted on the head and be
like you stay over there. Yeah. When was that found?
Two thousand seven? Yeah, and um it was found perfectly
preserved because apparently she had been colonized by a um
uh some sort of lactic acid producing bacteria that effectively
pickled her. So it preserved her, but it also made
(09:33):
her very unappetizing scavengers too. She tasted weird, right, So, um,
she's a really good example of a wooly mammoth. And
I can't remember how many tens of thousands of years
old she is, but she's pretty old. So we do
have this access to all these great specimens, and they've
figured out that about the shelf life of viable DNA
(09:57):
is a million years So there's plenty of wooly ammoths
that who's DNA we have access to that's much younger
than a million years old. And yeah, we'll talk about it.
But some people are like, let's bring them back, let's
de extinct them. Yeah, tricky territory. Oh yeah, but so
Willie mammoth pretty cute. It's not a sabretooth tiger, right,
(10:19):
that's not tricky. You just don't do that. But the
kind of the long and the short of all this,
with the distant cousins and all of the uh preserved
carcasses we found is that we have a really robust
picture of how these things lived and what they were like.
And um, I guess we'll take a break here and
we'll get a little bit into their you know, they're
(10:40):
nine to five. Job, we'll go back to the mammoth world.
(11:01):
All right. So if you picture in your mind a
wooly mammoth, you might think, all right, frozen waste land.
Uh and like Siberia, Right, they just eat like snow Wrong,
snow cones. That's wrong. I'm sure they appreciated again, snow cone.
They like Italian nights more than the snow cone. They're
(11:24):
a little more European. But what was actually going on
is they were they were trotting upon land what was
called a mammoth step st e p pe mm hmm,
not the step variety. Sure there's an extra p. Yeah,
like a steppy boy. It's not pronounced steppi is it? No? Okay, No,
(11:46):
when you first encountered the word, it is uh. And
this is this was basically it was sort of a
unique time in the in the history of planet Earth
in that it was rich. These areas were rich with
stuff for them to eat, just like overloaded with vegetation. Yeah.
(12:07):
One thing, were veggie eaters. Yeah, they were, they were
um actually um grassland grazers. You can call them. So
they ate long um long grasses sedges, which is like
a fake grass, but all intends of purposes. Yeah, they
come upon a basil field. Man, it was all over
like oh man, it's Italian night. So um, they ate
(12:31):
grasses and they were herbivores and they ate this pretty
specific diet and it certainly wasn't snow based and it
was definitely cooler, which is I think another reason why
people think, um they they they lived in a frozen wasteland. Well,
because they needed that coat, they did. And the reason
(12:53):
why is because they were living in the Pleistocene, which
was definitely it was a series of ice ages, right. Um,
so it was colder. It's like five to ten degrease
celsius colder than it is globally now. But the the
whole ecosystem was just utterly different than what it is today.
So like if you did manage to bring back Willy
(13:14):
Mammoth and you put him on the Siberian step, they'd
be like, well, I'm going to starve. There's nothing here
for me to eat. Things have changed. If you put
them in Arizona or New Mexico or someplace where it
might kind of look the same with the shrubbery and
brush and grasses. Uh, they would say, no, I can't
live here either, kind of die here too. It's too hot.
(13:37):
Why did you bring me back? Really didn't think this through,
that's right. But what you also had, though, is a
pretty nice I mean, it was colder, but it was
it was kind of nice weather for a wily mammoth.
It was the sea levels had dropped, so it exposed
all this great land for them to roam, and it
was very breezy and clear and kind of lovely, easy, freezy, beautiful, easy, breezy,
(14:01):
beautiful for wooly mammoth. Yeah. Because again, well we'll talk
about their coat. Actually, we can talk about it right now.
So their coat was, um, are you familiar with a
musk ox? Oh? Yeah, it was like that. It was
like a skirt of long hair. But beneath that was
wooly undercoat that really kept them warm. Yeah, the outer coat,
(14:24):
and we've talked about a lot of mammals, most of
them have like layers of different kinds of fur. But um,
the outer coat was the guard for and then under
like you said, was the the wooly undercoat. And below
that they had an inch of skin, very oily, and
below that they had three to four inches of fat
and all of this stuff made them nice and cozy
(14:45):
and warm. But they were de delicious to eat man
oily skin inches of fat. Yeah, I'm just gonna ignore that,
all right, Uh, twenty hours a day they spent eating,
I guess, fattening themselves up for for me, for you.
(15:07):
So they would just roam around and eat man and
get along with each other. They were you know, I
was about to say peaceful, which they kind of were
unless they were infringed upon. And you don't want to
mess with the willie mammoth alone, right, No, they they
This article puts it that in a standing fight they
could take all commerce. They were definitely like they could
(15:28):
defend themselves. And for the most part, apparently the major
predators of the day um would not have taken a
healthy adult mammothon. They would have like maybe followed a
herd because the mammoth's um you were. If you saw
a single mammoth, it was a male, or if you
saw a herd of them, it was females and calves
(15:50):
female calves, yeah right, or it could be male calves
or nursing still before they went off on their own teenager.
They sent them off pretty young though, I think maybe
starting when they were teenagers. Um. And either way, no
short faced bear or sabretooth tiger is going to take
(16:11):
on one of these guys by themselves. It would be
like a calf that fell behind yeah, um, or like
uh one that was sick or dying or trapped in
like a tar pit. You would leap out with your
clob spear, my knife and fork and have dinner my
napkin tied around my neck. Uh. And they were they did,
(16:34):
you know, share their their area with these fearsome creatures
like the sabretooth tiger. And there was actually something called
a wooly rhinoceros, which is exactly what you think it is. Yeah,
I'll bet you would not want to mess with that.
I'd want to scratch him behind the ear. Oh, rhinocero.
I are tough and mean. I know. That's the problem
with me. As I see these things, and I think,
(16:56):
like a big tiger, I think all that guy needs
is he looks like my Yeah, you know you should
not go a little just to give him a good
scratch behind the ear. And they're like, oh, well, I
kind of like this guy, he's not up to get me.
That's not what they do, I know. But that's why
I don't take Safari's I'd be the dope that you
know tried to pet the cheetah. Oh my god, did
(17:17):
you see the video of the woman who got out
of her car in a tiger preserve and was like
the just like a it's like a like a security camera,
so it's a steady shot. And I don't know what
the lady was doing out of the car. I think
maybe in China, and she's just standing there one second,
then all of a sudden, the tiger comes in frame
(17:38):
and just pulls her right out of frame. And then
like her sister and husband get out of the car,
and I think her sister was killed as well, and
the husband like just runs back and dives into the car.
But what were they doing out of the car, And
like this huge tiger at least the size of the
woman just comes and just grabs her. Was nuts, well,
(18:00):
really disturbing. Yeah, I don't want to see that. Then
you probably shouldn't. You'd still be like I'd still pet
that tiger. No, I wouldn't pet that tiger. You put
that another one. What was the name of the grizzly Man,
Timothy tread Well or Treadway. I think tread well Man. Yeah,
that was a disturbing The best you should that was
(18:24):
the best part was a terrible You should narrate everything.
He should. He should do every commercial, voice over, every documentary,
just you name it. He should do this podcast. They
should go back and redo the voiceover the Alec Baldwin
did for the Royal. Tannon bombs Burner put a different
(18:45):
spin on things. I think Royal was born in the avenue.
Now that's a good herzog. It's not bad. All you
have to do is try and do it like an
evil mad german scientist or something. Colonel clink Colonel clink um,
where were we? We were talking about how um they
(19:05):
could defend themselves. You'd still want to pet him, and
they'd probably be okay with you petting them. They just
accidentally trample you. Yeah, exactly. Elephant. Uh, those little calves
were born in the springtime. Uh. And here's something that
will come into factor later when they were wiped from
the planet. They have a very long gestation period. It's
(19:26):
twenty two months, so you know they're not pumping out
these calves with great regularity. It takes a long time,
almost two years. Yeah, that's that's a while. So they
would have been impregnated I guess, uh summer, late summer
a year previous, and then born in the spring because
they adapted to do that because there was more to eat,
(19:50):
you know. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, it's lovely.
There's stuff blooming everywhere. Look at that basil field and
so it We don't know exactly what they're society was like,
but just based on modern elephants, paleontologists have surmised that
they were very social. Most likely. There's mammoth track ways
(20:12):
that we've found fossilized footprints UM that show a number
of mammoths walking side by side and amongst one another
UM and they're clearly different size footprints. So there's different
generations all walking together, which would indicate that they probably
have similar societies to elephants. Right, the dead and stuff
(20:34):
like that. Yeah, defend their dead, grieve over them, man,
it's really tough. UM. And that they probably came together
in annual migrations, although the evidence for that is still lacking.
And if they did migrate, I think I saw somewhere
that they probably didn't go more than four miles. So
still that's I don't go more than four dred miles
(20:55):
when I walk. I don't either anymore, So hats off
to the manuths are walking that far. When they would
go into heat the female, Like many mammals and many animals,
there would be a competition of sorts among the men, uh, everywhere,
from you know, puffing their chest out and flaunting to
(21:16):
just straight up fighting with one another. I guess if
times were tough, there weren't a lot of ladies around.
And and that is a lot like the modern elephant
as well. Uh. And and that they had what's called
a must gland u s t not musk, which is
easy to say, must must. It's even when you've been
(21:40):
drinking a lot. I don't know that's exactly what it
sounds like. Or if you're Cindy Brady right, or if
you're missing a tooth right, Oh yeah, you're getting psyched.
I am getting psyched. And I'm also I was like,
can I just get it done before this, Like I'm
going to Paris for three it's for God's sakes. And
(22:01):
I was reading about Paris and they're like, if you
don't want to stand out, you know, Americans are kind
of if you want to blend in American French or preasons,
kind of chic, like you know, you should you know,
clean cut, and you know you shouldn't wear T shirts
and shorts and tenny shoes. And it's like, man, I'm
going to be the most American dude. They're you might
(22:22):
as well just go with it, where like there's nothing
chic about me. Yeah, just walk around your me and
these and an ill fitting T shirt and flip flops
is like born in the USA T shirt? Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah,
with an American eagle on your head. Yeah, and on
the back it says have you seen my tooth? They're
gonna love you. Yeah, we'll see. Well, we're also going
(22:47):
to the land of bad dentistry? So or is that
in the UK? They're gonna welcome us with me with
open arms. Oh yeah, they're gonna be like he's one
of us. Is that a thing still? I thought? No,
I'm sure it's gotten better, but it's still a joke
that we can make. Oh god, I think so, or
Mike Myers can We'll find out we have no idea,
how our humor is gonna go over there probably fall flat.
(23:09):
I we'll see um. All right, So there they have
the musk gland and that secretes a fluid which um.
And I think that just sort of it says here
it establishes their higher they're mating hierarchy there. It's like
a pheromone gland. Yeah, so whoever has the musk not
(23:29):
must oh desecrete musk. I'm sure you could call it that,
or it secretes must Let's talk about their tusks, because
here's something I didn't know. The tusks actually have evolved
from their incisors. And then I mean it makes perfect sense.
(23:50):
It's like Lisa Simpson with that um where she didn't
have a dental plan, so like her tooth was gonna
grow up through her. Remember that they have like a
projection or something. Yeah remember that? Uh yeah, that's exactly
what it's like. Actually these outward Yeah, and they twist around.
(24:11):
You know, if you've seen pictures of mammoths before, if not,
look one up and it's not like a standard just
curby elephant tusk. It's just beautiful the way it swoops around. Yeah,
and I believe like they could get up to like
sixteen ft long. It's enormous. That's a big tusk. Uh.
And we'll talk a little more about how they were used.
But they here here to me is one of the
(24:32):
saddest things. They go through. Well, first of all, their
other teeth are foot long, their molars, which is remarkable.
And they go through six sets of teeth like the
modern elephant, over a sixty year lifespan. And they die
after the last set of teeth is worn out. Yeah,
and that's just like the saddest thing ever. They their
(24:55):
last prune and kilo. Yeah, Like I guess they I
mean to me because he human, I assume they sense
this like this, this is it? Well that and then
they see me stalking on with my knife and fork
and napkin because I wouldn't kill a mammoth. I just
eat it after a diet of natural causes. Oh well,
that's different. You just waited out until they had a
(25:16):
loss of teeth. I'm like a jackal or a vulture.
Would herb herban board taste better or worse than a
beautiful Yeah? Yeah, grass fed? All right, Uh, chuck, let's
take a break and we'll come back, and we're gonna
talk about where wooly mammoth's come from, came from past tense.
(25:54):
All right, we're back. It's gonna have been a strong
my friend. So, you know, wooly mammoths resemble elephants. They
have a common ancestor. And what's that. There's a very
primitive Elephantine animal type of animal called the probosidian. And
actually if you look at the wooly mammoth, the massed
(26:16):
on some of those old ancient ones. Um their their
order they belong to, So I think it goes species
genus order, no species genus family order. Yeah, the order
they belong to is um probosidia. And it's like um,
like a you know, a bug has a probiscus, same thing. Uh,
(26:41):
that's basically Greek for nose. I believe it is. So
this the Greeks are just poking fun at their noses
and they this uh split off from the million years ago.
It split off from the mamillion tree. It's a long
time ago, right, And all this is happening in a Frica.
The elephant family, the probe probos probositians, they all were
(27:08):
found in Africa. That's where they evolved and then they
eventually spread out of Africa up into the Sinai and
over into Europe and then up into Asia, just like
humans did. Um, and I think something like seven million
years ago the first mammoths developed in Africa. No, they
weren't and we'll get to ye in a second. They
were like they were mammoths, but they yeah, they weren't
(27:31):
Willie like you said. They hung around in Africa for
about four million years, about three million years ago they
started to spread, and then about one point seven one
point eight million years ago the Earth changed dramatically. It
entered the Pleistocene. And again the palist scene was characterized
with huge dips in global temperature. It's been a hot
(27:51):
house up to that point, and all of a sudden
it's like getting cold, and there's like glacial periods and
all that. And now the mammoths are starting to adapt
to the cold. Now they became wooly and um kind
of differentiated from southern mammoths, uh, and became wooly mammoth's. Yeah,
there was one in particular, the largest one of all,
(28:12):
the step mammoth, and this sucker was fourteen feet and
that's always at the shoulder, right, yes, And that correct,
what do I don't measure from the top of the head,
because you can like make yourself seem taller by lifting
your head up, and they would do that when you
mammoth's great sense of humor delicious really uncooperative at the doctor, right,
(28:36):
wanted to be taller. Uh. And this one they think
originated in northeastern Eurasia, and uh was the ancestor most
likely of the wooly mammoth shaggy but not wooly. No,
it wasn't wooly. And the wooly mammoth actually is the
smallest of them all right, So not only did they
adapt to the cold with their wooly coat, right, they
(28:59):
actually had some really interesting adaptations with their blood and um.
One of the things they figured out that it was
that the willing mammoth had this pretty cool system where
their arteries, which carried warm blood from the heart to
the extremities, were really close to their blood vessels, which
(29:20):
brought deoxygen aated cold blood from the extremities back to
the heart. Well. The fact that the arterial blood vessels
were close to the veins means that the warm blood
would actually warm the blood in the veins on the
way back to the heart, so that the heat never
really made it out of the core. It kept the
core very warm, which is important, um. And it meant
(29:45):
the extremities were very cold, which is much less important
as long as you still have blood flow. And then
they also had this hemoglobin that could so hemoglobin clumps
onto oxygen and delivers it throughout the body. Right. Well,
it takes a little bit of heat energy to get
the hemoglobin to let go of the oxygen, but you
want as much heat energy as you can possibly have
(30:07):
if you're wooly mammoth on the steps, right. Um. So
they figured out get this by taking forty three thousand
year old wooly mammoth, the na, isolating the genes that
expressed hemoglobin that led to the expression of hemoglobin, and
then it's inserting it into E. Coli bacteria and getting
(30:28):
the equal light to manufacture wooly mammoth hemoglobin and then
analyzing that hemoglobin. And the researchers were saying, like, if
we had a live well, if we built a time
machine and went back in time forty three thousand years
and took blood hemoglobin from this wooly mammoth, it would
be this exact same substance we've brought back wooly mammoth hemoglobin,
(30:50):
and from studying they found out things like it required
less heat energy to release oxygen, so thus conserving more heat. Well,
and they're not the only ones either, Weren't there a
lot or they speculate at least are a lot of
cold adapted animals that had that same feature. Pretty cool. Um, alright,
so the wool we're finally at the wooly smaller wooly mammoth, right, Yeah,
(31:13):
they're the smallest of all the mammoth. Yeah, four hundred
thousand years ago, and the first one of those was
actually found in eighteen or six in Siberia from a
botanist named mackayl Adams. And um, these dudes like they
were widespread. They went as far as modern day Ireland
and then across the Bearing Land Bridge or sorry, the
(31:36):
Bearing straight was the bearing Land Bridge? Ye, the st
the water. Yeah, and then they roamed the east coast
of the United States and up into Canada and down
into Mexico. They went even yeah, they went west in
the United States and west pretty far west. Yeah, um, west,
and a little bit south because at the time some
(31:58):
of the glacial glacial is zation would come as far
south as like covering Chicago entirely in a glacier. So
they were a little further south. And they loved the
Great Plains because the Great Plains were still the Great
Plains back then. And yeah, they would eat the grasses.
But they also coexisted or shared the North American continent
(32:19):
with another type of wooly mammoth that was indigenous to
North America, the Colombian or Jefferson mammoth. Yeah, that's the
one that actually spent time in Mexico and Nicaragua, I
think as far south as Nicaraguay, Yeah, which is yeah,
it's pretty amazing. Of course, the weather was different back then, yeah,
like we said, but still, I mean they were closer
to the equator and it was definitely warmer. So they
(32:40):
were a different species of wooly mammoth or of mammoth,
but they were pretty closely related and I think they
were actually um descended from the step mammoth as well. Yeah,
and they were you know, they were they didn't need
the weather just to be one thing. They were pretty adaptable. Um,
not completely, as we'll see, because climate change probably did
(33:00):
factor in h although not specifically because of like the temperature. Um, well,
we might as well talk a little bit about that. Huh.
Are we there yet with the temperature? Well know, like
maybe where they went. Oh well, it's a big mystery.
Like I was saying, no one knows case close. Well,
they have some ideas, uh, and one of them is
(33:21):
climate change. But um, like I was hinting at, not
necessarily like the temperature was something that affected them. It
was more how the temperature affected their habitat. Shrinking their
habitat is what, ultimately I think had a lot to
do with it. I think so too. There's well, there's
so there are a number of theories. One was like
(33:42):
a meteorite that never found any evidence for that. Um uh,
maybe like a superbug got them doubtful. Yeah, And so
it came down to humans over hunting them, which is
called the overkill hypothesis, and then climate change hypothesis this
and I think of those two, if I had to choose,
(34:03):
I'm with you. I think the climate change is what
got them. I think it's a little bit of both.
I think ultimately it is too. But I think humans
finished off something that was a process that was already inevitable. Yeah,
like here, here's what happens. Here's a bad thing. If
you're a mammal or any animal. It's a bad, bad
mammoth day. If you're if you're ecosystem is shrinking and
(34:27):
your available food sources shrinking, and you continue to move
where that is, you become isolated and your area is
smaller and smaller, and that eventually is super bad news.
What you want if you're a wide ranging mammal like
that is especially a big one that needs like four
pounds of food today. Yeah, you want to be able
to travel a long way to get as much food
(34:49):
as you can because you're eating twentys a day. But
if your habitat is shrinking, Uh, yeah, that's what I meant. Habitat,
not ecosystem. That works. Yeah, it definitely works. Um. So
the climate climate change melted those glaciers, sea levels rose,
and then the land shrank, came cover with water yea,
and the wooly mamples like looking so good. Well, plus
(35:11):
not only that, with the changing climate and the warming
of the earth or the climate, I should say, um,
their their food supply, not just the amount of food,
but the type of food available diminished. Like I said,
you couldn't take them and put them on the Siberian
step Today. It's different plants that are there. They weren't
necessarily adapted to eat those things. You need certain enzymes
(35:35):
to break down certain types of sugars and stuff like
that to gain energy from it. And as their food changed,
they got to be in big trouble. Um. That's the
climate change hypothesis. The overkill hypothesis says that somewhere around
twelve to thirteen thousand years ago, humans showed up in
North America, and right about the same time, within a
(35:55):
thousand years, there were no more wooly mammoths, and not
just wooly amos. There's something called the um North American
mega fawn extinction where mammals I think ninety genera, so
not even species, but genera, the next level up in classification.
(36:15):
A lot of animals, ninety of them weighing over UM
I think ninety pounds. UM just all died off around
the same time we covered this. Yeah, surely or like
the Clovis one, maybe UM And a lot of people say, well,
clearly it was humans, and it makes a lot of sense.
(36:39):
It has some legs it's humans. A lot of people
do think humans did show up around that time in
North America. UM. The fact that it happens so quickly,
and then the point that I think about the overkill
hypothesis that really drives it home to me, although I'm
more on the climate change fand wagon UM, is that
these North America can mammoths would not have co evolved
(37:03):
with humans like African ones did. So the African ones survived,
the elephants down there, they survived because they covolved with
humans and came to understand that humans are dangerous. The
ones here in North America wouldn't have been innately afraid
of humans. You've seen them as dangerous, and so it
could have been easy pickens for humans. The big problem
(37:25):
is is there's not that much evidence of humans mass
hunting these things, well maybe not maths hunting. They have
found um. They have found like these spears and things
in mammoth bones the Clovis point, which is what we
were talking about earlier. And we do know that they
use their fur and they like to use their irene,
(37:46):
they like to eat them. But the problem with that
is that UM mammoth would have fed a lot of people,
especially in that cold weather. You know, this natural preservation
going on, so they could have lived and used that
that but like a single adult or mammoth for a
long time, which means they're not going to be hunting
(38:07):
like five of them a day. Uh. And there's also
evidence that they were revered somewhat by their cave art.
So there are people who think that maybe it was
like the buffalo with the uh Native Americans. Maybe they
respected it and they managed it. Yeah, and didn't say, hey,
let's kill millions of these over a span of months. Right,
this is a very euro American mentality. I mean, that's
(38:31):
where the buffalo almost went extinct, was when euro Americans
came over and said, let's start shooting. That's that doesn't
mean that that's what Native Americans did. And Plus also
there were plenty of mammoths that when extinct. The mammoth
species in the steps and in Europe when extinct two
and there are humans over there for a long time,
(38:55):
so it's not like the humans suddenly arrived everywhere. But
yet the amoths died out at about the same time
throughout the world. Yeah. Plus, mostly people hunted smaller game,
small the medium game back then like dogs maybe, but uh,
you know, a mammoth like what it was probably an
(39:16):
intimidating kill first of all. Uh, and you know what
do we do with all that stuff? So I mean
it's it's like we were saying, it is a mystery
still exactly what happened to him. I again my bets
on climate change. But obviously humans did kill or at
least butcher mammoths, But I don't think they killed them
(39:37):
out of existence, so I agree, uh. And then that
that leads us to that last point though about bringing
them back. Good idea, bad idea. I mean, it's always
a bad idea, isn't it. I think so. But you
can also makes but do they I mean that's a
pretty fatalistic view. Like you can also make the case
(39:57):
that if you believe that humans into them to extinction,
well then maybe it's our moral obligation to bring them
back if we can. And that's the view I think of. Remember, um,
the ten thousand Clock, ten thousand year clock episode. We
did so the Long Now Foundation, Um, they're big into that,
the people who made the ten thousand year clock, they're
(40:18):
big in the de extinction movement to bringing things back
and there's two ways you can do it. You can
take a you can take as much viable DNA from
a wooly mammoth as you can get your hands on
and insert it into an Asian elephant DNA treatment. Yeah,
and then make a hybrid, and then over time you
(40:39):
breed out the Asian elephant stuff through a breeding program
until you have a pure wooly mammoth. And then the
other one is to take a the nucleus of a
wooly mammoth cell and then plant it into an embryo. Sorry, yeah,
you're right, and then you've just cloned to wooly mammoth.
(41:00):
After it just states in a in a poor elephant,
it's like, what what are you guys doing? I wonder
if the elephant when it was born would be like
whoa right, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, this is uh,
this is a wooly man with you guys realized Rosemary's baby. Yeah,
so they Um. I think there's groups working on both
(41:20):
of those. And the ethics are questionable because I mean, like,
I'm sure it's gonna sound preposterous to some people, but
what about that elephant mom, Like, you know, is she
gonna care for this baby. How's it going to affect her?
How will it affect the baby? Um, it's just a
(41:41):
it raises a lot of questions. And plus also everyone
is pretty much in agreement that there's no way this
thing could ever live in the wild, so to living
captivity to charge people money to come see him. So yeah,
I agree with you. No I'll eat them. But so
we teased about the Mastodon earlier. Um, and you found
(42:04):
this was a mental flass thing, right, the difference between
a mammoth and the Mastodon because they coexisted here in
the US. The Mammoth is not a great metal band,
first of all, like Atlanta's own Mastodon, who, by the way,
our old friend Chris, bass player in my band, he
(42:25):
was at his one of his kids, or not one
of his kids. You always want a kid his kids
soccer game, and the lead guy from Mastodon was right there.
His kid is on the same soccer team, the one
with the face and neck tattoos. Yeah, that guy, that's awesome.
He was like, I know who you are. By the way,
fans like, yeah, let's talk soccer? Did they? Yeah? Nice? Anyway,
(42:47):
They're just like normal people. Sure they have kids that
play soccer, even though he's a metal god. Hm. But
what does that have to do with the wooly mammoth?
Not much? Uh. Their teeth is where you can all
the big diff that's uh yeah, is that the only
way these days? It's pretty clear that that's the only
way to tell. Well, the hair was a little different
(43:08):
and they don't have the high sloping back, and then
tusks are a little straighter. They look a lot more
like elephants than a mammoth does, because a mammoth looks
elephant time, but it looks like especially when you put
it next to an elephant or a mastodon, it looks
like a totally different animal. Agreed. But the teeth is
the giveaway. The the elephant molars, I'm sorry. The mammoth
(43:31):
has elephant like molars and they are like cheese graters
or like the sole of like a running shoe. Sure,
it's used to just grind through some some leaves, grasses, lovely.
The mastodon Actually the word means nipple tooth or boob tooth,
which is a bit of that was a lot of
(43:51):
fun on the playground, right. It's because they have like
um conical bumps on their molars. That reminded this anatomist
from the I think the early nineteenth century, George Cuvier.
He said, well, these bumps look like breasts, so we're
gonna name him breast tooth. And also, I've been out
(44:14):
alone with my journal for far too long. Help, Yeah,
you got anything else? When there's something about Thomas Jefferson,
he was into the mastodons. They were actually the mastodon,
the people he was convinced that there was a mammoth
(44:35):
still alive out west. Remember Lewis and Clark episode. That
was one of the reasons Lewis and Clark went out
west was to look for mammothing because he was just
convinced they were out there and he thought they were
meat eaters. Though he did, I think he was part
of that train. Ben Franklin was like, I think you
could probably also eat branches and stuff, which is went
mastodons eight. But the massdon became like the earliest symbol
(44:56):
of America, an American like, ah, let's mess stuff up,
let's let's kick some butt that it came from the mastodon.
And the mastodon. Also, this is like a hundred years
before they were finding um mammoths um. They it proved
(45:17):
for the first time the idea of extinction. Before that,
everybody's like, you're the Earth was created six thousand years ago.
Everything was in the Garden of Eden. There was a flood,
so we lost some things, but everything else is exactly
the way it's supposed to be. And the masted on
teeth that they were finding in Eventually the bones proved
(45:37):
that there were things that had lived before that. We're
not alive any longer, and extinction became a scientific thought. Amazing.
That's a nice little cherry on top. Do we finish strong?
We did, didn't we? And by we I mean you us,
Chuck us Uh. If you want to know more about mammoths,
you should type that word in the search bar at
(45:58):
how stuff works dot com. And since I said search,
parts the time for listening to mail. Hey guys, this
is my first time emailing because I was waiting for
an opportunity 'll tell you some stuff you should know.
I finally came today in the form of book talk
with Josh and Chuck. Remember that, Yeah, in the Moonwalk episode,
I think so, and uh, you said that I had
(46:19):
said previously I didn't give a book much and I
was like, I don't think I said that. Turns out
I did say that. I just don't remember because I'd
rarely read books that I have to put down, right,
I want to say. Also one other thing, I'm sorry
the guy who wrote Head full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay.
I believe um. Somebody tweeted to him and said, hey,
you gotta mention in this episode, and I guess he
went and listened. He was like, that was great, and no,
(46:41):
I know how to moonwalk. And then he tweeted some
time later he's like, Okay, it's been eight hours and
I still have not moonwalking. Well, and I guess they're
making a movie out of his his book with uh
Robert Downey Jr. Oh wow, it's gonna be big. Well.
I wonder if that was because of us. Probably they
were like, we're kind on the fence. And then they
heard our Moonwalk episode and they green lighted it. Wow.
(47:04):
Uh so, guys, I was excited to hear you rambling
about books, something I love dearly in A nice change
of base for movie talk with Josh and Chuck. Not
that I don't love movie talk or booze talk with
Josh and Chuck. Yeah, those are the only three things
we talked about. You talked about how long each give
a book before you give up on it. Did you
know there's a rule for that, Nancy Pearl's rule of fifty.
(47:26):
Have you ever heard of this? She says, I assume
Nancy as a woman. Uh, if you're younger than fifty,
you should read fifty pages before deciding to give up.
And for every year older than fifty that you are
subtract one page, soft one, forty nine pages, and so on.
At one hundred. You judge a book by its cover. Literally,
(47:50):
how about that? Who's this Nancy from Heart? Nancy Wilson? Nope,
I'm going to see Heart soon though, Like, are they
opening for somebody or that? Are the headlining? Their Cheap
Trick is opening in Joan Jett? Are opening for Heart?
Awesome triple bill? Yeah, that's a heck of a bill. Yeah,
I can't wait. Um, So Nancy Pearl says, yeah, fifty
(48:11):
and then subtractive page because obviously life is getting short.
You don't have enough time to waste time. So by
the time you're a hundred, you just look at it
and go now. And you could keel over just looking
at a book. You could Also, if you haven't heard
of Nancy Pearl, she's great. She's probably the most famous librarian. Okay,
there you go. I love that. At least, Well, is
(48:33):
there more than one famous librarian. There's gotta be If
she's the most famous, didn't have to be other famous ones.
John Dewey, inventor of the Dewey decimal system. That's right,
she says. At least she's up there, And she even
has her own action figure librarian action figure. I just
got my masters in library science last year or so.
(48:54):
I'm a Nancy Pearl fan. Multiple professors of mine have
had the action figure in their offices. I love this story.
Chris Palette, he wanted to become a librarian. Oh yeah,
he's He deserves an accent figure too. Oh I bet he's.
He's probably uh, he's probably got a Nancy Pearl one,
former host of tex Stuff and early host of co
host of Stuff. You should know before I snuffed him out, right,
(49:19):
I just I didn't like kill him. I just chloroformed
him and he woke up in a library. It was like,
I guess I'll get a degree. Yeah, that's exactly how
I want. Anyway, I hope this email wasn't too long.
I thought you'd like to know about the Rule of fifty.
All the best, Erica in Boston, p s ce you
in Boston and October right. Thanks a lot. We're doing
a show there sure are on your sober that the
(49:42):
Wilberth Theater. Yep, you can still get tickets at s
y s K Live dot com. BAM. Thanks for the
set up, Erica. If you want to set us up
to plug our shows, we'd love that. You can tweet
to us at s y s K Podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast to
how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us
at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
(50:04):
dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how Stuff Works dot com. M
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Frondhouse Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:28):
I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's
Jerry over there. So this is Stuff you should Know
before you started. I want to say best of luck
to mind. You means wonderful, great best friends Brandon and Laurel,
who are at this moment in the delivery room blow
Laurel's water broke. They're expecting their firstborn child. Wow. So
(00:51):
by the time this releases, it will be like six
years old. Yeah, pretty much, because we we have a
six year Yeah, so good luck guys. It's great. Yeah.
You should tell him that personally so they actually hear this.
I recorded it. That's enough. They'll give what they get
and be happy with it. Yeah. You you uh excited
(01:14):
about willy mammoths? I am you? Are you not? I
think it's I think they're wonderful, wily anything plus also
like a wooly mammoth. They were. They were sweet, good natured.
They could take a joke at their own expense, but
they weren't self deprecating. They just you know, had a
good sense of humor. Yeah, anything related to an elephant,
(01:37):
okay in my book, Yeah, I agreed. I have a
very big love for that animal. Well, it's a big animal,
deserves a lot of love, and they're just wonderful in
every way that they grieve over their dead. Oh God,
there's this one story about Domini. I believe it's the
name of the elephant that um. I think he or
(01:59):
she was a zoo and had like a best friend,
and the best friend died and this elephant could not
get over it, and she died of I think the
zoo keepers like, she died of a broken heart. You
can't take that she she grieved herself to death. Um.
And I think the story is even more tragic than that.
I'm not doing it justice, but just go go research
Domini the elephant d A m A N. I You're like, whatever,
(02:21):
it's kind of funny, right, he'll tickle your ribs. I
don't know if I did it justice. Did it come
across as funny stupid elephant? Well, you know what's even
cuter than a wooly mammoth? Oh yeah, Well, what's cuter
than an elephant is an elephant with hair. So that's
a wily mammoth, okay, or a mastodon, as we'll talk
(02:43):
about a little bit. Those are different, totally different. Yeah,
but they have hair. Not as much, yeah, but they
have hair. Yeah, but you wouldn't look at it and
be like, oh, that's wooly. You just be like, that's
kind of hairy, yeah, stubborly. But the only thing cuter
than a hairy elephant is a tiny hairry elephant. And
there was a place, well there still is a place
(03:04):
called Wrangel Island and they don't have them anymore. But
at one point, not too long ago, in the grand
scheme of you know, the history of everything, right, uh,
the Wrangel Island mammoths roamed the earth. And they are
how tall are they? Like human height? Right at the shoulder?
(03:26):
They were four to six ft tall. Oh man, So yeah,
it's like a mini wooly mammoth, give me one. And
they were directly descended from the wooly mammoths they just
ended up on this island, and the island is pretty good.
Size is the size of Delaware from what I understand.
But that's small enough. But that's small enough, well for
an island, you know, but it's small enough that that
(03:46):
they became dwarf. They went under that. Um what's that
process called where a population lands on an island and
it immediately begins to diminish in size. I don't know,
I haven't heard of that island fever, something weird like that.
Because they wanted to ride the roller coasters on the way,
you'd have to be bigger. Maybe they were scared of
roller coasters, That's what I meant. They're like, we're getting
(04:07):
out of here and we're gonna shrink, so we couldn't
possibly go on a roller coaster. But they butchered that one.
They were around for you, butcher them like a Wrangel
Island wooly mammoth. So they were around, uh until about
three thousand years ago, something like thirty years ago. I
think they were the last of their kind. Were on
(04:29):
Wrangle Island in six b C. And dude, by that time,
the pyramids were already a thousand years old. Like people,
they shared territory with people, but most I shouldn't say most,
A lot of the wooly mammoths, especially the ones that
lived at the end of the Place of Steem place
to scene. That's a tough one to say that scene,
(04:51):
is it not. Yes, I think that's right, but I
always want to like take continents and switch them around
and shuffle it up. Well, you're an anarchist, yeah, especially
with words. Um, I even hate the word anarchists. You
call it anarchist. Yeah, yeah, but uh, I mean that
threw me off. Sorry, Yeah, man, what was I saying? Oh? Yeah,
(05:15):
they did coexist with humans. Yeah, Like it's the one
thing the flint Stones were right about. When you see
a big willy mammoth in Fred flint Stone, that was
entirely possible that the dinosaurs, the Brnos source all that
stuff just fantasy. And if that wily mammoth on the
flint Stones was used to watch a car or some
other household chore, completely real, right. Yeah. They were very
(05:40):
helpful in addition to having a great sense of humor.
They would help you out around the house. That was
one of my favorite parts of The flint Stones. I
remember when I was a kid watching that and just
being so tickled every time a bird's beak was used
to play a record, and they were always just like
so willingly, like just tilt me down and I'll play
your record. Yeah, I love that stuff. And then every
(06:00):
once in a a while but they would thank the animal
and the animal be like oh man, most of the days.
So the Wrangel Island mammoths for around until about years ago, um,
and they survived the extinction of the rest of the
mammoths about four thousand years earlier. Right, Yeah, And if
(06:20):
we're talking, like if you look at the dinosaurs, they
left us sixty five million years ago, So this is
all very recent stuff. Like people hunted wooly mammoths and
ate them and use their bones and tusks and wore
their skin, I imagine, and uh not worshiped well we
(06:40):
don't really know for sure, but at least revered them
enough to put them in their cave art. Uh. So
this is all kind of really cool stuff to me.
We know a lot about them compared to a lot
of other extinct species, right, but where they went remains
a mystery a bit. Yeah, I mean it's definitely not definitive,
and there's a lot of theories. But there's really they
melted remember that one? Yeah, what was that from? It
(07:06):
was from one of our earlier podcasts. That was my
personal theory on like where like the proto humans one
or something. I don't even know they melted. Yeah, I
forgot all about that. That's an old one. And not
only that, my friend, but um, we have they have
like relatives, distant cousins still roaming the earth today because
(07:26):
if you look at the African bush and the African
forest elephants and the Asian elephant actually the closest, it's
very close. Yeah not, I mean it's close and distant.
If that makes sense, It doesn't. How do you mean? Well,
I mean it's close enough to say it's the closest relative.
(07:47):
But they're still distant cousins. You know, they don't have
the hair or the high sloping back or the curly
tusk right or yeah with the finger like grippers. Yeah yeah, um,
but they're still pretty close close enough that some mad
scientists are like Wickham resurrect wooly Mammoth's using the Asian
elephant because we have DNA right like when they found
(08:09):
and they have found a lot of these carcasses. Some
some of them really intact. I mean enough, like there's
brain and bone and blood and uh yeah, basically the
whole thing. It's just the slightly mummified so there's like
water loss. Other than that, it's all there. Like there's
one called um man this is tough word to say,
(08:31):
and there's another another continent Switchero. My brain wants to
pull liuba it means love in Russian. Was just a
little guy, yeah, the little baby. Yeah, this was not
a miniature. It was actually a calf right, It was
a baby baby wooly mammoth um. I think maybe like
a month old or something like that. But it was
(08:52):
still die. Yeah. And and then in lifness would have
weighed about um a hundred a hundred kilos or two
pounds now a hundred pounds fifty kilos. That's missing half
of its um weight and water while it was alive
when you'd want to pick it up and now now
(09:12):
you just kind of patted on the head and be
like you stay over there. Yeah. When was that found?
Two thousand seven? Yeah, and um it was found perfectly
preserved because apparently she had been colonized by a um
uh some sort of lactic acid producing bacteria that effectively
pickled her. So it preserved her, but it also made
(09:33):
her very unappetizing scavengers too. She tasted weird, right, So, um,
she's a really good example of a wooly mammoth. And
I can't remember how many tens of thousands of years
old she is, but she's pretty old. So we do
have this access to all these great specimens, and they've
figured out that about the shelf life of viable DNA
(09:57):
is a million years So there's plenty of wooly ammoths
that who's DNA we have access to that's much younger
than a million years old. And yeah, we'll talk about it.
But some people are like, let's bring them back, let's
de extinct them. Yeah, tricky territory. Oh yeah, but so
Willie mammoth pretty cute. It's not a sabretooth tiger, right,
(10:19):
that's not tricky. You just don't do that. But the
kind of the long and the short of all this,
with the distant cousins and all of the uh preserved
carcasses we found is that we have a really robust
picture of how these things lived and what they were like.
And um, I guess we'll take a break here and
we'll get a little bit into their you know, they're
(10:40):
nine to five. Job, we'll go back to the mammoth world.
(11:01):
All right. So if you picture in your mind a
wooly mammoth, you might think, all right, frozen waste land.
Uh and like Siberia, Right, they just eat like snow Wrong,
snow cones. That's wrong. I'm sure they appreciated again, snow cone.
They like Italian nights more than the snow cone. They're
(11:24):
a little more European. But what was actually going on
is they were they were trotting upon land what was
called a mammoth step st e p pe mm hmm,
not the step variety. Sure there's an extra p. Yeah,
like a steppy boy. It's not pronounced steppi is it? No? Okay, No,
(11:46):
when you first encountered the word, it is uh. And
this is this was basically it was sort of a
unique time in the in the history of planet Earth
in that it was rich. These areas were rich with
stuff for them to eat, just like overloaded with vegetation. Yeah.
(12:07):
One thing, were veggie eaters. Yeah, they were, they were
um actually um grassland grazers. You can call them. So
they ate long um long grasses sedges, which is like
a fake grass, but all intends of purposes. Yeah, they
come upon a basil field. Man, it was all over
like oh man, it's Italian night. So um, they ate
(12:31):
grasses and they were herbivores and they ate this pretty
specific diet and it certainly wasn't snow based and it
was definitely cooler, which is I think another reason why
people think, um they they they lived in a frozen wasteland. Well,
because they needed that coat, they did. And the reason
(12:53):
why is because they were living in the Pleistocene, which
was definitely it was a series of ice ages, right. Um,
so it was colder. It's like five to ten degrease
celsius colder than it is globally now. But the the
whole ecosystem was just utterly different than what it is today.
So like if you did manage to bring back Willy
(13:14):
Mammoth and you put him on the Siberian step, they'd
be like, well, I'm going to starve. There's nothing here
for me to eat. Things have changed. If you put
them in Arizona or New Mexico or someplace where it
might kind of look the same with the shrubbery and
brush and grasses. Uh, they would say, no, I can't
live here either, kind of die here too. It's too hot.
(13:37):
Why did you bring me back? Really didn't think this through,
that's right. But what you also had, though, is a
pretty nice I mean, it was colder, but it was
it was kind of nice weather for a wily mammoth.
It was the sea levels had dropped, so it exposed
all this great land for them to roam, and it
was very breezy and clear and kind of lovely, easy, freezy, beautiful, easy, breezy,
(14:01):
beautiful for wooly mammoth. Yeah. Because again, well we'll talk
about their coat. Actually, we can talk about it right now.
So their coat was, um, are you familiar with a
musk ox? Oh? Yeah, it was like that. It was
like a skirt of long hair. But beneath that was
wooly undercoat that really kept them warm. Yeah, the outer coat,
(14:24):
and we've talked about a lot of mammals, most of
them have like layers of different kinds of fur. But um,
the outer coat was the guard for and then under
like you said, was the the wooly undercoat. And below
that they had an inch of skin, very oily, and
below that they had three to four inches of fat
and all of this stuff made them nice and cozy
(14:45):
and warm. But they were de delicious to eat man
oily skin inches of fat. Yeah, I'm just gonna ignore that,
all right, Uh, twenty hours a day they spent eating,
I guess, fattening themselves up for for me, for you.
(15:07):
So they would just roam around and eat man and
get along with each other. They were you know, I
was about to say peaceful, which they kind of were
unless they were infringed upon. And you don't want to
mess with the willie mammoth alone, right, No, they they
This article puts it that in a standing fight they
could take all commerce. They were definitely like they could
(15:28):
defend themselves. And for the most part, apparently the major
predators of the day um would not have taken a
healthy adult mammothon. They would have like maybe followed a
herd because the mammoth's um you were. If you saw
a single mammoth, it was a male, or if you
saw a herd of them, it was females and calves
(15:50):
female calves, yeah right, or it could be male calves
or nursing still before they went off on their own teenager.
They sent them off pretty young though, I think maybe
starting when they were teenagers. Um. And either way, no
short faced bear or sabretooth tiger is going to take
(16:11):
on one of these guys by themselves. It would be
like a calf that fell behind yeah, um, or like
uh one that was sick or dying or trapped in
like a tar pit. You would leap out with your
clob spear, my knife and fork and have dinner my
napkin tied around my neck. Uh. And they were they did,
(16:34):
you know, share their their area with these fearsome creatures
like the sabretooth tiger. And there was actually something called
a wooly rhinoceros, which is exactly what you think it is. Yeah,
I'll bet you would not want to mess with that.
I'd want to scratch him behind the ear. Oh, rhinocero.
I are tough and mean. I know. That's the problem
with me. As I see these things, and I think,
(16:56):
like a big tiger, I think all that guy needs
is he looks like my Yeah, you know you should
not go a little just to give him a good
scratch behind the ear. And they're like, oh, well, I
kind of like this guy, he's not up to get me.
That's not what they do, I know. But that's why
I don't take Safari's I'd be the dope that you
know tried to pet the cheetah. Oh my god, did
(17:17):
you see the video of the woman who got out
of her car in a tiger preserve and was like
the just like a it's like a like a security camera,
so it's a steady shot. And I don't know what
the lady was doing out of the car. I think
maybe in China, and she's just standing there one second,
then all of a sudden, the tiger comes in frame
(17:38):
and just pulls her right out of frame. And then
like her sister and husband get out of the car,
and I think her sister was killed as well, and
the husband like just runs back and dives into the car.
But what were they doing out of the car, And
like this huge tiger at least the size of the
woman just comes and just grabs her. Was nuts, well,
(18:00):
really disturbing. Yeah, I don't want to see that. Then
you probably shouldn't. You'd still be like I'd still pet
that tiger. No, I wouldn't pet that tiger. You put
that another one. What was the name of the grizzly Man,
Timothy tread Well or Treadway. I think tread well Man. Yeah,
that was a disturbing The best you should that was
(18:24):
the best part was a terrible You should narrate everything.
He should. He should do every commercial, voice over, every documentary,
just you name it. He should do this podcast. They
should go back and redo the voiceover the Alec Baldwin
did for the Royal. Tannon bombs Burner put a different
(18:45):
spin on things. I think Royal was born in the avenue.
Now that's a good herzog. It's not bad. All you
have to do is try and do it like an
evil mad german scientist or something. Colonel clink Colonel clink um,
where were we? We were talking about how um they
(19:05):
could defend themselves. You'd still want to pet him, and
they'd probably be okay with you petting them. They just
accidentally trample you. Yeah, exactly. Elephant. Uh, those little calves
were born in the springtime. Uh. And here's something that
will come into factor later when they were wiped from
the planet. They have a very long gestation period. It's
(19:26):
twenty two months, so you know they're not pumping out
these calves with great regularity. It takes a long time,
almost two years. Yeah, that's that's a while. So they
would have been impregnated I guess, uh summer, late summer
a year previous, and then born in the spring because
they adapted to do that because there was more to eat,
(19:50):
you know. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, it's lovely.
There's stuff blooming everywhere. Look at that basil field and
so it We don't know exactly what they're society was like,
but just based on modern elephants, paleontologists have surmised that
they were very social. Most likely. There's mammoth track ways
(20:12):
that we've found fossilized footprints UM that show a number
of mammoths walking side by side and amongst one another
UM and they're clearly different size footprints. So there's different
generations all walking together, which would indicate that they probably
have similar societies to elephants. Right, the dead and stuff
(20:34):
like that. Yeah, defend their dead, grieve over them, man,
it's really tough. UM. And that they probably came together
in annual migrations, although the evidence for that is still lacking.
And if they did migrate, I think I saw somewhere
that they probably didn't go more than four miles. So
still that's I don't go more than four dred miles
(20:55):
when I walk. I don't either anymore, So hats off
to the manuths are walking that far. When they would
go into heat the female, Like many mammals and many animals,
there would be a competition of sorts among the men, uh, everywhere,
from you know, puffing their chest out and flaunting to
(21:16):
just straight up fighting with one another. I guess if
times were tough, there weren't a lot of ladies around.
And and that is a lot like the modern elephant
as well. Uh. And and that they had what's called
a must gland u s t not musk, which is
easy to say, must must. It's even when you've been
(21:40):
drinking a lot. I don't know that's exactly what it
sounds like. Or if you're Cindy Brady right, or if
you're missing a tooth right, Oh yeah, you're getting psyched.
I am getting psyched. And I'm also I was like,
can I just get it done before this, Like I'm
going to Paris for three it's for God's sakes. And
(22:01):
I was reading about Paris and they're like, if you
don't want to stand out, you know, Americans are kind
of if you want to blend in American French or preasons,
kind of chic, like you know, you should you know,
clean cut, and you know you shouldn't wear T shirts
and shorts and tenny shoes. And it's like, man, I'm
going to be the most American dude. They're you might
(22:22):
as well just go with it, where like there's nothing
chic about me. Yeah, just walk around your me and
these and an ill fitting T shirt and flip flops
is like born in the USA T shirt? Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah,
with an American eagle on your head. Yeah, and on
the back it says have you seen my tooth? They're
gonna love you. Yeah, we'll see. Well, we're also going
(22:47):
to the land of bad dentistry? So or is that
in the UK? They're gonna welcome us with me with
open arms. Oh yeah, they're gonna be like he's one
of us. Is that a thing still? I thought? No,
I'm sure it's gotten better, but it's still a joke
that we can make. Oh god, I think so, or
Mike Myers can We'll find out we have no idea,
how our humor is gonna go over there probably fall flat.
(23:09):
I we'll see um. All right, So there they have
the musk gland and that secretes a fluid which um.
And I think that just sort of it says here
it establishes their higher they're mating hierarchy there. It's like
a pheromone gland. Yeah, so whoever has the musk not
(23:29):
must oh desecrete musk. I'm sure you could call it that,
or it secretes must Let's talk about their tusks, because
here's something I didn't know. The tusks actually have evolved
from their incisors. And then I mean it makes perfect sense.
(23:50):
It's like Lisa Simpson with that um where she didn't
have a dental plan, so like her tooth was gonna
grow up through her. Remember that they have like a
projection or something. Yeah remember that? Uh yeah, that's exactly
what it's like. Actually these outward Yeah, and they twist around.
(24:11):
You know, if you've seen pictures of mammoths before, if not,
look one up and it's not like a standard just
curby elephant tusk. It's just beautiful the way it swoops around. Yeah,
and I believe like they could get up to like
sixteen ft long. It's enormous. That's a big tusk. Uh.
And we'll talk a little more about how they were used.
But they here here to me is one of the
(24:32):
saddest things. They go through. Well, first of all, their
other teeth are foot long, their molars, which is remarkable.
And they go through six sets of teeth like the
modern elephant, over a sixty year lifespan. And they die
after the last set of teeth is worn out. Yeah,
and that's just like the saddest thing ever. They their
(24:55):
last prune and kilo. Yeah, Like I guess they I
mean to me because he human, I assume they sense
this like this, this is it? Well that and then
they see me stalking on with my knife and fork
and napkin because I wouldn't kill a mammoth. I just
eat it after a diet of natural causes. Oh well,
that's different. You just waited out until they had a
(25:16):
loss of teeth. I'm like a jackal or a vulture.
Would herb herban board taste better or worse than a
beautiful Yeah? Yeah, grass fed? All right, Uh, chuck, let's
take a break and we'll come back, and we're gonna
talk about where wooly mammoth's come from, came from past tense.
(25:54):
All right, we're back. It's gonna have been a strong
my friend. So, you know, wooly mammoths resemble elephants. They
have a common ancestor. And what's that. There's a very
primitive Elephantine animal type of animal called the probosidian. And
actually if you look at the wooly mammoth, the massed
(26:16):
on some of those old ancient ones. Um their their
order they belong to, So I think it goes species
genus order, no species genus family order. Yeah, the order
they belong to is um probosidia. And it's like um,
like a you know, a bug has a probiscus, same thing. Uh,
(26:41):
that's basically Greek for nose. I believe it is. So
this the Greeks are just poking fun at their noses
and they this uh split off from the million years ago.
It split off from the mamillion tree. It's a long
time ago, right, And all this is happening in a Frica.
The elephant family, the probe probos probositians, they all were
(27:08):
found in Africa. That's where they evolved and then they
eventually spread out of Africa up into the Sinai and
over into Europe and then up into Asia, just like
humans did. Um, and I think something like seven million
years ago the first mammoths developed in Africa. No, they
weren't and we'll get to ye in a second. They
were like they were mammoths, but they yeah, they weren't
(27:31):
Willie like you said. They hung around in Africa for
about four million years, about three million years ago they
started to spread, and then about one point seven one
point eight million years ago the Earth changed dramatically. It
entered the Pleistocene. And again the palist scene was characterized
with huge dips in global temperature. It's been a hot
(27:51):
house up to that point, and all of a sudden
it's like getting cold, and there's like glacial periods and
all that. And now the mammoths are starting to adapt
to the cold. Now they became wooly and um kind
of differentiated from southern mammoths, uh, and became wooly mammoth's. Yeah,
there was one in particular, the largest one of all,
(28:12):
the step mammoth, and this sucker was fourteen feet and
that's always at the shoulder, right, yes, And that correct,
what do I don't measure from the top of the head,
because you can like make yourself seem taller by lifting
your head up, and they would do that when you
mammoth's great sense of humor delicious really uncooperative at the doctor, right,
(28:36):
wanted to be taller. Uh. And this one they think
originated in northeastern Eurasia, and uh was the ancestor most
likely of the wooly mammoth shaggy but not wooly. No,
it wasn't wooly. And the wooly mammoth actually is the
smallest of them all right, So not only did they
adapt to the cold with their wooly coat, right, they
(28:59):
actually had some really interesting adaptations with their blood and um.
One of the things they figured out that it was
that the willing mammoth had this pretty cool system where
their arteries, which carried warm blood from the heart to
the extremities, were really close to their blood vessels, which
(29:20):
brought deoxygen aated cold blood from the extremities back to
the heart. Well. The fact that the arterial blood vessels
were close to the veins means that the warm blood
would actually warm the blood in the veins on the
way back to the heart, so that the heat never
really made it out of the core. It kept the
core very warm, which is important, um. And it meant
(29:45):
the extremities were very cold, which is much less important
as long as you still have blood flow. And then
they also had this hemoglobin that could so hemoglobin clumps
onto oxygen and delivers it throughout the body. Right. Well,
it takes a little bit of heat energy to get
the hemoglobin to let go of the oxygen, but you
want as much heat energy as you can possibly have
(30:07):
if you're wooly mammoth on the steps, right. Um. So
they figured out get this by taking forty three thousand
year old wooly mammoth, the na, isolating the genes that
expressed hemoglobin that led to the expression of hemoglobin, and
then it's inserting it into E. Coli bacteria and getting
(30:28):
the equal light to manufacture wooly mammoth hemoglobin and then
analyzing that hemoglobin. And the researchers were saying, like, if
we had a live well, if we built a time
machine and went back in time forty three thousand years
and took blood hemoglobin from this wooly mammoth, it would
be this exact same substance we've brought back wooly mammoth hemoglobin,
(30:50):
and from studying they found out things like it required
less heat energy to release oxygen, so thus conserving more heat. Well,
and they're not the only ones either, Weren't there a
lot or they speculate at least are a lot of
cold adapted animals that had that same feature. Pretty cool. Um, alright,
so the wool we're finally at the wooly smaller wooly mammoth, right, Yeah,
(31:13):
they're the smallest of all the mammoth. Yeah, four hundred
thousand years ago, and the first one of those was
actually found in eighteen or six in Siberia from a
botanist named mackayl Adams. And um, these dudes like they
were widespread. They went as far as modern day Ireland
and then across the Bearing Land Bridge or sorry, the
(31:36):
Bearing straight was the bearing Land Bridge? Ye, the st
the water. Yeah, and then they roamed the east coast
of the United States and up into Canada and down
into Mexico. They went even yeah, they went west in
the United States and west pretty far west. Yeah, um, west,
and a little bit south because at the time some
(31:58):
of the glacial glacial is zation would come as far
south as like covering Chicago entirely in a glacier. So
they were a little further south. And they loved the
Great Plains because the Great Plains were still the Great
Plains back then. And yeah, they would eat the grasses.
But they also coexisted or shared the North American continent
(32:19):
with another type of wooly mammoth that was indigenous to
North America, the Colombian or Jefferson mammoth. Yeah, that's the
one that actually spent time in Mexico and Nicaragua, I
think as far south as Nicaraguay, Yeah, which is yeah,
it's pretty amazing. Of course, the weather was different back then, yeah,
like we said, but still, I mean they were closer
to the equator and it was definitely warmer. So they
(32:40):
were a different species of wooly mammoth or of mammoth,
but they were pretty closely related and I think they
were actually um descended from the step mammoth as well. Yeah,
and they were you know, they were they didn't need
the weather just to be one thing. They were pretty adaptable. Um,
not completely, as we'll see, because climate change probably did
(33:00):
factor in h although not specifically because of like the temperature. Um, well,
we might as well talk a little bit about that. Huh.
Are we there yet with the temperature? Well know, like
maybe where they went. Oh well, it's a big mystery.
Like I was saying, no one knows case close. Well,
they have some ideas, uh, and one of them is
(33:21):
climate change. But um, like I was hinting at, not
necessarily like the temperature was something that affected them. It
was more how the temperature affected their habitat. Shrinking their
habitat is what, ultimately I think had a lot to
do with it. I think so too. There's well, there's
so there are a number of theories. One was like
(33:42):
a meteorite that never found any evidence for that. Um uh,
maybe like a superbug got them doubtful. Yeah, And so
it came down to humans over hunting them, which is
called the overkill hypothesis, and then climate change hypothesis this
and I think of those two, if I had to choose,
(34:03):
I'm with you. I think the climate change is what
got them. I think it's a little bit of both.
I think ultimately it is too. But I think humans
finished off something that was a process that was already inevitable. Yeah,
like here, here's what happens. Here's a bad thing. If
you're a mammal or any animal. It's a bad, bad
mammoth day. If you're if you're ecosystem is shrinking and
(34:27):
your available food sources shrinking, and you continue to move
where that is, you become isolated and your area is
smaller and smaller, and that eventually is super bad news.
What you want if you're a wide ranging mammal like
that is especially a big one that needs like four
pounds of food today. Yeah, you want to be able
to travel a long way to get as much food
(34:49):
as you can because you're eating twentys a day. But
if your habitat is shrinking, Uh, yeah, that's what I meant. Habitat,
not ecosystem. That works. Yeah, it definitely works. Um. So
the climate climate change melted those glaciers, sea levels rose,
and then the land shrank, came cover with water yea,
and the wooly mamples like looking so good. Well, plus
(35:11):
not only that, with the changing climate and the warming
of the earth or the climate, I should say, um,
their their food supply, not just the amount of food,
but the type of food available diminished. Like I said,
you couldn't take them and put them on the Siberian
step Today. It's different plants that are there. They weren't
necessarily adapted to eat those things. You need certain enzymes
(35:35):
to break down certain types of sugars and stuff like
that to gain energy from it. And as their food changed,
they got to be in big trouble. Um. That's the
climate change hypothesis. The overkill hypothesis says that somewhere around
twelve to thirteen thousand years ago, humans showed up in
North America, and right about the same time, within a
(35:55):
thousand years, there were no more wooly mammoths, and not
just wooly amos. There's something called the um North American
mega fawn extinction where mammals I think ninety genera, so
not even species, but genera, the next level up in classification.
(36:15):
A lot of animals, ninety of them weighing over UM
I think ninety pounds. UM just all died off around
the same time we covered this. Yeah, surely or like
the Clovis one, maybe UM And a lot of people say, well,
clearly it was humans, and it makes a lot of sense.
(36:39):
It has some legs it's humans. A lot of people
do think humans did show up around that time in
North America. UM. The fact that it happens so quickly,
and then the point that I think about the overkill
hypothesis that really drives it home to me, although I'm
more on the climate change fand wagon UM, is that
these North America can mammoths would not have co evolved
(37:03):
with humans like African ones did. So the African ones survived,
the elephants down there, they survived because they covolved with
humans and came to understand that humans are dangerous. The
ones here in North America wouldn't have been innately afraid
of humans. You've seen them as dangerous, and so it
could have been easy pickens for humans. The big problem
(37:25):
is is there's not that much evidence of humans mass
hunting these things, well maybe not maths hunting. They have
found um. They have found like these spears and things
in mammoth bones the Clovis point, which is what we
were talking about earlier. And we do know that they
use their fur and they like to use their irene,
(37:46):
they like to eat them. But the problem with that
is that UM mammoth would have fed a lot of people,
especially in that cold weather. You know, this natural preservation
going on, so they could have lived and used that
that but like a single adult or mammoth for a
long time, which means they're not going to be hunting
(38:07):
like five of them a day. Uh. And there's also
evidence that they were revered somewhat by their cave art.
So there are people who think that maybe it was
like the buffalo with the uh Native Americans. Maybe they
respected it and they managed it. Yeah, and didn't say, hey,
let's kill millions of these over a span of months. Right,
this is a very euro American mentality. I mean, that's
(38:31):
where the buffalo almost went extinct, was when euro Americans
came over and said, let's start shooting. That's that doesn't
mean that that's what Native Americans did. And Plus also
there were plenty of mammoths that when extinct. The mammoth
species in the steps and in Europe when extinct two
and there are humans over there for a long time,
(38:55):
so it's not like the humans suddenly arrived everywhere. But
yet the amoths died out at about the same time
throughout the world. Yeah. Plus, mostly people hunted smaller game,
small the medium game back then like dogs maybe, but uh,
you know, a mammoth like what it was probably an
(39:16):
intimidating kill first of all. Uh, and you know what
do we do with all that stuff? So I mean
it's it's like we were saying, it is a mystery
still exactly what happened to him. I again my bets
on climate change. But obviously humans did kill or at
least butcher mammoths, But I don't think they killed them
(39:37):
out of existence, so I agree, uh. And then that
that leads us to that last point though about bringing
them back. Good idea, bad idea. I mean, it's always
a bad idea, isn't it. I think so. But you
can also makes but do they I mean that's a
pretty fatalistic view. Like you can also make the case
(39:57):
that if you believe that humans into them to extinction,
well then maybe it's our moral obligation to bring them
back if we can. And that's the view I think of. Remember, um,
the ten thousand Clock, ten thousand year clock episode. We
did so the Long Now Foundation, Um, they're big into that,
the people who made the ten thousand year clock, they're
(40:18):
big in the de extinction movement to bringing things back
and there's two ways you can do it. You can
take a you can take as much viable DNA from
a wooly mammoth as you can get your hands on
and insert it into an Asian elephant DNA treatment. Yeah,
and then make a hybrid, and then over time you
(40:39):
breed out the Asian elephant stuff through a breeding program
until you have a pure wooly mammoth. And then the
other one is to take a the nucleus of a
wooly mammoth cell and then plant it into an embryo. Sorry, yeah,
you're right, and then you've just cloned to wooly mammoth.
(41:00):
After it just states in a in a poor elephant,
it's like, what what are you guys doing? I wonder
if the elephant when it was born would be like
whoa right, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, this is uh,
this is a wooly man with you guys realized Rosemary's baby. Yeah,
so they Um. I think there's groups working on both
(41:20):
of those. And the ethics are questionable because I mean, like,
I'm sure it's gonna sound preposterous to some people, but
what about that elephant mom, Like, you know, is she
gonna care for this baby. How's it going to affect her?
How will it affect the baby? Um, it's just a
(41:41):
it raises a lot of questions. And plus also everyone
is pretty much in agreement that there's no way this
thing could ever live in the wild, so to living
captivity to charge people money to come see him. So yeah,
I agree with you. No I'll eat them. But so
we teased about the Mastodon earlier. Um, and you found
(42:04):
this was a mental flass thing, right, the difference between
a mammoth and the Mastodon because they coexisted here in
the US. The Mammoth is not a great metal band,
first of all, like Atlanta's own Mastodon, who, by the way,
our old friend Chris, bass player in my band, he
(42:25):
was at his one of his kids, or not one
of his kids. You always want a kid his kids
soccer game, and the lead guy from Mastodon was right there.
His kid is on the same soccer team, the one
with the face and neck tattoos. Yeah, that guy, that's awesome.
He was like, I know who you are. By the way,
fans like, yeah, let's talk soccer? Did they? Yeah? Nice? Anyway,
(42:47):
They're just like normal people. Sure they have kids that
play soccer, even though he's a metal god. Hm. But
what does that have to do with the wooly mammoth?
Not much? Uh. Their teeth is where you can all
the big diff that's uh yeah, is that the only
way these days? It's pretty clear that that's the only
way to tell. Well, the hair was a little different
(43:08):
and they don't have the high sloping back, and then
tusks are a little straighter. They look a lot more
like elephants than a mammoth does, because a mammoth looks
elephant time, but it looks like especially when you put
it next to an elephant or a mastodon, it looks
like a totally different animal. Agreed. But the teeth is
the giveaway. The the elephant molars, I'm sorry. The mammoth
(43:31):
has elephant like molars and they are like cheese graters
or like the sole of like a running shoe. Sure,
it's used to just grind through some some leaves, grasses, lovely.
The mastodon Actually the word means nipple tooth or boob tooth,
which is a bit of that was a lot of
(43:51):
fun on the playground, right. It's because they have like
um conical bumps on their molars. That reminded this anatomist
from the I think the early nineteenth century, George Cuvier.
He said, well, these bumps look like breasts, so we're
gonna name him breast tooth. And also, I've been out
(44:14):
alone with my journal for far too long. Help, Yeah,
you got anything else? When there's something about Thomas Jefferson,
he was into the mastodons. They were actually the mastodon,
the people he was convinced that there was a mammoth
(44:35):
still alive out west. Remember Lewis and Clark episode. That
was one of the reasons Lewis and Clark went out
west was to look for mammothing because he was just
convinced they were out there and he thought they were
meat eaters. Though he did, I think he was part
of that train. Ben Franklin was like, I think you
could probably also eat branches and stuff, which is went
mastodons eight. But the massdon became like the earliest symbol
(44:56):
of America, an American like, ah, let's mess stuff up,
let's let's kick some butt that it came from the mastodon.
And the mastodon. Also, this is like a hundred years
before they were finding um mammoths um. They it proved
(45:17):
for the first time the idea of extinction. Before that,
everybody's like, you're the Earth was created six thousand years ago.
Everything was in the Garden of Eden. There was a flood,
so we lost some things, but everything else is exactly
the way it's supposed to be. And the masted on
teeth that they were finding in Eventually the bones proved
(45:37):
that there were things that had lived before that. We're
not alive any longer, and extinction became a scientific thought. Amazing.
That's a nice little cherry on top. Do we finish strong?
We did, didn't we? And by we I mean you us,
Chuck us Uh. If you want to know more about mammoths,
you should type that word in the search bar at
(45:58):
how stuff works dot com. And since I said search,
parts the time for listening to mail. Hey guys, this
is my first time emailing because I was waiting for
an opportunity 'll tell you some stuff you should know.
I finally came today in the form of book talk
with Josh and Chuck. Remember that, Yeah, in the Moonwalk episode,
I think so, and uh, you said that I had
(46:19):
said previously I didn't give a book much and I
was like, I don't think I said that. Turns out
I did say that. I just don't remember because I'd
rarely read books that I have to put down, right,
I want to say. Also one other thing, I'm sorry
the guy who wrote Head full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay.
I believe um. Somebody tweeted to him and said, hey,
you gotta mention in this episode, and I guess he
went and listened. He was like, that was great, and no,
(46:41):
I know how to moonwalk. And then he tweeted some
time later he's like, Okay, it's been eight hours and
I still have not moonwalking. Well, and I guess they're
making a movie out of his his book with uh
Robert Downey Jr. Oh wow, it's gonna be big. Well.
I wonder if that was because of us. Probably they
were like, we're kind on the fence. And then they
heard our Moonwalk episode and they green lighted it. Wow.
(47:04):
Uh so, guys, I was excited to hear you rambling
about books, something I love dearly in A nice change
of base for movie talk with Josh and Chuck. Not
that I don't love movie talk or booze talk with
Josh and Chuck. Yeah, those are the only three things
we talked about. You talked about how long each give
a book before you give up on it. Did you
know there's a rule for that, Nancy Pearl's rule of fifty.
(47:26):
Have you ever heard of this? She says, I assume
Nancy as a woman. Uh, if you're younger than fifty,
you should read fifty pages before deciding to give up.
And for every year older than fifty that you are
subtract one page, soft one, forty nine pages, and so on.
At one hundred. You judge a book by its cover. Literally,
(47:50):
how about that? Who's this Nancy from Heart? Nancy Wilson? Nope,
I'm going to see Heart soon though, Like, are they
opening for somebody or that? Are the headlining? Their Cheap
Trick is opening in Joan Jett? Are opening for Heart?
Awesome triple bill? Yeah, that's a heck of a bill. Yeah,
I can't wait. Um, So Nancy Pearl says, yeah, fifty
(48:11):
and then subtractive page because obviously life is getting short.
You don't have enough time to waste time. So by
the time you're a hundred, you just look at it
and go now. And you could keel over just looking
at a book. You could Also, if you haven't heard
of Nancy Pearl, she's great. She's probably the most famous librarian. Okay,
there you go. I love that. At least, Well, is
(48:33):
there more than one famous librarian. There's gotta be If
she's the most famous, didn't have to be other famous ones.
John Dewey, inventor of the Dewey decimal system. That's right,
she says. At least she's up there, And she even
has her own action figure librarian action figure. I just
got my masters in library science last year or so.
(48:54):
I'm a Nancy Pearl fan. Multiple professors of mine have
had the action figure in their offices. I love this story.
Chris Palette, he wanted to become a librarian. Oh yeah,
he's He deserves an accent figure too. Oh I bet he's.
He's probably uh, he's probably got a Nancy Pearl one,
former host of tex Stuff and early host of co
host of Stuff. You should know before I snuffed him out, right,
(49:19):
I just I didn't like kill him. I just chloroformed
him and he woke up in a library. It was like,
I guess I'll get a degree. Yeah, that's exactly how
I want. Anyway, I hope this email wasn't too long.
I thought you'd like to know about the Rule of fifty.
All the best, Erica in Boston, p s ce you
in Boston and October right. Thanks a lot. We're doing
a show there sure are on your sober that the
(49:42):
Wilberth Theater. Yep, you can still get tickets at s
y s K Live dot com. BAM. Thanks for the
set up, Erica. If you want to set us up
to plug our shows, we'd love that. You can tweet
to us at s y s K Podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast to
how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us
at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
(50:04):
dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how Stuff Works dot com. M
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