Everything on Nothing
Welcome to the podcast where everything is connected and nothing really matters. Hosted by Mickey, Christian, and Jacki
Everything on Nothing
Everything on Neanderthals
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One day, we heard someone say autistic people are “more Neanderthal,” and our brains would not let it go. Not a meme, not a throwaway tweet.... a full-on, late-night, Google-tab-rabbit-hole of a thought:
“I am autistic. Am I derived from Neanderthals?”
This episode starts with that question and then refuses to stay simple.
From there, Mickey, Christian, and Jacki tumble down a Neanderthal‑shaped rabbit hole involving:
- How a single headline about autism and Neanderthal genes spiraled into four hours of paleo YouTube, academic papers, and questionable science TikToks
- The real story of Neanderthal DNA in modern human: why most non–sub‑Saharan people carry 1–4% of it, and why that’s a human thing, not an “autistic” thing
- What early scientists got wrong about “cavemen,” from bone races and fake fossils to the hunched museum mannequins that permanently ruined their PR
- Neanderthals as short, barrel‑chested ice‑age powerlifters who needed 5,000 calories a day just to exist, and hunted megafauna like furry murder rhinos at zero degrees “summer”
- The evidence for art, ritual, and empathy: cave structures, hand stencils, possible symbolic language, and a disabled elder who had to be cared for to survive... and what that says about their emotional lives
- Why modern scientists now think Neanderthals weren’t our evil rivals but our cousins, collaborators, and occasionally our baby daddies, thanks to a lot of very determined interbreeding
- How rapidly changing climate (not “superior” Homo sapiens) likely pushed Neanderthals to the edge, and what that does to the old “we were the winners, they were the losers” story
Along the way, we ask even messier questions:
- If almost all of us carry Neanderthal DNA, why do we throw “Neanderthal” around as an insult for idiots, bigots, and bad exes?
- Why does pop culture cling so hard to the grunting caveman when the fossils keep screaming “nuanced, social, tool‑using, pattern‑recognizing people”?
- Is “primitive” just a lazy word we use to dodge the fact that our era is full of bad science takes, propaganda, and willful ignorance, too?
- And what does it mean when neurodivergent folks look at Neanderthals and see something strangely… familiar?
If you grew up thinking Neanderthals were just the hairy idiots at the front of your history textbook, this episode is your corrective lens. It’s a neurospicy, science‑soaked, Blockbuster‑era deep cut through bones, DNA, bad museum mannequins, and even worse movie cavemen... all to figure out what Neanderthals really were, what autism absolutely is not, and why the truth is weirder, kinder, and way more human than the stereotype ever was.
Elizabeth Colbert said, Neanderthals are pretty smart, and if we actively killed them off, then probably we did it the same way humans kill each other. Welcome to Everything on Nothing, where everything is connected and nothing really matters. I'm your host, Mickey, and if you ask me a question, I will answer it thoroughly. Joining me today is my producer and life partner, Jackie.
SPEAKER_02Hey there.
SPEAKER_00And our talented friend, web designer, and graphic designer, Christian. How's it going? Great. Uh today's question I am autistic. Am I derived from Neanderthals? No.
SPEAKER_01That was a short one, guys.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, this is the fastest we've ever been in and out there. Surely you have more information than that, Mickey.
SPEAKER_00Uh, so recent history, there have been uh accusations uh stating that uh autistics share a lot of similar gene traits with the Neanderthals. Um and yeah, there's a whole there's a whole pit that we could fall into uh in this just in the study of Neanderthals alone, there's at least four hours worth of uh talking points. Uh but uh the the Neanderthal gene is found in uh about four uh let me see. Most people, except for sub-Saharan Africans, have anywhere from one to four percent Neanderthal uh DNA in their body. So it's not only an autistic thing, it is an is it's a human thing. It's uh part of the human race, is uh not only Neanderthal, but also um the Denevisians, or I can never remember how to pronounce that.
SPEAKER_02It's a very yeah, it's a very lot of consonant words.
SPEAKER_00Denovisians is is what I can remember. Uh so essentially um I guess uh I guess we can get started on uh what the the original thought of Neanderthal was, and in the Neander Valley in um uh Germany, they found a set of bones, and they were like, wow, these look like a human person, but weird.
SPEAKER_01Um like the skull was that looks like a weird guy in the ground, it looks like a bunch of bones that are weird.
SPEAKER_00Uh so they there were a couple scientists that were doing science work, but science work is slow. Um loud marketing people are fast, so the loud marketing guy was able to state his point clearly and loudly. And he said that uh the that the bones were probably a Cossack from like a hundred years previous in a war when Cossacks were raging through Germany, and said that oh, look, he hurt his leg and he had to ride a horse. He, you know, riding a horse, he's bow-legged, but he's got an injury, so he was always wincing, and that's why his brow was all furrowed up, and that's why his skull is shaped like that.
SPEAKER_01He was always smelling things that were poor.
SPEAKER_00And so, you know, you if you're good at marketing, you can sway uh, you know, uh, I can you know lead the nation with a microphone. It takes just takes being loud and consistent in your messaging, and you can get a whole bunch of people to believe what you are saying, whether you are right or wrong. And it took the scientist a little bit to catch up, and they were like, nah, this is a caveman, dude. And you know, he's uh you know, pre-history, pre-man, pre-everything. This is a long, this is old bones and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01Um, I love the idea that the that was like the hot story, was it was a Cossack, yeah. Whoa, a Cossack, and it's like this is like this might be the ancestor of mankind. Just like, hold on, hold on. It's actually way crazier than what that guy said.
SPEAKER_00Uh, and then they uh because the Germans had oh well, I I don't think it was Germany at the time, but you know, because this group had an old set of bones, everyone started digging in their backyard looking for old bones and trying to be because it was what like all right, so it was a bone race, yeah. Well, going like going back to the Romans, uh going back to the Romans, they wanted to establish a connection to as far back as they could reach, saying, Oh, we are the chosen, we have been here forever, we're not new kids on the block, we are here. Uh, we have been here, we are we are ordained by God to be here. Um, so Romans uh also Romans had a huge settlement of Neanderthal in and around Rome before Rome was even a thought or a twinkle in anyone's eyes. Uh, also Neanderthal DNA found in the uh founder and CEO of USA network, and uh Steve Bushimi from the area that he's from probably also has uh a little Neanderthal DNA in him.
SPEAKER_02I mean, look at his look at his triangle of sadness up here. Of course he does.
SPEAKER_00Uh but yeah, yeah, fellow in Neanderthals. Uh yeah, so there was essentially a a bone race, and people started digging up stuff in their backyard trying to find uh who you know where where these old old bones are settled, to the point where there were actually a whole bunch of uh bone fakers that go ahead.
SPEAKER_02Is the concept of a bone race not fascinating to anybody making like movies and TV these days? Like, I need to see this series, like a limited series, 10 episodes, please.
SPEAKER_01I want to say that there is some kind of thing that something happened with dinosaurs in America, and it was like they were submitting uh dinosaur, like they were like, here's a dinosaur, here's a dinosaur, so fast that like they that's why like a Patasaurus Bronosaurus happened, the big scandal. I'm but I think they're making a movie, like some kind of comedian thing, uh, or a comedy uh comedy historical thing about uh that they there was a bone race, I think that we could justifiably call it. This is just a maybe one of many bone races that I'm now looking at.
SPEAKER_02So, what you're saying is it could be multiple series talking about different, like multiple seasons, each season a different set of kind type of bones. One season Neanderthals, one season dinosaurs.
SPEAKER_01Uh you know, who whatever comes over the the telegram line or whatever in in whatever period, you know, like uh impossible ancestor of man found, stop, you know. What a rattle of pit thick kiss. This is too long, man. You're making no sense.
SPEAKER_00Um so yeah, the the study of prehistoric man uh and Neanderthals has vastly changed since the first bones were found. Um and it goes along side by side with the advancement of chemistry, radiology, um uh uh lasers, um, every technology that advances elsewhere comes back to studying bones. And um, you know, there's there's bones that have been dug up that were kind of cleaned up and stuck in a drawer. Um, the methodology of collecting bones and cle and and uh looking at sites has changed dramatically in the past 200 years or so. Um, like there was one where uh we watched one documentary where uh they talked about uh they would go and dig and brush off the bones and be like, here's a bone, and then just trash the rest of the site. And now they're you know, it's kind of like uh CSI where they're like taking pictures every step of the way, they're scanning, uh they're doing radio scans and laser scans. They're you know, uh the amount of data that they're getting, it's not just hey, we got these bones, and foot they're like finding footprints that just look like how the part that hurts my brain is how do they know that the footprints are that old because of how compacted the dirt is, like oh yeah, that it's go studying the people that study this stuff. Um it's it is a very, very um it's an exercise in trust and watching some of the people talk about what they're doing and how they're doing it, um the uh unadulterated pure authenticity of the way that they speak, the way that they hold themselves, like the autistic trait of being able to to suss out who is bull full of bullshit and who is actually really doing the work, uh, is a superpower that probably comes out from Neanderthal DNA. I'll go ahead and say that.
SPEAKER_01Um I think uh I think a good way to find to tell, honestly, is a lot the genuine scientists that I've seen, at least the ones that are that get on camera, look at how they behave when they find out that they were wrong at some point. Oh, yeah, and they're like ecstatic. Oh yeah, like when they found out that like dinosaurs had feathers, they were like, Holy fucking shit, guys, buckle up. Everyone else is like, they look stupid now. And like the paleontologists are like, don't care, found a new thing. This is awesome to us. Like they had feathers, dinosaurs invented feathers, you know.
SPEAKER_02It says a lot more, it says a lot more about somebody to be able to admit that they were wrong than to dig in their heels and insist that they're right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like change science, basically, to the method, even to or the language of science to to favor their thing.
SPEAKER_02And like uh, like Mickey was saying about how all of technology is used to study Neanderthals, like he was doing research, and then I sent him an article that came out like that day that like changed some of his research. Like the research about Neanderthals is always changing. And probably one of by the time this comes out, half of it will be wrong because they'll find out more Neanderthal Neanderthal stuff.
SPEAKER_01I feel like we like learn a certain amount of science, like every person learns a certain amount of science, and then they they're just like, all right, thanks, and then they get off that bus forever, and they're like, you like you try to go, like, yeah, you know, like uh, I don't know, something about the asteroid or from the dinosaurs, and like I'm good, I'm good. Then feathers, no, I'm good, actually. I'm good.
SPEAKER_00And and you know, to to anyone listening, and and you're like, oh, I don't want to learn anymore, or whatever. Not learning anymore led to lead being in gas for entirely, I think three full generations, and lead in gas put lead in the air, and lead in air put lead in your lungs, and lead in your lungs led to lead in your blood. Lead in your blood put lead in your brain and made you dumber by one percent. Now, all of the billions of people across the world for three generations subtracting one percent of their intelligence, that is the equivalent of trillions of IQ points lost because no one wanted to advance science because it was easy to go and fill up with lead in the gas. And someone said, Hey, and and it's it what the the thing is, they knew about it on day one, but they hid that fact, and everyone that was doing studies was like uh presenting their studies, and everyone that had learned good science in high school was like, nah, we're good, and it's like that's new stuff, yeah. We don't want new stuff. Uh so if you are presented with new information, take a second and dive. Like, that's what I want the show to to basically introduce people. Uh like I'm not gonna get all the facts right. Uh my brain, ADHD and my brain will not allow me to talk to someone about it while knowing it. I can know it and write it down and allow you to read it. Uh, I could try to organize it or whatever, but if I as soon as I start telling you, my brain starts editing everything that I say, unless I go into a fugue state and I just ramble and ramble and ramble, and that's just info dumping, which people kind of I can't gauge whether you're you're in in uh basically receiving the message that I'm getting, so I don't know how to adjust my message to make you learn it. So it's just the here's some ideas to present, go and look it up, and and hopefully something we say excites you, and you can go and you find it, and you're like, oh my god, they you know, I have new information in my brain, which is now altering the course of my life.
SPEAKER_02I that's all I'm hoping for. I would call it like a rabbit hole of a podcast. Like you listen to us, you hear a nugget, and then you go down a rabbit hole of your own.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because I mean every every like we watch South Park, like we're on a South part run through, and there's rabbit hole after rabbit hole after rabbit hole.
SPEAKER_01It's yeah, it's uh I love that. Uh at one point I really think, and I don't know about now, I think it's I think they've kind of they've gotten really good and they've receded and they've gotten really good again. Um, I really think they're excellent satirists, uh the South Park guys. They're they're just they they know how to take a a real a real scalpel to uh to stuff that's going on. Like, and it's it's crazy how quick they are.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, unfortunately, they suffer from the Archie Bunker disease, where they're trying to they're trying to make a point. And for let's as an example, uh, Mr. Garrison, from day one, he is a shitty, shitty person. He is an absolute terrible person, and then he goes on his uh homosexual time uh frame and then his transsexual frame, and all along, he regardless of whatever frame he takes, he is a shitty fucking person, he is a terrible human being, and everything that he says is terrible, but some of the South Park fan base, not all of them, uh you know, there's it's a big enough show and it's wide enough, and they insult everybody, so they have a very wide fan base. Some of those fan bases, or some of those people in the fan base, uh will take those quotes and make up their own and become and you know, cheer on the shittiness of that. And Archie Bunker was supposed to be a satire of a very shitty human being, and people were like, Yeah, he's talking truth, he's really good, and then went and George Jefferson was the same way. George Jefferson at the very core was a shitty person. His daughter, or um yeah, his his family, his his employees, his wife tells him continuously that he's a shitty person, but there were people that touted him as a hero. So um, as good as they are, they you you once you put the message out there, you can't control the message, and and you know, that's not on them, but yeah, it it is part of the part of the mix of of being a satirist, and they are very, very good at what they do. Um, they've done a clutch problem, really. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's one of the reasons one of my favorite shows to recommend to people is Search Party, but I do it with the caveat, I do not like these people, I would not want to be their friends, but boy, are they fun to watch on screen. It's very it's got it's very important to me that people know that I do not want to hang out and or be these people, they're fucking awful, but it's such a good show.
SPEAKER_00And most of the people that we have mentioned, Archie Bunker, George Jefferson, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, all have Neanderthal DNA props. Uh, maybe George Jefferson might not. It depends because there is there's a group of humans that just stayed in Africa and were like, nah, we're we're good. We got food. We're we're good. Is that okay?
SPEAKER_01I think this is a good time to ask this. Is does would that then be Crow Magnon or is that something else?
SPEAKER_00Um, so if you rewind um pre-Neanderthal, there were uh it's either Homo Heidelberg something or Homo erectus. Uh and then the weather changed, and some of them departed and went north. And um one of one of the things that um it that helps helped me kind of reframe this is traveling through time or through space, you will eventually end up on an alien planet. And so traveling back in time, Earth was essentially an alien planet. Uh at the time that uh Neanderthals 400,000 years ago, uh Neanderthals sprung up, and the world, most of the continents were in the places that they are now. However, there was huge, huge icebergs that sucked up all the water out of the ocean. So there was like uh the uh chun where the channel is under the channel between uh England and France, yeah. The English Channel uh was land, I think. Um, there was a lot more coast on Spain. Uh, most of Italy had more coastline. Uh it was not that big of a deal to get across the Mediterranean Sea because it was essentially the Mediterranean pond. Um, so in in that, and uh the weather was a lot colder. Like we just had a really cold winter across the United States, and that would have been their warm season. Um, so it it was very, very, very, very cold, and the animals that lived were very, very, very different. Everything about the planet at that time was very different, and slight change in the weather, uh, resource, and you know, you start off with um like I think whenever I graduated high school, there was like 6.5 billion humans on Earth, and now we're pushing eight million, uh eight billion or more. So, you know, as the population expands, food gets scarcer, and you're you start scooting out trying to find new food. And so there was a couple groups. Uh one went north up to Europe, and the other kind of went east over towards where China, Siberia, and everything else is, and over thousands and thousands of years, they started changing from Homo erectus into Neanderthal or Denovisians, and like as a human, it you kind of acclimate to cold weather after a while, and acclimation is is one thing, but um if you have 10 people and the fat guy survives, and the fat guy is the one that has sex with all the women and has children, he's gonna have fat children. And gamer nation rise up, yeah. And he survived, and the fat guy survived because he had more uh coating to deal with the cold. He had inflation, so the evolution like Pete, like uh, a lot of people think evolution is like, oh, something hits me and I change, I've evolved. It's like no, you. Don't evolve over one generation, you don't evolve over a hundred generations, you evolve over a thousand generations.
SPEAKER_01So all the transition is just like purely just like it's mostly motherfuckers dying. That's like evolution. I think that's the we really do get kind of the handy coated version of it, or we we develop kind of like well, we a bird turns into another bird over time, and it's like, no, all the other birds just die. That's how it works.
SPEAKER_00It's literally less literally, literally last man standing kind of deal.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, and so eventually it's all gonna be like humanoid cockroaches in the end, because you know God willing. Most of the armor is like protecting your, you know, protecting the back of the neck. So eventually, you know, the people that don't die are gonna be people that have like weird bone growths in the back behind their head down to their spine, and it's like it's not survival, it is survival of the fittest, not survival of the superior being.
SPEAKER_02Um speaking of bumps, uh, apparently, if you have Neanderthal DNA or something, you have a bump on the back of your head, right? Isn't that one of the things we learned, Mickey?
SPEAKER_00That's the one thing you told me. I don't remember about that. I know I have the bump.
SPEAKER_02Let me find that. You I don't have a bump.
SPEAKER_01I know if you have one on top of your head, you're a bad person. So phrenology joke for you, smarties out there.
SPEAKER_00Um, so yeah, over time the the ones that survived had thicker bones. And part of it is kind of your DNA. I my theory is that your DNA learns as you learn, and when you impregnate someone else, you pass, or if you get pregnant or impregnate someone, those genes are those genes that have learned, the DNA that is learned, uh is passed along. And so, like anything that I've learned after 22 years old is not gonna get passed along because that's when I stopped having kids. But up until then, I learned quickly how to how to survive doing certain things and fixing things, and both of my children can both of the children that have come from my loins, uh know how to fix things, and they have a certain degree of intuition about fixing things, and that's part of partly because my father was a fixer, and um hidden deep in my DNA is farming. Like, I went out with a rock and a stick, and I dug trenches and I planted a bunch of stuff, and that I had no study, I didn't learn anything about horticulture. It just came out and shit in my yard started growing, and it's like, holy cow, where did that come from? And going back into my ancestry uh studies, um, I had a group of people that were farmers, and then when the Hungarians took the farms away, they came over here and made steel, and they rose up and they were like, Hey, we don't like doing the pulling and the pushing, but we could do the fixing. And they were like, All right, so go ahead and do that. So generations of my family were people that were fixing stuff fixing stuff in a steel mill, and now I fix things everywhere else, but it is something that is as you do as your body learns, your DNA learns, and then it gets passed along. And if you serve if you survive, then your children are better adept at surviving, and then they'll pass that along and continuous. And hundred uh, we're talking four hundred thousand four hundred thousand years of existence and changing. Humans have been forty five thousand, maybe uh the the modern human is about forty-five thousand years old, so ten times longer than that, then we've existed altogether, and history itself isn't is what six thousand years or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Like history doesn't go back was about 10,000 years ago.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so yeah, history doesn't go back that you know when we're looking at time slivers. Uh the Neanderthals was in in comparison to us, a very, very, very big sliver, so they had time to adapt, and they adapted um different sinuses and different noses because it was cold. And when I say it was cold, I'm talking, you know, zero degrees Fahrenheit is summer, and it just got colder from there. Everything was ice and frozen and whatnot, and uh breathing that in would burn a human lung and freeze the and cause damage in your lungs. So they developed a sinus system that warmed it up and got it down into their lungs at a usable temperature. Um, they developed bigger lungs because they needed it. Um over time, they developed stronger arm, you know, their right arm was stronger, um, which you know would kind of be a reason why a lot of humans are right-hand dominant, I guess. If you wanted to it, I would like to see a study done to see if because of Neanderthals, most humans are right-hand dominant. Because they made spears, and they use that spear to they use their right arm to thrust it into the the weak points of giant, giant elephants and giant, giant rhinoceroses.
SPEAKER_01And we watched that arm free to cover their heart, maybe, or well, it's just the leading hand.
SPEAKER_00The the it's the left hand was the aimer, and their right hand was the thruster because they and um because they were short and stocky. Uh it goes into if you compare a power lifter to a javelin thrower, a power lifter uh would have difficulty. Uh, he was probably if you put him side by side, the power lifter is stronger, uh, probably better survivor, but if uh and probably a better fighter at close-up range, but if he had to throw a javelin, the javelin thrower uh is more sleek, more uh athl uh kind of thin and longer arms, and has the use of a rotator cuff where you know Neanderthal's the single action over thousands and thousands of generations of just jamming it into the carotid artery of a rhinoceros, it developed into you know an arm that jammed or jabbed instead of threw.
SPEAKER_02And we watched that we watched that video where they were trying to determine like if they used it for like stabbing or throwing, and they had like the English champion javelin thrower throw like Neanderthal spears to see how effective they were, and they were very effective at very short distance.
SPEAKER_00Well, like 10 10.
SPEAKER_02I think he made it a 20 20 feet solid meters, meters, sorry, you were they were they were your impressive, actually.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00But for for again, that and that was a later later generation uh Neanderthal, but like in the early days when it was cold, cold, cold, uh they snuck up. Uh and a lot of the descriptions of the hunting ability was more uh um what are the tiny little lizards that killed uh Norman uh Newman in Jurassic Park?
SPEAKER_02Oh um. Hold on.
SPEAKER_00Oh, wait, no, those were the smitty ones. If it was the tiny ones, it was uh Pete Stromer. Uh the I'm thinking of the Velociraptors where they kind of what you get one distracting you and then you get two attacking from the side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, because Neanderthals were pack hunters and they used a lot of ambushing. Um, and again, this is based on a very, very, very small sample size, which is why the the knowledge of Neanderthals keeps changing. Uh, they have I I think they had four full sets that they could go by, and then they unlocked something, and everyone went into their drawers of stored bones and went, oh, these are Neanderthal. Need these either so the sample size increased pretty much overnight in the 90s. Uh, a bunch of people unlocked the drawers and and checked out some old bones, and like the the sample size went up. But 400,000 years, and we have about a hundred samples to go by. So, you know, the story is very uh piecemeal, piecemeal, yeah. And it's it is very thin because they don't, you know, they don't have enough to go, oh, this is a definitive answer. And again, looking at the the way people talk and the the who's saying it is uh some of the scientists that say this is what we can gather by the evidence that we have, and others are like, Oh, yes, this is definitely the way it's done, these are the way the Neanderthals did it. The people that are absolutely sure that this is the way things were done are probably wrong and are probably going to be proven wrong at some point. And if they're not, it was a lucky guess. They don't no one can know for certain because there's just not enough evidence, and there's and people are trying to answer the questions and they're getting better at how they're doing things, where they're doing things, why they're doing things, and you know, um, again, yeah, Jackie sent me an article on Friday, and the article came out Friday, and it was based on a uh a scientific published uh a published science paper that came out. Uh we're recording on Tuesday. Uh, it's about a week old now. The the science paper is a week old now, and that science paper says uh everything we knew about Neanderthals is yeah, the headline wiping the sink wiping the slate clean and starting all over.
SPEAKER_02The headline reads Major disruption in Neanderthal history.
SPEAKER_01Um so I guess from from cave rant.
SPEAKER_02From bone wars.com. Bone bone races.biz.
SPEAKER_00Uh to kind of summarize that real quick, is this the newest study that came out in March, I would say March 24th, 2026 states that uh for 400,000 years uh the Neanderthal spread out and they had little groups and they formed their own little mini, mini nations. Uh a lot of them lived in tribes of like 12 or 20, uh but they had interaction between different tribes, and then all of a sudden something happened and wiped out most of them, and one little group in Spain, I'm sorry, Spain, uh survived, and then after the climate event was over, the group started pushing out from Spain and spreading back into other areas, and that's and the most likely the DNA that's in humans is from that Spanish group. Um, but who knows?
SPEAKER_01Like most of humanity, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And okay, so basically, Spain, somewhere in Africa, and uh the middle of Iraq, uh, is the three parts of the human being right now. I guess, but again, that could be proven wrong, and there could have been like an alien, you know, could have been an alien bomb that you know killed off everyone and changed the weather. Uh, and that's what my dad thinks, roughly. I when I was younger, I was like, man, that's crazy. But the more I learn, the less crazy, crazy stuff sounds, is is which is crazy, but it is it is what it is, because the more you know, the harder it is to understand what the hell's going on.
SPEAKER_01When you learn that like the government was trying to figure out how to talk to dolphins for like 10 years, like 10 years government money going to to figure out if we maybe dolphins could talk, we could talk to them. Maybe the dolphins are psychic. What if we gave LSD to the dolphins? And you're like, oh, that was in chimpanzees, too, I think. And it was just like, oh, that was uh a decade of someone's whole life. Uh there's another show there to go, oh well, maybe not. Uh that is trip and chimpy. It's definitely one of those.
SPEAKER_00I yeah, a TV show basement. Like kind of an X-File show, but the the call it the basement guys, and they're just I mean, because um George Clooners had the uh men at stare at goats, and it's like that's the stupidest thing ever. And it's like, hey, this is based on a real CIA document that was released, and it's all real, and you know, poisoning the water and seeing that, and it's like, oh, here's the CIA file that was released, it's real, holy shit, and you know, all the all the things that were crazy sci-fi or mystery shows or you know, television shows or movies or whatever, it's like, oh, it was based on true stuff. Holy shit. Wow, okay, cool.
SPEAKER_01Um, it's like sometimes it feels like you'll watch something and it'll be so that they can go, well, technically we never lied. We released a movie about it, so we never lied. You can't say we lied to you.
SPEAKER_00Uh going back to the the Neanderthal's throwing spears and stuff, and uh one of the one of the hallmarks of a good scientist is if they truly believe that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Um, just because we do not have a spear throwing Neanderthal that we could definitely definitively say, oh yeah, he this guy was the javelin champion of of Southeast Spain, um doesn't mean he didn't exist, we just haven't found his bones yet or her bones yet. Um so it's it's a matter of this. Is the you know, the people that present the story based on what we've collected so far are usually the ones that are super super excited when new evidence presents itself because that a fills in the story and gives them a little bit more depth and also another you know string to pull at, another rabbit hole to go down and dive in and and see. Um uh one of the one of the studies again, uh like I said, Jackie uh pointed out that they were they found footprints. And the question is, how do they know that those are footprints? And it's like a little bit of trust in the science process because they're not just going, oh yeah, that uh that looks like a footprint. It looks like you walked over there.
SPEAKER_01It's about uh 30, 35,000 years old, I think.
SPEAKER_00Um they you know they go in and they're they're you know, radiocarbon dating. Uh they've come up with new uh you know half-life dating is is only so accurate, but they've found new ways to calculate the age, they found new chemical processes to separate sand that was compacted versus others, and you know, just the science builds on top of each other, so it's not just like hey, we're digging up rocks, stare at it, come up with a good story, and you know, blame it on the Cossacks.
SPEAKER_01It's hey, we have a a uh an advancement in like acoustics could right figure something a new process out for archaeology or paleontology, it's that they yeah, like vibrate it or something in a different way, and then like you said, the sand comes loose, and it's like okay, well, that means it's less than 30,000 years old or whatever. They can narrow the band down using like new new ideas.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and based on based on the way the gentleman spoke of collecting these footprints, it seemed like he had done the work. Uh, like here's this new uh radio, you you know, you point it at, and it tells you how deep things are. It's not that he went, okay, I'm gonna point it at it, tell me how deep it is. He went and learned how to how the science behind that worked so that he could understand how it would impact the work that he's doing. And that's what good scientists do, is like they dig in, and I'm not just learning you know about electronics, I'm learning about how the electronics impact the the pneumatic cylinders that go in. And if the pneumatic cylinder fails this way, it's going to cause this to to you know, it's gonna cause this fluctuation in the electronic component. So if I see these electronics do these weird things that they're not supposed to do, then I could kind of point back to say, Oh, the the the pneumatic cylinder is doing something weird. Let me fix the pneumatic cylinder, get that in order, and then look back and it's like, okay, so the electronics are still doing something weird, it's not you know, it's something else, or oh, now that I fixed the pneumatics, the the electronics are still, or you know, the electronics are back to normal. So now we know cause effect, and there's a layering going on, and everything kind of touches. And like if you think about um uh real genius, uh it's great comedy, great movie. Still pissed off about the balloon scene. Never gonna never ever gonna get over that. But there is, you know, it it took an autistic guy living in a closet to point out hey, you created this laser, the girl down the hall created this mirror, and this person created this. If you put them all together, what are you gonna get? And then they were like, Oh shit, it's a space laser, and it's gonna be you know something that can fry someone from a satellite in outer space anytime they want. Holy shit, no one ever put that together. We were just so focused on creating this badass laser, she was so focused on creating this mirror, and this other dude was focused on creating this, but now that we're stepping out and you know, applying all the science together, it's like, holy shit, this is fucking bad. So it archaeologists are not only driving scientific, like they were like, Hey, we need something that can measure this, and then they go and they talk to other scientists, and they're like, Oh, well, you know, we could we could look at it this way, we could do this, we could do this, or um someone's trying to explore, you know, deep ocean stuff or far space stuff, and it's like, hey, if we turn that the other way and try to shoot it this way, then we can use we can adapt this technology to answer some questions that we have over here. And I think that's I that's one of the things I love about science is the intermingling of different um uh whatever they're called, uh fashions, different science fashions or um I want to say departments, but that's specialties. Specialties, yes. Like for instance, like it goes into like Velcro was created for you know uh going into space, and Tang was uh created to go into space. Um you know every time that you create something, something else uh results, you know, some unseen uh use of it comes about. So the the people that are in archaeology are digging, literally digging for answers, and anything that can come out of it, or anything that they can get their hands on. To use to help answer those questions, they're they're willing to learn, and that is the you know, that's a great way to be a scientist. And I everyone that I've seen doing archaeology, at least in the modern age, is is someone who wants to learn and who wants to be proven wrong, or have that discovery, not just for the fame, but to answer the question because it's bugging the shit out of them, and they're like, I gotta know. The definition of Neanderthal has changed because before, you know, um, I think one set of bones they had uh was kind of curved back and slumped over, and so for a long time it was the you know, kind of similar to the monkeys at the beginning of 2001, where they're all hunched over and they're like and it's like, oh, wait a second. We have this doctor who is really dug in, and he was an orthopedic doctor, and he studied osteoporosis, and he, you know, someone in the archaeology department was like, Hey, can you come take a look at this? And he looked at it and he's like, Yeah, this this dude was old, and he had he had osteoporosis, that's why he's hunched back. So, more than likely, they had straight spines and they walked upright. It's just this dude was old and fucked up, and then they started digging into that, and they called other medical professionals that have studied, you know, uh long-term basically long-term abuse and long-term healing, and went, Yeah, this dude was really cared for because he couldn't walk, he couldn't eat, he couldn't hear, he couldn't see. Why they kept him around, I have no idea, but they someone really cared for this old dude, and that is a sure sign that they had some sort of civilized brain in them, they had thought, they had family, they had empathy, which you know, if you are empathetic, probably probably that's your Neanderthal DNA talking to you.
SPEAKER_02Um, I might be misremembering this because I've done a lot of research about a lot of stuff in the last few days, but didn't Neanderthals also have different ear canals?
SPEAKER_00The shape of their skulls did present a different hearing, uh, a different vision. Uh they brought based again, based on the evidence provided, and what they can suss out so far is that you know they had different peripheral vision, uh, probably a wider array of peripheral vision, probably didn't have as much focus because who they didn't need it, they just needed to see the big large gray thing coming at them so they could stick their stick in it. Um but overall, yeah, uh just there was a lot of differences that you know like again, I hear things differently than most people, and there's sounds that just absolutely wreak havoc on me. I can hear neon light or fluorescent lights, I can hear incandescent lights, I can hear um uh a transformer buzzing. I I can hear a lot of electrical sounds, but that's also part of my uh training and upbringing is I know the sounds of a machine that runs properly, and I know when the the just a slight change in frequency and tone is is a huge change. So it's like oh, okay. Uh they're they're changing this to that. So or they they you know they started up number four or or whatever it is, you you become acoustically aware. And one of the one of the things with um one of the things that I read and and also followed that up with a podcast was that they were very good at pattern recognition. And part of the evidence is that you know for several generations they would show up at the same spot where there was a rhino crossing, so that they knew how to you know get enough meat for the winter. And you know, a couple rhinos and learning how to smoke it and you know preserve it and hang it up in a cave, and now they have enough food to get them through until um until the spring comes. So, you know, pattern recognition, better hear or not better, but different hearing, and it all comes down to what that they need to do to survive in the environment that they were in, and without studying, like it's it that's part of the difficult thing that uh I a lot of people don't have patience for, and I certainly wouldn't be able to have that patience because if I don't get the answer, I you know, if I don't get information to help me answer the question, then I start getting really, really twitchy. And uh so I avoid a lot of things that don't have answers just because I know I don't want to absolutely go batshit crazy. So having uh the scientists look at it and it's like the what do they need to survive? We don't have a lot of answers to a lot of the questions. And they geologists have have studied and say, okay, we know we did a nice age here, and we know that they were seated here. We know or we believe that you know at this time frame, this section of the world was lush and green and had a lot of uh uh flora and fauna, but we don't have any proof, we don't have any pictures, we don't have video, we don't have samples or anything like that. Well, all we have is the geolog, you know, the the geologists going through and and picking at rocks and saying, okay, see this. We believe that this is you know oak trees that did, you know, that fell and then got crushed by rock or or whatever. They had very thick, you know, they had cartman bones, they very very thick boned, uh uh barrel chested because they wanted you know to keep them meaty and warm. Uh the I I think most most of the Neanderthal studied people uh have agreed to, like they required like 5,000 calories a day just to get up and go to work and come home um and survive. And uh a pregnant Neanderthal uh or a nursing Neanderthal would require much more than that because you know a baby Neanderthal needed like just to lay there and and survive the winter and produce like um I think when winter hit Florida this year, there were a bunch of people that were like, Oh my god, my bill went this way and and this, you know, it went way up, and they were having brownouts and blah blah blah. And uh everyone was wondering why couldn't you know what's the difference? We run our air conditioners all summer long, and it cost more energy to create heat than it does to move heat. And when your air conditioning is just moving heat from one section to or from inside to outside, creating heat actually cost a lot more energy. So, in order to create enough heat to survive sub-zero winters year after year after thousands of years, they needed to burn a lot of uh calories. So, all of these are ways that the people that were able to create those genes inside themselves or those adaptations inside themselves uh survived, and the the less thick boned, the less chubby ones, the ones that didn't eat as much, uh, didn't survive, and then their bloodline died out.
SPEAKER_02And weren't the Neanderthals short kings too?
SPEAKER_00Uh, that is the study is that they were usually around uh, I think five, like the tall ones were five, six.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Uh yes. So yeah, sure. I in my head, uh as always, I listened to way too many podcasts on Neanderthals this week. And most of the descriptions I just kept thinking of uh Grimly from Lord of the Rings.
SPEAKER_03That's what you kept saying.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he's just a bear, it like he looks like a barrel or uh, you know, a nice stocky barrel where you have uh uh Orlando Bloom's this nice thin javelin thrower. Uh so you know that's the difference between you know the humans and and the Neanderthal was you know who's better at fighting? Well, it depends on what you're fighting, and you know, the the short stocky chubby fellas were that way because they were fighting giant furry rhinoceroses.
SPEAKER_01I think as a five-six man myself, I've always said uh that uh depending on the gas station I'm leaving, uh, but I've always said low center of gravity. You know, that's that's what it that's what it's gonna take in a fight, is if you if you're a if you're a weeble who wobbles but doesn't get knocked down, you've got the advantage pretty much across the board.
SPEAKER_00Like my best friend in high school was a wrestler, and um we fought a lot. Uh we like we would hang out and end up fighting. Kids at that age, you end up fighting, or not fighting, fighting, but you know, just rough housing and whatever. And that motherfucker would not go down because he would like he was 4'8 at the time, and I was 4'11, and I had just hit a there's always that kid who's just built like a brick shit house. Oh, yeah. And when I got to football, there was uh I I was six foot, uh six foot tall when I was playing football, and they moved me to the running back squad, uh, mainly because they needed someone to hold a tackle dummy. And the running back that was the starter was like five seven, maybe, but shoulders that were five seven wide, and that motherfucker knocked me on my ass daily, and you know, not out of any like he was really nice and smiled and picked me up every time, but like his job was to knock me down, and he did his job very fucking well. Um, so yeah, uh again, the the the idea is to try to think of an alien planet of cold ice that is constantly changing. And the Neanderthals were actually really good at adapting because whenever it got warmer and they had to fight, uh go through uh and hunt different things, they learned how to hunt different things. Uh, they knew how to use medicine very well. Um, and medicine in the fact that, hey, we've identified it goes back to pattern recognition. Hey, when I eat this plant, all my joints don't hurt. I want to have this plant daily, so either cook it or you know, put it into our meal, or uh you know, maybe I'll just chew it while I'm wandering around. Um, they were uh very prone to get hurt because of the way they hunted. They like face-to-face with like I I keep coming back to the rhinoceros because like I rhinoceros rhinoceros are badasses and they will knock your ass down. Um so I I think most of the studies uh kind of equate it to uh rodeo uh injuries, like broken ribs, uh, and some of the way they break their ribs is falling down and getting butted by a bull, and that's where most of their injuries came from. And uh, you know, they they were built with uh a way to heal and then get back to the job of hunting, and again, uh it's a trait that survived because those were the people that kept moving on and having children, and the people that couldn't recover from those injuries died out and didn't have kids, so you know the weaklings are dead, and uh um so whenever you know the the fall of the Neanderthal uh at first was oh man was superior, so we just killed them off, and it's like well, not really. Uh and again, this was a study that came out uh I think 2020 or something like that, and it was like at the uh end of the era for the Neanderthal, they they had adapted because as the climate changed, the climate changed slowly, and they were able to kind of drift with the the climate change, and then all of a sudden the climate went hectic and crazy and changed really, really fast, faster than evolution could help them. And um, so between that and whatever cosmic event or whatever catastrophic event happened at the the point that they're saying uh in this newest study, it wiped out a whole bunch of them, and then um uh the humans came with their javelins, and um, I think another big invention that uh was a huge change was man or humans or or whatever you want to call them. There's some scientists that believe Neanderthals are humans, uh just a different form of human. So it's kind of kind of gets weird talking, I guess Homo sapien uh developed the ability to use fish bones to sew.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, uh so were Neanderthals like the first those were those the tool guys, definitively. Do we or as far as we know, I guess?
SPEAKER_00Um, there's still questions uh on that. Like at first, uh at first glimpse in the early days of just in the early days of studying Neanderthals, they're like, oh no, they just picked up rocks and beat animals over the head and then chewed on their hide. And over the over a hundred years of studying them, they're like, Oh, wait, no, they develop tools. Like, there's um one podcast I listened to went in depth about the again going to the pattern recognition and seeing a rock and holding it, you know, basically taking a rock and setting it on a stump and hitting it in such a way that it would shave off a portion of it, and then basically three hits, and it would shape into a uh a nice pointy uh edge, uh sharp edge that they could a uh skin uh animals with, they could uh cut food with, they could hunt with, and then they developed some tar uh that acted like super glue and hardened so that they could put the the rocks that they just cut onto the ends of their spears and have better hunting tools. Um up until recently, they believe there was a belief that um well go back 20 years, people were like Neanderthals didn't know shit about fire, and then 10 years ago, it's like oh well Neanderthals knew how to tend fire, they just didn't know how to start it. And now recently there's a new study that said, No, they there were groups of Neanderthals that knew how to start fire, tend fire couple thousand years around some fire, you think you would eventually go, uh I've seen this before.
SPEAKER_01Racial memory, genetic memory, uh yeah, fire.
SPEAKER_00It is possible that that like in like say northern France, there was a like there there was very small groups, like most Neanderthals were in small groups, uh and separated and whatever. So you might have a group that is like as soon as the fire went out, they're like, Oh shit, now we're fucked.
SPEAKER_01And then instead of money to think about for thousands of years living like that.
SPEAKER_00Shit, we playing fast, like run out there, see if the like there went there's a storm coming. Let's run out there and see if lightning hits and whatever. Um, but also if you can picture an alien planet where you know it's in the middle of this frozen tundra, but there's this thousand-year-old, ten thousand-year-old fire that's just been burning, it's possible, and then they can just walk over to there, get the hot stone like an anthracite coal vein that got struck by lightning or something, like uh, like that place in Pennsylvania.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. That's that's an interesting little bit of lore that could yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh, or their version of uh Simpsons tire fire that's been burning.
SPEAKER_01Scientists are still trying to figure out who can put the tires there.
SPEAKER_00Um and then uh there like there's again you could have like the human race has certain members of the human race that are so secluded that have never seen any kind of technology. So if someone, you know, an archaeologist thousands of years down the road or a hundred thousand years down the road finds those bones, then judges all of human race based on oh, they didn't have TVs, they didn't have cars, they had thick feet because they walked everywhere, and that's the only bones they have. That's the picture that they're gonna have of the human race of this era, but yeah, because most of our bones are gonna be turned to whatever Sour Patch kids are made of, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Uh and like there was a discovery uh of a cave, and it was like there is no way that Neanderthals ventured this far into a cave because Neanderthals were too stupid to figure out how to spelunk down here, and the and then they found bones that you know solidified the the concept that yes, there were Neanderthals here, and then they started putting sorry, sorry, I got this is something I'm really excited about because not only were Neanderthals there, they were doing art in those caves, not just like cave drawings, they were doing sculptures, and that was really and um I found the name of the cave, Mickey. It's the I'm gonna butcher butcher this. It's the Brunacwell Cave, and it's in uh France. And they made the art with broken stalagmites, and we saw it on a video, and it's really cool. It's just a circle, but it's still cool.
SPEAKER_01The first liberal arts college in a cave.
SPEAKER_00And see, and one of the fascinating things about that cave to try to date it and figure out when the basic uh not I don't want to call it an altar because that gives uh religious connotations, and they're still not sure, but whatever room decorations that they use the stelagmites for, the the they used to figure out how old it was. And basically, uh they um as time went on, uh thing all the stalagmites were calcified because of water and and moisture and all this other stuff, so they bored a hole down through the center and basically looked at it like counting tree rings, which is also how they age some of the bones, is your every time every year that you grow, you get a little bit of bone uh circle on your bones, so they can cut it and kind of count your rings a little bit, not exactly, but kind of similar. So, yeah, they were able to age this uh cave to uh man Homo sapiens were not here at this time. There is no there the only explanation based on the bones being here and this the age of these stalagmites is this is a Neanderthal thing. They they took ink and they put their hand on the wall and they sprayed you know uh sprayed the ink so that they left a bunch of handprints. Um and one of the fat you know, the the scientist that I was listening to was absolutely fascinated because in order to have a fire down there, they had to use animal bone with a little bit of fat. You know, they sh they knew how to remove all the fat from the animal because fat has a uh much higher uh calorie content, so they were you know they they were gristle eaters and like which I'm pretty sure my dad was a Neanderthal. That guy would eat gristle off of it. He would clean a chicken bone. Oh my god, it was gross. I hated sitting across from him.
SPEAKER_02If I come across a piece of gristle, the whole piece of meat is done for me, it's done, but uh.
SPEAKER_00Saving the bone and keeping enough fat rendered on the bone so they could light it on fire and have a basically a torch to to go down there and they could keep a fire burning underground because it smoked less uh and burned long the bone and fat burned longer than uh than um just wood. And you know, if if anyone knew that bone burnt. I didn't either. I thought it was uh yeah. I I think the way they just I might be talking way off base, but it's like the the fat wrapped around it, and it the fat is what burnt and kept burning, but over time the bone would eventually you if you're sitting in a fire long enough, you it reaches that ignition point and then would finally take off. And because you know, in crematorians, the bones burn, yeah.
SPEAKER_02They have yeah, and they get crumbly.
SPEAKER_00That's true. So um, yeah, but the it takes a long time to burn it, you're not getting you know the super bright light that you get from lighting a birch branch, but it lit and it kept it lit, you know, kept light down in a dark like the cave was deep and down under, like there was no outside light getting in there at all. So it's like that that was the big question is how did this get here? Because it's deep, and it's like uh the like the hot thousands and thousands of years, no one else went down into this cave except for some uh some guy that wanted to spelunk, and he was like, Where's a deep hole that I could go? And it's like he gets down there and he's like, Whoa, someone's been here before. Damn it, you know, that kind of disappointment of uh spelunking. I guess I I guess everyone.
SPEAKER_01Everyone artist keeps on going down in that cave and dying, and the next guy goes down and goes, I thought I thought this was my cave.
SPEAKER_00And yeah, 100,000 years from now, some archaeologist or some spelunker is gonna be like, Hey, I'm gonna go down this cave no one's ever been in before. Um, so yeah, the the artistry, the thing, and that cave gave a lot of new information on how uh how we look at Neanderthals. And by we I mean the scientific community that's trying to overcome the marketing assholes that put out the story of them. Um but and it is it is still being studied, like they're still learning, and they're they didn't just find it, rip out a bunch of stuff, and go there, they're continuing to study the cave and they're gonna be learning more. And based on there, there was a lady that uh probably autistic saw a pattern in the paintings that they did, and she was like, Oh, I've looked at caves in several, like, I think there was like 12 different locations that had cave that had paintings, and she's like, based on my notes, they had 32 characters, so there is a point that someone's gonna find a cave that has a lot more, and it's going to be basically the the uh the um Rosetta Stone of Neanderthal language, and they're gonna be able to assemble some sort of some sort of alphabet type thing and say, Oh, these symbols represent this, and these symbols represent that. Right now, it's just she knows that they had 32 symbols that constantly showed up, and like she's identified them and she's got them catalogs, so the next person that you know might not be our generation, might be a couple generations down the road, but someone is going to put it all together and and unlock a whole bunch of shit. And it might be that you know, they had technology, they had televisions that just all that shit melted and went away and and went into the earth and became something else. Who knows? It's on the surface, it's a crazy idea, but the the more you think about it and the more information you have, it's like, well, it's possible.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, how do you explain those Gyco commercials? Explain that, atheists.
SPEAKER_02One of the things I always think about is like someone in millions of years discovering our technology from today, like they find a hard drive. With what they're gonna be like, what is this box? They're not gonna know what the fuck to do with it. They're not gonna know what magic is in there. So maybe there's stuff like that for uh from old other societies too, that we just don't know what's in the rocks and shit that we found. Maybe there's more to it.
SPEAKER_01I I remember reading a uh it's a Terry Brooks novel, and it's uh it's Shannara, it's one of the Shannara books. And they like they they have this airship, and the airship's mission is to go across the sea to find this uh like ancient magic, because I don't know they need more magic. They're like, this is a newer, or this is this is a lost type of magic, right? So they go across the sea, lots of trials and tribulations, but then like they get there, and it turns out that like the magic is computers. It's like post-apocalyptic, and like they talk about like uh they're talking about like uh like flat uh shining discs, you know. And then like you you the way that they write it, the way that he writes it, you don't realize until like three quarters of the way through, and he's putting it into like a disc tray that it's a C D. You know, it's like he doesn't it is like that, like that he writes it so well that like, oh, he picked up this thing, and like exactly like you said it would just be like a bot a box. It's they how do they know that how do they figure out that it's like magnetically transcribed on the inside with this arm that reads it, like all this whatever? It's insane that we made that, let alone that somebody could discover it with no context and go, ah, yes, I know how what this is.
SPEAKER_00And the speed that we're doing things, the spinning disc is going to be ancient history in about a hundred years. Oh, that's old.
SPEAKER_01That's old, it's all RAM chips now, baby. Yeah, I don't even know. It's gonna be like light trend, it's gonna be light etched onto a crystal in like two years.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was working in um uh working with a a guy from Bell Labs, and w when Bell Labs was still an American institution.
SPEAKER_01Anyway, hack and bell.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think no, I think they're Finland and Nora, whoever owns Ericsson, or I believe owns Bell Labs now, uh, which is the Vikings. Um, but yeah, they were they were looking at uh shooting protons through computer chips, basically uh light, uh and they were limited because light doesn't turn the corner very well, whereas electrons could turn on a well uh a thousand million times on a dime if electrons can move anywhere you want to put an electron. Light was a little bit different. The only problem or the the question was is since light is faster than an electron, can we make it can we manipulate it in such a way that we can make computer chips so much faster? And eventually they're going to unlock that key and all the computer chips that are out in the world today, which we would we were pumping out about a million chips a day in 2000. So there are probably like astronauts, like there's too many zeros to to calculate how many computer chips are in the world today that are all going to be obsolete in less than a hundred years. Just absolutely just every single one of them is just gonna be not even not just not used, but unable to be used by anyone that could put stuff together because there's just not going to be any way to connect to them in any kind of meaningful way. So they're just gonna be tracked.
SPEAKER_01The junkers and the stalkers that pick through the wastes will uh they'll they'll figure it out, you know, they'll find the right cables. Maybe, yeah, maybe if you get a tribe of Bulgarians together, uh it would it if anyone can do it, can Jerry rig it together, it's Eastern Europeans. Yeah, they will figure out how to make a computer work.
SPEAKER_00I worked with a uh Bulgarian gentleman who uh he drove a Subaru and his alternator started going bad, so he removed it from his car, brought it into the work center, unwound it, found the broken wire, like just the one section that was bad, rewild, rewound it, and put it back in his car and drove home that day. And he could he would drive down the road. Every time he drove down the road, if he saw something on the side of the road, he would within it like in a millisecond, he could calculate whether he could put it back together, pull over, grab it, put it in his car, take it home, and rebuild it in less than a week.
SPEAKER_01And it like he it's like they have that superpower from the Lego movie.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, absolutely. He it was absolutely amazing to watch him work. It just he would read popular science and other uh engineering magazines and start sketching little stuff, like he was he wasn't uh trained, uh, didn't go to school for engineering or anything like that. He just had that DNA in him that said, Hey, let's put some stuff together and make it work. And he was very, very good at it. So uh you're not to not to uh generalize about Bulgarians, but every Bulgarian that I have met has been very good at taking junk and making it work. All one, all one of them that I knew.
SPEAKER_01So small sample test.
SPEAKER_00Um so uh yeah, so like the again going through the history of the study, the study has changed a lot faster than you know the the Neanderthals have changed. Uh and again, we're talking about a much larger sample size than the human every there was the yeah, they have lasted 10 times longer than the human race has existed, uh, or the the Homo sapiens have existed. Um and the every time that they find something new, they find something new. It's not, oh, here's another set of bones. Yeah, it confirms everything we knew. It's uh they found a set of bones of a young, they they determined it was a young girl, and she was a mixed breed of a Neanderthal and a Denis Denovisian. Uh and again, the Denovisians had uh they're the ones that went east where uh the Neanderthals went north, and they ended up high in the mountains and developed better lungs that could suck more oxygen out of the air because they needed it up in the high mountains. They uh had different different noses that would basically allow them to take deeper breaths so that they could survive in in high, high, high altitudes. Um but this little girl had a mix of Neanderthal bone, uh Neanderthal DNA and Denovesian uh DNA. And then they kept digging and kept digging, and they and they were able to so far they've have been able to fully sequence uh a full uh Neanderthal DNA sequence. Like I I think the human uh genome project uh took I don't know if you were you were old enough to to remember this, Christian, but uh there was a point in 2000 and 2001 era where you could download a program, connect to the internet, and your computer would download punks of data.
SPEAKER_01Yes. This the one of the first um examples of like cloud computing, I think, or one of the first like public uh league accessible versions where they would, yeah, you would you would like uh leave your computer on overnight, your big old like beige uh Packard Bell uh S100 or whatever, and you would uh it would it would connect to Al Gore's internet and you would just like help MIT or whoever figure out where every human being on Earth came from.
SPEAKER_04Yep.
SPEAKER_00And then they turned it into a uh money-making scheme.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, there we are. That's humans, that's Homo sapiens right there, baby.
SPEAKER_00Uh, but with that technology, they were able to to sequence the the Neanderthal genome uh as well, so they have a full set to to have something to compare things to, and then they were able they a couple discoveries after that, they were able to get enough uh Denovisian uh DNA to sequence that. And whenever they had this little girl, they were able to again determine that she had a uh Neanderthal mother and a Denovisian father, and then they dug in a little deeper and looked at the coating, and the father was also a mixed breed from like several generations prior to that, so like he had like four or five percent uh Neanderthal uh DNA in him, so they're like, Oh, it wasn't just hey, they ran into each other and then they interbred, it was this has been going on all along, it's just the ones with this amount of sequencing is are the ones that survive, so it's a matter of time, and it's a matter of what do you need to survive?
SPEAKER_01And uh the the creature that that it that we call like human wasn't I guess like you could you could say a couple of different things, maybe depending on how you feel about it, uh because they're compatible genetically, so it's like either the the species that we would call human beings like wasn't alone in its human sort of adjacency or humanness, right? Uh or there were like multiple different kinds of humans, like you however you want to kind of slice that one. Uh that it was that we weren't a monolith, I guess. And it was kind of like a hotbed uh of of genetics for he for the shape of what the human race would become.
SPEAKER_00And if you're a computer nerd, everyone's a little bit Unix. Um not just so don't tell any girls that well some of us are are Macs and some of us are Linux and some of us are Windows, but deep down at the core, everyone's a little bit Unix. And and why and you know, while the Unix is probably the superior system, it just works, it didn't survive the the environmental conditions that it were needed for Unix to survive. Uh it's still going and it's still out there, but eventually Unix is gonna go away because it's just too expensive to to go.
SPEAKER_01But I was gonna say, I thought Unix was more like mitochondria, where it just like became the part of other uh like operating systems, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, uh homo sort homo erectus is the birth of most of them. I guess I I think that most people have settled on homo homo erectus as as being the group that let started to leave Africa and that became Homo sapiens and became I or became Cro-Magnon, became Neanderthal, became Dunabesian, and there's a couple other ones that we just don't have a large large enough sample size to identify solely as something, but the you know, scientists believe that there were you know a bunch of different kinds, like you have Germans and Swedish and French, and you know, the the Vikings, the Romans, the Carthaginians, they all have a little bit of something.
SPEAKER_01Uh, you know, you could tell a Japanese person isn't from England, uh, or you could tell that it's a big, bigger split than the Europeans between the Europeans themselves.
SPEAKER_00So, but you could sell, hey, I look at this Japanese person, that's a human. I look at this uh uh Egyptian person, that's a human. I look at this American, except for a couple of them, they're human. Um, but you know, the there's that that singular there, I no one has identified that singular species as a definitive marker, but most people are leaning, I guess, to to Homo erectus um with a couple steps in between here and there. But uh you know, it all came from Africa because that's where conditions were uh present for uh the the next step in evolution to become something to be enough big enough split for scientists to say, hey, all right, this marks this, and this marks this, and we're gonna identify. It wasn't just hey, uh the monkeys became this, and then this became this, and then this became this. It's we spread out, and some people survived, some people didn't, and what what is left is is who we are now.
SPEAKER_01Um the the body the body plan worked out well enough, and then the intelligence developed, and then tool use, and then everything kind of took off from there.
SPEAKER_00And uh, you know, the the again the the original idea of you know the humans or Homo sapiens coming out of Africa and and and throwing spears and killing off all the all the Neanderthals isn't the way it happened, uh based on evidence that we have now. It's they came out, uh they you know some of the Neanderthals joined um you know the the Homo sapien tribes and they just met a a pretty Homo sapien lady and and you know they got married and you know uh the the genes of uh the humans or the Homo sapiens kind of outpace the genes of the Neanderthal. So like if you have um an Irish baby or an Irish mom and a and a French dad, uh one of those genes, you know, every time that you have uh it's binary, uh, where you have uh you know I what is it, 23 chromosomes? You you get to pick one from one side and the other from the other side. Some I think some of them are are very this is definitely an X zone and this is a Y zone, blah blah blah.
SPEAKER_01It's like the game lights out. You ever play lights out? Where you push the ones, like uh three of them light up, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Three of them light up, and then you you keep on pressing those. I think it's like that where it's like, you know, uh, yeah, one of them turns the red hair on, but then another one down the line that's not even related turns the red hair back off, you know? Like and it's all about proteins and uh and I don't know where I'm going with this, but I just yeah, it's it's the punnet square is is pretty much why everything happens genetically. Yeah, there's a there's a strong guy and a weak guy, and if two weak guys are in the room, the weak one wins. If there's any strong guy in the room, strong guy overpowers uh the other the other expression of the gene, essentially.
SPEAKER_00And every now and then it doesn't quite work out that way, and it's like, well, we calculated this was gonna work, but it didn't quite work out that way. And sometimes genes get broken, or some of those chromosomes get broken in the manufacturing of the baby. It it's and sometimes that broken gene is a gift that it was like, hey, no, this is this is a better way of doing it.
SPEAKER_01So a lot of happy accidents, a lot of mystery, a lot of eventually, actually, it sounds like with the with the between the Neanderthal, the different like kind of species of proto-human there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, and um, something that I read that was interesting is when the mating between the Neanderthals and the humans happened, it was mostly human women mating with Neanderthal men. Like the girl. Human women were like, No, we're done with human men, these are new, let's have these.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they spent all day hunting still going on. They're still into Neanderthals. No, I get it though. You know, you want a strong guy who can reach stuff and throw the spear good. Yeah. Well, uh Barney Rubble.
SPEAKER_02Sorry. I imagine the Neanderthals were good at cuddling.
SPEAKER_01Probably. Well, they had to for survival.
SPEAKER_00True. It was so cold. So yeah, there it in the the mixed mixed breeding, uh, you're more likely to get a Barney Rubble, Betty Rubble situation than you are to get a Fred Flintstone, uh Wilma Flintstone situation.
SPEAKER_01Because we're those are from the we're we're ascribing tra uh Barney Rubble Neanderthal Betty as a homo sapiens.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, tracks. I mean look at look at the waist. Maybe Betty is definitely uh sapien.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So um and um as far as as as as pop culture though, uh one movie that I would suggest is is uh something like a Jurassic Park with Neanderthal DNA, but it already happened. Uh it just sucked really bad. I don't even I can't even remember the I think it was like Will or Dave or some stupid guy name um where they take uh a DNA sample from a bone and basically create a uh person and he's adopted by some parents and it devolved more into like an after school special or or just cheesy drama family kind of thing instead of actually exploring like if they could do it in the same vein as Jurassic Park, I think it would be an amazing movie. Like just they clone a whole zoo full of crow uh of uh you know proto-humans or pre-humans and try to set up a zoo and then they conglomerate together and and you know revolt. You know, it's funny, yeah.
SPEAKER_01You're saying that, and all I can think of is the the most recent uh Planet of the Apes like uh set of movies where they really I think like they do they lean in more in the in that first movie, they lean into like the horror aspect of like uh hey, what if a monkey was like as smart as a guy?
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh and and like I feel Planet of the Apes is seen as this hokey uh sci-fi sort of almost like operatic or uh epic type type thing, because it gets very like about like kingdoms of apes and stuff, yeah. Uh in the old movies. But like in that first movie, it's it's James Franco, who unfortunately is dead, and we don't talk about him anymore. Um, but he's he's got the the he they sort of it's almost like that where they kind of bring back they they it have the intelligence of even maybe like an early man, but with all so much more strength, like that that definitely could be horrific. Uh but almost you almost you gotta walk a line, right? Because I think if you're putting a Neanderthal or something like that, you know, you have to go for a certain look. Yeah, and I don't know, you gotta really walk a line on like how you approach that look, probably in this day and age. Um, but man, I love scary caveman. That's a great idea. Where's the Michael Crichton-based movie bit on that one?
SPEAKER_02When we were doing the research, there's a show on HBO called Primal that is apparently about Neanderthals, but we have not watched it yet. It's animated, so I don't know how they handle that part, that portion of events.
SPEAKER_01Uh Gendy Tartakovsky, I believe. That's a that's a that's the Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack guy. Uh, and I think that show Primal, yeah, has you has like Primal basically, I think, has won all the awards that Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack didn't, is what it feels like. It just everybody loves uh uh Primal, uh, I think it's like one of those, and that it completely escaped me. I'm like, this is like this is a uh proof of why the algorithm fails. Like, why am I not just like being fed this directly into my veins, essentially?
SPEAKER_00And I think uh the the one uh tent pole that sticks up above most is Clan of the Cave Bear. And six books. Yes, uh, she was supposed to do a seven seventh one, but whenever I guess the publisher just got tired of her shit.
SPEAKER_02And I would have, I got tired of it after the first book.
SPEAKER_01But uh, this is this is not a good thing to watch or read or whatever.
SPEAKER_00Oh, the movie. Well, I don't know. I I saw the movie a little bit, it's got Daryl Hannah as the main character who is a homo sapien who is adopted by a clan of Neanderthals, yeah, basically, and then she falls in love with one of them, and he takes her back like so he's a prisoner. I don't know the whole story. I never really paid attention because it was a bunch of grunts and groans, and I'm like, I don't like foreign movies.
SPEAKER_02The book was a struggle to get through because I I was thinking about this after we talked earlier today about it, Mickey. And the thing that annoys me about the book is they try to justify everything that happens in it. Like they talk with grunts and groans, and every time a conversation starts, the author feels a need to remind you that they don't use words, they can only communicate with grunts and groans. And then the other thing that they tried to justify was all of the child sex. Uh they're like, Well, because our lives are shorter, so it's okay to impregnate nine and ten years old. And I I'm after the first one, I'm like, I don't want to read this anymore. I am done with this rhetoric.
SPEAKER_01You can hey, you know what? Uh authors, everybody, you can modernize that one if you want. You can uh you can you can we can view that one through through a modern lens. I don't think I want like a that true to life uh Neanderthal drama experience.
SPEAKER_02There's there's a pregnant there was a pregnancy in the book that was like a 20-year-old Neanderthal, and they considered it a geriatric pregnancy. It just it's like just I get where you're coming from.
SPEAKER_01You want to be like true to the thig or whatever, but at a point there's like uh oh, this isn't fun art to engage with anymore, actually.
SPEAKER_02Okay, but also is any of that even based in fact, or is it just some shit that this lady came up with?
SPEAKER_01All right, well, is it then at the point? I guess maybe she assumed maybe she assumed what happened. She extrapolated.
SPEAKER_00She I it somehow, like I'm gonna say she just made it up because the book was written in the 70s, and at the time of the 70s, there was no evidence available that there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. So she made up that like a shot in the dark that she got right, uh, but not based on any scientific evidence, because that again, that is something that wasn't possible to identify until after 2000 when we when we as the internet gathered together and solved that genome puzzle.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I think it's like one of those things you can you could say, like, oh, this is a problem now, so it for sure was a problem back then, also, and maybe a worse problem. Uh, but again, I do do you I don't I think you can maybe like view that through more metaphor or like not everything has to be that historically accurate to be it makes it unenjoyable uh because it's crime. Uh and it's just like well if you're trying to present it, wasn't to them, obviously, because this is thousands and thousands of years ago, but that's like uh there me if you're gonna make this into a thing, uh I am alive now. And I uh hate that. I don't want I don't know, it's like the same thing where it's like uh I don't know, like the Call of Duty stuff where they're like, well, there were no women and whatever. And I'm like, yeah, but also like when you die, you get up like five minutes later. Like some of this isn't like it wouldn't be fun, it wouldn't be fun if you were just in World War One. You realize that, right? Like this is a video game.
SPEAKER_00You want realism? You want realism, or you want you want realism, pay $70, and as soon as you shot, as soon as you're shot, you die. Game over, can't be rebooted, can't be restarted, you have to go buy another disc.
SPEAKER_02If anyone ever had the guts to do that, I would applaud them. I mean, I it's obviously just a cash grab, but there's something really satisfying about that to me.
SPEAKER_01I played a flash game that uh it saved your cookies, and like if you had to make certain decisions, and uh most of those ended with like because it was like it was actually weird because it was a pandemic thing. Uh, and if you got it wrong, which was most endings, you would end up on like a park bench dead. And like if you came back to that page and you didn't clear your cache or whatever, you would still it would boot up and you would just be still on the park bench dead.
SPEAKER_03It's amazing.
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, it was a really cool idea.
SPEAKER_00There that reminds me, yeah. I I learned a lot about the Windows registry because of a I learned let me let me start over. I have learned so much computer science because of games. It's the value of games. The value of games in the in a computer education is extremely important. Uh I had a 486 Hewlett-Packard that was like ancient by the time I bought it because uh my sister-in-law was buying a brand new one, and she was like, Here, you want this? I'm like, Cool, I just got out of the military, I've got no computer. Sure, I'll check this out. And um, I bought a couple games at uh a toy store off the dollar shelf, and I was like, All right, let me try this. And uh, I think Mist was the first one, and it was like, nah, nah, we're we're not gonna do this. No, why is it this?
SPEAKER_01Your computer can't run mist, which is basically a slideshow of pictures.
SPEAKER_00And so it was like, oh, if you're having if you you know diagnose this problem, and if you see this, then you don't have enough memory. And I'm like, Okay, what do I do? So I went and I found you know, did some research, and it was like, Oh, this is this is pretty easy. So then I learned how to you know upgrade the memory, and I was like, Oh, this is awesome, cool. Now I can play Mist. And then uh uh there was another game, and it was an online game. And when you opened it up, it said, Hey, we're gonna write to your registry. I'm like, All right, whatever. And a similar situation where when you die, you die, you're done until you so I'm like, I wanna keep, I wanna I fucked up, I want to go, I want to redo, and so I had to look up how to hack my registry and clean out my registry. So I'm like, okay, now I know what's going on, and you know, other other uh it became something that I learned uh um to do in a work situation. They're like, hey, uh this is going on. I'm like, oh, I know this one, I know this one. I I got this.
SPEAKER_01So just rename it to dot old.
SPEAKER_00So if you have uh children that are obsessed with games, make sure that you know they know that what's happening underneath, uh, and don't can you know, don't get on them about playing games all the time. Let them play games as long as they know what's going on a little bit underneath. So uh oh, and uh just in in that that reminds me uh one of the first games that I bought for my oldest son. Um they they came out with a Hot Wheels and Barbie uh computer right as he was like five years old, and so I bought him one and it came with backyard baseball, and backyard baseball is coming back, and I am super excited. So um it's probably gonna be is it's probably gonna be lame, and I'm probably gonna have my hopes and dreams destroyed by uh really pathetic cash grab, but I hope not. I I am holding out hopefully transactions, yeah, because backyard baseball was absolutely fun as shit, and I highly recommend it uh checking it out when it does come out. Not a paid sponsor, but hey.
SPEAKER_01They could be it's from a time when you they would release a game, and that was the game. Yes, that was it was beautiful, just have it and it was complete on the disc and you owned it and it would always work.
SPEAKER_00Um, so uh I I hope that answers the question. Uh oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02What I have one more thing. Um uh we have not talked about Neanderthal's voices yet. Well, actually, I have two more things because I did a little bit of research while we're here too. Okay, go ahead. We haven't we haven't talked okay, we haven't talked about their voices yet. Uh because when they're depicted rarely in media, they're always like deep, grunty voices, but they actually had like higher pitch voices than we do.
SPEAKER_01Sorry. Uh it's so much funnier because in my head it's it has been all the oog and thrag and rum.
SPEAKER_04Just like no, yeah, yeah. Go over there.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00Uh I listened to a podcast called The Rest is History, and they did an episode on Neanderthals, and I forced Jackie to listen to it. And one of the hosts did an imitation, like he had talked to, like, they're they're they are very deep researchers, and uh they talked to somebody and they said, This is this is kind of what a Neanderthal sounds like. So he did an imitation of it, and it was absolutely hilarious because very high-pitched and very well.
SPEAKER_01They were probably like mimicking like bird calls and shit, right? Like coordinating and and communicating, and so like that was probably I would imagine most like very few mammals are using sound to communicate, and so they I wonder if it was picked up from birds, where that's like a much more common thing.
SPEAKER_00That is very astute, yeah. Yeah, that tracks, especially if they like they because they ambushed a lot of animals, they tracked a lot of animals, and if you're uh like hey, he's over here, the animals would be like, Oh shit, I'm being hunted, da da da da. Whereas if they're like, ah, ah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and uh the other thing that I researched while we were talking is were there any um Neanderthal musical instruments? Because if they're making other kinds of art, I wondered if they were making music too, and they have found um one musical instrument called the Divjay Bobay flute, also called a tittled bob, which is a fun word to say. Um, which is they found it in 1995 in a cave, and it's a bear femur pierced with holes, and there's controversy over whether it is a flute or whether it is just a femur pierced with like bear teeth holes. But I'm looking at a picture of it right now, and it looks like a flute to me. So I'm gonna say yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's cool, and then of course, after that, the second uh instrument, the fender bass.
SPEAKER_00Uh so yeah, I I I think the that answers the question of whether autistic people are derived from Neanderthals. Uh, I think we've definitely definitely covered all bases in in answering that question as a definitive. Probably, maybe, yeah, no, uh, we don't know yet.
SPEAKER_01Uh so maybe all people did, or most people did. So maybe so some autists, autistic people are from autists, are from uh great autists. They were the first autists, maybe the last autists.
SPEAKER_00Um so uh with that, I'll uh thank you to Jangy. Uh you can visit her at valley of o.com. Uh, check out some of her many articles on only in your state. Uh Christian uh is uh going to be revamping everything on nothing.com into something that everyone can enjoy. Hopefully, uh it is going to be very experimental. And uh if you have something to offer or join or or propose or whatever, uh this entire uh concept and idea is to basically just be wide open. Uh if it's related to everything or anything or nothing, uh it fits in the genre that we're going for. So you know, we kind of left it wide open. Uh if you have art to share, we'll share it. If you have art to sell, we might be able to buy some. I don't know. Yeah, we like buying if you have music, uh, we'll listen to it. If you have some weird concept, conspiracy theory, as long as it doesn't land me in jail yet. Uh I mean I'm eventually gonna be headed there. I'm gonna be in a re-education camp eventually. Uh but for something stupid, I don't want to you know be punished uh right out right now. Uh not until we're fully into the the fall of mankind. Uh, but by that time, jail's gonna be where all the cool people are hanging out anyway. It's like uh Christian, uh, do you have anything else to promote or or share?
SPEAKER_01Uh nothing to plug. I'm just gonna get started on that website here in a here in a minute.
SPEAKER_02Do we want to know what the topic is next week?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, we're going to explore the question of is outsider music exploitation?
SPEAKER_02Um this uh this started from a South Park episode, BT Dubs.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, South Park is full of rabbit holes, and eventually we'll probably do a deep dive on that as well. But uh yeah, uh we were watching an episode and wing so the the the gentleman who runs City City Walk uh had his wife uh transported over by the Chinese mafia uh to the United States, and then she was going on American Idol, and we were like, is this a real person? Or are they making fun of someone? And they were making fun of an actual artist named Wing, who uh is considered an outsider, uh, outside mute outsider music, and we started digging in, and uh it's gonna be in it. It's oh my god, it's gonna be so fun. All right, all right.
SPEAKER_02I'm gonna end the recording now. If you want to say bye.
SPEAKER_00Uh, so that was everything on nothing. Uh, join us next time where we explore outsider music and uh go if you haven't listened to the rest of the episodes, go listen to them now. No, it was nothing.