Licking, Part 3

In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the science, culture and mythology of licking. (part 3 of 3)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're back with the
third part in a series on lick licking with the tongue,
which we began before the week we were recently out
for the holiday. We thought we might end the series
after the second part. We got some great listener mail
on this subject and decided we'd like to come back
and talk about it for at least one more episode,

(00:38):
so to refresh on the previous two episodes. In part one,
we talked about licking in the context of ancient Egyptian
ritual magic, where licking could bestow healing and divine blessings.
For example, in the Licks of the Cow goddess Hathor
who is described licking the limbs of Pharaoh Hatchupsot to

(00:59):
give her life and kingly power, and licking could also
be a vehicle for curses and magical violence, like the
danger described in the Book of the Dead of the
danger of being licked by the demon Crocodile in the afterlife,
where the lick is some kind of attack understood is
removing protective magic from the dead person's soul. We briefly
talked about some research on at what age children start

(01:22):
to get the idea that food or eating utensils can
be contaminated by being licked by other people. And we
also talked about the surprisingly interesting question how many licks
does it take to get to the center of a
TUTSI pop? That question kind of well, it starts from
a classic candy commercial. If you haven't seen it, where

(01:42):
have you been? Look it up? But also that sort
of moved from the commercial to a bunch of laboratory experiments,
empirical testing, and then I think you could say, finally
winds up in the mind of the philosopher or the
philosopher of science, prompting us to think about think about
the ways that assumptions are often hit in seemingly mundane
empirical questions and how that should affect the way we

(02:05):
try to answer them.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, we got some good listener mail about the tussy
Rall topic as well.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah, definitely addressed in the listener mail episode from earlier
this week on Tuesday, So if you haven't heard that,
check it out after this In part two of the
Licking series, we talked about wound licking behavior in animals,
especially in mammals, and the difficult trade offs involved. In effect,
the licking of wounds comes with both benefits and dangers biologically,

(02:30):
so there's a balancing of risk and reward underlying the
evolution and preservation of that behavior. Though fortunately humans have
come up with a technological replacement for wound locking, which
is washing wounds with clean water or clean water and soap,
which gives us most of the same benefits while eliminating
most of the risks. We also talked about the specific

(02:50):
qualities of the cat's tongue and its roughness and function,
and self cleaning, and some prevailing theories about what it
means when a cat licks of human. After this, we
got into eye locking, especially self eye looking in geckos
and in a few alleged cases, I guess, some verified
cases in humans with extraordinarily long tongues. And we're back

(03:13):
today to do another episode.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yeah, so let's start with bears. So this is the one.
This is the reason that we're doing a part three,
though not everything that we're going to be discussing here
is going to relate directly to bears.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Right, So I wanted to begin with an email we
received after the first two parts from listener Elena. Elena says, hello,
Robert and Joe. I really enjoyed the episodes on licking.
They made me think of a medieval belief about bears.
People thought that bears gave birth to shapeless blobs of

(03:44):
flesh and only through licking the mother would give them
the physical characteristics of a bear cub. Elena, that's the
whole message, So thank you, Elena. I actually did not
know that. That was really interesting to me, and it
made me want to do a whole segment here. But
I have to also mention that with this email, Elena
attached a medieval illustration of an adult bear licking. I

(04:08):
guess what's supposed to be an unformed lump of flesh.
It is like a three lobed little pink ham, just
a little kind of three three hump thing. And I
didn't know where this was from. Elena did not include
that information in the email, but I did a reverse
image search and figured out that this is originally from

(04:29):
a twelfth century text called the Aberdeen Bestiery, which has
been held by the Aberdeen Library in Scotland. Since the
mid sixteenth century. The bear entry in this bestiary actually
shares a page with the entry for the monoceros, a
legendary one horned creature sometimes equated with the unicorn, or

(04:49):
maybe a different creature than a unicorn, but sharing a
lot of the same characteristics. Rab I went back and
I got a picture of the whole page for you
to look at here, so you can get bear licking
the three and the one horned unicorn or non unicorn
type creature right above it.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Well, I certainly can't read any of the text, but
the mere fact that the bear image is on the
same page with the unicorn image lets me know that
I can trust its accuracy. Right.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
The University of Aberdeen Collections website hosts a full scan
of the text, so you can actually go look at
it yourself if you'd like to. It's worth the look.
It's pretty interesting. They've also got sort of interpretation materials
beneath each page of the text, as well as their
own translations of the Latin. I believe it's in Latin,
but there are modern English translations. First of all, I

(05:38):
have to say that the best Eieri entry on the
bear is full of awesome twelfth century bear facts varying accuracy.
I'm going to come back to the claims about the
unformed newborn bear in a bit, but first I just
wanted to talk about a few other things said in
this text, especially since a few of them end up

(05:59):
connecting in interesting ways. Back to the bear's tongue. The
first thing that this book says, apart from some claims
about bears being unformed at birth, is quote, the bear's
head is not strong. Its greatest strength lies in its
arms and loins. For this reason, bears sometimes stand upright.

(06:20):
And I don't know, I think it's kind of hilarious
to imagine somebody in the twelfth century looking at a
bear and saying, not a very strong head.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Yeah, I don't know. I feel like I've seen plenty
of bear footage where I'm thinking long and hard about
how strong and terrifying the head is.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
To be fair, I think this might not be an
inaccurate original observation. Probably a lot of the facts in
this bestiary are not direct observations by the author, but
there are things being repeated from other texts going back
into classical times.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, that kind of game of telephone, And I don't know,
I guess you could. You know, you can probably imagine
certain interpretation of the basic form of the bear, and
maybe in some cases, with some bears particularly, I'm thinking,
like you know, black bears, you could maybe interpret the
head as being smaller than the body. Like, you know,

(07:13):
there's a way of looking at, say a black bear,
where you might interpret this. I can sort of see
where they're maybe coming from.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, yeah, so there's a way in which you could say.
This is kind of true, but not as stated. It
is not fair to say that bears have weak heads.
A brown bear, for example, has an extremely powerful skull
with powerful bones and jaw muscles, powerful neck muscles, with
a bite capable of crushing bones. What is true, however,

(07:40):
is that when you compare the bite force to the
body mass in a factor that's called bite force quotient,
that's how strong the bite is compared to how big
your body is. Even brown bears tend to have a
smaller bite force quotient than many other carnivores, like less
than half of that of standouts like the Tasmanian devil,

(08:02):
which has an incredibly high bite force quotient and still
significantly lower than that of a jaguar very high bite
force quotient. So it's a huge body and a very
powerful jaw. But you can say that its jaw is
not especially powerful for its body size, but its body
size is enormous.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
I also thought it was interesting how the text claims that,
so it doesn't have a strong head, its greatest strength
lies in its arms and loins. For this reason, bears
sometimes stand upright. That actually got me wondering why do
bears usually stand upright when they do? We've seen bears
doing this, you know, what are the most common reasons?

(08:42):
I was reading around. It seems that people with a
lot of experience with bears emphasize that the most common
reasons bears seem to do this is for information gathering purposes.
So the head contains the sensory array the eyes, the ears,
and the nose, and by standing up and placing the
head higher, bears allow themselves a longer viewing horizon, seeing

(09:05):
over obstacles, better ability to use directional hearing, and the
ability to isolate smells wafting from a distance as opposed
to what's coming up from right around the ground where
you are. Bears might also stand up to reach objects
high up or to manipulate objects with their forelimbs. So
there is some truth here. Bears do tend to have

(09:28):
more forelimb dexterity than many other carnivores, though not as
much as most primates. That dexterity comes from a number
of things, in part, like the way that bears are
able to rotate their arms with a greater degree of
freedom than animals like dogs, whose fore limb movement is
more restricted to the backward forward motion parallel to the
length of the body. There are also differences in the

(09:50):
bear's posture, like walking flat footed versus walking on the digits,
which some carnivores do, having more separated digits independently movable digits.
Things like that, and these things make bear arms and
bare four paws more versatile than like a dog's fore
legs and four paws, which are built with more focus
on running speed.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Yeah, and I guess something to keep in mind in
all of this, too, is that in general, when we're
talking about bears, especially modern bears, you're mostly dealing with
a varied omnivorous diet. Of course, there are outliers on
either end, you know, considering polar bears and panda bears.
But for the most part, you're dealing with a bear
that like one. Depending on what's available in the season,

(10:31):
it might be eating a bunch of vegetation. It might
be eating a part of a dead whale. It might
be eating honey, it might be eating the contents of
a refrigerator. You know, it's going to depend and it
needs to have the abilities to shift between these different
sources of food.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
The diet is more varied. Therefore, the bear's behavior needs
to be more general as opposed to more specific, and
so as a generalist, it has to have more freedom
to do different kinds of things with its bot.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
Another interesting claim from this book is about bear sex.
It says bears and we have to assume here that
this is talking mainly about brown bears, you know, for
geographical historical reasons. It says they do not mate like
other quadrupeds, but embrace each other when they copulate, just
like the couplings of humans.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
You know, I didn't have time to see what else
Plenty had to say about sexual positions for humans, but
it almost sounds like he's saying for humans, only two
sexual positions are known, and this is how bears stack,
or maybe just one.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Yeah, yeah, so it says, yeah, it says that they
embrace one another. I can't say for sure that bears
never face each other during copulation. I can't like rule
out that that happens. But after some extensive kind of
awkward googling, it seems to me that the standard what's
called the dorso ventral position, which you see in other

(11:58):
quadrupedal mammals, the male mounting from behind, that is also
the norm for bears, at least most of the time.
What is definitely true, however, and what may have inspired
this claim, is that male and female bears engage in
extensive courtship rituals, lasting for days or even weeks at
a time. And these courtship rituals, while the bears are

(12:22):
sort of getting to know one another, they can include
all kinds of things that could be mistaken for face
to face copulation. So this can include face to face
wrestling and play fighting, which does sometimes look like embracing,
as well as just lots of sniffing each other and
nuzzling and body rubbing of various sorts. So bears go

(12:43):
through extensive courtship rituals, and you could think how somebody
seeing this from a distance could think that this was
actually the act of mating.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
Another interesting claim here is the entry says when sick,
the bear eats ants. Now bears do eat ants, though
I couldn't find any evidence that they do so, especially
when they're sick. It just seems ants are part of
a bear's omnivorous repertoire, especially it seems with black bears.
I was reading up on this and I discovered that

(13:16):
bears are not usually interested in eating adult ants. Instead,
when they go ant hunting, they are looking for what's
called the ant brood, the plump little insect sausages that
are the ant colonies young. This would be the larvae
and the pewpe These are little grub like juveniles that
are packed with protein and fat, and they are especially

(13:40):
prized as a nutritious food source by black bears. And
in fact, to come back to the subject of licking,
have you ever seen a black bear's tongue, rob, I.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Don't think I had until you shared this image here,
and it is. Oh, it is extensive. This is a
creature that I'm not saying it could. It could of
its own power, own eye but the tongue is long
enough to at least with help reach the eye of desire.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Certainly. I've got one image here in the outline, and
it looks like a whole can of bubble tape hanging
out of the bear's mouth. It's just this long, long,
pink thing. So a black bear's tongue is quite long, flexible,
and sticky, and a major reason for it to be
that way is to help the bear attack difficult to

(14:27):
reach food sources. And this this can be I don't know,
reaching up to get berries and other stuff. It's not
limited to ants, but ants are a big part of this,
attacking ant broods inside nests. So the bear wants to
get the ant larvae and the pupet inside the cavities
of a rock crevice or a hollow log or a
piece of wood. Might chew, you know, chew at a

(14:49):
rotten log or piece of wood to get some holes
in it, and then kind of stick the tongue in
trying to get the ant brewed out. And so I
was reading about black bears attacking ant colonies to get
at the brood, and I came across a fascinating hypothesis
about that on a fact page for the North American
Bear Center. This is relating to the chemical warfare that

(15:13):
goes on during these black bear versus ant raids. And
so the North American Bear Center page says, quote, when
researchers experimentally put their faces next to the bears faces
at logs, First of all, that's funny. The researchers jerked
away from the acrid cloud of formic acid. Okay, so

(15:35):
the ants are producing this formic acid to repel the
attacking bear that's trying to steal all their children. But
then this goes on to say, quote, they stood amazed
that the bears could keep working. Formic acid is probably
and again I want to emphasize this is just a hypothesis.
This is not proven. But they say formic acid is
probably a reason bears sometimes bite into insulated snowmobile seats,

(16:01):
hot tub covers, and refrigerator walls. Huh, what's going on there? Well,
they explain these items all produce formic acid when the
formaldehyde in the insulation breaks down, making them smell like
ant colonies.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
Huh. That is fascinating.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
So yeah, some industrially produced foams and insulating materials apparently
do release these these scents that are reminiscent of the
scent of ant chemical warfare. So what the ants would
be producing in order to repel and attacking animal like
a bear, it and you know, to a hungry enough
bear that probably just smells like, well, you know, there's

(16:42):
something in there that's good to eat. Another thing that
is mentioned in this Besteria entry is quote they attack
beehives and try hard to get honeycombs. There is nothing
they sees more eagerly than honey. This one I rule
partially true. Hard to say, hard to actually rank the
food sources or say, there's nothing that bears like more

(17:04):
than honey, but honey is and especially energy dense food,
and black bears and brown bears will aggressively pursue honey
resources in their environment. They are partially protected from beastings
by their thick fur coat, though they will just also
put up with a lot of stings on the face
to get at the honeycomb, which it's worth emphasizing is

(17:25):
rich with both the sugar dense honey and the fat
and protein dense bee broods. So once again we're back
to the hymenopter and brood. Those insect young are like
little arthropod sausages, but unlike the ant sausages, which are
retrieved through a cloud of chemical warfare, these sausages come

(17:47):
preloaded with their own thick sugar syrup. So it's like
even better.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
All right, So the bear appreciation for honey is it's
a little different compared to the human appreciation for honey.
We maybe shouldn't lean too much on Winnie the Poof
for understanding it.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
Well, yeah, when humans look for honey, they're actually looking
usually just for the honey. They're not as much interested
in trying to eat the bee broods. Yeah yeah, but okay,
we want to come back to the idea of licking

(18:22):
the newborns, the stuff that Elayna mentioned in that original email.
So here I'm going to read a couple of passages
directly from the Aberdeen Library's online translation of the entry
on the bear. First passage says the bear is said
to get its name because the female shapes her newborn
cub with her mouth or a giving it so to speak.

(18:43):
It's beginning or sus ford is said that they produce
a shapeless fetus, and that a piece of flesh is born.
The mother forms the parts of the body by licking it.
The shapelessness of the cub is the result of its
premature birth. It is born only thirty days after conception,
and as a result of this rapid fertility, it is

(19:04):
born unformed. And then later the entry says, repeating some
of the same ideas it says among bears, the time
of gestation is accelerated. Indeed, the thirtieth day sees the
womb free of the cub. As a result of this
rapid fertility, the cubs are created without form. The females
produce tiny lumps of flesh, white in color, with no eyes.

(19:28):
These they shape gradually, holding them meanwhile to their breasts,
so that the cubs are warmed by the constant embrace
and draw out the spirit of life. So, to review
the claims here, the bear's pregnancy lasts only thirty days.
Newborn bear cubs are shapeless pieces of flesh, white in color,
with no eyes. And then the mother licks the flesh

(19:51):
lump into shape, giving it limbs, giving it a head,
and all the other parts of the body, forming it
with her tongue like a sculptor mold clay. I think
most of you can guess correctly that this is not true,
but it is interesting to compare to reality because, while
literally incorrect, it taps into the spirit of some true

(20:13):
facts about bear birth, about dinning, and maternal care in
several different bear species. So one of the ideas mentioned
here is that the bear cubs are born as these
limbless flesh lumps after a mere thirty day pregnancy. That
is not correct, but it does tap into something. So
the total pregnancy time for a bear varies bear to

(20:34):
bear in species to species, but generally it's going to
be a lot longer than thirty days. Nevertheless, bears actually
do have an interesting adaptation called delayed implantation, which means
that a fertilized embryo will pause its development for months
at a time, only implanting in the uterine, lining, and

(20:58):
continuing growth if certain timing and metabolic conditions are met.
For example, in the North American black bear, mating typically
happens in the spring or early summer, and then you
will get a fertilized egg inside the body that will
just kind of float in the uterus and it will
temporarily halt or at least dramatically slow down its development.

(21:21):
Shortly after fertilization at the blasticist stage, and it doesn't
implant and begin differentiated cell growth until late fall or
the onset of wintertime, and only then if the mother
has reached a sufficient body weight so that she will
have the energy resources to survive and sustain a pregnancy

(21:42):
and provide milk for offspring born over the winter in
the mother's den. The actual period of embryonic development after
the pause, again, it varies. It might be like, you know,
two months or something. Maybe maybe up to three months,
so like two to three months or something, but the
total time between mating and birth is a lot longer,
might be more like six to nine months, though it

(22:03):
is true, and I don't know if this is the
reason for the initial claim that's repeated in the bestiary here.
It is interesting that the actual time between the resumption
of development here from the blastocyst stage until birth is
quite short. It's still longer than thirty days, but it
happens pretty fast. Interesting, and I was just talking about

(22:26):
black bears. A similar overall pattern occurs in brown bears,
with a few different slight timing differences. Now coming to
the idea of the flesh lump, of course, that's not
literally correct. Newborn bears of all species do actually have
limbs and heads and fully formed individual body parts. But
the grain of truth in the flesh lump legend is

(22:47):
that newborn bear cubs are highly altricial and extremely small
compared to adults of the same species. Rob, I've got
a picture of some grizzly bear cubs for you to
look at at here that are adorable, But they're also
just so tiny compared to the adult. And they also
look I don't know, you know, they're very cute. There's

(23:09):
that signal of helplessness in what cuteness is. In a way,
so animals that are highly altricial are at one end
of a spectrum known as altriciality and precociality. This refers
to how independent an animal is after birth. If a
newborn animal is independent, able to use its senses and

(23:32):
move around and feed itself shortly after birth, that species
is precocial. If the newborn is relatively helpless and needs
a lot of parental care to survive, that species is altricial.
And it's not a binary, it's a spectrum. You know,
you can be somewhere along the spectrum toward one one
end or the other. Megapode birds like brush turkeys are

(23:54):
known for being highly precocial. Almost immediately after hatching. The
newborn chicks can run around and even fly a bit,
They can feed themselves, and they can basically make it
on their own. Bears are on the altricial end of
the spectrum. They are highly altricial, with tiny, helpless newborns
with extremely limited mobility and limited senses. Their eyes are

(24:16):
closed for some time after birth, and so bear cubs
need a lot of maternal care to survive. This reality
of altricial helplessness lends itself in a way to the
idea of a newborn bear as a tiny, formless lump,
and the way they look really helps with that as well,
because while they are born with limbs and differentiated body parts,

(24:39):
their skin and fur tends to be much paler than
that of an adult of the same species. The bestiary
text says that they're born as white lumps. They're typically
not white, but they might be more kind of a
pale gray or a paler gray brown, so they're paler
than the adults. Their eyes are closed, and they must
nuzzle against their mother for warmth and for nursing. So

(25:03):
even if you could somehow see them right after birth,
which that takes place inside the mother's winter den, it's
kind of hard to see that in nature without some
really special circumstances arising. If you could see them, they
would not be up and roaming around on their own.
They would be huddling close for warmth and trying to nurse.
Some other realities probably contributing to the licking the formless

(25:25):
lump myth. Mother bears do lick and then usually eat
the birth membrane almost immediately after the cub is born.
Mother bears of multiple species also do lick the cubs
right after birth. They've been observed licking the cubs themselves
after parturition, and this is a common maternal behavior, not

(25:46):
just in bears, but across lots of mammalian species. And
I think we can infer some probable survival motivations that
would drive the selection of this behavior. First of all,
licking after birth helps clean the cubs fur of the
wet residual amniotic fluid after birth. So why would this

(26:10):
be important cleaning the amniotic fluid off of the fur
and skin. A big reason, probably the biggest reason is thermoregulation.
Newborn bear cubs are incredibly tiny compared to adults. Like
newborn brown bears are typically at most around a one
to five hundredth of the body mass of their mother,
and thus they have a very high surface area to

(26:33):
body mass ratio. The smaller you are, the harder it
is for your body to retain heat to keep the
heat inside. So these babies, these baby bears lose heat
much faster than an adult bear. Also, they're usually born
in winter during cold weather. Also, they have much less
heat insulation in the form of subcutaneous fat and body fur.

(26:55):
They've got a lot less fur when they're born than
adults have. So newborn bears are at great risk of
hypothermia from the moment that they're born. Being coated in
amniotic fluid obviously makes that risk a lot worse. By
keeping the fur wet and matted down, it makes the bear,
the bear cub subject to evaporative cooling. You know, when
you're wet that the the evaporation steals energy from the

(27:18):
surface of your body. And to the extent that the
newborn bear has any fur, this very some of the
different bear species, but they're not going to have a
lot of fur, but what fur they have is going
to be matted down and matted down and wet, and
when it's matted and wet, it's not really going to
work very well as insulation against the cold. So by

(27:39):
licking the newborn clean, the mother is actually increasing the
cub's ability the cub's ability to retain body heat. A
second big thing that I see mentioned in the literature
about mother bears licking their newborns is in addition to
cleaning cleaning the body, licking of the perenneal or anogenital

(28:00):
region is important because that is thought to help stimulate
the cubs to urinate and defecate. In some cases, newborn
bears apparently can't poop or pee without external stimulation of
the ans and genitals, and at the very least, the
licking seems to make that easier. So the mother will

(28:21):
lick the nether regions to make the cubs poop and pee,
and then we'll often eat the feces after the cubs
poop and the den. I thought that was interesting, so
I was investigating, like, why eat the poop? This seems
to be often explained as a den hygiene behavior. I
can't prove this, but I wonder if a reason for

(28:41):
this is that it would help prevent the den from
having an excess of smells that would attract predators.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah, I was thinking about the smell issue earlier, just
in terms of say the ambiotic fluid, thinking of non
bear mamalion creatures that in which part of the the
young's protection is that they are sometimes described as being
perhaps smell neutral or having a much less pronounced odor.
It could alert predators to their presence.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
Well, yeah, I was thinking about that as well. This
is something that again that I have not found proof of,
but I was just wondering if smells associated with birth
I think would usually signal to predators if they're present,
that you are in a vulnerable state and that they're
a vulnerable newborns present. And so this did come up.

(29:33):
This wasn't in bears, but I was looking at another
study about maternal licking behaviors in mammals in general. Actually
this was more about not just licking but general postparturition
maternal bonding behaviors, and one of the things that was
looking at was licking. And this study reported in the
context of rodents that the presence of predator smells. If

(29:55):
you pipe in some smells of a predator, that actually
increased licking behavior in mother with newborns.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Oh fascinating.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah, So that did make me wonder if that it
does have something to do with trying to remove smells
that might signal prey vulnerability.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, and it seems possible, at least to me, that
the consumption of the feces here by the mother would
perhaps factor into that, because I've read about the reverse
the offspring's consumption of the mother's feces in some animals,
perhaps having to do with the transfer of the microbiome

(30:34):
and so forth. But obviously that wouldn't to my understanding,
be the case here.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Yeah, going the other way, it's harder to see why
that would be necessary.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah. The only other option that immediately comes to mind
is remaining nutrients that are still within the fecal matter
of the newborns. But ye, which is something you also
see in this kind of behavior.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah, overwintering in the den is also a resource conservation time. Yeah,
and there could be other motivations as well, Like in
lots of mammals, licking and mutual grooming behaviors promote social bonding.
We're already talking about that in part two of the series,
and so that might be another thing. There is just
part of a social bonding behavior that strengthens the emotional

(31:15):
connection between mother bear and offspring in some animal. In
some animals, maternal licking might stimulate autonomic survival functions like
breathing and blood flow. So maybe something like that is
going on here. But what's absolutely clear is that the
mother bear does lick the baby bear. At least part

(31:35):
of this seems to be related to stimulating urination and defecation,
and a big part of it, I think it's fair
to say, is motivated by cleaning the baby bear to
help it thermoregulate, help it retain heat.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah, but there are a number of things that are
just not online yet with the newborn bear, they eventually
come online, and part of the process, at least as
a observed, is the licking by the mother. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
I was actually reading about licking behaviors in bears in
a study that was like a this was really interesting.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
It was a.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
Wild den camera study. This was published in the journal
Animals in the year twenty twenty by Lynn Rogers and
a bunch of co authors. The title was behavior in
free living American black bear dens, parturition, maternal care, and
cub behavior, and the authors explain their method here. They say, quote,

(32:34):
we report here some of the major findings on the
behavior of black bear mothers and cubs in their dens
in the wild, based on observations in the state of Minnesota, USA.
Wild female bears were outfitted with radio callers and their
dens located as they prepared for hibernation in the fall.
Cameras were installed in the dens and events in the

(32:56):
den recorded until they and their cubs finally abandoned their
dens in the spring. So this is amazing. They actually
were able to get cameras into wild dens so they
could see what the bears were doing in the dens
in the wild. This is something that normally is really
hard to see. Obviously, you can study captive bears, but
captivity might alter the bear's behavior. It often does, so

(33:17):
this study looked at a bunch of different things, but
I was interested in the licking behaviors observed. So one
thing they documented was the licking of cubs right after birth,
started almost immediately, and it does seem to be related
to a period where the mothers are trying to warm
and stimulate their newborns. So, to read from the author's results,

(33:38):
quote activities were sufficiently visible for three litters born in
twenty ten Lily, twenty eleven Lily, and twenty twelve Jewel.
These are bear names to determine that the mothers began
licking embryonic membranes from the first born cubs within nine
sixteen and eighty five seconds of parturition. On the twenty

(33:58):
second of January twenty two twelve, when it was negative
eight degrees celsius outside, Jewel licked her first born seventy
seven times per minute for six point five minutes before
assuming the ventrally recumbent warming position and placing the cub
under her sparsely furred chest and belly. In that position,
with her head tucked under her chest and her crown

(34:20):
against the den floor, she continued licking the cubs dry
while warming them with her breath. So this seems to
me to be associated with a licking, clean, drying, and
warming behavior after birth, where the mother bear is trying
to make sure that the cub is sufficiently kept warm
and it's also adorable. The idea of warming her warming

(34:42):
the cub with her breath.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
The study also does document another thing I talked about,
the licking of the perineal region in what the study
calls toilet licking. Okay, that's the name for it. It
says in this process they lick, but also the mother's
quote ingest the urine and feces to avoid fouling their
living quarters. And it says that Lily and Jewel routinely

(35:08):
did this, often in response to their cubs cries. And
then finally they document one more thing that it seems
like actually totally different. This is not like licking of
newborn cubs. But they say, in our quote previous studies
in northeastern Minnesota, we have seen cubs, juveniles, and adults
touch tongues and engage in reciprocal tongue licking in apparent

(35:33):
signs of friendship, but we have not seen these behaviors
reported for bears in dens. Reciprocal tongue looking involves bears
simultaneously touching and or entwining tongues as they lick each
other in and around the mouth. And then they say
the webcams revealed Lily's licking Hope's mouth without Hope reciprocating
when Hope was thirty nine, forty one and fifty one

(35:56):
days old. However, on March seventeenth, twenty ten, fifty four
day old Hope vocalized the pulsing home of suckling for
twenty four seconds during a thirty seven second session of
reciprocal tongue licking. So, first, mom is trying to do
reciprocal tongue licking with the cub. First few times the
cub does not lick back, but then finally the cub

(36:17):
does start. They they're now reciprocal tongue licking, and it
mentions a couple other examples too. But I don't know,
I thought that was interesting. That seems to be maybe
another just social bonding thing. I don't know if there's
an established reason why they're licking each other's tongues other
than just some form of play or bonding.

Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah, yeah, it does sound like it could just be bonding.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Yeah, So that's what I've got on bear locking of
newborns for now. But Elena, thank you for writing in
on this subject.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. After I read this email and we
decided we were going to discuss this on the show,
I picked a bear book off of my bookshelf here.
It's one that I've referenced in the show before by
Wolf Dieter Storrel. He's a German American cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist.

(37:09):
But he has some interesting little bits about this. He
does briefly refer to this idea that we've been discussing about,
the bear licking this this this mass into form, and
he notes the Franco, German and otherwise Northern European proverbial
expression an unlicked bear, which was apparently used historically to

(37:33):
describe an unrefined person, like, oh, look at there, whatever
they're doing, you know, in breach of etiquette, that person's
an unlicked bear. Also, the idea licked into shape apparently
also stems from this idea as well, which is which
is one that certainly I'm more familiar with. Loked into shape.

(37:54):
That's I mean, that's exactly what we're talking about the
bear doing electually. All right, I want to return to
a couple of animals that we've already talked about and
get into some various beliefs and traditions surrounding them, Starting

(38:18):
first with cows, as we discussed in our previous licking episodes.
Cows are big liquors, and when they lick humans, it's
sometimes perceived as auspicious or even some manner of good luck.
This seems to especially be true in cultures where cattle
enjoy sacred status. There's a particular account of how the
cattle gathered around fifteenth and sixteenth century Hindu saint Chaitanya Mahapruvu,

(38:44):
founder of the Godhea Vishnuism Hindu religious movement, and licked
his body as an act of love. Accounts of cows
licking Krishna are also important, I understand in the Hadi
Krishna movement or the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, which
is itself a modern expression of Godia Vishnuism. Now, in

(39:05):
mentioning cowlix, I'm sure a number of you also were
instantly reminded that, hey, that's what we call this weird
part in our hair that may be difficult to comb
into shape. I have one of these. This is one
of the prime reasons I eventually gave up on combing
my hair and keep up a more sort of I
don't know, ruffled style, if you will, because the cowlick

(39:29):
itself is so difficult to manage. The cowlick, of course,
is just a pattern of follicle disruption on the human scalp.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
Sort of like going in the opposite direction of the
follicles around it.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, and it kind of looks like I grew up
hearing this word cowlick, which I have to made it
feel all the more silly and undesirable to have one,
because the idea of being lickd by a cow, for me,
it felt rather foolish. I think it's a good name, though,
because you look at a cow lick a very pronounced
cowl like and it does kind of look like some
sort of big wet tongue reached out and kind of disrupted.

(40:06):
It kind of made like a crop circle.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
In your hair.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
Yeah. Yeah, I do wonder how I might have felt
about it if I'd been raised in a culture that
saw the actual look of a cow as a potentially
auspicious thing unknown. But I was looking around and reading.
In some cases these were just like you know, like
online conversations people were having about different cultural traditions. But

(40:30):
in parts of India, having two cowlcks is considered lucky
and or that that child may be a handful and
I've read that this tradition like is also found in
other cultures. I was seeing threads where people of Korean
descent were talking about this as well, where another case
in which two hair licks meant that the child would

(40:52):
go on to have two marriages in their life, and
if you had more than two, it might mean more
than two marriages. So I would be very interested to
hear from listeners out there if you have some insight
on these, you know, you know, I think generally light
hearted interpretations of what a cow lick might mean for someone,

(41:13):
you know, especially as scene in a child. Now, I
want to turn from here to Norse traditions, because there
is some very important cosmic cow licking that goes on there,
as detailed in the twelve to twenty work The pros
at A, two entities emerged from the melting of the
primordial ice in Neffelheim. The first was, of course, the

(41:36):
giant Yemir, but the second was the giant cow Uhumla,
and her milk is said to have sustained Yemir. The
quote translated, of course, is four milk streams ran from
her teats, and she fed Yeamer. But then, while how's
she going to produce this milk, she has to consume

(41:56):
something herself. And what she does is she the frost
covered salt stones or the salty rhymestones for her own nourishment.
And as she licks them, something interesting happens. Depending on
the actual translation, and I think how you interpret it,
the rough action of her tongue against the salt stones

(42:17):
either uncovers a man, first his hair and then the
rest of him, a man perhaps already within the salt stone,
kind of like reaching the center of a TUTSI roll pop. Yes,
Or she licks the salt stone into the shape of
a man, forming the man out of the stone, kind
of carving him out of the stone with her tongue,

(42:39):
or something akin to what we were talking about with
the bear. The licking by the mammalian mother brings form
to the formless, And I think the latter is the
more popular interpretation. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Interesting, Yeah, I could imagine how it might be ambiguous
if it said something like the cow licked a man
out of the stone, setting one loose from the stone,
or turning the stone into a man.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
Yeah. I did a quick looking around and surveying. It
seems like most scholarly works are discussing it, not in
terms of revealing, like you know, the man was in
there to begin with, but she's literally forming him out
of the stone. So either way though, the individual inside
the stone or made from the stone, et cetera, is

(43:27):
important because it's this figure Bury or Burr grandfather of
Odin and also grandfather of course of Odin's brothers VILLI
and V and they become the first gods. They are
the slayers of Yamir. And the earth, of course is
going to be born out of this dead giant's bones.
So again interesting once more that we have this idea

(43:50):
of a mother's licking of a newborn, giving life and
perhaps echoing the ideas concerning the bear forming the birth
mass into a cup or calf. And I included an
illustration of from the pros here, and you can, folks
can look this up if you look up the cow
in question Odumla on say Wikipedia, you can see this

(44:12):
illustration of the big cow. You see the big tongue there,
you see the four streams of milk. And I believe
we see the figure being licked from the stone here
from the salt stone.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Oh okay, that's what that is. At first, I thought
that was you.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
Mer.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yeah, doesn't look happy to be being licked out of
the stone. He's got a big grimace on his face, like, oh, brother,
I got to live in this world.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Didn't ask for this, But here we are, all right,
And then I want to come back to the world
of dogs. I believe we talked a little bit about
dogs licking and also about the idea that a dog's
lick would have a healing power to it, and yeah,
this was a widespread idea in the ancient world, and
we discussed it's it's use in some ma interpretations, and

(45:01):
so we have another another chapter of that here to
discuss specifically, I want to talk about dog related rituals
attributed to the Hittites, an ancient Anatolian Bronze Age empire
in what is now Turkey, and there's some bleed over
into some related groups as well. Of note here there's
a fair amount of scholarly discussion about the relationship between

(45:23):
actual historic Hittites and the people described as Hittites in
the Bible.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
Like questioning whether that's actually referring to the same people.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
Yeah, yeah, I like, are the Hittites that we know
from other literature and archaeological evidence. Are they the same
as the people called Hittites in the Bible? And there
seems to be a fair amount of disagreeance that basically
they certainly don't line up one for one, and they
may be rather disaligned. But I didn't have time to
get into it too deeply in my own research, I see,

(45:54):
so I looked at a couple of papers on this.
An older nineteen ninety two were titled The Puppy in
Hittie Ritual by Billy Jean Collins, published by the University
of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, as
well as the more recent Puppy Sacrifice in Sinophagi from
early Philistine tel Nickney Ekron, contextualized by livtov at All,

(46:19):
published in the journal Jamas in twenty eighteen.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
Wait, hold on puppy sacrifice and Sinophagi. That dog eating.

Speaker 1 (46:30):
Yes, so I'm not going to talk as much about
dog eating, but I am going to talk a little
bit about puppy sacrifice. So I'm not going to get
into gross details at all, and not everything I'm going
to discuss is going to involve puppies being sacrificed outright,
But I totally understand if anyone wants to go ahead
and call it here and close this episode out. But

(46:50):
trust me that I'm not going to get We're not
going to get too gross here.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Well, I understand. Also my reaction is an unfair dog bias,
you know. Well, now, I mean to talk about animal
sacrifices of other kinds a lot.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, I mean it's humans have a special relationship with dogs,
and you know, even if you're not a dog person,
I'm not much of a dog person, but I of
course I don't want puppies to be sacrificed. I don't
like that idea. Puppies are cute, undeniably, and yeah, and
humans and dogs have a special relationship and it's, you know,

(47:23):
part of our culture and part of who we are,
whether there's one in your house or in your lap
or not.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
Let me steal my emotions, and we will. I want
to learn about this.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
Yes, So the recent the more. The more recent paper
that I reference here concerns a fine in Ekron, historically
a Canaanite and then Philistine city, where evidence of a
beheaded sacrifice dog dated to twelfth to tenth centuries BC
during the Iron Age are discussed, and then the remains
here are thought to be tied to the sorts of

(47:54):
rights that we'll be discussing here, and in this case,
not a funerary rite a quote, non elite domestic right,
So in other words, not something that was just done
by you know, for the king and queen, by the
king and Queen's you know, you know, wizards or priests,
but rather something that would be the part of non

(48:16):
elite domestic.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Life, household magic. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
Yeah, So essentially this is how the issue breaks down.
So we know from literature and archaeological evidence that the
Hittites valued dogs as trained herders, as hunters, and as
guardians guard dogs, but they also made use of young,
as yet untrained dogs, puppies, which they would have ready

(48:39):
access to, and they would sometimes be used in cases
of magical sacrifice. You know, this kind of part of
this comes back again. This is a culture that prized dogs,
but a puppy is untrained, they're around, they're easy to acquire.
And this also ties into some of these prevailing eyes

(49:00):
ideas that were present in the ancient world. Who've always
that we've already referred to that dogs have some sort
of a healing property to them. So the basic idea
here is that in specific cases of ritual is that
the puppy would serve as a sacrifice in a transfer
ritual by which the dog would lick the afflicted human

(49:21):
and in doing so absorb that affliction, and then the
dog would be ritually sacrificed. So again the tradition here's
a link to others who had discussed before the idea
that dogs heal via their licking. The ancient Greeks believed
in this, and also, according to Collins, would engage in
a kind of transfer ritual of their own. The dog

(49:43):
would lick an afflicted individual, absorb the illness, and then
the dog would be killed and examined to determine the
nature of the human malady. So in the Greek case,
not a situation all right, we've driven the illness into
the dog, and now we must kill the dog. But
rather we've driven the illness into to the dog, and
now let us examine the dog to see what the

(50:03):
sickness is, so we can then treat the human. Collins
also points out that among the Spartans, dogs were sacrificed
by the cult of their god of War, and that
it was thought that the lick of a dog could
cure blindness, and perhaps related, Hippocrates suggested dog meat as
being good for the eyes. Like you having ailments, will

(50:25):
cook up some dog meat that will help. Plenty the
Elder also wrote of such uses for the puppy, specifically
that a blind puppy, and this is playing off the
observation that dogs are born blind much like bears are
born blind. As we've discussed, you know, their eyes are not,
you know, fully operational and open and so forth, and

(50:48):
then by this view, are kind of healed by their
or given sight via their mother's licking. Plenty rights that
you could take a blind puppy press it to a
sick person's abdomen for three during which the puppy would
absorb the illness of the individual and die of said illness. Again,
nobody wants the idea of struggling up to a puppy

(51:11):
until it dies, but this was one idea that was
explored in the ancient world. By the way, Plenty is
full of eye wisdom elsewhere in the natural history as well.
Here's a quote in translation. It is said that goats
can see by night as well as they can in
the daytime, and that consequently a diet of goat's liver
restores twilight's sight to persons suffering from what is called

(51:33):
night blindness.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Interesting, Okay, I wonder why the liver, Well.

Speaker 1 (51:39):
You know, that's where most of the goat teness is.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
I mean, does the flavor Yeah, I mean I don't know.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
You know, you can certainly get into the health potential
health benefits of eating a mammal's liver, as well as
some of the health risks in some animals. So I
don't know. It's one of these things that without going
actually looking into it in depth, you know, there might
be some wisdom to it. There might be something in
an animal's liver that would help people with certain maladies.

(52:08):
I don't know if it's gonna actually help with night blindness,
but there you.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
Are, public service announcement, never read a polar bear's liver exactly.

Speaker 1 (52:28):
Collins also adds that there was a medieval German ritual,
and I'm guessing this is sort of like a folk ritual,
folk magic, very much domestic in nature, where you could
rid yourself a fever or some other ailment by placing
a bowl of sweet milk before a dog and reciting
the following good luck you hound, may you be sick

(52:49):
and I be sound this. I think the rhyme in
German would be gossooned and hooned. So the idea is
the dog drinks, then the human drinks sickness transferred to
the dog. And I love how this pre germ theory
folk ritual actually seems to invert the way that an
illness might conceivably be transferred between two participants.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
So again the Hittites, where we're not standouts in any
of their beliefs. Here she references the Hittite ritual of
Zui zu Wi in this text, by which a puppy
is called on to absorb one's sicknesses. Quote, just as
the puppy licks its own nine body parts in the

(53:35):
same way, let it lick up the illness in the
subject's body parts. And then each part is named, including
the butt. Just go through just the whole anatomy and saying,
just there's like a chant to it, like a very
much a ritualistic invocation to it. As the puppy then
licks the different parts of the human body and brings

(53:55):
about healing via transference. Wow. Yeah, And I'm not. I'm
not certain that in this particular ritual the dog's death
is inherently implied. Elsewhere in Hittite rituals and ideas presented
that the dead puppy of some sort of transfer like
this could be buried, and in doing so, you are
burying the illness as well. I don't know about you, Joe,

(54:20):
but in thinking about this, I was reminded of a
topic we've discussed on the show before, the story of
Jesus casting the demon Legion into the pigs and then
the pigs dying very much an act of transference.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
Yes, always seemed interesting to me. The logic of that
in the story, that the demon can't just be removed
to go nowhere, it has to be sent into something else.
The pigs must be there to receive the demon.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
Yeah, so I detect a certain amount of kinship between
these two ideas. Collins also outlines a Hittite apotropaic practice
that does not involve a dead dog. We're going to
end on a nice light note here, but this practice
is a practice by which a tallow puppy, so kind
of like a soap or a candle puppy, was placed

(55:06):
in the King and Queen's bedchamber at night to keep
evil at bay in the same way that the adult
guard dogs, or I think the term that she uses
the dogs of the table, and I think this is
also referred to in the writings of Homer as well,
the dogs of the table being the dogs that hang
around you and eat food scraps that you throw out

(55:28):
from under the table. They're also your protectors, but I
guess they are not allowed to sleep with you, or
they're not in the bedchamber, or maybe they's just a
sleep and kind of lousy, or they can't protect against
supernatural threats, and therefore you need this magical tallow puppy,
the soap puppy that's gonna keep the enemy at bay
at night.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
Well, this also reminds me of ancient Mesopotamian traditions we've
talked about on the show before, of apotropeic figurines, that
you would have a guard figurine some kind of might
represent a dema or might represent a kind of like
strong human soldier or something like that, a figurine that
would protect you in some way, maybe around your bed
while you sleep.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, very much the same thread.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
But here it's c puppy. Yes, all right. Are we
done with licking for the time being?

Speaker 1 (56:17):
I think so, unless we get just a really intriguing
bit of listener mail, which is always a possibility, So
at least conceivably for the time being, we're going to
go ahead and close the book on licking. Okay, just
a reminder for everyone out there that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast of
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on

(56:39):
Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
I didn't even get to my film notes. I had
some notes about angels licking people's eyeballs and the prophecy
three to learn their history, something that I think has
no real counterpart in actual folklore and mythology.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Well maybe not for history learning purposes, but we have
talked about gods licking people's eyeballs in Egyptian magic. Yes,
probably the whole deal there.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
Yeah, yeah, so it could be it could be related
to that. I just don't know that I've ever read
anything concerning angels per se. Licking eyeballs, but yeah, there's
likely a connection there. I also had some notes about
the other prophecy movie, the nineteen seventy five Bear movie,
in which the mutant bear is essentially a partially formless mass,

(57:29):
and I had some notes there where I was probably
reading too much into all of this, where it's like,
is it the idea that instead of the environment is
not nurtured by humans, it is polluted by humans, resulting
in mutant bears. There are also some mutant bear cubs
in that film as well, But like I say, I'm
probably reaching with all of that.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
One of these days, I mean have to see it.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
I don't know. I tried to watch it once. It
immediately begins with the death of like nine dogs, so
it's a it's a more serious film than Killer Mutant
Bear might make you think it's gonna be anyway. That's sorry,
That once again stuff to blow your mind. Find us
wherever you get your podcasts, subscribe and listen to us

(58:13):
whenever you like.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello.
You can email us at contact Stuff to Blow Your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (58:39):
For more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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(59:01):
have FOCU