Roman Extinctions

Humans are capable of amazing technological and societal feats, but we’ve also brought much misery, death and destruction to our world. We are currently in the midst of the sixth great extinction event -- the Holocene extinction -- and the ravages of human activity extend back throughout our history as a dominator species. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe focus in on some of the key extinctions that occurred during the Roman Empire. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios, How Stuff Works. Pay You Welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're gonna be talking about
not just extinctions, but we're gonna be talking about Roman extinctions,

(00:23):
extinctions that occurred during the time of the Roman Republic,
but especially the Roman Empire. That sounds like one of
those names for like a made up lewd act, the
Roman Extinction. Roman Extinctions maybe maybe so good band names.
Certainly so, Robert, I know you wanted to talk about
this because of some weird, uh maybe false memory you
had that you were trying to explain to me yesterday.

(00:45):
But it seems like a very apt topic, whatever the inspiration,
Because of course, all decadent empires place large stresses on
the environment around them, so you would expect the you know,
one of the great decadent empires of history would the same. Yeah.
So I think, well, one of the important things to
keep in mind throughout this topic is like, we're not

(01:06):
We're certainly not meaning to single the Romans out as
being like the like the the the sole examples of
some of these activities that lead to, uh, to some extinctions. UM.
Because ultimately you can look to various parts of the
world in various times, including our own, to see plenty
of extinction inducing activities. But I think it's an interesting

(01:26):
exercise to sort of look to to look at Rome,
which which would have been I think in many ways
sort of uh an intensification of of impulses that were
already present in other cultures. So to to get started,
let's just remind everybody who the Romans were. I'm not
sure that one of the Romans ever done for us, Yeah,

(01:47):
I mean, well, speaking of that, yeah, you know, I
don't for reasons like that. I think that we don't
really need like a full introduction. I think pretty much
everybody has some idea of who the Romans were and
what the Roman Empire was out. I mean just the
basic tropes, um of of the Roman Empire are pretty uh,
you know, ubiquitous in our culture. UM. Look to, for instance,

(02:10):
to Monty Python's Life of Brian, which you just quoted,
which by the way, has been singled out for being
actually quite historically accurate concernment concerning life in Roman occupied
first century Judea. Yeah, I've read that before a lot
of historians that it's more accurate than a lot of
serious movies. Right, yeah, because you know, a lot of
depictions of Rome they really especially the older cinematic interpretations,

(02:33):
but even like more modern films that were influenced by
those older interpretations, you just get like the stoic, colorless,
very British vision of Rome generally not a lot of
like street level understanding. Um. But but that's one of
the reasons that HBO's Rome series, it was one for
several years, um, you know, which isn't perfect, but certainly

(02:54):
had some admirers because of the way that it injected
a lot of color and and and life off in
like street level life into this time in this place.
I've also read that Kubrick spartacus Is is more accurate
than a lot of the films that you would have
encountered in the nineteen sixties regarding the Romans, but of

(03:14):
course still has a number of problems as well. I
mainly just remember Joe Panaliono and the Sopranos being mad
at it because Kirk Douglas has a flat top and
he's like, they didn't have flat tops in ancient Rome. Um.
But by the way, I always enjoyed the ancient Roman
detective novels of Gordianus The Finder by Stephen Saylor. UM.

(03:35):
I highly recommend those to anybody. There to be clear
contemporary novels set in ancient Rome. Anyway, we're in short,
we're talking about an empire centered in Rome, established in
twenty seven b C after the collapse of the Roman Republic,
which was founded in five oh nine BC, and eventually
grew grew rather rather sizeable and actually rather difficult to

(03:56):
manage due to its size, stretching across Europe, the Balkans,
the Middle East, and North Africa. It's the classic risk problem.
You overextend your armies, you go out too far, you
think you can hold all of Asia and get those
whatever you know, fifty men at the end of each turn.
That is overextend. Yeah, it's the problem you see in
every empire without fail and uh. And since they were

(04:17):
an empire, they were of course built on a military
conquest and domination of other lands. And and to be fair,
the characters in Monty Python are mostly correct in their
list of the quote unquote good things that the Romans
have done for us. Um, you know, we've we talk
a lot, especially on our other podcast Invention, about various
Roman innovations. Roman technologies talked about sewers and toilets, sewers

(04:39):
and toilets, but of course they didn't risk bring sewers
and toilets. They all in Rhods. They also brought death
and bloodshed. They depended on slave labor. And uh, we
can at least lay some of the hollow scene extinctions
at their sandaled feet. So that's what we're gonna focus
on today. And UH, and just fair warning that we
will be talking in places about the Romans trade and

(05:03):
exotic animals and their harsh treatment of these animals in
the in the arenas and in the colosseum. And this
is all bloody and depressing stuff, cruelty to animals on
a massive scale, So just you know, sort of fair
warning on that. And uh, and just a reminder for
information on how to report cruelty to animals today in
the United States, please visit the American Society for the

(05:24):
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals at a SPCA dot org
or search for Report Animal Abuse a s p c. A.
That being said, let's move on to the extinctions. Okay,
let's hear about it. So one of the articles that
we were looking at and preparing for this episode is
an excellent two thousand and sixteen Atlantic article titled the
Exotic Animal Traffickers of Ancient Rome by Caroline Wazer, and

(05:48):
in it she points out that bloody animal spectacles were
an important part of Roman culture, Like, you know, it
wasn't just you know, something that was also going on.
It's not like, say, pointing to today's culture and saying, uh,
look at look at the popularity of say, mixed martial arts.
It's central to the American experience. I don't know, you
can maybe make that argument, but it's not just a

(06:09):
thing in the culture. It's like an integral part of
the culture. Maybe you're saying, like you can't really understand
the culture without it. Yes, yeah, And I believe that's
the point she's making. Um So, I think most of
us are familiar more familiar with human on human gladiator sports,
which we've we've touched on on this show before. And
if it's a you know, any things in large part

(06:31):
of Ridley Scott's Gladiator in modern times, but so many
different treatments of gladiatorial combat have been rolled out in
our media, but it wasn't just human on human violence.
You also had damnatio add beast is my Latin correct
on that, Joe, it looks like dumb natio ad beasts.
I mean, I'm not an expert either, okay, but dumb
natio right like damn nation. Well, anyway, it stands for

(06:54):
execution by beasts. And then there were the natitiones or
the hunts, you which animals were condemned to die either
at the hands of human hunters um and sometimes like
just we're talking like just a brutal display of like
a hunter dispatching all sorts of exotic animals out there
on the field, or they would have animals battle each

(07:15):
other all for sport. And sadly, these uh, these blood
sports have been a part of human civilization for quite
a while, and though thankfully outlawed in most places, but still,
cock fighting remains legal in parts of the world, as
does dog fighting. Sports like bear baiting and lion baiting
continued depressingly far into modern times, at least in some
parts of the world, and bullfighting remains legal and parts

(07:37):
of the world as well, uh, namely Spain and Portugal.
I would say it's not quite the same because it
doesn't involve vertebrates. But I mean even the bug fights
thing on the internet. I'm sure you've seen that. We're
we're like crickets or beetles or made to combat each other,
or centipedes or spiders. I mean it's just basically you
put too kind of scary looking bugs into a container

(07:58):
together and then kit and try to make them fight. Yeah,
it's uh, I don't know what exactly that impulses. I
mean there's a part of it. I guess I understand
because I remember when I was a kid, I would
very often want to ask adults questions like what would
win in a fight between a tarantula and a scorpion?

(08:20):
And like as if I thought that, like, adults just
know these things. You know that, yeah, you're grown up,
you'd know which one would win. Well, there is kind
of like a need, there's an human necessity to to
rank and profile the creatures of the natural world. And
you still see this kind of thing in like kids
books today, Like my son has a book, uh like
who would Win? And and it's it's about prehistoric creatures

(08:41):
and dinosaurs, uh, and all good educational information, but it's delivered, uh,
with the wrappings of this creature versus this creature. So
I was not alone in this childhood curiosity. No, I
think it's I mean, I think there's something you know,
normal and healthy in it. I mean, I mean, look
at your documentaries, which can be quite uncomfortable to watch

(09:03):
at times when you have a predator and prey battling
each other. But of course, one of the key differences
here is that these are natural occurrences or they better
damn well be natural occurrences in a nature documentary, and
they're not something that has been orchestrated through cruelty by
by humans looking for entertainment. Right. Putting animals into the
Roman arenas kind of the equivalent of the bug fight,

(09:25):
Like you put them in the box and shake it
and try to get them fighting. Right. So, I think
this is though, an example of where you know, if
you know the Roman cruelty to animals via blood sport,
it's it's an outsized and more sensational example of something
that occurs in other cultures and in other times. It's
not an excuse for any of this, but again, it's

(09:46):
important to ground such activities in the larger picture of
human awfulness. But ways Are actually opens her article with
a discussion of Roman orator um Marcus Cicero in his
correspondences with a formal a legal client, a man by
the name of Marcus Kalias. This is while Cicero was
governor of Cilicia in modern day Turkey. So basically um

(10:10):
Calias just continued to hound Cisero about how he needs
him to have some hunters capture and send back some
local leopards which they refer to as Greek panthers, because
he needs because he's He's like, you gotta give these
to me, Cistero. I've got to throw him in the arena.
The people love this, and I'm trying to kick start
my political career here, come on, don't let me down.

(10:30):
And it's just it's like multiple correspondences where he's just
really hounding Cisero over this, and Cicero keeps dodging him
on the matter and saying, well, look though, you know,
the local hunters are busy, you know, etcetera. That's that
sort of thing. It's like, can you get Mick Jagger
to come to my party? Yeah? I mean it is.
It's like, imagine if instead of when you see an

(10:51):
individual running for political office today, instead of it being
a situation of them trying to score, say Neil Young
or you know, the guzzlers to play their event if
instead you were trying to procure exotic animals to massacure
each other in a public arena. But it speaks to
how important this was to at least a large segment

(11:11):
of the population. And so this is something that would
have been practiced in uh, you know, in the Roman Republic,
but but then reached you know, new heights in the
Roman Empire. But it but it also is important to
know that like not everybody was completely on board with this.
Uh Wayser shares descriptions by by Cicero the describe it
as being you know, barbaric and unnecessary and uh And

(11:33):
there are also some descriptions by a plenty of the
Elder as well, in which I think we can we
can trust him a little bit more here because he's
dealing with domestic matters and not mysterious species that he
has no firsthand knowledge of. But the plenty you will
get vindicated a little bit later on in this episode two.
But but in this case, Waser points out things that
they were both writing about how Pompey the Great organized

(11:56):
a series of spectacles. Um, but but what like the
main event essentially was a great elephant hunt in the arena.
And it's interesting interesting in the in the accounts that
showed that that while individuals like Cistero viewed these shows
as bloody and cruel, the crowds generally loved it. But
the elephant hunt was even too much for the masses.
And here's the quote from Cicero, obviously translated that she

(12:19):
shares quote. The last day was that of the elephants,
on which there was a great deal of astonishment on
the part of the vulgar crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay,
there was even a certain feeling of compassion aroused by it,
and a kind of belief created that the animal has
something in common with mankind. Yet they kept watching. Huh, Well, yeah,

(12:39):
they kept watching, and but apparently felt awful about it.
And there were you know, some some booze and whatnot.
And of course this didn't prevent later elephant spectacles from
taking place, and and ultimately, indeed, like the continued trafficking
of exotic animals is the focus of Waiser's article. Uh,
that there was this booming industry for folks who would
arrange the capture of addict wild animals, generally from the

(13:02):
extremes of the Empire, and then transport them back to
Rome to fight in the arena. So it was a
cruel business, but enthusiastic. The enthusiasm for the spectacles in
the arena also also bubbled over into enthusiasm for the
details of the actual hunts and the tactics that procured them,
and this is reflected to both in the literature of
the day and also in h in the art of

(13:23):
the Roman Empire, where you see murals and whatnot depicting
individuals hunting these wild animals so they could bring them back,
and that that, with the wildness of it, was something
that the Romans seemed to crave, she points out, because
the uh there there weren't there, weren't really that many
attempts to try and raise them in captivity. They had
to be captured and brought back to Rome as part

(13:46):
of the appeal. I wonder if the idea about the
methods used in hunting them does that show up later
in the sort of styles of gladiators that appear in
the arena. Because I know we have like the there's
the style of gladiator that's mob old after the fisherman,
you know, that has like the trident and the net
and all that. So there are certain styles that seem

(14:06):
to be based on on like the armies of opposing nations,
or or on professions like fishing. I wondered also if
that the hunting methods that they talked about with these
animals contributed there. Yeah, I mean, it might very well
be the case. So she doesn't get into that in
this paper, and I didn't see it mentioned in some
of the other more animal focused sources I was looking

(14:28):
at here. But you know, obviously the gladiatorial tropes that
they used in the arena, they were all, you know,
based on existing things, you know, to be it be
it a fisherman or a uh, you know, a soldier
or you know, some sort of animal component that was
going to be echoed in the design. So let's come
back to the elephants though, because I think so far

(14:49):
that's been the most alarming um you know, obscenity that
we've looked at here on the part of the Romans. Yeah,
it's interesting that passage that you read from Cicero, where
you know, he's describing the crowds feeling simp with you
for the elephants while they watch this brutality being done
to them. I mean, I wonder if there's more of
that kind of thing going on in the the appetites

(15:12):
of the Roman Arena audiences than we would normally imagine,
Like we imagine the audiences the gladiatorial games and all
this kind of stuff just being you know, bloodthirsty, like yeah,
they want the fight, they want the violence, and and
they love it and they're eating it up. I wonder
if there was some element of the audience that I

(15:33):
don't know, it's something more equivalent to to the kind
of like hate watching or the hate clicking kind of
thing that people do now, like where you know, people
are constantly clicking on things on the Internet that they
know we're going to make them unhappy. You know, you
just reliably know if I click this link, I'm gonna
feel bad and I'm not gonna like what I read,

(15:53):
but I click it anyway. You know, I wonder where
people going to the arena, like I know I'm gonna
fee all bad, but I have to look at this,
you know, that would be might be worthwhile to come
back and explore that in greater detail, like the nature
of these gladiatorial blood sport events UM which we should
stress are generally there were a lot more varied, uncomplicated

(16:15):
than UH is often relayed in popular media. But still
we're violent, blood, blood thirsty events. You know what, what
was the psychology of that? And then how much of
that psychology still remains in the fandom of various you know,
high impact sporting events or you know, actual mixed martial
arts or other martial arts contests, or even simulated um

(16:39):
athletic contests such as professional wrestling. I don't know, I
have to come back to that, I think. But one
thing the Waysier also points out is you know that
like there were there their artistic UH renditions of say
big cats that were used in some of these events,
and they would be given names in the art and
they would be kind of they're like some of the

(17:00):
iconography would be akin to that that would you be
used for human gladiators. So yeah, it gets it gets sticky.
And and then I mean just thinking about the elephants
and the obvious connection, like the obvious intelligence that is
there in the elephant the sympathy that one feels like this. Uh,
this kind of connection like has existed throughout I think
our our experiences with elephants, and yet cruelty to elephants

(17:22):
continues to this day. Uh. And um, you know had
certainly continued on through the you know, the history of
circuses around the world. So um, yeah, I mean our
relationship with animals is always complicated, even when we have
you know, sympathy actually activated for them. Well, I know
you wanted to explore more about the Romans and the elephants. Yeah,

(17:45):
so I found a book titled Elephant Destiny Biography of
an Endangered Species in Africa by Martin Meredith. And in
this the author details the slaughter in the Roman Arenas
in general in the in the opening of Pompei's Games
in the b C and he mentions that no fewer
than six hundred lions were massacured, just to give everyone

(18:07):
an idea of the scale of bloodshed. Here, six hundred lions.
Can you imagine, I mean, a lion is a lion
is an apex predator, So there already aren't that many
of them, And to remove six hundred lions from their habitat, Yeah,
to essentially like basically put out the call and say, look, Pompey,

(18:28):
the Great kneeds lions. So everybody that is in the
in the business of catching lions or could conceivably catch
a lion, get out there and start catching lions essentially,
uh and and this but this would have meant just
before the elephant event described previously. So what elephants were
they catching? Well, the author here points out that the
North African elephant was was the likely species. Is these

(18:52):
were the elephants used by the forces of Hannibals Carthagian army.
The African bush elephant that is still a round um,
this one is too wild to to ride around or
to really tame in the same way that one uses, uh,
the Asian elephant and uh and and not to just
you know, to a single out Carthage. Other groups used

(19:15):
the North African elephant for labor in war as well.
But anyway, following Hannibal's defeat, the region fell under Roman
control and the Romans used these elephants in their bloody
sports as well as in attractions that really have more
in common with the sort of circus work that we
see uh, you know throughout even like the twentieth century,
and then and then includes things like tight rope walking. Yeah,

(19:36):
they single he singles that out in the book. But
here's a quote that touches on the additional levels of
exploitation that get to become employed. Quote. Rome's liking for
elephants meant that the North African herds faced constant raids.
But even more perilous was the insatiable Roman demand for ivory.
Ivory was used to decorate temples and palaces, carried in

(19:58):
triumphal processions, and maid into a vast range of luxury
goods thrones, chess, statues, chairs, beds, book covers, tablets, boxes,
bird cages, combs, and broches. Caesar wrote in an Ivory
Chariot Seneca possessed five hundred tripod tables with ivory legs.
Do you need that many tables for large events? Large

(20:20):
scale events? I guess Caligula gave his horse an ivory stable. Wow.
I'm glad we got Caligula in there. I wasn't sure
we were can actually uh be able to make room
for him. So that being said, some of the ivory
came from India and Ethiopia, but North Africa suffered the
most and in seventies seven CE plenty of the Elder
rode about the shortage of African ivory quote an ample

(20:43):
supply of ivory is now rarely obtained except from India,
the demands of luxury having exhausted all those in our
part of the world. And of course, um the ivory
trade still remains a threat to elephant populations, despite laws
and the hard work of of conservationist world wide. And
if you want more information about what's going on and

(21:03):
what can be done, I recommend everyone check out stop
ivory dot org for more information. Okay, but what was
the ultimate effect on the elephant populations? Do we know
if the Roman exploitation of these animals did it? Did
it damage their populations? Did it drive them extinct? The
general consensus is that it it definitely drove their extinction.

(21:24):
They either died out during the fifth century or at
least we're well on their way to extinction. But the
damage was done during the Roman imperial period, so it
wasn't necessarily that we know that the Romans like hunted
down the very last of the North African elephants, but
they may whatever they did to them damage their populations enough,

(21:45):
and all that that we think it strongly contributed to
their decline, right, and that's something we're going to see
in some of these other examples we bring it. We
bring out as well is that there are other cases
where it's certainly not in a situation where the Romans
just went out and had killed or had killed all
members of a species, but they you know, they had

(22:06):
the power, through their their appetites, through their their economic demands,
to actually like do this much damage to the environment. Again,
with the Roman Empire, everything that was already present in
human of civilization was there only maybe ramped up a
little bit. Uh so their destructive tendencies, you know, they

(22:28):
had a little more reach than you might find in
other civilizations. And of course the same thing can be
said for today. Their various human appetites and are various
wants and desires and our uses for the natural world
that uh, at the scale we're doing things now are
even more destructive than they ever were. Yeah, it's a
sad fact, and it's going to come up again, and

(22:49):
some of the other stuff I've got here. It's it's
sometimes striking how similar the patterns of civilization level activity
are between things that we do today and the things
the Romans did to exploit their environment. Yeah, alright, Well,
on that note, let's go and take a quick break
and we come back. We're going to continue to discuss
Roman extinctions. Thank thank alright, we're back. So, so, Joe,

(23:14):
what what is the next organism we're going to discuss
here that was made to to fight glad he hats
in the arena? Well, uh, it's not. This next one
is a plant. But this is going to be one
of the main examples that people often bring up as
something that was likely driven to extinction by the Roman Empire.

(23:34):
So my main source here is an article from Conservation
Biology from two thousand three by Ken peedge Coo called
plenty of the elders Sylphium first recorded species extinction. Now
the author, Ken perege Coo, I looked him up. He
was a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin Stout.
I think he's retired now. But in this essay the

(23:57):
author asked the question, how do we know when a
specs has gone extinct? In the words of E. O. Wilson,
quote extinction is the most obscure and local of all
biological processes that it took me for a second, and
then I realized, Oh, yeah, I guess that must be true.
Whenever the last ones disappear, it's always kind of a
local and isolated phenomenon. Yeah. I mean, like a lot

(24:19):
of these cases, it's it's looking to when was the
last recorded like dependable and recorded sighting or killing of
a particular organism. Yeah, and so the author writes, quote,
the question of how many species extinctions have gone unnoticed
in human history is unanswerable. Yet the past may shed
light on the present, on what in our behavior has

(24:40):
changed and what hasn't. So he starts off by talking
about our old friend Plenty of the Elder. Now remember,
of course, so we know the timing. The Plenty of
the Elder's natural history was first published around seventy and
so Plenty, in one section of his natural history dives
into an ex explanation of sort of miracle plant that

(25:02):
he calls silphium. The plant is described as having plentiful
kind of stubby, thick roots, a finnel like stalk, blade
like leaves that resemble parsley, and then at the top
the stalks have an umbell. When an umbell is a
cluster of short flower stalks all clumped together, so that

(25:22):
the flowers kind of resemble a parasol. You've probably seen
plants like this. Robert got sort of a little dome
of little flowers all clustered together. So the Romans called
it sylfium. It was also known as silphion by the Greeks,
as well as laser wart uh and laser pithecum uh
and and from this plant, apparently you can create a

(25:44):
resin that is called laser l a s e r
that might be pronounced losser. I don't know, but I'm
gonna say laser. So this resin called laser Plenty describes
it quote as among the most precious gifts presented to
us by nature. And you could get this resin by
making slits in the roots and the stem of the
plant so that it's juices and its sap would leach out,

(26:08):
and then those juices and the sap would be dried
into a resin to produce laser Plenty. Cites a Greek author,
probably the philosopher Theophrastus, who was a student of Plato
and Aristotle's on the origins of the plant, and the
Greek author claims that the plant was discovered in the
seventh century b C. After a black rain fell upon

(26:28):
the gardens in a region of north North Africa known
as Synaica, which is now Libya. Precho writes, quote, it
grew most profusely in a region of that country known
as the sylphio Ferra, near the Gulf of Syrtus. There
where the plateaus along the Mediterranean coast rises tiered highlands
that received considerably more rainfall than the deserts to the south.

(26:51):
Sylfium thrived in a region of hilly and forested meadows.
So we're almost getting this picture of this pristine, you know,
lush little area with a desert to the south, the
coast to the north that has all these little plants
with the finel like stalks and the parsley leaves and
the umbell of flowers near the top. And in ancient
times sylfium had a number of uses that recommended it

(27:15):
to plenty as a kind of miracle plant. And among
these uses documented by Peregeco number one, it was fed
to livestock like cattle and sheep, under the idea that
it gave their meat a special desirable flavor. So you
really wanted you wanted your mutton to be fed on,
sylfium tasted way better. Apparently the plant parts could also

(27:38):
just be cooked and you know, used in cooking, like
the stalk could be used, or the resin could be used.
It was also used medically as a laxative, you know,
so for fast effective relief you go with sylfium. But
the concentrated resin called laser which was which was made
from the plant, was considered even more useful. It could
supposedly treat fevers and coughs and warts. It was believed

(28:01):
to be a pain reliever and a hair restoration tonic.
And apparently, as I mentioned, it was sometimes just also
used in cooking. And there's also another huge use for
this plant, which was that it was apparently believed to
be a contraceptive and a board efficient, and so the
juice or resin would be applied to a piece of
wool and then used as a vaginal suppository as a

(28:23):
contraceptive or a board deficient. And contraceptives and a board
officians were highly desirable in ancient room. They were largely
sought sought after for, of course, many of the same
reasons that they have been throughout all of history. So
apparently a laser was in such demand that there was
a widely acknowledged problem of unscrupulous merchants selling low quality,

(28:46):
adulterated laser. You cut that laser, buddy. You know, it's
like the scene in the movie where the guy gets
in trouble for for cutting the coke with baby powder
or something. You know, this is this is cutting the laser,
maybe with with assi fatigue or something like that. So
Peregiko notes that within Gaius Petronius first century CE fictional

(29:07):
work known as the Satiricon, there's a scene where an
Egyptian slave sings a song from what is apparently a
well known contemporary musical farce, and this musical force of
the day is called the laser dealer. So you get
a sense that the laser dealer of ancient Rome, the
ancient Roman Empire might have had a reputation sort of

(29:28):
like the used car salesman of today who's trying to
give you, you know, get you to buy, to pay
too much for something that's not worth what you think
it is. Okay, because I mean, ultimately we're not talking.
This was not FDA approved. There was not no like
a system. You were you were going to, you know,
essentially an apothecary or just somebody who had a supply
or claim to have a supply of the the the

(29:49):
the laser that you needed. And yeah, if you didn't
trust them, if if they were a little sketchy, they
might be cutting the product or selling something else, you
know that they're calling laser. And think about what people
were using this product for. I mean, it's something that
if you you got something that was an inferior product
that didn't work as well as you thought it would,

(30:09):
you might be facing serious consequences. And so here's the
weird fact. We don't know for sure what plant species
plenty was talking about. It was this hugely important, commercially
important plant, and we don't know for sure what it was.
There is a plant genus in North America called Sylfium,
but it's apparently not related. An author named Rackham in

(30:32):
nineteen fifty suggested that plenty of Sylfium might have been
the species called Ferula tingetna or Farolla marmarica, which are
North African plants that still exist today. Or of course
it could be an extinct relative of these, but that's
just rackham suggestion. It's widely believed that the Roman Empire
may very well have driven this miracle plant to extinction.

(30:56):
So how would that be. Well, already in his day,
Plenty comp lanes that you can't really get sylphium anymore.
He notes that in the year forty nine BC, Julius
Caesar ordered the stockpiling of fifteen hundred pounds of lasers
just the resin in the royal treasury. But by Plenty's
own lifetime, Remember Plenty, this is published in seventy seven,

(31:18):
so this would have been just about a hundred years
later in Plenty's lifetime. By this time, the plant had
vanished in its natural range, and the last known stock
of it quote being valued at its weight in gold
and sent to the Emperor Nero. And I'm you know,
I'm sure Nero did something awesome with So what's the
reason for this decline and disappearance of sylfium? Well, Plenty

(31:41):
says that number. The main explanation Plenty gives is quote
tax farmers who rent the pasturage and strip it clean
by grazing sheep on it, realizing that they make more
profit in that way. And to be honest, I'm not
positive I understand what plenties saying there what that means.
But I think pssibly it refers to the fact that

(32:02):
meat from the livestock that's fed on sylfium got a
much higher price because it was believed to taste better,
so you could get more money for the you know,
upgraded meat. But this is you know, this decimating your
sylfium fields. Okay, So in a in a way like
they're just multiple demands on the product because it was
used for so many things, including people who just want

(32:23):
to graze their animals on it and produce superior meat.
But it all comes down to, like to demand for
the various products direct products or products that depend upon
the sylfium, and there were limited habitats in which sylfium
would grow. So Perejiko also offers some other thoughts about
would have what could have contributed to the decline of
sylfium uh and a chief concern he raises his habitat destruction.

(32:46):
He says that a very popular would for Roman furniture
came from the thuon tree, which filled the forests of Synaica,
and over harvesting of this would possibly lead to def
for a station of the area that is now Libya,
and in turn this led to soil erosion. So without
tree roots to hold the soil in place, you know

(33:08):
the soil roads in rainfall or in the wind or
in anything um which destroyed the sylfium's natural habitat and
the hilly meadows near the coast. So there you've got
a couple of unsustainable practices coming together to conspire for
the demise of this plant. He also points to unsustainable
farming practices in the region which were aimed at short
term profits but which came at the long term expense

(33:31):
of soil quality. Also, he says there are historical records
of political conflict over sylfium in synaica Um so in
the region. In this region during the Roman Empire, they
were like there were native tenant farmers and then the
rich Roman landlords. And as sylfium became scarce, the Romans

(33:51):
tried to put tight control on the production by saying
only they could farm it on their lands, and they
put fences up around the meadows where the sylfium grew
in order to keep the locals out. But Perejko writes
quote the natives practiced to kind of agrarian terrorism by
tearing down the fences and letting their flocks graze on
the sylphium to increase the value of the sheep's mutton.

(34:14):
And then also apparently sometimes they would just go into
the fields in the night and just uproot the plants,
just pull them up by the roots, kind of as
a middle finger to the Roman overlords. Romans go home.
Another thing that's a possible explanation here, apparently the Romans
were obsessed with garlic. Oh well we still have that.
Well yeah, and I don't often side with the Romans,

(34:35):
but I cannot fault them there. Garlic is great. Yeah,
I mean garlic not only is it a wonderful culinary ingredient,
but I mean it has a number of different medicinal
uses and you know in in in herbal traditions. Um,
is that antimicrobial property? Yeah, um yeah, yeah absolutely, And
so Perejhko writes quote Garlic was such a popular plant

(34:58):
with the Roman army that it was said one could
follow the advance of the Roman legions and expansion of
the empire by plotting range maps for garlic. Uh. So,
the Romans and Cyrenaica also apparently destroyed some sylfium habitats,
so they could plant garlic locally. Uh. And so the
question is did sylfium fully go extinct in the first

(35:19):
century CE or not. Some scholars have argued that sylfium
was cultivated at least until a few hundred years later
in the fifth century, because there are references to it
in some later writings, like people who have writing letters
in the fifth century cee Talking about having sylfium plants.
But these references could very well be to what what

(35:40):
Peregco calls pseudo sylfium's other plants that were incorrectly identified
as sylfium and had been for a long time, or
also for a long time had been combined with laser
resin to adulterate it, or had simply been sold as
fake sylfium by yet another unscrupulous laser dealer. Yeah, you know,
this is something I I was reading about recently and

(36:01):
another book about just um. You know, as his ancient
people's moved around, there might be a traditional plant that
they depended upon, and as they move out of its range. Uh,
and sometimes you know, take it with them to some extent,
but then lose it. They have to find new substances
that will fulfill at least some of the properties, or
they hope will fulfill some of the properties. And sometimes

(36:23):
you just give it the same name or you know,
or a similar name exactly. Uh. And you know, and
not all plants can follow you outside of I mean,
some plants are very particular about their native range and
and can't be really grown outside it very well. And
it does appear sylfium as one of those. But in
the first centuries, see other plants and spices were being

(36:44):
recommended as a substitute for sylfium, like petco sites a
Roman cookbook from around twenty CE that recommends Assa fatida
as a substitute for laser and recipes, presumably because real
laser was already really expensive or hard to get. So ultimately,
we don't know for sure whether or not the species
plenty is talking about actually when extinct, but it seems

(37:05):
pretty likely it's got a limited natural range subject to
habitat destruction and over exploitation, as well as intentional destruction. Uh.
And the author ends by saying, either way, it's interesting
and sad to see the exact patterns of human behavior
leading to extinction of plant and animal species today have
been with us for thousands of years. I mean this

(37:26):
almost reads like a like a parody of you know,
modern stories about how we we overexploited certain plants and animals. Absolutely. Well,
on that note, we're gonna take a quick break and
when we come back, we're going to discuss a few
more Roman extinctions, or at least in some of these cases,
extinctions that were greatly contributed to by the Roman Empire. Alright,

(37:49):
we're back, Okay. Can we talk about bears? Yes, let's
talk about bears. Uh. The Atlas bear is um by
some estimates, a notable victim of Roman civilization and the
civilization that followed in the wake of the Roman Empire. Uh.
These were the brown bears of northern Africa, and their
extinction can at least be partially attributed to the Romans,

(38:10):
though we have to stress here it didn't truly go
extinct in the wild and in the wild to the
late nineteenth century, so sometime later to be sure. But
so we're saying that maybe the Romans did stuff to
contain its range or something like that, Yeah, or certainly
really kickstarted the tradition of of exploitation, uh and in

(38:32):
habitat destruction that would reach you know, its final form,
uh in the nineteenth century. Uh. So, basically what happens
is when the Romans expanded into the Atlas Mountains of
modern day Morocco, the bears were hunted for sport and
they were captured for transport back to the Arenas in
Rome as well. So we're talking thousands and thousands of

(38:54):
them again. You know, when we're talking about the the
trade and exotic animals, it's not just like a few
a few individuals here and there catching a few curious
creatures and sending them back. You know, I think it's
easy to fall back on. Uh. You know, certainly a
lot of this took place steering, you know, the time
of European colonialism as well. Um. But uh, a lot

(39:16):
of times it brings to mind pictures of say, like
the hold of a ship with a few different animals
in it or something like that. But no, we're talking
like tons and tons of creatures here, um, thousands, thousands
and thousands of bears. I mean, it's not like they're
all that many bears to begin with, right, Yeah, and uh,
and so the initial depleting of their numbers put them

(39:37):
in a terrible position for a centuries of habitat loss
and deforestation to follow, and also continued hunting, which was
ultimately bolstered by the development of modern firearms. And they
apparently when you look at the like the the the
last known sightings of these animals, they pretty much line
up with modern firearms being available, so that at just

(40:00):
pushing the hunting over the edge. Um. This made me
think a little though about bears and human extinction. Uh.
It was once theorized that prehistoric cave bears were hunted
into extinction by humans, but it doesn't seem to be
that this was actually the case, or at least this
is not the predominant theory now. Uh. You know, these
were largely herbivorous creatures and they might have just been

(40:24):
too much for ancient humans to really tackle on a
regular basis, and human numbers might not have been sufficient
to pull off that kind of extinction at the time,
so we can't lay their extinction entirely at human feet.
I'd love to come back and discuss cave bears or
or other prehistoric bears like the short faced bear in

(40:44):
the future, but it is interesting to sort of think
of that in terms of the scaling up of human activities,
like you know, there were there were times there were
certainly there were certainly animals that you know that that
that early humans contributed to their to the extinction of uh,
you know, no doubt about it. But if if, if
populations are smaller, uh, there's less that can be done

(41:06):
towards pushing an animal's extinction. Right now, another animal creature
you might not expect to show up on this list
is the ostrich because you know, it doesn't seem like
a natural creature that would be out there in the
Roman arena, right, But the ostrich we're talking about about
here is not the common ostriche that you're probably thinking of,

(41:28):
and that you would you can see it most zoos
and window and what have you. Well, I mean I
was thinking when you said this, okay, there are some
large birds I can't imagine in the arena. I was
thinking about the cassowary. Oh yeah, Well, and is the
scariest feed of anything I've ever seen? Well, yes, and
ostriches can be quite terrifying close up for sure, and
they can and they are dangerous animals. But but I

(41:50):
have to admit it wasn't like the first thing I
thought about is being something that there would have you know,
really suffered due to the pressure of Roman appetite. But
what we're talking about here is not common ostrich, but
the Arabian ostrich or the Syrian ostrich, also known as
the Middle Eastern ostrich, and it lived in the Near
and Middle East, as opposed to the common ostrige of
Africa that we still know today now. To be sure,

(42:13):
the Arabian ostrich suffered under humans for quite a while.
They're mentioned in in other ancient texts. Uh they're even
mentioned in the Bible. And given that they are giant birds,
you know they're they've always been something of a curiosity
for humans. And then you see this as far east
as China where specimens were taken for display, but the
Romans were were also rather taken with them. And again

(42:35):
everything with the Roman Empire you can sort of see
as like a leveling up of of of of appetite
to a certain extent, but also just the ability to
exert that appetite on the natural world. Uh So, because
again these ostriges, they were exotic and they became something
of a status symbol. You see them popping up on
Roman coinage. From that, from that time period seem true.

(42:55):
Sylfium sylfi amazon coins we have, which just speaks to
like what kind of value was put on these on
these species. But in the arena, the ostriches were made
to pull chariots to participate in other you know, violent
arena spectacles, which of course tended to have a terrible
end for the animal. But they were also prized in
Roman cuisine, both the meat and the eggs. I was

(43:19):
the Romans were omnivorous to an extreme. You can read these,
uh these cookbooks where you know, it seems like they ate,
they tried eating just about everything. I was reading a
cookbook entry and something earlier today with this recipe for
like parrot and flamingo. I think, yeah, there's some very

(43:39):
exotic dishes, which again I think is part of just
like the traffic of these exotic animals. Uh. Yeah, there's
apparently a really good book on it that I didn't
have time to really get into a lot. But Patrick
Foss wrote one called Around the Roman Table, Food and
Feasting in Ancient Rome. Uh, and then he was looking
at some Roman cookbooks and uh he appointed to at
least a couple of Austria recipes, one for an Ostrich

(44:01):
stew and one for a boiled Ostrich. So boiled whole Ostrich.
Uh No, not whole, not whole. You know, there were
limits to what you could do. But then I mean
outside of this too, I mean ostrich feathers were prized
um for use in ornamentation and costumes. But the Arabian Ostrich,

(44:22):
the Syrian Ostrich ends up surviving the Roman Empire, but
they did not survive the pressures of the modern world,
so they're thought to have gone extinct sometime in the
mid twentieth century. So they made it pretty far. But again,
this is a situation where you can't lay their extinction
entirely at the feet of the Roman Empire by any means,
but you can certainly look to the degree that the

(44:43):
Roman Empire added additional pressure upon their survival. All right, well,
I've got another one where, uh, we don't have clear
evidence that the Romans drove a species extinct, but there
are some interesting clues about possibilities in history that that
may have previously not been imagined. So uh, let's let's

(45:04):
take a look at Plenty again. Plenty of the Elder
from his Natural History Book nine, chapter five, and this
one's the John Bostock translation where Plenty is talking about billina,
the ballina and the orca uh. And note in this
passage there's this word billina. It's believed to refer to
some kind of you know, key toss, meaning like sea
monster or big fish, which which for Plenty would include whales.

(45:28):
But we don't. We think he's talking about a whale.
We don't know what whale he's talking about. Okay, but
this is where we get balin from. Is it like
similar etymology? I would assume so yeah, uh, so he says, uh.
The billina penetrates to our seas, even it is said
that they are not to be seen in the Ocean
of Gettyes before the winter solstice, and at periodical seasons
they retire and conceal themselves in some calm, capacious bay

(45:52):
in which they take delight in bringing forth. This fact, however,
is known to the Orca, an animal which is peculiarly hot,
hostile to the ballina, and the form of which cannot
be in any way adequately described, but as an enormous
mass of flesh armed with teeth. The animal attacks the
billina and its places of retirement, and with its teeth,

(46:14):
tears its young, or else attacks the females which have
just brought forth, and indeed while they're still pregnant, and
as they rush upon them, it pierces them just as
though they had been attacked by the beak of a
Liburnian galley. And that refers to like a sharp pointed ship.
And he goes on and on about the orca hunting
these billina. But all of it is I mean, this

(46:37):
sounds exactly like everything we've discussed regarding the orca in
the past. I mean, this is like straight out of
a modern documentary in which we get to see, you know,
spectacular underwater footage of the orcas, or at least the
the the variety of orcas that that feed on whales
going after them. Yes, I mean it is an accurate
description of things you might see in some parts of

(46:59):
the ocean. It scept there's a problem. In the early
part of this passage, he's referring to some kind of
whale that retires seasonally to the shallows to give birth
in the area around what is now Cadiz, So that's
in southwestern Spain. But the passage has long been of
interest to marine biologists because there are no whales in
the region that match this ecological and behavioral description, And

(47:22):
in fact, there are whales in the Mediterranean sometimes, but
they tend to be you know, like deep water whales
that do not retire to shallow bays around Cadiz to
give birth. So what was plenty of talking about, Like,
did he get the story mixed up? Is he confused
about the location or about the behavior of the whales
or what or maybe was he referring to whales that

(47:42):
once would have calved in that area but no longer
do Now there are whales that that fit that ecological
and behavioral description, but they don't live in the Mediterranean.
A couple of examples would be gray whales, which is
the gray whale is a baleen whale up to about
fifteen meters long or fifty feet about thirty five metric tons,

(48:02):
and it's worldwide range today has been reduced to a
couple of populations in the Northern Pacific Ocean, and one
of its two population subgroups, the Western group, is endangered.
And then also it would fit the North Atlantic right whale,
which is also a baleen whale of endangered today. It
lives in the Northern Atlantic. As the name implies, it's
up to about sixteen meters or about fifty feet long

(48:25):
and about sixty four metric tons. And the right whale
was a huge target of the historical whaling industry because
they were valuable and they were easy to catch, and
they were hunted to commercial extinction by the mid nineteen
hundreds and nearly to biological extinction. They're they're pretty much
entirely gone from the eastern North Atlantic. There's a single

(48:46):
population of about five hundred individuals that survives in the
western North Atlantic and that's it. And so, you know,
in terms of extinction, we've often touched on like the
differences between extinct and wild. Uh, you know, absolute extinction,
but commercial extinction is something I don't often think about,
like basically depleted to the point where, like the the

(49:06):
industry of whaling this particular animal is no longer viable. Yeah, exactly.
Um So, so let's come back to the whales in
a minute. A different question. When was the first time
somebody decided they could base a whole industry off of
hunting whales? And we know the hunting of whales in
like individual cases goes back thousands of years. But the

(49:27):
first known large scale commercial whaling industry and history has
long been believed to be the basque whaling business of
the medieval period. And there's no evidence that hunting of
whales by humans would have happened at any scale large
enough to have had an effect on whale populations before
the Basque whalers of the Middle Ages, but there are
earlier descriptions of whale hunting. Another piece of ancient Roman

(49:51):
literature we want to look at here is an awesome
poem about fishing by the second century ce Greco Roman
poet Opien, called the Halley Utica, and this is from
the Lobe Classical Library edition. It describes all kinds of stuff,
you know, the way the fishers go out in the
boat and they stab at the whale with barbs and
attached a hook to it with a rope, and that

(50:12):
they then attached the rope to water skins or skins
that are filled with human breath, and there of course buoyant.
So it's kind of like in Jaws, right when you
go and they spear the shark with the floating barrels um.
But then uh Oppian rights quote. Now, when the deadly
beast is tired with his struggles and drunk with pain,
and his fierce heart is bent with weariness and the

(50:34):
balance of hateful doom inclines. Then first of all, the
skin comes to the surface, announcing the issue of victory,
and greatly uplifts the hearts of the fishers. Even as
when a herald returns from dolorous war in white raiment
and with a cheerful face, his friends, exulting follow him,
expecting straightway to hear favorable tidings, so do the fishers

(50:56):
exult when they behold the hide, the messenger of good
news rising from below. And immediately other skins rise up
and emerge from the sea, dragging in their train the
huge monster, and the deadly beast is hauled up, all
unwillingly distraught in spirit, with labor and wounds. Yeah, it is,
I mean, it's like, I feel like Oppian is kind

(51:17):
of a good poet in a way, but it's uh,
it's it's a sad story. He seems to be delighted
about it, though it does seem to resemble the shark
hunting sequence and Jaws more than more than It's not
clear what kind of whale Oppian thinks he's talking about. Okay,
so we know the Romans didn't have the technology to
do deep ocean whaling, but it but is it possible

(51:39):
the Romans did participate in more shallow whaling than previously thought.
They certainly did a lot of fishing and fish processing.
The Roman Empire loved fish. They had like fish processing plants.
Basically they made stuff that's like you know, modern fish sauce,
like colatura, uh, you know, salted fish products. So they
were they were big on seafood and and the fishing industry.

(52:01):
But did they do any whaling. We we didn't previously
have really any evidence that that happened at any kind
of scale, but a study from ten finds some interesting
evidence that might make us question that. Uh. And this
was published in Proceedings to the Royal Society b Biological
Sciences by Anna Rodriguez at All and the authors here
point out that whales are often archaeologically invisible, meaning when

(52:24):
they die, their bones sink to the bottom of the ocean,
and we just don't usually get much of a record
of them even when they're you know, called or processed
by humans. They tend most often to be processed on
the beach and there's stuffed you know, all the blubber
and everything taken away, and then the bones just get
washed back into the water. Uh. And this study used
DNA analysis of bones found in Roman and pre Roman

(52:47):
archaeological sites, I think primarily ancient fish processing factories in
the Gibraltar region, and they found among the bones that
there were there were remains of three right whales, three
gray whales, but also a fin whale, a sperm whale,
a long finned pilot whale, a dolphin, and one bone
from an African elephant. Not sure what was doing at

(53:08):
the fish processing plan. Also makes me wonder which if
this was truly since it's not a study about elephants,
if we're talking about the uh, the extant African elephant
or the extinct North African elephant. Oh yeah, I'm actually
not sure they're But so the author has used radio
carbon dating that placed the bones with an origin between
two fifty b c E and five, so that's the

(53:30):
Roman Empire period. Uh. And the authors believed this indicates
that the historical range of these two whale species, the
gray whale and the right whale, actually included the Gibraltar region.
In the Mediterranean Sea as Calvin grounds at the time.
So in the Roman period, the ranges of these two
whales were very different. They were much bigger, apparently, And
the author's right that when these two whale species disappeared

(53:53):
from the Mediterranean, it was probably accompanied by quote the
disappearance of their predators, killer whales. So you're not normally
going to be seeing orca in the Mediterranean, right, but
they might have been there to prey on these whales
at the time. And when they're their their main prey vanishes,
they have to vanish as well, exactly. And then also
they say, and a reduction in marine primary productivity. And

(54:15):
the authors also think that if these two species of
coastal accessible whales were historically present, it might indicate that
the Roman Empire had a forgotten pre Basque whaling industry.
Quote none of this demonstrates that the Roman whaling industry existed,
but it indicates that Romans had the means, the motive,
and the opportunity to capture gray and right whales at

(54:36):
an industrial scale. And then also quote nonetheless, if such
an industry did exist, it could have had an impact
on the eastern North Atlantic populations of these two species,
as it would have affected particularly adult females with disproportionate
demographic consequences in these long lived, slowly reproducing species. Thus,

(54:56):
Roman exploitation may have played a role in the observed
decline in Atlantic gray whale genetic diversity before the onset
of industrial basque whaling. So quite a few ifs they're right.
We don't know, uh, you know, if this whaling industry
existed and all that, But you can see how it's
plausible that a Roman whaling industry could have contributed to

(55:18):
the decline of whale populations in the Mediterranean in the Atlantic.
But I did just want to caution this with, you know,
because not everyone agrees with how to interpret the study.
So I was reading an article about this in The
Guardian that cited a doctor Erica Rowan, a classical archaeologist
at Royal Holloway University of London, and she said the
study does show these whales habitats once included the Gibraltar region,

(55:41):
but that the small number of bones over the short
time span found doesn't necessarily prove that there was a
large commercial whaling industry in ancient in the ancient Roman Empire, which,
of course the authors didn't say they were proving that,
but they just suggested as possible. Uh quote. I think
that if these whales were present in such numbers, and
we're being caught on an industrial scale, that we would
have more evidence, perhaps not in the zoo archaeological record,

(56:04):
but in the ceramic record. In the literary sources, the
Romans ate and talked about an enormous variety of fish
and seafood, and if the whale was widely exploited and exported,
then it is strangely absent from many discussions. So she
makes the point. Yeah, you might not expect to find
many physical remains because of the way that whales are
often processed, but you would probably expect to find writings

(56:27):
where people talked about the whale industry. Yeah. One of
the Roman authors whose work survives today would have would
have seen it, would have commented on it, would have
been impressed by the scale of the industry. Yeah, you
would have said that they ate it, would have recorded
some sort of a recipe, or if not a recipe,
than like, you know, some sort of record of what
they were using the you know what, the various things

(56:49):
they might have been processing the whale into. Yeah, I
can see that being a potential red flag there. So
I guess the big takeaway today is that empires have consequences.
They do that, they have a lot of consequences, and
it's and it's I think easy to to overlook the
consequences that they have on the natural world and have
always had. And again we have to think about the
scaling up of human behavior as our you know, our

(57:12):
modern empires, in our modern um you know, nation states, uh,
continue to scale up what they're doing sometimes uh take
into into account their impact on the natural world, but
perhaps not as much as it should be the case.
Uh So kind of a cautionary tale, I guess from
the Roman world. Don't kill the elephants, don't deplete the sylphium.

(57:34):
And of course these are the mainly the species. Most
of the species we talked about here were things that
their absence is notable because they were a value in
some way. These are the things that they are historical
records of of going missing. Right, Yeah, so we're being reduced.
So just imagine other species that were less remarkable or
at least less valued, or you know, they weren't exotic creatures,

(57:56):
you know, very you think of the various rodents or insects, birds,
or what have you that could have also been destroyed
by Roman activity and it just didn't make it into
the history books. Yeah, all right, So there you have it.
As always, if you want more episodes of Stuff to
Blow your Mind, visit Stuff to Blow your Mind dot
com because that's where you'll find them. And if you
want to support the show always, the best thing you

(58:17):
can do is tell friends about the show. Make sure
that you rate and review us wherever you have the
power to do so. And if you have any thoughts
on the the organisms we discussed today, the histories we
discussed today, if you have additional ideas, if you have
corrections additional organisms we might have missed that when extinct
or might have gone extinct during the Roman time or

(58:39):
do in part to the Roman influence, let us know.
We'd love to hear from you. Huge thanks as always
to our excellent audio producer Try Harrison. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future,
to answer any of those questions Robert just said, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at Stuff to Blow Your Mind, dot com. Stuff to

(59:09):
Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radios How
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