How Bioarchaeology Works

Thanks to advancements in fields like genetics, and molecular chemistry, archaeology is undergoing a renaissance and opening up new understanding of the past.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from How Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry So
it's Stuff you Should Know and we're doing one of
my favorite things, Chuck archaeology. Yeah. We've done a few

(00:24):
of these over the years, guests, specifically one called Archaeology
and a Nutshell, which was mostly about archaeology. Yeah. And boy,
it's hard to find an archaeology article on the Internet
that doesn't mention Indiana Jones say that, including this one
from Stuff you Should Know or from How Stuff Works.
It was the one to third and fourth word in

(00:46):
this article. Forget the Indiana Jones fedora. Yeah, but you
know what, like no pun intended, hats off to that character,
for I mean, he he's that's that that character has
done so much for the field of archaeology just by existing,

(01:07):
you know. Yeah, for sure, he definitely opened my eyes.
Archaeology was one of the first complicated words I could
spell as a youngster. Yeah, thanks thanks to Indiana Jones.
I bet of archaeologists between the ages of UH thirty
and fifty five are there because of Indiana Jones, and
you can usually pick him out because they tend to

(01:28):
dress like him as well, Like you really don't need
a whip enough, I don't need it, I want it. Yeah,
but yeah, he he represents though this kind of um, well,
he represents a type of archaeologists that never actually existed,
you know, pulp pulp fiction kind of archaeologists from the

(01:51):
like the nineteen thirties adventures, right, so that that didn't
actually Indiana Jones and his ilk didn't never really exist.
But he also kind of represents this type of archaeology that,
um that has become old school for sure, and it's
starting to be replaced. I was gonna say slowly being replaced,

(02:12):
but I get the impression that is fairly quickly being
replaced by this kind of new method These new techniques
that put together all fall under the name of bioarchaeology, right,
which is a sub genre, not genre, but sub field,

(02:32):
sub field. There's a word I'm looking for. I can't
find it. I think subspecialty works or a specialty. Yeah,
it is a specialty, but I can't. I can't A
sub umbrella of the umbrellas term, a subbrella. Man, it's
gonna bug me. I'll think of it later. Uh So anyway, UM,
we're we're talking about the combining of a lot of

(02:54):
different disciplines in archaeology, and they all have great long
names like paleo DeMar graphy, just studying ancient populations, the
demographics of those, paleogenetics, which is a big deal, as
you will see with DNA scraping some old teeth, you know,
finding out what's going on there. Yeah, mortuary studies, which

(03:15):
that's the best way to get a date in college,
right if you say her, you're minoring and mortuary studies.
But else well, UM, basically anything where you can apply
new scientific techniques to um, the study of of bones
in particular, um bones coop that that kind of yeah,

(03:39):
that kind of um lends itself to being called bioarchaeology.
But the the field, this little thing that started out,
I think is kind of a kind of a fairly
specialized subdiscipline of archaeology. It's the word subdiscipline. I think
I suggested that, didn't I. Um it it's starting to
replace archaeology as a whole. From what I can see

(04:01):
and just from the outside looking in, it's becoming archaeology exactly.
It's replacing some of these old techniques with these new techniques.
It's kind of a technocratic approach to archaeology, and the practices,
the best practices they're coming up with are so good
that they're kind of undoing old archaeology. And so this
specialized field is kind of taking over the field as

(04:24):
a whole, and it seems to be the way that
archaeology is going. And one of the reasons. Just initially
it was just like dig up the bones and try
to read them in even better ways than the old
style of archaeology did. But as it's growing as a
field or as a subdiscipline, it's it's starting to try
to answer bigger and bigger questions about the people that

(04:48):
are being dug up and the populations that they belong to. Yeah,
kind of putting it in a historic context and not
just um, let me look at this one set of
bone owns and what this says about this person. But
like you said, they're trying to almost reconstruct societies as
a whole, uh, and social strata and what they ate

(05:12):
and what kind of things killed them and whether or
not they accepted outsiders. Like it's really kind of neat.
It really is. I like it. And plus I mean,
this is stuff that archaeology, UM, I guess you could
call it old school archaeology concerned itself with as well.
But I get the impression that, um, the old school

(05:33):
archaeology was not rooted enough in science, so they were
at risk of making grand pronouncements that were not necessarily
UM correct. So you just have limited evidence like this
one skeleton or maybe one burial area, and just from
a few things that we're basically based on observation. UM.

(05:58):
Just like visual observation, you would make these extrapolating you
would extrapolate onto the population as a whole, and you
could get that wrong really easily. So what bioarchaeology does
is the same thing still bury up dead bodies. You
you surmise things from the way that they were situated,
the stuff they were buried with, and all that. But
then you also apply scientific investigation like genetics and like UM,

(06:24):
like using mass spectrometers to to isolate isotopes and in bones,
and then you take that evidence and you apply it
to the visual observations you've made, and you get a
clearer picture and you're at less risk of getting it wrong.
I think that's why it's becoming archaeology. Yeah, and um,

(06:44):
we'll probably talk about this a little more later on,
but one of the things I thought was really neat
about this is they make the point in our article
here that you know, history is written by historians, so
you often just get stories or the history of the
more important people, right and uh, they even quoted a
bioarchaeologist in here that says that their goal is to

(07:05):
kind of work from the bottom up and to find
out what was going on with some of these marginalized
people in society or the very least society as a whole,
and not just you know, let's dig up King Tut's tomb,
which is great, but who who worked on King Tut's tomb?
Like that's interesting exactly. Yeah, And so the that's basically

(07:26):
what's called diplomatic or great Man historiography, which is the
study of well, that's the that's just digging up King
Tutt and focusing on him and leaders and rulers, and
that's based on the idea that they're the ones who
really push society forward or in whatever direction. It won't
love it. It was on the rulers and that's the

(07:47):
way that it's been. Like, that's like kind of the western,
white patriarchical approach to studying history. What what you love
and what bioarchaeology has test itself with is called history
from below, which is, like you said, it's it's sussing
out that the common people's lives and and figuring out
society from there. And one of the neat things about that, Chuck,

(08:09):
is it like imagine if you're just part of a
marginalized group today and you find out from some archaeologists
down the road or some historians down the road that
actually the group that you're a part of did some
really amazing things in this one civilization, at this one
period in time, that that's inspiring. That can inspire people
alive today to do great things with their own lives

(08:33):
based on, you know, finding out some neat stuff about
their ancestry that would have otherwise been overlooked if their
ancestry had never been part of the leadership of a society.
There's a lot of value to it. Yeah, and the
term itself, you're more likely at least at this point,
and I think you're right, it is changing um to
hear it in America, even though it was first used

(08:53):
by a British archaeologist name Sir John Graham Douglas Clark,
great British name, and then ninteen seventies, but an American
anthropologist named Jane Ellen. Uh, Bookstra, that's as good as
I could have done. Bookstra b U I K S
t r a UM. She's the one who kind of
popularized it and Americans kind of picked up on the

(09:16):
term a little more, at least at this point. You're
not as likely to hear it uh in Europe right now? Right, Well,
we're just gonna call her Jane Ellen. Okay, So Jane Ellen.
She was an anthropologist and she basically took that term
bioarchaeology and basically said it was the integration of archaeology
and human osteology, which is the study of human bones

(09:38):
and what they can tell us, um put together to
investigate biocultural change. That was her definition of bioarchaeology, and
she came up with it in in nineteen seventy seven, and
that really kind of is the uh, the definition for
the field today. Yeah, she was awesome. Actually I looked
into her a little bit. So does she wear a
pith helmet too. She's probably she's probably been a pith

(09:59):
or at some point. I had a dude right in.
Actually that was a fellow pither. Nice. I saw a
couple of people on Twitter saying like, I had to
go look this up, but this is what you're wearing
in the pool? Well, I mean there, to be fair,
there are the like the British soldier uh type, tall
pith helmets with the red feather. Yeah, that's not what

(10:22):
I'm talking about. I'm talking about the low safari type
that provides the coverage. That's precisely what I assumed you
were talking about. Yeah, that it would be just weird
to wear the tall one in a swimming pool. But yeah,
this guy was a mail carrier, so oh yeah, it
seems like that might be standard issue for um, for

(10:43):
the post office, now that you mentioned it. I've seen
him before. I have to for the walkers, at least
the undead ones. All right, well, I think I think
we should already take a break since we provided such
a nice broad overview. Gosh, that's all right, and we'll
come back, can talk more and more about bones and poop. Hi,

(11:22):
all right, so we promised talk of bones and poop. Uh,
we'll deal with bones first and um bones most times,
and less like recently when they found did you hear,
like just a couple of days ago they found this
couple from World War Two frozen in the Swiss Alps. Yes,
and okay, so this couple, it's so tragic, right, This

(11:45):
is they had tons of kids that were at home.
The mom finally the dad used to go hiking in
the mountains all the time. The mom finally went with
them for the first time and they get lost and
felt they fall into a crevass and or lost for
seven a year again. Yeah. And the reason why she
never went with them before with her husband before because

(12:06):
she's pregnant all the time. Yeah. So she reared a
bunch of kids, fell into crovoss, died, was lost for
seventy years, and then was found again by a ski
lift company. Could you imagine coming across something like that
and be grizzly in World War two outfits? I mean
uniform obviously, but period era clothing. Yeah. So anyway, barring

(12:29):
something like that, generally, what you're gonna be left with
when people die, that flesh goes away very quickly, and
you know, as far as in a relative sense, and
you're gonna be left with bones. These skeletons, Uh, they're
very durable, they're very hard, uh, and they last a
very long time. So, um, the best evidence that that

(12:52):
bioarchaeologists work with, for the most part, like bones and teeth, right,
because those, like you said, they lasted very very long time.
And there's actually quite a bit you can tell from
those things. In fact, I saw um an explanation of
bioarchaeology because it's such an evolving field. Still check that
the definition. Even though Jane Ellen's definition holds pretty well,

(13:15):
there's it's it's just not set in stone, know and
says this is the definition. Right. So one explanation for
bioarchaeology I saw so that it as a discipline, it
views the skeleton as a form of material culture crafted
through lived experience. Right. So the skeleton itself has the
markers of all these different things that this person did

(13:38):
in their lifetime, had done to them in their lifetime,
like say an infliction of violence, um, suffered from in
their lifetime, like a disease eight in their lifetime. Um, yeah,
all of this stuff is left behind in your bones,
and we've just recently really figured out how to read
this beyond looking at it and visually inspecting it. We've

(13:59):
learned how to apply scientific tools like DNA analysis to
to to glean more information from them. Yeah, it's really neat,
like did these people like it really puts a human
a more broad human aspect to it all. I think, uh, like,
did these people suffer as a society? Did they thrive?

(14:22):
Were they healthy? Were they sick? What did they overcome?
What was there? What was their environment? Like? Like did
they was it social upheaval that brought them down? Or
was it, uh, you know, a large wave or was
it a disease from eating the wrong thing? Uh? It's
really interesting. I know a couple of I think it
was in two thousand fourteen. I believe we talked about

(14:44):
this on some show, but it might have even been
an Internet round up. But they discovered the oldest human poop, uh,
fifty thousand year old Neanderthal poop, and they found out
that it was a bit of surprise that they ate
a lot of vegetable. Yeah. I saw this um documentary
recently called What the Health I think is what it

(15:05):
was called or whatever? Right, um, But there's an ongoing
discussion in it about whether humans are actually herbivores or omnivores. Yeah,
which was it was a bit of surprise because they
thought that Neander talls. I think it's talls, right us,
But I think I think it is supposed to be talls.

(15:26):
I don't know. Well that they ate largely only meat. Uh,
And then they found that no, that in the it's
called copper light, this these fossil feces. Um they did
eat a lot of meat obviously, but they were eating
and they couldn't tell from the chemistry analysis of the
poop itself, but they did pollen analysis of the area
and found that they were eating like berries and nuts

(15:47):
and tubers, and uh. It just you know, overall, just
gives kind of a more complete picture of something like
you were talking about earlier. They previously were like, no,
all they did was eating meat. Well yeah, plus also,
I mean, think about it. So there's this whole idea
that all of the megafauna in North America collapsed like
around twelve thousand years ago, and humans get blamed for it,

(16:09):
like we overhunted the megafauna. Well, if we find evidence
down the road through bioarchaeology, that. No. Actually, most of
the ancestors who made it to North America UM and
we're living here twelve thousand years ago were vegetarians for
the most part. They probably didn't overhunt and drive to
extinction these the mega fauna. It was probably something else

(16:30):
that did it. And so, you know, laying it at
the feet of these early humans has been kind of
a cautionary tale, like, look, what happened. You can lead
to environmental collapse if you don't manage the wildlife correctly.
But if that's not actually true, and we find out
what did lead to the collapse of the mega fauna,
then maybe we can protect against that instead, you know

(16:51):
what I mean, and just forget the rest of wildlife. Yeah,
you can overhunt all you want. Well, it's definitely calling
into question a lot of things that we took for
granted because of oh, just sort of limited science, I guess,
is the best way to say it. Yeah, And there's
this Atlas Obscure article we both read about um human feces,

(17:11):
about copper light the study of it. I think it
was something like to know ancient civilization, you have to
study its feces or something something along tho it's a
truly known ancient society, one must analyze its species, right.
And it gives an example of this one archaeologist who
was working back in the sixties and is working today,
and back in the sixties, when they would find copper light,

(17:32):
they would be like, oh, this is interesting, and then
they'd use it for like flying disc contests at lunch.
This is like, this is not that long ago that
the archaeologists were doing this, and today it's like, you
find copper light, you bag it separately from the other
copper light found. You're it's going back for genetic analysis.
You take half of the sample and preserve it so

(17:54):
that you can use it for later analysis when our
tools become even more advanced. Like it's it's just been.
It's just such a great example of old school archaeology
and the new um archaeology that's coming up today. Like
they're looking at it as which is as it is,
which is a legitimate, important fine that can tell you
a lot about a society, instead of playing frisbee baseball

(18:17):
with it. I guess it's frisbee football, right, frisbee frollf
playing frollf with the poop. Did you ever play that
frisbee golf. No, they have courses for that stuff. I know, yeah,
I know, they definitely do. I'm sure they did in Athens.
If they don't still well, in true Chuck form, I
went so far as to buy a couple of different

(18:39):
frisbee golf frisbees and never went Oh you never did hunt. Nope, nope.
That's kind of my thing. Nothing beats sitting around when
you're in college. Yeah, pretty much. Uh so. Yeah, So
copper Light, I mean it took. I mean it took
from the nineteen sixties until just recently, like even through

(19:00):
the eighties and nineties. It said that it was a
pretty small field of people that took it seriously, and
other people were still even in the nineties, like what
are you studying poop for um? And to be fair
at the time, especially like back in the sixties as
recently as like the eighties or nineties, I guess like
you're saying, we didn't have anything that we could do
with the human poop. Besides all, yeah, there wasn't anything

(19:24):
you could do. I mean, you could break it open
and be like, oh, look a corn corn seed. They
were eating corn. That's about the best you could hope
for right, So there there wasn't much you could do.
But even still, if you look at what we're doing
with it today, which is preserving half of the sample
for future analysis with better tools that haven't been adventagure,
that definitely um underscores a mentality that wasn't present before either,

(19:49):
which is this is not the apex yet, where we
haven't reached the apex of science. Yeah, I mean now
nowadays they can rehydrate it. Uh, they can say, hey,
they were recites in this poop and in fact, in
all the poop of all these people that lived here,
so perhaps that's what killed them. Yeah, And they don't
even have to have the stool sample. They can find

(20:10):
in like an set an ancient latrine and learn a
lot from that. And you know it sounds kind of funny,
but it's you can learn a lot from this stuff. Well.
I remember when I was writing the cannibalism article years back,
finding like right around that time, they had found evidence
of cannibalism from copper light and they had done it
really round about. Um, they found some protein that is

(20:33):
only found in human muscle, and they found it in
the poop of some South Southwestern Uh, indigenous groups poop
and they think that it was the result of climate
change because the climate had changed and people were starving
and they engaged in cannibalism as a result. But um,
that's a pretty sterling example of bioarchaeology and action. Yeah.

(20:56):
This one guy, Pierce Mitchell from University of Cambridge, go,
I don't know, go fighting chaplains, fighting chaplains. Uh. He
learned through studying fecal matter that King Richard the Third
had round worm. Yeah, so you know that's great man.
His storiography though, who cares? All right, so what man?

(21:21):
I didn't expect to go right into poop, but there
we did it. Well, let's talk teeth. Let's go from
poop to teeth, you know the standard. Yeah, teeth are
a big marker. Um, Like, if they dug me up
one day, they would say, well, this gentleman had at
least two bad teeth, because the only thing left. And

(21:42):
and I had a brief conversation with the very famous
Microw for just kind of weirdly had a conversation with
him one day about my implants and he said, oh,
you have those implants and he went, well, just know,
in a thousand years that will be the only thing
left of you. Right, So that's kind of good to know. Sure, yeah,
they'll they'll be like obviously this person was of higher

(22:05):
social status, he had implants, Yeah, or at least into
intern he was probably venerated. Uh and bury me with
my flippers is all I'm gonna say to So what
they could find out from teeth or can find out maybe, um,
if the children suffered from malnutrition, Well there's a whole

(22:25):
there's a whole thing where when you are malnourished as
a child, your teeth formed these little lines in them
as the development is kind of stunted, and they stay
there for life, even if you managed to become nourished
and survive. Right, So they can tell what your diet
was like as a child from just looking at your teeth. Well,

(22:47):
and can also tell I guess when I was talking
about how society may have overcome something. Uh maybe they
you know, we're close to death and overcame disease to
end up thriving, but they still had those lines and
the right exactly. Um, they can also tell from teeth
if you crush teeth up and powder them and run

(23:07):
them through a mass spect spectrometer. There's some pretty neat
stuff you can do with that. Actually, Um, when you're
a little kid and you start eating and drinking the
local water, there's something um called strontium and it's a
it's a stable isotope that's found in the bedrock of
your area, and it's specific to your area, your region.

(23:30):
It's pretty localized, right, the type of strontium isotope that's
going to be where you live and when you when
the when rain water filters through the bedrock into groundwater
and then comes back out, and it's taken up by
plants and enters the water supply, and then your mom
eats that plant and then breastfeeds you. Those strontium isotopes
get transferred to you and they get locked into your

(23:52):
teeth for life. Right, So where you're born can be
isolated by using a mass spectrometer to find what strownium
isotopes are in your teeth. That can be done whether
you were whether you live fifty thousand years ago or
we're born yesterday, either way, and that amazing. Yeah, I
feel like we talked about that before. There's no way

(24:13):
we haven't, right, Yeah, Like something about the water that
you drank as a child. Yeah, that would be it
totally right. So you're taking in stronium isotopes and you've
got those embedded in your teeth that you also get
different kinds of isotopes as well, stroni um, lead, oxygen.
They all have stabil isotopes that get embedded into your
into your skeleton, whether it's your teeth or your your bones.

(24:36):
But the stuff and your teeth from when you're young
stays in there, it's permanently locked in. But the stuff
in your bones. Remember we did like does the body
replace itself every seven or years? Um? Since your skeleton
replaces itself pretty pretty on a pretty regular basis, the
strown e um and the isotopes that are found in
your bones later in life are going to be a

(24:59):
marker of where you lived close to your death. Right.
So if the strawny of isotopes in your teeth are
different from the strawney of isotopes in your bone, well
a bioarchaeologist is going to say, this person, mindgraded where
did they come from? Why did they migrate? Why were
they buried with all these great grave goods? Did they
come from a different culture? And basically end up, you know,

(25:21):
becoming venerated in this new culture where they like a
high priest or what what's the deal? Where did this
person come from? Yeah, and that's just kind of um
laying the groundwork now. And we might not have the
to the technology to say, oh, well, this is where
he came from. We don't have the interpretation yet to
say this is where, this is where they came from,
and this is what happened when they arrived. But we can,

(25:45):
we can create raw data from that for successive generations
of archaeologists to look at and use to to UM
to include it into a better understanding of the population
they're examining. Yeah. And with the the mass spectrometer, which
we've talked about another shows too, they do something called
stable isotope analysis in terms of also finding out what

(26:06):
what people ate. That if there's a difference in molecular weight,
like the ratio of heavy to light particles, they can
determine whether someone consumed more carbon or more nitrogen in
their lifetime. If they have a lot of nitrogen, maybe
they ate a lot of meat or most likely had
a lot of meat, or they just ate handfuls of
nitrogen maybe so uh, nice nitrogen fields could come across

(26:31):
you know, Uh, if they have a high ratio of
the carbon, maybe they ate a lot of like corn
or I guess, maze, Um, it's sorghum. That's such a
great word, low carbon. It's an old timey word. Like
any time I hear sorghum, I immediately think overalls. Yeah,
me too. Low ratio of carbon isotopes might mean they

(26:52):
ate more potatoes and wheat and stuff like that. So, like,
it's just amazing that science has gotten to this point.
You can dig up a bone, find out where someone
was from where they died, and what they ate yep,
like largely in their life. And again you're putting it
in context with where you're finding this, like, yeah, that's

(27:13):
already like the story that's already there exactly. You know,
because people if you if you put if you bury
somebody with something, um, that says a lot like it
just as much as as what your bones say about
how you lived. I saw somebody say like the way
that you're treated in death by the people who you're
survived by, that says quite a bit as well. So

(27:36):
the type of burial, the way that your your grave
was marked, um, says a lot about not just you
and how you were treated, but also what the society was,
you know, found important. That's true because you can ask
for whatever you want in your burial, right, but someone's
got to feel good enough about you to carry that
out out. They might be like, you know, I want

(27:58):
to keep this this wooden fallus. I don't want you
to be buried with it. Did you see that thing them,
those mummies that were discovered in China? I don't think so. No.
I think that was like um Middle Eastern artifacts the
hobby lobby had, But I don't know anything about that,
do you. I read briefly after I saw the words

(28:20):
hobby lobby. What were they doing with that stuff? I
don't know. It's it's very bizarre. Maybe they were collectors,
maybe where they were going to turn it into a
line of like um tasteful home decor. Probably so well
that there was a group of mummies found that belonged
to an unnamed population that lived about four thousand years

(28:42):
ago in um, a part of an autonomous part of
China that's now a desert. It's called the Tacklemmcin Desert.
I'm sure I got that right. But the the area
of the district that they were um found near is
called the show Hood You district, and um, the there's

(29:06):
the mummies are just incredibly well preserved, so much so
that their hair is totally intact. They were buried with
these um felt hats and fur lined boots that are
totally intact. I think one of them had like a
feather in their cap that was intact. Like the preservation
is just unheard of. And one of them is so
well preserved that she's called the Beauty of show Hood

(29:27):
you right where. Um she's just kind of good looking
as far as mummies go, Like, go look her up.
Don't think I'm a weirdo. You'll feel odd about this
after you see her yourself. What was the name again,
the Beauty of show jew So Um, it's not at
all pronounced like that, but just type in beauty Mummy
China or something like that and they will definitely bring

(29:49):
it up. But this this unknown group, Um, they were
like they would bury they're dead with Phallus's or Volva's.
They were buried with like thirteen foot fallacies sticking out
of like their graves. They were really into sex for
one reason or another, right, and the hats that they
were buried in UM were found in burials in the

(30:12):
area two thousand years later. And so this unknown group
that no one has any idea what they what they
were like, or what they were into, aside from they
were super sexy, right. Um. They they think that they
know what language they spoke, Um, because the the group
that had similar hats two thousand years later was known

(30:35):
to speak this one lost language and it was more
related to Latin than say, like Central Asian, which doesn't
really make sense until you find out that some of
these mummies actually had red hair and European features. And
they think that they were a pastoral group that basically
herded their cows all the way from western Europe over
to the the deserts of central China, and that is

(31:00):
funding yeah, holy cow. Yeah, but again bioarchaeology. All right, well,
let's take another break here. We'll talk a little bit
about d n A and UM, a little bit about
how hobby lobby kind of figures into this in a way.

(31:33):
All right, So we talked about mass spectrometers, talked about
good old fashioned tooth scraping, good looking mummies, talked about
the sexiest mummies in history, right. I'm sure that's a
there's a top ten list on the internet somewhere. I'm
telling you you'll be like, oh, there's number one. I
gotta see this. Um So, I guess DNA is sort

(31:58):
of is sort of the next place to get Oh
it's uh. They've been using DNA in archaeology for a while.
Obviously since the advent of DNA, they've been trying to
apply it. But they use it as as much as
they can now ancient DNA because obviously with DNA you
can find out all kinds of things from relatedness, uh,
to other individuals within a population, marriage patterns maybe, and

(32:22):
obviously just something is I mean, they can tell largely
from the bones what kind of sex of an individual.
But DNA is the shoe in. Yeah, supposedly, even even
if you are sexing an individual by the bone structure,
you're it's still an educated guest. It's not definitive. It's
d N A that that's the only definitive way to

(32:43):
say this is a man, or this is a woman
that could could have been a man. With very dainty frame. Um,
there's this. Uh. So the mummy is called the Beauty
of x I A O h e. Which, believe it
or not, is show hood you? Yeah? Show who would you?
How's my Chinese? That was pretty good? Actually, thanks man.

(33:06):
I actually I'm going the extra step these days and
looking up pronunciations and then practicing, which is the second step.
What what word was it that shamed you into doing that? Oh?
There's been so many. Uh. I can't bring any of mine.
I think I blocked them out to keep any level
of self respect. But there have been plenty, as you're

(33:28):
well aware. Can you think of one? No, okay, nothing recently.
I'm sure everyone will let us know on the internet.
Oh I just found the money? Yeah? Am I right?
Or what that's a good looking mummy? Well, I don't know.
It's a little weird to say it is, but I
think when you when you approach it from like, oh wow,

(33:49):
that's a mummy. I can't believe how well preserved it
is this place instead of like a mummy. Yeah, although, hey, man,
to each his own, does that extend to that? Yeah? Sure?
All right? Uh all right? What else about DNA lineages?
Obviously it's a very big deal. Um well, yeah, you

(34:12):
can you can find a group of a group burial
or basically a cemetery. And now bioarchaeologists like to show
off by showing who's related to whom. Yeah, just by saying, well,
let's look at their their their genes, their d NA,
which is pretty neat. Yeah, and as a whole, if

(34:34):
you look at a cemetery, I mean that's I mean,
finding an individual is great. But when archaeologists can uncover
a burial ground, that's when they really kind of lick
their chops because they can learn a lot about like
the hierarchy of the society, what different ones of them
eight Like you said, if they migrated, Uh, maybe they're

(34:55):
from somewhere else where were they born, which says a
lot about a population, if they took in people from
other societies. Yeah, that's a great point actually, yeah, um,
And that that actually gives a pretty good example of um,
like the social hierarchy thing. That gives a good example
of bioarchaeology. And that whereas before you would find a

(35:18):
grave and this one had like a marker and the
person was buried with a lot of cool stuff, and
then it's next to a grave or there's a grave
nearby that isn't really buried with as much stuff, so
you would say, well, this, this person was obviously venerated,
and this was a socially unequal society. And it's a
pretty good guess. You know, you're you, you're you're probably right.

(35:40):
But what bioarchaeology does now is they take that that
that's surmising and then they say, okay, well this person
had a diet that was rich and meat, and this
person ain't nothing but vegetables. So the rich and meat
person who had the nicer grave was probably richer. And
let's look at their bones. Well, their bones are less,
which would indicate they had not engaged in hard labor

(36:02):
during their lifetime, whereas this other person's bones are very dense,
which meant that they probably did engage in hard labor.
And so you start putting all this stuff together, and
you're backing up that that um, the surmise that you
made about the um social strata her stratiography. Yes, you

(36:24):
know what I'm saying. I'm glad at least one person does. Uh.
And and you're you're basically backing it up rather than
just jumping to conclusions and leaving it at that. Yeah,
it's a much more firm science for sure. Yeah, So uh,
I kind of teased before the break that hobby lobby
kind of plays apart, but I was referencing in general

(36:44):
when it's kind of the UM. Anytime we talk about archaeology,
there's a certain amount of controversy involved because what you're
inherently doing is disturbing UM, ancient graves. UH. In almost
all cases is unless you know there are no humans there.
But UM, that's there's gonna be some controversy within that.

(37:05):
Some people think you shouldn't do it at all, uh,
and then other people have come along the way to
at least kind of give a framework of how best
to do this best practices. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization UM, in nineteen seventy adopted a
convention called the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export,

(37:31):
and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. That's a mouthful,
It is a mouthful, but basically what it says is, UM,
you know, try not to let happen, which is what
hobby lobby did, which is obviously pay for a cultural
object that didn't belong to your people, right, individually and

(37:51):
right that's the key. If if somebody, even if it's
somebody who is a member of, say like the tribe
that that artifact comes from, that that skeleton come from.
There's something called cultural patrimony, which is that that is
an object that belongs to the tribe as a whole,
and no individual, including an individual from that tribe, can
claim ownership over it or over the tribe. Right. So yeah,

(38:16):
so if the tribe says no, that's ours, the tribe
wands that individual doesn't. Yeah, And there's been a really
big and I know we talked about this on other episodes,
but there's been a really big push um in the
past ten years, but really in the past like years
for repatriation of these cultural items here in the US.
And I think they um, yeah, George H. W. Bush. Yeah,

(38:40):
they passed the legislation called the Native American Graves Protection
and Repage Repatriation Act nag PRO. Sure, why not not
as catchy as UNESCO. That's a good one. But you know,
like I said, the idea is that you just can't
come in here and and uh, steal is such a

(39:04):
harsh word, but it's yeah, it's really tough. I think
Gray Robbing we did one on that right as a whole. Yeah,
I remember that one that one audience member in London
called me out, was like, are you saying my parents
are gray Robberts because they're both archaeologists, And I was like,
of course that was our life topic. I said, some
people would say that, for sure. I do remember that. Uh.

(39:29):
There's a little bit of like pushback though in some cases,
because sometimes they end up having to rely on oral history,
and I think that the cynics, uh would are saying, um, well,
you know, how do we know they're just saying this stuff,
yeah that was passed down orally like show it to
me in writing there, like we didn't have writ didn't

(39:51):
have an alphabet, dude. Or you might have to be uh,
you might have to negotiate with a religious leader and
then another um jerk might come along and say, oh
wait a minute, Uh, these are their religious beliefs and
this is federal law, like we have to keep those
things separate. So, I mean, those are all very cynical viewpoints.
I think generally, bioarchaeologists try as much as possible to

(40:15):
work with the the local people or the indigenous people
and say, hey, you know, this is your stuff, let
us uncover some of your secrets. Here unless they're like, no, don't,
we don't want the secrets out right, right, but you know,
they try to have a good working relationship with the
indigenous people. Uh well that's the best way to go forward,

(40:38):
of course. Yeah, um yeah, Like I would think, I mean,
you never know, I'm not gonna obviously, what's important to
like one Native American tribe might be different for another.
But I would think a lot of times they might
want some of the stuff highlighted and even you know,
put on display as long as it's a temporary thing

(41:00):
and they can get it back, you know. Yeah, I
think it also depends on the context. Like you know,
the turn of the last century was really rife with
I mean, you really can't call it anything much more
than than academically sanctioned grave robbing, where you know, universities
of prestigiousness would send off basically guys who amounted to

(41:22):
adventurers to go, you know, locate graves and loot them
and bring them back for the universities to to widen
their prestige with these collections. Right sure, and then if if,
for if, for decades you said, hey, give that back
that was taken by anyone's um definition illegally in the

(41:44):
university is like, oh, sorry, no, you're gonna be upset
about that. Whereas if the person says, well, oh, yes,
of course, let's get this back to you. Can we
do this analysis on it first and then get it
back to you. Um, Or if you've discover something and
you say, hey, we need to hold a meeting with
this local indigenous population, saying we found a grave site.

(42:06):
We'd really like to excavate it, but it's up to
them whether we do or not. You're probably gonna get
a lot better reception than than you would if you
just rolled right over their wishes and didn't take them
into consideration at all. Well, there's a saying here in
the South, Josh, that you've probably heard catch more flies
with honey than you do with vinegar. Right, So true,

(42:29):
It's always been my approach. That's why there's always plenty
of honey at all of these local meetings of indigenous people.
When the bioarchaeologists show up, you know they're digging that.
This is uh, I just learned this today. They're they're
exhuming Salvador Dali. Yeah you see a paternity test. Yeah,
they're there. Terry springers behind officially. No he's not, is he. No,

(42:53):
it wouldn't surprise me. No, that wouldn't mean officials in
Spain are gonna break into his tomb, get a e
and a sample and see if this lady, Uh, this woman,
Pillar Abelle is in fact his daughter. It's a good name, Pillar.
She's a fortune teller. Oh yeah, she's a little wacky,

(43:15):
but uh, well apparently her claims legit enough that they're
taking the guy up. Yeah, Holly, um from stuff you
missed in history class and we're talking about this and
I hadn't heard about it yet, and she was telling
me about She was like, oh this ladies, she's a
piece of workman, she's wacky. I was like, well, she
probably just waltzed into court and knowing anything about Salvador Dali.
The judge was like, yeah, maybe we should look into

(43:36):
this right, like to the Great Odd Figures or at
least one. I'd like, how you just exposed Holly to
a lawsuit from this lady by saying she was a
wacky ways I quote Holly Fry said wacky. Uh. And
of course his families, the Salvador Deli Foundation is fighting it,

(43:58):
but it's going be buried. Yeah. I mean I think
it's interesting when it seems a little sentimental for Salvador Daldy.
It doesn't seem to fit his character, you know, like
I'm sure he'd be like, whoa, all right, let's get
it going. Yeah, dig me up, like, dig me up
and bury me with the world's good, best looking mummy.

(44:18):
She said, it's uh uh, she said, it's not about
the dough. Um, so it's about the money. Yeah, we'll
see about that. It's like tens of millions of dollars
at stake here easy. Oh, so she has a claim
on his estate, is what it is? Huh. Well that
also explains why the foundation doesn't want me. Yeah, I

(44:40):
mean that's a good thing. If he if he fathered
a child, that she is his rightful error because he
didn't have any kids. I got you. I always could
feel I have always have mixed feelings about that stuff. Well,
I mean, on one hand, it seems like Jesus person
coming along and like trying to get some of this money.
But then on the other hands, like, well, yeah, but

(45:02):
that's if that's his daughter that he never cared for. Uh.
I mean, I definitely end up siding with the fact
that it is family in the end. But I don't know,
it feels little icky sometimes too. Well. Yeah, I mean,
you're digging up a body. You're you're digging up a
body so you can make a claim on money, whether

(45:24):
it is about that or not involved. But I also
feel like there's a certain amount of like reverence for
the dead body. Yeah, where it's kind of like, no,
if you've fathered an illegitimate child in life, just because
he died doesn't really get him off the hook from
you know, from from that from whatever consequence that might be,

(45:46):
even in death. I don't I don't know. I hadn't
really considered it until now, but um, I guess it
is this kind of an icky thing overall. But it's
also it's just a dead body, you know what I mean.
It's a dead body and care. I'm not too precious
about my remains. That's good to know, because I'm gon
dig you up based on that could make me into

(46:07):
a bunch of soccer balls a just kick me around
the world. That man, what a great idea. So Chuck,
let's let's wrap it up talking about you know, why
this kind of stuff is important. I think we've hit
on it. Like here, they're like explaining the history of
a society from you know, the common people rather than

(46:29):
just the leadership. Gives a better idea of the society.
That's definitely one thing, um. But also I think that
bioarchaeology is kind of tasked itself with using the past,
getting a clear picture of the past to explain the
present or predict the near future. You know, Like one
thing that a lot of people are um trying to

(46:51):
figure out is our humans inherently violent. And one way
you you could kind of provide evidence for that case
is were we violent in the past. It's a huge
I think we even did in an entire episode on
that one that was pretty great about whether humans have
always been violent? Um. And I think that's one thing

(47:12):
that bioarchaeologists are trying to solve is finding evidence of
violence or an evidence of a lack of violence in
a society that happened before. Another, what big one is
climate change and how humans have responded to that in
the past, right, and what we might can do about
it in the future based on that that learning. And

(47:33):
then there's just something to be said about you know,
getting bones out of a grave. There's nothing more satisfying
than that. Put him in a bag, throwing the bag
over your shoulder and walking back to the lab whistling
as you do. That's right, the job well done. You
got anything else? I got nothing else, sir? Okay. Well,
I'm sure bioarchaeology will have plenty more for us to

(47:54):
talk about in the future, so maybe we'll revisit it.
In the meantime. You can type that word by oh
archeology into the search bar at how stuff works dot com.
And since I said that, it's time for listener mail,
I'm gonna call this what was in the subject line,
which is am I in a hole? Except she really
said the word was from michaela uh. And I always

(48:19):
like these that kind of pose a question to us,
so this one does that. Here's what went down, guys. Uh.
There's a recent conversation with my boyfriend. I stopped at
a stop sign at the same time as a car
coming from the opposite direction who had a turn signal on.
I was going straight. The guy and I both waved
for the other to go ahead first. Got a little awkward,

(48:40):
but that's not the important part. My boyfriend said, he
notices that it's usually men who do the wave to
usher people that stop signs, and he thinks it's just
them trying to be controlling and that they are probably jerks.
I waved people through all the time, just trying to
be nice and help them get where they're going a

(49:01):
little bit faster, without worrying about who should technically go first.
So I've always assumed that when people do the wave
at me, because they're trying to be nice. So my
questions to you all are, how do you perceive the wave?
Am I controlling a whole? Is this how my boyfriend
perceives the wave? Is he a controlling a whole if

(49:22):
he sees it that way? And should I stop doing
the wave? And that's from Mikaela. She said thanks, I'll
be seeing you in Lawrence, Kansas in a couple of months.
Have been spreading the good word often. Thank you. So, Josh,
what are your thoughts on the wave? When I am
I'm very infrequently wave, you just go no, I guess

(49:44):
that's not true. I don't actually wave. I do the
you know where you like present with your hand, your
palm up and then you kind of move it to
one side like oh please after you that's what I do,
which I just realized, is a form of the wave,
and I do that sometime times, but I guess the
only time I would do it is when it's not
obviously clear who's supposed to go, So I tend to

(50:08):
just let's ask the other person to go ahead and
please after you, right. I don't think of that as
being controlling, but that's exactly what I'm doing, is taking
control of the situation but not doing it, not trying, yeah,
to me, just not even giving a second thought and
just and basically pushing through ahead of somebody who may

(50:28):
or may not justifiably should have gone first. That's the
jerky move to me. I think it goes both ways.
It just it just depends on your perception of the world.
Do you hate people? If so, then you probably find
the way to be controlling and jerky. What about you?
All right? So my four way stop sign a deal

(50:48):
is very deep. It's a very big thing in my
life really and on me. Well, I've got a lot
of thoughts on this um. First of all, the worst
people in society are people who mistreat children, animals, and elderly,
and then right behind them are people that just like
run right through a stop sign because they just know,

(51:11):
like I don't want to be bothered. Yeah, well they
could mistreat children, animals and the elderly with the front
end of their car. That so those are awful people. Um,
as far as the wave, I tend to just I
tend to try and let someone else go first. But
I'm also kind of impatient. So you've just got a

(51:32):
moment like if you just sit there and dawdle after
I wave, how either get aggressive with my wave and
then kind of look like a jerk or I'll just
go and be like, you know, you had your chance. Yeah,
I I do the I just go where I'm like,
all right, see you in hell. Uh. And then the
other thing that really bugs me about stop signs lately
I've noticed is there there's a growing segment of society

(51:55):
that seems to think like it doesn't matter who arrive first.
Is us Like I feel like I've been waiting long enough. Yeah,
you can't do that, like heavily heavily trafficked four way stop.
You maybe the fourth, And I'm sorry that you feel
like you've been sitting there too long. But if you
were the fourth one to come to a complete stop,

(52:16):
then you gotta let the other three go, not just
like I think they treat it like, hey, I stopped
and now I'm going Now. Now there's a there's a
sub there's a subdiscipline to that chuck right where if
somebody is going straight and you're going straight in the
other way, you can go straight right then and just

(52:38):
use up a turn simultaneously. It actually keeps things going faster.
It's not at all rude. Somebody might be like, hey,
wait a minute, but if they stop and think for
even half of a second, they'll see that you actually
did them a favor. So that is okay as long
as you're not trying it while somebody's turning left in
front of you. Yeah, And there's also the thing that
bugs me is when two people stop facing each other

(53:02):
and uh, you both go to go at the same
time because you think we're both going straight, and they
go to turn into you and like honk at you,
and I'm like, dude, let me know which way you're
going yet I probably would let you go anyway, but
I thought you were going straight. Gott to use that blinker.
You'll get a finger if you don't use the blinker.

(53:22):
Whoa not by me. I'm just saying some people so
anyway that I think out of all the traffic things,
even including like highway merging, the four way trapped stoplight,
I'm sorry, the four way stop sign intersection is my
most troublesome and frustrating part of driving for me, that's
number one. Well, now everybody knows, so look out for Chuck.

(53:44):
All right. Yeah, this is MICHAELA that brought all this up. Yeah, MICHAELA,
I hope, I hope we explained that. I don't think
that means you're controlling jerk, and I don't think that
means your boyfriend is because he thinks that is what
it means either. Yeah, maybe you guys should just find
some other topics to discuss. Yes, but MICHAELA, I do
think you're with the wrong guy overall though, poor guy. Okay, uh,

(54:12):
I can't believe we're ending it like that. But if
you want to get in touch with us, like MICHAELA
did um, then you can tweet to us at s
Y s K podcast. You can hang out with me
on Twitter at josh um Clark. You can hang out
with Chuck on Facebook at facebook dot com slash Charles W.
Chuck Bryant or slash Stuff you Should Know You can
send us an email. The Stuff podcast at how stuff
Works dot com and has always joined us at at

(54:34):
home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff Works dot com.