From the Vault: 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. (Originally published 6/27/2019)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault. This episode originally aired
on June nineteen, and it was about the Roman extinctions.
We all know that we're creating plenty of ecological catastrophes
and extinctions today, but how far back has this gone

(00:26):
in history? Or are there examples we can find of
previous empires driving species to extinction? Right? Yeah, And it's
not to single out the Romans as the only empire
that caused extinctions, but there are some pretty interesting examples
from that time period. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,

(00:54):
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, 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 made

(01:16):
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. 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
about so you would expect the you know, one of

(01:38):
the great decadent empires of history would do the same. Yeah.
So I think, well, one of the important things to
keep in mind throughout this topic is, like, we're not
we're certainly not meaning to single the Romans out as
being like the like the the the soul examples of
some of these activities that led to uh, to some extinctions, um,
because ultimately you can look to very parts of the

(02:00):
world in various times, including our own, to see plenty
of extinction inducing activities. But I think it's an interesting
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,

(02:22):
let's just remind everybody who the Romans were. I'm not
sure that one of the Romans ever done for us. Yeah,
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 about. I mean, just the

(02:42):
basic tropes um of of the Roman Empire a pretty
uh you know, ubiquitous in our culture. Um. Look to,
for instance, 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.

(03:04):
A lot of historians that it's more accurate than a
lot of serious movies, right, yeah, because you know, a
lot of de pictions of Rome, they really especially the
older cinematic interpretations, 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

(03:25):
a lot of like street level understanding. Um. But but but
that's one of the reasons that HBO's Rome series, it
was on for several years um, you know, which isn't perfect,
but certainly had some admirers because of the way that
it injected a lot of 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

(03:49):
is more accurate than a lot of the films that
that you would have encountered in the nineteen sixties regarding
the Romans, but of course still has a number of
problems as well. I mainly just remember Joe Panaliono in
the sub Pranos 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,

(04:09):
I I always enjoyed the Ancient Roman detective novels of
Gordianus The Finder by Stephen saler Um. 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

(04:31):
founded in five oh nine BC, and eventually grew grew
rather rather sizeable and actually rather difficult to manage due
to its size, stretching across Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East,
and North Africa. It's the classic risk problem. You over
extend 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,

(04:51):
that is to overextend. Yeah, it's the problem you see
in every empire without fail and uh. And since they
were an empire, they were of course built on military
conquest in 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've we

(05:13):
talk a lot, especially on our other podcast, Invention, about
various Roman innovations. Roman technologies talked about sewers and toilets,
sewers 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

(05:37):
focus on today. And uh, and just fair warning that
we will be talking in places about the Romans trade
and 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

(05:59):
for information on how to report cruelty to animals today
in the United States, please visit the American Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals at a spc A
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

(06:20):
this episode is an excellent two thousand and sixteen Atlantic
article titled the Exotic Animal Traffickers of Ancient Rome by
Caroline Wazer and the 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 like, uh, look at look at the

(06:43):
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 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 a king. Um So,
I think most of us are familiar more familiar with

(07:03):
human on human gladiator sports, which we've we've touched on
on this show before and if it's in you know,
any things in large part 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 daminatio at best.

(07:25):
It's my Latin correct on that, Joe. It looks like
dumb natio a beast. I mean, I'm not an expert either, okay,
but dumb natio right like damn nation. Well anyway, it
stands for execution by beasts. And then there were the
venatitiones or the hunts, in 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

(07:48):
of like a hunter dispatching all sorts of exotic animals
out there on the field, or they would have animals
battle each 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

(08:11):
baiting continued depressingly far into modern times, at least in
some parts of the world, and bullfighting remains legal and
parts 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
like crickets or beatles are made to combat each other,

(08:33):
or centipedes or spiders. I mean, it's just basically, you
put two kind of scary looking bugs into a container
together and then shake it 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

(08:57):
in a fight between a tarantula and a score be
in and like as if I thought that, like, adults
just know these things. You know that, Yeah, you're grown up,
you 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

(09:19):
who would Win? And and it's it's about prehistoric creatures
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

(09:40):
at nature documentaries, uh, which can be quite uncomfortable to
watch 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 humans looking for entertainment. Right. Putting animals into the

(10:04):
Roman arenas kind of the equivalent of the bug fight
like you put him in the box and shake it
and try to get him 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

(10:25):
not an excuse for any of this, but again it's
important to ground such activities in the larger picture of
human awfulness. But ways are actually opens her article with
a discussion of a Roman orator m. Marcus Cicero in
his correspondences with a former illegal client, a man by
the name of Marcus Calias. This is while Cicero was

(10:46):
governor of Cilicia in modern day Turkey. So basically um
Calias just continued to hound Cicero about how he needs
him to have some hunters capture and send back some
local leopards, which they refer to a 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.

(11:06):
The people love this, and I'm trying to kick start
my political career here, come on, don't let me down.
And it's just it's like multiple correspondences where he's just
really hounding Cistero over this, and Cistero keeps dodging him
on the matter and saying, well, look, the the you know,
the local hunters are busy, you know, etcetera. That's that
sort of thing. It's like, can you get Mick Jagger

(11:27):
to come to my party? Yeah, I mean it is.
It's like, imagine if instead of when you see an
individual running for political office today, instead of it being
a situation of them trying to score saying 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

(11:48):
how important this was to at least a large segment
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 that describe it as

(12:10):
being you know, barbaric and unnecessary and uh. And there
are also some descriptions by a plenty of the Elder
as well, 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

(12:30):
but in this case, Wayser points out things that they
were both writing about how Pompey the Great organized 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 Cicero viewed these shows
as bloody and cruel, the crowds generally loved it. But

(12:53):
the elephant hunt was even too much for the masses.
And here's the quote from Cicero, obviously translated that She's
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

(13:15):
something in common with mankind. Yet they kept watching. Huh, well, yeah,
they kept watching, and but apparently felt awful about it,
and there was 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 Weser's article. Uh

(13:37):
that there was this booming industry for folks who would
arrange the capture of exotic wild animals, generally from the
extremes of the Empire, and then transport them back to
Rome to fight in the arena. So it was a
cruel business, but enthusiasm, 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,

(13:59):
and this is reflected both in the literature of the
day and also in the art of the Roman Empire,
where you see murals and whatnot depicting individuals hunting these
wild animals so they could bring them back, and that
that the wildness of it was something that the Romans
seemed to crave, if she points out, because the uh
there there weren't there weren't really that many attempts to

(14:20):
try and raise them in captivity. They had to be
captured and brought back to Rome as part 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 was the style
of gladiator that's modeled after the fisherman, you know that

(14:43):
has like the trident and the net and all that.
So there are certain styles that seem 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, what these animals can
tributed there? Uh yeah, I mean it might very well

(15:03):
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
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

(15:25):
going to be echoed in the design. So let's come
back to the elephants though, because I think because so far,
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 sympathy for the
elephants while they watch this brutality being done to them.

(15:45):
I mean, I wonder if there's more of that kind
of thing going on in the appetites of the Roman
Arena audiences than we would normally imagine, like we imagine
the audiences of the editorial 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

(16:07):
love it and they're eating it up. I wonder if
there was some element of the audience that I 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

(16:30):
know if I click this link, I'm gonna feel bad
and I'm not gonna like what I read, but I
click it anyway. You know, I wonder where people going
to the arena, like, I know, I'm gonna feel bad,
but I have to look at this, you know, that
would be might be worth while to come back and
explore that in greater detail, like the nature of these
gladiatorial blood sport events um which we should stress are

(16:54):
generally there were a lot more varied, uncomplicated than uh
it is often relayed in fular 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

(17:16):
other martial arts contests or even simulated um athletic contests
such as professional wrestling. I don't know, I have to
come back to that, I think. But one thing the
ways are 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

(17:38):
would be kind of there, like some of the 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, and the sympathy that one feels
like this, uh, this kind of connection like has existed

(17:59):
throughout I think our our experiences with elephants, and yet
cruelty to elephants 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,

(18:22):
I know you wanted to explore more about the Romans
and the elephants. Yeah, so I 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

(18:43):
he mentions that no fewer than six hundred lions were massacured.
Just to give everyone an idea of the scale of bloodshed. Here,
six hundred lions. Can you imagine, I mean a lion
is a lion as an apex predator, so there already
aren't that many of them. And to remove six hundred

(19:04):
lions from their habitat, Yeah, to essentially like basically put
out the call and say, look, Pompey the Great knees 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 one meant just before the elephant event described previously,

(19:24):
So what elephants were they catching? Well, the author here
points out that the North African elephant was was the
likely species, as these were the elephants used by the
forces of Hannibals, Carthagian army, the African bush elephant that
is still around. Um that this one is too wild
to to ride around or to really tame in the

(19:45):
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 the North African elephant
for labor in war as well, but any by following
hannibals defeat, the region fell under Roman control, and the
Romans used these elephants in their bloody sports as well

(20:06):
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 that includes
things like tight rope walking here, yeah, they single he
singles that out in the book. But here's a quote
that touches on the additional levels of exploitation that could
become employed. Quote. Rome's liking for elephants meant that the

(20:29):
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 triumphal processions and
made into a vast range of luxury goods, thrones, chess statues, chairs, beds,
book covers, tablets, boxes, bird cages, combs, and broches. Caesar

(20:51):
wrote in an ivory Chariot Seneca possessed five hundred tripod
tables with ivory legs. Do you need that many tables
for large events? Large 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

(21:11):
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 Road about the shortage of African
ivory quote an ample 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,

(21:33):
um the ivory trade still remains a threat to elephant populations,
despite laws and the hard work of of conservationist worldwide.
And if you want more information about what's going on
and 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

(21:54):
know if the Roman exploitation of these animals did it
Did it damage their populations, did it drive mixtincts? The
general consensus is that it it definitely drove their extinction.
They either died out during the fifth century or at
least were well on their way to extinction. But the
damage was done during the Roman imperial period, So it

(22:15):
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 damaged their populations
enough 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 We
bring out as well, is that there are other cases
where it's certainly not in a situation where the Romans

(22:39):
just went out and had killed or had killed all
members of a species, but they you know, they had
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 An empire. Everything that was already present

(23:01):
in human of civilization was there, only maybe ramped up
a little bit. Uh so their destructive tendencies, you know,
had a little more reach than you might find in
other civilizations. And of course the same thing can be
said for today. They are various human appetites and our
various wants and desires and our uses for the natural
world that uh, at the scale we're doing things now

(23:25):
are even more destructive than they ever were. Yeah, it's
a sad fact. And that's going to come up again,
and 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, all right, Well,
on that note, let's go and take a quick break,

(23:46):
and when we come back, we're going to continue to
discuss Roman extinctions. All right, we're back. So, so, Joe,
what what is the next organism we're going to discuss
here that was made to to fight glad he years
in the arena? Well, uh, it's not. This next one
is a plant. But this is going to be one

(24:07):
of the main examples that people often bring up as
something that was likely driven to extinction by the Roman Empire.
So my main source here is an article from Conservation
Biology from two thousand three by Ken Peregeco called plenty
of the elders Sylphium first recorded species extinction. Now the

(24:28):
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
author asked the question, how do we know when a
species has gone extinct? In the words of E. O. Wilson, quote,
extinction is the most obscure and local of all biological processes.

(24:51):
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. I mean,
like a lot 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

(25:14):
have gone unnoticed in human history is unanswerable, Yet the
past may shed light on the present. On what in
our behavior has 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

(25:38):
history dives into an ex explanation of a sort of
miracle plant that 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

(25:59):
umbell is a a cluster of short flower stalks all
clumped together, so that 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

(26:19):
and laser pithecum uh and and from this plant, apparently
you can create a resin that is called laser l
A s e R. It 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

(26:40):
get this resin by making slits in the roots and
the stem of the plants so that it's juices and
its sap would leach out, 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
is a student of Lato and Aristotle's on the origins

(27:02):
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 the gardens in a region
of north North Africa known as syen Aca, which is
now Libya. Pareto 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

(27:25):
the Mediterranean coast rise as tiered highlands that received considerably
more rainfall than the deserts to the south. 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

(27:45):
the fenel like stalks and the parsley leaves and the
umbell of of flowers near the top. And in ancient times,
sylfium had a number of uses that recommended it to
plenty as a kind of miracle plant. And among these
uses document ended by Peregco number one. It was fed
to livestock like cattle and sheep under the idea that

(28:06):
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
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,

(28:28):
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
to be a pain reliever and a hair restoration tonic,
and apparently, as I mentioned, it was sometimes just also

(28:49):
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
contraceptive or a board deficient, and contraceptives and a board
officians were highly desirable in ancient room. They were largely

(29:11):
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,
adulterated laser. You cut that laser, buddy. You know. It's
like the scene in the movie where the guy gets

(29:33):
in trouble for for cutting the coke with baby powder
or something. You know, this is this is cutting the laser,
maybe with with assa fatida or something like that. So
Peregco notes that within Gaias Petronius first century CE fictional
work known as the Satiricon. There's a scene where an
Egyptian slave sings a song from what is apparently a

(29:55):
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
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

(30:16):
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
the 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,

(30:39):
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,
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

(31:03):
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
nineteen fifty suggested that plenties Sylfium might have been the
species called Ferula tingatana or Farolla marmarica, which are North

(31:23):
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, So
how would that be Well. Already in his day, Plenty
complaints that you can't really get sylfium anymore. He notes

(31:44):
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 CES, so
would have been just about a hundred years later in
Plenty's lifetime. By this time, the plant had vanished in

(32:05):
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 says that number.
The main explanation Plenty gives is quote tax farmers who

(32:27):
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 possibly
it refers to the fact that meat from the live
stock that's fed on sylfium got a much higher price
because it was believed to taste better, so you could

(32:50):
get more money for the you know, upgraded meat. But
this is you know, this decimating your sylfium fields, Okay,
I said 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 to graze
their animals on it and produce superior meat. But it
all comes down to like to demand for the various products,

(33:11):
direct products or products that depend upon the sylfium, and
there were limited habitats in which sylfium would grow. So
Peregiko also offers some other thoughts about what what could
have contributed to the decline of sylfium uh and a
chief concern he raises his habitat destruction. He says that
a very popular wood for Roman furniture came from the

(33:33):
Thuon tree, which filled the forests of Synaica, and over
harvesting of this would possibly lead to deforestation 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 the soil of roads in
rainfall or in the wind or in anything um which

(33:53):
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 plan.
He also points to unsustainable farming practices in the region
which were aimed at short term profits but which came
at the long term expensive soil quality. Also, he says

(34:15):
there are historical records of political conflict over sylfium in
Syrenaica 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 tried to put tight control on
the production by saying only they could farm it on

(34:36):
their lands, and they put fences up around the meadows
where the sylphium grew in order to keep the locals out.
But Perejko writes, quote the natives practiced to kind of
a grarian terrorism by tearing down the fences and letting
their flocks graze on the sylfium to increase the value
of the sheep's mutton. And then also apparently sometimes they

(34:57):
would just go into the fields in the night and
just upper 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, but I cannot fault them there. Garlic

(35:18):
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
herbal traditions, Um is that antimicrobial property? Yeah? Um yeah, yeah, absolutely,
And so Pereshiko writes, quote garlic was such a popular

(35:39):
plant 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 extend in the

(36:00):
first 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 have you know,
writing letters in the fifth century CEE talking about having
sylfium plants. But these references could very well be to

(36:20):
what what 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 was reading about recently,

(36:42):
and another book about just 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

(37:02):
they hope will fulfill some of the properties. And sometimes
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

(37:25):
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

(37:46):
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 act patterns of human
behavior leading to extinction of plant and animal species today
have been with us for thousands of years. I mean,

(38:07):
this 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

(38:27):
Roman Empire. Alright, we're back, Okay. Can we talk about bears? Yes,
let's talk about bears. The Atlas bear is by some estimates.
A notable victim of Roman civilization and the civilizations that
followed in the wake of the Roman Empire. Uh. These
were the Brown Bears of northern Africa, and their extinction

(38:48):
can at least be partially attributed to the Romans, though
we have to stress here it didn't truly go extinct
in the wildland, 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 kick started

(39:09):
the tradition of of exploitation uh and and 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

(39:29):
for transport back to the Arenas in Rome as well.
So we're talking thousands and thousands of 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 during

(39:51):
you know, the time of European colonialism as well. Um,
but uh, a lot of times it brings to mind
pictures of sale 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,

(40:14):
and uh, and so the initial depleting of their numbers
put them 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 apparently when you look at the like the the
the last known sightings of these animals, they pretty much

(40:37):
line up with modern firearms being available, so that that
just 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

(40:58):
is not the predominant theory. Now. Uh. You know, these
were largely herbivorous creatures and they might have just been
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.

(41:20):
I'd love to come back and discuss cave bears or
or other prehistoric bearers like the short faced bear in
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
that early humans contributed to their to the extinction of uh,

(41:40):
you know, no doubt about it. But if if, if
populations are smaller, uh, there's less that can be done
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 knack roll creature that would be out there in

(42:01):
the Roman arena, right, But the ostrich were talking about
about here is not the common ostrich that you're probably
thinking of, 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
that is the scariest feed of anything I've ever seen. Well, yes,

(42:24):
and ostriches can be quite terrifying close up, for sure,
and they can and they are dangerous animals. But but
I have to admit it wasn't like the first thing
I thought about as 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 the common ostrich,
but the Arabian Ostrich or the Syrian ostrich, also known
as the Middle Eastern ostrich, and it lived in the

(42:47):
Near and Middle East, as opposed to the common ostriche
of Africa that we still know today now. To be sure,
the Arabian Ostrichs suffered under humans for quite a while.
They're mentioned in other ancient texts. 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.

(43:08):
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 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 ostriches,

(43:29):
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, seems true 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

(43:51):
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 the Romans were omnivorous
to an extreme. I mean 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

(44:11):
cookbook entry and something earlier today with this recipe for
like a parrot and flamingo. I think, yeah, there's some
very 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

(44:33):
and Feasting in Ancient Rome. Uh and and he was
looking at some Roman cookbooks and uh he appointed to
at least a couple of Ostrich recipes, one for an
ostrich 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

(44:54):
I mean outside of this too, I mean ostrich feathers
were prized um for use in ornamentation and costumes. But
the Arabian Ostrich, 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

(45:16):
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 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 with there are some interesting clues about

(45:40):
possibilities in history that that may have previously not been imagined.
So uh, let's let's take a look at Plenty again,
if any of the elder from his Natural History book nine,
chapter five, and this one's the John Bostock translation, where
Plenty is talking about ballina, the ballina and the orca.
Uh and note in this passage there's this word billina.

(46:00):
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. 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

(46:21):
to our seas. Even it is said that they are
not to be seen in the Ocean of Getties before
the winter solstice, and at periodical seasons they retire and
conceal themselves in some calm, capacious bay in which they
take delight in bringing forth. This fact, however, is known
to the orca, an animal which is peculiarly hostile to

(46:41):
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 tears its young,
or else attacks the females which have just brought forth,
and indeed while they're still pregnant, and as they rush

(47:02):
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 pointing ship. And he
goes on and on about the orca hunting these billina.
But all of it is I mean, this sounds exactly
like everything we've discussed regarding the orca in the past.
I mean, this is like straight out of a modern

(47:25):
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 the ocean,
except there's a problem. In the early part of this passage,
he's referring to some kind of whale that retires seasonally

(47:47):
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 in fact, there are
whales in the Mediterranean sometimes, but they tend to be
you know, like deep water whales that do not retire

(48:09):
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 once would have calved
in that area but no longer do Now there are
whales that fit that ecological and behavioral description, but they

(48:31):
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 roughly fifty
feet about thirty five metric tons, 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

(48:55):
fit the North Atlantic right whale, which is also a
baleen whale of being day injured today. It lives in
the Northern Atlantic. As the name implies, it's up to
about sixteen meters or about fifty feet long 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

(49:17):
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 population of
about five hundred individuals that survives in the western North
Atlantic and that's it. So, you know, in terms of extinction,
we've often touched on like the differences between extinct and

(49:38):
the 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 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

(50:00):
that they could base a whole industry off of hunting whales?
And we know that the hunting of whales in like
individual cases goes back thousands of years, but the 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

(50:21):
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 literature
we want to look at. Here is an awesome poem
about fishing by the second century CE. Greco Roman poet
Opian called the hali Utica, and this is from the

(50:42):
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 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

(51:03):
and they spear the shark with the floating barrels um.
But then uh Opian writes, 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
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

(51:25):
when a Harold 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
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

(51:47):
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
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

(52:07):
hunting sequence and jaws more than more than It's not
clear what kind of whale Oppian things 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
the Romans did participate in more shallow whaling than previously thought.
They certainly did a lot of fishing and fish processing.

(52:28):
The Roman Empire loved fish that 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.
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

(52:51):
evidence that might make us question that. Uh And this
was published in Proceedings to the Royal Society b Biological
Sciences by Anna Rodrige as at All and the authors
here point out that whales are often archaeologically invisible, meaning
when 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

(53:12):
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 archaeological sites, I think primarily ancient fish processing
factories in the Gibraltar region, and they found among the

(53:35):
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
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

(53:59):
or the extinct the 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 and C. So that's the 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

(54:21):
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
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

(54:43):
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
the authors also think that if these two species of
coastal excess sable whales were historically present, it might indicate
that the Roman Empire had a forgotten pre basque whaling industry. Quote.

(55:08):
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
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 uh, particularly adult females with

(55:31):
disproportionate demographic consequences in these long lived, slowly reproducing species. Thus,
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

(55:53):
existed and all that, But you can see how it's
plausible that a Roman whaling industry could have contributed to
the client 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

(56:14):
at Royal Holloway, University of London, and she said the
study does show that these whales habitats once included the
Gibraltar region, 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.

(56:35):
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, 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

(56:57):
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 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,

(57:17):
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
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.

(57:39):
They do, uh, 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 modern empires, in our modern um you know, nation states,
UH continue to scale up what they're doing, sometimes uh

(58:02):
taken into into account their impact on the natural world,
but perhaps uh 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. 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

(58:22):
a value in some way. Right, these are the things
that they are historical records of of going missing, right, Yeah,
so we're being reduced. Yeah, so just imagine other species
that were less remarkable or at least less valued, or
you know, they weren't exotic creatures, you know, very you
think of the various rodents or insects or birds or
what have you that could have also been destroyed by

(58:45):
Roman activity and it just didn't make it into the
history books. 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
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tell friends about Out of 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

(59:05):
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 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, Torri Harrison. If you would like to

(59:28):
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 Blow

(59:50):
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