April 24, 2021 • 40 mins
From an imagined palace constructed out of bone to the curious ways in which animals and humans use bone for tools and construction materials, take a stroll through halls of bone with Robert and Joe in this pair of episodes from Stuff to Blow Your Mind. (Originally published 4/9/2020)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a vault episode. This one originally published on
April ninth, and it's the second part of our Bone
Palace series. So we hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stook
to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
(00:34):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two of our episodes the Bone Palace, where the
humans are the bone Lords, the bones are their houses,
and we all build with bones. That's right. Last episode
we spoke quite a bit about the use of mammoth
bones by early people's and the harsh reality of the
(00:59):
Ice Age. Yeah, that's right. We we we talked about the
the bone circles of the Russian plane from the from
the last glacial maximum, where a Stone Age hunter gatherers
would take mammoth bones from either scavenged or or from
memoths that they had killed in hunting, and they would
build these strange circular walls out of them. Uh. And
(01:22):
it's not exactly known what all of these structures were
for We talked about a recently discovered one that that
yielded some especially intriguing results. We talked about what the
function of these buildings could have been. Was it a dwelling?
Was that a storehouse for food? To have some kind
of symbolic or religious significance? Uh? And today we wanted
to continue on that theme. We wanted to build with bones.
(01:44):
That's right. So it's easy, of course to just wallow
and the necromantic, Gothic and death metal glory of imagine
palaces built out of bone, and and certainly we we
enjoy doing that as well. Uh, paluses of bone, thrones
of bone, bone forged weapons that incur one D six
chronic damage on a critical hit, that sort of thing
(02:05):
orcus name be praised. But to use or the lord
of bones old rattle shirt from Game of Thrones, Oh yeah,
we'll come back to rattle shirt in a bit. But yeah,
to use bones as tools and raw materials, I mean, ultimately,
it's just good sense. So first, let's consider why so
for starters to state the obvious bones do decay, They
(02:27):
just decay at a much slower rate than soft tissue.
It might take a decade and say a rainforest environment,
or thousands of years in a dry environment, But decomposition
still eventually occurs, because we have to remember that fossils
are of course no longer proper bones, but they have
undergone mineralization. Yeah, there are a couple of methods by
(02:48):
which fossils are formed, but when you're looking at like
dinosaur fossils, those are not the bones of the dinosaurs.
They are ways that other minerals have have taken the
shape of the original bones. Right, But given our short lives,
it's easy to sort of fall into the loose idea
that bones last and flesh does not, and any way
(03:08):
you shake it. For us vertebrates, our bones do tend
to outlive us. The fledge rots away, but the bones remain,
And then what are you going to do with them? Now,
obviously there's a great deal of room here for human complexity.
We reflesh the bones with memory, magical thinking, and symbolism.
The skull becomes a species wide symbol for impermanence in
(03:29):
the inexorable pull of the grave. But in congress with
this for humans, and separate entirely from it from any organisms,
bones are simply durable materials of varying and novel size
that can lend themselves very well to various uses. And uh,
I thought we might begin by just considering just a
few quick examples from the animal world. All right, let's
(03:52):
do it. So our necromancers are fictional necromancers. From the
top of the first episode, they love a good bone pile.
Any necromancer is going to love a good bone pile.
And while other animals display complex emotions around death as well,
burial of the dead is generally the domain of humans
and Neanderthals. But there are other ways to amass a
(04:13):
collection of bones, and that is via predation. So think
of the Killer Rabbit and Monty Python and the Holy
Grail right right, yeah, look at the bones? Oh yeah,
Tim the enchanterer the bones or does somebody say bones shmones?
I think do they? I don't remember that part. Certainly,
this is a deadly killer organism and as such is
(04:35):
places just littered with with their remains. Yeah, this is
uh the way in which predators are often predators and
scavengers can become what's known in the fossil record as
an accumulating agent that that sort of gathers stuff together
into a single site, right, and then this accumulation is
often referred to as a nidden. So I want to
(04:55):
return us to a place that we've gone to many
times in the podcast, and that is the world of
the octopus or the octopus midden is a great example
of this, consisting of the remains of various creatures that
the octopus has preyed upon. And so this includes generally
it's you we're talking about shells, but also it can
include bones. Now, a midden like this need only be
(05:18):
the accumulated bones of one's prey, but it can be more. Uh.
The Sydney octopus, for example, Octopus uh tetricus. According to
a two thousand fourteen paper from David Shell and Peter
Godfrey Smith UH. Peter Godfrey Smith is the author as
well of Other Minds, The Octopus, the Sea and the
Deep Origins of Consciousness. They point out that this particular
(05:41):
octopus may be engaging in a form of ecosystem engineering
via their middens. Basically, they occur in large numbers on
a shell bed of their prey. Shell bed that has
become ends up becoming home to a community of invertebrate
grazers and scavengers, while all also creating additional shelter possibilities
(06:02):
for the occupods themselves. However, the downside seems to be
that the increased fish population can then bring in sharks
and make it a bit busier and more dangerous than
it would normally be for these octopuses. So, uh, it's
an interesting example, like it kind of getting into this
area of perhaps like accidental tinkering with the environment, accidental
(06:24):
ecosystem engineering that becomes then becomes part of this uh,
this creature's habit, part of its life cycle. But then
there's an unbalancing that occurs as well. So this makes
me think, so if the octopus is um, let me
know if I'm understanding this wrong. Is the idea maybe
that the octopus is using instinctually using this pile of
(06:47):
shells from its prey to attract other animals to the site,
which can then themselves become prey. Yeah, I believe so,
though again it comes with certain complications, maybe also attracting predators.
Yeah yeah, yeah. The octopus here that we're talking about
is is typically solitary. But the side they observed here
(07:08):
was just one of a couple of examples that scientists
have come across of where we've seen octopods living in
high density populations with complex social behaviors. Trash makes friends. Yeah,
but the you know, the the impact of the middens here,
I think drives home how the use of bone or
shell material can sort of emerge out of a creature's lifestyle.
(07:28):
You know, like by eating a lot of creatures and
then leaving their bones, you begin to create artificial environments
that are composed of bones, and that opens and that
changes the ecosystem, at least in pockets. Now, these are,
of course, uh, extant octopods, But what about extinct dctopods. Well,
there's a lot we don't know about extinct octopods because
(07:51):
you know, we're talking about creatures composed uh, you know,
mostly soft tissue, and there they are a rarity in
the fossil record. But there's there's one potential example, certainly
a controversial hypothesis that I've brought up on the show
before and I can't help but bring it up again here.
It's a by paleontologist Mark mcminimon, and he and his
(08:13):
co authors proposed in twleven that a peculiar arrangement of
etheosaur bones from the Triassic period were arranged in a
linear pattern by a presumed giant octopus that was playing
with its food, perhaps even creating some manner of And
this is where he gets really kind of trippy and
(08:34):
more controversial, the idea that perhaps this creature was not
only arranging the bones of its prey in a novel pattern,
but was engaging in some sort of self portrait. Okay,
so I love this idea, but it is we should
definitely acknowledge like at least two layers of pure speculation.
(08:55):
I mean, it is not not accepted by the scientific
community in any brought way at all. So the first
layer of speculation is just the idea that the octopus
was arranging the bones like this, which that doesn't seem
implausible to me, but still it's speculative. We don't know
that's what happened. The second level is the intention behind
the arrangement, the idea that the octopus was creating a
(09:16):
portrait of its own tentacle, right or not tentacle arm? Sorry, yeah,
so you know there's a there's no way to for
us to know that it is pure speculation. I mean,
and again, even the the idea of this being an
actual species. It's just we have a presume the researchers
are presuming that there is an octopus here that did this,
because there is again no no fossil evidence of its
(09:37):
of it's of the soft tissue that would be associated
with this creature that is sometimes informally referred to as
a crack in a Triassic kracking. Now, on the other hand,
I would not say at all that it would be
implausible for an octopus to mess around with the bones
of its prey animals and put them in strange arrangements,
(09:58):
because octopus is absolutely modern. Octopuses play, They play with
objects all the time. They manipulate objects in ways that
have no obvious, uh practical advantage. You know, they're not
just like using objects as tools or something. They apparently
engage in purely recreational object manipulation. Right, And then one
(10:18):
can easily imagine that you have this, you have this
play that's occurring with the bones. This you know, steady
manipulation of the bones, and it's the thing that could
in theory, lead to more complex uses of bones later on,
the use of bones as tools. Now, I don't think
we've see anything occurring in nature with octopods with bones
(10:40):
like this, But we do have examples of octopods seeming
to engage in tool you say, with with coconuts or shells, right, yeah, yeah,
using them basically is like a shield for their bodies. Yeah. Now,
other animals certainly work with bones and shells as well.
Bones factor into the nesting behaviors of certain birds and
pack rats. Bower birds have been no known to use
(11:00):
bones in the creation of their mating bowers. But when
you think of bones as tools or bones as materials,
you can't help but think of hominids and their two
and the two use of early humans in particular, perhaps
in part due to that stunning sequence uh that we've
all seen from two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, right,
(11:20):
in which a human ancestor discovers that the bone of
a taper might be used as a weapon, not stonework,
but bone work. Now. I love this scene. We've talked
about it on the show before, But this scene is
actually a reference to the nineteen forty nine uh Osteodonto
choratic culture hypothesis or O d K hypothesis by Professor
(11:44):
Raymond Dart, the man who also identified the tongue child
fossil in nineteen two UM What does that mean? The
O d K hypothesis is basically bone tooth horn culture
OSTEO danto choratic culture, and the idea here is that
austro Lepithecus Africanists would have engaged in a carnivorous and
(12:05):
sometimes cannibalistic lifestyle augmented by bone and horn tools that
they used to hunt other animals and each other. Dart
based this on skeletal part representation patterns at fossil sites,
presenting evidence that they were possibly using bones as tools
and weapons. Essentially, it's a model for the transition from
(12:25):
ape to human via bone assisted predation, depending on tools
made from the bones of their own kills and or
the kills of other predators that they have scavenged. Now,
this hypothesis has met with a generally skeptical audience and
it's and it had several notable detractors. Now it is
generally considered that O. D K culture did not exist
(12:46):
as Dart envisioned it, and that the bones he observed
were simply due to the natural breakup of skeletons, predator preferences,
and environmental damage to skeletal remains. The criticism of the
hyena is is often brought up as a possible scavenger
responsible for the bone. Didn'ts that Dart interpreted as an
example of this O d K culture. All right, so
(13:08):
darts picture of this extinct human relative making this tool
use transition through the use of bones for wide scale
or large scale predation. That's probably not accurate, but that
doesn't mean that humans never used bones as tools, right, Yeah,
And I want to drive home that od K culture
hypothesis was not it was this was not like a
crazy hypothesis, and it's you know, it's it's it's very
(13:32):
very sensible. But yeah, it just doesn't seem like it's
really um held up over time. But still at the
same time, the use of bone tools is an important
part of of human tool use. There's evidence of early
humans using bone tools one point five million years ago
and what is now South Africa, and these would have
(13:53):
been used, uh we believe to dig in termine mounds.
Included a photo here for you to look at them. Know,
they the kind of thing where you know, if you
didn't know what you were looking at, you might not
get that these were tools. But but these were specialized tools.
I mean, this is a huge problem in archaeology actually.
I mean by the time we as just lay consumers
(14:15):
of artifacts come to these artifacts, they've already been interpreted
as tools. But when you're just like looking at sediments
in the ground and fragments of things, it's often hard
to tell what is a tool and what is not. Yeah.
Another example, I came across bone knives from North Africa
dating back ninety thousand years connected with Middlestone Age terry
(14:37):
and culture, and these would have been made from rib bones. Wait,
rib bones of what of humans or of something else?
I believe animal, But I'm not sure they really were
able to figure out exactly what sort of animal. Now.
According to a two thousand fifteen study from the University
of Montreal, Neanderthals of the Middle Paleolithic might have used
made use of multi purpose bone tools. These were found
(15:01):
at grot Dubaison grotd Bissan at r C Circure in Burgundy, France,
and they would have been used alongside stone tools. So
you know, it's not this idea of like bone or stone,
but like bone and stone. And I think that makes sense,
especially based in the UH the example that we uh
we we focused on for the first episode in this
(15:23):
pair of episodes about bone technology. Yeah. Now, I can
think about some ways in which stone I think would
be superior to bone it for certain types of tool uses.
And one of the things is that, uh it seems
there are certain types of stones that flake away in
a kind of shearing pattern, which along with the technique
(15:44):
of napping, which is where you strike stones together to
try to shear off part of a target stone to
make a sharp edge on it. That that works with stones,
but it doesn't really work with bones, at least as
far as I can imagine. But that doesn't mean bones
would be useless. It would just mean that you couldn't
use them really to create a knife edge as effectively
(16:04):
as you can with napping of certain types of rock. Yeah.
So I could be wrong about that, does it? Does
that seem right to you? Yeah? I think so? Yeah. Yeah.
So again, this would have been a multi purpose bone
tool that the Neanderthals would have used here. Uh so,
the Reacher's researchers point out that, first of all, naturally
the prime purpose of hunting an animal was to obtain
(16:24):
meat and also hide, but the bones were very useful
as well. Uh So, for example, one of the bone
tools found here, that the pivotal multi tool that they're
talking about here, was made from the left femur of
an adult reindeer, and it was seemingly used for a
few different purposes. First of all, carved sharpening of cutting
edges of stone tools, So you would have used bone
(16:47):
tools to help refine and make your stone tools. That
makes sense. Uh. This would have also been probably used
as a scraper and quote evidence of meat butchering and
bone fracturing to extract marrow or evidence on the tool.
So yeah, this would have been a very useful device.
And again I included a picture for you to see, Joe.
And again it's one of these things where you know,
(17:09):
you know, if you if you're not, you didn't know
what you're looking at. If you're not you know paleontologists, uh,
you you might not get that what you're looking at
is a multi tool. Are staring at it here for
the longest time trying to figure out what it looks like.
I realized if you turn it sideways, it looks like
an iguana head. So it does kind of looks like
a horner ear on it. Yeah, but that that spike
(17:29):
edge there. Yeah. Now, another interesting thing about this particular
study is that prehistoric experts were previously reluctant to attribute
bone work tools to Neanderthals, but such fines as this
from the very late nineteen nineties and then into the
twenty first century changed that. I also want to point
out that the Eureka Alert release on this particular study
(17:51):
bears the amusing title quote, you have a dab a
dough stone age man wasn't necessarily more advanced than the Neandertals.
Oh my god. Ten points So that's so good. Wait wait, wait,
should they have gone with the abadebba? Don't because he
was not necessarily more advanced. I don't know if that
quite makes sense. Uh, that one was probably on the table.
I'm guessing. I'm just guessing. And then someone's like, oh, man,
(18:13):
what if we work Homer into this as well? Fred
Flintstone and Homer in one single uh science press release title.
This is gonna be great. Alright, we're gonna take a
quick break, but when we come back, we are going
to discuss more about bone tools and bone technology. Thank alright,
we're back. So bone technology stands alongside stone technology is
(18:38):
as a key marker of technological and cognitive development, even
if we're not putting all of our eggs in the
O d K basket, so you won't really find it
popping up in extent non human animals. But how about
how about this You mentioned old rattle shirt earlier, Um,
you mentioned bone armor and that I brings to buy
not only old rattle shirt, but it makes me think
(19:00):
of the Kurgan from Highlander. Remember that bone armor that
he wears or it's like bone augmented to armor, don't
do the necromongers in in in Chronicles of Riddick were
bone armor. I don't remember. I mean they certainly have
some some dark, gloomy, you know, necromantic aspects to their armor.
(19:20):
I don't remember if they actually had any real bone,
but but certainly they would have appreciated those who wore
pone without a doubt. Another example that's really burned into
my mind is the character General Cal from Willow. You
saw Willow, Yes, yes, yes, yes, it's been a long time,
but yeah, he was the sub villain in that particular movie.
(19:41):
And of course he was played by Pat Roach, everyone's
favorite former pro wrestler British heavy man. Uh you know,
he's alway, he was always fighting. He's he's what he's
He's been killed by Indiana Jones, He's been killed by
Conan the Barbarian, all the greats. In fact, he as
he played the Sorcerer in Conan the Destroyer. Uh if
(20:03):
you're really wait a minute, did the Sorcerer and Conan
the Destroyer also have bone armor and get like a
sword thrown through his head or something? Um? It was
the scene with the mirrors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
really a fantastic sequence. I really need to I can't
believe I'm saying this. I really need to watch Conan
the Destroyer again because it does have some great two
(20:25):
scenes there. It has a reputation for being quite bad,
but we should revisit anyway. It had a tough act
to follow, for sure, but it has some some pretty
wonderful magic in it, as I recall, certainly really more overt,
you know, fantasy magic than what you find in the
first film. Uh. Well, anyway, this is making me wonder. Okay,
(20:45):
bone armor real thing? Did anybody ever actually try to
wear armor made out of bones? Well? You know, obviously
there's some problems with the idea. I mean it would
it would be ideal if there was a slightly larger
bipedal creature that had bones and bone plates that were
just already perfectly made for someone to wear his armor. Uh.
(21:05):
You know, I'm sure we would hunt it to extinction
uh in no time. But I don't know. I wonder
if that's been that idea has been explored in fantasy.
That's where all the squatches went, so they were to
extinction for their bones. Uh. Yes, the squatch skull makes
such a great helm. Well, in reality, you know, you know,
there are probably some examples you can come to where
(21:26):
people are used utilizing bone ornamentation, but in terms of
using bone as like the primary material and construction, I
did run across a really cool example. Uh. This is
from a three thousand, nine hundred year old suit of
bone armor that was unearthed in Omsk, Siberia. And in
(21:47):
this example, and I encourage anyone to look up an
example of this, you'll find a picture if you just
look for bone armor OMPs that's O. M. S. K Uh.
In this example, what we have is basically a shirt
of plate mail, but with each individual plate carved from
animal bone and Uh, you know, it reminds me too
of the sort of the ceremonial jade armor that you
(22:09):
see used in Chinese culture. Um, where nobody's wearing like
just like the big obvious bones of a creature, but
you have all of these little plates of bone. They
are then stitched into this this garment that is worn
by the warrior. And this would have been worn, the
researchers point out, by a very specialized warrior, a hero
if you will, a prince of the universe, if you will, yes, Well,
(22:33):
do we know exactly what the pros and cons of
this type of armor would have been if it involved bone? Like,
are there like how does that compare to standard materials?
Do do we know anything about that? About the it's durability?
I mean, I think this is something we need to
explore and if if for a future like full on
look at armor, which is something we've been talking about
(22:55):
wanting to do for a while. But I mean, basically,
we do see so many different approaches to armor in
different cultures depending on available resources. You know, we we've
discussed in the past, Uh, the Inca and how Inca
armor depended so heavily on fiber. You know, and UH
and it could apparently it was apparently quite effective in
(23:16):
their engagements. Uh. Certainly you get into cultures that have
more access to uh various metal working UH strategies, and
you see the metal armor. Uh. This seems to to
make sense though, because you would have a durable material
that would would augment whatever, you know, kind of like
hide based armor. You're you're you're you're creating. Uh, but
(23:38):
it's gonna be it's gonna be lighter than using little
bits of stone. It's gonna be lighter than weighing yourself
down with this with an enormous stone garment. Uh. So
I think that's it's basically it's just gonna come down
to material availability. Now you said this was unearthed in
Omsk in Siberia. I wonder with the people living in
this region have had access to many other types of
(24:01):
resources to make armor out of, or would would be
closer to like the the Bone House in uh In
in the Ice age situation where basically this is what
you got. Yeah, I like I said, I feel like
resource availability is is one of the key aspects of this.
And U this would have been UM. This would have
been Bronze age UM technology basically. Uh. The article I
(24:25):
was reading about this from the Siberian Times titled Warriors
thirty year old suit of are of the bone armor
uneartheden OMPs uh from September six, two fourteen. UH. They
mentioned that that at the at the time, uh in
the individual using this armor and uh and also the
(24:46):
individuals they would have have battled, you would have found
the weapons at the time consisting of bone and stone arrowheads,
but also bronze knives, spears tipped with bronze and bronze axes,
and and and they contend that this sort armor would
have held up reasonably well against the armors of the time,
and therefore this would have been like a very precious suit.
(25:07):
This would have been like, this would have been high
end again, the stuff a true hero would wear, and
not just for decorative reasons, actually like for functional reasons. Yeah.
They seem to think that this would have this would
have been functional. Yeah, alright, well I'm getting some Yeah.
I mean that the artistic interpretation looks looks rather cool,
rather stylish. You know, it's not rattle shirt. It's not
(25:28):
nearly as intimidating in terms of looking like you're just
covered in bones, but it has trans it has used
the bone as a raw material for their technology. All Right,
we need to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more. Thank and we're back. So earlier
we talked about octopods creating their bone middens and in
(25:50):
doing so, remaking the local ecosystem. And uh, I haven't
an example here that that is really interesting that that
I ran across concerning human and is doing much the
same way. In two thousands, sixteen, researchers from the University
of Georgia discussed how native people's in southwest Florida, known
as the Caloosa, engaged in landscape engineering quote essentially terraforming,
(26:15):
according to study lead and University of Georgia anthropologist of
Victor Thompson, Alright, so how would this work? Okay, so,
what we're dealing with fisher gatherer hunter people here. You know,
they're depending a lot on on gathering up um and
and and hunting creatures that live in and around the water.
So what they would have done is they would have
(26:36):
piled their accumulated shells, all the shells of the creatures
that they've scavenged and you know for food already. They
would put these in massive heaps to construct water bound towns,
essentially artificial islands. Hundreds of millions of shells would have
ultimately been required to produce these islands. But again it's
(26:58):
it's very much in keeping with sort of what those
octopods are doing and and also ties back to what
we were talking about with the mammoths early on, Like
you're accumulating these leftovers, these remnants, uh, these these hard
materials that that are the results of your lifestyle. And
then you put all that together, that's a lot of
(27:20):
material You can start doing things with it. You can
build uh, some sort of a small palace out of them,
or you can keep them together, you know, add mud
and other materials and essentially start remaking the landscape that
you live in. Yeah, letting these in edible animal products
not just become trash, but become building materials, become tools,
become a way of shaping your world. Now, in terms
(27:42):
of other bone structures and human culture, you'll find various
examples of this as well. Various crips and assuarias come
to mind. You know, bone houses that at times have
say walls or structures that are decorated with bones, if
not made of bones and stuff. To Bow Your Mind
actually has an older episode about ossuaries that I would
(28:04):
refer listeners to. This is what I did with Julie
Douglas several years ago. But one of the more amusing
and less gloomy examples of the sort of thing that
I came across is that the fossil bone Cabin in
Medicine Bow, Wyoming, which you absolutely should look up a
picture of. There's an Atlas Obscura article about it as well,
(28:24):
and it is this uh it first, it just looks
like a rock little house, you know, nothing too gloomy,
nothing too weird, but it's just standing out in the
middle of nowhere where it's kind of like waste land
landscape around it. And it has a sign out front
at least when this picture was taken that says believe
it or not. And this cabin is is itself only
(28:47):
about eighty years old, but it's bill using rock that
contains fossilized dinosaur bone fragments, So essentially it is a
dinosaur bone house out in the middle of Wyoming. I
want to be I'm gonna be the Indiana Jones of
this house. This belongs in a museum Yeah, you know, Joe,
(29:08):
we don't have any any live shows coming up, but
I'm just gonna go and say it. If we could
book this location store for a for a live show,
I would do it. We maybe we only have like
one wyoming listener out there, uh, that could possibly come,
but it would still be worth it to record in
the Believe it or not, fossil dinosaur cabin. Wyoming mind
(29:28):
blowers out there, chime in, let us know you exist,
tell us contact and stuff to blow your mind dot com.
If enough of you let us know what, We'll try
to see if we can do a show from the roof.
All Right, we're beginning to to reach the end here,
But Joe, I understand you have one more gnarly bone
palace denizen to discuss with us here. Well. Yeah, I
(29:50):
was thinking about other species that practice something like the
prehistoric bone lords the Russian plane, and I came across
evidence of a marvelous wasp species that I think would
have had a real affinity for the mammoth bone houses.
This animal lives in southeast China and it's known as
due to a genia O sari um. You can probably
(30:11):
hear in the the second part of its species name
osari Um. That's named after the ossuaries right the the
the human bone houses where where bones are stored or
sometimes used in construction um. And this is also known
that this animal is known as now the bone house wasp. Now,
the use of the word bone there might be a
little misleading, because while this wasp absolutely does practice corps architecture,
(30:35):
it's bricks are not the bones of mammals, but the
crumpled exoskeletons of ants. And I gotta give credit to
Gwin Pearson, writing for Wired, for one of the best
article leads I've ever read. So she's writing an article
about this animal, and she starts with a quote from
Conan the Barbarian. You know that scene where the general
asks Conan what is best in life? And Conan says,
(30:58):
of course, to cross joy to me. See them driven
before you and hear the lamentations of the women and
they all laugh. You know, ha ha, that is good.
But Pearson goes on to say, a newly described wasp
species would disagree. What is best in life is to
feed your children living spiders and build a wall around
your nursery in which you've entombed the bodies of giant ants.
(31:20):
I think that's a pretty good point in comparison, because
it's like, um, the same way that the you know,
the the general riding out over the step, you know,
must project strength in order to in his mind protect
his own clan. This, uh, this female wasp that that
builds this nest out of dead insects is also doing
it in a way from a place of love. Yeah. Yeah,
(31:42):
this is a wonderful organism if memory serves. I did
a monster blog post about them, uh back when we
had blogs. I did one comparing the good old days. Yeah,
I did one comparing this species to the creeper from
the Jeeper Creepers movie, which is another intitated like builds
(32:02):
stuff out of dead things. Really, I guess kind of
a common trope, or at least not an uncommon trope
in the world of fictional monsters. But here we have
the real deal that the natural world example. This was
the only example that I could really find of this
being done with insects. And maybe there's another one, but
but I didn't come across it. Uh So, this species
(32:23):
and its unique nest building strategy was described in the
paper in Plos one by Michael stab, Michael Ohl, Chaodong
Jou and Alexandra Maria Klein uh And the paper was
called a unique nest protection strategy in a new species
of spider wasps. So the species was found and described
(32:43):
during a biodiversity survey in the forests of young Z
Province and uh So. The bone house wasp is a
pomp a lid, which is a family of spider hunting wasps.
This also includes the famous tarantula hawk. And there are
a bunch of different species of pompa lids, but most
are pretty similar in their basic survival and reproduction strategy.
(33:05):
A lot of times the adults on their own would
seem to be fairly peaceful. A lot of them are
you know, sort of vegetarian nectar feeders, but when it's
time to reproduce and provide for the next generation, that's
when the true horror comes in. So they tend to
be solitary rather than living in colonies like so many
other bees and wasps. And the standard predatory reproductive strategy
(33:28):
is that a female wasp, a female pomp lid, will
find a spider and then sting the spider, and the
sting will paralyze it and it will drag the still
alive but paralyzed spider back to a nearby nest and
then lay an egg, usually a single egg, on the
spider's body, often like sort of on the abdomen, and
(33:49):
then it will seal the spider up in this cask
of a manteado style live burial, and then the egg
hatches and the larva begins to eat the spider, slowly
inside it out as it grows, often saving the most
vital internal organs For last man, I love wasps um.
Yeah you know, I actually wrote how Wasps work for
(34:12):
How Stuff Works years and years ago, and I remember
that was one of the features. One of the many
features about wasps in general that I love is that
that adult solitary wasps mostly feed on nectar, but then
they spend most of their time foraging food for their
carnivorous younglings. Yeah. Well, I mean it makes me think
like the human analogy would be like an adult an
(34:35):
adult who is vegan, but they also are like hunting
animals for their for their babies to like eat while
they're still alive. Yeah, baby needs meat, Baby needs a
living meat in the nursery, but the hunt entirely powered
by blueberry smoothies. Yes. Um, so what makes this bone
house wasp different from the other pomplids is the strategy
(34:58):
that it uses to protect the net where its larva
gets sealed in with its food source. And uh and
so the basic idea here is that the nest will
have a vestibular cell or sort of like an outer
cell area where the adult wasp will pack in the
dead bodies of ants. And uh So the nests of
(35:19):
the species the researchers found were less vulnerable to attacks
than the nests of other similar wasps. And this would
would seem to suggest that the dead ants play a
role in repelling predators or parasites from the nest, likely
through chemical cues smells, Right, so there's something about these
ants that, you know, even when they're dead, they give
(35:40):
off this smell like, oh, that's something I don't want
to mess with, and the predators will go away because
I mean, you know, an ant colony can be a
formidable adversary. You know. This also reminds me of another
group of famous cinematic corpse de filers, uh, the chainsaw
family from Texas Chainsaw mask here, because what do they
do with the various bones uh, and and fragments that
(36:01):
they have left over they hang from the trees right
surrounding the compound. Uh, you know, almost to warn people away. Uh,
you know, except for, of course, the meddling teenagers that
are central to the plot. Well, I mean, it makes
me think back to the to the bone lords, the
prehistoric peoples of the Russian plane. Obviously, again there is
(36:22):
no direct evidence whatsoever that the bones that they built
these rings out of were in any way to repel predators.
But now I'm just trying to imagine for a second,
could could play any kind of role like that? Could
there be some significance we're not imagining where this is.
Maybe it gives off a stink like a carnivore's den
or something. And I don't know, pure guess work. I mean,
(36:44):
I guess any kind of any kind of benefit you'd
get like that, you'd probably also get get concurrent downsides
of stinking like meat and attracting carnivores in the process.
But but you can easily see with this wasp example,
how like this is the sort of thing that they
would likely emerge out of just the keeping of a midden,
you know, like the leftovers of these metals are around
(37:07):
and or in the nest, and then in some cases
they can they can come to have a you know,
a key uh, you know benefit, They can offer a
key benefit to the nest itself. Okay, So if you
were going to play the strategy and try to plant
something around your house to keep people out that that
worked on a on the basis of smell, what would
it be? What would repel everything and attract nothing? Oh,
(37:31):
I mean, there are plenty of grizzly examples, but um
but you know, an actual real life example, and this
is completely ridiculous, but there have been times where I've
been working on my laptop on my front porch and
once the mosquitoes are active, I'll kill a mosquito and
they'll be this weird idea that I should leave the
corpse of the mosquito out where the others can see
(37:53):
it as a warning, you know, that they shouldn't mess
with me because I will kill them. They're not going
to be fast enough. Um but but of course that's
just ludicrous on my part. But there's like some sort
of weird instinct to do that, to make an example
out of the creature that is that is hunting me. Yeah,
I would say probably works to the opposite effect. You've
created a martyr and now they must avenge their falling sister. Yeah,
(38:16):
there's that. There is that, but in terms of like, actually, yeah,
I don't know, hanging skulls outside of my my home.
I mean around Halloween we all do that, but that
that actually has the opposite effect that people in Yeah. Well,
I gotta tell you, going back to that first episode
about the about the bone circles, I mean, some of
(38:37):
the hypotheses offered do seem interesting, but I've still got
this mystery banging around in my head. I'm not going
to forget about this. Yeah, it's it's one of those
that really forces you to to think long and hard
about you know, who our ancestors were, and you know
what was important to them in this uh this this
this time of great trial. All right. So there you
(38:58):
have it, a second dose of the Bone Palace. More
examples of bone technology, bone collection, and the remaking of
our world with the remnants of those that came before.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
Grizzly episodes of stuff to blow your mind, you will
find them wherever you find our podcast and you can
(39:20):
find us just about anywhere. If you go to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com, that will shoot you
over to the I Heart Listening for our show and
you can of course subscribe and listen there as well.
Huge thanks as always to our amazing audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, to let us
(39:41):
know you listen and you listen from Wyoming, or just
to say hi, you can email us at contact that's
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the I heart
(40:02):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your
favorite shows,
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a vault episode. This one originally published on
April ninth, and it's the second part of our Bone
Palace series. So we hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stook
to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
(00:34):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two of our episodes the Bone Palace, where the
humans are the bone Lords, the bones are their houses,
and we all build with bones. That's right. Last episode
we spoke quite a bit about the use of mammoth
bones by early people's and the harsh reality of the
(00:59):
Ice Age. Yeah, that's right. We we we talked about the
the bone circles of the Russian plane from the from
the last glacial maximum, where a Stone Age hunter gatherers
would take mammoth bones from either scavenged or or from
memoths that they had killed in hunting, and they would
build these strange circular walls out of them. Uh. And
(01:22):
it's not exactly known what all of these structures were
for We talked about a recently discovered one that that
yielded some especially intriguing results. We talked about what the
function of these buildings could have been. Was it a dwelling?
Was that a storehouse for food? To have some kind
of symbolic or religious significance? Uh? And today we wanted
to continue on that theme. We wanted to build with bones.
(01:44):
That's right. So it's easy, of course to just wallow
and the necromantic, Gothic and death metal glory of imagine
palaces built out of bone, and and certainly we we
enjoy doing that as well. Uh, paluses of bone, thrones
of bone, bone forged weapons that incur one D six
chronic damage on a critical hit, that sort of thing
(02:05):
orcus name be praised. But to use or the lord
of bones old rattle shirt from Game of Thrones, Oh yeah,
we'll come back to rattle shirt in a bit. But yeah,
to use bones as tools and raw materials, I mean, ultimately,
it's just good sense. So first, let's consider why so
for starters to state the obvious bones do decay, They
(02:27):
just decay at a much slower rate than soft tissue.
It might take a decade and say a rainforest environment,
or thousands of years in a dry environment, But decomposition
still eventually occurs, because we have to remember that fossils
are of course no longer proper bones, but they have
undergone mineralization. Yeah, there are a couple of methods by
(02:48):
which fossils are formed, but when you're looking at like
dinosaur fossils, those are not the bones of the dinosaurs.
They are ways that other minerals have have taken the
shape of the original bones. Right, But given our short lives,
it's easy to sort of fall into the loose idea
that bones last and flesh does not, and any way
(03:08):
you shake it. For us vertebrates, our bones do tend
to outlive us. The fledge rots away, but the bones remain,
And then what are you going to do with them? Now,
obviously there's a great deal of room here for human complexity.
We reflesh the bones with memory, magical thinking, and symbolism.
The skull becomes a species wide symbol for impermanence in
(03:29):
the inexorable pull of the grave. But in congress with
this for humans, and separate entirely from it from any organisms,
bones are simply durable materials of varying and novel size
that can lend themselves very well to various uses. And uh,
I thought we might begin by just considering just a
few quick examples from the animal world. All right, let's
(03:52):
do it. So our necromancers are fictional necromancers. From the
top of the first episode, they love a good bone pile.
Any necromancer is going to love a good bone pile.
And while other animals display complex emotions around death as well,
burial of the dead is generally the domain of humans
and Neanderthals. But there are other ways to amass a
(04:13):
collection of bones, and that is via predation. So think
of the Killer Rabbit and Monty Python and the Holy
Grail right right, yeah, look at the bones? Oh yeah,
Tim the enchanterer the bones or does somebody say bones shmones?
I think do they? I don't remember that part. Certainly,
this is a deadly killer organism and as such is
(04:35):
places just littered with with their remains. Yeah, this is
uh the way in which predators are often predators and
scavengers can become what's known in the fossil record as
an accumulating agent that that sort of gathers stuff together
into a single site, right, and then this accumulation is
often referred to as a nidden. So I want to
(04:55):
return us to a place that we've gone to many
times in the podcast, and that is the world of
the octopus or the octopus midden is a great example
of this, consisting of the remains of various creatures that
the octopus has preyed upon. And so this includes generally
it's you we're talking about shells, but also it can
include bones. Now, a midden like this need only be
(05:18):
the accumulated bones of one's prey, but it can be more. Uh.
The Sydney octopus, for example, Octopus uh tetricus. According to
a two thousand fourteen paper from David Shell and Peter
Godfrey Smith UH. Peter Godfrey Smith is the author as
well of Other Minds, The Octopus, the Sea and the
Deep Origins of Consciousness. They point out that this particular
(05:41):
octopus may be engaging in a form of ecosystem engineering
via their middens. Basically, they occur in large numbers on
a shell bed of their prey. Shell bed that has
become ends up becoming home to a community of invertebrate
grazers and scavengers, while all also creating additional shelter possibilities
(06:02):
for the occupods themselves. However, the downside seems to be
that the increased fish population can then bring in sharks
and make it a bit busier and more dangerous than
it would normally be for these octopuses. So, uh, it's
an interesting example, like it kind of getting into this
area of perhaps like accidental tinkering with the environment, accidental
(06:24):
ecosystem engineering that becomes then becomes part of this uh,
this creature's habit, part of its life cycle. But then
there's an unbalancing that occurs as well. So this makes
me think, so if the octopus is um, let me
know if I'm understanding this wrong. Is the idea maybe
that the octopus is using instinctually using this pile of
(06:47):
shells from its prey to attract other animals to the site,
which can then themselves become prey. Yeah, I believe so,
though again it comes with certain complications, maybe also attracting predators.
Yeah yeah, yeah. The octopus here that we're talking about
is is typically solitary. But the side they observed here
(07:08):
was just one of a couple of examples that scientists
have come across of where we've seen octopods living in
high density populations with complex social behaviors. Trash makes friends. Yeah,
but the you know, the the impact of the middens here,
I think drives home how the use of bone or
shell material can sort of emerge out of a creature's lifestyle.
(07:28):
You know, like by eating a lot of creatures and
then leaving their bones, you begin to create artificial environments
that are composed of bones, and that opens and that
changes the ecosystem, at least in pockets. Now, these are,
of course, uh, extant octopods, But what about extinct dctopods. Well,
there's a lot we don't know about extinct octopods because
(07:51):
you know, we're talking about creatures composed uh, you know,
mostly soft tissue, and there they are a rarity in
the fossil record. But there's there's one potential example, certainly
a controversial hypothesis that I've brought up on the show
before and I can't help but bring it up again here.
It's a by paleontologist Mark mcminimon, and he and his
(08:13):
co authors proposed in twleven that a peculiar arrangement of
etheosaur bones from the Triassic period were arranged in a
linear pattern by a presumed giant octopus that was playing
with its food, perhaps even creating some manner of And
this is where he gets really kind of trippy and
(08:34):
more controversial, the idea that perhaps this creature was not
only arranging the bones of its prey in a novel pattern,
but was engaging in some sort of self portrait. Okay,
so I love this idea, but it is we should
definitely acknowledge like at least two layers of pure speculation.
(08:55):
I mean, it is not not accepted by the scientific
community in any brought way at all. So the first
layer of speculation is just the idea that the octopus
was arranging the bones like this, which that doesn't seem
implausible to me, but still it's speculative. We don't know
that's what happened. The second level is the intention behind
the arrangement, the idea that the octopus was creating a
(09:16):
portrait of its own tentacle, right or not tentacle arm? Sorry, yeah,
so you know there's a there's no way to for
us to know that it is pure speculation. I mean,
and again, even the the idea of this being an
actual species. It's just we have a presume the researchers
are presuming that there is an octopus here that did this,
because there is again no no fossil evidence of its
(09:37):
of it's of the soft tissue that would be associated
with this creature that is sometimes informally referred to as
a crack in a Triassic kracking. Now, on the other hand,
I would not say at all that it would be
implausible for an octopus to mess around with the bones
of its prey animals and put them in strange arrangements,
(09:58):
because octopus is absolutely modern. Octopuses play, They play with
objects all the time. They manipulate objects in ways that
have no obvious, uh practical advantage. You know, they're not
just like using objects as tools or something. They apparently
engage in purely recreational object manipulation. Right, And then one
(10:18):
can easily imagine that you have this, you have this
play that's occurring with the bones. This you know, steady
manipulation of the bones, and it's the thing that could
in theory, lead to more complex uses of bones later on,
the use of bones as tools. Now, I don't think
we've see anything occurring in nature with octopods with bones
(10:40):
like this, But we do have examples of octopods seeming
to engage in tool you say, with with coconuts or shells, right, yeah, yeah,
using them basically is like a shield for their bodies. Yeah. Now,
other animals certainly work with bones and shells as well.
Bones factor into the nesting behaviors of certain birds and
pack rats. Bower birds have been no known to use
(11:00):
bones in the creation of their mating bowers. But when
you think of bones as tools or bones as materials,
you can't help but think of hominids and their two
and the two use of early humans in particular, perhaps
in part due to that stunning sequence uh that we've
all seen from two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, right,
(11:20):
in which a human ancestor discovers that the bone of
a taper might be used as a weapon, not stonework,
but bone work. Now. I love this scene. We've talked
about it on the show before, But this scene is
actually a reference to the nineteen forty nine uh Osteodonto
choratic culture hypothesis or O d K hypothesis by Professor
(11:44):
Raymond Dart, the man who also identified the tongue child
fossil in nineteen two UM What does that mean? The
O d K hypothesis is basically bone tooth horn culture
OSTEO danto choratic culture, and the idea here is that
austro Lepithecus Africanists would have engaged in a carnivorous and
(12:05):
sometimes cannibalistic lifestyle augmented by bone and horn tools that
they used to hunt other animals and each other. Dart
based this on skeletal part representation patterns at fossil sites,
presenting evidence that they were possibly using bones as tools
and weapons. Essentially, it's a model for the transition from
(12:25):
ape to human via bone assisted predation, depending on tools
made from the bones of their own kills and or
the kills of other predators that they have scavenged. Now,
this hypothesis has met with a generally skeptical audience and
it's and it had several notable detractors. Now it is
generally considered that O. D K culture did not exist
(12:46):
as Dart envisioned it, and that the bones he observed
were simply due to the natural breakup of skeletons, predator preferences,
and environmental damage to skeletal remains. The criticism of the
hyena is is often brought up as a possible scavenger
responsible for the bone. Didn'ts that Dart interpreted as an
example of this O d K culture. All right, so
(13:08):
darts picture of this extinct human relative making this tool
use transition through the use of bones for wide scale
or large scale predation. That's probably not accurate, but that
doesn't mean that humans never used bones as tools, right, Yeah,
And I want to drive home that od K culture
hypothesis was not it was this was not like a
crazy hypothesis, and it's you know, it's it's it's very
(13:32):
very sensible. But yeah, it just doesn't seem like it's
really um held up over time. But still at the
same time, the use of bone tools is an important
part of of human tool use. There's evidence of early
humans using bone tools one point five million years ago
and what is now South Africa, and these would have
(13:53):
been used, uh we believe to dig in termine mounds.
Included a photo here for you to look at them. Know,
they the kind of thing where you know, if you
didn't know what you were looking at, you might not
get that these were tools. But but these were specialized tools.
I mean, this is a huge problem in archaeology actually.
I mean by the time we as just lay consumers
(14:15):
of artifacts come to these artifacts, they've already been interpreted
as tools. But when you're just like looking at sediments
in the ground and fragments of things, it's often hard
to tell what is a tool and what is not. Yeah.
Another example, I came across bone knives from North Africa
dating back ninety thousand years connected with Middlestone Age terry
(14:37):
and culture, and these would have been made from rib bones. Wait,
rib bones of what of humans or of something else?
I believe animal, But I'm not sure they really were
able to figure out exactly what sort of animal. Now.
According to a two thousand fifteen study from the University
of Montreal, Neanderthals of the Middle Paleolithic might have used
made use of multi purpose bone tools. These were found
(15:01):
at grot Dubaison grotd Bissan at r C Circure in Burgundy, France,
and they would have been used alongside stone tools. So
you know, it's not this idea of like bone or stone,
but like bone and stone. And I think that makes sense,
especially based in the UH the example that we uh
we we focused on for the first episode in this
(15:23):
pair of episodes about bone technology. Yeah. Now, I can
think about some ways in which stone I think would
be superior to bone it for certain types of tool uses.
And one of the things is that, uh it seems
there are certain types of stones that flake away in
a kind of shearing pattern, which along with the technique
(15:44):
of napping, which is where you strike stones together to
try to shear off part of a target stone to
make a sharp edge on it. That that works with stones,
but it doesn't really work with bones, at least as
far as I can imagine. But that doesn't mean bones
would be useless. It would just mean that you couldn't
use them really to create a knife edge as effectively
(16:04):
as you can with napping of certain types of rock. Yeah.
So I could be wrong about that, does it? Does
that seem right to you? Yeah? I think so? Yeah. Yeah.
So again, this would have been a multi purpose bone
tool that the Neanderthals would have used here. Uh so,
the Reacher's researchers point out that, first of all, naturally
the prime purpose of hunting an animal was to obtain
(16:24):
meat and also hide, but the bones were very useful
as well. Uh So, for example, one of the bone
tools found here, that the pivotal multi tool that they're
talking about here, was made from the left femur of
an adult reindeer, and it was seemingly used for a
few different purposes. First of all, carved sharpening of cutting
edges of stone tools, So you would have used bone
(16:47):
tools to help refine and make your stone tools. That
makes sense. Uh. This would have also been probably used
as a scraper and quote evidence of meat butchering and
bone fracturing to extract marrow or evidence on the tool.
So yeah, this would have been a very useful device.
And again I included a picture for you to see, Joe.
And again it's one of these things where you know,
(17:09):
you know, if you if you're not, you didn't know
what you're looking at. If you're not you know paleontologists, uh,
you you might not get that what you're looking at
is a multi tool. Are staring at it here for
the longest time trying to figure out what it looks like.
I realized if you turn it sideways, it looks like
an iguana head. So it does kind of looks like
a horner ear on it. Yeah, but that that spike
(17:29):
edge there. Yeah. Now, another interesting thing about this particular
study is that prehistoric experts were previously reluctant to attribute
bone work tools to Neanderthals, but such fines as this
from the very late nineteen nineties and then into the
twenty first century changed that. I also want to point
out that the Eureka Alert release on this particular study
(17:51):
bears the amusing title quote, you have a dab a
dough stone age man wasn't necessarily more advanced than the Neandertals.
Oh my god. Ten points So that's so good. Wait wait, wait,
should they have gone with the abadebba? Don't because he
was not necessarily more advanced. I don't know if that
quite makes sense. Uh, that one was probably on the table.
I'm guessing. I'm just guessing. And then someone's like, oh, man,
(18:13):
what if we work Homer into this as well? Fred
Flintstone and Homer in one single uh science press release title.
This is gonna be great. Alright, we're gonna take a
quick break, but when we come back, we are going
to discuss more about bone tools and bone technology. Thank alright,
we're back. So bone technology stands alongside stone technology is
(18:38):
as a key marker of technological and cognitive development, even
if we're not putting all of our eggs in the
O d K basket, so you won't really find it
popping up in extent non human animals. But how about
how about this You mentioned old rattle shirt earlier, Um,
you mentioned bone armor and that I brings to buy
not only old rattle shirt, but it makes me think
(19:00):
of the Kurgan from Highlander. Remember that bone armor that
he wears or it's like bone augmented to armor, don't
do the necromongers in in in Chronicles of Riddick were
bone armor. I don't remember. I mean they certainly have
some some dark, gloomy, you know, necromantic aspects to their armor.
(19:20):
I don't remember if they actually had any real bone,
but but certainly they would have appreciated those who wore
pone without a doubt. Another example that's really burned into
my mind is the character General Cal from Willow. You
saw Willow, Yes, yes, yes, yes, it's been a long time,
but yeah, he was the sub villain in that particular movie.
(19:41):
And of course he was played by Pat Roach, everyone's
favorite former pro wrestler British heavy man. Uh you know,
he's alway, he was always fighting. He's he's what he's
He's been killed by Indiana Jones, He's been killed by
Conan the Barbarian, all the greats. In fact, he as
he played the Sorcerer in Conan the Destroyer. Uh if
(20:03):
you're really wait a minute, did the Sorcerer and Conan
the Destroyer also have bone armor and get like a
sword thrown through his head or something? Um? It was
the scene with the mirrors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
really a fantastic sequence. I really need to I can't
believe I'm saying this. I really need to watch Conan
the Destroyer again because it does have some great two
(20:25):
scenes there. It has a reputation for being quite bad,
but we should revisit anyway. It had a tough act
to follow, for sure, but it has some some pretty
wonderful magic in it, as I recall, certainly really more overt,
you know, fantasy magic than what you find in the
first film. Uh. Well, anyway, this is making me wonder. Okay,
(20:45):
bone armor real thing? Did anybody ever actually try to
wear armor made out of bones? Well? You know, obviously
there's some problems with the idea. I mean it would
it would be ideal if there was a slightly larger
bipedal creature that had bones and bone plates that were
just already perfectly made for someone to wear his armor. Uh.
(21:05):
You know, I'm sure we would hunt it to extinction
uh in no time. But I don't know. I wonder
if that's been that idea has been explored in fantasy.
That's where all the squatches went, so they were to
extinction for their bones. Uh. Yes, the squatch skull makes
such a great helm. Well, in reality, you know, you know,
there are probably some examples you can come to where
(21:26):
people are used utilizing bone ornamentation, but in terms of
using bone as like the primary material and construction, I
did run across a really cool example. Uh. This is
from a three thousand, nine hundred year old suit of
bone armor that was unearthed in Omsk, Siberia. And in
(21:47):
this example, and I encourage anyone to look up an
example of this, you'll find a picture if you just
look for bone armor OMPs that's O. M. S. K Uh.
In this example, what we have is basically a shirt
of plate mail, but with each individual plate carved from
animal bone and Uh, you know, it reminds me too
of the sort of the ceremonial jade armor that you
(22:09):
see used in Chinese culture. Um, where nobody's wearing like
just like the big obvious bones of a creature, but
you have all of these little plates of bone. They
are then stitched into this this garment that is worn
by the warrior. And this would have been worn, the
researchers point out, by a very specialized warrior, a hero
if you will, a prince of the universe, if you will, yes, Well,
(22:33):
do we know exactly what the pros and cons of
this type of armor would have been if it involved bone? Like,
are there like how does that compare to standard materials?
Do do we know anything about that? About the it's durability?
I mean, I think this is something we need to
explore and if if for a future like full on
look at armor, which is something we've been talking about
(22:55):
wanting to do for a while. But I mean, basically,
we do see so many different approaches to armor in
different cultures depending on available resources. You know, we we've
discussed in the past, Uh, the Inca and how Inca
armor depended so heavily on fiber. You know, and UH
and it could apparently it was apparently quite effective in
(23:16):
their engagements. Uh. Certainly you get into cultures that have
more access to uh various metal working UH strategies, and
you see the metal armor. Uh. This seems to to
make sense though, because you would have a durable material
that would would augment whatever, you know, kind of like
hide based armor. You're you're you're you're creating. Uh, but
(23:38):
it's gonna be it's gonna be lighter than using little
bits of stone. It's gonna be lighter than weighing yourself
down with this with an enormous stone garment. Uh. So
I think that's it's basically it's just gonna come down
to material availability. Now you said this was unearthed in
Omsk in Siberia. I wonder with the people living in
this region have had access to many other types of
(24:01):
resources to make armor out of, or would would be
closer to like the the Bone House in uh In
in the Ice age situation where basically this is what
you got. Yeah, I like I said, I feel like
resource availability is is one of the key aspects of this.
And U this would have been UM. This would have
been Bronze age UM technology basically. Uh. The article I
(24:25):
was reading about this from the Siberian Times titled Warriors
thirty year old suit of are of the bone armor
uneartheden OMPs uh from September six, two fourteen. UH. They
mentioned that that at the at the time, uh in
the individual using this armor and uh and also the
(24:46):
individuals they would have have battled, you would have found
the weapons at the time consisting of bone and stone arrowheads,
but also bronze knives, spears tipped with bronze and bronze axes,
and and and they contend that this sort armor would
have held up reasonably well against the armors of the time,
and therefore this would have been like a very precious suit.
(25:07):
This would have been like, this would have been high
end again, the stuff a true hero would wear, and
not just for decorative reasons, actually like for functional reasons. Yeah.
They seem to think that this would have this would
have been functional. Yeah, alright, well I'm getting some Yeah.
I mean that the artistic interpretation looks looks rather cool,
rather stylish. You know, it's not rattle shirt. It's not
(25:28):
nearly as intimidating in terms of looking like you're just
covered in bones, but it has trans it has used
the bone as a raw material for their technology. All Right,
we need to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more. Thank and we're back. So earlier
we talked about octopods creating their bone middens and in
(25:50):
doing so, remaking the local ecosystem. And uh, I haven't
an example here that that is really interesting that that
I ran across concerning human and is doing much the
same way. In two thousands, sixteen, researchers from the University
of Georgia discussed how native people's in southwest Florida, known
as the Caloosa, engaged in landscape engineering quote essentially terraforming,
(26:15):
according to study lead and University of Georgia anthropologist of
Victor Thompson, Alright, so how would this work? Okay, so,
what we're dealing with fisher gatherer hunter people here. You know,
they're depending a lot on on gathering up um and
and and hunting creatures that live in and around the water.
So what they would have done is they would have
(26:36):
piled their accumulated shells, all the shells of the creatures
that they've scavenged and you know for food already. They
would put these in massive heaps to construct water bound towns,
essentially artificial islands. Hundreds of millions of shells would have
ultimately been required to produce these islands. But again it's
(26:58):
it's very much in keeping with sort of what those
octopods are doing and and also ties back to what
we were talking about with the mammoths early on, Like
you're accumulating these leftovers, these remnants, uh, these these hard
materials that that are the results of your lifestyle. And
then you put all that together, that's a lot of
(27:20):
material You can start doing things with it. You can
build uh, some sort of a small palace out of them,
or you can keep them together, you know, add mud
and other materials and essentially start remaking the landscape that
you live in. Yeah, letting these in edible animal products
not just become trash, but become building materials, become tools,
become a way of shaping your world. Now, in terms
(27:42):
of other bone structures and human culture, you'll find various
examples of this as well. Various crips and assuarias come
to mind. You know, bone houses that at times have
say walls or structures that are decorated with bones, if
not made of bones and stuff. To Bow Your Mind
actually has an older episode about ossuaries that I would
(28:04):
refer listeners to. This is what I did with Julie
Douglas several years ago. But one of the more amusing
and less gloomy examples of the sort of thing that
I came across is that the fossil bone Cabin in
Medicine Bow, Wyoming, which you absolutely should look up a
picture of. There's an Atlas Obscura article about it as well,
(28:24):
and it is this uh it first, it just looks
like a rock little house, you know, nothing too gloomy,
nothing too weird, but it's just standing out in the
middle of nowhere where it's kind of like waste land
landscape around it. And it has a sign out front
at least when this picture was taken that says believe
it or not. And this cabin is is itself only
(28:47):
about eighty years old, but it's bill using rock that
contains fossilized dinosaur bone fragments, So essentially it is a
dinosaur bone house out in the middle of Wyoming. I
want to be I'm gonna be the Indiana Jones of
this house. This belongs in a museum Yeah, you know, Joe,
(29:08):
we don't have any any live shows coming up, but
I'm just gonna go and say it. If we could
book this location store for a for a live show,
I would do it. We maybe we only have like
one wyoming listener out there, uh, that could possibly come,
but it would still be worth it to record in
the Believe it or not, fossil dinosaur cabin. Wyoming mind
(29:28):
blowers out there, chime in, let us know you exist,
tell us contact and stuff to blow your mind dot com.
If enough of you let us know what, We'll try
to see if we can do a show from the roof.
All Right, we're beginning to to reach the end here,
But Joe, I understand you have one more gnarly bone
palace denizen to discuss with us here. Well. Yeah, I
(29:50):
was thinking about other species that practice something like the
prehistoric bone lords the Russian plane, and I came across
evidence of a marvelous wasp species that I think would
have had a real affinity for the mammoth bone houses.
This animal lives in southeast China and it's known as
due to a genia O sari um. You can probably
(30:11):
hear in the the second part of its species name
osari Um. That's named after the ossuaries right the the
the human bone houses where where bones are stored or
sometimes used in construction um. And this is also known
that this animal is known as now the bone house wasp. Now,
the use of the word bone there might be a
little misleading, because while this wasp absolutely does practice corps architecture,
(30:35):
it's bricks are not the bones of mammals, but the
crumpled exoskeletons of ants. And I gotta give credit to
Gwin Pearson, writing for Wired, for one of the best
article leads I've ever read. So she's writing an article
about this animal, and she starts with a quote from
Conan the Barbarian. You know that scene where the general
asks Conan what is best in life? And Conan says,
(30:58):
of course, to cross joy to me. See them driven
before you and hear the lamentations of the women and
they all laugh. You know, ha ha, that is good.
But Pearson goes on to say, a newly described wasp
species would disagree. What is best in life is to
feed your children living spiders and build a wall around
your nursery in which you've entombed the bodies of giant ants.
(31:20):
I think that's a pretty good point in comparison, because
it's like, um, the same way that the you know,
the the general riding out over the step, you know,
must project strength in order to in his mind protect
his own clan. This, uh, this female wasp that that
builds this nest out of dead insects is also doing
it in a way from a place of love. Yeah. Yeah,
(31:42):
this is a wonderful organism if memory serves. I did
a monster blog post about them, uh back when we
had blogs. I did one comparing the good old days. Yeah,
I did one comparing this species to the creeper from
the Jeeper Creepers movie, which is another intitated like builds
(32:02):
stuff out of dead things. Really, I guess kind of
a common trope, or at least not an uncommon trope
in the world of fictional monsters. But here we have
the real deal that the natural world example. This was
the only example that I could really find of this
being done with insects. And maybe there's another one, but
but I didn't come across it. Uh So, this species
(32:23):
and its unique nest building strategy was described in the
paper in Plos one by Michael stab, Michael Ohl, Chaodong
Jou and Alexandra Maria Klein uh And the paper was
called a unique nest protection strategy in a new species
of spider wasps. So the species was found and described
(32:43):
during a biodiversity survey in the forests of young Z
Province and uh So. The bone house wasp is a
pomp a lid, which is a family of spider hunting wasps.
This also includes the famous tarantula hawk. And there are
a bunch of different species of pompa lids, but most
are pretty similar in their basic survival and reproduction strategy.
(33:05):
A lot of times the adults on their own would
seem to be fairly peaceful. A lot of them are
you know, sort of vegetarian nectar feeders, but when it's
time to reproduce and provide for the next generation, that's
when the true horror comes in. So they tend to
be solitary rather than living in colonies like so many
other bees and wasps. And the standard predatory reproductive strategy
(33:28):
is that a female wasp, a female pomp lid, will
find a spider and then sting the spider, and the
sting will paralyze it and it will drag the still
alive but paralyzed spider back to a nearby nest and
then lay an egg, usually a single egg, on the
spider's body, often like sort of on the abdomen, and
(33:49):
then it will seal the spider up in this cask
of a manteado style live burial, and then the egg
hatches and the larva begins to eat the spider, slowly
inside it out as it grows, often saving the most
vital internal organs For last man, I love wasps um.
Yeah you know, I actually wrote how Wasps work for
(34:12):
How Stuff Works years and years ago, and I remember
that was one of the features. One of the many
features about wasps in general that I love is that
that adult solitary wasps mostly feed on nectar, but then
they spend most of their time foraging food for their
carnivorous younglings. Yeah. Well, I mean it makes me think
like the human analogy would be like an adult an
(34:35):
adult who is vegan, but they also are like hunting
animals for their for their babies to like eat while
they're still alive. Yeah, baby needs meat, Baby needs a
living meat in the nursery, but the hunt entirely powered
by blueberry smoothies. Yes. Um, so what makes this bone
house wasp different from the other pomplids is the strategy
(34:58):
that it uses to protect the net where its larva
gets sealed in with its food source. And uh and
so the basic idea here is that the nest will
have a vestibular cell or sort of like an outer
cell area where the adult wasp will pack in the
dead bodies of ants. And uh So the nests of
(35:19):
the species the researchers found were less vulnerable to attacks
than the nests of other similar wasps. And this would
would seem to suggest that the dead ants play a
role in repelling predators or parasites from the nest, likely
through chemical cues smells, Right, so there's something about these
ants that, you know, even when they're dead, they give
(35:40):
off this smell like, oh, that's something I don't want
to mess with, and the predators will go away because
I mean, you know, an ant colony can be a
formidable adversary. You know. This also reminds me of another
group of famous cinematic corpse de filers, uh, the chainsaw
family from Texas Chainsaw mask here, because what do they
do with the various bones uh, and and fragments that
(36:01):
they have left over they hang from the trees right
surrounding the compound. Uh, you know, almost to warn people away. Uh,
you know, except for, of course, the meddling teenagers that
are central to the plot. Well, I mean, it makes
me think back to the to the bone lords, the
prehistoric peoples of the Russian plane. Obviously, again there is
(36:22):
no direct evidence whatsoever that the bones that they built
these rings out of were in any way to repel predators.
But now I'm just trying to imagine for a second,
could could play any kind of role like that? Could
there be some significance we're not imagining where this is.
Maybe it gives off a stink like a carnivore's den
or something. And I don't know, pure guess work. I mean,
(36:44):
I guess any kind of any kind of benefit you'd
get like that, you'd probably also get get concurrent downsides
of stinking like meat and attracting carnivores in the process.
But but you can easily see with this wasp example,
how like this is the sort of thing that they
would likely emerge out of just the keeping of a midden,
you know, like the leftovers of these metals are around
(37:07):
and or in the nest, and then in some cases
they can they can come to have a you know,
a key uh, you know benefit, They can offer a
key benefit to the nest itself. Okay, So if you
were going to play the strategy and try to plant
something around your house to keep people out that that
worked on a on the basis of smell, what would
it be? What would repel everything and attract nothing? Oh,
(37:31):
I mean, there are plenty of grizzly examples, but um
but you know, an actual real life example, and this
is completely ridiculous, but there have been times where I've
been working on my laptop on my front porch and
once the mosquitoes are active, I'll kill a mosquito and
they'll be this weird idea that I should leave the
corpse of the mosquito out where the others can see
(37:53):
it as a warning, you know, that they shouldn't mess
with me because I will kill them. They're not going
to be fast enough. Um but but of course that's
just ludicrous on my part. But there's like some sort
of weird instinct to do that, to make an example
out of the creature that is that is hunting me. Yeah,
I would say probably works to the opposite effect. You've
created a martyr and now they must avenge their falling sister. Yeah,
(38:16):
there's that. There is that, but in terms of like, actually, yeah,
I don't know, hanging skulls outside of my my home.
I mean around Halloween we all do that, but that
that actually has the opposite effect that people in Yeah. Well,
I gotta tell you, going back to that first episode
about the about the bone circles, I mean, some of
(38:37):
the hypotheses offered do seem interesting, but I've still got
this mystery banging around in my head. I'm not going
to forget about this. Yeah, it's it's one of those
that really forces you to to think long and hard
about you know, who our ancestors were, and you know
what was important to them in this uh this this
this time of great trial. All right. So there you
(38:58):
have it, a second dose of the Bone Palace. More
examples of bone technology, bone collection, and the remaking of
our world with the remnants of those that came before.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
Grizzly episodes of stuff to blow your mind, you will
find them wherever you find our podcast and you can
(39:20):
find us just about anywhere. If you go to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com, that will shoot you
over to the I Heart Listening for our show and
you can of course subscribe and listen there as well.
Huge thanks as always to our amazing audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, to let us
(39:41):
know you listen and you listen from Wyoming, or just
to say hi, you can email us at contact that's
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the I heart
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