The Artifact: The Meister “Footprint”

In this episode of STBYM’s The Artifact, Robert discusses so-called Meister footprint (which is in no way an actual footprint)...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and
this is the Artifact, a short form series from Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on particular objects, ideas
and moments in time. And did those feet in ancient

(00:25):
time walk upon England's mountains green? And was the Holy
Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures scene? Those are
the stirring words of English Romantic Age poet William Blake,
inspired by an apocryphal tale of a young Jesus of
Nazareth visiting the British Isles. The same sense of wonder

(00:45):
and dubious believability may also be applied to the so
called Meister footprint, which would seem to suggest that feet
in ancient time walked upon a bunch of trilobytes during
the Cambrian period. To be clear, this is quite impossible,
but let's discuss the details of the fine. Amateur fossil
hunter William Meister discovered the so called footprints in the

(01:09):
Wheeler Shale fossil site in nineteen Breaking open a slab
of rock, he discovered a print that he took to
be a human sandal print complete with a trilobite crushed
under the heel. These findings were championed by creationists eager
to poke holes in geologic and evolutionary history, because, if
even remotely true, the print would mean that sandals clad humans,

(01:32):
if not a time traveling Jeffrey Lebowski or Christ himself,
walked about in the Cambrian muck. But of course this
is not a sandal print. As pointed out by geologist
William Stokes in Tripping Over to Trilobite, a study of
the Meister tracks by Ernest C. Conrad, the Meister specimen

(01:54):
was the result of a natural rock fracture known as
a spawling. Furthermore, as Conrad points out, the fracture only
resembles a sandal print in the most superficial way possible quote,
the specimen was in no sense fate, and I am
sure it was found exactly as reported Stokes as quoted
as writing quote. But I, along with my geologist friends,

(02:17):
are equally sincere in my belief that it is an
accidental natural product and not a footprint. And again, the
fossil in question is a good five hundred million years old.
Humans only split from their ancestors between two hundred thousand
and three hundred thousand years ago. The oldest sandals yet
recovered are a mere ten thousand years old, discovered in

(02:38):
oregons Fort Rock Cave. The Maister Print is not technically
an artifact, nor is it evidence of one, but it
does serve as an interesting illustration of humanity's willingness to
redesired answers in the rock and jump to human centric interpretations.

(03:00):
Yeah tune in for additional episodes of the Artifact each week,
and as always, you can email us at contact at
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow

(03:20):
Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
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