CLASSICS (Bonus Episode): Dr. Meldrum Returns!

one hundredth episode, our two hundredth episode. We really appreciate your time.

a number of disciplines that he published in regularly. He was a paleoanthropologist, so he worked with the both the discovery of and identification and analysis of fossil hominin bones, skeletal remains, and so also as a classical physical anthropologist, I'm sure he did teach the Human Osteology course, which is an in depth treatment of the skeletal system of the human species and for both evolutionary but also archaeological objectives.

He was also very talented anatomist and applied that talent to forensic reconstructions of crania from partial remains. So his Gigantopitheicis skull is an example of that. He also did, you know, the only kind of working model of what meganthropists might have looked like based on its very large and robust mandible remains. So based on the correlation of form and function, he could take a few bits and estimate what the remainder of the skull may have looked like.

And I think he you know, exhibited some real talent and insight in that respect. He was kind of a renaissance man in many ways.

one an alternate pathway. Instead of the classical anthropological degree that included the disciplines the subdisciplines of archaeology, social, cultural linguistics, and physical I instead was a cohort at an institution where physical anthropologists had been recruited into departments of anatomy at medical schools to teach human gross anatomy in the health professions programs in medical school, physical therapy school, and

so forth. And so my degree was actually an anatomical sciences So rather than having with an emphasis with an emphasis in physical anthropology, so rather than having the classic for sub discipline anthropological training, which would really better suit me for employment in an anthropology department, I got this degree which then afforded me the opportunity to teach human gross anatomy regional gross anatomy at the graduate level in

medical schools and there. Like I said, there were programs like that that were popping up in various places, and Sunny Stonybrook was one, Duke was one where I did a post doc, and others Johns Hopkins, UCLA and other schools. But anyway, so it was a little different. So I basically had the first two years of medical school elbow to elbow with one hundred and twenty medical students. You know, I think there were six of us in my cohort

of anthropology students. And when then subsequently, as those medical students would go into more and more clinical courses, we would go into classes in evolutionary biology, in osteology, in comparative primate anatomy, and so forth, and so more of the basic sciences that touched on anthropology and ecology and evolution. And so it was a great experience. I mean, it was really it was a tough program though. I mean, of the six, I think only two of us completed the program.

early bipedal hominin. And it was that, you know, that that latent interest in bipedalism, which was probably initially seeded by the interest in Bigfoot, you know, another bipedal primate, that that motivated me to pursue that. And you know, as you go along, your opportunities across your path that that afford the chance to kind of branch out a little bit and do some different things as well. And so I mean along the way, for example, I got

interested in locomotive behavior. You're in primates, both living and fossil, much more broadly than just human bipedalism actually, and I would note that it's a kind of a tight not a closed shop, but it's a it's a narrow niche

because of the rarity of hominine fossils. So really, unless your professor was actually had access to the to the fossil sites and was participating in the discovery of new material, you rarely had the chance to do any of the initial examination, analysis, and so forth study of those fossils. So I had to kind of come at bipedalism from from the side door, you know, through through the mud

room and back into the up the hallway. And so I was actually my doctoral dissertation was on terrestrial adaptations in in in monkeys, in African monkeys and looking at adaptations to terrestrial quadrupedalism, and then I could compare and contrast that from you know, from a more theoretical practical perspective with bipedalism. And it was actually a very effective way because those features that were held in common were those that were common to walking on the ground versus

clamoring and climbing in the trees. And then those that were distinctive between bipeds and quadrupeds were those features that were unique to the adaptations for walking on two legs.

So anyway, so along the way I dabbled in I got interested in South American primate evolution because of the again the opportunity of working with my mentor in the field, and then on another occasion, when I was doing a post doc at Duke, the opportunity to dabble in some DNA sequencing and approaching the reconstruction of the phylogeny or family tree in this case South American monkeys by way of looking at the genes in living primates was another.

I mean, that was a very different departure for me, But one I wasn't going to say no to my mentor, and two it was a great opportunity to learn a technique that, as it turns out, I didn't end up pursuing that further, but it placed me in a very good position to, from a more informed stance, be able to evaluate the publications of the studies that others were doing in an area that it was still of real interest to me. That was the evolution of South American

primates as an adaptive radiation. So you know, principles of evolution stribology that have been applicable to a variety of different species in different continents and so on. So it's all it's all good.

He recognized it as a pressure ridge, but tried to explain it as you know, a push off from the foe foot of a very flat a very flat foot. But he did not eliminate the the existence of an arch entirely. He he and and this is why he

had to hypothesize that the toes were very short. You know, our our toes have shortened remarkably by comparison to chimpanzees and gorillas, and even in comparison to the intermediate state, the intermediate links found in some early bipedal hominins like the Australia Pithesenes, which still had rather long and somewhat curved pedal digits foot digits of their feet toes.

toed dress shoes and so forth, very confining footwear. But and even you know, cowboy boots, there's a little bit of accommodation there because the boot that has a pointed toe is usually a longer toe. I mean, it was a longer toes so you could keep it in your stirrup. Basically, it was the strategy nowadays that you know, these these fancy fashionable dress shoes have really law toes and the pointed toes of the shoe, the pointed tips of which extend out beyond and so they don't know the toes

aren't crushed into that little conical tip. But nevertheless, no, it's interesting because when the Victorian era physical anthropologists struck out to study all the various ethnic diversity that was out there, they thought that they would find these poor, unshod native tribes would display very poor foot hygiene, foot conditions, that they would have fallen arches, that they would have all kinds of ailments of the joints and so forth,

because they didn't have the benefit of Western supportive footwear. And of course what they found was just the opposite. That the human foot responded very well, and the arches were healthy and were high, the toes were splayed, the pads pointed down towards the ground like they were supposed to. They were very much fewer foot ailments amongst these barefoot

tribal peoples than there were amongst the Western Europeans. So in any case, so Grover was his argument was that Sasquatch had even shorter toes, which kind of fed into this image that.

between the toes. But you get the profile of the first and second toe, and that little toe on that fourteen and a half inch ish foot is as long as my pinky finger, and that's pretty, you know. So imagine toes on that foot that are as long as my fingers on my hand, and combine that with, you know, the musculature of the lower extremity and something as big as this creature probably was, and that's a powerful, grasping, prehensile foot. So then the other thing that kind of

got it going was there were two other things. One was looking at the Bosbird cripplefoot, because you know, Grover had actually attempted to do a skeletal construction or inferential reconstructure outlining on that diagram and on actually etching on the physical cast his interpretation of the of the foot, and he had the toes very short. But as I looked at more details of the flection creases and so forth, and where the joints would be based on the contours

of the outline of the foot, it didn't work. It didn't work. You had to have a toe that was much much longer. And then that combined with those individuals, particularly some of the examples on the Blue Creek Mountain trackway that had a very decided flection crease across the ball of the foot, this split ball that has gotten you know, various I've actually got this old diagram that was drawn by Ivan Sanderson where he tried to interpret and I should publish it as just a short article

because it's of such interesting historical significance. I think as these investigators tried to grapple with this otherwise inexplicable anatomical characteristic. But I mean, if you look at your own at the palm of your hand you have, and you flex your fingers just a little bit at the knuckle, you see it throws up a crease across the palm of your hand where the tissue of the palm extends beyond that joint up under the proximal filangies the first bones

in your fingers. Well, in the sasquatch tracks as well as in human footprints as well human feet there's evidence of that of an extension of that soulpad to varying degrees up underneath that first bone. In some individuals it

goes almost up to that first interfalangeal joint. Well, when those toes flex, then they create a crease right across the soul at the mid ball at the heads of the metatarsals as they join the digits where your knuckles the corresponding position of where your knuckles are in your hand. So in the toes flex, it throws up a crease just like that. And in fact, if you go and look at your birth certificate, if you have an inked footprint, you'll find that you, like almost every human baby has

that flexion crease on its foot when they're born. But as the arch develops, as the infant starts to walk, that soulpad fills out some more with more connective tissue and less baby fat, and you get an elaboration of the connective tissue under the ball of the foot at that metatarsal falangel joint, and it fills out, and so in most people it pretty much disappears.

words after that either. So but to your point, though, and actually doctor Krantz made that same point in this book now that i'm thinking of it.

Now the prevenience is little clear to me because I originally thought that it was at the at d Duck Springs and was found just just prior to the shooting of that footage there. But now I'm told to know it was a different it was an earlier segment.

I believe it's called Gifford Peak in the previous April if I remember correctly, by the shape of the casts in the ground drawing, you know, with the redit I look looking at the copies that I have, you can identify them as Oh, those are the same individuals those are the actually those are the same casts. So that was actually from Gifford Peak the previous ninety two I think in April, I remember correctly.

It goes more directly into the ground. Because of these differences, what behavioral differences can we infer?

can we learn from looking at it? And one of the things that just blows me away is when you take a robust australopithesene like paranthropists paranthropist boise eye, which existed in East Africa about to one point eight million two, about eight hundred thousand years ago in the known fossil record anyway, and it stood about five to five and

a half feet tall. Was robust. When we say robust austrolipithesenes, we're talking about their facial cranial adaptations, these heavy jaws, extremely enlarged molars and premolars and reduced canines for a more side freeing up a side to side what they call the phase two of the chewing cycle, the grinding aspect, with very very thick enamel and very puffy rounded cusps and crusts on the teeth, so indicating indicative of a

diet of very tough and very hard items. Okay, So anyway, if you take the we have remarkably complete examples of crania of this species. And you take one of those and just scale it to the same absolute size as Patty and put it up next to her bust, and sure enough, every single bony landmark from the top of the head to the receding chin on the jaw blinds up. Now, you know, that's that's no small point because the you know, the facial proportions on this thing, this robust astrolopithesene, are

really remarkable. They are an extreme specialization for this what we call a dual fagius diet dural meaning as you might expect, like from durabol, a very tough, unyielding diet. And so you know, some some have compared these robust

austerlopithesenes to quizin arts. They can, you know, really grind up and handle all kinds of food ite and so it's it's an extreme adaptation with very deep jaws with very flaring angles to the to the mandible, a very prominent cheekbones that that flare forward and why to provide attachment for the chewing muscles on the side, the massi muscles that it even has a bit of a crest on its skulled for increased attachment of the anterior fibers of the temporalis muscle, which is the second of the

two large, very large principal chewing muscles, the temporalis and the mass anyway, so point for point, I mean it's not just a queer coincidence. I mean that correlation suggests that the sasquatch has a similar type of diet and has those same extreme craniofacial adaptations.

And so one of the interesting correlations to this, as I mentioned, the reduced canines that allows that side to

side grinding. Is it it interesting that the most credible sightings of sasquatch, where the observer has been privileged to see the teeth from a gaping smile or an open mouth, there's usually an absence of projecting canines like you would see in a bear or in a gorilla or an orangutan, you know, And so that correlates with the you know, the fact that that that most witnesses who do see the teeth comment on the squared off human like appearance

of the teeth without fang like canines projecting. That is exactly the anatomy that would be correlated with the facial skeletal adaptations and proportions that that are seemed to be a present.

robust australopithesene in that regard as well. And these robust australopithesenes were barely you know, bipedal gorillas or gyms in that regard. Their brain was maybe fifty cubic centimeters ccs bigger than that for a chimpanzee. So you know, sasquatch would have an absolutely largeranium because of its more gigantic size. But nevertheless, the proportion of brain to body mass would

be the same. The encephalization quotient, you know, when you take a ratio of brain size to body mass, would be on par with that of the known grade apes or early hominins like the robust australopitheesenes, which were just you know, a half step half notch greater. So then go back to the hand question again, and you pointed

out some of the distinctions. I mean, the limited record we have of hand prints and casts thereof seem to consistently indicate a hand that lacks the adaptations associated with opposability, with that potential for fine precision grip like you use when you hold a pin or pick up a needle. You know, that requires the action of opposition, bringing the pads of the thumb in direct opposition to the pads

of the other digits, particularly the index finger. Obviously, now those movements, those fine, finely controlled movements, have selected four specializations of the muscles at the base of the thumb which give that thumb kind of a drumstick looking appearance. That's called the theen r pad or the theenar muscles, And that feature seems to be uniformly absent from the sasquatch and in fact, instead of the thumb being set

at a ninety degree rotation to the other digits. So if you look at your hand right now, you flex your fingers, they cross your palm, but your thumb is facing ninety degrees across your palm. So when you flex your fingers, it doesn't flex your thumb. It does not move in the same orientation that your other fingers does. It crosses over the palm at a right angle. And so that set sort of predisposes the thumb for this

opposition positioning. Well, the sasquatch thumb much more like an ape, gorilla, or chim the thumb isn't rotated nearly so much, and so when the thumb flex is, it really moves in parallel to the other digits, and since it doesn't have the adaptations for that precision grip, you'll notice a flattening of the palm and a lack of the enlargement of

that drumstick appearance. Those the in are muscles. Now, isn't it interesting because the hand lacks the very features that we associate with precision grip, with fine grip, which we infer as essential to the evolution of tool use, of the manufacture of stone tools, for example, or other manual activities associated with other sorts of tool use, with the use of needle and thread, or you know balls or scrapers, Well,

scrapers are more power grip. And the correlation being is witnesses don't see sasquatch doing or doing those types of behaviors or utilizing those tools. Nor do we find an archaeological record in North America that is attributed to Sasquatch. I mean, they're certainly not making the arrowhead points that we find in Native American as a result of Native American activities.

the thinking of anthropologists of the time. And yet someone allegedly hoaxed all these things, you know, left this trail of breadcrumbs that is so remarkably coherent but actually has anticipated what we now understand.

counterintuitive to what was considered conventional wisdom and at the risk of being redundant. But it's such a prime example that bears repetition the writings of John Napier, who was a bonafide primatologist an anatomist. He was a physician and a trained anatomist. And it's interesting that it's those since we started off talking about anatomy, that tend to have a more open mind to some of that anatomical evidence. I guess it comes through the appreciation of the significance

of that evidence due to the training and experience. But Napier was very focused on the footprints, and in his book, which you know, had a lot of negative tones or observations, he still the final bottom line was he was convinced there was something out there that sasquatch, something was leaving footprints, and therefore sasquatch must exist. What exactly it was he was able to conclusively state. But when it came to the Patterson Gillen film, he was quite negative, not quite negative.

He had a negative opinion. He did not he could not endorse it. And yet he was forthright enough to acknowledge. He really couldn't offer a good rationale for that rejection, but he said, when he saw that figure on the film, from the waist up it looked essentially like an ape, and yet from the waist down it had long legs like a human or a hominin.

so isn't it interesting? Though, because shortly after that the publication of that book, which was in the early seventies seventy two, I think in the mid to later seventies, was kind of considered by some to be the golden age of anthropology, with the discoveries of Australopithegus a Forensis and Lucy and sort of the first real glimpse beyond going back to the very beginnings of the emergence of hominin bipedalism, it was thought at that time, and so

for the first time we had much more complete hip bones. The pelvies, we had the thigh bones, the femera that we had knees and so forth, and associated with the crania of these australopithesenes. And the statements to the popular press were, isn't this interesting? From the waist up they look essentially like chimpanzees, but from the waist down they look like little Harry humans.

probably is where the more inlined inline trackways. The lack of straddle in the trackways probably comes from, I'm guessing, is the center of gravity issue. Let's address that and talk about that a little bit and how that ties into like the bent knee gate as a shock absorber sort of thing, and the high leg lift in the swing phase of the gates and things.

not the hip joint. But in a chimp, they are are elongated, tall and still very narrow, but they're very tall, and they face front to back so that the muscles, the gluteal muscles that attach on the back of those blades are acting simply as retractors of the hip. They extend and extenders of the hip. So when you're climbing up a tree, or when you're walking, you know on

all fours, you don't worried about balance. Then they weren't to draw the hip back, draw the thigh back as the hip is extended and you're walking forward, all right. So the thought was then that that had to be modified in order to become bipeedle. Well, as it turns out now, which it should have been self evident, it

really was, but sometimes it just got lost. Gymps have been evolving over the same period of time since the divergence from a last shared common ancestor maybe in different ways that they have been involving, and they have evolved these remarkable specializations for arm hanging. They've experienced a shortening of the lower back, the lumbar spine, and this elongation of these of these hip bones, and obviously the greater emphasis on the forelimbs, so their forelimbs are actually longer

than their hind limbs. And so but now as we as the fossil record, you have to remember that chips and guerrillas are themselves relic populations that do not reflect the totality of ape evolution. We have over well over one hundred different species of extinct eight that have been discovered in the past half century, and they don't often get as much press, you know, as the human ancestors.

But one thing that has come out of that is that some of these also sort of dabbled in bipedalism, maybe not a fully committed bipedalism on the ground, but because they spent time climbing and standing and reaching overhead for resources, their bodies with that tailless torso and had a modified, more generalized pelvis that was less like a

chimp than it was similar to our own. And so the the emergence of the bipedal hominins that then committed to walking on the ground really probably really didn't have

to change their pelvis all that much. Now, as far as narrowing, the only there really hasn't been a trajectory of narrowing so much as it's it's the lack of sexual dimorphism, the lack of differences between the genders that we see in humans, which is entirely the result of our big brains a female pelvis has to have a broader outlet in order to accommodate a human infant with a relatively large brain by comparison to an ep like

a chimper gorilla. This is why some of the statements that were made about the PG film by the experts of the time are so inane and so silly in hindsight.

Infant sasquatch, as we've just discussed earlier, have a small brain. They have a brain that's not much bigger than a chimps or gorillas, and so females wouldn't have white hips. Females would have a pelvis that essentially looks just like a male sasquatch pelvis, and so a female sasquatch like Patty, even though she sports breasts to nurse her offspring, has a pelvis that doesn't look much different than her male counterpart would, and she would walk like a man. And

this comes into the next point you made. When the commitment to terrestrial bipedalism was made, in order to help balance the torso over not three limbs or two limbs, but one at a time, there were some changes that pelvis. That shorter pelvis, not necessarily narrower, but shorter. The blades instead of facing just front to back, curled around to

the sides. So now the smaller what we call the lesser glue teles, the gluteous minimus, and medius, especially the medias, are on the sides, and so instead of pulling the leg back the lower limb the thigh back retracting it,

they balance the torso over the support limb. You can test this out just next time you stand up and take a step or two, put your hand down right on the side of your hip, and as you lift one leg, you'll feel the muscles on the opposite side on the support limb flex, keeping that pelvis and torso from dropping to the unsupported side, you know, like a drunken soldier. Well, just think about the way a chimpanzee

walks on two legs. That characteristic and actors try to emulate that whenever they don an eight suit, And it's that characteristic kind of arms out like a tightrope walker and swinging the torso back and forth in a swaying motion over the alternating limbs in order to balance the pel or the torso over the support limb anyway. So one of the ways to address that, in addition to the reorganization of the pelvis, is to angle the thigh in towards the midline, so your base of support is

already closer to the center of mass than otherwise. So when we walk, instead of a wide splayed gate with our feet apart, we place. You know, it's not as extreme as a model walking down a catwalk, you know, with it where they literally almost cross their feet over in front of the others. But it's closer to that. And you find too when you take on a heavy load. Next time you're backpacking with a heavy backpack, notice the

way you modify your gate a little bit. And if you're at all experienced, you do this intentionally, whereas you do tend to walk a little more tightrope because you're bringing the center or bringing your line or a point of support more directly under the center of mass, and you don't have to utilize the muscular effort quite as much to balance your helvis and torso over that in any case, So then you talked about the compliant gate.

Humans have adapted, are adopted of a manner of walking that maximizes the step length and takes advantage of that rigid longitudinal relatively rigid longitudinal large and so together with the elongation of of our legs are lower extremities. We reach out with a very extended limb and come down with a heel strike and then transfer onto that supporting foot.

But that that extends our our step length. And you know, over a long period of walking, and that even if you've only gained a couple of inches, you multiply that by hundreds of thousands of steps and you've reduced significantly the number of individual steps you've had to take to

cover that that ground. But as a result of that extended limb, we have a bit of a jar when we when you know jolt, when when our heel strikes the ground when it's called the heel strike versus the toa and and because of our art, we have two points of peak pressure beneath the foot, one at the heel strike, and then as you know, the full foot

is in contact, the heel comes up. And now now the point of contact has shifted to the ball of the foot, to the metatarsal heads because of that arch, and there's another peak pressure point concentrated in that small surface area. As we push off ultimately with our big toe, well, you increase body mass considerably, and those peak plant pressures

are something to be avoided. And so one way is to not have an arch which differentially concentrates pressure under those limited points of contact, and don't have a heel strike where you where you're you know, you're actively limiting the surface area to absorb all of that weight, that and that force, you know, that accelerating force through a small area of tissue. Walk in such a way that the whole foot comes in contact.

through the area or across cement or something like that. Yeah, I've often thought that perhaps they come down rather flat footed as opposed to a heel strike, because you know, five hundred pounds of weight coming down on a heel every single time would do a real number to their heel bones, I would imagine.

foot isn't much different than the theoretical isn't much different than what is observed for the human foot, which is, you know, right there at the tolerance levels of the of the tissue of the skin and connective tissue fatty tissue and bone. So you can address the increased forces anatomically,

but you can also address them behaviorally. And that's that's what you were talking about with placing the foot more flatly initially instead of a decided heel strike, which you, as you correctly point out, seems to be the evidence of that seems to be completely absent, largely absent from the fossil record or excuse me, the footprint track record. In addition, you can soak up some of that impact force with the tendons and ligaments in the joints of

the ankle and the knee and the hip. And this is where the compliant or flexed jointed gait comes into play. In the biomechanical literature, it's referred to, kind of in an informal sense as a Groucho walk. Now, most of the younger generation don't even know who Groucho Marx is, let alone having seen him on the movie screen.

is what's called the compliant gate. And there have been very systematic studies done using force plate to collect data of ground reaction forces to show that you can reduce the impact forces which are called ground reaction forces, the forces the ground is pushing back against the force that you're imposing on it, just the way that description works,

by upwards of eighteen twenty percent. That's that's pretty significant when you start talking about, you know, the magnitude of forces of a big seven hundred pound paddy walking across the sandbar.

the distal and which is an adaptation for running. We are our skeleton, our long legs are you know, a lot of the discussion about the changes in the cranial base and in our proportions of upper extremity to lower extremity, and and you know, just the more light, the lightning, the grassilization of the skeleton. These are adaptations for endurance walking and running. And we're quite different sasquatch has evolved in a very different way.

the one hundred yard dash. But the long distance runners, marathon runners don't run at that pace, and I don't think a sasquatch would be capable either it doesn't have those adaptations, or a gorilla, but sasquatch would be much more capable than would a gorilla. And so you know, feats of distance, an overnight trek across a gap between forest fragments would be something that you know sasquatch could undertake.

I think that's probably why sometimes we get sign or sightings in otherwise odd places, is because there could be a like Krantz used to refer to rogue mails who are breaking out from their natal territory. They've been forced out by the resident male, dominant male, and they have to find their own turf and their own females attract their own females, So sometimes they strike out through less desirable habitat in order to find a place of their own.

about experimenting with my own gait while backpacking. You know, if I have like a forty pound pack, you know, on my back, that's a significant addition to my own weight, and I do find myself leaning forward slightly and just for you know, just for laughs, I kind of adopt the compliant gait, and it sure makes a big difference on the impact, especially going downhill, and there's some degree up, mostly downhill. But I'll tell you, I am sore in the morning.

a bungee cord, that connective tissue. Within the way it's arranged within the tendon, it allows for a little bit of stretch and there's some elastic tissue in there as well that helps it to rebound to its original shape. But they have found, you know, that these these tendons can return a significant fraction of the kinetic energy once they're loaded back into the system in propulsion.

The tail tends to come down in the to also tends to come down, which loads all of the ligaments and tendons in the back and the spine and you know, big tendons of the muscles for the tail. And then that tends to upon recoil, lift the kangaroo up again, you know. And and so the force necessary to generate the lift for that next step, that next spring rather is is in part contributed by the recoil of these

ligamented structures. So the point is that it's interesting. You look at at Paddy, you look at a chimpanzee, and they have almost no real significant tendon, and what is there is a broad much more what we call appo neurotic, a broad tendon that spanning between the calf musculature and the heel. But if you look at Patty, she's kind of intermediate between a chimpanzee and a human. She has

a massive broad tendon in the area. The heads of the gastroc nemus are discernible, and they're long, but they're shorter than they are in a chimpanzee. They're a bit longer than they are in the human. And the length well, when we say the length I'm talking about the length of the fibers that constitute the two gastroc heads. So if you're relying on those muscles to kind of load

the tendon, they don't need to be very long. The chimps are long because they move their ankle through such a huge range of motion compared to ours when they're climbing up and down trees, and so the muscle fiber has to shorten through that range of motion. But if the range of motion is greatly restricted, and the adaptation is to load the tendin so that when the four foot hits the ground, see, it would otherwise stretch that tendon. I almost ruptured my tenton just to show you the

kind of the principle, you know. I was out we were collecting firewood, and rather than using axe as we were and saws, we were just gathering up the dead fall and were breaking it on rocks or leaning across something and stomping on it. Well, when you do that, you need to stomp so that your ankle is right over the top, so that the force coming down through your leg goes straight through the well like a dummy.

Was being a little careless, and when I stomped I caught the branch with the tip the end of my boot out of my toes and it flexed my foot up really forcefully, and oh man, it pulled my achilles tendon and I had a Charlie horse like you wouldn't believe, and I thought I had a vaults. I mean, that's how you can a volts tear tear the tendon. Either it either it fails internally in the fibers slip and then you get this big swollen contusion and potential hematoma.

Or it literally tears. It can pull it right free from the heel bone and sometimes even tears some of the bone that those fibers are embedded within, away from the heel bone. So I was limping for several days. I immediately put some ice on it. Thankfully we had some ice in one of the ice tests and I could put some ice on of it.

single week, you can become a member. Just go to Big and Beyond podcast dot com and click the membership link and I'll bring you right there and you get an extra maybe half hour forty five minutes of conversation every single week. And I don't know, reviews are in. It seems to be a big hit. People are enjoying it, so maybe you're missing out on something. So Jeff, go ahead and stick around with us for a moment and Bobo, Why don't you close down this episode here?