From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Bed. We're joined with our guest super producer, Ben the Bed, the hatchet Hacket. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. We'd like to begin this evening's show with a bit of a reenactment and historical documentation of a run in with a troll. Once upon a time, a guy tries to cross a bridge. O hold it right, says a voice beneath the stones.
If are you pass me bridge? You have to answer a riddle?
Or what says the guy?
Or achi?
The guy pauses at the threshold of the bridge.
Fair enough, what's the riddle?
How do you count to six?
Well, that's easy, one, two.
The creature under the stones interrupts.
A fee a fall.
Five. The thing beneath the bridge pauses, confused, Six says the human.
Six is after five, you jerk.
The human knew already this was going to be a weird day. This is the old one of the old stories about running into a troll. We love trolls, not the Internet phenomenon. I think we made sure to put that in the title here, But the old school trolls, right the details, Yeah, bridge trolls also, Ben, can we get some applause there for that dramatic retelling.
Yeah, I can peep up the single hand clap.
Yeah, I clap loud. It's true. But we move in numbers, which is part of tonight's show. What do you guys think about when you think of trolls.
I think of the little kid going, oh my god, you know, from troll to the movie. Oh, I think it's a wonderful internet meme.
That's yeah, it is. I think of Justin Timberlake and a bunch of other actors as animated characters singing a bunch of songs.
That's a banger of a song right there, from Trolls, the movie the soundtrack.
I think of films like troll Hunters, where there's another there's another film called Trolls, which is much more disturbed. But look, we all kind of accept that trolls are creatures of myth and legend these days outside of arguably a small population of humans in Iceland. As we continue our exploration of fact, fiction, cryptids, mythology, and the paranormal, we had to get to trolls and spoiler fillow conspiracy realist,
we may have learned the truth. Here are the facts, as we're saying, at least in the United States, trolls are most commonly associated with fiction, and of course the famous troll dolls.
Remember these jewels in their tummies.
Yes, I heard about that extensively because friend of the show and my actual girlfriend, Brandy, was originally super excited by this episode. She assumed we were talking about troll dolls.
Another friend of the show, who shall remain nameless, has a a tobacco pipe let's just call it that is built to look like a troll. And you put the tobacco in its belly button and you smoke it out of its butthole.
Wow, okay, the anti booth.
Then Hackett made a face.
Well, I was trying to imagine. Okay, you put the tobacco in the belly button and then you go around back.
Think of it lying on its back, right, and its legs are kind of up in the air, and it's not anatomically correct.
Nobody tried to smoke through your friends.
Yeah, genitals, at least troll dolls. They're like ken dolls down there.
Interesting. In one of the more disturbing stories I read recent fiction, you know, the guy who wrote Let the Right One in I.
Don't remember the I love both versions of that film.
He wrote a story that got adapted into another film, and in that story, trolls are closer to the Scandinavian folklore. They are hermaphroditic spoilers.
They got Kloika's or something. No, I don't know about that. You know what else I think of when of the controls, I think of the Rankin and Bass Hobbit movie and the whole thing where you know, Bilbo and company come upon a band of trolls who very much want to eat them and roast them.
Yes, yes, I'm glad you mentioned the catabalistic tendencies, the predatory nature. The story of folklore transmission, I think is familiar to most of our longtime listeners. Trolls as a concept, the word it comes from Northern Europe, Scandinavia, the so called Low Countries, which is a weird joke. It's about sea level and as taste well well. As Europeans migrated to what we call the Americas today, they've brought their folklore and beliefs along. This is a big part of
the narrative American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I'm leaning on fiction a lot here, but I think it's pretty obvious to that pre existing native cultures had their own long standing legends of giants and half men and monsters and things that were almost but not quite human. So if you think about it, the idea of being an indigenous or Native American and hearing someone tell you about trolls,
it would not have been entirely unfamiliar to you. You would have said something like, oh the sea techa, right, you know these other creepy things.
Yeah, we just did that Reptilian episode, so you know, when we're thinking about half man, half human, getting back to centaurs getting back to what are some of the other things. Mermaids all kinds of creatures that are, like you said, ben almost human, but they got something a little weird going on, usually on the downstairs.
Oh man, I guess that's the thing. You know, wherever you hail from or whatever your origin story or you know, cultural heritage might be. We are all human at the end of the day, and so we all have kind of a similar set of equipment. Therefore, a lot of the perceptions and fears and things that we develop as individuals, despite where we come from or who we know, there's a lot of parallel stuff going on in things like religion and cultural practices and these sorts of mystical creatures.
Yeah, it's a weird comparison. Since we were talking about automotive things earlier. A weird comparison would be imagine your typical American today, and you learned that people in the United Kingdom also have cars, and their cars have trunks, but they called the trunk the boot. It's the same concept. It's a different name.
Over here. We call them frunks. All right, get it right?
I think it's a you thing, man, I like it on.
It's an Elon musk thing. Yeah, that's what the cyber truck boot is called. It's in the it's called a frunk.
Mm hmm. All right. We'll teach their own and each their own. Who are we to change, did you guys?
Look? I saw a random instagram that I don't think is real. This is a side note. It was about a Kanye West cyber truck.
I saw that.
I saw it looked AI generated, but the thing it looked like one of those stealth bombers. It was like totally black with no windows, very sleek. He said, only one existed. I don't think it was really either, but maybe you know.
I saw it in right, so I elected not take care.
I'm sorry I did not investigate further. But Matt, I do believe you're right that it is most likely fake.
Okay, just want to make sure. Oh yeah, the Internet says fully fake. Okay.
The stories, yeah, the stories we tell ourselves. One for the etymology nerds before we dive in the noun. Troll come like now it is thought to be a very specific, distinct creature in folklore, at least then noun. But back in the day, it just meant It's kind of like our exploration of the anti Christ. It just meant a weird off vibe. And some people will tell you that originally troll just described anyone who walked weird scans.
I could see that.
They said strolling.
They were trolling, Yeah, in a truck.
Ministry of Front funny walks.
Side to side fashion, you know it. It reminded me of a Charlie day and always sunny in Philadelphia, who says he was going by Trontle the Great.
What do they call that thing they do in the dune? The worm walk? Whatever they have to like walk funny so they don't attract the worm. Oh right, that would be a troll patrolling. The origins of this word are ancient, and the etymology comes far after the fact, so there's
a lot of debate, a lot of educated guessing. We can kind of see that the phrase troll the way we use it now derives from a Proto Germanic term a language that came before all of the Germanic languages Truslan, Trusolan or Trolan, and back in the day it was just a general term for supernatural creatures or supernatural actions. Dude, can you imagine how guttural and Proto german language would have been and it has been all grunts.
It's basically all all battle rap at that point, So you can see. You can see roots of this in Swedish terms like trolla, which meant to charm or bewitch, or the old Norse troll de more meaning just witchcraft, just not cool stuff or baby cool stuff.
Well, that's really interesting because the mystic kind of goes into there. That's really interesting as like at least what we think of, well, some perceptions of trolls.
I guess often that they have magical powers. There's big dunderheads.
Again, some perceptions of that, right, and what we've learned often in the show, when when magic is attributed to like a group of people or a creature or a thing, and it's given that kind of mythical uh, those mythical characteristics, there's fear associated with that creature or being right.
Well, how does it work? And magic the gathering with trolls. Yeah, there's all sorts of different trolls. I'm imagining a lot of them with fire.
A lot of generative powers.
I think, yep, regenerate was one of the original things that trolls had, which is a really cool thing that needs to come back. I don't think that's a mechanic that exists right now.
They're not doing it anymore.
I think maybe it's in there, it's just not I don't know. I haven't seen it in a while.
I haven't called to you wizards, Wizards of the Dark, Wizards of the Deep, of the Air, and of the coast. Yes, Philadelphia would would have.
Would having too many regenerative abilities be like an unfair advantage or something? Is that why? Maybe they got rid of it. It was like game breaking or something.
Technically, too many regenerative abilities is cancer.
That's that's man's proliferate. I think cancer is proliferate. To regenerate emitted, it's pretty great. So if a creature with regenerate would be dealt damage that would be sufficient to kill it. You just tap a couple manna usually or pay a little bit of life and then that thing comes right back.
And yes, I'm shouting out, I'm trying out a reference to Flight of Dragons where they assemble all the wizards. Do you guys remember Flight of Dragons? Doesn't matter, We'll do a dragon's episode maybe. So the idea here is fascinating. I think that the notes about magic the Gathering show
us like these creatures. The idea of trolls. It exists in the modern day very much so, you know, and it dates back to Nordic folklore essentially from what we can tell in Old Norse folklore, trolls dwell in isolated wild areas, craggy rock ranges, distant mountains, and deep caves. It's only later in folk lif or that we get specific types of trolls, like, you know, a forest troll or a hill troll or whatever. You know, the new Pokemon, the new Pokemon of folklore. Yes, I love the idea.
Pokemon is folklore too.
I mean, isn't it isn't pot culture its own kind of widely proliferated folklore in a way that I get we accept as being fiction. I think that's maybe the only difference. But I guess some people maybe don't know the difference. I don't know.
Well, give it twenty eight thousand years, that's exactly right.
Then people will be worshiping Pokemon as gods.
We conquer this empire for the glory of Chahrazad, the name of Snawlax. That the trolls in myth often live together in small packs or family units, again in caves. They are not fans of humankind. If you catch them on the wrong day, especially if you smell like one of those as modern high faluting Christians, well then heck that troll might eat you. That's the idea, the ancient Christian they can smell you if you're if you're a Christian, blood of Christ all over you. Yeah, And it's an
interesting way to deliver a message. So we've got some notes on folklore. We know, of course, there are there are, as we were saying, a lot of different vinn diagrams. Folkloric overlap ancient sources oral traditions sometimes called trolls jot nar the the idea conflating them with giants, and the belief in these things is way older than Christianity. By that time Christianity got like moved on up to the north side of Europe, trolls were an established concept.
Is it Jodenheim the land of the giants in the God of War games and conversely also in Norse mythology?
Yeah, yes, yeah, in both.
In both I'm pretty sure God a War did it first.
But you know, yeah, yeah, who are we to judge? Right? It wasn't. It wasn't until much later the trolls got more specific attributes, descriptions, abilities. They became distinct mythological creatures. And what we can say for sure is various things have been called trolls things that we might not describe as trolls today, they're to your point. No, they're in mythology all over the place pretty consistently, and today most
people generally do not believe in them. They're just really cool features to put in a story, and no offense to anybody who genuinely believes that there is some sort of ten foot tall, vaguely rock like creature that hides from the sun and eat to you. If you're baptized. If that's your thing, go with it, and we hope it doesn't mess up your day.
If that is your thing. Watch the show Hilda on Netflix. It is one of the best shows that I've seen in a long time that I could share with my son, and it deals directly with trolls. And when you're talking about hiding from the sun thing. In this version of it, it's a Canadian TV show. In this version of it, the trolls are like stones.
That they turned to stone in the sun in some tradition. Isn't that right?
Well, there are just stones out on the mountain side, like just litter it everywhere, just huge stones, and then at night they turn into you know, sometimes really dangerous things. That attack the village. Other times, as you'll find out, maybe they're not so dangerous.
Well, but that's the thing though, they charge their stones during the day because the sun turns them to stone exact. Yeah, but I've seen I've seen that depicted in other places.
That's really that's argoyles.
That's exactly right.
Yeah. Also, just for the record, the sun sucks. I hate it, you guys.
And butt head, Oh my god, you guys. I'm in Augusta, Georgia, which is just two hours from Atlanta, but it's in a in a valley, whereas Atlanta's kind of up on a hill a little bit more. And I swear to god, the humidity here knocked me on my butt, like it is just absolutely uh, completely different feeling. And I had to like go indoors.
What's the troll content or troll demographic.
I think there's a there's a decent troll population. They only come out at night, and I went I stayed in so I didn't see any because.
Of the masters, like exactly.
Yeah.
Different flavor of trolls or golf trolls are the worst kind classic We've got different categories of trolls. We've got so much folklore about them. What if trolls are less like a myth and more like a cryptid There be any sand to the legends. We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsors and we'll dive in. Here's where it gets crazy.
All right, Oh wait, all, here's where it gets crazy. You're talking about golf controls, and I just I have Happy Gilmore in my head with Shooter McGavin when he's he's like, uh, it's I think it's the last game. And or there's that guy that's constantly heckling him. Do you know what I'm talking about? Mister Larson was his name, and he's this huge dude. Uh and he's just like tells me like barking lot. You do you guys remember this at all? He looks like a troll to me.
And he's this huge dude that heckles him.
Uprolls no, no, no, no, no, carry on.
Yeah yeah, I remember Happy Gilmore featuring that up and coming Adam Sandler.
He's gone places here.
I think he's going to get into comedy.
Well yeah, Supher McDonald as Shooter McGavin, come on.
Great, great, heal?
We know one thing for certain about all human cultures, just like Adam Sandler. They did and do get up to incredibly stupid, funny, arguably self destructive things. But they were not any more nor any less intelligent than human beings today. You know, folklore is another communication platform, right, It's as untrustworthy as Twitter or social media in general. It's all, but it's all meant. It all comes from this noble intention to see and to explain the world
around us. So our question then becomes fascinating. Instead of saying, oh, people in Europe back in the day were dummies, we should say what were these ancient people attempting to explain to themselves, to their peers, to their children. What if trolls weren't mythical giants? What if what we're seeing in these stories is instead an attempt by Homo sapiens to
describe encounters with something real, something not quite human. More directly, what if trolls are in fact a corrupted story based on encounters with the Neanderthal.
Okay, go on, you're.
Well, I mean we get a learn about the Neanderthal first? What are they? Are?
They like?
Cave folk?
Yeah, sort of sloping, foreheaded, bad posture, slightly bigger than the average bear a little dimmer too, right, early man.
That's the idea. Oh, also shout out to our pals on theme, Eves, Jeffcoat, and Katie Mitchell, who just casually taught us that highbrow is a a problematic term originating from phrenology. Right, you can find that episode wherever you find your favorite shows.
But but that's just saying the lowbrow of a neanderthal in the high brow of a human.
Yeah, that's the implication. Not to be too Dennis Reynolds about it. But Matt, what do you think about when you hear the word Neanderthal?
Well, I think of I can't you go back to popular depictions. I think of the television series The Cavemen.
Based on the campaign. Yeah, yes, it was. That was that progressive? It was an insurance company, wasn't it?
Saturday Night Live? Sketch Caveman Lawyer?
Just a simple but this is a whole series with Nick Kroll like starring Nick Kroll.
It really was based on an ad series for an insurance company.
Yeah, but but it is well, as we've learned. Okay, now, Craig me if I'm wrong here, humans and Neanderthals are very close when when you're thinking about DNA, but they are a very specific and separate not species. What what do you what do you call it?
All of them? A distinct species? Is it? Uh? Yeah? The I think the proper term we're supposed to use, which we didn't on our previous episode on early humans. Uh, the proper term is archaic humans because we can't call them not human.
Yeah, because they are.
It's just.
I don't know before a major split. But we're going to talk about later in this episode about Neanderthals and I guess modern what would be described as modern humans?
Uh?
In mating and how that like changed.
Everything kissing cousins. Yeah, okay, I see.
It's just so confusing to me, Like how if they are a distinct species, then how could they even breed?
Right?
How could humans and Neanderthals breed successfully?
Well, they're closer than like a lion and a tiger, and a lion and a tiger can create a liger.
Yeah okay, yeah, totally that makes it.
I didn't mean that to sound like lazy mumble wrap, but bread for his abilities and magic, right right? We need to regenerate this this idea. I think the Neanderthal first off has been uh and beat me here, ben. The Neanderthal has been upon for most of modern history. When modern quote unquote humans first discovered quote unquote the remains of what we will call a Neanderthal, it was like eighteen twenty nine in Belgium, and the guy who found it just said, oh, I found a dead, very
poorly developed human being. This was of course also Belgium in the eighteen hundreds.
So I had Homo neanderthalinensis.
Yes, yes, sir, I think the age of Silent guys dance and later discoveries followed. There were Neanderthal remains found in Gibraltar, and when these things were discovered, that these remains were woven into like the social and scientific attitudes of the day. People found weird bones that looked pretty human, but not quite modern human, as they would say, and so they told their own stories to each other about the provenance of those bones, and they usually confirmed pre
existing racist attitudes of Western science at the time. A troglodyte a literal caveman. I don't even know if we can say troglodyte on air. Isn't that an insult?
I mean, there are insults that are acceptable to say on air, I love trogoloid die. You can't take that away from you can pry it for my cold dead hands.
Oh, let's find out if they will.
Troglodyte a member of a fabulous or a prehistoric race of people that lived in caves, dens, or holes.
I'm sorry, a fabulous Wow.
They had a lot of bizaz.
I didn't see that, I am. You can also describe a person who is regarded as deliberately ignorant, or deliberately old fashioned.
Or deliberately reclusive.
Someone might use it as a stand in for a Luddite, you know, a Luddite is a very They are troglodytes of technology.
There you go.
And the Neanderthal, mainly, as you can tell, folks of the Neanderthal is always portrayed this kind of knucklehead, a dim wit, you know, in bred maybe to the point about Luddites, a hater of modernity in any form, a real brute, a creature that you would either fear or conquer, or in some cases both.
So it's basically describing royal families across the leaders of the Homo sapiens.
Right, the royal family is gonna come for you, Matt.
Do you think they're coming after me?
No?
May No, you're not related to them exactly.
Okay, that's true.
If you're related to them, they'll find you, they'll get you. So what was that John Goodman movie Duke of Earl?
Oh, you're talking about King Ralph, King Ralph.
Yes, they sing Duke of Earl, King Ralph.
I just remember that was the first time I ever heard of the British luxurious dish spotted dick. Yes, yes, like a pudding of some sort with raisins.
Spotted dick, barley water. They're nailing it with food names, you know what I mean. We got to give them that. I got lost for a second just thinking about the weird food names used in the United Kingdom.
Not to malign British cuisine as a whole. There's very amazing fine dining opportunities there, but a lot of traditional British food pretty gross.
Looking, very much to malign it A sorry, a lot like the Royal family see our stereotypes in play already, and the British Empires still exists, the United Kingdom still exists, and we're blowing smoke at it. Imagine what would happen if you were gone for thousands and thousands of years.
They're so much trash.
There is no Neanderthal to hop up and do a ted talk. You know. This is again the game of telephone. So there's a wealth of incorrect assumptions about Neanderthals because they fit the social framework of the day, and this stymied,
i would say even crippled science for generations. Afterward, the more current civilization learns about the Neanderthal, the Denisovan, the real life Hobbits, the early mixtapes of mankind, the stranger, the story becomes because get this, Neanderthals human Basically, they're human. They don't have superpowers, they don't turn to stone in the sun. They are mainly reclusive because they're trying to run from the other humans.
Right, what are people referred to ben when they say the missing link is sort of like a piece or a type of Neanderthal that would have bridged the gap between uh, you know, apes and humans or is that sort of along the right lines.
Yeah, it's it's the in the theory of evolution, it's the chain between the actual great apes that we still observe today and the you know, the Denisovin's the Neanderthals between those two things.
That's right.
There's nothing there right now, at least no nothing that we've found which would explain everything.
Well, yeah, there's like Homo habilis, Homo erectus. But there's this gap in the in the in the literal evolution, you know what I mean.
It's it's basically the standing up straight thing like where is the full see the chart.
Out of the trees, like non arboreal and uh you know to quote, uh some fans of doctor Moreau to walk on two legs, the bipedal versus the platro pedal. Uh. Anywait, like I the thing is, we know that modern quote unquote modern human beings hung out with Neanderthals. We literally know this. This is not a conspiracy theory. We have
the receipts to prove it. We also understand that the world was less densely populated with this kind of life form, you know, up till about forty thousand years ago, when the Neanderthal population seemed to disappear. But we haven't been kind to the lives of the Neanderthals. We call them
lumbering morons. We again talk trash about them, But recent discoveries have shown us some amazing things, like in those caves where the Neanderthals lived, they did practice symbolism, They had some understanding of object permanence, of great philosophical quandtry. They lived, they loved, they were loved, They had kids, they cared about their kids, They buried their dead.
They also laughed, though I know they lived and loved. We got to know whether or not they laughed.
We know they were sick at music.
Cool and drums have crazy residents, you know what I mean, like the reverb in there.
Oh yeah, I mean, I'm really not joking here, but like early musical instruments you know, were derived from banging on planks of wood and making different tones and even like rocks and stuff. Those are really cool sounds, very cool resonances.
Precisely mat you guys think they survived some apocalypse and they had to move into the caves. You know what I'm talking about.
Well, the world's sending for someone every day, right, Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, So I bet you're right. I bet maybe maybe there was this hyperborean pre Neanderthal situation. Maybe Homo sapiens are the remnet thereof I think that's cool. Anyway, we know we know Neanderthals are route. There is a non zero chance that encounters between the Sapien and the Neanderthal may be the formative factor for some of humanity's oldest monster stories.
In fact, as we know, some of us in the audience this evening make airy a bit of that legacy.
Guys, before we go to our ads, we're not currently sponsored by twenty three and a meter, but it says on their website here that you can eat you can find out if you have Neanderthal DNA. That's really quick?
Is that an up charge?
Maybe let's go to the ads.
And we're back. Congratulations to everybody who just learned a lot about themselves while at the same time sacrificing some of the most private information you will ever possess.
Yeah, you don't feel bad.
I did it years ago, before it was even even that interesting. I sacrificed my stuff for you're basically European dude.
That was literally what the results said. They didn't really judge it up any.
That came with some sort of then diagram and like a colored map. But I know it's come a long way since then. But an I don't think they were testing for that at the time. The technology just wasn't that bad.
It wasn't that I love the idea that somebody attached to post it. They just said, I'm sorry, sorry, this is boring. Yeah, I don't think.
It's boring, right. You were fascinated in her twenty twenty one book Growing Up in the Ice Age, as well as her more recent work from just last year, Rethinking Neanderthals. An archaeologist named April Noel from Canada University of Victori Area. She broke down these questions like how much genuine consideration have Homo sapiens given to the life form of the Neanderthal? And she notes this DNA stuff we're talking about, She says, quote.
Researchers have spelled out the entire Neanderthal genome from multiple individuals, offering new insights into their biology as well as our own. There is no longer any doubt that human beings and neanderthals inter bred.
I thought that was going to be that game where you say, in bed after something.
Multiple experts now agree in bed and a scientific consensus is building in bed. It is irrefutable that the Neanderthal and the Sapien interacted. We may never know the full breadth of these engagements, but we know one species is extinct, and the surviving species or group or whatever you want to call it, people are still arguing about it. The surviving thing carries within its population remnants flotsam jetsam of the of the non existent group.
Real quick. I'm sure we mentioned this book on the on the podcast before, but Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by you've all Noah Harari has a fantastic greed and deals with a lot of this stuff in depth in a very i would say, understandable and intelligent and pretty poetic way.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Shapiens. Harari's doing some great work. Not everybody loves him, but I think I read every book.
I would just say, a very good science communicator.
You know, guys, speaking of communicating science, we've heard a lot about these Neanderthals. We talked about trolls. What do they have to do with each other?
My gosh, what a coincidence that we would arrive at this point.
No, that's right here in the outline.
Yeah, oh jeez. So there is this idea of we always say it there is a grain of truth carried in most of these stories that people told themselves over millennia, because we cannot forget that communication, and therefore stories are a kind of technology, indeed one of the earliest forms of technology. So humans typically will have a pretty insular, self centered definition of themselves and the universe around them,
like most human cultures. In their native language, their name for themselves is something like the people or the real people were the true people. Yeah, everyone, it is not that so it's not one person. Yeah. So think about this. These humanoid creatures, these trolls, in all their varying forms throughout history, they regularly seem to tick a lot of
boxes for what we understand about Neanderthals. They dwelling caves, they're suspected of catibalism, they're reclusive and or unfriendly to modern.
Society, and they're smoking hot.
Well, everybody's got a type.
Yeah, they're big, buff bodies.
But they may not speak any languages that the modern humans encountering them speak, which means there would be some kind of territorial animosity. First of all, if you encroach on, let's say, where they live in their home and they can't understand anything you're saying at them. That kind of makes sense. The Neanderthal will be cranky.
Wouldn't you Someone bust into your house and they go like, Hey, whoa your brakes? I don't want to call the cave cops.
And I'm the only one series throwing rocks, telling you.
Yeah and then eating you, grinding your bones to make their bread.
Well maybe maybe, but I think that's just because everybody else ran away really fast when one guy fell, you know what I mean, So who knows what happened to him?
People needed better OPSEC really.
But wasn't he a giant not a troll? Is there other things that we discussed how they were kind of interchangeable concepts.
Right, interchangeable?
Right?
It's like the the question I always think about. Uh, there are two versions of it. First, was Goliath tall or was David short? Second, when we hear about sea monsters in the age of maritime expansion, were they that big or were the boats smaller?
Yeah? Probably a combination. I mean, I'm sure if you saw a whale breach for the first time, not knowing that it was a relatively gentle giant, I would mark that down as a sea monster real quick.
I would my pants, I would other people's pants.
I've told you, guys about my night terrors about being in the water with a whale. I know it's not going to hurt me in real life, but like, it's just the hugeness of it. It's something that captivates the imagination. And you just a big one that I can't see, but I just know it's there, it's underneath, and it terrifies me. I've had this recurring nightmare since I was a kid.
Guys, I'm seeing all kinds of different stories about how tall David and Goliath both were. Some of the most common. I guess depictions of David are below five feet tall, and then Goliath is just a foot or maybe two taller than him. So real beefy boy, though probably a little beefy big boy. But maybe David was pretty small.
That's the question, right, And this is this is the nature of perspective, right, This is what informs a lot of these legends. The idea of trolls as an embellishment on human interaction with Neanderthal has been explored extensively in fiction. William Golding, the guy who wrote Lord of the Flies, wrote about it in a novel called The Inheritors. A lot of people, a lot of academics from Finland are
super into the idea. And if we treat folkloric tradition as a story with a meaning, a technology with a purpose, then we can look at some of these more fantastical claims and dismiss them as malarkey, no offense to winning non Christians. But you cannot just smell someone and know they are Christians. You can't smell anyone. You can't smell anyone and know their religious affiliation.
I'm just gonna agree with you. Right, You're right, Ben, You're right.
I mean, tell me, tell us if we're wrong. You know, if you got a thing where you're like the Bahai clearly smell of raspberries or something, I just have a little.
Sensitive sniffer, you know, I've got to follow my nose.
Par Giant.
Maybe, man, I'm just saying, I think you could probably post up in like a city center on a Saturday and Sunday and just sniff around for like stale bread or crackers and wine, and you could probably you could probably you could probably way to a church Christian or just some welches, you know what, I'm saying I think, I think it might.
I don't know.
So you could do that with your your eyes your eyes bound and your ears stopped.
Yeah, that pepsi challenge any day of the week, Ben Bowling.
It would just have to be a close talk, you know what I mean, Get a little close talk and then.
I can rest it. That'd be, you know what, what an interesting experiment? Well we we do know. Okay, so maybe that superpower is based in fact, perhaps, But what about the idea that one would turn to stone in sunlight?
Wait a minute, I think the trolls in the ranking in Basshumm movie do turn to stone?
Yeah, because they make them argue amidst themselves over the until.
They turn the stone. I'm almost positive. And it's really creepy when they do, because they get all like really like you start to shake and kind of get all rictus looking.
Yeah, it's like electric light orchestra.
There you go. Well, I mean the idea of an evil being turning to stone in the face of a cleansing presence or something that's you know, representative of life or you know, growth like the sun is super common. I mean like Medusa, for example, you know it turned to stone if shown her own.
Reflection, right, yeah again, or.
Could turn people to stone, but then you turn that power on Medusa and then you know.
She was turned to stone. Another derivative of the fantastic mythos of electric Light Orchestra, or as we call them on this show, El.
O Eello slaps dude. Mister I was about to say, mister Bright's side. Mister Bluesky is one of my favorite gems. Actually, that's one people know the most. But there's this album of theirs called El Dorado, and the cover of it's super cool. It's like the ruby slippers from Wizard of Oz and like these kind of witch hands and there is a song on it I can't get it out of my head that I think is in my top ten favorite songs of all time. It's absolutely incredible. Jeff
Lynn is a genius. Sorry, that's my yeah, I mean soapbox.
The question is how did how did the story of trolls turned into the Scandinavian top folklore story of all time or one of those top ten, Because what we see is if you take away the more extravagant claims, right, we can attribute those to the hazard of eyewitness accounts translated over a long period of time. The game of telephone writ large what we find. Then, if we take away the supernatural stuff, we find that the folkloric record of trolls checks a lot of boxes for what we
know about Neanderthals. They are held in tradition to have occupied what we call Scandinavia long long before humans in the north or sapiens in the North. I should say, they're called the old ones. They're described as unattractive relative to humans. They're not socially oriented, they're relatively elusive. Maybe they were prescient of this other encroaching life form. Maybe they didn't so much smell the different Homo sapiens, but they sensed them in the fact that resources were being
taken from them. Right, Animals were being hunted, I guess, plants were being gathered. Humans have fire by this point, so stuff was burning.
Dude. It just occurred to me that I smell the blood of an Englishman. That is probably strange to a member of the Church of England, right, Yeah, it never occurred to me until this moment. That's wild.
Yeah, And I hope we are forgiven for our again completely accurate historical rendition. At the top of this episode, there's a great article by Patrick Hunt, writing for Electro Magazine, who notes commonalities between descriptions of trolls and what we know about Neanderthal.
He says this, some of the commonalities between known Neanderthal features and habitats and the folklore around trolls include heavy, large boned skeleton, thick skinned for cold insulation, cave dwellers, pronounced brows, broad based, possibly large fleshy noses, living in remote or montane topography aka mountain trolls or beard trota in Danish, or loki not considered optimum by increasingly sedentary
human Let's look back that real quick. Loki like as in like locusts of control, Like, what is lokai referring to here? I'm a little that's that's a that's a big one.
Is it locations like that concept?
Yeah? Just that loki is like saying area within ki.
I just I don't think I've seen it used that way before. That's cool.
Well, there. The argument is that the sapiens became an agricultural enterprise, right, Yeah, that's what they mean, hunting in gathering, so that the the humans or the homo sapiens here because of the new practice, the new fangle practice of agriculture. They're not ranging as widely. They're not going into the mountains. They're not delving into the caves.
Right and they're nine. They're not delving in the caves and not going to the mountains, and they're not trolling around those mountains right where they're They're hanging out by the farm now because hey man, we got all these crops. We can't go anywhere.
They had all these potatoes.
Often they'll get potatoes later.
Fair.
Every so often one of them may venture into the craggy wild, and every so often something may come from the caves. Right, and modern Hue humans treat trolls and Neanderthals like the same kind of creature. These are dumb, These are scary. These are evil. They're both often presented as the quote unquote bad guy by the same life for that probably assaulted, murdered, and ate them. In at least a few cases, we know that Homo sapien hunted, killed,
and consumed Neanderthals. The closest this is an unfair comparison, but the closest analogue we could imagine is a scenario where you say, Hey, I'm based in I don't know name, mistake or right, any state in Georgia, Saskatoon, Okay, I'm based in Saskatoon. The people who live people who live in Maine are way too different. We should hunt them and eat them and maybe assault them and then salt them.
But that's a may. Right. Humans may have been eating Neanderthals, or do we have evidence of that?
We don't have. You're right, we don't have a smoking gun, hard evidence like there's no written documentation from the prosata or whatever where someone says I will always fondly remember that time I ate a Neanderthal. Yeah I think like that.
Oh well yeah, okay, I mean Charles.
Darwin, sure what have if he got in his hands on one, yeah, he would have one hundred percent.
It's good that he's not here now. I love the face you made there, Matt, so uh what, No, it's fine. It's good that Charles Darwood is not here.
Now.
He would have.
Eaten things you would have eaten us all.
He might have eaten it like a phone, you know what I mean? He would think he discovered that too. He ate everything he discovered it just it wouldn't work out well.
He has a really popular TikTok this like will it digest? In trying all the stuff?
So we can provably verify the physical characteristics of Neanderthals. We do have circumstantial, if not conclusive evidence of cannibalism, similar to the story of the Cecha here in the United States. But because trolls are considered mythical beings, getting a hold of a specimen or remnants thereof that what we would call a troll has proven pretty tricky, you know. And then of course we can fast forward through some
of this. A lot of people listening tonight might say, hey, guys, for a long time modern human we modern humans or ai eyes or chat chepts at all. We know there's no evidence of the Neanderthal in Scandinavia. But you didn't think about the climate.
What's that about the climate?
Didn't think about the climate. This is thousands of thousands of years in the past. Ice ages come and go, interglacial periods, the northern reaches of Europe and Russia could have easily supported Neanderthal populations.
That makes sense, That makes a lot of sense. In the caves, very caves, very nice when it's hot out.
Yes, yes, think about the caves.
Or cold it could be freezing.
Mmm mm hmmm.
Yeah.
Also, you know, why build a house when you can live in a cave? Why learn to build a house? Yeah?
Man, Earth already made you one, and it's huge, and it's it's climate controlled.
Yeah, we're looking like a bunch of suckers right now, aren't we. Seriously?
Oh you guys, I got a bunch of wood and glass, So let's live inside there. The temperature will modulate just as it does outside.
It's great. That's a disturbingly good point. And I'm kind of upset that we have to pay mortgages.
And reds seriously, but we won't get wet exactly.
Oh man, I was just talking with my buddy who I'm staying with, about how both fire and water are two things that are necessary to create life, but also on their own can destroy everything. Water will disintegrate your house if you do not keep it in check, and fire will just you know, burn it down.
Robert Frost was right, Maybe that's nominative determinism for us. But what was that poem? Fire and ice worth it? Yeah?
The Song of Ice and Fire by Robert Frost classic classic fantasy.
I have opinions about Robert Frost, love to hear yours. Folks.
Do the two roads divers in the Yellow Wood? H did, knowing which was bloody bloody blue? I took the path less traveled.
I don't remember from that, and that's made all the difference.
Hasn't made all the difference exactly?
And then it explodes.
Now that's a different poem.
Ben, would you say you've cooled on Robert Frost.
I'm still out about it. The opinions are strident and subjective, and we'd love to hear yours. Also, always send us your your favorite literary references with Neanderthals and trolls. If this connection holds true, wouldn't we expect legends of something like trolls to be most prevalent in areas of the world where we can prove a longer lasting Neanderthal population, right,
like you know, even past the Ice ages. In short, and I'm cursing a lot in this episode, we have to logically ask what the happened in Scandinavia such that an encounter or series of encounters could survive, transforming into legend over the course of like twenty eight thousand years. How terrible was that day? Someone might have walked over a bridge and had that riddle.
Yeah, I'm trying to see it in my mind how it morphed that that far. But just as you as you said, time is the thing that will change anything and everything, like most assuredly, time's gonna change it. And if it really is twenty eight thousand, thirty thousand years, I bet nothing. I bet he was almost nothing. It was like, uh, there was a there was an animal, some kind of animal under the bridge, and it kind
of scared me. But I just kept going and I got here a little faster and I normally would because I was running.
And it turned into this thousands of years later. Soone's like, this thing was huge, it was maybe made of stone, there were rocks nearby.
It made me answer riddles.
Oh wait, wait the guy makes it back to the village or the tribe, what happened? Said No, I'm done with riddles for today.
That's it, and it all just now.
It's a troll, cool, cool, everything's fine. This also, I think gives us another idea. Right, So if this relationship unproven between trolls and neanderthal is correct. Then the most important thing to realize is that the trolls are still here. The call is coming from inside the house in the most real sense of the idiom. What does this tell us about humanity today, humanity in the future, whatever the
thing we call humanity will become. I don't know. I think it just tells us winners write the history.
Yeah, it tells us that the term troll for that thing some people do on the internet. Really it kind of fits, kind of fits.
I mean, i'd agree with that. Yeah. The more we learn about the Neanderthal, the more we see the bad guy of prehistory was relatively sophisticated, empathetic life for same questions, same fears, similar hopes and dreams of its sapian cousin. But perhaps it was just different enough to be seen as prey, and just perhaps a lot of legends about trolls are a slow cultural reckoning with the sins of the human past.
Slow clap, slow clap. No, well's that been I don't know.
You know, it could be completely wrong. If you're a troll, like an actual as our pal Lauren likes to say it, actual facts, supernatural troll, and you're hearing this right, let us know. We'd love to hear your opinions. We try to be easy to find online.
That's right. You can find us at the handle of Conspiracy Stuff, where we exist all over the internet, on Facebook, or we have our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy, on YouTube where we have video content rolling out every single week, and on x fka Twitter. You can also find us in the handle Conspiracy Stuff show on Instagram and TikTok. But weight there's more.
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