From the Vault: The Bone Palace, Part 2

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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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,

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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 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. 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.

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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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

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