Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Artifact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on particular objects, ideas and moments in time. And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green? And was the Holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures scene? Those are the stirring words of English Romantic Age poet William Blake, inspired by an apocryphal tale of a young Jesus of
Nazareth visiting the British Isles. The same sense of wonder and dubious believability may also be applied to the so called Meister footprint, which would seem to suggest that feet in ancient time walked upon a bunch of trilobytes during the Cambrian period. To be clear, this is quite impossible,
but let's discuss the details of the fine. Amateur fossil hunter William Meister discovered the so called footprints in the Wheeler Shale fossil site in nineteen Breaking open a slab of rock, he discovered a print that he took to be a human sandal print complete with a trilobite crushed
under the heel. These findings were championed by creationists eager to poke holes in geologic and evolutionary history, because, if even remotely true, the print would mean that sandals clad humans, if not a time traveling Jeffrey Lebowski or Christ himself, walked about in the Cambrian muck. But of course this
is not a sandal print. As pointed out by geologist William Stokes in Tripping Over to Trilobite, a study of the Meister tracks by Ernest C. Conrad, the Meister specimen was the result of a natural rock fracture known as a spawling. Furthermore, as Conrad points out, the fracture only resembles a sandal print in the most superficial way possible quote, the specimen was in no sense fate, and I am sure it was found exactly as reported Stokes as quoted
as writing quote. But I, along with my geologist friends, are equally sincere in my belief that it is an accidental natural product and not a footprint. And again, the fossil in question is a good five hundred million years old. Humans only split from their ancestors between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand years ago. The oldest sandals yet recovered are a mere ten thousand years old, discovered in
oregons Fort Rock Cave. The Maister Print is not technically an artifact, nor is it evidence of one, but it does serve as an interesting illustration of humanity's willingness to redesired answers in the rock and jump to human centric interpretations. Yeah tune in for additional episodes of the Artifact each week, and as always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.