How Bioarchaeology Works

and a Nutshell, which was mostly about archaeology. Yeah. And boy, it's hard to find an archaeology article on the Internet that doesn't mention Indiana Jones say that, including this one from Stuff you Should Know or from How Stuff Works. It was the one to third and fourth word in

this article. Forget the Indiana Jones fedora. Yeah, but you know what, like no pun intended, hats off to that character, for I mean, he he's that's that that character has done so much for the field of archaeology just by existing, you know. Yeah, for sure, he definitely opened my eyes. Archaeology was one of the first complicated words I could spell as a youngster. Yeah, thanks thanks to Indiana Jones.

I bet of archaeologists between the ages of UH thirty and fifty five are there because of Indiana Jones, and you can usually pick him out because they tend to dress like him as well, Like you really don't need

a whip enough, I don't need it, I want it. Yeah, but yeah, he he represents though this kind of um, well, he represents a type of archaeologists that never actually existed, you know, pulp pulp fiction kind of archaeologists from the like the nineteen thirties adventures, right, so that that didn't actually Indiana Jones and his ilk didn't never really exist. But he also kind of represents this type of archaeology that, um that has become old school for sure, and it's

starting to be replaced. I was gonna say slowly being replaced, but I get the impression that is fairly quickly being replaced by this kind of new method These new techniques that put together all fall under the name of bioarchaeology, right, which is a sub genre, not genre, but sub field, sub field. There's a word I'm looking for. I can't find it. I think subspecialty works or a specialty. Yeah, it is a specialty, but I can't. I can't A sub umbrella of the umbrellas term, a subbrella. Man, it's

gonna bug me. I'll think of it later. Uh So anyway, UM, we're we're talking about the combining of a lot of different disciplines in archaeology, and they all have great long names like paleo DeMar graphy, just studying ancient populations, the demographics of those, paleogenetics, which is a big deal, as you will see with DNA scraping some old teeth, you know,

finding out what's going on there. Yeah, mortuary studies, which that's the best way to get a date in college, right if you say her, you're minoring and mortuary studies. But else well, UM, basically anything where you can apply new scientific techniques to um, the study of of bones in particular, um bones coop that that kind of yeah, that kind of um lends itself to being called bioarchaeology. But the the field, this little thing that started out, I think is kind of a kind of a fairly

specialized subdiscipline of archaeology. It's the word subdiscipline. I think I suggested that, didn't I. Um it it's starting to replace archaeology as a whole. From what I can see and just from the outside looking in, it's becoming archaeology exactly. It's replacing some of these old techniques with these new techniques. It's kind of a technocratic approach to archaeology, and the practices, the best practices they're coming up with are so good

that they're kind of undoing old archaeology. And so this specialized field is kind of taking over the field as a whole, and it seems to be the way that archaeology is going. And one of the reasons. Just initially it was just like dig up the bones and try to read them in even better ways than the old style of archaeology did. But as it's growing as a field or as a subdiscipline, it's it's starting to try to answer bigger and bigger questions about the people that

are being dug up and the populations that they belong to. Yeah, kind of putting it in a historic context and not just um, let me look at this one set of bone owns and what this says about this person. But like you said, they're trying to almost reconstruct societies as a whole, uh, and social strata and what they ate and what kind of things killed them and whether or not they accepted outsiders. Like it's really kind of neat.

It really is. I like it. And plus I mean, this is stuff that archaeology, UM, I guess you could call it old school archaeology concerned itself with as well. But I get the impression that, um, the old school archaeology was not rooted enough in science, so they were at risk of making grand pronouncements that were not necessarily UM correct. So you just have limited evidence like this one skeleton or maybe one burial area, and just from

a few things that we're basically based on observation. UM. Just like visual observation, you would make these extrapolating you would extrapolate onto the population as a whole, and you could get that wrong really easily. So what bioarchaeology does is the same thing still bury up dead bodies. You you surmise things from the way that they were situated,

the stuff they were buried with, and all that. But then you also apply scientific investigation like genetics and like UM, like using mass spectrometers to to isolate isotopes and in bones, and then you take that evidence and you apply it to the visual observations you've made, and you get a clearer picture and you're at less risk of getting it wrong.

I think that's why it's becoming archaeology. Yeah, and um, we'll probably talk about this a little more later on, but one of the things I thought was really neat about this is they make the point in our article here that you know, history is written by historians, so you often just get stories or the history of the more important people, right and uh, they even quoted a bioarchaeologist in here that says that their goal is to kind of work from the bottom up and to find

out what was going on with some of these marginalized people in society or the very least society as a whole, and not just you know, let's dig up King Tut's tomb, which is great, but who who worked on King Tut's tomb?

Like that's interesting exactly. Yeah, And so the that's basically what's called diplomatic or great Man historiography, which is the study of well, that's the that's just digging up King Tutt and focusing on him and leaders and rulers, and that's based on the idea that they're the ones who really push society forward or in whatever direction. It won't love it. It was on the rulers and that's the way that it's been. Like, that's like kind of the western,

white patriarchical approach to studying history. What what you love and what bioarchaeology has test itself with is called history from below, which is, like you said, it's it's sussing out that the common people's lives and and figuring out

society from there. And one of the neat things about that, Chuck, is it like imagine if you're just part of a marginalized group today and you find out from some archaeologists down the road or some historians down the road that actually the group that you're a part of did some really amazing things in this one civilization, at this one

period in time, that that's inspiring. That can inspire people alive today to do great things with their own lives based on, you know, finding out some neat stuff about their ancestry that would have otherwise been overlooked if their ancestry had never been part of the leadership of a society.

There's a lot of value to it. Yeah, and the term itself, you're more likely at least at this point, and I think you're right, it is changing um to hear it in America, even though it was first used by a British archaeologist name Sir John Graham Douglas Clark, great British name, and then ninteen seventies, but an American anthropologist named Jane Ellen. Uh, Bookstra, that's as good as I could have done. Bookstra b U I K S

t r a UM. She's the one who kind of popularized it and Americans kind of picked up on the term a little more, at least at this point. You're not as likely to hear it uh in Europe right now? Right, Well, we're just gonna call her Jane Ellen. Okay, So Jane Ellen. She was an anthropologist and she basically took that term bioarchaeology and basically said it was the integration of archaeology and human osteology, which is the study of human bones and what they can tell us, um put together to

investigate biocultural change. That was her definition of bioarchaeology, and she came up with it in in nineteen seventy seven, and that really kind of is the uh, the definition for the field today. Yeah, she was awesome. Actually I looked into her a little bit. So does she wear a pith helmet too. She's probably she's probably been a pith or at some point. I had a dude right in.

Actually that was a fellow pither. Nice. I saw a couple of people on Twitter saying like, I had to go look this up, but this is what you're wearing in the pool? Well, I mean there, to be fair, there are the like the British soldier uh type, tall pith helmets with the red feather. Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the low safari type that provides the coverage. That's precisely what I assumed you were talking about. Yeah, that it would be just weird

to wear the tall one in a swimming pool. But yeah, this guy was a mail carrier, so oh yeah, it seems like that might be standard issue for um, for the post office, now that you mentioned it. I've seen him before. I have to for the walkers, at least the undead ones. All right, well, I think I think we should already take a break since we provided such a nice broad overview. Gosh, that's all right, and we'll come back, can talk more and more about bones and poop. Hi,

all right, so we promised talk of bones and poop. Uh, we'll deal with bones first and um bones most times, and less like recently when they found did you hear, like just a couple of days ago they found this couple from World War Two frozen in the Swiss Alps. Yes, and okay, so this couple, it's so tragic, right, This is they had tons of kids that were at home. The mom finally the dad used to go hiking in

the mountains all the time. The mom finally went with them for the first time and they get lost and felt they fall into a crevass and or lost for seven a year again. Yeah. And the reason why she never went with them before with her husband before because she's pregnant all the time. Yeah. So she reared a bunch of kids, fell into crovoss, died, was lost for seventy years, and then was found again by a ski lift company. Could you imagine coming across something like that

and be grizzly in World War two outfits? I mean uniform obviously, but period era clothing. Yeah. So anyway, barring something like that, generally, what you're gonna be left with when people die, that flesh goes away very quickly, and you know, as far as in a relative sense, and you're gonna be left with bones. These skeletons, Uh, they're very durable, they're very hard, uh, and they last a

very long time. So, um, the best evidence that that bioarchaeologists work with, for the most part, like bones and teeth, right, because those, like you said, they lasted very very long time. And there's actually quite a bit you can tell from those things. In fact, I saw um an explanation of bioarchaeology because it's such an evolving field. Still check that the definition. Even though Jane Ellen's definition holds pretty well, there's it's it's just not set in stone, know and

says this is the definition. Right. So one explanation for bioarchaeology I saw so that it as a discipline, it views the skeleton as a form of material culture crafted through lived experience. Right. So the skeleton itself has the markers of all these different things that this person did in their lifetime, had done to them in their lifetime, like say an infliction of violence, um, suffered from in

their lifetime, like a disease eight in their lifetime. Um, yeah, all of this stuff is left behind in your bones, and we've just recently really figured out how to read this beyond looking at it and visually inspecting it. We've learned how to apply scientific tools like DNA analysis to to to glean more information from them. Yeah, it's really neat, like did these people like it really puts a human a more broad human aspect to it all. I think, uh, like,

did these people suffer as a society? Did they thrive? Were they healthy? Were they sick? What did they overcome? What was there? What was their environment? Like? Like did they was it social upheaval that brought them down? Or was it, uh, you know, a large wave or was it a disease from eating the wrong thing? Uh? It's really interesting. I know a couple of I think it was in two thousand fourteen. I believe we talked about this on some show, but it might have even been

an Internet round up. But they discovered the oldest human poop, uh, fifty thousand year old Neanderthal poop, and they found out that it was a bit of surprise that they ate a lot of vegetable. Yeah. I saw this um documentary recently called What the Health I think is what it was called or whatever? Right, um, But there's an ongoing discussion in it about whether humans are actually herbivores or omnivores. Yeah, which was it was a bit of surprise because they

thought that Neander talls. I think it's talls, right us, But I think I think it is supposed to be talls. I don't know. Well that they ate largely only meat. Uh, And then they found that no, that in the it's called copper light, this these fossil feces. Um they did eat a lot of meat obviously, but they were eating and they couldn't tell from the chemistry analysis of the poop itself, but they did pollen analysis of the area and found that they were eating like berries and nuts

and tubers, and uh. It just you know, overall, just gives kind of a more complete picture of something like you were talking about earlier. They previously were like, no, all they did was eating meat. Well yeah, plus also, I mean, think about it. So there's this whole idea that all of the megafauna in North America collapsed like around twelve thousand years ago, and humans get blamed for it, like we overhunted the megafauna. Well, if we find evidence

down the road through bioarchaeology, that. No. Actually, most of the ancestors who made it to North America UM and we're living here twelve thousand years ago were vegetarians for the most part. They probably didn't overhunt and drive to extinction these the mega fauna. It was probably something else that did it. And so, you know, laying it at the feet of these early humans has been kind of

a cautionary tale, like, look, what happened. You can lead to environmental collapse if you don't manage the wildlife correctly. But if that's not actually true, and we find out what did lead to the collapse of the mega fauna, then maybe we can protect against that instead, you know what I mean, and just forget the rest of wildlife. Yeah,

you can overhunt all you want. Well, it's definitely calling into question a lot of things that we took for granted because of oh, just sort of limited science, I guess, is the best way to say it. Yeah, And there's this Atlas Obscure article we both read about um human feces,

about copper light the study of it. I think it was something like to know ancient civilization, you have to study its feces or something something along tho it's a truly known ancient society, one must analyze its species, right.

And it gives an example of this one archaeologist who was working back in the sixties and is working today, and back in the sixties, when they would find copper light, they would be like, oh, this is interesting, and then they'd use it for like flying disc contests at lunch. This is like, this is not that long ago that the archaeologists were doing this, and today it's like, you find copper light, you bag it separately from the other

copper light found. You're it's going back for genetic analysis. You take half of the sample and preserve it so that you can use it for later analysis when our tools become even more advanced. Like it's it's just been. It's just such a great example of old school archaeology and the new um archaeology that's coming up today. Like they're looking at it as which is as it is, which is a legitimate, important fine that can tell you a lot about a society, instead of playing frisbee baseball

with it. I guess it's frisbee football, right, frisbee frollf playing frollf with the poop. Did you ever play that frisbee golf. No, they have courses for that stuff. I know, yeah, I know, they definitely do. I'm sure they did in Athens. If they don't still well, in true Chuck form, I went so far as to buy a couple of different frisbee golf frisbees and never went Oh you never did hunt. Nope, nope. That's kind of my thing. Nothing beats sitting around when

you're in college. Yeah, pretty much. Uh so. Yeah, So copper Light, I mean it took. I mean it took from the nineteen sixties until just recently, like even through the eighties and nineties. It said that it was a pretty small field of people that took it seriously, and other people were still even in the nineties, like what

are you studying poop for um? And to be fair at the time, especially like back in the sixties as recently as like the eighties or nineties, I guess like you're saying, we didn't have anything that we could do with the human poop. Besides all, yeah, there wasn't anything you could do. I mean, you could break it open and be like, oh, look a corn corn seed. They were eating corn. That's about the best you could hope for right, So there there wasn't much you could do.

But even still, if you look at what we're doing with it today, which is preserving half of the sample for future analysis with better tools that haven't been adventagure, that definitely um underscores a mentality that wasn't present before either, which is this is not the apex yet, where we haven't reached the apex of science. Yeah, I mean now nowadays they can rehydrate it. Uh, they can say, hey, they were recites in this poop and in fact, in all the poop of all these people that lived here,

so perhaps that's what killed them. Yeah, And they don't even have to have the stool sample. They can find in like an set an ancient latrine and learn a lot from that. And you know it sounds kind of funny, but it's you can learn a lot from this stuff. Well. I remember when I was writing the cannibalism article years back, finding like right around that time, they had found evidence of cannibalism from copper light and they had done it

really round about. Um, they found some protein that is only found in human muscle, and they found it in the poop of some South Southwestern Uh, indigenous groups poop and they think that it was the result of climate change because the climate had changed and people were starving and they engaged in cannibalism as a result. But um, that's a pretty sterling example of bioarchaeology and action. Yeah. This one guy, Pierce Mitchell from University of Cambridge, go,

I don't know, go fighting chaplains, fighting chaplains. Uh. He learned through studying fecal matter that King Richard the Third had round worm. Yeah, so you know that's great man. His storiography though, who cares? All right, so what man? I didn't expect to go right into poop, but there we did it. Well, let's talk teeth. Let's go from poop to teeth, you know the standard. Yeah, teeth are a big marker. Um, Like, if they dug me up one day, they would say, well, this gentleman had at

least two bad teeth, because the only thing left. And and I had a brief conversation with the very famous Microw for just kind of weirdly had a conversation with him one day about my implants and he said, oh, you have those implants and he went, well, just know, in a thousand years that will be the only thing left of you. Right, So that's kind of good to know. Sure, yeah, they'll they'll be like obviously this person was of higher social status, he had implants, Yeah, or at least into

intern he was probably venerated. Uh and bury me with my flippers is all I'm gonna say to So what they could find out from teeth or can find out maybe, um, if the children suffered from malnutrition, Well there's a whole there's a whole thing where when you are malnourished as a child, your teeth formed these little lines in them as the development is kind of stunted, and they stay there for life, even if you managed to become nourished and survive. Right, So they can tell what your diet

was like as a child from just looking at your teeth. Well, and can also tell I guess when I was talking about how society may have overcome something. Uh maybe they you know, we're close to death and overcame disease to end up thriving, but they still had those lines and the right exactly. Um, they can also tell from teeth if you crush teeth up and powder them and run them through a mass spect spectrometer. There's some pretty neat

stuff you can do with that. Actually, Um, when you're a little kid and you start eating and drinking the local water, there's something um called strontium and it's a it's a stable isotope that's found in the bedrock of your area, and it's specific to your area, your region.

It's pretty localized, right, the type of strontium isotope that's going to be where you live and when you when the when rain water filters through the bedrock into groundwater and then comes back out, and it's taken up by plants and enters the water supply, and then your mom eats that plant and then breastfeeds you. Those strontium isotopes get transferred to you and they get locked into your

teeth for life. Right, So where you're born can be isolated by using a mass spectrometer to find what strownium isotopes are in your teeth. That can be done whether you were whether you live fifty thousand years ago or we're born yesterday, either way, and that amazing. Yeah, I feel like we talked about that before. There's no way we haven't, right, Yeah, Like something about the water that you drank as a child. Yeah, that would be it

totally right. So you're taking in stronium isotopes and you've got those embedded in your teeth that you also get different kinds of isotopes as well, stroni um, lead, oxygen. They all have stabil isotopes that get embedded into your into your skeleton, whether it's your teeth or your your bones. But the stuff and your teeth from when you're young stays in there, it's permanently locked in. But the stuff in your bones. Remember we did like does the body

replace itself every seven or years? Um? Since your skeleton replaces itself pretty pretty on a pretty regular basis, the strown e um and the isotopes that are found in your bones later in life are going to be a marker of where you lived close to your death. Right. So if the strawny of isotopes in your teeth are different from the strawney of isotopes in your bone, well a bioarchaeologist is going to say, this person, mindgraded where did they come from? Why did they migrate? Why were

they buried with all these great grave goods? Did they come from a different culture? And basically end up, you know, becoming venerated in this new culture where they like a high priest or what what's the deal? Where did this person come from? Yeah, and that's just kind of um laying the groundwork now. And we might not have the to the technology to say, oh, well, this is where he came from. We don't have the interpretation yet to say this is where, this is where they came from,

and this is what happened when they arrived. But we can, we can create raw data from that for successive generations of archaeologists to look at and use to to UM to include it into a better understanding of the population they're examining. Yeah. And with the the mass spectrometer, which we've talked about another shows too, they do something called stable isotope analysis in terms of also finding out what

what people ate. That if there's a difference in molecular weight, like the ratio of heavy to light particles, they can determine whether someone consumed more carbon or more nitrogen in their lifetime. If they have a lot of nitrogen, maybe they ate a lot of meat or most likely had a lot of meat, or they just ate handfuls of nitrogen maybe so uh, nice nitrogen fields could come across you know, Uh, if they have a high ratio of the carbon, maybe they ate a lot of like corn

or I guess, maze, Um, it's sorghum. That's such a great word, low carbon. It's an old timey word. Like any time I hear sorghum, I immediately think overalls. Yeah, me too. Low ratio of carbon isotopes might mean they ate more potatoes and wheat and stuff like that. So, like, it's just amazing that science has gotten to this point. You can dig up a bone, find out where someone was from where they died, and what they ate yep,

like largely in their life. And again you're putting it in context with where you're finding this, like, yeah, that's already like the story that's already there exactly. You know, because people if you if you put if you bury somebody with something, um, that says a lot like it just as much as as what your bones say about how you lived. I saw somebody say like the way that you're treated in death by the people who you're

survived by, that says quite a bit as well. So the type of burial, the way that your your grave was marked, um, says a lot about not just you and how you were treated, but also what the society was, you know, found important. That's true because you can ask for whatever you want in your burial, right, but someone's got to feel good enough about you to carry that out out. They might be like, you know, I want to keep this this wooden fallus. I don't want you

to be buried with it. Did you see that thing them, those mummies that were discovered in China? I don't think so. No. I think that was like um Middle Eastern artifacts the hobby lobby had, But I don't know anything about that, do you. I read briefly after I saw the words hobby lobby. What were they doing with that stuff? I don't know. It's it's very bizarre. Maybe they were collectors, maybe where they were going to turn it into a

line of like um tasteful home decor. Probably so well that there was a group of mummies found that belonged to an unnamed population that lived about four thousand years ago in um, a part of an autonomous part of China that's now a desert. It's called the Tacklemmcin Desert. I'm sure I got that right. But the the area of the district that they were um found near is called the show Hood You district, and um, the there's the mummies are just incredibly well preserved, so much so

that their hair is totally intact. They were buried with these um felt hats and fur lined boots that are totally intact. I think one of them had like a feather in their cap that was intact. Like the preservation is just unheard of. And one of them is so well preserved that she's called the Beauty of show Hood you right where. Um she's just kind of good looking as far as mummies go, Like, go look her up. Don't think I'm a weirdo. You'll feel odd about this

after you see her yourself. What was the name again, the Beauty of show jew So Um, it's not at all pronounced like that, but just type in beauty Mummy China or something like that and they will definitely bring it up. But this this unknown group, Um, they were like they would bury they're dead with Phallus's or Volva's. They were buried with like thirteen foot fallacies sticking out

of like their graves. They were really into sex for one reason or another, right, and the hats that they were buried in UM were found in burials in the area two thousand years later. And so this unknown group that no one has any idea what they what they were like, or what they were into, aside from they

were super sexy, right. Um. They they think that they know what language they spoke, Um, because the the group that had similar hats two thousand years later was known to speak this one lost language and it was more related to Latin than say, like Central Asian, which doesn't really make sense until you find out that some of

these mummies actually had red hair and European features. And they think that they were a pastoral group that basically herded their cows all the way from western Europe over to the the deserts of central China, and that is funding yeah, holy cow. Yeah, but again bioarchaeology. All right, well, let's take another break here. We'll talk a little bit about d n A and UM, a little bit about how hobby lobby kind of figures into this in a way.

All right, So we talked about mass spectrometers, talked about good old fashioned tooth scraping, good looking mummies, talked about the sexiest mummies in history, right. I'm sure that's a there's a top ten list on the internet somewhere. I'm telling you you'll be like, oh, there's number one. I gotta see this. Um So, I guess DNA is sort of is sort of the next place to get Oh it's uh. They've been using DNA in archaeology for a while. Obviously since the advent of DNA, they've been trying to

apply it. But they use it as as much as they can now ancient DNA because obviously with DNA you can find out all kinds of things from relatedness, uh, to other individuals within a population, marriage patterns maybe, and obviously just something is I mean, they can tell largely from the bones what kind of sex of an individual. But DNA is the shoe in. Yeah, supposedly, even even if you are sexing an individual by the bone structure,

you're it's still an educated guest. It's not definitive. It's d N A that that's the only definitive way to say this is a man, or this is a woman that could could have been a man. With very dainty frame. Um, there's this. Uh. So the mummy is called the Beauty of x I A O h e. Which, believe it or not, is show hood you? Yeah? Show who would you? How's my Chinese? That was pretty good? Actually, thanks man.

I actually I'm going the extra step these days and looking up pronunciations and then practicing, which is the second step. What what word was it that shamed you into doing that? Oh? There's been so many. Uh. I can't bring any of mine. I think I blocked them out to keep any level of self respect. But there have been plenty, as you're well aware. Can you think of one? No, okay, nothing recently. I'm sure everyone will let us know on the internet. Oh I just found the money? Yeah? Am I right?

Or what that's a good looking mummy? Well, I don't know. It's a little weird to say it is, but I think when you when you approach it from like, oh wow, that's a mummy. I can't believe how well preserved it is this place instead of like a mummy. Yeah, although, hey, man, to each his own, does that extend to that? Yeah? Sure? All right? Uh all right? What else about DNA lineages? Obviously it's a very big deal. Um well, yeah, you can you can find a group of a group burial

or basically a cemetery. And now bioarchaeologists like to show off by showing who's related to whom. Yeah, just by saying, well, let's look at their their their genes, their d NA, which is pretty neat. Yeah, and as a whole, if you look at a cemetery, I mean that's I mean,

finding an individual is great. But when archaeologists can uncover a burial ground, that's when they really kind of lick their chops because they can learn a lot about like the hierarchy of the society, what different ones of them eight Like you said, if they migrated, Uh, maybe they're from somewhere else where were they born, which says a lot about a population, if they took in people from

other societies. Yeah, that's a great point actually, yeah, um, And that that actually gives a pretty good example of um, like the social hierarchy thing. That gives a good example of bioarchaeology. And that whereas before you would find a grave and this one had like a marker and the person was buried with a lot of cool stuff, and then it's next to a grave or there's a grave nearby that isn't really buried with as much stuff, so you would say, well, this, this person was obviously venerated,

and this was a socially unequal society. And it's a pretty good guess. You know, you're you, you're you're probably right. But what bioarchaeology does now is they take that that that's surmising and then they say, okay, well this person had a diet that was rich and meat, and this person ain't nothing but vegetables. So the rich and meat person who had the nicer grave was probably richer. And

let's look at their bones. Well, their bones are less, which would indicate they had not engaged in hard labor during their lifetime, whereas this other person's bones are very dense, which meant that they probably did engage in hard labor. And so you start putting all this stuff together, and you're backing up that that um, the surmise that you made about the um social strata her stratiography. Yes, you

know what I'm saying. I'm glad at least one person does. Uh. And and you're you're basically backing it up rather than just jumping to conclusions and leaving it at that. Yeah, it's a much more firm science for sure. Yeah, So uh, I kind of teased before the break that hobby lobby kind of plays apart, but I was referencing in general when it's kind of the UM. Anytime we talk about archaeology, there's a certain amount of controversy involved because what you're

inherently doing is disturbing UM, ancient graves. UH. In almost all cases is unless you know there are no humans there. But UM, that's there's gonna be some controversy within that. Some people think you shouldn't do it at all, uh, and then other people have come along the way to at least kind of give a framework of how best

to do this best practices. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UM, in nineteen seventy adopted a convention called the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export,

and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. That's a mouthful, It is a mouthful, but basically what it says is, UM, you know, try not to let happen, which is what hobby lobby did, which is obviously pay for a cultural object that didn't belong to your people, right, individually and right that's the key. If if somebody, even if it's somebody who is a member of, say like the tribe that that artifact comes from, that that skeleton come from.

There's something called cultural patrimony, which is that that is an object that belongs to the tribe as a whole, and no individual, including an individual from that tribe, can claim ownership over it or over the tribe. Right. So yeah, so if the tribe says no, that's ours, the tribe

wands that individual doesn't. Yeah, And there's been a really big and I know we talked about this on other episodes, but there's been a really big push um in the past ten years, but really in the past like years for repatriation of these cultural items here in the US. And I think they um, yeah, George H. W. Bush. Yeah, they passed the legislation called the Native American Graves Protection and Repage Repatriation Act nag PRO. Sure, why not not

as catchy as UNESCO. That's a good one. But you know, like I said, the idea is that you just can't come in here and and uh, steal is such a harsh word, but it's yeah, it's really tough. I think Gray Robbing we did one on that right as a whole. Yeah, I remember that one that one audience member in London called me out, was like, are you saying my parents are gray Robberts because they're both archaeologists, And I was like, of course that was our life topic. I said, some

people would say that, for sure. I do remember that. Uh. There's a little bit of like pushback though in some cases, because sometimes they end up having to rely on oral history, and I think that the cynics, uh would are saying, um, well, you know, how do we know they're just saying this stuff, yeah that was passed down orally like show it to me in writing there, like we didn't have writ didn't

have an alphabet, dude. Or you might have to be uh, you might have to negotiate with a religious leader and then another um jerk might come along and say, oh wait a minute, Uh, these are their religious beliefs and this is federal law, like we have to keep those things separate. So, I mean, those are all very cynical viewpoints. I think generally, bioarchaeologists try as much as possible to work with the the local people or the indigenous people and say, hey, you know, this is your stuff, let

us uncover some of your secrets. Here unless they're like, no, don't, we don't want the secrets out right, right, but you know, they try to have a good working relationship with the indigenous people. Uh well that's the best way to go forward, of course. Yeah, um yeah, Like I would think, I mean, you never know, I'm not gonna obviously, what's important to like one Native American tribe might be different for another.

But I would think a lot of times they might want some of the stuff highlighted and even you know, put on display as long as it's a temporary thing and they can get it back, you know. Yeah, I

think it also depends on the context. Like you know, the turn of the last century was really rife with I mean, you really can't call it anything much more than than academically sanctioned grave robbing, where you know, universities of prestigiousness would send off basically guys who amounted to adventurers to go, you know, locate graves and loot them and bring them back for the universities to to widen

their prestige with these collections. Right sure, and then if if, for if, for decades you said, hey, give that back that was taken by anyone's um definition illegally in the university is like, oh, sorry, no, you're gonna be upset about that. Whereas if the person says, well, oh, yes, of course, let's get this back to you. Can we do this analysis on it first and then get it

back to you. Um, Or if you've discover something and you say, hey, we need to hold a meeting with this local indigenous population, saying we found a grave site. We'd really like to excavate it, but it's up to them whether we do or not. You're probably gonna get a lot better reception than than you would if you just rolled right over their wishes and didn't take them into consideration at all. Well, there's a saying here in the South, Josh, that you've probably heard catch more flies

with honey than you do with vinegar. Right, So true, It's always been my approach. That's why there's always plenty of honey at all of these local meetings of indigenous people. When the bioarchaeologists show up, you know they're digging that. This is uh, I just learned this today. They're they're exhuming Salvador Dali. Yeah you see a paternity test. Yeah, they're there. Terry springers behind officially. No he's not, is he. No,

it wouldn't surprise me. No, that wouldn't mean officials in Spain are gonna break into his tomb, get a e and a sample and see if this lady, Uh, this woman, Pillar Abelle is in fact his daughter. It's a good name, Pillar. She's a fortune teller. Oh yeah, she's a little wacky, but uh, well apparently her claims legit enough that they're

taking the guy up. Yeah, Holly, um from stuff you missed in history class and we're talking about this and I hadn't heard about it yet, and she was telling me about She was like, oh this ladies, she's a piece of workman, she's wacky. I was like, well, she probably just waltzed into court and knowing anything about Salvador Dali. The judge was like, yeah, maybe we should look into this right, like to the Great Odd Figures or at

least one. I'd like, how you just exposed Holly to a lawsuit from this lady by saying she was a wacky ways I quote Holly Fry said wacky. Uh. And of course his families, the Salvador Deli Foundation is fighting it, but it's going be buried. Yeah. I mean I think it's interesting when it seems a little sentimental for Salvador Daldy. It doesn't seem to fit his character, you know, like I'm sure he'd be like, whoa, all right, let's get

it going. Yeah, dig me up, like, dig me up and bury me with the world's good, best looking mummy. She said, it's uh uh, she said, it's not about the dough. Um, so it's about the money. Yeah, we'll see about that. It's like tens of millions of dollars at stake here easy. Oh, so she has a claim on his estate, is what it is? Huh. Well that also explains why the foundation doesn't want me. Yeah, I mean that's a good thing. If he if he fathered a child, that she is his rightful error because he

didn't have any kids. I got you. I always could feel I have always have mixed feelings about that stuff. Well, I mean, on one hand, it seems like Jesus person coming along and like trying to get some of this money. But then on the other hands, like, well, yeah, but that's if that's his daughter that he never cared for. Uh. I mean, I definitely end up siding with the fact that it is family in the end. But I don't know, it feels little icky sometimes too. Well. Yeah, I mean,

you're digging up a body. You're you're digging up a body so you can make a claim on money, whether it is about that or not involved. But I also feel like there's a certain amount of like reverence for the dead body. Yeah, where it's kind of like, no, if you've fathered an illegitimate child in life, just because he died doesn't really get him off the hook from you know, from from that from whatever consequence that might be,

even in death. I don't I don't know. I hadn't really considered it until now, but um, I guess it is this kind of an icky thing overall. But it's also it's just a dead body, you know what I mean. It's a dead body and care. I'm not too precious about my remains. That's good to know, because I'm gon dig you up based on that could make me into a bunch of soccer balls a just kick me around the world. That man, what a great idea. So Chuck, let's let's wrap it up talking about you know, why

this kind of stuff is important. I think we've hit on it. Like here, they're like explaining the history of a society from you know, the common people rather than just the leadership. Gives a better idea of the society. That's definitely one thing, um. But also I think that bioarchaeology is kind of tasked itself with using the past, getting a clear picture of the past to explain the present or predict the near future. You know, Like one thing that a lot of people are um trying to

figure out is our humans inherently violent. And one way you you could kind of provide evidence for that case is were we violent in the past. It's a huge I think we even did in an entire episode on that one that was pretty great about whether humans have always been violent? Um. And I think that's one thing that bioarchaeologists are trying to solve is finding evidence of violence or an evidence of a lack of violence in

a society that happened before. Another, what big one is climate change and how humans have responded to that in the past, right, and what we might can do about it in the future based on that that learning. And then there's just something to be said about you know, getting bones out of a grave. There's nothing more satisfying than that. Put him in a bag, throwing the bag over your shoulder and walking back to the lab whistling as you do. That's right, the job well done. You

got anything else? I got nothing else, sir? Okay. Well, I'm sure bioarchaeology will have plenty more for us to talk about in the future, so maybe we'll revisit it. In the meantime. You can type that word by oh archeology into the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this what was in the subject line, which is am I in a hole? Except she really

said the word was from michaela uh. And I always like these that kind of pose a question to us, so this one does that. Here's what went down, guys. Uh. There's a recent conversation with my boyfriend. I stopped at a stop sign at the same time as a car coming from the opposite direction who had a turn signal on. I was going straight. The guy and I both waved for the other to go ahead first. Got a little awkward,

but that's not the important part. My boyfriend said, he notices that it's usually men who do the wave to usher people that stop signs, and he thinks it's just them trying to be controlling and that they are probably jerks. I waved people through all the time, just trying to be nice and help them get where they're going a little bit faster, without worrying about who should technically go first. So I've always assumed that when people do the wave

at me, because they're trying to be nice. So my questions to you all are, how do you perceive the wave? Am I controlling a whole? Is this how my boyfriend perceives the wave? Is he a controlling a whole if he sees it that way? And should I stop doing the wave? And that's from Mikaela. She said thanks, I'll be seeing you in Lawrence, Kansas in a couple of months. Have been spreading the good word often. Thank you. So, Josh,

what are your thoughts on the wave? When I am I'm very infrequently wave, you just go no, I guess

that's not true. I don't actually wave. I do the you know where you like present with your hand, your palm up and then you kind of move it to one side like oh please after you that's what I do, which I just realized, is a form of the wave, and I do that sometime times, but I guess the only time I would do it is when it's not obviously clear who's supposed to go, So I tend to just let's ask the other person to go ahead and

please after you, right. I don't think of that as being controlling, but that's exactly what I'm doing, is taking control of the situation but not doing it, not trying, yeah, to me, just not even giving a second thought and just and basically pushing through ahead of somebody who may or may not justifiably should have gone first. That's the jerky move to me. I think it goes both ways. It just it just depends on your perception of the world. Do you hate people? If so, then you probably find

the way to be controlling and jerky. What about you? All right? So my four way stop sign a deal is very deep. It's a very big thing in my life really and on me. Well, I've got a lot of thoughts on this um. First of all, the worst people in society are people who mistreat children, animals, and elderly, and then right behind them are people that just like run right through a stop sign because they just know,

like I don't want to be bothered. Yeah, well they could mistreat children, animals and the elderly with the front end of their car. That so those are awful people. Um, as far as the wave, I tend to just I tend to try and let someone else go first. But I'm also kind of impatient. So you've just got a moment like if you just sit there and dawdle after I wave, how either get aggressive with my wave and then kind of look like a jerk or I'll just

go and be like, you know, you had your chance. Yeah, I I do the I just go where I'm like, all right, see you in hell. Uh. And then the other thing that really bugs me about stop signs lately I've noticed is there there's a growing segment of society that seems to think like it doesn't matter who arrive first. Is us Like I feel like I've been waiting long enough. Yeah, you can't do that, like heavily heavily trafficked four way stop. You maybe the fourth, And I'm sorry that you feel

like you've been sitting there too long. But if you were the fourth one to come to a complete stop, then you gotta let the other three go, not just like I think they treat it like, hey, I stopped and now I'm going Now. Now there's a there's a sub there's a subdiscipline to that chuck right where if somebody is going straight and you're going straight in the other way, you can go straight right then and just use up a turn simultaneously. It actually keeps things going faster.

It's not at all rude. Somebody might be like, hey, wait a minute, but if they stop and think for even half of a second, they'll see that you actually did them a favor. So that is okay as long as you're not trying it while somebody's turning left in

front of you. Yeah, And there's also the thing that bugs me is when two people stop facing each other and uh, you both go to go at the same time because you think we're both going straight, and they go to turn into you and like honk at you, and I'm like, dude, let me know which way you're going yet I probably would let you go anyway, but I thought you were going straight. Gott to use that blinker. You'll get a finger if you don't use the blinker.

Whoa not by me. I'm just saying some people so anyway that I think out of all the traffic things, even including like highway merging, the four way trapped stoplight, I'm sorry, the four way stop sign intersection is my most troublesome and frustrating part of driving for me, that's number one. Well, now everybody knows, so look out for Chuck. All right. Yeah, this is MICHAELA that brought all this up. Yeah, MICHAELA,

I hope, I hope we explained that. I don't think that means you're controlling jerk, and I don't think that means your boyfriend is because he thinks that is what it means either. Yeah, maybe you guys should just find some other topics to discuss. Yes, but MICHAELA, I do think you're with the wrong guy overall though, poor guy. Okay, uh, I can't believe we're ending it like that. But if you want to get in touch with us, like MICHAELA did um, then you can tweet to us at s

Y s K podcast. You can hang out with me on Twitter at josh um Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at facebook dot com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant or slash Stuff you Should Know You can send us an email. The Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at at home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.