00:00.00 archpodnet Are not. 00:00.00 Shane Yo yo yo yo welcome to segment 2 of episode 98 of the life in ruins podcast with my co-host the dudes. 00:09.92 David So well done chain. Well done. Um. 00:10.93 archpodnet Thank you Shade! Thank you. 00:12.85 Shane I didn't know who I didn't know who to go first in order like if I'm looking at in my screen and I don't want to like go somebody first and have David be like why'd you put me last and make it all awkward I didn't want to I didn't want to ruin things. 00:22.55 David Ah, well. 00:27.80 archpodnet We do it alphabetically so CACOD a that's how we've that's how we've avoided this conflict. 00:33.86 David Oh. 00:33.91 Shane Um, okay. 00:35.55 connor I think I think David's always last and I'm technically an h a h I j where we doing. 00:38.43 archpodnet Because alphabetically he's last I mean if we had someone named when one of us drops out and we bring on an Ian he'll be last. You know it's all just we just all for you know, just how the name system works. Ah first names. 00:42.21 David I'm the last always during the sessions too. So. 00:48.35 connor We we doing first names or last names on oh common cupan okay, cleaning stuff up with a comet. 00:54.39 David We're doing comments. Um I have a question I see on Reddit a lot on the archeology Reddit which is currently a dumpster fire as usual, not sometimes it's good. Ah, people keep posting these things about like bronze or copper that's in ah like up north by like the great lakes or something like that and that it was an impact thing and like we're like archaeologists are hiding evidence of like the copper age and the Americas. Does this have anything to do with that. 01:28.36 Shane I don't think so wouldn't surprise me if it's what's funny is I talked to people who who like don't really know that much about they're not like neck deepep in archeology like maybe we are by. They're just regular folk but they'll hear about stuff and they'll go down a rabbit hole started by Joe Rogan having Graham Hancock or they'll be on the the Reddit the thing and they'll they'll come out with all kinds of weird stuff like you know that? um, that's a new one to me. 01:52.62 David Um, Wow That's interesting. 02:01.22 David Yeah. 02:04.60 Shane But I had somebody who was who gave me a whole entire spiel like on a college football message board about how you know you know is like lecturing me about how we how little we know about about how long people have been in North america and yada yada yada and I was like wow okay, that's weird. That's that's really weird. 02:21.43 David Yeah, it is weird right? Like how many shovel tests have you dog man where you pull up nothing but friggin bison bone and dear bone. Ah. 02:24.51 Shane Um, yeah, yeah, and it's like 1 of those things where I don't want to go full argument from authority either you know, shout out to Dave Anderson um bad arguments. but ah but yeah it's weird when people take off and run with stuff like this comet paper. 02:36.19 David Right? right. 02:44.18 Shane And it was weird like you guys sent me those like public. Ah the public press articles like the popular articles and I was like whoa people are going to take this in some weird directions. Um. 02:53.67 connor Yeah, like 1 of the titles is a cosmic airburst may have devastated a vast native american culture fifteen hundred years ago which is a bad and but interpretation of the paper to begin with because I think they suggest it right that it might have a factor. 03:08.20 Shane Um, yeah. 03:11.76 connor Might have factored into ultimately the hope will decline but it's not saying that like Alien artillery like ruined the hope. Well. 03:18.76 David Right? and. 03:19.84 Shane Um, like starship troopers. Ah, it's the it's it's. 03:23.45 archpodnet That's what I was thinking ah the damn bugs man. Oh my good. Yeah. 03:25.60 connor Um. 03:28.87 David There's also no way to rule out that it was not Thanos um, you can't read. There's no constant to hypothesize with that. But. 03:36.32 Shane Do you guys? Follow Mark Boslow on Twitter or who that is so Mark Boslow is this guy who works I think yet Los Alamos um he's based out of New Mexico and 03:38.55 archpodnet I Now I. 03:38.95 David And I use Twitter. 03:51.96 Shane He's a guy that's done a bunch of the actual modeling for how impact events how you actually model them and like he's been very very very antagonistic to these series of comment papers saying that they're basically physically impossible like the story that they are. They're using their the mechanisms for like the younger dryas come and I'm assuming this he really went in on the sodoma and as sodo and Gomorrah comet paper and just said like the actual physics of this are impossible and so I mean there's there's that's the other thing that's like hard to. Convey to people too is like a paper like this will come out nature. The scientific reports. Whatever it is the parent company for this like they have a vested interest in generating controversy because that gets clicks articles get shared. They get cited more. Article article is that get are controversial get cited more because people immediately start arguing about them kind not unlike the dynamics on Facebook that drive those those dynamics back and forth when you get eyeballs on it. It generates clicks and if you're a. Journal like nature that also drives up your citation indices whenever there's there's controversies and so that's part of their metric for trying to argue that libraries need to carry their subscriptions. Um. And all kinds of other things is like look how how important our journal is look at all the citations from these articles in our journal from the last year this is where the conversation's at you need to pay us lots of money so you get access to our journal. So. There's like this financial vested interest and maybe. Promoting things that are controversial. 05:42.91 David That makes sense I mean it's all just clicks like if if it you know meteor takes out indigenous. You know society. Um, yeah I mean ah same stuff. We always talk about with the what was it the white sands one and the serity one. It's just like it. It's. 05:45.22 Shane Um, yeah. 06:02.83 David Buzzwords it gets clicks. It's like easy to digest like it's It's a footprint in that case like okay, there's evidence of people. It's not like some seed in someone's poop and like you know the mammoth one. It's like oh well they were extracting the marrow. It's like quick and easy and this one's just like a. You know they're gone. Um, yeah. 06:24.90 connor I was going to add to that I think it's these papers do really really well because it's like 2 things. It's like 1 scientists. Don't want you to know about this, you know that scientists are ignoring the data. That's like Sarudi that's white sands. That's all these these ah you know that's younger younger dry's impact theories that this appeal against that like us as archaeologists don't want them to know what's really going on and it's all and these these things are also tied to like 1 single event. So. It's easy for folks to understand. You don't have to contextualize the paleoindian period. You don't have to contextualize Geo Arc you don't have to put them into and give them a bunch of other information to and help them understand why this is true or or not true. So I think it's it's these like 1 ne-off things that. Really like go and and explode into the popular culture just because it's yeah, it's appeal you appeal to a authority saying that we we don't know about it and also that it's just easy to comprehend I think as I think David alluded to earlier. 07:37.14 David Yeah, and while you were talking I was just thinking too like we know how like Rome fell I mean there's like many you gotta incorporate the visigoths you gotta incorporateed till the hun you gotta incorporate the franks you gotta incorporate disease money power. You know. Shields not working right? I don't know but like there's a lot of stuff that we can talk about with that and it's all historical and we know the processes in which like a civilization just fell and like China and like you know Alexander's empire they all just ripped each other apart but over here we don't have that information. Um, and there's all that nuance to stuff about how civilizations rise and fall and in this case, it's just like maybe it just kind of like ran its course and like it dissolved into other you know or different cultures and it you know just comes and goes like it does in Europe or Asia. Her Africa and like again like a comet is just like ah oh well, that makes sense because there's all that nuance that people don't have. 08:39.33 Shane Um, it's like I feel like a good since we're talking about comparisons of rome it's like trying to understand it's trying to understand what carthage was like after the muslim expansion in North Africa if you didn't have any written record or something like that and you're just like trying to like you got so much cultural overprinting that it really ruptures a lot of stuff and without that written record you've got oral histories and oral histories are very complex. Um. 09:13.65 archpodnet You know I read this article and they talk about oh well after this event hope wells created circular like impact craters and emulating the common event and I'm just like thinking like we know the archeology in the southeast like poverty point. Is like 1000 years before this that looks more like an impact creator to me like we have a record of cultures in the Americas creating circular structures well before a cosmic event like this like it just it's not. You know, going back to that term context like this is not a well-written paper that contextualizes the hope well within a tradition of earthworks that are circular that span from you know the Ohio River Valley down to Peru right. 10:07.53 connor Yeah, and I want to I was just going to add to that that like they don't contextualize like is this an increased amount of comments within this period. All they say is that there's 69 comments within this period but humans have been seeing comets since humans have existed. 10:08.47 archpodnet Like it's just. 10:25.34 connor So what? what makes this period special. They don't really tell you that within that and why why is this all of a sudden. Why would they? Why would they pick it up more here and create like whole earthworks based on this even though people have been seeing that stuff for thousands and thousands of years. That that is a big part of the context that is missing in that. 10:46.71 Shane I always like to think of these things in terms of like statistical probabilities and I really so like as I was reading this several things like jumped out like they said that the stuff. Ah, that the palites whatever those terms were they're different from the stuff in Kansas and they're like 10% different in iridium or something like that without the context of knowing what that background scatter is and really zeroing that out is that is 10% a big number or a small number you know like. Um, is it a statistically significant number. Um, it's hard to evaluate then you start like rolling your way through this and there's like several other things like um this graph with the spikes by level like how are those. Statistically significant or are those within the error rates of the instrumentation. Um, then you start thinking about that and it's like all right? What about how about finding some sites that date well before this or well after this in that area. And see if these things pop up are you looking at stuff that seems to accumulate on stable surfaces with people around um or ah, do you do need a big catastrophic event to have this is it like a bunch of little small events or 1 big event. It reminds me of those. Argument in Europe with like the origins of geology is like is the geological record created by very few big events catastrophic events. It's called catastrophism or just the regular everyday things that we see which is uniformitarianism and so it. Seems to me you can create a uniformitarianism style counterargument to a lot of this that um, it's just the stuff that happens when everyday people are using stuff and if they're processsing this bits of meteorite that are coming from Kansas that stuff's going to spread around an archeological site. 12:47.80 archpodnet And I'd be curious to see like talking about population dynamics in these areas because they talk about like a ah ah ah Breadth of geography and cultural and you know population demographics I'd be curious to see like. Some probability distributions of radiocarbon data for this period because if there is an airburst around this time that's causing like fires and burning down like part of their argument is they have all these sites where things look burnt to hell then we should see you know population um depopulation areas right. So For're using Radiocarbon dates and some probability distribution as proxies for population around this period. You should see a decrease in radiocarbon data and you should see increases in outlying areas. 13:31.83 Shane Um, and yeah and you know on that point too. That's ah, that's actually a really great point and if you also think about sedentary. People they talk about them becoming more sedentary. They're not moving around as much they're not moving or fires around as much they're burning more stuff in 1 place. It should not be surprising that there's more evidence for burnt things at these sites because that's what people do like for over 1000000 years we've been setting things on fire. And so it's like that stuff should be accumulating more at these sites. So I don't know man it's it's hard for me to get there. It's hard. It's just and I hate I hate being a hater. Um, but man. 14:19.46 archpodnet It but it's like as we've talked about with the footprints and with Sarudi like these kind of topics that are that are essentially this paper this airburst paper is trying to change radically change our understanding of why this archaeological culture ceases to persist in time and. Is the cause for a transition in human behavior in the southeast or or Ohio River Valley like that has to be as we've talked about previously with you like this has to be investigated critically in a critical lens like this isn't just some raw like raw material sourcing of chert. Might be like okay these people are getting it from West Virginia instead of Georgia Whoop do do this is oh an extraterrestrial object came to our atmosphere blew up caused some crazy shit on the surface and radically changed the um the trajectory of human lifeways. 15:13.80 Shane I know this is going to be my conversation starter essay is anybody at anytime I run up on somebody who studies woodland period stuff and be like yo Eddie Henry what you think about this ah what did you what you think about this hopewell comet paper and just. 15:27.56 David What that comment. Do. 15:30.14 archpodnet That what that comet do. That's a new sticker. That's a new sticker David get on it. 15:30.79 Shane Yeah, what that comment do yeah ah oh man shoot I don't know where to go next. 15:34.45 David Working on it right now. 15:39.73 connor Yeah I I was just gonna add that I think and everyone we've all studied this and heard this and talked about this multiple times. It's like things fall apart in societies for different reasons and it's complex and if you point to 1 thing falling apart. It's causing this. Whole thing. You're probably wrong I mean it's people move for a bunch of different reasons and I you know this this one this narrative that 1 thing changes. Everything is it. It just doesn't I don't think really. Really undermines the complexity of humans and their culture I think. 16:19.55 Shane I made a note in the pdf as I was reading through it. It reminds me of this study by these 2 behavioral economists Kaneman and Diversky the famous behavioral economist and there's a really great example of just how our minds work. Similarly, we all all of our brains have like the similar flaws in judging probabilities of things happening and he's got a great example of having a brief description of an individual It's like a young lady here's what she majored in in college this is what she does. And the answer the 2 answers you have to choose from are ah Linda is a banker and Linda is a banker who's active in the feminist movement and after reading that description everybody always picks Linda is a feminist Linda the feminist baker but the odds of. Without realizing it's more than more probable that Linda is 1 thing than 2 things and the the outcome of that why that study matters is it kind of they build off of that and show that we love a narrative if we have a narrative. Um, a good narrative causes. Our brains to throw probabilities out the window and so this is like a narrative here's this one thing that happened that caused all these other things and it's in our it's like catnip to our brains to like think oh yeah, now this is likely without asking. Is it probable they actually have a term in here it's like it is probable and that's a difference. It's or it's it's like 1 of those things it could have happened like the ancient aliens guy but is it late to have happened those are 2 very different things. 18:01.20 archpodnet So yeah. Of course and with that we're gonna end segment 2 of episode 98 we'll be right back here to talk more astrology is that what we're at now I was trying to make fun of it. Astro astrology geminize in retrograde. 18:17.36 connor So astrometology. 18:18.00 David Astronomy.