The Infinite Monkey Cage - Space Archaeology

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian and writer Sara Pascoe, biological anthropologist Alice Roberts and space archaeologist Sarah Parcak. They look at how archaeology today looks far more Star Wars than Indiana Jones, as an archaeologist's list of kit can now include satellites and lasers. They discover how searching for clues from space has led to the discovery of several ancient lost Egyptian cities and how the study of ancient DNA and artefacts reveals our similarities, not differences, with our ancient forebears. Producer: Alexandra Feachem

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are travelling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working.

Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince. This is the Infinite Monkey Cage. For the first time since lockdown, we are joined by an audience remotely connected, one by one, in their own attics, basements, sheds.

Many of them no idea whether they're human, replicant, robot, or just some other form of algorithm see i just want to stop you there robin because i don't understand that intro because a replicant or a robot may not have any idea whether they are a replicant or a robot irrespective of the fact that they're connected by zoom or remotely it doesn't matter does it no no no and i think it's good brian i think it's good that not every replicant knows it's a replicant, Brian, or Brian V6.2, as I know you best. Anyway, today we are combining space, genetics and archaeology. It's Star Wars meets Indiana Jones, which will, of course, allow fans of both franchises to do their favourite thing,

which is to go to chat rooms and go, it wasn't as good as when I was eight years old. I feel very let down by the more recent sequels to The Infinite Moon. I would like to meet, by the way, one Star Wars fan who really seems to have ever liked a Star Wars film. Almost every Star Wars fan I know didn't like that one, didn't like Solo, didn't like Rogue One, didn't like that. Brian, actually, to be fair, Brian, I think you are a proper Star Wars fan. And you have quite an array of lightsabers to show for that even though as we know you do have issues with the practical problems of dueling uh with a sword made entirely using light no i don't actually you can do it you can make a lightsaber with sufficiently high energy photons because at

high energy is the photon photon cross sections large yeah but how big would the handle of the sword have to be well you're right i mean you need something bigger than the Large Hadron Collider. But in principle. And would it make that noise? Well, this is the thing. The Large Hadron Collider makes a beautiful, gentle noise. Yeah, but if you're just holding it around. I mean, this is the thing.

Portability with a 29-kilometre circumference is an issue, isn't it? We're dealing with big hands there. You need big hands. Anyway, today we're combining space, genetics and archaeology to explore the origins of human civilisation and in fact the origins of humanity itself. We're joined by a wild swimmer, a space cowboy and an autobiographer of the female body and they are... I'm Alice Roberts. I'm a biological anthropologist and professor at the University of Birmingham and the thing I hope we eventually find out about our past is exactly when our ancestors started eating dead strawberries. No, it's how. It's a more broadly biological question actually which is how genotype relates to phenotype. How do we get from

DNA to whole bodies and functioning minds? Hello my name is Sarah Parkak. I am an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the thing that I hope we eventually find out about our past is the origins of our resilience and creativity and how studying them can give us some hope for the future which is what I think we need a lot of right now. Whoa we definitely do. Hello my name is Sarah Pascoe. I'm a comedian and writer and what I'd like to know about the human past is whose idea it was to domesticate dogs. Who was the first person who decided to kind of get a wolf and make him lovely? And you have gone the right panel for this

because Alice Roberts knows the answer, but it's not the subject we're doing. But anyway, this is our panel. Oh, that is... What wonderful applause. We've missed it so much, that sound. Hungry for it. Lovely. Anyway, this week also I should say that we have two Sarahs on the show

and normally that isn't particularly an issue because we're all together in a studio and you're able to use through kind of nods and glances. It's clear which Sarah you're talking to. But unfortunately, this one's going to be more difficult. But what I can tell you for people listening is fortunately one Sarah has an H that's Sarah Parkak and Sarah Pascoe does not have an H so that means that when I say Sarah I'll be meaning Sarah Parkak but when I say Sarah I'll be meaning Sarah Pascoe so that should uh that should deal with all of it you could say you could say Sarah P or Sarah P though yeah that's

the thing not as enigmatic. No, I'm not going to. That's a typical scientist answer. It's like halfway through your surname that I stop being nervous that you're talking to me. It's only when you get to the hard C that I go, phew, okay, I don't have to answer this. You'll have these moments of going,

how much am I meant to know about the use of laser technology in archaeology? Maybe I was meant to have genned up on this. Now, Alice, it's 12 years now since you made that landmark BBC documentary, The Incredible Human Journey, which told the story of humanity as a species and the spread of our ancestors across the globe. What's changed in our view of those pretty fundamental questions since you made that programme? Well, a lot, because science moves on.

And I think what's remarkable is that the broad brush picture is still the same. So the idea that our species originated in Africa, we're still very sure about that. And all of the evidence that's accumulated in the last 12 years has just made us more sure of it. You see the greatest diversity in terms of genetic diversity and morphological diversity in Africa. And we've also got the earliest fossils of our species in Africa.

In terms of the paths that our ancestors took out of Africa as they started to emerge and then colonise the entire world back in the Stone Age, we've changed our minds about when people started to emerge out of africa we've seen people arriving in australia much much earlier than we thought actually although we went out on a limb when we made that series and we trusted a particular piece of evidence which came from the northern territories in australia and we said we we do actually think that that modern humans homo sapiens got to aust to Australia by 60,000 years ago. It was quite controversial at the time. But since then, we've had more archaeological sites

being found in the Northern Territories, and we're pretty sure now that actually it's probably as early as 70,000 years ago, 65,000, 70,000 years ago. And again, seeing people very, very early on in East Asia, we've got human fossils from East Asia dating back to about 100,000 years ago, which is a real surprise. So it's lovely when those, I love it when the surprises come up. And the massive big revelation, of course, has been that 12 years ago,

we didn't know that when our species emerged out of Africa, we interbred with Neanderthals. And we did, because we've all got Neanderthal DNA in us. I think that is one of the most remarkable things in the 21st century, because you actually, I mean, reading any old science book is always always intriguing if you go back to the 50s or the 30s or everything oh well we thought this or the extinction of the dinosaurs again you watch about what I was growing up with in the 70s compared to this but that the Neanderthal one in particular I still it doesn't seem that long ago having conversations with oh no no no maybe

the odd absolute pervert might have done it but yeah now we we know it happened a lot and we know that there's you know there was a lot of neanderthal dna and and and a significant amount of it has been cleared out of our genomes so there used to be a lot more neanderthal dna in our genomes than there is now but it's what's weird about it is that we sort of found that in humans because we're you know we're very pro-kill and we start investigating ourselves first and then um looking at I was really interested in animals that became domesticated over time and I started and plants as well and started looking into the kind of genetic story there and it just happened again and again and again so it transpired that people originally thought that apples spread from Kazakhstan where they

originated and you know didn't interbreed with any wild apples any crab apples on the way and spread right across Europe and that's what they thought from the from small parts of DNA that they were analysing you know sort of 10-20 years ago and then when they start to do genome-wide analyses it turns out our eating apples are mostly crab apple genetically and it's and it's basically anything you look at everything just interbreeds with its closest relatives and it's interesting to me that it's such a short time scale that we're talking about you're talking about 70,000 years 100,000 years and what is it that the emergence of our species about a quarter of a million years or so yeah i mean we've got a common ancestor with neanderthals which we think

goes back about 800 000 years and so you know you can't obviously say there's one day when one species turns into another it's something that happens over time and some people even argue against separating species out over time as well but we have got good fossils from uh from morocco from a site called jebel aroud which date to about 300 000 years ago which look modern human so you know something that looked like us has been around for that long and and yeah i think when you start talking about the deep past like that it doesn't seem it doesn't seem that long actually since you know we emerged out of africa and colonized the world and turned into the incredibly numerous species and the other the other huge thing is that you know we had bottlenecks when it's estimated that our numbers dropped as low

as 10 000 like globally and and and you think and you know they're from genes do you because yeah those 10 000 people would have oh wow yeah so you can kind of spot those times in the past where you know we shrank so much that we were basically a very inbred population uh and and you just think that is an endangered species they were quite lucky to be here it really drives home how lucky we are well sarah your your research is much of it in terms of that point once you know human beings when civilization begins and the growth of of civilization and you use satellite technology and this for a lot of people who think of archaeology they think of there are people

digging and there are people you know on the different sites but you are using space archaeology what is space archaeology yeah so so space archaeology is the use of all sorts of different kinds of sensors from airplanes to uavs to drones to satellites to even pictures taken from the space station. And what you're doing is you're looking for two things. You're looking for patterns on the surface of the earth that indicate things that were built by ancient humans. But sort of what you're really doing, think of it like a space-based CAT scan, because there are so many things that are partially to completely buried by soil or vegetation or even modern towns. And what the satellites allow us to do is to look at different parts of the light spectrum that we simply can't see. We're stuck looking at the visible part of the light spectrum,

but of course it extends far beyond to the near-infrared, middle-infrared, far-thermal, and so on. And what the satellites do is they record this information in different parts of the light spectrum, and when things are buried under the ground, they affect the overlaying soils and vegetation and sands in ways that we can't detect in the visible part of the light spectrum. But say if it's vegetation and there's a ditch, an Iron Age ditch hidden beneath the ground, that dense, moist vegetation or soil is going to affect the overlaying vegetation in such a way that it's going to be healthier. And in the near-infrared part of the light spectrum, which is the part where we can see vegetation health, it's going to show up as much clearer. And then you zoom out and zoom out and zoom out,

and you're able to see the shape of an Iron Age ditch. And this is why a couple of years ago in England, I think it was about two summers ago, when there was a massive drought, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of archaeological sites that started popping up in places that archaeologists simply hadn't seen before. So this technology is used all over the world. It's used where I work in Egypt, it's used throughout the Middle East, the Americas, and even in places like Central America and Southeast Asia where there's dense rainforests. And just to set the timescales here, Sarah. So we heard from Alice that our ancestors, if you like, Homo sapiens, the history stretches back hundreds of thousands of years, let's say maybe 300,000, 800,000 years or so. When we're talking about civilization, so visible evidence or archaeological evidence of

human civilization, I suppose, town settlement cities, what kind of timescales are we talking about? So for built archaeological features, you're going back five, six, seven thousand years. But actually, the work that my colleagues and I do, it's not restricted to, say, what we would think of as civilization. My colleagues have used this in East Africa to look for evidence of early hominid sites. It's also used to look at long-term changes of the environment, so looking at river shifts over time. Satellites have been used in the Western Sahara,

for example, to find what were called radar rivers. So these long buried rivers that dated to 12 plus or more thousand years ago, an archaeologist went out to the desert, these gigantic dunes, and went out and picked up stone tools that had been left there over time through site deflation. So it really can be used to pick up any evidence of human remains, but obviously if we're talking about pyramids and cities, you know, 4,000 or 5,000 years ago. Sarah, not Sarah, Sarah.

You are someone who has written books on, which involve evolution and psychology and neuroscience. And when you do hear about something like space archaeology, something which is so... I'm so jealous, Robin. That's what I was thinking. I'm so jealous. I was going to say, do you about something like space archaeology, something which is so... I'm so jealous, Robin. That's what I was thinking. I was going to say, do you know who I'm jealous of, Robin? I'm jealous of eight-year-olds now,

because when I was a child, I thought you had to choose between space and archaeology. I was like, do I go to the moon, or do I become an Egyptologist? And now the fact that they can just grow up and do all of it at once, it's infuriating. They don't know they're born with technology, do they? Well, you see, if you read this... Yeah, I was reading about Sarah's work today.

I was reading about it and I kept gasping. Like, I wanted to shout to someone, like, guess what they can do now? And the fact that lay people can look on the satellite, can't they? And you can train them to be useful. And that's such an amazing thing now. See, I'm just surprised that if you'd read, if you had had different newspapers coming to your house, such as the Sunday Sport or the Weekly World News,

you would have had headlines like Sphinx found on the moon. And therefore, through misinformation, you could have still become a space archaeologist. Well, I think that's what confused me, because actually, do you remember a magazine called The Fortean Times? I love The Fortean Times. So same here. And it was always it was those kind of well-written conspiracy theories about how, well, actually, where did consciousness come from if we didn't breed with aliens? Or, yeah, the architecture of ancient Egypt is too clever for apes to do, someone must have helped us.

So I think for a long time I did have a confusion with that. That is a fascinating... Can I just interject and say that's all nonsense, just for the listeners? Yeah, just in case. All those theories. That's really persuasive. Isn't that just... Well, this is why I can be a terrible dinner guest,

because invariably someone will ask the question, come on, tell me the truth. Did aliens build pyramids? And then I'll go get someone, I'll get someone to get me a huge sheet of paper, and I will spend about 30 minutes doing diagrams showing the 800 plus year evolution from tombs under the sand or graves in the ground and how there was a long, slow evolution to the construction of pyramids. You can actually see it over time, and it's a really logical progression. You have the genius of someone like Imhotep, the architect of the Great Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, and he was sort of the Steve Jobs of his time. He was the one that decided, you know, instead of having stone rectangular mastababas let's just stack them one on top of the other and see what happens and lo and behold the pyramid was born so you definitely have these extraordinary genius breakthroughs like you see throughout

human history and you see today sarah the time scale um surprises me that when we talk about ancient egypt we're talking about a civilization that was around for thousands of years continuously aren't we and and the the are those buildings that we see so the the the real archaeology of ancient egypt we see cities um are they the first cities are they the first thing that we would call large settlements that we see evidence for so So there are debates in archaeology, you know, what constitutes a major city, right? So are you talking about like a modern major city, or are you talking about a large settlement? So for example, you know, you have a city like Jericho, right, in Israel, going back 8,000 years or more. You have, of course, extraordinary settlements

from five or more thousand years ago in places like Iraq. But we archaeologists, we define cities a little bit differently. So you have, you know, densely gathered urban populations who decide to leave their hunter-gatherer lifestyles and pull together. So, you know, what is a city? How do we begin to define what a city is? And that is something very much up for debate. It's still very relevant today, though, because as Robin will tell you, when you're touring with a comedian, if you accidentally call a city a town,

they get very, very upset because you've just made a judgment because of the size of the place walking from the station and they get they correct you really quickly actually we've got a cathedral okay yeah well i i am i've got a series on channel four called britain's most historic towns and we've visited um 12 cities and i just get just get inundated with irate emails and irate tweets going, we're not a damn city. People are very sensitive about it. And I enter into interesting discussions.

I said, you know, we could call it Britain's most reasonably large settlements, and it doesn't really have the same. See, I'd like to see the opposite of that, because, you know, I think historians, I would like to do a series called Britain's Least Historic Towns. It's one of, there's nothing here, nothing. Even their Lidl's only a couple of years old. It's got very few grocery items of interest.

Nothing. Alice, I wanted to ask you actually on the, in terms of technology, the 21st century technology, what do you think has been, you touched on this in the first answer, but what for you are the most important innovations in terms of us now understanding the human story, the development of the human story? I think it comes down to a whole range of different technologies. I mean, you know, this is the thing we see again and again in so many branches of science that, you know, you can sit and think about things mean, you know, this is the thing we see again and again in so many branches of science that, you know, you can sit and think about things and, you know,

be an armchair archaeologist or biologist or whatever. But actually, at the end of the day, you need to be able to see it. And, you know, we had extraordinary developments in biology as soon as people invented the microscope. And it's the same thing. You need to extend the abilities of the human. And as Sarah said, you you know having something which can see parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can't see opens up your eyes and and you start to see an awful lot more so I mean I think what

what Sarah does is extraordinary because it also takes you away from archaeology being having this kind of focus on individual sites case studies and suddenly shows you this landscape picture so it helps you find new sites but it also shows you what was happening right across a landscape rather than just homing in on one individual site and so so we've got things like that all sorts of remote sensing and then um kind of at the other end of the spectrum getting down really really tiny and burrowing inside ourselves. I think, you know, genetics is having this amazing transformative effect. And the other thing which has made a massive difference in terms of study of the past is absolute dating.

So if you go back to the 19th century, everybody's trying to work out how everything fits together. And the only way they can do it is stratigraphy. So the only thing they can do is is stratigraphy so the only thing they can do is say well this seems to be underneath that and therefore it must be older and it's all relative dating and then you get this revolution through the 20th century where we start to be able to do absolute dating usually using radiometric techniques and of course the famous one is radiocarbon dating so suddenly you can go well what is the date of this you know we don't we don't have to just look at it in terms of this this is before that we can actually put a precise

date on it then you can start to see how culture spreads then you can start to see how people spread and ancient migrations worked and i think now bringing it all to i mean you know how what amazing powerful scientific tools we have to be able to study the past bringing together remote sensing with genetics and with um radiometric absolute dating as well and of course relative dating is very dangerous in terms of the advancement of the family as well isn't it that's uh um sarah i wanted to talk about some specifics so we've got this broad outline of our our species humans moving out of africa let's say what did you say again alice about a hundred thousand years ago or so depending on where you go yeah somewhere i would say somewhere

between 60 and 100 000 years ago something like that um and then we begin to build civilizations. And then the techniques, I'm interested in the techniques that you use from space to detect these buildings, these cities, whatever we want to call them. And I know in particular, there's the discovery of Tannis, this lost city that was in a reference in Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? This legendary city that you discovered, or you were part of the discovery. So could you go through the details of how it is that you can use space-based observation to uncover something that we can't see from the ground? You would think it would be easier to go and do archaeology, but you do it from space. Yes, so Tannis is a great example. So you have this massive city.

It was ancient Egypt's capital about 3,000 years ago. It was a capital for 400 years, so a very long-lived capital, sort of the end of the New Kingdom imperial age have excavated large parts of temples to the god Amun and others. But while they certainly knew the general area of where the city might be, they simply didn't know the size or scale of extent of it and ancient Egyptian cities, like so many cities throughout the ancient Near East, were constructed of mud brick. And there's so many villages and towns today that are made of mud brick. And what happens is over time, the buildings degrade, they get knocked down, they get bolted over. And what you have left typically in archaeology are foundations, the foundations of houses, of temples, of pyramids, of tombs, etc. And what happens is with these buried mud brick structures, and they're generally between sort of 8 by 8 meters,

10 by 10, the larger upper middle class homes are about 20 by 20 meters in size, the mud brick degrades ever so slightly and sort of degrades into the overlaying soils. And whereas while you're walking over the top of it, you can't really see anything there. If you walk over the city of Tanis today, it's just this vast vista of brown, slight helix. Just you cannot see anything. I mean, maybe you can see the hint of a wall or two, but otherwise nothing.

But what happens is, you know, with remote sensing, with space archaeology, it's not just about finding things. You have to really understand the weather systems that are in play, the geology, the makeup of the chemical composition of the soils, the planting seasons of the crops surrounding the sites. And what happens is when it rains and during a wet time of year, that mud brick that's slightly degraded in the soils overlaying the foundations, it absorbs moisture and holds onto it a little bit more than the surrounding soils because brick is dense and it holds water well. And what you do is you look at the satellite imagery in sort of the edge between the red part of the light spectrum and the near

infrared. And when you process it and use edge enhancement, I sort of, I joke, I say sometimes I just do really fancy Photoshop work, but it's really playing with light. It's playing with the physics of light and pixel strength. You know, you have, if it's 8-bit imagery, the pixels can have a number between 0 and 255, and you're really trying to make those pixel differences pop

and to see those edges. Locally, you may not see a lot, but when you pull out and pull out and pull out, lo and behold, you have the outline of a city. So you see the street plan, the street plan, essentially, and this buried and visible from looking at the... Yeah, it's quite remarkable, actually, that you can get that resolution. How small size structures can you see and identify from space?

So this is what's amazing about satellite imagery. The resolution only keeps getting better and better. You know, when satellites were first available to archaeologists almost 40 years ago, they had a resolution of about 100 or so meters. Now, the highest resolution satellites that you can get commercially and this is stuff you can see on google earth it has a resolution of 0.25 centimeters so you can zoom in yes 0.25 centimeters so you can zoom in from 400 miles in space and pretty much see any buried wall or most buried walls now that when you i remember we talked a while ago about something which is when you talk about that level of technology and when you talk about the change in the possibilities of archaeology, you mentioned to me once that you had a sense of the overview effect, which was known for astronauts, very often the idea that when they go into space and they look back at the Earth, it has an immense psychological and philosophical effect.

it has an immense psychological and philosophical effect. And so, Sarah, does that have the same thing for you to suddenly be, you're now, you've been digging in the dirt, and now suddenly you're looking at these incredible images from 400 miles in space. That must have an effect on the way you view your discipline. It has. I've been very lucky to do this now for almost 20 years. And the one thing it's taught me, and this is kind of getting to what you were saying about the astronauts in the overview effect, just how interconnected we are today, you know, being able to see the impact of modern civilization on ancient

archaeological sites with site destruction and looting, but also looking at site interrelationships. I'm not just looking typically at one site. I'm looking at that site. I'm looking at it in 3D. I'm looking for old courses of the Nile River. I'm looking for other cities that are nearby. So I think in terms of landscapes, not particular archaeological sites. And it's really challenged my thinking, you know, really rethinking ancient human environment interaction and understanding how fragile things are. And I know I've heard a number of astronauts talk about just that sense of fragility they get for our planet.

And also, of course, from space, typically, you can't see borders. So the idea of borders and who belongs and cultural fluidity becomes a lot more apparent, just how interconnected we all are so yeah it has had a profound effect on on me and the work i do and how i think about the world today that links back exactly to what alice was saying about how our ancestors just moved to where it was better to live or where they wanted to go to the idea of nationhood that concept is so new when actually just beforehand you just you roamed or when you found somewhere where you could grow things or the weather was good or you stayed. And that made complete sense to everybody.

It's quite extraordinary, I think, going back to the kind of Paleolithic colonisation and thinking about how crazy it must have been. Just, you know, that idea, you know, that is so anathema to us today of being able to just walk into a new landscape and just go well this is home now yeah i'm fed up of trees i'm gonna go i'm gonna go to the beach over here yeah and now of course you know territories all carved up around the world and then it gets really interesting um you know around the neolithic uh when we see the first civilizations and we see the you know the first farming Neolithic, when we see the first civilisations and we see the first farming, because then there's a massive population expansion of the farmers and you've got the kind of farmers expanding. And I think one of the really interesting questions in archaeology at the moment is what happens when those farming communities start expanding

and encroaching on the territory of the hunter gatherers. And that's something that we're starting to pick apart through culture, but also now through genetics as well. And it's tempting, isn't it? And it's a question to both Alice and Sarah. It's tempting to, or for me anyway, as a physicist, a mere physicist, to look back over these timescales and think somehow that these people that you are studying are different to us, you know, sort of mentally and physically.

It's a primitive time. But I was put in mind when I was thinking about this program of I'd got a book that my wife had given to me, actually, of very old translations from Egypt of just writing, 2000, 3000 BC. And I wanted to just read you one. There's a wonderful, I think it's one of the oldest pieces of writing. It's something, Sarah will correct me here, but it's something like 2500 BC.

And it was translated as, as Ray Hathor and all the gods desire that the king should live forever and ever. I am lodging a complaint through the commissioners concerning a case of collecting a transport fare. So it's a letter of collecting a transport fare. So it's a letter of complaint. It's fantastic. And there's another one here where this is from 1100 BC, 1145 BC. Remesies III, I think. And it's someone says, your husband took a coffin from me saying I shall give half a calf in exchange for it but he hasn't given it to me

and i mentioned it to my friend who replied well give me in a bed give me a bed then as well and i'll bring you the calf when it's mature and then i i never got the bed and i didn't get the coffee neither and then you said you'd give me an ox but i'm saying no i don't want the ox i want you to return the bed and the coffee you You know, there's no lessers. That's life is 3,000 years old. That is how old they are. He promised a coffee, but on Tuesday. I wanted to ask both Alice and Sarah.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you both if you get a sense of a feel for these people and how they lived and how how they behaved yeah definitely and and I think those those early writings are just they're just brilliant I mean I quite often say um you know when I'm giving talks and things I say you know there are any accountants in and I'm like well your your predecessors invented writing so you know you can go home going yeah that was down to us it's all accounts isn't it Sarah to begin with it's like that's that's why people it's got you know that's why people start writing so they can go you owe me this and yeah and you didn't give me my coffin

the earliest so the earliest writing we have and it's it's a big debate between people who study ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, and it will continue in perpetuity, did writing originate in Egypt or in Mesopotamia, but at a site in Egypt called Abydos, that's the earliest evidence for which we have writing in Egypt. And they're essentially, as Alice said, they're wine docket accounts, right? So they're counting how much and how many and what is in each pot. They're keeping the records of things. But it wasn't so long after that, just a couple hundred years, when we had things like curses from the old kingdom that were written on pots. And so these magical spells and curses were written by an agitated family member or neighbor to one of their family members in the afterlife saying things like, I'm going to paraphrase quite a bit here, Imhotep is a complete jerk.

If you could please talk to the gods on my behalf and curse him, that would make me really, really happy. But then you have things like mother-in-law jokes from antiquity. You actually have one of my favorite accounts from ancient Egypt. It's from the New Kingdom. And it's talking about a school teacher. And he's complaining. He's complaining about basically his teenage scribe apprentices. And again, I'm going to paraphrase heavily. He's like, kids these days, scribe apprentices. And again, I'm going to paraphrase heavily. He's like, kids these days, they cut class and they went out to the fields to drink beer and they're not doing their work. I don't know what to do. They're us. They're us. Nothing's changed.

What I was going to say about this whole thing about account all comes down to something that's really, really evolved much, much older than language, which is the idea of fairness. Because, you know, when people study apes, chimpanzees, there's this really inbuilt thing of, no, that wasn't the deal, or, no, if you've got slightly more than me. And so, of course, the minute we're writing symbols, that's the most important thing. What were you supposed to do? What do you get in return? Who's taking too much?

Yeah, definitely. I think it's important for everyone to know that, as they're all the monarchy all of us are genetically linked to accountants so don't feel down if you're worried about that I was imagining those accountants after your lecture Alice going home going well who's boring now one of my favourite things

to do if I'm teaching an archaeology class around Valentine's Day I'll read ancient Egyptian love poetry and it will turn your ears purple because it's filthy is it is that what you mean yeah yeah it's incredibly erotic it's I mean you know people were very sexual of course they were. And extraordinarily expressive of love. They talk about having their hearts broken, cheating husbands. You know, just the same stuff we read today. It's glorious. I was going to say, Sarah, the Turin papyrus,

that's from ancient Egypt, isn't it? And that's the oldest pornography. Have you seen this, Robin? Of course he has. Of course, that's why I asked him. It's intellectual and it's saucy. So, yeah, it's lots of animals in clothes and then people doing it. I always thought that the animals in clothes,

so on the one side of the turn papyrus you have mice playing checkers or the equivalent of ancient egyptian checkers with cats and lions singing and dancing and i always thought it was a ruse like because when you turned it over it's wow so like hide screen like yeah like now minimize minimize turn it over turn it over they're coming but it's interesting because that's also essentially the internet now it's half porn and half cats playing the piano so so alice so it's clear that if we if we went back now and and we could speak the language to

ancient egypt we would recognize ourselves as we've. We go back to 3000 BC, the same concerns are there. Everything that we see today is present. If we go back in time, how far do we have to go back before really we would recognise very different humans, different capabilities? We'd see that they were, I suppose, more primitive than us. Yeah, it's such a good question because i think that um that comes down to kind of looking at what the gap is between us

and our closest living relatives today so kind of really nailing that and saying what is the difference between us and chimpanzees and then trying to think of how you're going to spot that in the archaeological record and i mean there's so much that's really disappointing about it because obviously you know you find a lot of fossils of early hominins and you've just got this empty space where the brain was and trying to work out what that brain does is very difficult and you know there are there are people like me biological anthropologists who will look carefully at the inside of the skull and say oh you know what the temporal lobes of the brain are a bit bigger I actually think that's completely barking up the wrong tree what you do is look at the output of that brain and the output of that brain is human behavior and that brings us back to archaeology

it brings us back to the material and cultural record of of our ancestors so then again you have to go well what what do we do that that that chimpanzees don't and when can we start to see early signs of that because obviously you've got to strip away all of modern technology and be looking for quite basic things and I think one of those things is mark making I think one of those things is the the need to create pattern and what we might call early art so we find examples of that there's examples of ochre being found in in caves in in South Africa that dates back to about 160,000 years ago and has definitely been ground down to release the pigment from the ochre and then by 77,000 years ago we've got this wonderful chunk of ochre from a cave called Blombos in South Africa with a scratched pattern on it

and you kind of look at that and go we don't think any other animal does anything like this, this is very artistic, this is humans. Other things that we might look for are attitudes to death, say burial for instance, you know when do we start to see the first burials and we've got artistic this is this is humans other things that we might look for are attitudes to death say burial for instance you know when do we start to see the first burials and we've got burials that go back about a 120 000 years ago in israel that's some of the earliest excursions of our of our ancestors out of africa so yeah it's about kind of it's about saying what is it that makes us human what are we doing that's different to other animals and then can we pick that up in the archaeological record something that i think so amazing and it's i shouldn't be

astounded by it but and it's something you do see from skeletal remains is when someone's had an injury sometimes quite a bad injury but has obviously healed and been alive which means that people have cared for them because that's something that we would think of is so human rather than animal that that kind of weakness rather than leaving somebody behind and going you're going to slow us down like there was love and nurture and and that's obviously really hugely ancient in us yeah i mean there are examples of where you've got um examples of things like healed femurs for instance and you know if you've got a if you've got a broken femur you're incapacitated you can't move around and so obviously somebody is looking after you and bringing you food

but I think what we do have to do in those cases is be really careful to make sure that we're doing the comparison so you can't just look at the human record for that you can't say oh we've got these people who you know had particularly bad teeth and couldn't have eaten food without somebody chewing it up for them as we've got from a site called Domanese in Georgia and you know had particularly bad teeth and couldn't have eaten food without somebody chewing it up for them as we've got from a site called deminesia in georgia um and you know a healed a healed femoral fracture means that some kind of human capacity for compassion was there we need to actually look at the ape record as well the modern ape record and we do find evidence of healed fractures in in you know modern gorillas and chimpanzees so it's not quite as you know it's not quite as clear cut but you know

they're sociable too is this alice now we now ask were the aliens looking after people was it was it them who were giving people soup when they felt poorly hey oh brian decided not to deny that one in home planet they're going to be furious i denied it i'll say again. So, Sarah, I wanted to ask you. So we've talked about this, the human journey, and we've talked about the emergence of civilization. Although, as you've said, it's difficult to define what we mean by civilization and when cities appear and so on. What are the great mysteries?

I know you're looking for one of the other ancient Egyptian capitals at the moment. So perhaps you could talk about that a little bit. But also a follow-up question would be how far back might we want to see? Is there something there 10,000 years ago or 12,000 or 15,000 years ago that might really surprise us? Is there a metropolis waiting to be discovered? So, yeah. So your first question. So the archaeological project that I'm currently co-directing together, it's a joint mission together with Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities. It's in an archaeological site called El Lisht.

That's L-I-S-H-T. And it was Egypt's capital in the Middle Kingdom, so actually a period of time when so many of these great stories were written, you know the Old Kingdom was known for pyramids, the New Kingdom was known for imperialism and King Tut, the Middle Kingdom was ancient Egypt's renaissance

it's a great period for art and architecture and literature, so this is about 1800 or so BC, and the site of Lisysh today is in the desert. There are two pyramids of some Walser I and Amun-Emmet I, the two co-founders, father and son of Dynasty 12. So the real sort of the heart of the Middle Kingdom. There are many, many thousands, tens of thousands of tombs of the people that lived and worked in the court of the king. And the real mystery is, where was ancient Egypt's capital? It was called Itchtawi. Yes, the name is spelled as strangely as it sounds. It stands for seizing of the two lands or the uniting of the two lands. And it

was perfectly situated in between Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. And this is when the Nile River was much, much, much farther to the west than it is today. And it's a city that is legitimately lost. We have to be careful with sort of these lost tropes and, you know, local people often know about them, but legitimately it is lost. It is many meters beneath the modern floodplain. But this is a case where we've been able to use satellite imagery really effectively. And, okay, you can't use satellites to peer four or five meters under dense silt and sand. But what we did use, we used shuttled radar topography mission data, so radar data, to map out the relic course of the Nile River, so where it was about 4,000 years ago. And then just sort of guesstimating, and there were several areas that were a little bit higher,

we did augering, and we were able to go down three, four, five meters. And we found dense lenses of elite Middle Kingdom pottery. It's the first time where cores have been done in Egypt where we found worked semi-precious stones. We found agate, carnelian, amethyst, and we found what we thought was a jeweler's workshop. So the city is there and we're going to be going out once we're through coronavirus, and we're going to be doing lots of cores in the floodplain to be able to look for the city. And I think parts of it are close to the surface, because when you walk in the fields today, you can actually find a lot of Middle Kingdom pottery. So I think it's interesting. Ancient

Egyptian cities could often be islands. It wasn't just one place. There were multiple places. So it'll just help completely retell the story of Egypt's Middle Kingdom. And to your second question, will we find things many thousand years ago that will surprise us? Yes, we will. Actually, this is a discovery that my husband made. He's also an Egyptologist. And he was walking out in the western desert of Egypt, and he was using aerial photography. So not quite satellites, 30 years, 30 more years ago. And he sort of came around a bend, and he found hundreds and hundreds of hut circles, all clustered together from about, say, 8000 years ago. Was it a city in modern terms?

No, but it was definitely a large settlement. So there are these settlements everywhere. Everywhere you look in the world, to what Alice said earlier about these extraordinary archaeological sites that are in the Northern Territories of Australia from 60,000 years ago, I think we're going to keep finding

these amazing sites and places all over the world. And what it shows us again and again is that so many of our assumptions about the size and scale and extent of human occupation are wrong. And I love it. I love being proven wrong. And that's what makes me so excited about sort of where archaeology is headed and what we're going to find when the technology develops even more. Can I just say, can I just ask, because I i you know i this might also it almost sounds a a crazy question but is it possible that there's a you know a civilization like ancient egypt that we don't know about because

it's essentially been obliterated because if you're talking about these time scales 10 000 15 000 years what about atlantis like under the sea is that possible i was trying to navigate around saying something crazy maybe a crazy question i don't know if it sounds like some weird conspiracy theory question but but it is it it strikes me it could be i don't know is it is it possible or that a wishful thing? Well, there are these amazing sites. I mean, I was very lucky to visit Göbekli Tepe in Turkey with Klaus Schmidt, who led the excavations there and sadly passed away since. And Göbekli Tepe, I think, is the most extraordinary archaeological site I've ever seen. It's on a hill in southern Turkey, about 30 miles from the Syrian border.

And it is a whole sequence of what look like temples. And they are huge T-shaped pillars, stone pillars, and there are carvings on them. And they're covered with carvings of birds and animals. And some of them are in relief and some of them are in the round. They're very beautiful. They look very accomplished. They don't look like crude carvings they you know they're recognizable animals and they are arranged in ways where you think this

must have been a story you know this must have been part of storytelling and that dates to about 11 000 years ago it is pre-neolithic it's before we find any evidence of settlement and civilization it's before we've got farming and so we're looking at hunter gatherers coming together to create those astonishing temples. I mean, that totally blew me away because we, you know, we said, oh, well, organized religion

and that kind of building obviously happens after people start to settle down when they've, you know, come up with farming. And it turned that on its head. And again, like Sarah, I love that. You know, when those kind of sites come up

and you just go, whoa, we're going to have to, we're going to have to rethink a bit here. Oh, I love that when it you know, when or 13, maybe more countries in the heart of Central Africa. And that is an area that has never before been extensively explored archaeologically. And my colleagues who work specifically in sub-Saharan African archaeology say that the whole history of the African continent could potentially be rewritten with civilizations that are as yet undiscovered there. And I think it's with things like laser technology. So, you know, things that will allow us to see beneath the rainforest. I think you're going to find civilizations with

extraordinary architecture and art, just like they're finding in the Amazon right now. Unfortunately, with deforestation, we're able to see more, but there are these large geometric fortified structures and enclosures. There are hundreds of them. And we never knew they existed before. So I think it will hopefully be used to help overturn, you know, preconceived notions, assumptions about African civilization. So yeah, I agree. I think there's amazing things that are yet to be found. I really hope that we find some ancient civilizations who are really bad at stuff. Where like they really did try at art but it's rubbish and their pots are just

all leaky and their pyramids are like wonky and then we can be like oh guys we might have poisoned the planet but we're not the worst. I mean if you look at these guys in Asia oh they're just very untalented. It'd be good for our self-esteem

But it might be our bit of the fossil record We found the rubbish ones The final question really is for all of you I suppose, and I'd like to start with you Alice, which is what do you think is the most important

lesson that you've taken from us being able to begin to really piece together and understand our past I think for me the overwhelming uh message underlying it all is that is that humans are humans wherever we look and however far back in time we get so I'm just I'm I'm always struck by that common humanity that Brian was asking about earlier. And I just think that that is, it's an amazing story. It's an amazing emotion, I suppose, that comes out of the science, that the science is very powerfully telling us that equality should exist, that we, you know, there's diversity and equality. Yeah, yeah, it's common humanity. Sarah?

So to build off that point, so eloquently presented by Alice, you know, I think we are, we are in a great period of transition right now. And you hear the word collapse a lot. And I think what the archaeological record allows us to do is question collapse for whom, and what, and its systems that are collapsing. And I think what we can do, and what the archaeological record shows us, and especially say at the end of Egypt's Great Pyramid Age, when there was massive political strife, social strife, economic strife, and a large scale drought event that not just impacted Egypt, but many civilizations across the ancient world. You know, there was this intermediate period for about 200 years,

and then all of a sudden things started getting better. And because income and wealth started getting more equitably distributed throughout Egypt, you had the rise of the middle class. And as a result, you had this great Renaissance period, this great rise in art and literature and so on. It's a great lesson for us today. I think going through these periods of chaos, as awful as it is, it shakes things up, it reestablishes order, and it has the potential to make things better for so many more people. And that's what we need in our world today. So that's really, to me, what the archaeological record shows. It gives me hope that there's a possibility for a better future. And we see this so many times. We see the resilience of so many indigenous

groups and peoples, and we have so much to learn from it. Sarah? Well, I've learned so much, so much listening to all of you, and mainly from Brian. And the one thing I do take away is that probably extraterrestrials have interfered at some point and manipulated things i really i made a note on my pad defo spacemen there is a there's actually a serious point that could be made from that which is that i mean this is a whole different show but many many astronomers and biologists think that because it took of order four billion years three three and a half to four billion years to go from the origin of life to a civilization here on this planet which is one third of the age of the universe planets where civilizations exist may be extremely widely

spaced across the universe and it's possible that this is the only planet currently in the milky way galaxy of 200 billion plus stars where a civilization has emerged so far in the history of the universe so there could be one civilization on average at any one time per galaxy and that just feeds into what both alice and sarah said about the precious nature of what we are talking about because it may it's very likely i think if you go outside now and you've got clear skies and you look up all those stars i think it's extremely likely that none of them will have a civilization around them sometimes you smile at the moments of bleakness but that none of us that really suddenly just hit home and yep it's a long way away the other whoever you're thinking is going to come to help us

they're a long way away carl sagan always used to say that didn't he there's no one else no one's going to come and save us from ourselves so apart from the atlanteans and venusians and all the yeah the uh um the uh audience question we asked was, this week we wondered, what would you most like to unearth when digging in your garden? And a surprising number of people said, my MP's backbone. But I...

Oh, here's one. Here's one for Alice, actually. Geoffrey Harris said that he would like to find a chest full of Roman artefacts and coins because I'm on the east coast of Australia. So that would be very difficult for you lot to explain. Could you explain that away? They were good seafarers, you know. Maybe they could have been blown off course.

Well, actually, I suppose it's not that difficult, is it? Because I suppose that they did trade across the world, the Romans, didn't they? Well, no, not that far down, maybe. Maybe the aliens dropped it on the way back into space. David, I like David, David says, my archaeology PhD thesis, which is proving to be an elusive, almost mythical object that may just turn out to be some sort of urban myth. And the most common answer we actually had was i'm hoping to dig up

a reset this planet by pressing this button kevin here is right the common ancestor of brian cox and robin ince what we've discussed there is none is there different planets man different planets it's a flat one isn't it? I don't think you were as generous last time. I think you merely said yeast. So thank you to our panel, Sarah Parker, Alice Roberts and Sarah Pascoe. Next week, we are back up in space again, actually.

We're going to be talking isolation with Chris Hadfield and Rusty Schreiker and more. And it's about, you know, sure, isolation is not easy, but at least we don't have to urinate into the cold emptiness of space. That's not, you don't do that on the space station, do you, though? You don't urinate into the cold. You don't open the window and you cause also... I know that now, Brian. I know that now. Hard lessons for NASA.

I should never have won that competition. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The mission I went on was one of those hoax moon missions. So thank you very much, everyone, for joining us. And thank you very much to our first ever virtual, detached but wonderful, great amount of chutzpah from our audience. So we'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Thank you.

APPLAUSE Till now nice again Hello, I'm Dr Hannah Fry And I'm Dr Adam Rutherford And we present the curious cases of Rutherford and Fry That's me and her Certainly do And every week what we do We take a listener question An everyday mystery if you will

And we try and investigate it Using the combined powers of science, books and occasionally the internet. Sometimes we just look it up. But anyway, we are back with a new series that's investigating queries like... Why do our tummies rumble? Can we make it rain? And what exactly is the point of wasps? What is the point of wasps?

It's the end bit, the other end of their faces. Lolz. I was really pleased with that. You can hear all the answers to these questions and more by subscribing to The Curious Case of Rutherford and Fry on BBC Sounds. Or wherever you get your podcasts. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change.

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