Dire Wolves and Beautiful Hubris
When I awoke, the dire wolf / 600 pounds of sin / Was grinning at my window / All I said was, "Come on in" - R. Hunter, J. Garcia
Please scroll down for links below the transcript. This is lightly edited AI generated transcript and there may be errors.
Dire Wolves and Beautiful Hubris
mindbodyevolution.info
Dr. Josh Stout
Dr. Josh Stout 0:00
Hubris is when you get cursed by the gods, okay? And you get specifically cursed by the gods, when you start challenging the gods
Eric 0:09
Don't they know the story of the golem, like.
Dr. Josh Stout 0:10
Or all of these, you know, you shall not trespass in God's domain kind of stuff. You know, that's a real story. And we've done it over and over again. And so, yeah, there's there's now a compound with literal monsters in it with a giant fence around it. Like Jurassic Park
Eric 0:26
This actually exists.
Dr. Josh Stout 0:27
This actually exists.
Eric 0:43
Today is Friday, April 11th. This is mind body evolution. How are you doing, Josh?
Dr. Josh Stout 0:48
I'm doing well. How are you, Eric?
Eric 0:50
I'm very well. Very excited to be recording again after a couple of weeks when we couldn't get to it.
Dr. Josh Stout 0:54
Yeah. Yeah, I.
------ The Dire Wolf is Back from the Dead ------ 0:56
Dr. Josh Stout 0:57
I love recording. I just have so much in my head that needs to come out. No, And it's. It's, it's. It's constant. And it also allows me not to live in some of the horrible world we are now creating for ourselves. And I can think about more interesting things.
Eric 1:16
And I guess it is something I don't think about it that way that we are creating for ourselves. That's exactly what's happening.
Dr. Josh Stout 1:20
and a week. And so I can I can watch the news and not always be in despair and I can look outside and not always be in despair. So I like I like to think about interesting things that, you know, sort of grasp my attention. So there's been something in the news recently. We've created Direwolves. This is an extinct species of giant wolf as seen on Game of Thrones.
Eric 1:43
Yeah, I was going to say, the only time I've actually ever seen like Direwolves referred to other than
------ Hubris as a Driver of Change, Art and Great Works ------ 1:49
Eric 1:49
in a Grateful Dead song was in the Game of Thrones. Is this what a direwolf is?
Dr. Josh Stout 1:54
That's what we've made. It was it was
Eric 1:57
Like a giant bearish dog?
Dr. Josh Stout 1:59
It was it was a Game of Thrones fans who made it. They did. They have three of them and they're named Romulus Remus and Khaleesi.
Eric 2:07
This is terrible.
Dr. Josh Stout 2:09
Maybe. Or maybe it's amazing.
Eric 2:12
Why couldn't it be Star Trek fans who made a communicator or a transporter?
Dr. Josh Stout 2:16
They did those things somewhat too. We had flip phones for a while and then we moved beyond that. No, we've we've lived in the world of nerds for a long time and, you know, for good or ill. And so that's some of what I want to talk about is how while we tend to think of ourselves as these sort of interchangeable components in this huge society, there's also these individuals who, through force of will, which is not always the best thing, are able to sometimes change things. And that's what I want to talk about. I you know, I just got back from a trip to Rome. It was amazing. I got to see this incredible artwork. That was all the expression of tremendous egos, doing really good work. But they were also, you know, murdering thieves. And they were they were, you know, fascists. And they were all of that was happening in Rome for, you know, thousands of years. You know, I an emperor would see a villa he liked and he would just murder who was in it. And then he had a villa he liked. And just that's.
Dr. Josh Stout 3:21
Pretty straightforward and simple.
Dr. Josh Stout 3:22
It's pretty straightforward and simple. And a pope would say, I need some new
------ Hubris in the Natural World - The White Throated Sparrow Song ------ 3:27
Dr. Josh Stout 3:27
decorations for my palace. Go dig over there. Anything you find, fix it and stick it in my palace. So new heads would be put on the Roman statues that they dug up, and they would, you know, totally dig up a for example, a baths. So, you know, a Roman bath that had been ruined for 1500 years. They would dig up and take all the statues and put them in there in their villas. And so it I was seeing what sort of hubris and vanity and and all of this can do on a grand scale. And it was beautiful and also terrifying at the same time. And it was it was a very interesting trip. And I, I started to think about the nature of the individual and how how this things like this can happen from people just, you know, puffing up their own ego and at the same time, I like to look out natural world. I've mentioned this, the white Throated Sparrow song that I heard, you know, several years ago. Yeah, that was like a Philip Glass. It was. It was just an amazing composer. I've now heard a new one. And it's it's really interesting because during the season I the male maybe I it's not a completely defined term in these the species but anyway.
Eric 4:54
We'll talk about that another time.
Dr. Josh Stout 4:57
Filled with testosterone and their brain actually grows particularly things in the language region of the brain the same one we have the FOXP2 language region. The brain grows in response to the hormone and they are able to sing because of the growth of their brain in this in this language region. So they're it's almost like a flowers for Algernon. They're waking up and they're having this new capability of communication and when they start singing, it first starts to sort of like a it and it's kind of creaky and it's not great and they're not really good at it, but they start, they start communicating with each other. And so they'll they'll, they'll be go, I'm going to need another one to go to eat. And so you hear them playing tunes to each other. And then this one that I heard, you know, many years ago was able to play a tune to itself and remember it over 15, 20 minutes.
Eric 5:53
You have spoken about this, yes
Dr. Josh Stout 5:54
And it was it was breathtaking. I wish I could remember music better, but recently I've been listening to a neighborhood way through this barrel, and I can hear its brain improving and its songs been getting better over time, and it's not going in
------ Hubris, Ego, Genius and Transcendent Beauty ------ 6:09
Dr. Josh Stout 6:09
the Philip Glass direction. It's it's much more sort of like baroque chamber music. It's like a dun dun dun dun. It's been doing that kind of stuff. You should try to go dun dun dun dun. It'd be really difficult, but it's obviously much higher pitch than that. But I definitely have heard some Beethoven. I've heard little tunes and it's again playing to itself, but it's, it's a different thing, right? There was a different genius. And now five years later, I'm hearing a new genius. I've heard white through the sparrows in between, but no one reached a new level. But now it's happened again. And you know, this must be happening all the time
------ The Hubris of the Greeks, The Trojan War and the End of Civilisation ------ 6:44
Dr. Josh Stout 6:43
everywhere. You know, if it's happening with a few dozen sparrows that I've been hearing over, over over the years. And so this is sort of what I was thinking about is is how this kind of genius is also associated with with ego. And that's what the sparrow is doing. I'm here and I'm the best and I'm making this beautiful music for the world. But to specifically to get a mate and the mate has to be able to understand my genius to come to me and so I'm, I'm looking for a particular kind of mate who who has some of the genes that would, you know, further my genius. And this is all absolute hubris and, you know, built into our evolution right from the very beginning. And is this is, you know, built in the creation of this really almost transcendent beauty that can come from what what is also the downfall of humanity. I mean, hubris to the ancient Greeks was, you know, part of what was creating the Trojan War. It was the end of civilisation. And, you know, I've talked about how I think the Trojan War was discussing the end of of the Bronze Age. It was the Bronze Age collabs in the beginning of a new Dark Ages and the Trojan War is, is the ships of Greece going to burn the civilisations on on the mainland and in Troy? And so that was the hubris of the Greek army destroying everything around it but create writing this, this transcendent epic that we still know today, not necessarily to the good of everyone involved. Right, Right. And that's part of the story is, you know, Agamemnon gets himself murdered. He he he murders his own daughter. You know, there's lots of murdering and, you know, and the house of Agamemnon is cursed. And as is known for this curse that passes through because of the hubris and the ego, but they're also immortal, right? We still speak of them, which was the point. Which was the entire point because of their hubris. Yes. And so, you know, this this is the kind of stuff where you get both of these things going on. And I you know, I saw it definitely when I saw, you know, Elon Musk sending his Tesla into space. I was I was weeping with the beauty of that. And yet it was all foreshadowing of what
------ Hunris: a two sided coin ------ 9:12
Dr. Josh Stout 9:12
we see now where, you know, essentially he's he's gone completely to the dark side and he he's he's embraced fascism and destruction and he's not creating things anymore. And it and it is all destruction, which is, you know, the essence of.
Eric 9:26
He does run a bunch of companies that make things.
Dr. Josh Stout 9:29
And they're being destroyed. And some of them were good, right? Electric cars were saving the planet and now we're not buying them anymore. And that's a not a good thing. But I'm not going to buy one. One of his not one of his
Eric 9:42
There are definitely others, though. And the Chinese are making them.
Dr. Josh Stout 9:44
Exactly what. And what are we doing to the Chinese? I mean, you know. Exactly
------ What is a Dire Wolf ------ 9:48
Dr. Josh Stout 9:49
That's not what this is supposed to be about.
Dr. Josh Stout 9:50
This is not what it's about. So what I'm saying is, in the world we see today, we see how hubris leads to a whole bunch of bad things very quickly, but can also make amazing things. We can launch a Tesla into space. You know, that's an amazing thing. That was a moment of accomplishment. I'm not sure if it amounted to anything, but it was you know, it was a test drive for some other things that have gone further. You know, we are now have a real presence in space, partly because of this.
Eric 10:16
Because of the Tesla.
Dr. Josh Stout 10:18
You know, because of the launch capabilities. But I wanted to talk about this in relation to the the Direwolf. So Direwolf.
Eric 10:28
Right. The Direwolf.
Dr. Josh Stout 10:29
Right. The Direwolf is an extinct species of wolf that roamed North America for, I don't know, 150,000 years or something like that. Maybe more. Nope, nope. Five and a half
------ Colossal Bioscience is recreating the Dire Wolf ------ 10:41
Dr. Josh Stout 10:41
million years was when they switched. When they when their first ancestors split from other wolves was about five and half million years ago. So splitting from the gray wolf when they were exactly direwolves after that, I don't I don't know the exact details.
Eric 10:56
Big giant things.
Dr. Josh Stout 10:58
They were the extra big wolf. Yes. So they stood 25, 50% larger than a regular wolf
Eric 11:04
600 pounds of sin.
Dr. Josh Stout 11:06
Yeah, they had giant teeth. They were they were they were designed to crush bone. They were designed to hunt very large Pleistocene ice age animals, m, you know, all of that kind of stuff.
Eric 11:18
Wow, so they were pretty scary.
Dr. Josh Stout 11:19
They were very, very scary. They were literal monsters. And there is a company I think of it is the gigantic Saurus company, but its name is Colossal Bioscience.
Eric 11:33
That doesn't sound good. I don't like that.
Dr. Josh Stout 11:35
I know it sounds like a villain in a movie. Yeah. Yeah. And so Colossal Bioscience has this idea that they're going to recreate Pleistocene fauna and recreate an ecosystem that was destroyed when humans came to North America and wiped out the mastodons and the mammoths and all of the megafauna that were America. Yeah, Probably
Eric 11:58
Is that what happened? We wiped them out?
Dr. Josh Stout 11:59
Yeah. Yeah. So the direwolf existed to about 12,500 years ago, which coincides with when people showed up.
Eric 12:04
Yeah, right. Okay.
Dr. Josh Stout 12:06
And we probably didn't kill them directly. They were way big, but we, we killed the things they hunt.
Eric 12:11
We killed what they ate
Dr. Josh Stout 12:12
And so then, and then the gray wolf came into the into the into the vacuum and came down through Canada. So everything else was evolving in Eurasia, the gray wolf, the the Doles, which were a kind of African wild dog, the coyotes, all of these things were were Eurasian canids. But the Direwolf was the North American
Eric 12:33
species, so very patriotic monster.
Eric 12:37
So we've been working on climate change since the moment we got here.
Dr. Josh Stout 12:41
I mean, we we certainly change our environment wherever we are and in a drastic way drastic. And so, yeah, we as a single culture,
------ The Answer to "Why?": Hubris. Maybe not right, but still very beautiful. ------ 12:49
Dr. Josh Stout 12:49
we had gone from coast to coast across North America as soon as we arrived and wiped everything else.
Eric 12:55
Was that was the dire wolf, the apex predator at its time or.
Dr. Josh Stout 13:02
Well, there was also the saber tooth cats, but the Direwolf wolf had a pack. And so they they yeah, they were, I think, the apex predator. And when they were attacked, when they were in a pack. Yeah. The saber tooth cat is hard to beat, but a pack of dire wolves. I can't imagine anything more powerful except there were a bunch of things. There were giant pigs with huge tusks that ran like horses,
sometimes called the hell pig. So anyway, it was. It was a time of a lot of big, nasty things. And we've decided to recreate some of them.
Eric 13:35
Why?
Dr. Josh Stout 13:36
Well, see, that's the thing. I would say that this is hubris, and it's exactly why Musk was launching a Tesla into space.
Eric 13:43
Doing it Because we can.
Dr. Josh Stout 13:45
Because we can.
Eric 13:46
Because we can doesn't mean we should. Right?
Dr. Josh Stout 13:48
And yet it is absolutely beautiful. Okay. So here's the so gorgeous. I mean, these are amazing animals. And yeah, if you're a Game of Thrones fan or, you know, you like wolves in general, which are both of those apply to me. They're amazing.
Eric 14:01
I'm holding my head in my hands.
Dr. Josh Stout 14:03
Yeah, exactly. So the idea is we could create the entire ecosystem that we had destroyed. We could. We could. We could atone for our prior sins and recreate a tundra ecosystem with large animals as an intact thing. We don't have Pleistocene ecosystems outside of Africa. The reason we have an intact, more or less Pleistocene ecosystem in Africa is all of those things try and kill humans as soon as they see them. And so they were able to defend themselves against our ancestors until we got guns. You know, you there's nothing you can do with a spear against a whole herd of elephants coming at you. You just run and hope you survive. And you know, it's true for a whole range of the animals in.
Eric 14:49
Africa, I have walked with the smaller elephants in in Surin. And yeah, I can't imagine if they were angry and running. There's no this.
Dr. Josh Stout 14:59
Yeah. And so African elephants are, you know, very aggressive. They're even more aggressive than the Asian elephant giant. And they're gigantic. They're bigger. They're bigger than. And so. Well, Africa, you're essentially looking at an intact Pleistocene fauna.
Eric 15:11
Well, that's why everything is bigger.
Dr. Josh Stout 15:12
Well, it's bigger. And it didn't get wiped out by us. We killed all the big things everywhere else. The big things learned how to defend themselves because they co-evolved with us and were able to keep going when we showed up. Right. And they knew what to do when they saw us, which was kill us. And, you know, a group of our ancestors barely made it out at the time when we were leaving, you know, parts of us were leaving Africa. Our total population was like 50,000.
Eric 15:41
I mean, this is something you you turned me on to in college that the birds announced that were coming.
Dr. Josh Stout 15:46
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Y know, every, every everything knows to be afraid of us. And they're talking about us. But yeah. So anyway, back, back to hubris. We created these beautiful, beautiful animals to recreate an ecosystem. Our first goal had been the mammoth. They wanted to recreate a mammoth.
Eric 16:03
I'm sorry. No, we don't want to recreate this whole ecosystem that wants to kill us.
Dr. Josh Stout 16:05
Well, the ideas.
Eric 16:06
Ecosystem.
Dr. Josh Stout 16:07
Mammoth.
We know elephants control their ecosystem. They level the trees, they create the Serengeti in many ways. And so there's parts of probably the tiger that could be a mammoth habitat, except they've been overgrown with trees for the last 20,000 years because we wiped out the mammoths. If we reintroduce them, we might be recreating certain habitats that haven't existed before. If you're going to recreate mammoths, you even have to recreate a predator for mammoths. So that was the idea behind the Direwolves.
Eric 16:40
But I'm sorry, all of this, I still have to say why.
Dr. Josh Stout 16:43
Essentially atoning for sins and because they'd be super cool. And who wouldn't like to see a mammoth and. All right. Okay. I mean, there's a reason I was saying hubris. Okay? Hubris is when you get cursed by the gods, okay? And you get specifically cursed by the gods, when you
------ How the Dire Wold was Re-Created ------ 17:01
Dr. Josh Stout 17:01
start challenging the gods
Eric 17:03
Don't they know the story of the golem, like.
Dr. Josh Stout 17:04
Or all of these, you know, you shall not trespass in God's domain kind of stuff. You know, that's a real story. And we've done it over and over again. And so, yeah, there's there's now a compound with literal monsters in it with a giant fence around it. Like Jurassic Park
Eric 17:21
This actually exists.
Dr. Josh Stout 17:21
This actually exists. They did it. They made.
Eric 17:24
Them those bad movies like that didn't end well.
Dr. Josh Stout 17:28
For some reason. Yeah. The stories about hubris never end well. They never end.
Eric 17:34
Well. This is amazing. W an amazing act of hubris. I wonder how.
Dr. Josh Stout 17:37
And yet they are beautiful animals. It is. It is amazing what they have created. And I'll say created too. They did not take Direwolf DNA, extract it and put it into a an egg, which then came out of a dog and was was was a direwolf. What they did is they sequenced portions of Direwolf DNA that they thought would be useful, like parts that would make an animal bigger, parts that would give it stronger jaws and teeth. The part that gives it a light colored coat because that makes it look more like the Wolf's son, Game of Thrones. And so it was, you know, they very specifically were creating a look as much as anything else.
Eric 18:19
Just that makes me so deeply uncomfortable.
Dr. Josh Stout 18:22
And the look was designed to be looking like this, this monstrous animal. But okay, so they did it and an amazing feat of science. They changed 20 genes at a time that had never been done before. So using CRISPR, they analyzed what was in 75,000 year old Direwolf DNA sequenced it made artificial DNA that copied the sequence for the genes they wanted that would get bigger teeth and stronger muscles, used CRISPR and inserted it into a gray wolf and then took that gray wolf nucleus. With this modified DNA, put it into an egg and then and in vitro fertilization for a into a dog. And then the dog gave birth to these direwolf pups. But they were you know, almost all of their DNA was gray, Wolf, with just these toe modified genes of those to modify genes, five were modified just to stop blindness and deafness, they were corrected ahead of time. So the 15 were directly from the direwolf and were, you know, specifically for size. And they tested them. So they made these huge muscle bound beagles using direwolf genes that increase muscle size. And so there's these like, you know, jacked beagles. They had it as a test when when they were working on mammoths,
------ Dr. Stout reads from Mary Shelly's Frankenstein ------ 19:53
Dr. Josh Stout 19:53
they created woolly mice. They, they it was that was the previous test. They did five edits at the same time, read about
Eric 20:01
I read about the woolly mice.
Dr. Josh Stout 20:02
They were so cute again, beautiful hubris.
Eric 20:05
This is this is this is not just hubris. This is this this feels this feels deeply wrong. Like this is because
Dr. Josh Stout 20:14
That's because the trespassing in God's domain stuff is deep, deep, deep in our stories. Our culture always knows that this goes wrong. You're literally this is the Tower of Babel. This is all this kind of stuff
Eric 20:24
Creating living things that nature did not balance things out for. You don't know what you're doing, you don't know what you're going to make or how it's actually going to exist over time. Like
Dr. Josh Stout 20:35
I think this is the right moment. Let me read from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
So this this is Victor Von Frankenstein talking about his his dream. No one can conceive of the variety of feelings which Bora bore me onwards like a hurricane. In the first enthusiasm of success, life and death appeared to be appear to me ideal balance, which I could first breakthrough and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source. Many happy and excellent natures would oh their being to be to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I could deserve theirs. I mean, what what greater I, you know, modern. I tale of hubris can we have than Frankenstein? It just shows someone trying to play God and break through these bounds of life and death. And that's what these have done. They've recreated an extinct species that hasn't existed for 13,000 years.
Eric 21:36
Haven't even done that. From what you said, they haven't recreated anything. No, They've literally mashed some things together and
------ Wooly Mice, Wooly Mammoth and Dodos ------ 21:44
Eric 21:44
switched some things on. And what did Frankenstein do? Something did. Frankenstein didn't exist.
Dr. Josh Stout 21:50
Actually make the thing? No. He took parts and mushed them together and ended up with something that really had never existed before. That's what I'm talking about. They've made a Frankenstein. They by this monster? Yeah, they've made it a monster.
Eric 22:03
This is why it feels so deeply wrong.
Dr. Josh Stout 22:06
And yet they are gorgeous. They are. They're, you know, there's there's no bolts sticking out of their neck. They are. They are absolutely beautiful.
Eric 22:13
When do we have super wealthy people paying them to make creatures to order?
Dr. Josh Stout 22:19
Like soon? It probably as soon as they can. They can they can sort out the regulations they
Eric 22:24
My skin is crawling.
Dr. Josh Stout 22:25
Okay. So this is a startup company. They have between ten and $30 billion depending on what you read. I because they have their own they declare their own market capitalization. So it's difficult to know. So they have a lot riding on this. This is the first success they were they were they made those woolly mice in the idea of making the woolly mammoth. But then they realized that elephants are difficult and no one had ever done in-vitro fertilization with an elephant. And we didn't really know much about it. And they're also trying to do the dodo, and they have the dodo genes pretty much figured out. They were going to recreate a dodo using some of its relatives and then some of the extant DNA and remake a dodo. But egg shells are difficult. With a mammal, you can literally stick a pipette into an egg and suck the nucleus out, and then you can put a new nucleus in there. And it's all pretty easy, but relatively easy. You know, it's been it's been well-trodden technology now for almost 40 years. So and we know how to do this with dogs, and dogs are commercially cloned and people can get clones of their existing dog and that that is that is a an existing, you know, business model. And so they were able to take the commercial cloning of dogs and just do some genetic editing on it, which they were really good at. So yeah, the wool, the woolly mouse was it was, it was a test run for woolly mammoth. They gave up on that, gave up on the dodo and said, you know we can really do dogs and so let's do the dire wolf. But yeah, they're, they're creating an apex predator for an ecosystem that doesn't exist. And it's, it's merely it's incredible, you know, charisma that, that, that, you know, make makes, makes the whole thing worthwhile in that way. So it is.
Eric 24:12
Who's funding this have you looked into that? Do you know who is paying for this.
Dr. Josh Stout 24:15
They always say private funding.
Eric 24:18
Yeah I'm sure it's private.
Dr. Josh Stout 24:19
Yeah
Eric 24:20
Very private.
Dr. Josh Stout 24:21
Yeah. So this this so we have Yes. Literally created monsters during these what seem almost like end times so that when all the world goes they will break free and start repopulating North America and you know, will be their number one preybecause what's slower and tastier.
Eric 24:42
I mean that's that's that's that's kind of like saying the machines are going to revolt. No, no.
Dr. Josh Stout 24:46
Of course, it's not really going to happen. But, you know, we did what
Eric 24:49
What could go wrong, what could go wrong? When you create an apex predator for an environment that doesn't exist
Dr. Josh Stout 24:53
We really did make a
------ Wolves and Dogs - Our Oldest Mammal Companion by Far ------ 24:54
Dr. Josh Stout 24:54
lot monsters and we really are, you know.
Eric 24:57
And it really is a Frankenstein monster. It's a mash up. It's a mash up.
Dr. Josh Stout 25:01
And at the same time, we think we control them by being the ones that feed them, but instead we're really just habituated them to humans.
Eric 25:08
So going back to Game of Thrones, I just rewatched that episode where that guy got eaten by his own dogs. Yeah, but. Oh, they're loyal to me.
Dr. Josh Stout 25:16
Oh, horrible. I don't even want to talk about him.
Eric 25:18
But they're starving now, aren't they?
Dr. Josh Stout 25:19
Yeah. And you're. And you're a terrible person. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Eric 25:24
It was that felt good in Game of Thrones, but that feels like that's going to happen here. Yeah.
Dr. Josh Stout 25:29
So anyway, that was that was just sort of what I wanted to point out is that, you know, this is a story that we've seen many, many times. It's really interesting to think of it as, you know, part of our story. You know, we we made these wolves extinct. We evolved with wolves that became our dogs, you know, I think so. We know that our dogs were selected from wolves. But when we look at the wolf DNA, they were selected from those wolves branched off a million years ago from other wolves. So the original gray Eurasian wolf of the steppes was not the ones we get our dogs from. I think that we we domesticated a group of wolves that specialized in humans. And sometimes they preyed on us and sometimes they worked with us, and that we were chasing the herds. And sometimes we were scavengers and sometimes we were hunters. And when we were scavenging, we were scavenging from the wolves a lot of the time. And when the wolves were scavenging, they were scavenging from us. A lot of the time.
Eric 26:33
So you're saying we evolved with the wolves in from in a way that predated history significantly?
Dr. Josh Stout 26:38
Yeah. So, so, so so these dire wolves are a perfect, like, example of, of really primal hubris. We are going to create our dream are nightmare and our dream and our companion and the most beautiful thing we can think of in our deepest brain is, is the things we grew up with, providing us with food, but also the dangers in the night. You know, you build your fire to keep the wolves away in the day. They and a million years ago, we weren't even fully human. We were we were Homo erectus, you know, in in in Eurasia. And we we extended all the way from Europe to China. We had hand axes, we had fire, but we didn't have, you know, advanced. We didn't even have spears. Right? So this was a very early group. We know that there are contemporary oral histories of Native Americans working with wolves in Wyoming to hunt, just like people hunt with dolphins where the dolphins actually heard the fish towards the nets. These were Native Americans working with wolves who had heard the game towards the people throwing the spears, and that this is no longer a practice because the wolves are gone and the people are gone. But they remembered doing this and it wasn't that many generations ago. And they're, you know, actually repopulating some of these areas with wolves. Now in Wyoming
Eric 28:10
That's fascinating.
Dr. Josh Stout 28:11
So, yeah, so really deep, deep in our brains, we've always liked these animals. And so when we get the power, it's going to be the first one we turn to. And for very specific scientific reasons, because they're the ones we know how to do, because we've lived with them the longest. They were the first things we learned how to do things like cloning and genetic modifications of beagles are a major study animal. We do we do a lot of our science on Beagles
Eric 28:36
I did not realize that dogs were the animals that we'd been with the longest. They thought of cattle, you know, because I knew the cattle came were with us from the beginning of our history. Yeah, but this is prehistory by a significant amount
Dr. Josh Stout 28:48
By at least as much again. So, so, so cattle are, you know, in our artwork 10,000 years ago, they're living with us in corrals seven or 8000 years ago. But they're still wild and they so we have
------ There is some evidence that we hunted with ancient dogs/wolves - or were we hunted? ------ 29:06
Dr. Josh Stout 29:06
herds. We've we're we're we're herding wild cows. We take them out into the hills and they periodically breed with wild bulls and they come back so they're not genetically separate. And then around 5000 years ago, they become genetically separate. So, yeah, those that's a tremendously deep history. We've we've always been with the cows, but the wolves go back a million years as part of our you know, they were our living companions. Yeah.
Eric 29:34
No I had no idea.
Dr. Josh Stout 29:35
And, and, and as, as dogs 20,000 years somewhere in there. And so they, there is a, there's a roughly 20,000 year old wolf skull that has dog teeth. So wolves have sort of hooks for teeth. Yeah. Whereas dogs they're, they're they're, they're wider and more and more for crushing bones. And so they're more dedicated to the scavenging because we would hunt with them and we'd give them the bones. And so the wolf teeth weren't as necessary because they didn't need to catch things.
Eric 30:05
We gave them the bones. We didn't end up fighting with them over the food.
Dr. Josh Stout 30:08
Well, some of that probably happened for a while. And then we started making them ours. And so that that is where we see a change in the actual skeletons, right, from a sharp tooth animal.
Eric 30:20
So the dogs that we hunted with with that you're talking.
Dr. Josh Stout 30:22
About, the wolves that we hunted with.
Eric 30:24
The wolves that we hunted with 500,000 years ago. Yeah, we're not. They also lived with us. They weren't just wild wolves. They were wild in that they weren't pets that had a, you know, a collar around their necks. They live by us. They lived. They lived. They. They knew us.
Dr. Josh Stout 30:41
They knew us. They interacted with us. They would wait for the hunting party to go out. Work with the hunting party. Yeah. All of that was probably happening
Eric 30:49
I've never heard this version of history.
Dr. Josh Stout 30:52
It's based on some maybe separate evidence points. I'm conjecturing slightly points
Eric 30:59
Separate evidence points. Interesting.
Dr. Josh Stout 31:00
So there's you can't draw direct lines but but there there is evidence that traditional peoples have worked with wolves for hunting. We know we do it with dogs. Yeah. You don't have to train them. They know how to do it right away. You know, I would run down a trail. Piper would cut into the woods, run down the trail, and then cut back at a right angle. And more than once, she had a deer in front of her, and she instinct and she would put that deer right in front of me and just knew exactly how to do it. And the wolves do it with each other. Right. They don't have to talk about it. Right. The wolves will drive an animal towards another wolf. They know how to do this. They just have to figure out to do it with us. Right. So, yeah, I think that we've been doing this for a very long time. So the very first dog skull that we know about, only difference from it from a wolf is slightly thicker teeth and it's in a cave with a bone in its mouth. So we put that bone in its mouth.
Eric 31:53
Yeah.
Dr. Josh Stout 31:53
After it died.
Eric 31:55
Yeah, because we cared about that thing.
Dr. Josh Stout 31:56
Because we cared about that thing. Yeah. So this is so deep in, like, our natures, of our understandings of afterlife, of of, of the world we interact with, of, you know, how we get things in the world has to do with dogs.
Eric 32:11
You know.
Dr. Josh Stout 32:11
I and we have now created the ultimate member of the species. We've recreated it except not really we've created a monster his version that looks absolutely gorgeous. And so I just sort of wanted to connect that to the wider stories of hubris connecting to nature. You know, the the The Sparrow song is its own hubris and come and see me. I'm beautiful. And it is a beautiful song. It's also dangerous to the sparrow, right? It's
------ Rome is beautiful and, you know, you blood stained streets everywhere, but. Oh, my God, it's so gorgeous. ------ 32:39
Dr. Josh Stout 32:39
singing. There's there's hawks. They know the song. They can find it. They. They know exactly what it is. My cat certainly knows exactly what it is, you know? So yeah, there's always been this element of of I am wonderful and this is dangerous, but I'm projecting this to the outside world and it's going out for a whole bunch of reasons. I'm making a territory. Other males should stay away, females should come to me.
Eric 33:03
I'm creating my own environment.
Dr. Josh Stout 33:05
I'm creating my own environment, and then linking that to the idea of the world we've lived in with with the wolves and the dogs for, you know, the last million years, and that we were sort of without any real thought just following that plan. Yeah, because we can. And that, you know, we write books about it, we feel movies about it. We warn ourselves over and over again, and we just keep doing it because it's so deep.
Eric 33:33
Yeah.
Dr. Josh Stout 33:34
And it's beautiful, too. I mean, Rome is beautiful and, you know, you blood stained streets everywhere, but. Oh, my God, it's so gorgeous... you know.
Eric 33:43
Is it worth it, though?
Dr. Josh Stout 33:46
Well, I mean, I hope so. I anyway, I would I would like more, you know, monuments to our hubris that are beautiful. I think. I think these direwolves are one. I hope it doesn't go completely wrong.
Eric 34:01
What could go wrong?
Dr. Josh Stout 34:02
What could go wrong? Exactly.
Eric 34:04
All right, folks, we'll put up some links on mindbodyevolution. info. that was fascinating, as always. Josh.
Dr. Josh Stout 34:12
Thank you.
Eric 34:13
Thanks, Everyone. Until next time.
Theme Music
Theme music by
sirobosi frawstakwa
john
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
Contributors to Wiki of Westeros
Johanna Berkman
In the timbers of Fennario
The wolves are runnin' 'round
The winter was so hard and cold
Froze ten feet 'neath the ground
Don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
I sat down to my supper
'Twas a bottle of red whisky
I said my prayers and went to bed
That's the last they saw of me
Don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
When I awoke, the dire wolf
600 pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window
All I said was, "Come on in"
Don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
The wolf came in, I got my cards
We sat down for a game
I cut my deck to the Queen of Spades
But the cards were all the same
Don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Don't murder me
In the backwash of Fennario
The black and bloody mire
The dire wolf collects his due
While the boys sing 'round the fire
Don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
No, no, no, don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Source: MusixmatchSongwriters:
Robert Hunter / Jerome GarciaDire Wolf
lyrics © Ice Nine Publishing Co Inc.
0
Top level art by Wendy Bellermann - https://www.bellermannarts.com/
