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How the La Brea Tar Pits Work · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff
0:04
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
0:12
Speaker 1: Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over
0:15
Speaker 1: there making our lives difficult. And uh so that as
0:19
Speaker 1: usual means it's time for stuff you should that's right. Yes,
0:23
Speaker 1: how are you, my friend? I'm good? Good, yeah, well healthy,
0:27
Speaker 1: feel a little tubby, but yeah, oh yeah, I'm okay.
0:30
Speaker 1: That just means you've been living, right, that's my motto.
0:34
Speaker 1: It's sugar cookies, yeah, which I like. Yeah, you gotta
0:38
Speaker 1: have sugar cookies sometimes. So I leave for l A
0:41
Speaker 1: in the morning, where the home of the Librarea tart pits.
0:46
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that you were doing the intro or
0:49
Speaker 1: should I call it Pueblo Dave nuestra senora la de
0:53
Speaker 1: los Angeles. I want us, I think. So it's hard
0:57
Speaker 1: to hear that los Angeles without thinking it really is. Yeah,
1:00
Speaker 1: but yes, that was the original name of Los Angeles, Chuck,
1:03
Speaker 1: did you know that before this? Yeah? I did not. Sure.
1:07
Speaker 1: That's a mouthful. I can see why everybody just calls
1:09
Speaker 1: it Los Angeles. Or if you're really hip l A, yeah,
1:13
Speaker 1: or if you're a jackass city of angels. That's like
1:18
Speaker 1: people do Hotlanta. Yeah, some people say that you can
1:23
Speaker 1: get a magnet still, that says Hota. Yeah, well, no
1:25
Speaker 1: one in it or from Atlanta says that. That's a
1:29
Speaker 1: total outsider thing. You don't think they make Atlanta magnets
1:31
Speaker 1: in Atlanta. Yeah, but they saw him at the airport,
1:36
Speaker 1: you know, Atlanta people selling it. That's like saying Nevada
1:41
Speaker 1: instead of Nevada. Is that really how it's supposed to
1:44
Speaker 1: be pronounced Nevada? Yeah? Man, you don't hear everyone every
1:48
Speaker 1: time they don't see those emails from angery Nevadas Nevadians.
1:52
Speaker 1: After a while, they just kind of all become a blur. Yeah,
1:55
Speaker 1: we get taken the dank for that. And I said,
1:56
Speaker 1: you know what, everyone outside Nevada says, Nevada I hate
1:59
Speaker 1: to break. Yeah, like everybody. And they say, you know what,
2:02
Speaker 1: everyone outside of Atlanta says Hotlanta. I don't think they
2:05
Speaker 1: say that. Some people do, but now I don't. I
2:07
Speaker 1: don't hold the grudge against you. If you say it,
2:09
Speaker 1: I just pretend you aren't there. Okay, you know, you
2:12
Speaker 1: just ignore Hot Lanta. Uh So that was my intro.
2:17
Speaker 1: That was a good one, man. I think you should
2:18
Speaker 1: do one and people should vote. Oh here is mine, Chuck.
2:22
Speaker 1: Have you ever been to Los Angeles? You used to
2:26
Speaker 1: live there, didn't you. Yeah, and you've been to the
2:29
Speaker 1: Break of tar Pits obviously a bunch of times. Surely
2:31
Speaker 1: I've been on to you. And I went to LACMA. Yeah, yeah,
2:35
Speaker 1: I had no idea. It was like right there, mid
2:38
Speaker 1: Wiltshire Miracle Mile. It's like you you walk out the
2:41
Speaker 1: back entrance into a Japanese garden at at the Los
2:45
Speaker 1: Angeles County Museum of Art BLACKMA, and you just keep
2:49
Speaker 1: walking a little further and all of a sudden there's
2:51
Speaker 1: a huge masted on and then you go into the
2:53
Speaker 1: museum that time forgot it was closed while we were there,
2:57
Speaker 1: And I'm really sad, especially after reading this article. The
3:00
Speaker 1: page museum is what it's called. Are they Did they
3:02
Speaker 1: update it? I think they might have updated it. No, no, no,
3:05
Speaker 1: I mean like it was closed for the day. Oh
3:07
Speaker 1: like we spent all of our time in Lachmen and
3:09
Speaker 1: then came out. It was close for the David mm hmmm.
3:12
Speaker 1: I think they may have updated. I think they did
3:14
Speaker 1: very recent since I left because when I went in
3:17
Speaker 1: when I was living there in late two thousands or
3:19
Speaker 1: late nineties, early two thousand's, it was delightfully old. Yeah,
3:25
Speaker 1: well it was open in seventy seven. Yeah, it looked
3:27
Speaker 1: pretty untouched, mechanical mastodon's inside that we're all like clunky
3:32
Speaker 1: and oh no, I'm really we gotta go back. Yeah,
3:36
Speaker 1: it's pretty neat the herky jerky masthodon. And they could
3:38
Speaker 1: tell they were old. Yeah, not in the ways that
3:41
Speaker 1: mastodons are supposed to be old. From the seventies. Yeah.
3:46
Speaker 1: So no, I haven't been to the Page Museum, but
3:47
Speaker 1: I have been to the tar pits themselves. And tar
3:50
Speaker 1: pits actually is a misnomer. Yeah, they're actually they should
3:55
Speaker 1: be called asphalt pits or bitumen pits because tar is
4:00
Speaker 1: derived from coal and these pits are derived from petroleum. Yeah,
4:05
Speaker 1: so that's there's the fact of the podcast. Sadly is
4:08
Speaker 1: it is that the fact that the podcast, Yeah, the
4:12
Speaker 1: oil crude oil steeps up through fissures in the Earth's
4:15
Speaker 1: crust and then some of that evaporates, and that leaves
4:18
Speaker 1: behind that tar asphalt asphalt. But let's go back even
4:21
Speaker 1: further than that. These tar pits leabre of tar pits,
4:24
Speaker 1: which are basically for anybody who hasn't been there, if
4:27
Speaker 1: you're walking around the grounds of the tar pits, there's
4:29
Speaker 1: just basically black ponds that look like they have oil
4:33
Speaker 1: slicks on top of them. Then when you look a
4:35
Speaker 1: little close, you're like, oh, it's all oil. Yeah. Every
4:38
Speaker 1: once in a while there's a bubble coming up here
4:40
Speaker 1: there quite a bit uh and um again there's like
4:44
Speaker 1: a huge masted on coming out like a model coming
4:49
Speaker 1: out of the out of the one of the pits.
4:51
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool, well, not quite coming out, but trying
4:55
Speaker 1: to write, he's never gonna come out. You never made
4:58
Speaker 1: that played out as a film that he would make
5:00
Speaker 1: it out right. Um. And that's the whole reason that
5:02
Speaker 1: the tar pits are even um have fences and a
5:06
Speaker 1: plastic masted on in the first place. Because many many
5:10
Speaker 1: millions of years ago, Los Angeles was underwater. There's a
5:13
Speaker 1: lot of aquatic life that lived and died in that area,
5:18
Speaker 1: and uh went to the bottom, and over time we're
5:21
Speaker 1: compressed into the fossil fuel petroleum fossil fuel. Yes, yeah,
5:27
Speaker 1: And then as the ice age came and the waters
5:30
Speaker 1: were seated and were locked into glaciers up north um
5:34
Speaker 1: that land became drier and as a result, like you said,
5:37
Speaker 1: that bit Chaman started coming up through fissures in the
5:40
Speaker 1: ground and has been ever since. Those are the Librea
5:44
Speaker 1: tar pits. That's right, and uh in those pits, we're
5:47
Speaker 1: talking about the Pleistocene epoch, which is about two point
5:52
Speaker 1: six million to eleven thousand, seven hundred years ago. And
5:56
Speaker 1: the neat thing is is except for a handful, well
6:00
Speaker 1: more than a handful, except for some of these huge
6:02
Speaker 1: land mammals that they found, a lot of the animals
6:05
Speaker 1: are the same as they are now. And this was
6:08
Speaker 1: the last time we had major climate cooling, So studying
6:12
Speaker 1: these fossils can like, we can learn more about our
6:15
Speaker 1: climate from studying these things than I don't know what
6:20
Speaker 1: I was halfway those sentence was like, wait a minute,
6:22
Speaker 1: I don't know what part two is, but yeah, I
6:24
Speaker 1: think you made the point. Yeah, but that's how they
6:26
Speaker 1: You know, you can learn a lot from uh future
6:29
Speaker 1: climates by studying past climates, right exactly, And that's one
6:31
Speaker 1: of the things that they're doing now. There's kind of
6:34
Speaker 1: a second wind that's going on the Libreo tar pits.
6:37
Speaker 1: The first win came about what we should say, Um,
6:40
Speaker 1: Since the LaBrea tar pits made their first debut about
6:43
Speaker 1: forty tho years ago, it's been they've been successfully trapping
6:47
Speaker 1: animals of all sorts and not just animals of plant
6:50
Speaker 1: life too. Yea mostly carnivores though, yes, And there's a
6:54
Speaker 1: reason that there's mostly carnivores. They figured it out because
6:57
Speaker 1: there is a disproportionate amount of carnivores in the Librea
7:02
Speaker 1: tar pits. Yeah, which is way more than there were
7:07
Speaker 1: carnivores proportionately speaking during the Pleistocene epoch, specifically this last
7:15
Speaker 1: year era. Um. And they they think they haven't figured
7:19
Speaker 1: out why. Well, it makes total sense. Animal gets stuck
7:24
Speaker 1: in tarpit, bigger animal comes along and wants to eat
7:27
Speaker 1: that animal, it gets stuck in tarpit, and maybe even
7:30
Speaker 1: a bigger animal wants to eat both of those it
7:32
Speaker 1: gets stuck in tarpit. Yeah. Well, plus also a lot
7:34
Speaker 1: of carnivores hunting packs. So if they're like, well, this
7:38
Speaker 1: stupid mastodon can't get out of this black pond, I'm
7:41
Speaker 1: going in after him. Let's all go in after him.
7:44
Speaker 1: Everybody gets stuck pretty much it. Yeah, that's why there's
7:48
Speaker 1: more carnivores. That's why they're just proportionately represented. Yeah, it's
7:52
Speaker 1: actually I said he talking about the mastodon outside the
7:55
Speaker 1: fake one. I believe it's if I remember correctly, a mama.
7:59
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's babies, and there's babies like on the
8:01
Speaker 1: shore and the mama is trapped and it's really kind
8:04
Speaker 1: of sad, is what they picked there. But I guess
8:07
Speaker 1: that was the realism of the place to see an
8:10
Speaker 1: epoch these mommy goes hunting and doesn't come back. It's right,
8:13
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, and you can. I think I've told
8:17
Speaker 1: this story before. I was shooting there once on a
8:19
Speaker 1: TV commercial and I was far away from the uh
8:23
Speaker 1: the large pools, and I was standing there and I
8:26
Speaker 1: looked down and there was a little two foot diameter
8:29
Speaker 1: pool of tar right by my feet. Yeah, I mean,
8:32
Speaker 1: they're not all walled up and fenced off, and it
8:34
Speaker 1: was bubbling. Uh you know what that is, by the way,
8:38
Speaker 1: the it's methane, I guess, yeah, from bacteria they found out.
8:42
Speaker 1: So that was only like five or six years ago
8:44
Speaker 1: that they've learned that. And they discovered like two d
8:46
Speaker 1: new kinds of bacteria that's neat petroleum loving bacteria. Yeah,
8:50
Speaker 1: that's great, and that it's still burping even in these
8:53
Speaker 1: tiny little puddles. Yeah, and they're the even the big
8:56
Speaker 1: puddles are only about twelve ft deep. Yeah. It's just
8:59
Speaker 1: like meat or something like that for our non Liberian friends. Yeah. Yeah, so, um,
9:07
Speaker 1: the tar pits have been just trapping animals, like you said,
9:09
Speaker 1: even there's lots of recent animals in it. They found.
9:11
Speaker 1: They still find cattle bones. Rodney Dangerfield, Yeah, he was
9:16
Speaker 1: found in there. Apparently there was a Los Angeles um
9:20
Speaker 1: Police Department scuba diver that dove into the pits to
9:24
Speaker 1: retrieve evidence for cold murder case and was successful apparently.
9:29
Speaker 1: But he said, like I've dived all over the place
9:32
Speaker 1: looking for evidence. He said, that was the craziest dive
9:34
Speaker 1: I've ever made. He's scuba dived in the tar pit. Wow. Yeah.
9:41
Speaker 1: And the article I read wasn't really um big on detail.
9:46
Speaker 1: They wouldn't even say what evidence he was looking for.
9:48
Speaker 1: It must be less dense as you go, because the
9:51
Speaker 1: tar that I've seen it's like, I mean, it's like
9:53
Speaker 1: road tards, so thick. I don't see how you can move.
9:56
Speaker 1: I would think scuba diver gets trapped. I think it's
9:58
Speaker 1: probably more dense towards the bottom, and if you're a
10:00
Speaker 1: masted on, you're like, it's probably quick sandy, and this
10:04
Speaker 1: guy was probably avoiding the bottom. Plus I'm sure there
10:06
Speaker 1: are a lot of people like pulling him out. Yeah.
10:09
Speaker 1: I think that bad Roblow movie they he did a
10:12
Speaker 1: buried body in there. Yeah, I mean it's what was
10:15
Speaker 1: what was that bad that influence bad influence bad behavior,
10:19
Speaker 1: familiar bad something bad movie that's probably pretty bad. This
10:24
Speaker 1: is before Rob Blow had his comeback. This is the
10:27
Speaker 1: post sex stape years. Oh yeah, when he was just
10:30
Speaker 1: trying to hang in there, trying to hang in there. Yeah,
10:33
Speaker 1: we don't make it back row Blow. But they got
10:35
Speaker 1: all kinds of like sabre tooth tigers and dire wolves
10:37
Speaker 1: and like original original native horses to North America that
10:43
Speaker 1: don't exist anymore. There used to be horses here. There
10:46
Speaker 1: used to be camels, and they're not like the European
10:48
Speaker 1: horses that everyone thinks their horses here. You're focusing on
10:51
Speaker 1: the horses. There used to be camels here, I know.
10:54
Speaker 1: And like you said, sabre tooth tigers they found about
10:57
Speaker 1: um four thousand of those. The higher wolf they found
11:00
Speaker 1: about two thousand dire wolves so far. Um and then uh,
11:05
Speaker 1: they also found something called the American lion. This thing
11:09
Speaker 1: was the coolest animal in North America ever. Right. They
11:13
Speaker 1: got up to eight ft long four ft at the haunches. Um.
11:19
Speaker 1: They weighed something like up to seven seventy five pounds,
11:22
Speaker 1: which is three These are giant mantals. They were about
11:27
Speaker 1: larger than an African lion. They were huge. If they
11:30
Speaker 1: wanted you dead, you were dead. Not like these lions
11:34
Speaker 1: these days. They're lazy. This American lion would have just
11:39
Speaker 1: taken your head clean off and burt. All sorts of
11:43
Speaker 1: flightless predator or flightless flying predators in the sky. Yeah, um,
11:50
Speaker 1: they're in apparently. So far they found six hundred sixty species,
11:54
Speaker 1: fifty nine mammal species, a hundred and thirty five bird species,
11:58
Speaker 1: tons of everything from like mall asks to um. The
12:01
Speaker 1: new bacteria you're talking about, the libre tarpets have been
12:05
Speaker 1: so vital and providing a picture of um, the of
12:10
Speaker 1: life during the late Paleozoic that the error the time
12:14
Speaker 1: period from three hundred thousand years ago to the end
12:18
Speaker 1: of the UM not Paleozoic. Did I say that, I
12:22
Speaker 1: meant Pleistocene. So the three hundred thousand years to the
12:26
Speaker 1: end of the Pleistocene is called the Rancho Lebray in
12:30
Speaker 1: all one word land mammal age. They renamed it for
12:33
Speaker 1: all this activity. Right. Yeah, like that's how important these
12:36
Speaker 1: little pits of bitumen are. And we'll talk about how
12:40
Speaker 1: all of this was discovered in just a moment. So chuck,
12:47
Speaker 1: if this, if these are basically pools of bubbling crude,
12:53
Speaker 1: sticky asphalt, how did a bone ever get pulled out
12:57
Speaker 1: of it? Well, because of progress, my friend, and the
13:02
Speaker 1: fact that Los Angeles was not going to uh sorry,
13:05
Speaker 1: Pueblo de Arienna de Los Angeles. Um, it was bound
13:13
Speaker 1: to be developed because of the weather there and the
13:16
Speaker 1: beautiful Pacific coast and um, so progress people came along
13:20
Speaker 1: and started making a city there, and uh, it's such
13:24
Speaker 1: a volatile area. They realized, hey, this is you know,
13:29
Speaker 1: this is dangerous this area right here until let's start
13:32
Speaker 1: drilling for oil. Yeah. And it was I think the
13:34
Speaker 1: Hancock family, Yeah, of Hancock Park fame, which is right
13:38
Speaker 1: there as well. I'm more McArthur Park person. Yeah. Wow,
13:43
Speaker 1: it's a good song. Okay, I thought you met you
13:46
Speaker 1: just like scoring cheap drugs and literally someone leaving a
13:50
Speaker 1: cake out in the rain. Yeah. MacArthur Parks not the
13:52
Speaker 1: greatest area, no, but it's a it was a good,
13:55
Speaker 1: good song. Yeah. But Hancock Park boy, is that nice? Well? Sure, yeah,
14:00
Speaker 1: I say that like it should be obvious, but I
14:02
Speaker 1: don't know where. Yeah, it is nice. Okay, so we're
14:05
Speaker 1: talking about progress. Yes, the Hancock family in eighteen seventy
14:08
Speaker 1: started drilling for oil and they basically the pits have
14:13
Speaker 1: been used um since by Paleo Indians for things like
14:18
Speaker 1: um waterproofing canoes and stuff that stuff. You want to
14:21
Speaker 1: patch a hole in a canoe, Sure, you can do
14:23
Speaker 1: a lot worse than asphalt. Yeah, because before that was
14:26
Speaker 1: before what's that like a new miracle tape that they make.
14:31
Speaker 1: It's like one of those products you see on TV
14:33
Speaker 1: type things. The only one I'm familiar with is that
14:35
Speaker 1: spray that the guy on the clear PLEXI class boat
14:39
Speaker 1: to holes drilled in. Yeah, this get stuff. But we
14:42
Speaker 1: don't buzz market here, no, because we don't remember the
14:45
Speaker 1: names of anything. That's true. But back then, this tar man,
14:49
Speaker 1: I mean that was like that was magic to the
14:52
Speaker 1: to the Native America and it's just sitting there just
14:54
Speaker 1: don't get too close. And then when the Spaniards came
14:57
Speaker 1: in and started using that area for cattle rustling. Uh,
15:02
Speaker 1: they used it also for waterproofing for their roofs. They
15:05
Speaker 1: also used it as fuel. Um. And then once the
15:09
Speaker 1: Hancock family started digging for oil, they kind of left
15:12
Speaker 1: the tar pits alone. But um, as far back as
15:16
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy five, a guy named William Denton was the
15:20
Speaker 1: first person to describe a fossil. Take him from the
15:22
Speaker 1: bray of tarpet. Somebody gave him a saber tooth, tiger tooth,
15:27
Speaker 1: canine tooth and then inspired him. It did, and so
15:31
Speaker 1: UM the Nascent Natural History Museum from Los Angeles contacted
15:36
Speaker 1: the Hancock family and said, hey, why don't you let
15:38
Speaker 1: us start tooling around there? And they let them starting
15:42
Speaker 1: in nineteen o one. Uh, they were allowed to basically
15:47
Speaker 1: do some kind of random, small, misguided excavation. Yeah, they
15:52
Speaker 1: were only concerned about the big daddy bones. Well, that
15:55
Speaker 1: came in the thirties. In the thirties when they started
15:58
Speaker 1: like really digging the pit a thought. Nineteen thirteen is
16:01
Speaker 1: when they started their first full scale You're right, I'm sorry.
16:05
Speaker 1: They also did in the thirties too, well, from nineteen
16:08
Speaker 1: thirteen till now, right, Okay, So in nineteen thirteen they
16:12
Speaker 1: started digging pits around the Librea tar pits further pits,
16:15
Speaker 1: uh nine six of them in total. Yeah, they had
16:18
Speaker 1: to dig down to these. They weren't just big natural
16:20
Speaker 1: pools of black tark, because people would have seen that
16:22
Speaker 1: previously and be like, hey, what's up with all that stuff? Right,
16:25
Speaker 1: So they would dig down UM remove all of the bones,
16:30
Speaker 1: and like you said, they were really only interested in
16:32
Speaker 1: the big ones, so they kind of discarded and left
16:35
Speaker 1: alone a lot of the bird bones and plant fossils
16:38
Speaker 1: and all that stuff that's boring. And the other thing
16:41
Speaker 1: they didn't do was catalog the bones together, so they
16:45
Speaker 1: basically just threw them all into piles. And there's a
16:47
Speaker 1: picture on the Page Museum's website of UM one of
16:51
Speaker 1: the early lead excavators just surrounded by like boxes and
16:57
Speaker 1: boxes of bones. I'm sure they were like, what do
17:00
Speaker 1: we do with all this stuff? Yeah, they found something
17:02
Speaker 1: like a million or so a million and a half bones,
17:05
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah, they dug ninety six pits in total,
17:07
Speaker 1: and uh, well, we'll talk about the new progress. But
17:12
Speaker 1: before the new progress. They had close to four million fossils,
17:17
Speaker 1: and that sounds like a lot, but they said you
17:19
Speaker 1: only have to get like once every ten year or
17:21
Speaker 1: some big animals. Well yeah, that was another thing too.
17:23
Speaker 1: They're like, well, that doesn't make any sense. In forty
17:26
Speaker 1: thousand years, how could you have you know, four million bones?
17:31
Speaker 1: When they were saying, well, yeah, if you do the math,
17:33
Speaker 1: I think if you have thirty or ten animals stranded
17:38
Speaker 1: every decade, it would account for it. Yeah, surprise, it
17:40
Speaker 1: would more than that. Yeah, you know, because I mean
17:43
Speaker 1: animals wander into tar pits. Yeah, they might also get
17:46
Speaker 1: smart and avoid tar pits when when they see their
17:49
Speaker 1: mommy go in and not coming out. I guess so,
17:51
Speaker 1: you know, because those little baby mastodonce didn't look like
17:54
Speaker 1: they were going in. After they were out of there,
17:56
Speaker 1: they went to the beach, they went to maccarth apart.
18:01
Speaker 1: Score that's right, all right? So I said they dug
18:06
Speaker 1: ninety six pits. Not all of them bore fruit. Uh,
18:09
Speaker 1: quite a few of them did. And pitt number was
18:13
Speaker 1: ninety one was noted for the bounty of fossils. It
18:17
Speaker 1: provided it's always the fifth to last one. That isn't
18:20
Speaker 1: that the same it's always the fifth to the last,
18:23
Speaker 1: and they for about forty years they really concentrated on
18:27
Speaker 1: Pitt ninety one. I don't think they're digging there and
18:30
Speaker 1: right now, although they may have started again, and I
18:32
Speaker 1: think they're hot and heavy on Project Well, should we
18:35
Speaker 1: go ahead and go to Project three. We'll get to
18:37
Speaker 1: Project twenty three in a second. Let's do a message
18:39
Speaker 1: break real quick. Okay, okay, So let's talk about Project Yeah.
18:59
Speaker 1: I think probably JE twenty three started in two thousand six,
19:02
Speaker 1: and that was basically a plan to continue digging and
19:08
Speaker 1: find more fossils and take better care with the small guys,
19:12
Speaker 1: to get a more complete fossil record. And they call
19:15
Speaker 1: it twenty three because they did a well, this whole
19:17
Speaker 1: thing started because LACMA wanted to build a parking garage
19:20
Speaker 1: and underground parking garage, yeah, which you can't do unless
19:23
Speaker 1: you know, around that area because so volatile, without getting
19:25
Speaker 1: some help from archaeologists. And so they ended up digging
19:29
Speaker 1: twenty three just big chunks of land essentially in these crates.
19:35
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen you know, if you buy a
19:37
Speaker 1: fully grown tree from a nursery, it comes in a
19:40
Speaker 1: huge box. Huge wooden plants or have never seen him
19:44
Speaker 1: like that. That's what they used. Yeah. Well, and much
19:47
Speaker 1: larger even, and some of them capable of like close
19:49
Speaker 1: to sixty tons of soil and tar and bones or
19:53
Speaker 1: whatever else is in there. And that's why they called
19:55
Speaker 1: the project because there's twenty three of them and this
19:58
Speaker 1: was two dozen six of their You, much more sophisticated
20:01
Speaker 1: techniques than they were using even in the sixties. Um,
20:05
Speaker 1: when they were really hitting pit one hard. Um that
20:10
Speaker 1: sounded so stupid, Please forgive me everyone, But they're using
20:15
Speaker 1: sophisticated techniques. And they they had the um luxury of
20:19
Speaker 1: coming at these deposits from the side or from underneath,
20:24
Speaker 1: rather than having to go down through the tar pits
20:26
Speaker 1: from above. Um. So they really scored a lot of
20:30
Speaker 1: like just a trove of deposits of bones, including um,
20:34
Speaker 1: a wooly mammoth named zed them. Yeah, it was a
20:39
Speaker 1: Columbian wooly mammoth. It was the most intact skeleton ever
20:43
Speaker 1: found of a Columbian wooly mammoth. Yeah, and the wooly
20:46
Speaker 1: mammoth you see um reconstructed at the Page Museum. Or
20:50
Speaker 1: they were, like you said, they used to just put
20:52
Speaker 1: all the bones together so those were bones made up
20:55
Speaker 1: of all kinds of wooly mammothz is all zed or
20:59
Speaker 1: eight percent of them is all dead. And they name
21:01
Speaker 1: him Zed in honor of zero, the British way of
21:05
Speaker 1: saying zero um. And the reason they named him zero
21:09
Speaker 1: is because he represents basically like a new start and
21:12
Speaker 1: understanding of not only that um, that species, but all
21:17
Speaker 1: of the life around that era. Patient zero pretty much. Uh.
21:23
Speaker 1: And the cool thing is, I mean, I like all
21:26
Speaker 1: the campiness of the Page Museum, but one of the
21:28
Speaker 1: really neat parts about it is they have what they
21:30
Speaker 1: call the fish bowl. They have a the room where
21:33
Speaker 1: they're doing this work is all glass, and you can
21:37
Speaker 1: walk through and see all the skeletons that they put
21:40
Speaker 1: together and all the funny old dated uh, holy mammoths
21:43
Speaker 1: that are going. Yeah, you can pound on the glass
21:47
Speaker 1: and go nerds scientists, we can do that. At the
21:50
Speaker 1: very end of it, you can uh that they're in
21:52
Speaker 1: they're brushing, and they have microscopes and all sorts of
21:57
Speaker 1: neat little tools that scientists here. You want to wait
22:00
Speaker 1: to the end anyway, so you can run off right
22:02
Speaker 1: after you say that, and they're recording all this stuff
22:05
Speaker 1: it's very detailed. Um, they're they're what they're doing is
22:09
Speaker 1: they're getting a fossil record from that time like they
22:11
Speaker 1: didn't have before because they were lazy in the nineteen on, right.
22:16
Speaker 1: So one of the reasons why they're looking for this
22:18
Speaker 1: fossil records because this is a particularly curious time period
22:22
Speaker 1: that the Librea tar pits encapsulated. Literally, Um, they're humans
22:28
Speaker 1: evolved the and well that's remember with the the early Americans.
22:33
Speaker 1: The debate over that this is around that time, Um,
22:37
Speaker 1: there was something called the late Pleistocene extinction. Um, there
22:42
Speaker 1: were a lot You'll notice a lot of animals, large
22:45
Speaker 1: animals that used to be in North America that aren't
22:48
Speaker 1: any longer. There's no camels, there's no indigenous American horse
22:53
Speaker 1: any longer, there's no American lion, and all of these animals,
22:56
Speaker 1: these what are called megafauna, started dying off at about
22:59
Speaker 1: the same time in North America, and scientists aren't really
23:03
Speaker 1: sure why. And I think that's one of the reasons
23:05
Speaker 1: they're so excited about zed is they're hoping he can
23:08
Speaker 1: kind of tell them. There's three competing or um combination
23:15
Speaker 1: hypotheses for what caused this extinction. Humans killed them. That's
23:20
Speaker 1: one that humans either overhunted all of them or overhunted
23:24
Speaker 1: a keystone species like mastodons that led to collapse of
23:27
Speaker 1: the ecosystem as a whole. It doesn't seem likely to me.
23:30
Speaker 1: I know the timeline suggests that, but I think that's correlation. Okay,
23:34
Speaker 1: that's just my opinion. The other one is climate change
23:37
Speaker 1: itself did that. This was the end of an ice age.
23:40
Speaker 1: Temperatures were rising, sea levels were rising. Um It's possible
23:44
Speaker 1: that a lot of these species just couldn't possibly adapt,
23:47
Speaker 1: possibly because they were large, because this late Pleistocene extinction
23:52
Speaker 1: was mostly among mammals um or animals a hundred pounds
23:56
Speaker 1: or more. And then the third one is something called
23:59
Speaker 1: hyper disse any highly infectious disease, possibly introduced by man
24:05
Speaker 1: and then transferred from man to animal. I wonder if
24:08
Speaker 1: they found a human bones and the tar pits at all.
24:11
Speaker 1: I don't know. I haven't heard about that. Yeah, I
24:15
Speaker 1: didn't come across anything like that either. You think they
24:17
Speaker 1: would have made pretty big hey, that kind of thing. Actually, Josh,
24:21
Speaker 1: I did something we rarely do, and I just looked
24:23
Speaker 1: it up mid Chow and they did find a human
24:26
Speaker 1: skull called the Libreya woman evidently like early on in
24:30
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen, and that I think that's the only human
24:32
Speaker 1: bones that they've ever found. So there you have it.
24:36
Speaker 1: There you have it. Do they have any idea where
24:38
Speaker 1: like when she lived approximately ten thousand years wow? So
24:45
Speaker 1: and she was like between because she was old. Supposedly
24:50
Speaker 1: that's a fallacy. Yeah, once once you they had a
24:54
Speaker 1: high infant mortality rate back then, which excuse the average
24:58
Speaker 1: life expectancy downward. But once you survived infancy, you could
25:02
Speaker 1: expect to live like to a nice ripe old age.
25:06
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's possible that Zed will give us an
25:09
Speaker 1: idea of what the heck happened at the late Pleistocene extinction,
25:12
Speaker 1: because North America in particular had a peculiar, peculiarly large
25:18
Speaker 1: die off like it happened elsewhere in roughly the same
25:22
Speaker 1: time in other continents, but in North America it was big, massive.
25:27
Speaker 1: So what happened? Maybe the humans killed them all? Maybe
25:31
Speaker 1: I'm wrong, ask Z well, not necessarily, but there were
25:35
Speaker 1: humans in other places to where the extinction wasn't nearly
25:39
Speaker 1: as pronounced. Maybe there were vegetarians. So go to the
25:44
Speaker 1: Libreo tar pits. Yeah, because he's dead with his ten
25:47
Speaker 1: foot long tusks. It's an l A institution. Yeah that
25:50
Speaker 1: if you were just fan of movies, they've shot all
25:52
Speaker 1: kinds of movies in there, and yeah, it was a
25:56
Speaker 1: great movie, Miracle Mile. Yeah, Anthony Edwards. Did you ever
25:59
Speaker 1: seen that? No, you should check that out. That's a
26:03
Speaker 1: little known U cult classic about nuclear war and uh,
26:09
Speaker 1: the last like twenty four hours before the bomb is
26:11
Speaker 1: supposed to hit l A. Really and it all takes
26:14
Speaker 1: place at the Miracle Mile area. Their scenes in the
26:18
Speaker 1: tar pits and there's a diner there right on will
26:21
Speaker 1: shure that. I think Johnny's Diner. That's not even open anymore,
26:24
Speaker 1: but they just keep it there because they filmed so
26:26
Speaker 1: many movies there. Uh yeah, highly recommended by me. Nice, Well,
26:31
Speaker 1: I will see your Miracle Mile. Yeah. Very eighties though,
26:36
Speaker 1: like get ready for the synthesizer score for you. Have
26:40
Speaker 1: you ever seen Night of the Comment? Oh, dude, I
26:43
Speaker 1: love Night of the Comment. That's that's a good one too.
26:45
Speaker 1: Nothing to do with nuclear bombs or l A, but
26:47
Speaker 1: that's great super eighties. Yeah, I love that movie. Do
26:53
Speaker 1: you have it? Oh? I was behind Anthony Edwards at
26:56
Speaker 1: the Reality to Restore Sanity. Oh really, yeah, I'm thinking
26:59
Speaker 1: the right guy, right, the guy from Top Gun. Yeah,
27:01
Speaker 1: and you are yeah, yeah, sure, yeah and Miracle Revenge
27:05
Speaker 1: of the Nerds. Yeah. I don't remember his name that one,
27:08
Speaker 1: but it was that was his best role. I think. Um,
27:12
Speaker 1: we saw the I don't know if you saw him,
27:13
Speaker 1: but when we were in l A for uh that
27:18
Speaker 1: TV show that we had, Remember when they brought us
27:21
Speaker 1: out for the press weekend thing. Um, I can't rember
27:24
Speaker 1: what that's called, but we the junket. Yeah, it was
27:27
Speaker 1: a junk It's a junket. The two Revenge of the
27:29
Speaker 1: Booger and um, the Carte and guy were both there
27:33
Speaker 1: promoting their new show, and they walked by me and
27:35
Speaker 1: I was like, holy cow, that's two nerds of the
27:38
Speaker 1: Revenge of the Nerds gang. I remember you saying that.
27:41
Speaker 1: It was pretty excited. I felt like I missed out.
27:44
Speaker 1: That's all right, not seeing them. It really wasn't a
27:48
Speaker 1: big deal. And we're Matt Damon and uh Michael Douglas
27:51
Speaker 1: there too, promoting the Liberati movie. Yeah. I remember seeing
27:54
Speaker 1: them and going, what are they doing together? And that
27:56
Speaker 1: is what our TV show has to do? With behind
27:58
Speaker 1: the Candle labruk uh. If you want to know about
28:03
Speaker 1: more amazing connections, you can check us out on social media.
28:07
Speaker 1: We're all over the place. We're on Twitter, s y
28:09
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Speaker 1: us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works
28:19
Speaker 1: dot com. The triumphant return of that U R L
28:23
Speaker 1: and uh. If you want to know more about the
28:26
Speaker 1: Libreria tar pits, I did this totally out of order?
28:30
Speaker 1: What is wrong with me? Today? You got a case
28:33
Speaker 1: of the Monday's weird? It's Wednesday, anyway, I guess we'll
28:37
Speaker 1: leave it in Huh. No sense in recording something in
28:41
Speaker 1: error over again. Well, and since no one ever knows
28:43
Speaker 1: how to get in touch with us, it's clear that
28:45
Speaker 1: most people tune out by this time anyway, right, okay? Well, anyway,
28:48
Speaker 1: if you want to know more about the Libraria tarpets,
28:51
Speaker 1: type that in the search bar how stuff works dot
28:53
Speaker 1: com and that will bring up this listener mail. Uh
28:57
Speaker 1: am Nizia expert is what I'm gonna call this. We
29:00
Speaker 1: called out for amnesia experts and we got one. Uh
29:04
Speaker 1: or she says, I sort of am. Her name is Maya.
29:06
Speaker 1: She's a PhD student working on her dissertation and neuroscience.
29:10
Speaker 1: She said, my work focus is on spatial working memory,
29:13
Speaker 1: and our lab actually models human amnesia and rats. While
29:16
Speaker 1: there were a few things that were nitpicky, nitpicklely wrong, um,
29:20
Speaker 1: I most wanted to write in about your discussion of
29:23
Speaker 1: short term in working memory. While in the podcast you
29:26
Speaker 1: stated that there were two separate things, there were two
29:28
Speaker 1: separate things, and that working memory forms a bridge between
29:31
Speaker 1: STM and l t M. In fact, the term short
29:34
Speaker 1: term memory is no longer really used in the memory field.
29:37
Speaker 1: Working memory now encompasses what used to be referred to
29:40
Speaker 1: as short term uh. The working part is in reference
29:44
Speaker 1: to the fact that these items can be remembered as
29:46
Speaker 1: long as the brain works at rehashing the information, like say,
29:50
Speaker 1: repeating it to yourself, rather than for a certain arbitrary
29:53
Speaker 1: period of time. That's why they use a Clydesdale to
29:55
Speaker 1: represent working memory. There's also competing theories about the actual
30:00
Speaker 1: limits of working memory, but our lab believes in as
30:02
Speaker 1: shown that it is capacity dependent that the traditional idea
30:07
Speaker 1: of seven items really holds true for simple things like
30:10
Speaker 1: numbers or letters. In fact, the more complicated the information,
30:14
Speaker 1: the fewer items your working memory can hold. It's amazing.
30:17
Speaker 1: For example, why you can easily remember the ten digits
30:19
Speaker 1: uh by repeating it in your head. You could only
30:22
Speaker 1: remember one or two faces using the same strategy. Huh.
30:26
Speaker 1: So that is from Maya Uh, and good luck on
30:29
Speaker 1: your PhD studies. Thanks for correcting us too. Maybe it
30:34
Speaker 1: would have held a little more weight if it come
30:36
Speaker 1: after you got your PhD, but we appreciate you writing
30:40
Speaker 1: in either way. If you want to be derided by
30:43
Speaker 1: me or chuck a listener mail, or if you want
30:46
Speaker 1: to just correct us uh, we appreciate that in all seriousness,
30:51
Speaker 1: you can write to us, as I said before Stuff
30:55
Speaker 1: podcast at how stuff works dot com. And while you're
30:59
Speaker 1: on the computer, you might as well check out our beautiful,
31:02
Speaker 1: luxurious home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
31:11
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
31:13
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