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How Trepanation Worked · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
0:04
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
0:13
Speaker 1: There's Charles w Chuck, Brian over there, and Jerry's even here,
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Speaker 1: which means this is a bona fide bonafid they shut
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Speaker 1: your mouth episode of Stuff you should Know, right until
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Speaker 1: Jerry's like, who go to Google? You know, I wasn't
0:28
Speaker 1: gonna outer like that, but you did, so She'll probably
0:31
Speaker 1: end up being sore at me about it, though. We're
0:34
Speaker 1: all busy these days. Seriously, life man, lifetime's a hundred, right, Yeah,
0:40
Speaker 1: I mean thirteen years in and we're still working out
0:42
Speaker 1: technical difficulties. I know, I know, but we're working it out.
0:47
Speaker 1: We're working it out. Chuck like a brilliant scientists, one
0:51
Speaker 1: of my all time favorites and a frequent guest star
0:54
Speaker 1: of the show in the early years. Paul Baroka, Yeah,
0:57
Speaker 1: it's been a while. Huh Yeah, Like he worked out
0:59
Speaker 1: a little puzzle that he had handed to him almost
1:02
Speaker 1: literally in the eighteen seventies. That's right. This is one
1:07
Speaker 1: of those where I was positive we had covered it before.
1:11
Speaker 1: Oh really, no, I knew, I knew four a fact
1:13
Speaker 1: we had and I'll explain why in a minute. I'll explain.
1:16
Speaker 1: Did it had to be on an Internet roundup or something?
1:20
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I know we talked about the
1:24
Speaker 1: movie Pie when he drilled a hole in his head.
1:26
Speaker 1: I forgot about that. Uh. I just can't remember what
1:30
Speaker 1: episode or what it what format it was? Maybe or right,
1:33
Speaker 1: maybe it was an Internet round up, because I could
1:36
Speaker 1: see us talking about that Internet group doing that kind
1:40
Speaker 1: of stuff, the International Trepid Nation Advocacy Group. I'll bet
1:44
Speaker 1: I even went to our Wikipedia page because they have
1:47
Speaker 1: a place where they list things that we've redone. Oh yeah,
1:51
Speaker 1: I didn't see that. Yeah. And by the way, I
1:54
Speaker 1: wanted to put out a call if you are a
1:56
Speaker 1: Wikipedia editor, our pages years and years years out of date.
2:02
Speaker 1: It says that we're writers for how stuff works. We
2:04
Speaker 1: haven't written for them in what like eight years. It's
2:06
Speaker 1: been a little while. Yeah, so if anyone wants updated,
2:10
Speaker 1: it's got I mean, God bless her, I miss Rebecca,
2:12
Speaker 1: but it said that Rebecca is our web publisher right
2:15
Speaker 1: a long time ago. Yeah, it has been a little while.
2:18
Speaker 1: So anyway, if anyone feels like blowing the dust off
2:20
Speaker 1: of that thing, well free Okay, so well, that was
2:24
Speaker 1: a great call out, Chuck. But let's get back to
2:26
Speaker 1: trepid nation. Okay. And like you said before we started recording,
2:30
Speaker 1: no No, Chuck said he has no trepidation about trepid nation.
2:35
Speaker 1: That was for year years. That was great though it
2:37
Speaker 1: is definitely worth sharing terrible. But so maybe I mentioned
2:40
Speaker 1: it before then because I always associate trepid nation with
2:43
Speaker 1: this little second one second long snippet from those time
2:48
Speaker 1: life Mysteries of the Unknown book ads from the and
2:54
Speaker 1: there's like one moment where they like show somebody like
2:58
Speaker 1: doing a trepid nation surgery on somebody else's head in
3:01
Speaker 1: like a cave by torchlight. I think I remember that. Yeah,
3:05
Speaker 1: And I was like, wait, what is that? I want
3:07
Speaker 1: to know more about that. So this has been sitting
3:09
Speaker 1: in our back pocket all this time, and I guess
3:10
Speaker 1: we busted it out at least once before. It had
3:13
Speaker 1: to have been Internet round up. It definitely wasn't an episode. Yeah,
3:17
Speaker 1: I think you're probably right. Unless we talked about it
3:19
Speaker 1: during lobotomy is I don't know, it could have been.
3:24
Speaker 1: It could have been Chuck, because a lot of people say, well, yeah,
3:26
Speaker 1: the lobotomy was the natural progression to um trepid trepid
3:32
Speaker 1: nation and not really no, no, it's actually that's incredibly false.
3:36
Speaker 1: It turns out trepid nation is maybe one of the
3:40
Speaker 1: oldest medical techniques, if not the oldest medical technique we have,
3:45
Speaker 1: aside from like slapping someone on the back when they're choking,
3:49
Speaker 1: that might be older, but we don't have any evidence
3:52
Speaker 1: to back that up. We actually have the evidence from
3:55
Speaker 1: trepid nation. And to get back to Monsieur Broca um
3:58
Speaker 1: famous for the Broker area, which is the first region
4:02
Speaker 1: of the brain that demonstrated localized UM function like the
4:07
Speaker 1: speech center is um. It produces speech, and it's the
4:12
Speaker 1: first time we could ever say this part of the
4:13
Speaker 1: brain is responsible for this function. And Broca was the
4:16
Speaker 1: guy who did that. He had a skull handed to
4:19
Speaker 1: him in the eighteen seventies and it turned out to
4:22
Speaker 1: be an inc in skull. I couldn't find out anywhere
4:24
Speaker 1: how old it was, but we can guess that by
4:27
Speaker 1: the time Broca got his hands on it, it was
4:29
Speaker 1: at least a couple of hundred years old, if not
4:31
Speaker 1: more than a thousand years old. Yeah, can you imagine
4:35
Speaker 1: the feather in your cap of you're just sitting around
4:38
Speaker 1: with your other cohorts. You're like, I have a part
4:41
Speaker 1: of the brain named after me, by the way, So
4:43
Speaker 1: I don't know what you guys have done, but I
4:45
Speaker 1: know they're like Paul, you in every argument with that Hi, Um,
4:50
Speaker 1: Paul broke broke his area. It says it on his
4:54
Speaker 1: card to Paul broke a comma broke his area. Uh yeah,
4:58
Speaker 1: So yeah, he was obviously like, well, this is an
5:01
Speaker 1: interesting thing because what he was looking at was a
5:04
Speaker 1: piece of skull, what was his human skull where a
5:07
Speaker 1: piece of it had been purposefully cut away and removed
5:13
Speaker 1: remarkably well, and it actually actually started to grow back,
5:18
Speaker 1: which indicates that whoever had this performed on them. That
5:22
Speaker 1: means they survived and was trying to heal. Yeah, at
5:25
Speaker 1: least for a little while. Yeah, Like it takes a
5:27
Speaker 1: little time for the bone to heal around like a
5:29
Speaker 1: skull cut away. So yeah, they had to have lived.
5:33
Speaker 1: I think in some cases I've seen, um, when the
5:36
Speaker 1: skull starts going back, it indicates at least a year
5:39
Speaker 1: of survival. I was gonna ask that. So I only
5:43
Speaker 1: saw that one or two places. I didn't see exactly, Like,
5:46
Speaker 1: I don't know a d percent, but it seems like
5:48
Speaker 1: it's it's a little while right, It's not like a
5:51
Speaker 1: right yea. So the thing is is like Broca's sitting
5:55
Speaker 1: here saying like, Okay, this is this is evidence of
5:58
Speaker 1: like this is a purposeful medical procedure. I believe that
6:01
Speaker 1: this person had what had their brain cut into to
6:05
Speaker 1: treat some form of malady or something like that. It's
6:09
Speaker 1: a proto brain surgery basically. And it was called trepi nation.
6:13
Speaker 1: And Paul Broca went to the French Anthropological Society I think,
6:18
Speaker 1: which he founded. Yeah, that was another thing he did,
6:21
Speaker 1: was the first pay of the Anthropological Society. Yeah, and
6:24
Speaker 1: they still were like, no, you got this one wrong,
6:26
Speaker 1: Paul um. But he went to them and said as much,
6:29
Speaker 1: and they're like, no, that's just not possible. And here's
6:33
Speaker 1: the thing that stuck out to me, Chuck. It wasn't
6:36
Speaker 1: that they were saying it's not possible that somebody could
6:39
Speaker 1: cut into someone else's head. Because these these people, these
6:43
Speaker 1: members of the Anthropological Society or just people in general
6:47
Speaker 1: in France in the eighteen seventies were well aware of
6:50
Speaker 1: that procedure. It had a name trepid Nation, and you
6:53
Speaker 1: could go to the hospital and get trepanned, depending on
6:56
Speaker 1: what kind of problem you had with your head. So
6:59
Speaker 1: it's not like they were just totally unfamiliar with this.
7:02
Speaker 1: They were super familiar with it. What they refused to
7:05
Speaker 1: believe is that some other society, and non European society,
7:09
Speaker 1: especially when removed in time, was capable of performing the
7:13
Speaker 1: surgery and in performing it in a good enough way
7:16
Speaker 1: that the person could possibly survive it. Yeah, I mean
7:20
Speaker 1: they were like, I just I just don't know. That
7:22
Speaker 1: sounds like they certainly weren't performing medical procedures. The Incas
7:26
Speaker 1: weren't doing that. And he was like, I don't know,
7:28
Speaker 1: look at that whole Yeah, it's pretty purposeful to me. Yeah,
7:32
Speaker 1: And so what Broca figured out was he was the
7:35
Speaker 1: first one to really stumble upon this evidence that this
7:38
Speaker 1: medical procedure that they were carrying out in the hospitals
7:41
Speaker 1: trepa nation was part of like a really ancient medical procedure,
7:48
Speaker 1: virtually unchanged in a lot of ways, Like, yeah, the
7:51
Speaker 1: tools that they used were kind of changed and kind
7:53
Speaker 1: of updated, but basically the procedure they were carrying out
7:56
Speaker 1: in the hospitals of France in the eighteen seventies and
7:59
Speaker 1: elsewhere in Europe and America. It was basically the same
8:02
Speaker 1: thing that people were doing thousands of years ago and
8:05
Speaker 1: had been doing for thousands of years as well. Yeah,
8:09
Speaker 1: I mean they were doing it so much. In Europe
8:11
Speaker 1: in the eighteenth century it was known as the is
8:14
Speaker 1: it tree pin or trip In I say trapin trip
8:18
Speaker 1: in the Trepin century, or because it's us, we'll call
8:22
Speaker 1: it the golden age of Trepa nation. Now I'm doubting myself,
8:26
Speaker 1: and it seems like the Golden Age might have been
8:28
Speaker 1: you know, a thousand years ago. Yeah, I think you
8:30
Speaker 1: might be right about that too. But it's started out
8:34
Speaker 1: as a veterinary practice. And we'll get a little bit too,
8:38
Speaker 1: a little bit, you know, they were we'll get to
8:40
Speaker 1: the famous cow later on, right, antient cow. But in
8:42
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century they think that it started out as
8:45
Speaker 1: a veterinary practice, correct, and then we'll get to the
8:48
Speaker 1: ancient cow a bit later. But it extended humans after
8:52
Speaker 1: the veterinary procedures, and you know, doctors at the time
8:56
Speaker 1: we're like, you know, we think it's useful, we think
8:59
Speaker 1: it hell us out with certain things that we'll get
9:02
Speaker 1: to as well. But they said, it's also killing a
9:05
Speaker 1: lot of people, and it's got a survival rate of
9:09
Speaker 1: about ten. And here's the little like a whopper of
9:13
Speaker 1: a detail here. The survival rate in ancient times was
9:18
Speaker 1: really really high, Like it made the modern survival rate
9:23
Speaker 1: just look embarrassingly low. It was flip whopped, really, wasn't it? Yes?
9:28
Speaker 1: And the Golden Age, like you were mentioning, it seems
9:30
Speaker 1: like the golden age of trepid nation occurred thousands of
9:34
Speaker 1: years before modern medicine ever came around, and that when
9:38
Speaker 1: modern medicine came around and kind of took over, trepid
9:40
Speaker 1: nation really dropped the ball kind of well yeah, and
9:45
Speaker 1: then you know, of course, once he finds that one skull,
9:49
Speaker 1: other skulls start coming forward. They start walking forward and saying, hey,
9:54
Speaker 1: check me out. I'm out here as evidence as well,
9:57
Speaker 1: which was pretty remarkable. That's like compariously, that Mystery Science
10:00
Speaker 1: Theater three thousand episode on the Screaming Skull. It's like
10:06
Speaker 1: the villain in the in the movie is like a
10:08
Speaker 1: skull that can move around and fly at people, kind
10:11
Speaker 1: of like the money from uh Monty Python and the
10:14
Speaker 1: Holy Grail, but it's a skull version of that, uh
10:19
Speaker 1: they found or we now know that the oldest trepon
10:22
Speaker 1: skull comes all the way back from about eight thousand
10:26
Speaker 1: years ago in the Stone Age during the Meso Philic Mesolithic.
10:31
Speaker 1: Sorry and my first and that was eight thousand years ago,
10:37
Speaker 1: and like this is the beginnings of sort of uh,
10:42
Speaker 1: planting things and eating vegetables and like building cities, like
10:47
Speaker 1: the very beginnings of civilization basically, yeah, and we're like
10:51
Speaker 1: cutting holes into one another's heads, and that we found
10:55
Speaker 1: evidence of this stuff like all over the world. This
10:57
Speaker 1: wasn't just like one one weird old city do doing this,
11:00
Speaker 1: Like this was everywhere in places that were really removed
11:04
Speaker 1: from one another. Like there's evidence of ancient trepid nation
11:08
Speaker 1: among indigenous peoples in Canada and North America. There's the
11:12
Speaker 1: same thing in Ukraine, North Africa, Portugal, everywhere that the Scandinavia,
11:19
Speaker 1: the iraq Um, all over the place there there's evidence
11:24
Speaker 1: of trapan skulls that turn up. South America is another one.
11:27
Speaker 1: And so it just kind of goes to show you
11:29
Speaker 1: either it was something that evolved independently in all these places,
11:33
Speaker 1: or it's so ancient that it it originated somewhere and
11:38
Speaker 1: then managed to spread out as people spread across the globe,
11:42
Speaker 1: which is pretty interesting either way. Yeah, and it was
11:45
Speaker 1: it like it got like really popular. This set really
11:47
Speaker 1: got me. During the copper Age, which was just after
11:51
Speaker 1: Stone Age, they found that about five to ten of
11:55
Speaker 1: all skulls that they found from the Neolithic area where
11:58
Speaker 1: Trapan's yeah not just yeah, like like up to ten
12:02
Speaker 1: percent of all the skulls that have ever turned up
12:05
Speaker 1: had holes cut into their skull. And the thing is
12:08
Speaker 1: is like we were saying, like, if if that had
12:10
Speaker 1: just been in, if that were the sum total of it,
12:12
Speaker 1: that you know, wow, that's really interesting. People used to
12:15
Speaker 1: cut holes in in their skulls and that was it. Um,
12:19
Speaker 1: it would still be worth remarking remarking on, you know,
12:22
Speaker 1: or talking about probably would have just stayed at the
12:24
Speaker 1: Internet round up. But the reason that it's worth a
12:27
Speaker 1: whole episode is because of that survival rate. That not
12:31
Speaker 1: only do they cut skulls in each other's heads with
12:34
Speaker 1: with rocks, actual rocks, Um, the people survived these operations
12:40
Speaker 1: and may have actually been improved as a result of
12:43
Speaker 1: these operations, and that it had been going on for
12:46
Speaker 1: thousands of years and still kind of continues today. That's
12:49
Speaker 1: what really makes the whole thing noteworthy. And when you
12:53
Speaker 1: look back at trepid nation in like the Mesolithic and
12:56
Speaker 1: Neolithic era, um, like that's part of medical history. It's
13:00
Speaker 1: not just some weird thing that people used to do
13:02
Speaker 1: in other cultures. Like that was the beginning of a
13:04
Speaker 1: surgery that we still carry out today. I don't think
13:07
Speaker 1: we can get that across enough. Yeah, there's a neuroscientist
13:11
Speaker 1: named Charles G. Gross that put the estimate of survival
13:16
Speaker 1: sometimes up to fifty And then a survey of skulls
13:22
Speaker 1: from the Iberian Peninsula showed evidence that they had healed
13:28
Speaker 1: or at least we're healing at that site, which means
13:30
Speaker 1: they lived for a while. Um. Like you said, skull
13:33
Speaker 1: just doesn't grow overnight. It takes a little while. And
13:35
Speaker 1: as long as that blood flowing, I guess it's healing. Uh.
13:38
Speaker 1: And then that actually dropped, so, like I said, that's
13:41
Speaker 1: flip flopped from success rates, you know, thousands and thousands
13:45
Speaker 1: of years later in Europe. Uh. And then when the
13:48
Speaker 1: Holy Roman Empire was doing this in medieval Europe, they
13:51
Speaker 1: weren't doing it as good. They had a higher mortality rate,
13:54
Speaker 1: and the thinking is is because they used um knives
13:58
Speaker 1: and then like wiped them off and then lives got
14:00
Speaker 1: really dirty. Waras in the olden days they would fashion
14:03
Speaker 1: like brand new tools out of bone and rock and stuff,
14:06
Speaker 1: and you know they were I guess comparatively pretty sanitary. Yeah,
14:10
Speaker 1: because if you if you nap um, you know, cut
14:13
Speaker 1: off the face of a rock to create a new
14:16
Speaker 1: stone tool to to perform a trepidation, that rock hasn't
14:20
Speaker 1: been exposed to anything. It's basically sterile now because you
14:23
Speaker 1: just cut off the face and now you're using it.
14:27
Speaker 1: Whereas if you're performing surgery using the same tools and
14:29
Speaker 1: all you're doing is washing it off, like that's just
14:32
Speaker 1: bacterious city and it's not that hard to get a
14:35
Speaker 1: brain infection when you cut into a skull using reusing
14:40
Speaker 1: tools that have just been kind of washed off with
14:42
Speaker 1: water a little bit. So yeah, that was probably a
14:45
Speaker 1: really good reason why the survival rate went down. But
14:49
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why it was so high also
14:51
Speaker 1: earlier is because people like even back in the Mesolithic
14:55
Speaker 1: and Neil, they seem to have understood a couple of things,
14:58
Speaker 1: and one was you stay away from the dura mater,
15:01
Speaker 1: which is that really hard tough, not hard, but really
15:04
Speaker 1: tough membrane that encases the brain and the spinal cord
15:09
Speaker 1: and protects it from the outside. Even if your skull
15:12
Speaker 1: cracks open, as long as you stay away from that
15:15
Speaker 1: and don't cut into that, your your chances of survival
15:18
Speaker 1: are pretty high. And ancient people seem to have really
15:21
Speaker 1: understood this. They also knew to stay away from sutures,
15:24
Speaker 1: which is where your skull the pieces of your skull
15:26
Speaker 1: which are not set, which are not um fused together
15:30
Speaker 1: when you're born. They fuse as you grow older. The
15:32
Speaker 1: places the lines where your skull plates formed together. Those
15:36
Speaker 1: are called sutures, and they also need to stay away
15:39
Speaker 1: from those as well. So apparently, if you just do
15:42
Speaker 1: those few things and create a new stone tool every
15:44
Speaker 1: time you perform the surgery, your your survival rates going
15:47
Speaker 1: to go through the roof. Yeah, and you know, before
15:50
Speaker 1: we get called out, maybe we shouldn't refer to those
15:52
Speaker 1: stone tools as sterile. Maybe we should just say like
15:55
Speaker 1: pretty clean for the time, clean enough, How about that
15:59
Speaker 1: clean enough for rock and roles? All right, I guess
16:02
Speaker 1: we should take a break, right set up? Yeah, I
16:05
Speaker 1: thought so too, man, And uh, we'll come back and
16:08
Speaker 1: try and answer the big question after this, which is
16:10
Speaker 1: why the heck were they doing this? All Right, so
16:44
Speaker 1: they know this was happening, they know it was working
16:46
Speaker 1: pretty well, and that people were surviving at remarkable rates.
16:50
Speaker 1: But the big sort of question that they had then
16:54
Speaker 1: and that we're still trying to kind of figure out
16:56
Speaker 1: and we don't know for sure, is like, why would
16:58
Speaker 1: they do this to begin with? Why a day dig
17:01
Speaker 1: into a person's head and cut out a piece of
17:04
Speaker 1: their skull eight thousand years ago? Uh? And you know,
17:08
Speaker 1: we've got some decent ideas that all makes sense to me. Yeah, um.
17:13
Speaker 1: And the whole problem is is kind of like like
17:17
Speaker 1: put you have to put yourself in the mentality in
17:20
Speaker 1: the shoes in the world view of somebody who was
17:22
Speaker 1: no shoes right right exactly. There's a huge different people
17:27
Speaker 1: who are still humans. They were modern humans in every
17:30
Speaker 1: sense of the word, aside from not living in the
17:32
Speaker 1: modern era. Um. But they didn't have the benefit of,
17:36
Speaker 1: you know, a general knowledge of medicine that that just
17:39
Speaker 1: about every human alive has today just from living in
17:42
Speaker 1: the twenty one century UM, or just kind of under
17:46
Speaker 1: having read about something on the internet, you know, like
17:48
Speaker 1: there's just so many pieces of the way we see
17:51
Speaker 1: the world that we take for granted because it's just
17:54
Speaker 1: there's just so many ways that we absorb information, and
17:57
Speaker 1: there's so much information available to us that wasn't before that.
18:00
Speaker 1: To to kind of remove yourself from that and put
18:02
Speaker 1: yourself in the position of somebody six thousand years ago
18:05
Speaker 1: and and to understand what they were thinking when they
18:08
Speaker 1: were cutting into someone's head that drove that purpose, it's
18:11
Speaker 1: really tough to do. But yeah, like you were saying,
18:13
Speaker 1: there's some some researchers have come up with some pretty
18:18
Speaker 1: good ideas, general ideas, um, broad categories that you could
18:22
Speaker 1: probably put just about anything into. And there's actually three
18:25
Speaker 1: researchers that are worth shouting out. There was um Lopez,
18:29
Speaker 1: Carro and Pardin, Yes, three Spanish researchers who wrote a
18:33
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven paper that, um it was a pretty
18:36
Speaker 1: one of the better recent comprehensive looks at at trepid
18:40
Speaker 1: nation ancient trepid nation. Yeah, so one of the reasons
18:44
Speaker 1: and like you said, you, I mean, I don't think
18:46
Speaker 1: it's lazy, but you could kind of slap these reasons
18:48
Speaker 1: on anything that happened back then. Uh, one of them
18:52
Speaker 1: was magic a religious UM like, you know, free the
18:54
Speaker 1: demons from someone's head. I kind of read that as, uh,
18:59
Speaker 1: possibly to help cure mental illness, which they were definitely
19:03
Speaker 1: doing in Europe thousands of years later, So I don't
19:07
Speaker 1: see why they wouldn't have maybe done the same thing.
19:11
Speaker 1: But I mean, it's it's remarkable though, to think that
19:14
Speaker 1: eight thousand years ago that they they knew enough or
19:18
Speaker 1: we're guessing enough to know that there is even a
19:21
Speaker 1: brain in there that was really important to the human body,
19:26
Speaker 1: you know, calling the shots. Yeah, yeah, I mean how
19:29
Speaker 1: they even know that, I don't know. And similarly, that
19:32
Speaker 1: whole idea that like the third eye, that that part
19:36
Speaker 1: that kind of connects you to the to the metaphysical
19:39
Speaker 1: world UM was located somewhere, you know, in the front
19:42
Speaker 1: of your head, which I think is actually right where
19:45
Speaker 1: the pineal gland was, which was later associated with that too. UM.
19:48
Speaker 1: That kind of falls into that same tranche as well.
19:51
Speaker 1: The magic religious which is UM to kind of open
19:55
Speaker 1: yourself to a greater plane of spirituality, like they think
19:59
Speaker 1: that in some in some dimensions or in some cultures
20:04
Speaker 1: UM like shaman or medicine people or UM. The high
20:09
Speaker 1: priests whoever we were kind of responsible for that would
20:14
Speaker 1: would possibly be trepanned to kind of connect to that
20:17
Speaker 1: that different level, that other way of thinking. Yeah. Another one,
20:22
Speaker 1: and this is definitely one that you could probably say
20:25
Speaker 1: explains away a lot of things. Is some sort of initiation, right, uh,
20:29
Speaker 1: child passing into adulthood at you know, the age of seven,
20:33
Speaker 1: or uh, if you want to turn someone to into
20:36
Speaker 1: a great warrior, maybe before some big battle, hopefully a
20:40
Speaker 1: little bit before that big battle, you know, just to
20:43
Speaker 1: give a chance to heal up. But that you know,
20:45
Speaker 1: that makes sense. They did all kinds of things back
20:47
Speaker 1: then for writes of passage, so why not this? Um.
20:50
Speaker 1: There's also those two me are the ones that are
20:53
Speaker 1: the hardest to to grasp, I think even harder than
20:56
Speaker 1: magic religious the ones for initiations not grasp I mean
21:00
Speaker 1: to to pin down definitively, to say, yes, that's exactly
21:03
Speaker 1: what was going on here, you know what I mean? Yeah,
21:06
Speaker 1: and then follow like real legit medical purposes like if
21:11
Speaker 1: someone if tooktok had epilepsy or something, or chronic migraine headaches, uh,
21:17
Speaker 1: any weird changes in behavior or convulsions or anything like that,
21:21
Speaker 1: they maybe tumors um as a literal way to maybe
21:24
Speaker 1: relieve like brain swelling or pressure on the brain, which
21:28
Speaker 1: is I mean, if that's real, then that's that's remarkable
21:31
Speaker 1: because that is very much a medical procedure that they
21:34
Speaker 1: still do today. Craniotomy's right, and then kind of tied
21:38
Speaker 1: into that is a treatment of trauma, UH, specifically head wounds.
21:43
Speaker 1: And there's an anthropologist who specializes in I think UM
21:47
Speaker 1: maybe the INCA. His name is John Rizzo, and he
21:50
Speaker 1: thinks that the ink with the inc at least um
21:53
Speaker 1: and the INCA went on to become prolific trepans. I
21:56
Speaker 1: think maybe half of all of the Trapan skulls that
22:00
Speaker 1: have been discovered came from the inca. They were big
22:03
Speaker 1: time into trepainning um. But he thinks that there their
22:07
Speaker 1: trepi nation may have started when somebody was picking bone
22:11
Speaker 1: out of a head wound to like clean it or
22:13
Speaker 1: treat it, and that that person went on to survive
22:17
Speaker 1: and they thought, Okay, maybe this is a thing. Maybe
22:19
Speaker 1: like you want a hole in your head or um,
22:22
Speaker 1: if you have a hole in your head, it's supposed
22:24
Speaker 1: to be a little more cleaner than you know, just
22:26
Speaker 1: bone sticking out and that you know you can it's
22:29
Speaker 1: not hard to make the leap to Okay, we're actually
22:32
Speaker 1: going to carve a hole in your head to maybe
22:35
Speaker 1: treat something else that is associated with the head. To
22:39
Speaker 1: us um that that that's not really a big stretch
22:42
Speaker 1: to tell you the truth. And I definitely bought into it. Yeah,
22:45
Speaker 1: the one that didn't see, which um, I think is
22:49
Speaker 1: is sort of plausible. Is just like ancient curiosity, Sure,
22:54
Speaker 1: what happens when I carve a hole in my friends?
22:56
Speaker 1: Or what's in that thing? What is in this round
22:58
Speaker 1: thing that had this very hard protective covering, Like maybe
23:02
Speaker 1: something important is in there that we should take a
23:04
Speaker 1: peek at. I wonder because I know that there's like
23:07
Speaker 1: a mechanism among people against self harm, and if I
23:12
Speaker 1: feel like there's a mechanism against harm as well, I
23:15
Speaker 1: don't know how just letting that, yeah, or harming somebody,
23:19
Speaker 1: like doing that to somebody else, you know what I mean.
23:21
Speaker 1: Like there's just it's almost like there's some innate sense
23:24
Speaker 1: of like you shouldn't shouldn't crack open ahead someone's or
23:29
Speaker 1: yourselves or your own, um, and that there's like some
23:33
Speaker 1: in a instinct against it. And I would guess it's
23:36
Speaker 1: older than ten thou years old, you know. Yeah, And
23:40
Speaker 1: you know you made a great point and you put
23:41
Speaker 1: this one together yourself that even if it was to
23:45
Speaker 1: like because there was a head injury or something like that,
23:48
Speaker 1: that's a big difference. Like treating a wound with some
23:51
Speaker 1: sort of surgical procedure is way way different than that
23:55
Speaker 1: being the surgical procedure to begin with. Yeah, and it's there,
23:59
Speaker 1: that's where it's like murky. That's where it's like, Okay,
24:02
Speaker 1: you're really kind of making some assumptions and leaps here
24:05
Speaker 1: when you put yourself in that person's position and try
24:07
Speaker 1: to say, this is why they were doing it, you
24:09
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Yeah, like the medical thing to
24:12
Speaker 1: reduce influ Like maybe they did have some really vague
24:16
Speaker 1: understanding of what swelling was in uh and on other
24:20
Speaker 1: parts of the body, and maybe it just made sense.
24:23
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's I mean, I think it it
24:25
Speaker 1: might be an overlapping of all these reasons. Um. And
24:29
Speaker 1: also like, hey, we did this for this thing, so
24:32
Speaker 1: why not try it for this thing? Not gonna deal. Yeah,
24:35
Speaker 1: And you know, I think like, um, like I get
24:40
Speaker 1: what you're saying with the curiosity but I think tied
24:42
Speaker 1: into that is is observation to like somebody falls down
24:45
Speaker 1: and hits their head on a rock, or they're attacked
24:48
Speaker 1: by some other group and gets hit on the head
24:50
Speaker 1: with a rock and they see brain people, yeah, and
24:53
Speaker 1: people like the other people around like watch what happens,
24:56
Speaker 1: just out of natural curiosity, and they learn from that.
25:00
Speaker 1: So I feel like it was probably a series of
25:03
Speaker 1: accidents and that that knowledge was gleaned from that that
25:07
Speaker 1: kind of got passed along and then developed into an
25:09
Speaker 1: actual procedure, you know. Yeah, And then you know, there
25:13
Speaker 1: are other cases where they may not fall into any
25:16
Speaker 1: of these categories. I think people in modern day Hungary
25:20
Speaker 1: during the Neolithic they did this after death as a
25:24
Speaker 1: funeral rite, which I think, I guess I could fall
25:26
Speaker 1: into magic religious reasons, or write a passage even especially
25:31
Speaker 1: if you believe that there's some other there's some part
25:33
Speaker 1: of the body that survives after death that maybe needs
25:36
Speaker 1: to escape or whatever. I could see trepanning a skull
25:40
Speaker 1: to let that out to go onto the afterlife. Again,
25:44
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm well aware I'm falling victim of the
25:46
Speaker 1: very thing I was warning about that I'm just totally
25:48
Speaker 1: putting myself into their shoes and answering for them like
25:52
Speaker 1: it's I'm not a I'm not a professional anthropologist, just
25:56
Speaker 1: an intense hobbyist, you know. And what was the deal
26:00
Speaker 1: with the Russians that we're trepanning where the man bun sits? Yeah,
26:04
Speaker 1: so that'sn't the Obelian I think? Yeah, Yeah, which is
26:09
Speaker 1: a really risky place to trapan because that's where the
26:12
Speaker 1: blood supply to your head collects, Like where I saw
26:16
Speaker 1: it described I think on the BBC is where a
26:18
Speaker 1: high ponytail would be gathered. Yeah, that's where the blood
26:23
Speaker 1: that's going to be distributed throughout your brain first collects
26:25
Speaker 1: and gathers. So it's really risky to cut in there.
26:28
Speaker 1: And I think something like one percent or less of
26:30
Speaker 1: all the trapan skulls ever found show a Trepi nation
26:33
Speaker 1: site there. And yet there's um a number of uh
26:38
Speaker 1: calculithic copper age skulls that have been found that are
26:43
Speaker 1: endemic to Russia only that have the Trepi nation at
26:47
Speaker 1: that site, and they seem to have been healthy, and
26:49
Speaker 1: they most of them seem to have healed. So they're like,
26:52
Speaker 1: we're pretty sure this is some sort of ritual maybe
26:55
Speaker 1: in an uh an initiation, I could see that being
26:59
Speaker 1: like a warrior thinging or like a you know, priestly
27:01
Speaker 1: class kind of thing early KGB. Yeah. Probably probably they
27:06
Speaker 1: stuck some sort of proto micro chip in there and
27:10
Speaker 1: keep an eye on everybody. So I mentioned the famous
27:13
Speaker 1: cow um Like we mentioned it was a purposeful veterinary
27:18
Speaker 1: procedure in Europe in the in what they call the
27:22
Speaker 1: Golden Age of trepid nation UH in the eighteenth century.
27:25
Speaker 1: But they found a cow skull from about five to
27:28
Speaker 1: six thousand years ago in France that was the so
27:33
Speaker 1: far the first sign of trepid nation on an animal.
27:36
Speaker 1: And this was another one where it was like it
27:38
Speaker 1: was clear that it was very purposeful. It wasn't a fracture,
27:42
Speaker 1: it wasn't a cow fight or a cow scrap uh
27:47
Speaker 1: there wasn't a tumor or at least no signs of
27:49
Speaker 1: anything like that. But they did find a very purposeful
27:53
Speaker 1: trepid nation And it could have been It's either either way.
27:57
Speaker 1: It's cool, it could have been then practicing on an
28:00
Speaker 1: animal before they did it on humans, which shows pretty
28:03
Speaker 1: decent amount of sophistication medically, or it's just early that
28:07
Speaker 1: nary medicine, which is also remarkable. Yeah, and either way, it's,
28:10
Speaker 1: as far as we know, the earliest example of either
28:12
Speaker 1: one of those. So yeah, it's a it's a cow
28:15
Speaker 1: skull worth hanging on to if it ever comes. They
28:18
Speaker 1: all are into your possession. But I mean it's a
28:23
Speaker 1: special one because it's got a whole like right in
28:25
Speaker 1: the front. I've seen a picture of it. It's pretty cool. So, um,
28:29
Speaker 1: once we enter history, things become a lot clearer because
28:33
Speaker 1: by definition, everybody wrote stuff down. That's when you enter history, right,
28:37
Speaker 1: it's recorded, and the ancient Greeks continued trepanning, and I
28:42
Speaker 1: would guess, Chuck that the reasons and the procedures that
28:46
Speaker 1: the ancient Greeks were performing, as far as chupin Nation
28:49
Speaker 1: goes closely resembled stuff that that the reasons and the
28:56
Speaker 1: procedures from prehistory as well. Yeah, we uh, like you said,
29:01
Speaker 1: once they started writing stuff down, we could read it
29:03
Speaker 1: in the Hippocratic Corpus, which was a collection of ancient
29:07
Speaker 1: Greek medical texts, uh, from the teachings of Hippocrates. Obviously, Um,
29:13
Speaker 1: they talk about therapeutic reasonings behind it. Some of the
29:17
Speaker 1: ones that we already talked about basically UM, including something
29:21
Speaker 1: called uh Places in Man, which is one of the
29:25
Speaker 1: texts in there, and it recommended trepid nation for the
29:27
Speaker 1: president prevention of UM probably swelling because of skull fractures
29:33
Speaker 1: and swelling. And then they were also preventing infection of
29:37
Speaker 1: that diameter um, that membrane that in cases the brain um.
29:42
Speaker 1: And they were saying basically, if you have a fracture,
29:46
Speaker 1: especially a fracture along one of the sutures, you want
29:49
Speaker 1: to actually trepan and open up a bigger hole because
29:52
Speaker 1: pus can get into the fracture that suture and it
29:56
Speaker 1: can't get back out, and it's going to infect the
29:58
Speaker 1: dirameter and the brain and have all calls, all sorts
30:01
Speaker 1: of problems. So you want to open up a larger
30:04
Speaker 1: hole to let some of that puss out and clean
30:06
Speaker 1: some of the puss out. And that's pretty sophisticated. That's
30:10
Speaker 1: brain surgery they're describing right there. And you know, Hippocrates
30:13
Speaker 1: was in the third i think third or fourth century BC,
30:19
Speaker 1: so UM like if they understood this by this time,
30:22
Speaker 1: keep puss out of the derrimator. You know what did
30:25
Speaker 1: they understand a thousand years before? Five years before they
30:29
Speaker 1: just don't. They just weren't writing it down, but they
30:31
Speaker 1: still they still had that knowledge. You know what I'm saying,
30:33
Speaker 1: that's my guess. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and throw
30:36
Speaker 1: in then this, this is so official, it can go
30:39
Speaker 1: on the Wikipedia page I'm doing. With plus, that's my
30:43
Speaker 1: worst word. Worse than moist. Oh, plus is way way worse.
30:48
Speaker 1: What about really moist? A turkey can be moist, but
30:50
Speaker 1: a turkey with plus, that's true, you know a turkey
30:54
Speaker 1: could be moist with pus? Oh, oh man, I can't
31:01
Speaker 1: take that word. It's pretty it's the worst. It's the
31:04
Speaker 1: word for a three letter word, usually three letter. It's
31:06
Speaker 1: not packing a big punch you need for letters. Yeah,
31:10
Speaker 1: p us, I thought, Oh yeah, I guess never mind. Uh,
31:15
Speaker 1: mentioning earlier that mental illness, like you know, releasing the
31:19
Speaker 1: demons or something could have been a reason thousands of
31:21
Speaker 1: years ago, and that they also did that in medieval Europe.
31:24
Speaker 1: There was something called the stone of madness, uh that
31:27
Speaker 1: where they believed that was an actual like stone inside
31:30
Speaker 1: your head, like a foreign literal foreign object that caused
31:33
Speaker 1: people to go crazy. And there are even painters, specifically
31:38
Speaker 1: Horonymous Bosh and others who depicted this surgery removing the
31:42
Speaker 1: stone of madness. Yeah, have you seen that painting? It's
31:45
Speaker 1: pretty famous one. Yeah, it's pretty great. I mean I
31:48
Speaker 1: wouldn't want it on my wall, but and yeah, so
31:50
Speaker 1: so it's almost like understanding of, um, you wouldn't want it,
31:55
Speaker 1: you wouldn't want it next to your frame poster of
31:57
Speaker 1: the guy melting with stoned again written underneath it, and
32:05
Speaker 1: then that's right next to the kitten that's going to
32:09
Speaker 1: hang in there, hang in there baby. Um. So it's
32:13
Speaker 1: it's it's worth pointing out again that by the time
32:16
Speaker 1: the Medieval area and even the Renaissance came around, we
32:18
Speaker 1: had we had gotten really bad at trepid nation as
32:21
Speaker 1: far as survival rates go, and our reasons for it
32:24
Speaker 1: possibly had degraded as well, you know. Uh yeah, And
32:28
Speaker 1: just real quickly, my favorite part of that painting is
32:31
Speaker 1: the the funnel on the surgeon's head. Yeah. Well I
32:34
Speaker 1: was reading about that and I read it. So if
32:38
Speaker 1: you notice also there's a nun seated at the table
32:40
Speaker 1: where the man is being trepanned, and she's wearing a
32:44
Speaker 1: book on her head, And I mean maybe that was
32:47
Speaker 1: for balance practice at least Supposedly, Bosch was basically mocking
32:51
Speaker 1: the doctor in the nun um for like basically taking
32:57
Speaker 1: them to tasks, suggesting they should know better, that that
33:00
Speaker 1: a stone of madness was b s and that they
33:02
Speaker 1: shouldn't be inflicting this on this poor this poor individual
33:06
Speaker 1: who wouldn't necessarily know better, because I think he's depicted
33:09
Speaker 1: as a fool in it, so he's he wouldn't have
33:12
Speaker 1: any No, no, no no, the patient, the doctor, and the
33:16
Speaker 1: nun should know better than to perform this kind of
33:18
Speaker 1: sentrey on somebody because there is no stone of madness.
33:21
Speaker 1: That was the interpretation I read, which makes me like
33:24
Speaker 1: even more with the armadillo and his trousers. Yeah, really breaches.
33:32
Speaker 1: So you want to take a second break and come
33:34
Speaker 1: back and explain a little bit more about how this
33:37
Speaker 1: might happen, Yeah, okay, and how they even did it? Good. Yeah,
33:41
Speaker 1: we'll be right back, everybody, all right, So our old
34:13
Speaker 1: pals Lopez Carro and Pardinis, the Spanish researchers who wrote
34:17
Speaker 1: that two thousand and eleven paper um also kind of said, hey,
34:21
Speaker 1: we've we've got some general ways from what we can tell.
34:24
Speaker 1: There's some like three maybe four I saw, but you
34:27
Speaker 1: can really lump them into three categories of how trepid
34:31
Speaker 1: nation surgery was performed. Um, and they are basically they
34:37
Speaker 1: boiled down to grooving, scraping, and boring and cutting. And
34:41
Speaker 1: if you just wiggle in your seat, that's the appropriate
34:44
Speaker 1: response to hearing about that. Yeah, the first one I get. Um,
34:49
Speaker 1: that makes sense to me. If I had a skull
34:52
Speaker 1: and primitive tools, the way that I would cut a
34:54
Speaker 1: hole in it would probably be to groove it. That
34:57
Speaker 1: is too Ah, take a hard stone, something really sharp
35:02
Speaker 1: that you probably even sharpened further, and and carve basically
35:06
Speaker 1: do little digging, little half turns or full turns in
35:11
Speaker 1: a circle. Uh, you know, carving until you can kind
35:15
Speaker 1: of just pop that thing off or lift it off.
35:18
Speaker 1: You don't want to there's no where to pop it
35:19
Speaker 1: into you know one of those Yeah, you don't pop
35:22
Speaker 1: it into your into your brain. Um, you know one
35:25
Speaker 1: of those like apple cores that's like kind of like
35:28
Speaker 1: an open tube. It's like open in the middle. Yeah,
35:31
Speaker 1: and there is such a thing as an apple core,
35:33
Speaker 1: by the way, But if you took one of those
35:36
Speaker 1: and you put a handle, a cross wise handle on
35:38
Speaker 1: top to grip that's that was kind of the tool
35:41
Speaker 1: that you would use for grooving, and there's actually the
35:45
Speaker 1: Romans head it. The Greeks had it. I think there's
35:47
Speaker 1: I saw a picture of a sixteenth century Trepi nation
35:50
Speaker 1: kit that had one of those. It's a really ancient tool.
35:53
Speaker 1: But like you're saying, you could also do it with
35:55
Speaker 1: a stone, And I think grooven sounds pretty bad. Scray
36:00
Speaker 1: being I think would be worse. Yeah, I didn't quite
36:05
Speaker 1: understand scraping. It sounded like grooving to me. Oh no,
36:10
Speaker 1: I'm no dancer. Imagine that somebody has peeled back part
36:16
Speaker 1: of your your your scalp, and this is this is
36:20
Speaker 1: worth pointing out, like cutting into your scalp is far
36:23
Speaker 1: and away the worst part. Once you do that, your
36:26
Speaker 1: skull in your brain, they don't have pain receptors, so
36:31
Speaker 1: it's the scalp being cut back that actually really hurts
36:34
Speaker 1: and produces the most blood. So they do brain surgery
36:37
Speaker 1: with you awake like now, precisely because you don't can
36:41
Speaker 1: You don't feel any pain um because there's not pain
36:44
Speaker 1: receptors there. So once you have the scalp peel back,
36:47
Speaker 1: what they do with scraping, or what they would do
36:50
Speaker 1: is take a very sharp rock and then later on
36:52
Speaker 1: tools too. But they're basically taking advantage of the fact
36:56
Speaker 1: that your skull is curved and just making a straight
36:59
Speaker 1: motion kind of like you would with like a would
37:02
Speaker 1: um is it would laugh, a would grasp something like that,
37:07
Speaker 1: where you're just scraping away a little by little would,
37:10
Speaker 1: but you're doing this instead with the skull until you
37:13
Speaker 1: finally wear a hole into the skull. That's the scraping technique. Okay,
37:19
Speaker 1: I guess that sounds a little like grooving to me,
37:21
Speaker 1: but no. Grooving is like taking a circular tube, putting
37:26
Speaker 1: it down on top of the skull and twisting it
37:28
Speaker 1: back and forth until you like that. Yeah, yeah, it's different.
37:31
Speaker 1: It's definitely different. I'll show you. I'll show you. We'll
37:35
Speaker 1: get a cow skull, uh, and then I have one
37:39
Speaker 1: no problem boring and cutting. This one was not used
37:45
Speaker 1: much in Europe. I think this is more of a
37:47
Speaker 1: South American Arabic jam. Also in Africa. This is when
37:52
Speaker 1: and this is something that it's sort of a carpentry trick.
37:56
Speaker 1: If you're ever carpentry trick of your cot without the
37:59
Speaker 1: right saw me be um. Let's say you wanted to
38:03
Speaker 1: make a hole in a piece of wood and all
38:05
Speaker 1: you had was a drill. You would drill little holes
38:08
Speaker 1: in a circle and then you know, as close together
38:11
Speaker 1: as you can, and then from there it's not too
38:13
Speaker 1: hard to kind of punch out the areas in between.
38:16
Speaker 1: But instead you're doing this with a skull, that's right,
38:20
Speaker 1: and you don't have a drill, and uh, this one
38:24
Speaker 1: to me would be the one that's the most rough
38:27
Speaker 1: around the edges, probably right. Yeah, they know that this
38:30
Speaker 1: is the technique used when they find a skull that
38:32
Speaker 1: has like a serrited opening. And apparently the Inco were
38:36
Speaker 1: super fond to that one, right sure, as as I
38:39
Speaker 1: did this just last week actually, but not in a
38:42
Speaker 1: skull because I was stuck without us all and all
38:45
Speaker 1: I had was my drill. So I did that and
38:47
Speaker 1: it works, Okay, you just gotta have like some sandpaper
38:50
Speaker 1: file or something to kind of smooth it out. Well, yeah,
38:52
Speaker 1: I saw like one of the ways that they thought
38:54
Speaker 1: they might have done the drill is by rolling the
38:57
Speaker 1: you know, pointed sharp guess rock in between your two palms,
39:03
Speaker 1: you know, like you're trying to start a fire, which
39:05
Speaker 1: is actually something I saw that that the ancient people
39:08
Speaker 1: would have known you want to avoid heating the bone.
39:11
Speaker 1: Whatever technique you're using, you've got to stop and like
39:13
Speaker 1: rest for a little while to prevent the bone from
39:16
Speaker 1: heating up because you don't want to transfer that heat
39:18
Speaker 1: you want to start a fire inside the skull, which
39:21
Speaker 1: is essentially what you could all also be doing if
39:24
Speaker 1: you're not careful with letting the friction, the heat produced
39:26
Speaker 1: by the friction to cool off in between little sessions. Yeah,
39:30
Speaker 1: it's funny that this came up now because, um, you know,
39:33
Speaker 1: I mentioned a couple of times watching that survival show
39:35
Speaker 1: and History Channel Alone where you have you can bring
39:39
Speaker 1: like ten things and then they throw out in the woods.
39:41
Speaker 1: There's a new spinoff series now called Alone Beast where
39:45
Speaker 1: it's only thirty days but you take nothing but the
39:48
Speaker 1: clothes on your back. So the people that are dropped
39:51
Speaker 1: here are are literally fashioning stone tools and stuff, and
39:54
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of cool to watch. At least they
39:56
Speaker 1: have clothes on. They have clothes, and that's it. I
39:59
Speaker 1: guess the next step would be naked, and uh, the
40:03
Speaker 1: beast thing comes in is that the only thing they
40:04
Speaker 1: give you as a one large dead animal in the buyou,
40:09
Speaker 1: it's an alligator. And the arc ticket's like a or
40:12
Speaker 1: or a bore, and the arctickets like a moose or
40:13
Speaker 1: a buffalo or something. It's not for a companionship. No,
40:18
Speaker 1: no, no no, the animal is dead and they're like, this
40:21
Speaker 1: is all you got, so you can, you know, use
40:24
Speaker 1: their bones. Like an animal's jawbone is really useful because
40:27
Speaker 1: that's like super sharp. A boar's tusk is can be
40:31
Speaker 1: really sharp. So they make knives out of that stuff.
40:33
Speaker 1: And they use some of these carving and boring grooving
40:37
Speaker 1: techniques to break off bone to make like sharper things. Yeah,
40:40
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, I'll bet getting your your hands
40:43
Speaker 1: on that first tusk or that first jawbone to get
40:46
Speaker 1: started as pretty messy. Well it is. And they have
40:50
Speaker 1: to get in these I mean it's kind of gruesome,
40:52
Speaker 1: especially if you're uh a vegetarian. But they have to
40:57
Speaker 1: get into these animals without a knife to begin with.
40:59
Speaker 1: So they have to start with like a sharper rock
41:02
Speaker 1: as they can get basically and go from there. How ghastly.
41:05
Speaker 1: This is just pretty reality television now, Well, I mean sure,
41:11
Speaker 1: I guess. So. Wow. Next up is the Stone of Madness. Well,
41:18
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of interesting. Because it's not like,
41:20
Speaker 1: look at some cool modern reality idea. It's like, well,
41:23
Speaker 1: let's take people back to the Stone Age and see
41:25
Speaker 1: how they could do. No. I get that, I get that,
41:28
Speaker 1: that's cool, but you just know there's a coked up
41:30
Speaker 1: producer fifteen feet away. You're really kind of dragging the
41:33
Speaker 1: whole thing down as far as the Stone Age goes. Yes. Correct,
41:37
Speaker 1: So um, you might be saying, chuck. Uh, well wait
41:41
Speaker 1: a minute, wait a minute, they're cutting into your head here,
41:43
Speaker 1: and yeah, maybe the bone doesn't hurt and the brain
41:45
Speaker 1: doesn't have pain receptors, but it's gonna hurt to get
41:48
Speaker 1: to the skull. What are they're doing here? Um? And
41:52
Speaker 1: it depends on where you are. Um. A lot of
41:54
Speaker 1: places supposedly just used restraint. Like you were awake, you
41:58
Speaker 1: were not innesthetized. There were just a couple of dudes
42:01
Speaker 1: holding you down while whoever was performing the Trepid Nation
42:05
Speaker 1: performed the Trepid Nation. Yeah, that's rough. Another thing they
42:10
Speaker 1: would do, and to me, this is one of the
42:12
Speaker 1: better band names we've had in a while. They would
42:13
Speaker 1: use uh somniferous agents and that's you know, depends on
42:18
Speaker 1: where you are in the world. And when it is,
42:20
Speaker 1: it could be coco extract, could be poppy, it could
42:23
Speaker 1: be just getting them super drunk on wine, just basically
42:26
Speaker 1: anything to kind of dull somebody out a little bit. Yeah,
42:29
Speaker 1: and one of the places that just used restraint was
42:32
Speaker 1: among the Kisi I think I'm saying that right, the
42:36
Speaker 1: Kisi people uh and Kenya who were practicing this as
42:40
Speaker 1: recently as the mid nineties sixties, UM using basically the
42:44
Speaker 1: old traditions and uh A, I think an anthropologist Im
42:49
Speaker 1: sure El Margetts went back um tive years later, decade
42:53
Speaker 1: or two ago and reported that they're still doing the
42:56
Speaker 1: trepid nation surgery, but now they're using like local anesthetic
42:59
Speaker 1: and some other stuff. But this is still performed in
43:02
Speaker 1: some in some places, and um for that reason, there's
43:08
Speaker 1: like a group of people in the Western world, UM
43:12
Speaker 1: on the Internet even who basically who basically say like, hey,
43:16
Speaker 1: you know what the Kisi people are doing in Kenya,
43:19
Speaker 1: Like that's part of a really ancient tradition and we
43:22
Speaker 1: are here for it. And there's a a trepid Nation
43:27
Speaker 1: basically appreciation society that has developed pre Internet, but really
43:32
Speaker 1: took off when the Internet came around. Yeah, and there
43:35
Speaker 1: are people, and I know this is what we talked
43:38
Speaker 1: about at some point because I remember self trepend Nation. Yeah,
43:40
Speaker 1: I kind of talking about that. But there was an
43:43
Speaker 1: artist name and a lobbyist name, Avanda Amanda Fielding, uh,
43:48
Speaker 1: Countess of Wemyss and March whatever that means. And and
43:54
Speaker 1: then night is that what that is? Yeah, she's got
43:58
Speaker 1: she's royalty. She's a minor royalty. But that's for real.
44:01
Speaker 1: I thought it was just something she made up. No, No,
44:04
Speaker 1: I think she's ractual royalty all right. Well, in nineteen
44:07
Speaker 1: seventy she performed an act of self trep nation. A
44:12
Speaker 1: couple of years after that, a man named Pever Halverson
44:14
Speaker 1: did it? Peter? Would I say, Pever? Why am I
44:20
Speaker 1: sticking VS in there? Leave it to Pever? What is
44:27
Speaker 1: going on with me? Can't you just see Peter Halverson
44:30
Speaker 1: listening to this? And he's like, oh, they mentioned a
44:32
Speaker 1: man Fielding I know I'm next to Can you hit
44:34
Speaker 1: him with the Pever? And he's like, man, I'm so sorry, Pete,
44:41
Speaker 1: very sorry. Uh. And then there's a guy named Bert.
44:45
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Bart. You know what the real problem is.
44:47
Speaker 1: I have a light off in here, and I can't
44:49
Speaker 1: see as well. Oh, I would say that might have
44:51
Speaker 1: something to do with it. Yeah, Bart, you just well
44:55
Speaker 1: he's Dutch, so I'll bet it's we would say, Bart
44:57
Speaker 1: here really just it's probably that. Uh. He is a
45:03
Speaker 1: former med student and he got really into this. In
45:07
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two he had a he wrote something called
45:11
Speaker 1: large Mechanism of Brain blood volume one word and he
45:16
Speaker 1: said that you know what, a person's level of consciousness
45:18
Speaker 1: really depends on how much blood is flowing to the brain.
45:21
Speaker 1: Maybe there's something to that, and he said it falls, Uh,
45:26
Speaker 1: it falls as we get older, and um, so maybe
45:29
Speaker 1: what we should do is trepan ourselves basically and open
45:34
Speaker 1: up our creativity. Yeah. His his whole point was that
45:37
Speaker 1: if you look at kids, kids are way more creative,
45:39
Speaker 1: they're way more free, they enjoy life more, and that
45:42
Speaker 1: just so happens that their skulls haven't fully fused. So
45:45
Speaker 1: his whole thing was, if you are an adult, your
45:48
Speaker 1: skulls fused for the most part, you're you have a
45:51
Speaker 1: few skulls. Some very lucky people, um don't ever have
45:55
Speaker 1: their skull fused. According to Bart Hughes, and he actually
45:58
Speaker 1: apparently talked John and out of self trepen nation or
46:01
Speaker 1: being trepanned, because he said, you probably wouldn't notice a
46:03
Speaker 1: difference because I suspect that your skull isn't fully fused.
46:06
Speaker 1: Your very creative person. Yeah, I don't know that, but real. Yeah.
46:10
Speaker 1: But then John Lennon went to recommend trapanning to Paul McCartney,
46:14
Speaker 1: who said, no, and I can't do that. But this
46:16
Speaker 1: guy head, this guy was like a guru of Trepi
46:21
Speaker 1: Nation and ended up like creating this following including a
46:25
Speaker 1: Mando Fielding and Peter Halverson, and they went on to
46:28
Speaker 1: basically carry on this guy's vision. Um. Halverson formed the
46:32
Speaker 1: International Trepid Nation Advocacy Group. Fielding runs the Beckley Foundation,
46:39
Speaker 1: and both of them help people get trepien nation surgery.
46:43
Speaker 1: I think from this one surgeon down in Mexico, and
46:46
Speaker 1: they all believe that it's like this basically shortcut to
46:50
Speaker 1: psychedelic existence and opening up the third eye and becoming
46:53
Speaker 1: more spiritual, happier person, and so um, you know, Western
46:59
Speaker 1: researchers like, no, this, this goes against science. This doesn't
47:02
Speaker 1: make sense. Like, yes, if you have a problem in
47:04
Speaker 1: your brain, if there's like if you have inflammation, opening
47:08
Speaker 1: up your brain will help with blood flow. We know
47:10
Speaker 1: that we perform that surgery. It's trepen nation. We call
47:13
Speaker 1: it craniotomy, but we do it. But if you're healthy
47:16
Speaker 1: and you don't have inflammation in your brain and everything
47:19
Speaker 1: is just normal, this is not going to help you.
47:21
Speaker 1: And the internet said, I can't hear you. All I
47:23
Speaker 1: heard was what these other people said, and it kind
47:25
Speaker 1: of took off on the internet first to some extent.
47:28
Speaker 1: I don't want to say it's like huge, but it's
47:30
Speaker 1: still got some sort of traction and following on online
47:33
Speaker 1: I believe, well, it took off so much that the
47:37
Speaker 1: British Medical Journal Journal felt the need to say, hey,
47:41
Speaker 1: medical establishment, be on the lookout for this. If someone
47:44
Speaker 1: shows up that has drilled their head, at least you
47:47
Speaker 1: know what's going on. And all the trepen Nation people
47:49
Speaker 1: were like, yeah, establishment, Yeah, exactly, my freedoms. So yeah,
47:56
Speaker 1: that's out there. It's a thing, and it's probably not
47:59
Speaker 1: helpful at all. So it's not going to cure depression
48:03
Speaker 1: or anxiety or anything like that, which is some of
48:05
Speaker 1: the things that tout. So be careful out there, everybody
48:08
Speaker 1: meaning to wit. Don't trepan yourself or have somebody else
48:12
Speaker 1: trepan you okay, No, the only only groop and you
48:14
Speaker 1: should be doing is on that wooden floor. Yeah. I
48:17
Speaker 1: love it when we're grooving together. Very nice. Uh you
48:22
Speaker 1: got anything else? Like nothing else? Well? I don't either,
48:25
Speaker 1: So that means that this episode of trepid Nation has
48:28
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I keep trying to end everything like a
48:30
Speaker 1: short stop. Let me do it differently, everybody. If you
48:32
Speaker 1: want to know more about trepreate Nation, go read up
48:34
Speaker 1: on entrepren Nation. It's pretty interesting stuff. And since I
48:37
Speaker 1: said that it's time for a listener mail, I'm gonna
48:41
Speaker 1: call this Josh made me quit vaping. Oh I saw
48:45
Speaker 1: this one. I was so proud. That's great. Hi, guys.
48:48
Speaker 1: Never thought i'd have a reason the email, but now
48:49
Speaker 1: I do. I want to say thank you for essentially
48:51
Speaker 1: making me want to quit vaping. I was listening to
48:54
Speaker 1: your child Labor episode and got to the part where
48:55
Speaker 1: Josh said Eve been smoking. Uh started smoking in his
48:59
Speaker 1: young teens and and quit in his adult years. I
49:02
Speaker 1: only started using a vape one year ago and hadn't
49:05
Speaker 1: really considered quitting anytime soon. I just kept telling myself
49:08
Speaker 1: I would get around to it. You guys made me
49:10
Speaker 1: get around to it. A policy episode. Wow, through the
49:13
Speaker 1: vape Away and now I'm one week off of it
49:16
Speaker 1: May That's awesome. As a goal, I told myself I
49:19
Speaker 1: couldn't listen to the rest of the podcast until September one. Wow.
49:23
Speaker 1: I love this uh, and could only listen if I
49:25
Speaker 1: avoided vaping. So far, I've had no urge to go back.
49:28
Speaker 1: Thank you guys for helping me get a jump on
49:30
Speaker 1: quitting early on. I believe you saved me from some
49:32
Speaker 1: unnecessary future misery. I appreciate everything you guys do, and
49:36
Speaker 1: that is from Tim. That's awesome, Tim. I was so
49:39
Speaker 1: glad to hear that. I haven't written him back quite yet,
49:41
Speaker 1: but he's in my inbox. Well, I'm gonna tell me
49:45
Speaker 1: he made listener mail. So hopefully Tim will be like, uh,
49:48
Speaker 1: won't be like I started vaping again? Right, No, don't
49:51
Speaker 1: don't don't do that. Um, congratulations Tim. I really do
49:56
Speaker 1: think that was a very good move. And if you
49:57
Speaker 1: want to be like Tim, then you just throw your
50:00
Speaker 1: vapor away, to throw your pack of cigarettes away and
50:02
Speaker 1: get started. It's like, um, It's like Bob Hope always said,
50:07
Speaker 1: the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
50:10
Speaker 1: That's right, And that was from Tim of course, So
50:13
Speaker 1: if you want to write twist like Tim did, you
50:16
Speaker 1: can send us an email. Everybody Stuff podcast at iHeart
50:20
Speaker 1: radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
50:26
Speaker 1: of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
50:29
Speaker 1: the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
50:33
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.