Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1561 - Kermit Pattison
Uploaded: 2020-11-10T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1561 - Kermit Pattison' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1561 - Kermit Pattison' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-10. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1561 - Kermit Pattison

welcome thanks for doing this man i really appreciate it i'm very very
fascinated by this
subject well thank you for having me it's great to be here so this is a this is
a long journey for
you to have written this book and being to be involved in this project can you
talk us through
how you got involved in this sure uh it was um completely unintentional uh i
had started off
working on a different book on um the evolution of human locomotion and i mean
just as an aside
humans are weird primates in a lot of ways but one way we're weird is just we
we're slow we're weak
but we have this ability to walk and run long distances which is kind of unique
so i thought
okay i mean i'm not certainly a lot of other people have noted that before but
as far as i was
concerned no one had really written the deep history of that so i was going to
go sort of investigate the
the anthropology of where this weird human capacity came from and uh you know
so i thought that the
early human history like arty would be this you know a little sliver of
background before i got to
the interesting stuff uh but anyway i started reading the arty papers and they
kind of undercut a lot of the
things that i had the research community had taken for granted or at least
challenged them let's say
and um so anyway started talking to the people on the arty team and and then uh
thinking oh this
tells me about how you found this thing oh that sounds pretty interesting and
then um so i thought
okay well maybe already it'll maybe i'll it'll be a page it's more than this
little line then you know
a little learn a little more that's five pages now actually this is a whole
chapter no this is three
chapters oh this this is and then at some point after this agonizing time of
reappraisal i said you know
but this is much better than the actual story i was working on uh i mean this
is a discovery that is
has been announced to the world but it hasn't really been described in detail
and it's interesting at a
whole uh number of different levels i mean there's the anatomy it's just the
exploring the natural history
of the human body literally from head to toe because the skeleton was so
remarkably complete they had a skull
they had hands um they had feet and the hands and feet were almost complete
which is is unheard of i
mean you're lucky to find any skeleton at this age and to get something that's
that complete is really
unusual and so there are other parts of the skeleton too but um so it sort of
became a way to sort of
tickle this interest i had in like the the natural history of the human body
and human biology
um so that's the science of it and then the discovery story the sheer adventure
story was just
astounding to me when i started talking to the field crew in particular and
hearing about how they
you know all the challenges in the field and oh my god i mean this is like
collision of cultures in the ethiopian desert you know the indianist afar
people and the highland
ethiopians and then the foreigner you know the americans the japanese you know
coming in and all
you know meeting and the initial meetings were not friendly you know i mean you
got guys coming out
fr guys coming out with guns and saying you know get the hell out of here and
uh so that part is
fascinating and then the drama of discovery and there's bullets flying overhead
and there's this
excitement of finding one little piece and another little piece i mean anyway
to make a long story short
um i kind of stumbled on this and every time i turned over a rock there was
something interesting
um and then it got you know more interesting once this whole saga kind of moved
into the lab
because uh you know there's this old cliche in in in the science and that is it's
not so much what
you find it's what you find out so in other words when you find a skeleton or
something like that
the the truths that it contains the scientific revelations aren't immediately
evident you know
you look at the skeletons oh that's you know this that i mean these people
spend years studying this
thing measuring you know thinking about it so there was also this other
detective story that sort of
followed the field there's a lab detective story that sort of followed the
field detective story
um that went along with it and then and of course when this thing finally was
revealed to the world
there was this again another clash you know this time a clash in the world of
science in academia
about um people taking issue with the interpretation or denying its importance
or trying to
trying to bury the skeleton again if you will you know with inattention uh and
and
denial so anyway long story short it just uh you know i didn't set out to do
this but it just sort
of dawned on me that this was like a huge scientific saga that was still mostly
untold we should fill
people in on exactly what we're talking about so we're talking about a skeleton
that was discovered
that is 1.2 million years older than lucy so yeah the skeleton is yeah it's 4.4
million years old
the oldest known human relative uh well it's the oldest known skeleton and
actually this is an
okay important distinction i should make so like i said before skeletons are
rare um this is the
oldest skeleton there are uh three other members of the human family that are
uh older but the thing is
they're much more fragmentary they're not anywhere near as complete like there's
one another one from
ethiopia found by the same team that found the skeleton we're talking about um
that's you know
some some teeth you know like a toe bone a few other broken elements of the
skeleton there's another
thing uh another species called auroran from kenya which is about six million
years old again you know much
more fragmentary some teeth i think they got a couple um thigh bones partial
thigh bones and then there's
a skull from chad called salanthropus that's about uh six million maybe seven
years old depending on
who's dating you believe uh and that's that's a very nice skull but it's a head
without body so right
um so so anyway so there are uh people sometimes get confused by this so arty
is is indeed the oldest
skeleton it's by far more complete than this other stuff uh but uh there are
some you know fragmentary
things that are older and they're they all become part of this story too and
what is the what is the
scientific controversy do you think it's is it based on real skepticism or is
ego involved in this
like you're laughing you got it's science what are you talking about it's
unfortunate man no no these
these are scientists no no yeah yeah there's a lot of egos involved in science
unfortunately right
yeah there's there's a lot of egos there's a lot of disbelief uh because the
the the skeleton was so
surprising in a lot of ways and so contrary to the predictions that many people
in science had made
that there was a kind of like a you know a head exploded for a lot of people so
we should break
down those particular things that are different than what was expected right
first of all it walked
upright yeah so it it it walked upright so it's primitive i mean if you saw you
know if we could
go back in the time machine and look at it you know this this thing are the
species name is artipithecus
ramitas that's kind of a mouthful but arti is the the individual skeleton that
they found is that's you
know the individual like like your joke you're the individual and your species
is homo sapiens that's
how you think about this artipithecus ramitas species already the individual
skeleton so um uh so the
interesting revelations with it is it has upright posture so it's standing
upright but it's still got the
opposable toe so this is a creature that was in the trees um you know clearly
climbing but
it also up you know appears to be upright uh walking with this opposable toe so
it has seemed it you
know everyone knows that sometime deep in the human past there was some kind of
a boreal ancestor you
know some kind of ape but you know the question has always been well what what
kind of ape does it look
like a modern ape or does it look like you know something we've never seen
before and um uh so
the surprising thing about arti is it's actually quite different than the
living apes um so yeah so
it's got the supposable toe walks upright um are there proportions what chimps
have shorter legs than
they have arms are these proportions similar to that uh no already i mean it's
certainly more ape-like
than than than than any of us uh but it's uh there's a couple interesting
things about its proportion so
all the other living apes have longer arms than they do legs they spend a lot
of time climbing that's you
know that's you know you have long arms long and they have you know they're
different proportions but
they all have that in common they got longer forelimbs than hind limbs already
was a big surprise
because it actually had longer legs than forelimbs i mean you know it
definitely has bigger hands
has longer arms than we do but uh you know that was a surprise at least was to
me and i think to
at least some of the researchers um and you know i was talking before about
these kind of um surprises
that appear after the fact well that that was one because the bones are broken
you know these guys
on this research team it's called the middle outwash research project um they
spent a lot of time you
know reconstructing this and then estimating you know how what are the lengths
of the pieces that are not
there and then you know run all kinds of regressions and a lot of calculations
and stuff but uh so
that revelation was sort of a delayed you know delayed bombshell if you will
that it actually had
uh these limb proportions of that were more like a biped
and so uh ours our legs are longer chimps have longer arms so is this like does
it have almost
equal length arms and legs like jamie actually just put a photo of it up here
and i'm getting a chance
to take a look at oh it's fascinating so it has long legs almost like a person
but longer arms than
we do yeah yeah longer arms than we do for sure i i think uh i don't remember
the exact name but i
think the calculation they did was that legs are um uh oh i think i think the
arms yeah i want to say
it's like 90 something percent so it's it's pretty close to one-to-one um of uh
length but indeed the
the arms are uh a bit shorter so the surprising part was that it didn't walk at
all on its knuckles
being it that it was that old uh yeah so so the okay so humans are we come from
the african apes that's
pretty clear from genetics that's been clear for a long time um there are two
main groups of african
apes there's uh gorillas and there's chimps now within those and chimps also
includes this other
species you might have heard of called bonobos and now within those there's
like debate about you know
should we divide them into some subspecies and stuff but you know i don't worry
about that for
now but anyway what they all have in common is they knuckle walk so they got
these long fingers and when
they walk you know i mean they you know do this i mean if you look at a video
sometime you'll see it
and um you know because our two closest cousins both do that you know there was
a perfectly plausible
theory that um human ancestors did it well so we evolved from a knuckle walking
ancestor i mean there
was even a cover story in nature that the the title the headline was almost
that you know humans evolved
from a knuckle walking ancestor uh so um yeah so that was that was the theory
and then so here with
arty we have a creature that's you know it's it's it's not the last common
ancestor with the african
apes but it's it's certainly getting closer it's getting a big step closer and
uh the people you know the
anatomists who specialize in these things say that there's like no hint of knuckle
walking not
not only was it not knuckle walking uh to get around but also it has no vestige
of a knuckle
walking ancestry so in other words there's no like residual anatomy th