What's the oldest story ever told?

An astrophysicist uses the motion of the stars to argue that a single story has been told for 100,000 years. A cognitive anthropologist has questions. Guests: Ray Norris, astrophysicist; Manvir Singh, cognitive anthropologist at the University of California, Davis To watch this episode on video, find us on ⁠Netflix⁠! For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  In 1872, a working-class Londoner named George Smith made one of the most shocking discoveries in history. Smith had been a banknote engraver, and he used to go to the British Museum on his lunch breaks and just stare at all these ancient Babylonian tablets. He did this so much that he eventually taught himself to read them. A curator hired him to translate them. And one day, he came across a story that sounded pretty familiar. A great flood, a ship come in arrest on a mountain, and a man sending out a dove to search for dry land.

• 1:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Smith reportedly stripped off his clothes and ran around after yelling, "I am the first man to read that after more than 2,000 years of oblivion." Smith had discovered the Epic of Gilgamesh, this roughly 4,000-year-old story that had a part in it that was a lot like Noah's Ark. And it was written down way before the Bible was, which led to a kind of unsettling idea. If Noah's Ark was just one version of a much older story, the Bible, this central text that made up so many people's identity, maybe it wasn't unique. Maybe it had even older roots. And then the question is, how old can you go?

• 2:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  What about stories people told before they could even write them down? All across the world, people have been hunting, and one astrophysicist thinks he might have found it, a story that's 100,000 years old. So today on Unexplainable, what's the oldest story ever told?

• 3:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Meredith Hoddinott.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  No, I'm Hassenfeld.

• 3:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hello.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Hello, hello.

• 3:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  So you edit a lot of my stories.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  I do.

• 3:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  We go back and forth about the right way to tell stories. We talk about stories a lot.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  We do.

• 3:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  So what do you think is the oldest story?

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Oldest, how?

• 3:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Like something that's old, that people have been telling for a really long time.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know, like, you know, stories before writing, the Odyssey, some like oral tradition.

• 3:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, the Odyssey is definitely an old one. That gets us like almost 3,000 years ago.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  But I want to tell you a story that might be older than all of them.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  And it starts with a picture that I'm going to show you now.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Let's see it.

• 3:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Do you know what this is?

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's Orion.

• 4:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's Orion.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  I love Orion. It's in the sky during my birthday.

• 4:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, it is probably the most famous winter constellation, at least in the northern hemisphere. You can see his belt, the sword.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  The feet, the hands. You can even kind of faintly see his bow out there.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Oh, I never knew there was a bow.

• 4:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and so what do you know about the myth of Orion?

• 4:23Speaker 03

  You know, I actually, I have no idea what the myth of Orion is.

• 4:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so famous hunter, had a bow, pretty arrogant, bragged that he could hunt any animal on Earth.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Classic hubris.

• 4:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Kind of pissed people off, pissed off the gods.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's also this one particular story where he's pursuing these seven sisters called the Pleiades.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  And Zeus transforms them into stars to save them. So this is what the Pleiades would probably look like with the naked eye. So they're called the Seven Sisters, but how many do you see?

• 4:56Speaker 03

  One, two, three, four, five, six.

• 4:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Six stars.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  Seven sisters.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  So why would there be a story about?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Make it to the stars from Zeus?

• 5:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so the Greeks have a second part of the story. One of the sisters fell in love with a mortal, and she was so ashamed, she went into hiding. So there are only six sisters in the sky, six stars.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  But all across the world, all kinds of people have stories of the Pleiades as a group of seven with one of them going missing.

• 5:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  So there's this Islamic story where the seventh star falls to Earth and becomes the Great Mosque. There is an Iroquois story where one of the stars is singing as it ascends to the sky, so it becomes fainter. And then there's this Aboriginal Australian story where the constellation that they identify with Orion, it pursues the Seven Sisters, they pray to be saved, and so they're lifted into the sky. But one of the sisters is apparently not as beautiful as the others.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Get out of here.

• 6:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  So she hides behind the rest.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  This constellation can be seen from everywhere on Earth.

• 6:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  And all of these stories contain a missing star.

• 6:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  It feels specific, right?

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's weird. So this is where I want to tell you about an astrophysicist named Ray Norris.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  So did he like find the seventh star?

• 6:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sort of. And it's because he kind of got obsessed.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  I was fascinated by the big questions. And people are saying things like the Aboriginal people are the world's first astronomers. And we can see from their songs and stories that the Aboriginal people had enormous intellectual insights into how the sky worked. The thing that fascinates me is that the Aboriginal people came to Australia about 65,000 years ago. And between them and the British invasion about 250 years ago, there was almost no contact between Aboriginal people and the rest of the world. So how come they've got the same stories as the Greeks?

• 7:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  If you've got a similar story, you'd probably think that one group of people told it to the other group of people.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  But the Aboriginal Australians have been pretty isolated for anywhere from 50 to 65,000 years, like well before the Greeks became Greeks.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  The only reasonable way I have of explaining it is that when the Aboriginal people came here 65,000 years ago, they brought this story with them.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Damn.

• 7:33Noam Hassenfeld?

  And Ray is actually wondering whether this goes even further back.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Further back than Australia.

• 7:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, like you know how all humans came from Africa?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Ray is basically wondering whether this story goes all the way back to that point, back when all of our ancestors were in Africa, like 100,000 years ago.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  All right, why does he think that?

• 7:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, I had the same reaction.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  That, okay.

• 8:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay. Because Ray understands the criticism.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  The criticism of it is that we don't know any stories that old. We don't know whether humans can actually pass a story on for that ages.

• 8:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's really old. It's like extremely old.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  100,000 is really old. And people argue about whether stories can be more than a few hundred years old.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Hmm, that just sounds like an impossible amount of time to try and track something as ephemeral as a story or a legend.

• 8:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  But Ray didn't just pull this date, you know, 100,000 years ago out of a hat. So if you look at the Pleiades, right, you only see six stars.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  But if you use a telescope, you can see thousands of stars in the Pleiades.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 8:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so here is a picture from the Hubble. So most of those stars are not bright enough to see with the naked eye, but there is one pretty bright star that is at a range we should be able to see. It's just kind of hiding right next to another one. So check out, check out this picture. I drew some red circles for you.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  One, two, three, four, five, six, with two in those red circles.

• 9:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Exactly, so there's two stars right next to each other.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  That's the ugly sister right there.

• 9:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, I didn't say it. But with the naked eye, those two just look like one big star.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  But Ray says that 100,000 years ago, those stars might not have been that close together.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  So at the moment, humans can only see one star there. We can't see there are two stars that are too close together. You're basically dazzled by the brighter one. But 100,000 years ago, they were far enough apart that you could actually see two stars. Most people with normalized sight would see that there were two stars there.

• 9:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  So here's what that means. Everything is moving in space, right? We kind of maybe forget this. We look out and the stars are basically in the same place, right? But over thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, stuff moves around. And Ray used satellite data to show that 100,000 years ago, those two stars, you know, right next to each other, they actually would have been far enough apart that they would have been visible as two separate stars with the naked eye.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Wow. I mean, I think something that occurs to me, though, is that like, the story is seven becoming six. So it would have to be unfolding on a time scale where people would notice a celestial change.

• 10:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so here, this is Ray's idea. Okay, his idea is that maybe 100,000 years ago, people had this story of there being seven sisters.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  That story gets passed down over time. Thousands of years later, people are talking about these seven sisters in the Pleiades. But eventually, you know, some little kid looks up and says like, Mom, there's

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Wait a second.

• 10:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's only six stars, like, what's up with the seven?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then his idea is that a bunch of people independently come up with an explanation for why there's only six, when we all have this memory of there being seven.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful story about a story, but it also seems nearly impossible to prove.

• 11:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I share the thought that this is beautiful.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  I think it is just an incredible idea. And I just like want this to be true. Like, I have two parts of me, I'm like, I feel both deeply skeptical of this. And then I also just like want it to be true.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like, other than the biology, the DNA in our cells, like, what stretches back that far?

• 11:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know. It would be incredible if some of the stuff that we're doing today really dates back 100,000 years.

• 11:48Speaker 04

  So that's the most amazing thing. It really ties together all of humanity. Everybody comes from the same roots, and it looks like we've all got the same story.

• 11:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Now, here's where I start getting skeptical.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I called up this guy, Manvir Singh. He's a cognitive anthropologist at UC Davis. He studies comparative mythology.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  So literally what we're doing here.

• 12:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Literally what we're doing, like, how stories are similar, where they come from, how old they are, what they say about us, like, literally my favorite alternative possible career.

• 12:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  And I asked him what he thought about this Pleiades as the oldest story idea.

• 12:27Speaker 05

  So it's a really interesting theory. It's in many ways a very exciting theory. I would say that I remain pretty skeptical, and I'll give you a couple of reasons.

• 12:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  The first reason Manvir gave me to be skeptical here is that if you look at all the other groups in Europe, none of them have even the most basic form of this story, that the Pleiades are women and Orion is male. Like, the Greeks are the only one in Europe that have that. And then if you go further out, so all the languages related to Greek, the people who we think have common ancestors with the Greeks. So everything from English to Italian to Sanskrit.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  The only other time this shows up in this specific way is in the Bengali tradition in India. So two times in this entire group of languages.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  And so that would mean that every other close linguistic or cultural relative of the Greeks had somehow lost them in recent history.

• 13:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  If this story really went that far back, you'd be saying that every single culture in this group forgot the story, except for two. Or, on the other hand, your option is to just say, two groups invented a similar story simultaneously.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a really compelling case if you're like, handpicking all the stories and like mythical traditions that back this up.

• 13:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yes.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  But that's, you know, like, what's the denominator there? Like, how many, how many mythical traditions have like come and gone that we don't even have any idea about?

• 14:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  Exactly.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  In the intervening time.

• 14:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  Manvir makes that exact point.

• 14:04Speaker 05

  I think sometimes it's hard to appreciate how many human ethno-linguistic groups or cultures there have been in existence, thousands, thousands. And so even very striking similarities are possible when you have a denominator that is so incredibly large.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we're talking about going back to like the beginnings of humanity.

• 14:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Exactly.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  It's not about the oldest story ever told, it's about every story ever told.

• 14:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not so sure a bunch of different societies coming up with a story like this independently is impossible. Like, just look at Orion. So here's a picture of Orion. I drew some nice lines.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Aww.

• 14:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, Orion's got a little face.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I just, I had to.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Love hunting women.

• 14:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, it's the best.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  So fun.

• 14:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, no.

• 14:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sorry, edge of Greeks. But look, Orion is in the sky, visually pointing at the Pleiades. Like, if you trace the line on his belt, it literally points at the Pleiades.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  It does not surprise me if a bunch of societies take the most visible iconic part of Orion, his belt, say, what is that pointing at? Oh, it's pointing at the Pleiades, there's probably some connection there. And then if you're talking about this seven to six number thing, Ray said that some people actually can see more than six stars, like, people with really good eyesight. Some people can see eight, some people can see even up to 13. It's like pretty rare. He says anecdotally from talking to people that nobody can see exactly seven. That's what he's found. But, you know, the story might just use seven as a stand-in for more.

• 15:45Speaker 05

  If most people can see six and some people can see more, I mean, it's plausible to me that they would go to seven rather than eight or nine or 10.

• 15:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  But I don't want to just leave us on skeptical. I want to try to reconstruct old stories.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

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• 19:01Speaker 01

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• 19:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Let's do the oldest reconstruction we can do. That's what I want to do.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  All right.

• 19:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I asked Manvir, and he told me that the best way anthropologists do this is by looking through related languages.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  That makes sense, yeah.

• 19:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, like if two people have a related language, the ancestors of those two languages were probably one people that split off.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  Kind of like how, I don't know, like whales and hippos have a similar common ancestor.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  And you know how scientists make those family trees of whales and hippos? All whales and hippos.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  Just whales and hippos.

• 20:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Anthropologists do this with languages and myths.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 20:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  So you find similar tropes and myths, and then you look at related languages and you build these family trees.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  But we don't have like a language family tree that goes all the way back to 100,000 years ago.

• 20:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Not even close. Like, one of the oldest we have goes back 5,000, 6,000 years ago. So have you heard of Proto-Indo-European?

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  So this is, for those who may not be the nerds like us, this is this really, really, really ancient language that's been reconstructed from all these similar languages. So if you look at English, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Sanskrit, they all have these similar words. So like in Sanskrit, the word for guru actually comes from the same root as English for gravity.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Gravitas.

• 21:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, exactly, gravitas, exactly. And based on all of these similarities, researchers have constructed this language, this ancient language, Proto-Indo-European. But they haven't just reconstructed the ancient language. They've reconstructed ancient gods. The Greeks had Zeus, or Zeus Pater, he's sometimes known as Zeus the Father.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  The Romans had Jupiter, Jove Pater, Jove the Father. That's not that surprising. They're like very similar.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  Very connected.

• 21:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  But then there's this Sanskrit god, Diao's Peter, who's also a sky god, sounds very, very, very similar. And anthropologists think this traces back to one ancient Proto-Indo-European sky god.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  So we can almost reconstruct this god that we had no idea about before.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 21:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then we can do the same thing to stories. So I'm going to tell you a story that Manvir thinks is maybe 5,000 years old. It goes like this.

• 22:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  A brash, muscular storm god who drinks a lot, who usually has a beard, takes a big weapon, and goes off to fight and beat a big snake, serpent, dragon monster.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 22:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Usually associated with water.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 22:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  And you can see a version of this story in Greece with Zeus and Typhon, the snake monster, which you can see on this ancient vase. You see a version of this with Indra in this old Indian drawing. And you see a version of this in Norse mythology with Thor. This is actually one of my favorites. You can see it. It's this 1,000-year-old runestone.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Oh, very cool.

• 22:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  With a very goofy eyes. And it's not just that, like, the story sounds the same, or the characters are similar. There's echoes of this story in later texts.

• 23:03Speaker 05

  The thing is, not only that across Indo-European traditions, you have a well-reconstructed thunder god, you have a serpent, but even in actual texts, you have the phrase, "He slew the serpent." You find that in Vedic texts, you find it in old chants, you find it in hymns, you find it in poetries, you find it in magic. And so all of this suggests that not only was this a story that people talked about, but there was even a poetic phrase that was often, that was a part of maybe some old poetic tradition that has since been inherited.

• 23:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  So Manvir thinks that this is actually 1,000 years older than writing, and we can reconstruct it from all of these things that we have. We just have to have like a lot of it. We have a lot of different strains of evidence here.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's a much more compelling case, I would say, absolutely.

• 23:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  And, you know, finding these connections, it can be pretty meaningful. Like, for Manvir, he told me he was raised as a Sikh, like Sikhism. And he grew up with this sort of Sikh versus Hindu idea, as if there was some, you know, big divide.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Intention, yeah.

• 24:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and, you know, seeing these old Hindu texts as being part of his Sikh tradition, it like deepened his identity.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  Like, my son's middle name is an Indo-Iranian sacred drink. Like, I see engaging with this history has definitely made me feel like I'm part of a much larger story than maybe, you know, the kind of more culturally cloistered environments that we can sometimes grow up in.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  It's interesting, because I named my son after the sun god in Greek mythology. But I don't think I, I didn't name him that necessarily as like a direct, like, oh, Helios was, this big, powerful guy with a chariot in the sky. But I just love the characteristics of warmth and strength and joy that are associated with myths of the sun. And that is something that I wanted to like give to him as a gift.

• 25:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, it's like an idea that has stood the test of time, right? That's really what we're after here, right? We're after ancient ideas that are so good that they're still around.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, I think about my own tradition. Like, I grew up studying the Bible, the Torah. And when I got older and I started reading more academic stuff, I learned about the Epic of Gilgamesh and how it showed that Noah's ark probably came from some earlier shared story. And at first, I was kind of, I don't know, it felt kind of disconcerting that like the Torah was not this unique, special thing that maybe I had been told it was. But over time, I started feeling like it just makes it richer. And I think in the end, that is what I see this Pleiades story as doing. Like, whether it's true or not, I think Ray's idea is really provocative, that maybe

• 26:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  culture, right, which is something we think of as unique and separate, you know? Like, I think the most beautiful idea of this story of the Pleiades is that this is all of our culture.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  What if it's not connected? What if a good story is just a good story without that connection?

• 26:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  Well, Manvir, despite being very skeptical of this Pleiades as the oldest story theory, he does think that we can still say something about what these people thought. So he says that the fact that there are so many similar stories around the world today, it means that the ones they told back then might be pretty similar in kind, if not in the actual story.

• 27:01Speaker 05

  They were probably telling stories about tricksters and supernatural beings, heroic conquests, dangerous critters. We can still inhabit, to some degree, the imagination of the people 100,000 years ago. And the project of comparison still gives us some insight by showing us what is common to the human experience.

• 27:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  Without knowing that there's a single story that goes all the way back 100,000 years ago.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  I do feel connected to those people, because I feel like I can get some glimpse of what it means to be human on an almost universal level, that we all want to tell these types of stories. We all want to tell surprising and emotional and engaging stories, and it's probably what they were doing 100,000 years ago.

• 27:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  If you want to see this episode on video, head over to Netflix. And if you want to dive deeper on some of the stuff we got into, Ray Norris has a great new book called Big Sky: When the Emu Left the Earth. And Manvir Singh has an excellent one as well, called Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Joanna Salataroff. Our video editor is Jacob Reynolds. Our animator is Kareem Karia. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Our studio engineers are Ibrahim Ochik and Joe Nebrous. Meredith Hadnath runs the show. Mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala. Music from me. And Bird Pinkerton thanked Flaptan for the guitar and turned to leave. How do I get out of here?

• 28:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  Flaptan turned to her and said, "Just remember to stand clear of the closing doors."

• 28:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  Special thanks to Luke Bauma, Alex Kohl's, and thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Bird. If you have thoughts about the show, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected]. Or if you want to support the show, join Vox, become a member. Just go to vox.com/members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. We'd love to hear it. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you right back here next time.

• 29:14Speaker 07

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