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- [00:00]
Tristan Hughes
Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the Ancients ad free, get.
- [00:04]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours.
- [00:12]
Tristan Hughes
Of original documentaries, including my recent documentary.
- [00:14]
Professor Caroline Winterer
All about Petra and the Nabateans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:25]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [00:56]
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- [01:37]
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- [02:21]
Professor Caroline Winterer
The New World, a term that for centuries was applied to the Americas, was by the 19th century this idea that America was a young continent compared to Europe and Asia, well, it was becoming obsolete. The remains of great ancient creatures of terrifying beasts were starting to be unearthed. Suddenly the reality of just how old their continent was began to dawn on Americans. A history more ancient than anyone could ever have imagined. A place of primordial natural beauty. It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring the story of deep Time America. How in the 19th century, people began unearthing countless fossils of ancient animals and dinosaurs that revealed how the New World might in fact be the oldest world of all, challenging the commonly held view of the time that the world was in fact, only 6,000 years old. Now, our guest today is Professor Caroline Winterer from Stanford University. Caroline has recently written a new book, exploring this deep time revolution in America, and it was wonderful to get her on the podcast. We're going to Explore everything from 4 billion year old rock formations in Northeast Canada to 500 million year old trilobites, and of course, dinosaur remains. We'll be examining the dinosaur craze that seized America through the 19th century as great sea beasts and dinosaur remains started to be discovered and much more. Forget Jurassic park, think Jurassic America.
- [04:09]
Tristan Hughes
Caroline, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [04:12]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [04:15]
Tristan Hughes
Now, I'm used to, on the podcast sometimes delving into particular monuments or like focusing in on a particular period of ancient history or prehistory. This one feels like we're going to be talking in millions of years and so on. Is this the story of actually how old North America is and the misconceptions there were about that in previous centuries?
- [04:35]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yeah, there were a lot of misconceptions until very recently. Actually, 200 years ago, people around the world thought that the Americas were only about 6,000 years old, which was the age of the Earth. And within the space of a mere century, they absolutely changed their minds about it, thinking it was a billion or even more years old. So that was quite a change of their minds.
- [04:59]
Tristan Hughes
And is it this idea of deep time? So what is that?
- [05:03]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yes, deep time is the view that actually probably most of your listeners carry around with them without knowing it. And that is the view that the planet Earth itself is billions of years old, and life upon several hundred million of years old. That view, even though it's broadly accepted today, is in fact a very new idea. And it emerges in the space of a mere century, between around 1800 and 1900, when people in Europe and the Americas began to imagine that the Earth was quite old and not the 6,000 years that a literal reading of the Bible would suggest.
- [05:45]
Tristan Hughes
Yes, absolutely. Well, let's focus in on North America. And first off, how old do we therefore think the North American continent is understood to be?
- [05:54]
Professor Caroline Winterer
So today, scientists believe that the North American continent is over 4 billion years old. Whoa. Yeah, whoa. And also, you can walk on some of those 4 billion years old rocks if you Go to the eastern part of Canada where the so called Canadian Shield of extremely ancient rocks is visible, visible at the surface. So you can walk on 4 billion year old rocks.
- [06:22]
Tristan Hughes
So for 4 billion years those rocks have been there. They haven't been modified or changed. And you can still see them today.
- [06:28]
Professor Caroline Winterer
You can still see them today. Most rocks of that age have been submerged under the continental shelves, right? So they're swimming under the crust of the earth somewhere and gradually getting digested deep in the bowels of the earth. But for whatever reason, the kind of luck of long geological time in eastern Canada, there are some that are still there. Now, of course, they've been blasted over the millennia by the icy winds and, you know, whatever other dramatic effects happen, but there they are.
- [07:02]
Tristan Hughes
And do we also have like other famous names, I might think immediately of Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon? Do these well known geological features in the USA today, do they have their origins billions of years back as well?
- [07:17]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yes, well, and actually I should say so do part of the British Isles. You know, if you go to Scotland, you can see some very, very ancient rocks, actually rock formations that are shared with North America. But yes, deep in the Grand Canyon are rocks that are also billions of years old. And you can also, you have to work a little harder than on the Canadian Shield. But if you hike all the way down to the bottom to the Colorado river, you will encounter very, very ancient rocks. And it was these rocks that Americans began to discover over the course of the 19th cent. To imagine that they were not 6,000 years old, that they were in fact quite a bit older than that. And that's what my book is calling the Deep Time Revolution, because it really is revolutionary to think about time in such expansive terms. Essentially how big the stage is for the story of Earth and for the story of life upon it.
- [08:17]
Tristan Hughes
And with this unraveling of thought, as you say, as more information comes to light and the technological advancements that come with it, so that these people can start realizing just how old the North American continent was, what were the main types of materials that they had available to learn more about this stuff and just how old some of these things were. I mean, how can you tell that particular rocks could be some 4 billion years old?
- [08:40]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Well, this is such a great question. So in fact, they didn't know how old the rocks actually were until the early 1900s. And that's when they discovered radiometric dating, which is dating rocks by the decay of electrons and protons. And all the chemists out there, science, yes, fill in with science so that's what we call actual dates, is assigning an actual year value, like to, you know, how old you are, how old I am, how old the Earth is. They did not have this before 1900. And so what I'm calling the Deep Time Revolution unfolds only with relative dates. So that's saying that a layer of rock that lies on top of another one is younger. Right? Because we imagine that things are deposited in order. Right? As you would make a sandcastle at the beach, the layer on the bottom was put down at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, the layer on the top was put down at 3:00. But you actually have no idea how old the layers are. And so what's extraordinary about the Deep Time Revolution is that it unfolds precisely in the absence of what you were calling scientific instruments. So this is purely an act of the imagination. Young rocks are on top, older rocks are underneath. But we can only have fights about relative dates, not about actual dates. So it's really purely an act of the imagination that they are imagining deep time. And it's really not until the 20th century that we can start saying, oh, you know, this is billions and that's millions, etcetera, Et cetera. It's the same thing that happens with the discovery of dinosaur fossils and all kinds of fossils, you know, around what we would say now 500 million years old. They have no idea. They only know that the trilobite fossils, you know, these little sort of about the size of the face of an apple. Watch. Right, that's the size of a trilobite. These funny little things that look like horseshoe crabs. They find these by the millions in the northern Appalachian Mountains. They think they look really weird, but they know very hauntingly that these are the first beings that lie over the rocks that have no fossils. So these must be the first life forms created on Earth. But created by what and created by whom? Did God, in fact, create trilobites first? Putting aside Adam and Eve, was it in fact instead the trilobites that God created first, and then after them, the dinosaurs that are eventually found in strata all over the east coast, but especially in the Midwest? All of these wonderful discoveries occur in the absence of any kind of actual dates, which makes this revolution all the more amazing.
- [11:40]
Tristan Hughes
You mentioned their trilobites as well. I would love to do an episode just about trilobites in the future. I think trilobites are fascinating little things, but you've kind of preempted what I wanted to Talk about next, which is, okay, if we're talking about the time now where there's life in the North American continent and let's say over the hundreds of millions of years in the past. Can you give us a sense? I know there are different eras at the time of the dinosaurs, the Ice Age more recently, and the trilobites further back, but do we get a sense, I mean, are there different, dare say, kind of keystone species that we should just highlight 800 million years. Think of this 600 million years thing. Could you kind of give us a sense of that and how we should imagine that?
- [12:18]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yeah, absolutely. It's a wonderful series of exciting finds, each of which is very meaningful. So the first, of course, are the trilobites, and you should definitely do an episode of Trilobites. They love the trilobites. They imagine that God, in his infinite love for the life forms he created, gave the first oceans to these lowly creatures. And one of the huge debates of the time was whether the trilobites had had eyes. It was unclear in the fossil record because they're so tissues, they had disappeared. But they did imagine that God must have given them eyes because God would have wanted them to see and enjoy the beautiful sunlit waters of the infant oceans. So they created a new Eden around the trilobites. God's first created beings then came right on top, was later called the Carboniferous. These are the huge fossil forests that gave us the industrial age. And contrary to our own era, where we wring our hands about all the pollution that we've put into the air that is causing climate change. And, you know, because we've essentially taken these fossil forests and aerosolized them, right, We've put them into the atmosphere where they're causing warming people. In the 19th century, both in Britain and America, when they found the fossil forests, which are basically oil deposits, right, they said, oh, well, this is a sign once again of God's love for his human creatures. He has given us the capacity to warm ourselves and to create light in the darkness. God's first forests, or the forest primeval, as the poet Longfellow called them, were God's gift from the past to the present day. So that was another key marker.
- [14:02]
Tristan Hughes
I remember watching a show when I was much younger called Prehistoric park, and I think they went to Carboniferous, and it was almost where the insects were much bigger than they are today, like giant dragonflies, centipedes and scorpions. Is that from that time period?
- [14:15]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Roughly, yes. So think of a Louisiana bayou A big swamp with, you know, atmosphere and clouds and all. And then dragonflies the size of small gliders, centipedes, you know, the size of a Volkswagen. These were places that are fun to imagine. You wouldn't want to be there. And they actually started making paintings of them. And actually all of our greenhouses of the present era are ultimately descended from the first greenhouses of the 19th century, which were meant to recreate the tropical foliage of the Carboniferous. So they had a love affair with the Carboniferous because this was going to save us from the lot of humanity for the last, however many thousand years, which was to be dark, cold, tired. Everyone was tired all the time because they had to work. But now they had machines, machines that were powered by the ancient fossil forests that had swaddled the infant Earth. So that was the second one. Then came, okay, this comes the fun part, right, is the dinosaurs. So they begin to scrape away again at the Earth, and they find on top these enormous skeletons, you know, the size of a 737 of giant sea creatures, Mosasaurs. And this was quite extraordinary. One of the reasons that they found them was because that they were in search of fertile soils to re fertilize the land that had been exhausted by 200 years of tobacco cultivation. So the first Europeans to come to North America had arrived in the 1600s. They immediately started making tobacco plantations to send tobacco to places like England, for example, where all of Europe became addicted to smoking. But after 200 years of this, in the early 1800s, all of the soils in the American south had been exhausted. So the soils of the Cretaceous, which basically means chalky, were used to re fertilize what became the cotton plantations of the slave south in the period 1800-1860. Our listeners may have heard of the term the Cotton Kingdom. This is the Cotton Kingdom, essentially stretching from South Carolina to Mississippi and the Mississippi river itself. The giant artery of water whose sides the canyon sides clearly exposed these fertile soils that happened also to be full of gigantic dinosaur fossils, which they then excavated and brought back to the museums. First of the United States, places like Philadelphia, you can still see them. Some of them have American names. The Hadrosaurus, named after Haddonfield, N.J. but also they love to ship them to Europe to say, hey, you guys think that we are inferior Americans, right? We had the chutzpah to seek independence from Mother Britain 50 years ago. We think we're so great, and in fact, we are so great, because here on this ship is a giant fossil of a dinosaur that is bigger than your puny little English fossils.
- [17:36]
Tristan Hughes
It's almost kind of a reversal, isn't it, that at the time there were a lot of people, you know, who were collecting antiquities from Egypt and Greece and Disney and bringing them to Britain or France or whatever and they become part of the exhibitions and America is almost a bit late, but this almost a contrast to that. Now America is front of the queue with things that actually they're discovering in their own land. Look what we can bring to the party kind of thing.
- [18:03]
Professor Caroline Winterer
I guess it is exactly that. It is no more sophisticated than 4 year olds in the playground. You know, my bucket is bigger. Yes, look what I've got. So you know, Americans have a terminal inferiority complex. Many carry it still today. The Greeks and Romans had never been to the New World. No matter what you read on the web. Romans and Greeks had never been to the New World and they didn't have the Middle Ages in the sense of crumbling castles and monarchies and, you know, all these things. But now they had dinosaur fossils that were bigger and also that were older. So what? They couldn't win on the culture front, they won on the antiquity and size front and they continue to do that today. You know, if you come to American natural history museums, all you ever read is how much older they are than European fossils. So it's not like Americans got over it.
- [19:03]
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- [20:50]
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- [21:34]
Tristan Hughes
You mentioned in passing. Earlier Cretaceous. So with those key dinosaur periods in deep time, so millions of years ago, is it in America, it feels like the main areas aren't they. It's the Cretaceous, the last period which ends with the meteorite. The Jurassic beforehand, Jurassic park and so on. Triassic before that. That's where the rise of the dinosaurs is. Jurassic and Cretaceous, those periods where I'm guessing it's the richest fossil records from in America.
- [22:01]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Oh, yes. And they discover that the whole Midwest of the United States, which is, you know, 1500, 2000 miles wide. If your listeners can imagine the area between the Rocky Mountains in the west and the Great Lakes in the east, they realized that this had been an ancient ocean, that North America had been divided into two. Yeah, and that there were these giant monsters swimming in the ocean, you know, cavorting in these shallow seas. And that the beaches on both sides, east and west, there had been giant T. Rexes, you know, and we should think of the significance of that name, Tyrannosaurus Rex. You know, it's the king Terrible lizard. As many like things as you can cram into a single name. And it's not surprising that Americans would have named it, you know, the Terrible King Lizard. They wanted a king, they never had a king. So of course it's Rex. And the more terrifying, the better. Brontosaurus, Allosaurus, T. Rex. All of these things had been patrolling the scary beaches of the Jurassic and the Cretaceous afterwards. And they began in the 1850s, 60s and 70s to create these extraordinary colored landscape paintings of this time that no one had ever seen and no one ever would see. Right. Because humans didn't come along until many millions of years later. But they began to imagine that not only was North America very old and that it had this enormous antiquity of the Jurassic and the Cretaceous, but that very significantly, these were older than the native peoples who now live there on the dry land of places like the Nebraska Territory which white Americans were trying to take over. And so there was a very sharp political dimension to the claims of the antiquity of North America. It was that it. It was older than the most ancient peoples who lived there. The quote, Native Americans. So it was essentially white Americans saying, you say you're the first Americans, but in fact the first Americans were T. Rexes and Brontosauruses, So don't even try. And Trilobites. Yeah, don't even try. And that this solid, dry land that you are now living on, they were speaking to the Lakota Sioux, for example. This dry land is not yours, it is ours. And we take claim of the deep antiquity beneath your feet. In a sense, the Cretaceous and the Jurassic, they're not just sort of sitting there passively awaiting discovery. They are invented and created partly for political uses.
- [24:52]
Tristan Hughes
And it's that dark side of many of these stories, not just in America, but across the world, where deep archaeology can be twisted for political means. But it's important to highlight regardless, isn't it? I would actually quite like to talk about those sea discoveries, those sea fossils, because you mentioned earlier, Mosasaurs, which. They are one of those big sea beasts, aren't they? And this is something to get your head around today. So the Midwest, you think, of course, land as far as the eye can see. But back there, they are discovering these massive sea beasts that lurk beneath the waves, I guess, smaller beasts, ammonites, those kind of ammonite things. But also the big ones, too.
- [25:29]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Oh, yes. It is just a riot of wonder. And they have fun with it, right? They pull out the Mosasaurus, which is named after the Meuse river in northern Belgium, where they find some of these sea creatures also when they're, you know, digging for coal and things like that. And so they sort of say, oh, well, we have a Meuse river monster as well. And as you say, the ammonites, these, you know, if you can imagine a car tire that is swirled, and they fill museums with these wondrous sea creatures. And imagine, you know, this North America that is so alien to them that now it's just flat, boring Midwest. You know, what Americans call flyover territory, right? You fly from New York to San Francisco, and it's all the flat stuff in between. But now they thought, well, oh, it's flat because it used to be an ocean, and God had seen to it that that ocean dried into a fertile landscape that now supports the farms of America. And so every farmer who digs in his or her fields and finds an ammonite or a mosasaur or ichthyosaur or any kind of swimming saurus, should immediately ship those extraordinary, fun, ancient creatures to the museums of New York City and Philadelphia so that we could show them off to the world. And to visiting British scientists like Thomas Huxley, who comes to the United States and says, wow, this is great.
- [27:00]
Tristan Hughes
Well, this is the next thing I was going to ask is that as news spreads out, you know, from beyond America, that look at what these amazing things that are coming out of the ground is, there just almost a rush to get out there, to learn more about these discoveries that are being made.
- [27:12]
Professor Caroline Winterer
There is a rush to get out there. So Darwin, sadly, himself never comes to North America. But Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Huxley, who is even he was even more a Darwinian than Darwin is, he comes to America, he visits not only the extraordinary dinosaur fossils, but what came after the age of dinosaurs, which was the age of mammals. And he realizes that some of these strata, for example the Cretaceous and the Jurassic, are more visible in North America than they were anywhere in Europe. So Europe had had those time periods, but they weren't sitting on the surface, easily accessible in the same quantity as they were in the giant space of North America. So America becomes the great fossil hunting ground for Europeans and in some sense it still remains so today. Although now, of course, many other areas of the world have been opened up for fossil hunting, like China and North Africa, et cetera.
- [28:11]
Tristan Hughes
We'll definitely go back to exploring more of that fossil hunting story and some particular really interesting examples of that race to unearth these fossils and who these people were. But as you hinted at there deep time, it doesn't end with the end of the dinosaurs. Obviously it continues there millions of years before the first humans in North America. So far you've given the sense that it's almost layer upon layer upon layer, and then you get to the dinosaurs. But then you mentioned there that some dinosaur bones were at the surface. So what about the animals that follow the dinosaurs? How easy were they to discover as well? What do we know about their story in the 19th century with discoveries?
- [28:45]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yeah, well, again, taking us into the American Midwest, in the dry landscape of the Dakotas of Nebraska, sort of the upper Midwest, right under Canada, Americans begin to build the transcontinental railroads in the decades after the Civil War. We can imagine it as a kind of zipper relinking the continent that had been shorn in two by the Civil War, that in order to build the railroads, you need to bring the geologists and the geologists of course, are going to find bones of various kinds, especially the badlands of the Dakotas, where you have these deep gullies you find on top of the dinosaur bones. Suddenly the dinosaurs are gone, vanished, and you have a new kind of creature which turns out to be mammals. And they find these enormous crazy mammals, like giant rhinoceroses on drugs. You know, things the size of rhinos, but with crazy horns all over their skulls. They find tiny little monkeys and every kind of creature in between. So, being Victorians, everything is the age of this and the reign of that. So they christened this the age of mammals. And they realized that the age of the dinosaurs had ceded to the age of mammals, and that they were going to show the world once again that American mammals were bigger than any other mammals around the world. But also that significantly, some of the mammals, like the horse, that had been associated with the European conquests of the world had in fact originated in the Americas. So they find, yeah, the little eohippus, the dawn horse, IO means dawn in Greek. The first camels, all of these various ungulates, animals of the plains, kind of the steppes, right, that circled the globe. 50 million years ago, they had their birthplace in the Americas. Now, this was so important for Americans to claim because one of the things that Europeans love to say was that the New World was inferior because its land was not fertile. Why would God have wasted fertility on the New World? And Americans could say, but no, in fact, some of the great civilization bearing animals that we know today, like the horse, originated in the Americas, migrated westward over the Bering Straits, which had been dry, and into Asia. And so Europe, in some sense, was a colony of America. That was such a great moment for the Americans.
- [31:31]
I'm sure it was.
- [31:32]
Tristan Hughes
But that also hints an important point. So no matter what era, we're talking about Jurassic, Cretaceous, and of course, there are changes in the shape of the continent and geology and all of that. But, you know, you've got the Bering Strait, there's a clear water divide between Asia and America. But back then, before the ice sheets come down, it was possible, you know, for animals long before humans to venture, I could speak, westwards into Asia and then Europe. That way.
- [32:00]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yeah, like you can get on a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo today. All these little horses and camels and various other early mammals had sprung from nothing in the Americas because of the great fertility that was imagined and that on some early geological formation that was later erased by time, they migrated first into Asia and then finally into Europe and then they went extinct in the Americas. So by the time the Spaniards arrived in North America in the 1500s, Cortes and others, they were bringing their horses, but it was really the return of the horse to its native land in much bigger form. So that was an exciting time. You know, the final layer, of course, was humans. And this created an extraordinary dilemma because the oldest fossil humans that were found were in fact being found In Europe around 1870. 1880. The word prehistory is invented to begin to talk about a time in human history that predates written records. So history is written records, you know, Herodotus, Thucydides, that's history because it's written. But now they were finding evidence of human beings before there was writing. So, you know, cave paintings, Neanderthals, how to talk about those? Well, they're prehistoric, they're human, human, but they don't write. Now the trouble for North Americans was that those fossils were not being found in North America. So what white Americans did essentially was to adopt European human fossils as their own and to create human family trees that attributed the wonderful cave paintings at places like Lascaux that they were discovering to white Caucasian peoples who then were thought to live in New York City today. So they were basically saying white Americans have nothing to do with Native Americans. Their cultural origins are in Europe. And Europeans, many thousands of years ago were already creating beautiful cave paintings. And those are our people. So if you go to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, it was founded in 1870 or so, there are reproductions of European cave paintings to create a kind of cultural affinity between America's ruling classes and, you know, the fine art of Europe.
- [34:53]
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- [35:35]
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- [36:18]
Tristan Hughes
Let's go back to this age of the dinosaurs in America and these early discoveries and focus on some particular discoveries and the people behind them. When are the earliest dinosaur fossils discovered? And what's the process behind the discoveries? Because you mentioned, like plantations and stuff like that. Is it almost accidental by plantation owners? And then these things happen and they call someone or they come in. I mean, what's the story of the. The discovering of these first fossils?
- [36:44]
Professor Caroline Winterer
So it tends to be accidental. People are not in search of fossils because they don't know that they're weird and interesting. Because, you know, fossil just means from the ground. It doesn't imply old until the late 19th century, right? So they're just mining their own business, they're farming, they're digging for coal. They're just going about their daily life in the 19th century. So, for example, one of the first people to find fossils is Thomas Jefferson. You know, he's the great naturalist founder. And he finds these mastodon bones. These are these ancient elephants, you know, with tusks, and he displays them at his house at Monticello. Part of the reason he sends the Lewis and Clark expedition to The Pacific in 1804 is to say, bring back one of those mastodons, but bring it back alive. He imagines that there must still be a live mastodon roaming around the Earth because they're just beginning to think through the idea of extinction. That's another idea we take for granted today. Extinction wasn't even formulated until around the year 1800. And the reason is because they imagine this loving God who creates all these creatures and then never uncreates them, right? So every fossil we find must have some living analog around the Earth, because why would the loving creator God annihilate Tristan, right? He created Tristan. Why would he make you go extinct? So the Macedons must have a living analog. So that is what they are sort of thinking initially about some of these ancient creatures that they're finding. But yeah, it's really the Industrial Revolution, the digging very deep in the earth for coal and other kinds of fuels that leads them into these weird lost worlds of trilobites and all kinds of things that today many of them have British names like the Devonian and the Cambrian. Cause the British were doing the same thing. But I always say the Industrial Revolution and the dinosaurs went hand in hand because one would not have happened without the other.
- [38:55]
Tristan Hughes
And who were some of the people in America who then hear about this and then oversee the excavation of the dig. Or almost kind of a Jefferson like figure who then hears about it and then sponsors groups of people to go out and find more. And does it almost become a bit of a competition, a tournament with rival groups trying to find the next big monsters that have just been unveiled in this area of America?
- [39:17]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yes, definitely. Science is baked from the beginning with competition firmly within it. So scientists from the north, scientists from the south are all hearing about these finds and they send out about some of the first very primordial scientific expeditions. So we shouldn't imagine, you know, hundred person expeditions like we might have today, but more like two or three people who are invited, for example, from Philadelphia, which is the scientific mecca of the United states. In the 19th century, the founding fathers declined to fund a scientific infrastructure. And so all of these museums are privately funded. The American Philosophical Society is one. Anyway, Philadelphia is sort of the place. And so you. In one case, for example, there's a plantation in Alabama that's really getting going in the 1820s. It sits right on the edge of the Alabama river, which is this giant, very wide artery, and the slaves keep digging up these marine monsters. And so the plantation owner writes to Philadelphia and says, hey, could you send one of your guys down and he can live on my plantation and take some of the enslaved people on essentially geology expeditions, which is what happens in the 1820s and 1830s. A guy comes down from Philadelphia and finds an extraordinary trove of ammonites and mosasaurs and ships those back. They also find human remains from Native Americans, past and present, because the Native Americans are now being pushed off of this land in what are called the Indian wars, peoples like the Natchez and others. So all of this, this bony debris gets pulled out of the earth and sent to these sort of centers of collection and calculation on the East Coast. And even today, the center of American academic and intellectual life is on the East Coast. And that's vestigial from the 19th century Age of fossil collecting. So if you want to see the extraordinary Midwest fossil. Fossils don't go to the Midwest, go to New York City, go to Washington D.C. to the Smithsonian. There they are.
- [41:35]
Tristan Hughes
Is it then kind of that as they start digging deeper? You said Cretaceous, then Jurassic. I mean, how long is it before you get people discovering things like trilobites and then realizing that there's no more to it? How long does it take to go from those top layers to those earliest animal remains?
- [41:53]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yeah, you know, interestingly, it's the trilobites that are discovered first, even though we know their last, because they're exposed at the top of the Appalachians. So they're not discovered in the order of chronology. So in some senses, you know, depending on where you dig, different layers are exposed. So the trilobites come to attention actually in the 18, around 1815, 1820. And they haven't found any dinosaurs yet. It's not until quite a bit, you know, Quite a bit 1830s, 1840s that they begin to uncover the first dinosaur. So everything is all sort of mixed up and the neat and tidy geological column that they eventually create was not in place until a little bit later. Everything is a bit of a jumble. But to go back to the dinosaurs for a second, it's not obvious either. You know, when we think of Jurassic America, it's not immediately obvious that this had to be a bloodthirsty land of gore and rapine, right? These creatures had teeth, but we have teeth and we're not gnashing our way through forests, you and I normally. And so it was very much a product of the Victorian mindset that they imposed on an ancient time period, the capitalist values of their own day. This is the era of the robber barons and unfettered capitalism with no safety net and no unions. But they wanted to think of themselves as civilized human beings and so they thought that any ancient time period must have been a lawless era of blood and gore. And, you know, the first paintings of T Rex were very gore filled. And so that's what they impose on the Jurassic and that's what we carry around with us today. We don't remember, you know, we don't think about the gentle parts of the Jurassic. You know, there were gentle little creatures in the Jurassic, but that wouldn't be any fun for us. So we populate it with these big, scary and fun dinosaurs. You know, don't give me a small, boring vegetarian dinosaur, I want a big bloodthirsty one. It is because we have inherited the Victorian dinosaurs of 150 years ago. So that's worth remembering.
- [44:13]
Tristan Hughes
So by the early 20th century, just how different have people's not just in America, but also in Europe and elsewhere have people's perception of North America. How significantly in that hundred years or so have mindsets, attitudes changed towards North America because of that discovery of deep time?
- [44:35]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yeah, well, you know, Europeans came around, some of them, to the idea that North America and then South America had a legitimate place on the Internet, national stage of science, that they, you know, they were producing scientists and they were producing interesting scientific finds. So it's a really a kind of declaration of independence for American science as a result of Deep Time, even though Americans would never win on the stage of the Greek and Roman high culture that we see in European museums. So it was very significant as a chapter in American history.
- [45:14]
Tristan Hughes
And lastly, seems very important and timely to bring it up today is this rich prehistoric history of the North American continent and its varying environments. Is this part of the reason why North America is so rich in minerals and fossil fuels today? You know, resources, natural resources that continue to be used aplenty in North America today?
- [45:35]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Yeah, you know, that is accidental. The first white settlers of North America didn't know that the mineral riches of North America were there for the taking. But it is a product of this deep time revolution between 1800 and 1900, that the full realization of the industrial uses of the oil and minerals of North America, all of that came into focus. You know, we are sitting on this extraordinary land that not only has great agricultural fertility, you know, in the form of these now dried seabeds that we have from Texas to Saskatchewan. Right. But the mineral wells that is excavated just not only in the east coast, but flowing all the way to the West Coast. And anybody who's visited the La Brea Tar pits in Los Angeles, you know, these kind of burping oil pits in the middle of downtown Los Angeles where ice age mammals come bubbling to the surface. Those were discovered and exploited because of the need to find oil in Los Angeles. Angeles. So, yeah, it cemented for Americans what they suspected, which was that God had favored North America with a divine mission to lead the world to salvation, and that he was going to show this. This is called Manifest Destiny. Right. He was going to show this not just through missionary campaigns and such, but by allowing white Americans to uncover the mineral rocky wealth of the United States. And the second coming would come any minute after they had found that.
- [47:25]
Tristan Hughes
Caroline, this has been a fantastic chat. Last, but certainly not least, your book all about this and more. It is called.
- [47:31]
Professor Caroline Winterer
So, yeah, my book is called how the New World Became Old. The subtitle is the Deep Time Revolution in America. It was published last fall by Princeton University Press. If you like dinosaur pictures, it's got over 100 of them in color and black and white. Trilobites, T. Rexes. It's all there. Because I'm hoping everyone out there loves dinosaurs as much as I have since I was three.
- [47:58]
Tristan Hughes
Absolutely. From trilobites to T. Rex.
- [48:00]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Brilliant.
- [48:00]
Tristan Hughes
Caroline. This has been fantastic. And it just goes to me to say thank you. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
- [48:06]
Professor Caroline Winterer
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
- [48:11]
Well, there you go. There was Professor Caroline Winter highlighting the story of Deep Time America and how fossils uncovered in the 19th century began to reveal just how ancient America really was. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you for listening to the ancient. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of Historyhit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe. Lastly, if you want any more ancient history videos and clips in the meantime, then be sure to follow me on Instagram. Ncients Tristan now that's enough from me and I'll see you soon in the next episode.
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