A day in the life of a human 75,000 years ago I Sam Kean

0:00 My name is Sam Kean,

0:01 I am a science writer and my latest book is "Dinner with King Tut".

0:06 How rogue archaeologists are recreating the sight,

0:09 sounds, smells and tastes of lost civilizations.

0:14 A day in the life 75,000 years ago.

0:18 So imagine your person in Africa 75,000 years ago.

0:23 You're a bit nomadic, you probably travel around from place to place,

0:27 maybe spend a few weeks sleeping in a cave.

0:29 But caves have hard dirt floors, not very comfortable.

0:32 So you're going to have to make a bed of some sort.

0:35 Also, your main activity is probably going to be gathering food and water.

0:39 So you would have a canteen of some sort to carry water around,

0:43 probably made from an ostrich egg.

0:45 And then to get ready to find food that day,

0:48 you're going to have to make your own tools and go out on a hunt.

0:51 So let's start with the bets.

0:52 The first thing you would do is you would spread a bunch

0:54 of debris around in the cave and you would light it on fire.

0:58 It would burn, that's going to clean the cave out.

1:00 But also importantly, leave a nice soft layer of ash.

1:04 That's essentially going to be your mattress.

1:06 Then you're going to go out and gather some plants, aromatic leaves especially.

1:11 You're going to lay those down as sort of a top sheet on that layer of ash.

1:15 So this is going to be fairly comfortable because ash,

1:18 it's nice and soft, sort of like sleeping on the beach.

1:21 And people have actually recreated these beds and have slept in them overnight.

1:25 And they said that they were in fact pretty comfortable.

1:28 It also had another benefit in that the ash kept away ticks.

1:32 Insects were a big problem for people thousands of years ago.

1:36 They didn't have repellent, they didn't have ways of keeping them off.

1:40 So having a nice ash layer on the ground

1:42 prevented ticks from burrowing up and locking onto your legs.

1:45 I talked to a woman who actually gathered a bunch of ticks,

1:49 put them in the center of a nice ring of ash and then watched what they did.

1:54 The ticks tried to burrow through the ash.

1:56 Most of them did not make it out.

1:58 They died part way through.

2:00 And the ones that did make it through the ash,

2:03 their mouth parts ended up so gummed that they couldn't bite anyone afterward.

2:07 So the ash also provided a way to prevent ticks from biting your legs.

2:12 And then the top layer of the leaves,

2:14 they were usually aromatic leaves that kept mosquitoes away.

2:18 So in addition to providing comfort,

2:20 this bed also kept away parasites that can annoy you and spread diseases.

2:24 So when you get up in the morning you're probably thirsty.

2:27 And if you're in this cave you're going to reach

2:29 for your water receptacle which will be an ostrich egg canteen.

2:33 Ostrich eggs are usually pretty large

2:35 and they're usually pretty thick and dense.

2:37 So what they would do is they would take a stone

2:41 tool and they would saw the top of the ostrich egg open.

2:44 Usually make a little square or something like that.

2:47 They would pour the insides of the eggs out

2:50 and then they would clean it out with some aromatic herbs,

2:53 wash it, and then you have a nice little canteen.

2:56 For the book I actually bought an ostrich

2:58 egg online and tried these steps myself.

3:00 I got to cook the ostrich egg in a big old skillet.

3:04 Parts of it were delicious.

3:06 The yolk was this amazingly rich sort of caramelly egg flavor.

3:10 It was delicious.

3:11 I loved that part.

3:12 The whites were less good, little runny, kind of foamy,

3:16 not my favorite, but you know they weren't horrible.

3:19 And then after I had cut open the top of the ostrich egg

3:24 with the stone tool I washed it out and used it to hold water.

3:29 It held about six cups of water and one really

3:32 cool thing about ostrich eggs is that they're slightly porous.

3:34 Not so much the water is going to leak out of it,

3:38 but microscopically there are tiny little pores

3:40 in the ostrich egg that let water escape from it.

3:44 Evaporation cools it so it keeps the water colder than the ambient temperature.

3:48 So an ostrich egg is actually a self-cooling canteen.

3:51 So after you get your nice drink of water you're probably

3:54 going to start on one of the main activities of the day,

3:57 which is making stone tools.

3:58 For this you're probably going to use churte or flint,

4:01 a very hard rock that fractures very cleanly.

4:04 This is an example of a stone that you might try to make a tool out of.

4:09 So you're going to hold it in your lap like this.

4:11 Then you're going to take another stone called a hammer

4:14 stone and you're going to drop it on to this tool.

4:17 So imagine my fist here is the hammer stone.

4:20 Usually they're sort of potato shaped,

4:22 kind of big and oblong and very smooth on the outside.

4:25 So you would take the hammer stone and you would

4:28 drop it down on the very edge of this stone.

4:31 And you're not going to smash it down, you know, like really pound it on there.

4:35 It's more of a controlled drop to just strike the edge of it.

4:38 So you take it in your lap you would

4:41 drop it down and then a piece would come off.

4:44 And you can see how nice and clean this edge is.

4:47 It's not going to shatter like a pot or something like that.

4:50 And you're going to get a nice edge here

4:52 and you can use this piece and refine it more.

4:55 You know maybe get rid of this, make a little smaller tool.

4:57 And this is an example of something that you might

5:00 be able to make if you were a master footnapper.

5:02 You can see a nice little head there on this little spear that I have.

5:06 You can also see how it's half-dead to this wooden shaft.

5:10 So this would be animal sinew.

5:12 So from a tendon, a ligament, something like that.

5:15 You would pound that out, you would separate the fibers and use it

5:19 to wrap around and half-dead to this shaft.

5:22 Then you would dribble resin probably from a tree that you would gather.

5:26 You'd warm it up and you would dribble it around there

5:28 to act as glue essentially to really bind it to this spear.

5:32 And then you have a nice little hunting tool that you can use.

5:36 One coveted material in ancient times was obsidian like you can see here.

5:40 It's a black volcanic rock and if you strike

5:44 it properly you can get extremely sharp flakes from it.

5:47 Flakes that are sharper actually than modern steel scalpels.

5:52 They're extremely extremely sharp.

5:54 And those are dangerous.

5:55 I actually cut myself with obsidian at one point accidentally.

5:59 And I was surprised that I didn't notice how deep the cut went.

6:04 It was right across my arm.

6:06 And unlike a paper cut it did not hurt at all because that edge was so sharp.

6:11 But it immediately started bleeding all over the place.

6:13 I was surprised how quickly things got bad with it.

6:16 I had to wrap it up pretty quickly.

6:18 And you can imagine if this was 75,000 years ago and you

6:22 had cut yourself like that, it could get pretty dangerous pretty quickly.

6:26 They didn't have antibiotics.

6:27 There was no hospital to run to.

6:30 So however important napping tools was, it was also a dangerous occupation.

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