Joe Rogan Experience #1561 - Kermit Pattison

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Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) 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 t- to have r- written this book and be i- 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, uh, I mean, just as an aside, s- 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 ... Uh, I mean, I'm not ... Certainly a lot of other people have n- noted that before, but as far as I was concerned, no one had really written the deep history of that. So I was gonna 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 Ardi would be this, you know, a little sliver of background before I got to the interesting stuff. Uh, but anyway, I started reading the Ardi 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 Ardi team, and, and then, uh, thinking, "Oh, this ... Tell me about how you found this thing. Oh, that sounds pretty interesting." And then, um ... So I thought, "Okay, well maybe Ardi, it'll ... Maybe they'll, they'll ... It'll be a page. It's more than this little line." Then, you know, little, learned a little more. "Ah, it's five pages. No, no, 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 what? This is much better than the actual story I was working on." Uh, I mean, this is a discovery that has, 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, is unheard of. I mean, uh, you're lucky to find any skeleton at this age, and to get something that's that complete is really unusual. And so are 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 sh- s- 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 ... Uh, you know, all the challenges in the field. And I go, "Oh my God." I mean, this is like collision of cultures in the Ethiopian desert. You know, the indigenous 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 th- and the initial meetings were not friendly. You know what I mean? You got guys coming out, Afar 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, th- 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, the truths that it contains, the scientific revelations aren't immediately evident, you know? You look at the skeletons like, "Oh, that's ..." You know, this, that, 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 ... (laughs) tr- trying to bury the skeleton again, if you will, (laughs) you know, with inattention, uh, and, 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.