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My name is Sam Kean. I am the author of several books and my latest book is "Dinner with King Tut." How rogue archaeologists are recreating the sight, sounds, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations. Part 1. Bringing Ancient History to Life Chapter 1. Resurrecting Ancient Practices If you're thinking of Indiana Jones, traditional archaeology is not that. It's things buried in the ground that you have to dig up, put in context, and try to piece together the past. Brushing
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off little pot shards and bits of bone with toothbrushes. Day after day, hour after hour. Traditional archaeology is very good about what the past looked like. So they can tell you there was a wall here, there was a building over here. You get a good general sense of the landscape and probably the range of materials that an ancient civilization was using. But what I was lacking was all of the other senses. What did the past sound like? What did it taste like? What did it smell
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like? So you can imagine how excited I was when I discovered experimental archaeology. Experimental archaeologists make and do things. They try to recreate the past in all sorts of different ways. Whether it be making ancient recipes and foods, stone tools, ancient medicines, building ships and heading out into the ocean. All sorts of things that involve resurrecting the past. If you have
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deep knowledge about how to do something or how to make something, you're going to ask different, better questions about it and have a better eye about what to look for, the range of things people might have used, stuff like that. And another thing experimental archaeology can do is help us solve some of the great mysteries of the past. How did they actually build the pyramids in Egypt? How did they erect those giant statues on Easter Island? Human beings? How did we hunt ancient
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creatures, big packadearms and things like that? Experimental archaeology can help us get at those questions. For this book, I attended an authentic Roman banquet and ate strange foods of all kinds, everything from caterpillars to walruses. I spent a day out in Utah with a guy who built a 30-foot catapult, and we spent an afternoon hurling these giant stone boulders around the river. I got to
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give and get my very first tattoo. I got to fire a medieval cannon. I got to try my hand at ancient neurosurgery and all sorts of other projects. One thing I really like about experimental archaeology is the range of people that are involved in doing it. In some cases, you have sort of hardcore lab geeks that are in a lab collecting data, just sort of like a traditional scientist would. In other
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cases, you have archaeologists who fell in love with some ancient civilization, and they wanted to connect with it on a deeper level. They figured there was no other way to do that except to go out and try to recreate certain aspects of the past. You also have indigenous communities, who in a lot of cases have kept these traditions alive for thousands and thousands of years. Often they are
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the ones actually teaching archaeologists about this material. It's really a two-way street with these groups where they are the ones imparting their knowledge to the scholars and academics. Then you can go all the way to sort of these grouchy survivalists who live out in the woods, but they've picked up tricks or tricks have been passed down to them and they have a lot of knowledge, some cases implicit knowledge, that you just don't get from armchair archaeology. In
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some cases, they've actually rewritten what we know about archaeology because they brought to bear their own knowledge on the field and showed the experts where they were wrong. So imagine your person in Africa 75,000 years ago. You're a bit nomadic, you probably travel around from place to place, maybe spend a few weeks sleeping in a cave. But caves have hard dirt floors, not very
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comfortable, so you're going to have to make a bed of some sort. Also, your main activity is probably going to be gathering food and water, so you would have a canteen of some sort to carry water around, probably made from an ostrich egg. And then to get ready to find food that day, you're going to have to make your own tools and go out on a hunt. So let's start with the bets. The first
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thing you would do is you would spread a bunch of debris around in the cave and you would light it on fire. It would burn, that's going to clean the cave out, but also importantly, leave a nice soft layer of ash. That's essentially going to be your mattress. Then you're going to go out and gather some plants, aromatic leaves especially. You're going to lay those down as sort of a top
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sheet on that layer of ash. So this is going to be fairly comfortable because ash is nice and soft, sort of like sleeping on the beach. And people have actually recreated these beds and have slept in them overnight and they said that they were in fact pretty comfortable. It also had another benefit in that the ash kept away ticks. Insects were a big problem for people thousands of years
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ago. They didn't have repellent, they didn't have ways of keeping them off. So having a nice ash layer on the ground prevented ticks from burrowing up and locking onto your legs. I taught to a woman who actually gathered a bunch of ticks, put them in the center of a nice ring of ash and then watched what they did. The ticks tried to burrow through the ash. Most of them did not make it out,
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they died part way through. And the ones that did make it through the ash, their mouth parts ended up so gummed that they couldn't bite anyone afterward. So the ash also provided a way to prevent ticks from biting your legs. And then the top layer of the leaves, they were usually aromatic leaves that kept mosquitoes away. So in addition to providing comfort, this bed also kept away parasites that can annoy you and spread diseases. So when you get up in the morning,
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you're probably thirsty. And if you're in this cave, you're going to reach for your water receptacle, which will be an ostrich egg canteen. Ostrich eggs are usually pretty large and they're usually pretty thick and dense. So what they would do is they would take a stone tool and they would saw the top of the ostrich egg open, usually make a little square or something like that. They would pour the insides of the eggs out and then they would clean it out with some aromatic
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herbs, wash it and then you have a nice little canteen. For the book, I actually bought an ostrich egg online and tried these steps myself. I got to cook the ostrich egg in a big old skillet. Parts of it were delicious. The yolk was this amazingly rich sort of caramelly egg flavor. It was delicious. I love that part. The whites were less good, little runny, kind of foamy, not my favorite, but you know, they weren't horrible. And then after I had cut open the top
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of the ostrich egg with the stone tool, I washed it out and used it to hold water. It held about six cups of water and one really cool thing about ostrich eggs is that they're slightly porous. Not so much the water is going to leak out of it, but microscopically, there are tiny little pores in the ostrich egg that let water escape from it. Evaporation cools it so it keeps the water colder
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than the ambient temperature. So an ostrich egg is actually a self-cooling canteen. So after you get your nice drink of water, you're probably going to start on one of the main activities of the day, which is making stone tools. For this, you're probably going to use churte or flint, a very hard rock that fractures very cleanly. This is an example of a stone that you might try to make a tool out of. So you're going to hold it in your lap like this. Then you're going to take
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another stone called a hammer stone and you're going to drop it on to this tool. So imagine my fist here is the hammer stone. Usually they're sort of potato shaped, kind of big and oblong and very smooth on the outside. So you would take the hammer stone and you would drop it down on the very edge of this stone. And you're not going to smash it down, you know, like really pound it on there. It's more of a controlled drop to just strike the edge of it. So you take it in your lap,
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you would drop it down and then a piece would come off. And you can see how nice and clean this edge is. It's not going to shatter like a pot or something like that. And you're going to get a nice edge here and you can use this piece and refine it more, you know, maybe get rid of this, make a little smaller tool. And this is an example of something that you might be able to make if you were a master footnapper. You can see a nice little head there on this little spear that I
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have. You can also see how it's half dead to this wooden shaft. So this would be animal sinew. So from a tendon, a legament, something like that, you would pound that out, you would separate the fibers and use it to wrap around and half dead to this shaft. Then you would dribble resin probably from a tree that you would gather, you'd warm it up and you would dribble it around there to act as
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glue essentially to really bind it to this spear. And then you have a nice little hunting tool that you can use. One coveted material in ancient times was obsidian, like you can see here. It's a black volcanic rock. And if you strike it properly, you can get extremely sharp flakes from it. Flakes that are sharper actually than modern steel scalp. They're extremely, extremely sharp. And those are
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dangerous. I actually cut myself with obsidian at one point accidentally. And I was surprised that I didn't notice how deep the cut went. It was right across my arm. And unlike a paper cut, it did not hurt at all because that edge was so sharp. But it immediately started bleeding all over the place. I was surprised how quickly things got bad with it. I had to wrap it up pretty quickly. And you
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can imagine if this was 75,000 years ago and you had cut yourself like that, it could get pretty dangerous pretty quickly. They didn't have antibiotics. There was no hospital to run to. So however important napping tools was, it was also a dangerous occupation. Now let's jump forward in time to ancient Egypt in the 2000s BC. You get up in the morning and you're going to want some food.
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You're probably going to grab some bread and some beer. Then you're going to go about your day. This was the era when they were making the pyramids. You would actually get to see them as they're being constructed. You might also go and talk to someone who was making actual mummies. It was a very big industry in Egypt at the time and odds are good. You would know someone who was working
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on those kind of things. One real delight in the book was the chance to recreate lost recipes and eat foods that people would have eaten thousands of years ago. In Egypt especially, I found the food absolutely delicious. Bread was really the main food that Egyptians ate. They're staple food. And I got to meet someone who actually recreated an Egyptian style loaf of bread in his backyard.
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He was a bit fanatical about it. He went over to Egypt. He cultured the yeast that they would have used way back then. He sourced some heirloom grains to make this bread. He even got the right type of wood that they would have used in Egypt for the fire pit in his backyard. Then he had some friends make a conical mold the way that they would have in ancient Egypt. And he cooked this bread in his backyard and let me try some of it. And I have to say this was the best loaf
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of bread I have ever eaten in my life. It was so delicious. It was very simple recipe, however. It was just emmer the grain that they used for flour. Emmer, coriander, salt, yeast, and that's it. The taste of it was delicious, perfectly balanced, a nice springy crust on the outside. And the bread that I ate was two days old and we had warmed it up in the company microwave. If I had gotten this
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bread fresh out of the ground, it would have been absolutely delicious. It would have drawn braves in any bistro in New York or Paris I'm convinced. The other treat from ancient Egypt was getting to make Egyptian style beer. They used emmer as the main grain in there with some barley mixed it. And it tasted a little different from modern beer that we think of because they didn't use hops in the
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beer. Hopps imparts a bitter flavor to beer. And without the hops, it actually tasted a lot more like a sour beer that you might get today. Which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. They were out there in the sun dragging blocks around the sun beating down on them. You want something a little sour it quenches the thirst. These were a lot closer to a kambucha than they were to what
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we think of as a beer. One surprising fact about ancient Egypt is that we have no idea how they built their most iconic structures, the pyramids. There's a lot of information available about ancient Egypt and their writings and the hydro glyphs and pictures on the walls but they really did not address how they built their pyramids. So it's been a big mystery for thousands of years at this point. And experimental archaeology has not solved this mystery but it can do a lot in ruling
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out certain theories about how the pyramids were built. One important thing that they have ruled out is that ramps were probably not that useful in building the pyramids. You can imagine a big ramp to the top of the pyramid pushing a block up it maybe on a log roller or something like that. But in experiments that has failed completely. However nice log rollers look on paper they do not work well in the real world. They're not uniform they slip all over the place. It's a
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pain to get the log rollers at the back run them around to the front when you're holding a five ton block trying to push that up a hill. It's a real hassle to do that. And there are even big problems with the very idea of using a ramp. If you look at a pyramid make a scale sized pyramid and then start piling material up in front of it. You realize pretty quick that these ramps need to be incredibly long. Maybe even a mile or a mile and a half long to get all the way to the top of
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the pyramid. They also have to be incredibly broad because the material you might use sand cannot form a nice steep wall. So in building this ramp you're probably going to have to use as much or more material as you're putting into the pyramid itself. They probably use technology of some sort to winch or drag them up instead of just pushing them up a ramp. Mummies are one of the most iconic aspects of ancient Egypt. But we really don't know a lot of details about how they made
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mummies because they didn't record a lot of this information. Either they were trying to keep it a secret or it was just passed down from person to person and no one bothered writing it down. So even though we have a lot of mummies from ancient times we didn't know a lot of the details. And experimental archaeology turned out to be a really good way to investigate the process of mummification. Now a lot of scientists have looked at animal mummies. A lot of people don't realize
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it but the Egyptians mummified a lot more than just human beings. In fact they mummified millions upon millions of animals. There are graveyards in Egypt with 4 million dogs in it or 7 million birds. They really were creating these animal mummies on an industrial scale. So by making these mummies in modern times scientists can learn a lot about the overall process. And there have been a few rogue archaeologists who decided to make an Egyptian style human mummy in modern times.
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It was quite a controversial project. It took place in the 1990s in Baltimore with two people. One was an anatomist and one was an Egyptologist. Even though they got a lot of pushback from other archaeologists from bioethicist people like that they said this was a very important problem and they wanted to go forward to answer some of these mysteries. So someone had donated their body to science and they decided to use it to make this mummy. And the person I talked to for the book
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Bob Breyer actually went over to Egypt and he dug out the mineral that they were going to use as a drying agent in the body. So he was very committed to authenticity here. He also had a series of stone tools made, some from a bacidian or other stones, some from copper and they actually used that on the body to open it up. They had to open up a little hole to get the organs out, to dry those out. And then once they had the organs out they had to wash the inner cavity
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and then use the mineral that he had found in Egypt to dry the body out. And that mineral was a mix of baking soda and salt, a mineral called natron. And you can actually make some at home if you want. I did this in my home with a fish and actually mummified a fish. It was very, very easy to do. We think traditionally about a fish as being one of the smelliest animals out there. But I brought this fish home, never put it in refrigerator. I just put it in a casserole
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dish, put this baking soda and salt mixture over it, and a week or two later I had a perfect fish mummy. Then I wrapped it up in linen just like they did with the Egyptian mummies and it's still sitting on my counter today. And by making a human mummy they learned a lot about the process and solve some of the mysteries. One was how much natron you would even need to do this. They ended
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up meeting several hundred pounds of this. Another mystery was how long does it take? Ended up taking them about 70 days or so to make a human mummy. They had to change the natron in a few times but overall that's about how long it took. And one of the big mysteries that they wanted to solve was when we find an Egyptian mummy today, you can see the very weathered skin. It's usually changed
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color, gotten a little darker, the hair is very wispy and the skin is retracted on the face, kind of pulling back like this. And they wanted to know well was it the mummification process that had done that or the fact that they were sitting in a dry environment in Egypt for thousands of years. And even after four or five weeks with the human mummy in modern times, they realized that it was
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the mummification process that was doing this. The person I talked to, they cracked open the crust, looked at the mummy and he sort of gasped and he said, "Oh my God, this looks exactly like Ramses the Great from Egypt." He was stunned that in just a few weeks they had recreated an Egyptian style mummy. Now let's jump forward in time again to the ancient Roman Empire of around 180. You live
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outside the city in Avila and you're going to walk in along a Roman road. You're going to get into the city and you're going to get your hair done. You have a big ball that night and you want to impress some people. And after sitting there for a few hours of getting your hair done, you get a little hungry. So you go around the corner, you're dodging all of the filth in the street and you walk up to a little sidewalk stall and you order yourself a meal. One of the main ingredients
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in that road and in some ways one of the secrets of Roman architecture is the amazing concrete that they made. Concrete isn't really sexy material but the way the Romans made concrete has allowed a lot of their buildings, bridges and roads to stand even to this day. And archaeologists, when they would look at Roman concrete, they always thought they had made a bit of a mistake when making it. And that one of the big ingredients in concrete is a substance called quick lime. You mix
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it with water and it helps form a glue to bind the concrete together. And when archaeologists looked at Roman concrete, they would find big undigested lumps of quick lime in there. And they thought this was a mistake. You can imagine a loaf of bread in modern times. If you bid in and found a chunk of raw flour in there, you would think, "Okay, the baker didn't mix the flour as well as they should have." Archaeologists had the same sort of thought with the Roman concrete. They
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thought they made a mistake. But it turns out that that was not a mistake and actually was a key feature of Roman concrete. Modern concrete is quite good, quite strong, but it's prone to cracking. And once a crack starts, cracks widen very quickly. But with Roman concrete, a few archaeologists at MIT recreated some of it and they found something very interesting with this concrete. With normal concrete, when water gets in there, it freezes, it expands it, it can crack
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it apart. With Roman concrete, when water got in there, it would find these undigested chunks of quick lime and react with them and actually create a substance that filled the space. So it was essentially self-healing concrete. And because of that feature of their concrete, it strengthened it over time and actually allowed it to stand much longer than modern concrete does. One of my favorite people to talk to for the book was Janet Stevens of Baltimore. Stevens is a hairdresser,
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has no formal training in archaeology. She was at a museum and something intrigued her. She saw several busts of Roman matrons there and she as a hairdresser noticed their amazing hair. And she was especially interested in the backs of their hair because, you know, as a hairdresser, that's the part she's usually looking at. And she saw that these busts had these amazing hairstyles, these mountains of curls, these spirals around their hair. And she thought, "Wow, I want to go
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and try to recreate these hairstyles." So she went home, she had a few modeling dummies with hair on them that she uses to practice. Despite being an expert professional stylist, she could not recreate these hairstyles even with all the modern tools at her disposal. And she got curious and she thought, "Well, how did they actually make this hair then?" So she went to the archaeological literature and the classics literature, started looking up papers about Roman beauty,
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Roman hair styling. And she quickly realized that the people who wrote these articles had no idea what they were talking about. Just the way they would describe hair, the physics of hair, how to move it, how to pile it up, how to sculpt it, they didn't know what they were talking about. And so she decided, "Well, if someone's going to solve this mystery, it's going to be me." One obstacle
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to her solving this mystery was that she did not read Latin at all. In fact, she had failed Latin when she took it in school. But she was motivated this time. So she started tediously typing pages of Latin text into Google Translate line by line to try to figure out if she could find some clue as to how they made this hair. And a few years finally, into this project, she was typing yet
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another line into Google Translate and the penny dropped. She read a line about the needle that the tailor and the hairdresser used. And she realized, "Aha! They weren't sculpting this hair and pinning it up with bobby pins or bodkins or something like that. They were actually sewing people's hair into place using a needle and thread." After that, she went home, tried it out with a needle and thread,
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and was suddenly able to recreate any one of the hairstyles she wanted. And this hairdresser from Baltimore, who had no experience in archaeology, was able to actually publish a paper that revolutionized the field. And she's now one of the world's leading experts on Roman beauty and Roman hair styling. Roman food has always had a very bad reputation, mostly because of one ingredient that the Romans use in almost every dish that they made, a sauce called garum. For a long time,
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garum was translated as rotten fish sauce, as if they had taken a fish, let it decompose, and then squeezed the putra juices out and just dumped that all over their food. And as you can imagine, people thought that must have been disgusting. That sounds terrible. Why would you eat this food drenched in putrid fish sauce? And that sentiment prevailed until modern times when a few people who actually wore cooks or chefs read about the process of making it and they said, "Wait a
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second. This isn't rotten fish sauce. It's just fermentation. That's all they were doing. They were fermenting it under controlled circumstances, actually breaking the muscle of the fish down and producing a sauce that way." An equivalent in modern times is Thai fish sauce. People use that all the time and cooking, maybe even sprinkle a little bit on your food. It's a very common ingredient. And once people realize this, they realize it was actually a very versatile dish
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that you could use in a lot of meals. It has a nice umami flavor to it so that savoriness that you get with protein has a lot of salt in it too. So you can add a dash to kind of brighten a dish up. And the Romans loved it so much, this garum fish sauce, that they actually used it in desserts as well. Pretty much any dish that you can imagine, they would dump the fish sauce on it. And I don't know if all of us would want it in our desserts nowadays, but I have eaten some
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meals with this garum fish sauce. And I can tell you, it adds quite a nice kick to a lot of foods.
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Let's jump forward one more time to the AD 900s when the Vikings were running wild, pillaging and destroying villages all along the coast. Imagine you were in one of these villages, they rampaged through it and they attacked someone that you know and love. They cracked their skull with a big axe and they leave them lying and bleeding on the ground. And now it's your job to save them. You have to perform a surgery on them and then prevent that wound from getting
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infected. It sounds kind of startling to say, but one of the first surgeries that human beings ever performed was a type of neurosurgery called a trepination. So imagine someone gets hit on the head and there's skull craters in and there's bits of bone pressing against the brain. That's a very dangerous situation. It's offer brain damage, even die from that as pressure and blood builds
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up beneath the skull. And they would remove those broken bits of bone. That would allow any blood to seep out and would prevent it from pressing down on the brain and injuring the brain. So for the book, I actually got to try a trepination myself. I used a stone tool for it like you can see here, it's a piece of flint with some serrations on it. So it was kind of like a sawtooth piece of
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stone tool. And I tried it out on a deer skull. I essentially cut a triangular hole in the skull and then levered that bit of skull off. You can see right here, that is the piece of skull from the deer and there's a little bit of skin still adhering to it. And cutting this small piece, it's about the thickness of a bottle cap or so, took me about 90 minutes of work to do. And these were
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some of the worst 90 minutes that I had doing the book. This was an awful, awful chore. The stone tool actually worked quite well at first. I was surprised at how good it was slicing through skull for a lot because one disadvantage of stone tools, even though they're very sharp, is that they dull very quickly. They grind down little bits, start flaking off. And eventually you're left with a fairly dull tool where you're just sort of grinding away at it. So after the first cut
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was completed, this took me a very long time. It was a very big struggle. The other thing I didn't expect to happen was that I was outdoors while I was doing it a very warm day and flies started coming around. There were flies everywhere. They were in my hair, crawling in my shirt, crawling up my shorts, biting me, swarming all over the wound as I was shooing them away. I was also starting to
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sweat and there was blood and bodily fluids coming out of this deer skull that I was working on. It ended up being a gigantic, gigantic frustration for me. But in a way, that was actually a good thing because part of the experience of experimental archaeology is show you some of the frustrations and show you the things that people must have endured in ancient times as well. So one thing you might be wondering with trepanations is, well, didn't people die all the time? I mean, you
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have a big open wound on your head. You have flies crawling in it. They're going to cause infections. And the answer is people survived a lot more often than you might think. We have lots of examples of skulls with holes in them where you can see new bone growth around the rim of the skull, which proves that the person must have survived this trepanation. And especially in the Viking times,
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they would have had ways to combat infections. One way was discovered in what was called a leech book. Leeches yield slang for doctor. They would actually use leeches to draw blood off people. And in this leech book, a couple of modern scholars, one a historian and one a microbiologist, found some recipes that they thought might be plausible that would control infections. So they decided to test one. The recipe in the leech book called for a few ingredients. Onions, garlic, wine,
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and what was called ox gall, so bile from the liver of a cow. You had to mix this together in a copper bowl and then let that sit for about a week or so and then use that on an infection. And the book claimed that it was great with infections. It would really, really combat infections. But they wanted to see if that was true because the book had some other unusual recipes in it that didn't
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sound very plausible to them. So after making this mixture, the microbiologist tested it out in her lab. And she purposely chose some two pretty tough bacterial customers. One was staff and one was gonorrhea. And in modern times, both of these bacteria have shown a lot of resistance to drugs. So they're kind of running rampant in some people. It's very hard to control these infections. But it turned out that this mixture of onions, garlic, wine, and ox gall did a really nice job
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killing these drug resistant bacteria. She was surprised at how good they were. And in fact, she tried them in another even tougher test and they passed this test as well. Sometimes when bacteria get inside you, they form what's called a biofilm. So bacteria, they essentially lock their arms together and they secrete a mucus that blocks drugs from getting through. So it's a protective
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barrier that they produce inside living creatures. And these biofilms are actually one big reason why a lot of drugs that show promise in test tubes fail when they try them in living beings. But when they try this ancient mixture on biofilms, it busted right through and killed the bacteria anyway. She was very, very excited about this because biofilms are very difficult to overcome. They're actually developing this ancient recipe as a modern drug and moving forward into human
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trials with the goal of helping us combat some of these drug resistant modern strains. One nice lesson of this example is that knowledge isn't always a linear. I think we have sort of an idea that we're constantly accumulating knowledge that we knew more than people did 10 years ago, more than 20 years ago, more than a few centuries ago, and certainly more than people knew thousands of years ago. But that's not always the case. Sometimes knowledge does fall through the cracks.
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And this mixture was a really nice example of that, of something a doctor in the 900s would have immediately turned to, but that people nowadays would not have known unless they looked back. And we should probably give people in ancient times more credit for the real knowledge that they did have. One great thing about experimental archaeology is that it can reinvigorate people's love for the past. If you go to a museum and you start reading the displays,
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looking at the objects, that's a really nice experience. But that kind of knowledge has a pretty short half-life. It's probably not going to make that deep of an impression on you, and the knowledge will probably seep away pretty quickly. Imagine going to a museum and getting a slice of Roman bread or a quaff of Viking beer. Imagine getting to try on ancient leather clothing or get a whirlous spear at a dummy of a mastodon. It would really enliven the experience
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and bring it to a whole new level in your mind. And so a lot of people call the field not just experimental archaeology, but experiential archaeology, or even living archaeology, because it really brings the past alive in a new way. Part two, how do the Allies sabotage the Nazi atomic bomb? Chapter one, rumors of a Nazi atomic bomb. So imagine it's World War Two, and you are a scientist who's been kicked out of Nazi Germany and you've come to the United States,
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and you start to hear some rumors about some work going on in Germany about atomic bombs, and you are terrified. Because you know a few things about Germany. You know they have some of the best scientists in the world. You know they have a head start on important processes like fission that would help them make an atomic bomb. And you know they have the best industry in the world there. And most scary of all, Adolf Hitler is head of Germany at the time. He has shown himself to be
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ruthless in every other circumstance. And you think if he gets an atomic bomb in his hands, he is going to destroy the world. One thing that amplified a lot of scientists' fears was that they knew the Germans had also developed what they called their V-weapons. Essentially they were missiles. They could launch something in Germany, it could fly over to another country, and explode there. And nowadays we sort of take it for granted that missiles can fly hundreds or
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even thousands of miles. But to people back then this was a terrifying thought, that even if they had Germany surrounded, they could still launch weapons over the top and wipe out whole cities. Especially if they got atomic bombs mounted on the tops of those rockets. Werner Heisenberg, an atomic scientist living in Germany. One of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. A Nobel Prize winner, a brilliant, brilliant person. But he was working under the Nazi regime during World
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War II. And he was specifically working to help build an atomic bomb. One early experiment that he was doing was trying to create a chain reaction. Essentially in a chain reaction you have uranium atoms that split, they shoot neutrons off, these neutrons fly, they hit another uranium atom, that one splits, shoots more neutrons off. At each step it releases energy, and with each step as it
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progresses more and more energy gets released. So it's a chain reaction of events. Before this time, no one had ever been able to successfully produce a chain reaction in the lab, and Werner Heisenberg wanted to be the first one to do it. So he and his assistants built this giant sphere that had alternating layers of uranium and heavy water inside them. They put a neutron source in the
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very middle of this sphere and let it go and just started letting the chain reaction proceed to see what would happen. Unfortunately, part way through this experiment they realized that there was a leak. There was water leaking in to the uranium. And uranium does not react well with water. It's actually explosive when the two come into contact. This is not an atomic explosion, it's a regular
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chemical explosion. But it is a doozy. And so once they noticed water started leaking into there, they essentially panicked, fled the room, and a minute later, boom, there was a giant explosion as all this uranium and heavy water burst into flames. There were 20 foot flames roaring out of the top of the building. They had to call the fire department in to put it out, and this fire burned
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for two days. That's how hot and intense this fire was. Now again, this was just a regular chemical explosion. But Heisenberg was working on an atomic project. And as Heisenberg started to tell his colleagues about this failed experiment, essentially a game of telephone occurred, where one person got the details, told another person, changed the details a little bit, maybe even inadvertently. But as the story kept getting passed along from person to person,
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it changed a little bit. It wasn't just a chemical explosion anymore, it was a low-grade atomic chain reaction. And then things got even wilder. Switzerland was a neutral country during the war. So scientists from Germany could travel there, but scientists from allied countries like the US or England could travel there as well. And they would often meet in Switzerland and talk and exchange
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stories. And this story about Werner Heisenberg, supposedly atomic fire, got passed to allied scientists in Switzerland. They knew Germany was already working on an atomic bomb. And once they heard about this story about this supposed atomic explosion that occurred, they panicked. They ran right back to their countries, told everyone about it. And before long, in their minds, this was a small-scale atomic explosion with several people dead. Rumors were running wild about how
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close Germany was. In fact, one scientist at the University of Chicago after hearing this story did a few calculations on the blackboard, and he announced very gravely to his colleagues that Germany would have a bomb within six months. And it terrified them. And this is really where the Manhattan Project got going in earnest was once they realized that Germany might be a lot farther along than they feared. So various scientists started talking, and they said, "We have to
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take some action on this. We can't just be passive and let Germany potentially build an atomic bomb and not have a response for it. We need to start our own project to build an atomic bomb." But in addition to that, we need to start our own project to stop the Nazi atomic bomb project. And that is how the all-sauce mission got put together. Chapter 2, the Mission to Sabotage Hitler's Bomb. The essential goals of the mission were to spy on sabotage, and in some cases even tried
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to assassinate members of the Nazi atomic bomb project. There was a real motley crew of characters involved in this mission to stop the Nazi atomic bomb project. On the one hand, you had sort of the core all-sauce mission that was made up of military people and scientists. The military people came from the security branches of the Manhattan Project. The scientists usually came from the world of atomic science and atomic physics. And you just sort of threw them together
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and let them work. Kind of two different worlds coming together here. And there were often a lot of clashes about things like priorities, how to handle things. The scientists were a little more informal. The military people about the scientists were a little too lackadaisical. A real culture clash within this unit. But they had to figure out how to work together for this very important project. Despite its importance, the people involved really did not get a lot of
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training. These were scientists coming right out of the lab. They weren't used to being under fire, you know, running behind enemy lines, things like that. And the military people involved had no special knowledge of the science. They were just kind of winging it. But they didn't have a lot of other resources or precedent for what they were doing. So they just threw them out there and said,
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"Good luck boys, let's see what happens." In addition to that, you had sort of these peripheral side branches of this project. One involved what was called the OSS, which is the precursor to the CIA. But the OSS was not the sort of professional well-run organization that the CIA became in later times. The OSS was pretty freewheeling and in fact sort of chaotic in a lot of cases. They recruited
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a major league baseball player named Mo Berg to be an atomic spy to go into Europe, slip in their undercover and try to fair it out whatever he could about the Nazi atomic bomb project. Now it sounds kind of strange on the face of it that you would recruit a major league baseball player as the first atomic spy in history. But Berg was not your typical average major league baseball player. He could speak five or six languages fluently. He was friends with Albert Einstein.
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He was the perfect person for this role. And in addition to that, you had another military branch that was essentially developing weapons that could potentially wipe out any atomic bunkers that the Nazis did build. Different branches of the mission were working on different goals at the same time. You had the core OSS unit in Europe who were trying to push toward the front lines and gather
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up any material or people that they could find. One early success of theirs was they were one of the first military units to actually get into Paris during its liberation. Even when the Nazis were still gunning people down in the streets trying to defend Paris, the lead avant-garde of the all-sauce mission was running in there trying to get to a few atomic scientists there. Most importantly was Frederick Joliot, who was the husband of Irene Joliot-Kierry, the daughter of
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Marie Curie, a very famous and prominent scientist who had in fact pioneered a lot of the atomic research and the chain reaction research that underlay the atomic bomb. Then you had another mission in Norway that was going after one of the key ingredients in the Nazi atomic bomb, a substance called heavy water. So compared to regular water, heavy water is obviously a bit heavier. There's essentially an extra subatomic particle on the hydrogen in H2O. And it has a
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lot of nice properties when you're trying to build and test atomic equipment and get chain reactions going. The Nazis were very dependent on heavy water from a plant in Norway. In fact, that was the only place in the world that was producing heavy water at the time. And so the people in charge of the all-sauce mission decided we cannot let this plant survive. So they snuck a few commandos undercover into Norway who spent several days trekking through the snow and ice.
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They infiltrated this plant and they destroyed all of the heavy water cells in there. It's one of the big first success stories of the all-sauce mission and it really delayed and damaged the Nazi atomic bomb project. So that was one of the very big successes that they had. In many ways, all-sauce was an unconventional mission with unconventional people on the front line. But there were conventional military aspects to the overall project as well. One important event here was the
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bombing of Pienemut, which is where the Nazis were building all of the rockets they were launching into England and other places. The Allies feared that here the Nazis were going to build the rockets they would use to deliver atomic weapons. So they decided to wipe it out and prevent any prospect of that happening. One important aspect of the all-sauce mission was espionage, gathering information about what the German scientists were up to and where they were getting material and
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storing their material. After hunting down some leads and interrogating some scientists, they finally managed to track down a warehouse with several tons of raw uranium ore in it. They seized it immediately, not only to get it out of Nazi hands, but to get it over to the United States for our Manhattan Project. And most of that uranium ended up in the bomb that got dropped in Hiroshima the next year. In terms of the core espionage mission, they were on the front lines. They
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were often in fact beyond the front lines in enemy territory while there was shooting going on both sides. One group led by Boris Pash were some of the first people in Paris during its liberation. They were under fire the entire time they were doing that. The ex-major league baseball player Mo Berg went undercover and snuck into Switzerland posing as a graduate student. While he was there,
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he attended a lecture by none other than Werner Heisenberg, and Berg entered the lecture room that day with a pistol in one pocket and a cyanide pill in the other. And his mission was, if Heisenberg said anything about them being close to making an atomic bomb, Berg was supposed to stand up and shoot Heisenberg dead right there in the middle of the lecture. Then he was supposed to try to
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get away, but if he didn't, he had that cyanide pill to take to kill himself right there. He was under a lot of danger and a lot of pressure and easily could have died undertaking this mission. And then you had people who were trying to wipe out the Nazi atomic bunkers. This included Joseph Kennedy, the older brother of John F. Kennedy, the future president. Essentially they were trying to
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fly what were drone airplanes, so they would have a big bomber airplane that they were going to pack with explosives, fly it across the English channel, and ram it into a Nazi atomic bunker, which would have been a pretty good idea, a pretty big conventional bomb. But the problem was, these drone airplanes could not take off on their own. They could fly on their own but not take off. So they needed pilots to volunteer to get in these planes packed with explosives, get them off
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the runway, point them toward their target, and then eject out of these flying bombs. And Joseph Kennedy volunteered to be one of these people, a very brave mission, and he ended up losing his life because of it. The death of John F. Kennedy's older brother Joe really changed the dynamics of the Kennedy family. He was Joseph Kennedy Jr., the firstborn son. And he had been the one that their
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father had always groomed for the presidency. And their father actually said at one point that John would not amount to a whole lot. Joe was going to be the big star. But with Joe dead, they had to put all of their time and energy and passion into John instead. And he became the president.
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Chapter 3. Ethical Dilemmas in the Atomic Age The goal of the Alsace mission was to stop the Nazi atomic bomb project, however they could. And some historians think there were also people on the inside in Germany were trying to do those same things. In particular, Werner Heisenberg always claimed later that he deliberately slowed the Nazi atomic bomb project down so that they would not make progress. Not outright sabotage, but not working as hard as they could. It's a
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very controversial claim and a lot of people don't believe Heisenberg. They think he was just doing that to make himself look good after the war. But it is an open question about how much the Germans were trying to build a bomb and how much they were dragging their feet knowing that Adolf Hitler would ruin the world if he got his hands on one. So they had to decide how much they wanted
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to weigh those two things, saving Germany versus empowering one of the worst dictators of all time. There were also ethical dilemmas for scientists on the other side working in the Manhattan Project. A lot of them got started with the project because they had been run out of Nazi Germany and they hated Adolf Hitler. They were happy to build a bomb to take Hitler out. But once Germany lost the
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war, they suddenly realized that, uh-oh, now we're still fighting Japan, we don't want to necessarily use this bomb on Japan. But by that point, the test had gone so far and there was a momentum to the project that they would not be able to stop. So a lot of them felt very conflicted about the idea of using it on Japan when they had originally built it to go after Adolf Hitler. Some scientists
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at the time said they didn't want to use the atomic bomb on Japan, they wanted to give Japan a demonstration, show them how deadly it was before we actually used it on innocent people. But the military said no about that, they wanted to use it in war. And a lot of scientists, most famously Robert Oppenheimer, expressed regrets about this afterward. "We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed. Few people cried. Now I am to come death, the destroyer of
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worlds. I suppose we all fought that one way or another." They wished they had pushed harder for a test or tried to stop it in some way, but that's not the way history turned out. The big success of the All-Saus mission was in figuring out that Germany was not going to be able to build an atomic bomb by the war's end. What this result did was it allowed the Allied planners, people like Dwight Eisenhower and the other generals to get their focus off of big surprises, atomic bombs,
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and they could focus on what they knew well, which was conventional warfare. Essentially, it was a big relief for them to not have to worry about this wild card. Germany suddenly coming up with something that would turn the tides of the war in their favor. So it was a big relief for them to know that we were going to win the war if we just kept doing what we were doing. Toward the end of the war, the All-Saus mission captured most of the key players in the Nazi atomic bomb project
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and brought them to England where they put them up at a big country estate and just put them under house arrest, essentially. And when news broke of the atomic bomb that had dropped in Hiroshima, they were absolutely stunned to hear that the United States had built an atomic bomb when mighty Germany had failed at the project. They could not believe that anyone had beaten them the greatest scientists in the world. After Nazi Germany fell, there was sort of a scramble
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to grab all of the greatest scientists that they could. And this happened on both sides of what would become the Iron Curtain. The Allies were scooping up scientists like Verner von Braun, who went on to NASA to become one of the most famous scientists and one of the most famous people in the United States. But the Soviet Union was sweeping up scientists too. This was an early skirmish actually in the Cold War, was grabbing these scientists and pitting them against each
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other in building things like missiles and other weapons. The Manhattan Project changed the world by ushering in the atomic age. And I don't think actually we would have atomic bombs nowadays, if not for the fear that we had of Adolf Hitler getting an atomic bomb first. One of the best scientists of the 20th century, Niels Bohr, famously said that there was no way anyone could build an atomic bomb. And his reason wasn't that the science was too hard. He said, "You
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couldn't do it because you would have to turn your entire country into a factory to refine enough uranium or to get the plutonium for an atomic bomb. He just didn't think anyone would make that commitment." And probably no country would have, except the United States had scientists terrified about Adolf Hitler. The Manhattan Project was one of the biggest industrial projects in history. It cost two billion dollars in 1945 money. It was a massive project. They would never have
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been able to justify the cost without that fear driving them. A few things about the Nazi ideology really interfered with their ability to carry out atomic research. One was the fact that they didn't like Jewish people and they kicked a lot of very smart scientists out of Europe who ended up coming to the United States and playing key roles on our Manhattan Project. We certainly would not
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have built an atomic bomb without the influx of talent from Nazi Germany. And the other aspect was that a lot of Nazis were just sort of snobs. They figured they were the most advanced civilization in the world and that no other nation could possibly reach the same levels that they did, especially not a Yahoo country like the United States. There were many scientists in Germany who were stunned to hear that the United States of all countries had built an atomic bomb where
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they had failed to. They were so blinded by their own supposed superiority that they never considered another country would beat them. If the Nazi atomic bomb project had not failed, we would live in a much different world. And even if Hitler had never used the bombs per se, just the threat of it, the thought of him having the bombs would have really changed everything about how we negotiated what lands we were willing to give up. Hitler could have overrun Europe and
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completely dominated the continent or he would have moved into Asia and Africa. He might have even gone over to North America or farther and tried to conquer that. With atomic bombs, he was basically omnipotent. He could do whatever he wanted. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think members community where you get access to videos early? Add free.
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