Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime. When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping Kroger for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices, plus extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week, and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points so you can get big flavors and big savings, Kroger, fresh for everyone, fuel restrictions apply. Sometimes it may not seem like it, but everything in this universe is connected in all kinds of unseen ways. Humans have always known that chaos is a capricious and fickle thing, something that can show up when you least expect it. I find this aspect of history fascinating. Here's the butterfly effect, the concept that a butterfly flapping its wings in China will set off a complex domino effect in the atmosphere that somehow results in a low pressure wave blasting from Africa across the Atlantic, causing a hurricane in the Caribbean. Now that really doesn't happen in the real world. This was a metaphor created by a meteorologist and mathematician named Edward Norton Lawrence back in 1963 when he discovered that a minuscule change in atmospheric conditions, he ascribed a value as tiny as 0.00127, could make an enormous difference down the road. This shows why it's so hard to forecast the weather. A little difference can add complexity and instability to a very large system. Remember that Treehouse of Horror episode from The Simpsons where Homer accidentally turned a toaster into a time machine? He travels into the past where he manages to screw up the future multiple times by making tiny, tiny mistakes. This is based on a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury entitled A Sound of Thunder. A man named Eccles goes back in time and kills a dinosaur. And when he returns to the present, everything is different. We hear about black swan events, these random things that no one expects and no one could have possibly predicted yet they happen and suddenly everything changes. COVID-19 was an example of that. There spawned the virus, bats, infected animals in a wet market, a lab leak. It started as something very, very small, but ended up changing the lives of everyone on the planet. We can also apply this sort of investigation to the world of music. If you pick a topic or thing, you can often trace it back to something that illustrates the wonderful and awful randomness of the universe. This is another episode that I call Connections. This is the ongoing history of new music podcast with Alan Cross. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross and welcome to another show about the unseen and unknown connections that exist in the universe of music. And like previous shows on this topic, I'm hoping that by the time we're finished, you won't look at certain things the same way ever again. Now full disclosure, this series was inspired by a BBC show called Connections hosted by James Burke. He masterfully wove together stories about history by pulling on threads that, at first glance, had nothing to do with each other. Yet out of all this chaos and complexity, our modern life was born. Can we do this with rock music? Absolutely. It requires a ton of research, some serious imagination, and all kinds of unexpected discoveries, but it can be done. And just wait until we get to the end of this particular episode. I have one theory that I think will completely and utterly blow your mind. Let's start with something fairly simple, the term rock and roll. It is connected, if we follow things far back enough, to firing flaming rats out of giant cannons. Let me explain. Humans have been trying to blow stuff up for centuries. The Chinese came up with gunpowder sometime in the 9th century, and they used it for both fireworks and as weaponry, and this is where the rats come in. An army would stuff live rats into long hollow tubes packed with gunpowder. They would then shoot the rats, now completely on fire, toward the enemy. You can imagine the psychological effect that had. Gunpowder also led to the concept of a bomb, an incendiary device that exploded with great force destroying people and property. Such devices were also put to use in excavating mines to get at coal or whatever minerals were down there. The trick was in setting off the bomb without hurting yourself. In 1745, a British physician named William Watson invented the first version of the blasting cap. It used an electric spark ignited from a distance that would set off some gunpowder resulting in an explosion. Years later, Benjamin Franklin refined the idea, and over the next 100 years or so, various inventors figured out ways to safely blow stuff up using a version of Watson's original design of a blasting cap. But there were still dangers. Blasting caps could explode on their own. It wouldn't be a big bang, but depending on the design, it could be enough to really hurt someone. Over the decades, many blasting caps went astray, sometimes in places where they could be found by unsuspecting children, which is exactly what happened to Louis Hardin on July 4, 1932. Louis was out in a field near his home in rural Kansas, and he found a funny looking thing on the ground. It turned out to be a dynamite cap, a blasting cap. It blew up in his face, and he was permanently blinded. Fortunately, he had a loving sister who looked after him, reading him book after book after book. She read him philosophy, myths, and legends, and plenty of science. And somewhere along the way, Louis vowed to become a composer of music. He went to several schools specializing in teaching music to the blind. He got a scholarship, he learned music theory from books written in Braille, and Louis became pretty adept. In 1943, he moved to New York, determined to meet the most famous conductors of the day. Standing outside stage doors, he eventually met Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Tuscanini, Benny Goodman, and Charlie Parker. Many days were spent performing on the street, and Louis became well known and loved by the city's jazz musicians. Sometime in 1947, he started calling himself "Moon Dog." He once knew a dog that loved the howl at the moon, and he liked that imagery. He even wrote and recorded an instrumental piece called "Moon Dog Symphony." Now, let's listen to the original 78 RPM release on a label called SMC. Here is "Moon Dog," playing drums, maracas, gourds, bells, Chinese blocks, cymbals, and even a hollow log. Now, let's slide over to Cleveland, and radio station WJW, where a fast-talking DJ named Alan Freed, was making a name for himself by playing R&B records by black performers for an audience of white kids. One of the records Freed loved was "Moon Dog Symphony." It was raw, tribal, and had a beat that he could talk over. So, he basically co-opted "Moon Dog Symphony" as his own. Freed started referring to his radio show as "The Moon Dog House," and he was "King of the Moon Doggers." He also started hosting the world's first rock concerts, something that he called "Moon Dog Balls." Now, the original "Moon Dog" didn't know any of this until Freed got a job at W.I.N.S. in New York City, where he continued his Cleveland's "Moon Dog" shtick. "Moon Dog" heard about it, and he wasn't sensed. So, in 1956, he filed a lawsuit against Freed and W.I.N.S. for infringement. "You can't call anything "Moon Dog." I'm the original "Moon Dog," he said. I have been since 1947, long before that Freed character started using my name. "Moon Dog" won the case, and Freed had to pay $6,000 in damages, and also had to promise that he would never use the word "Moon Dog" again. This created a professional crisis for Creed. He needed a new catchphrase. After calling together some buddies for a drinking session, someone, maybe Freed himself, came up with the idea of going back into the history of R&B records, specifically, a 1951 release by Billy Ward and the Dominoes called "60-Minute Man." This was released on federal records in the spring of 1951, and Freed would have certainly played this on his show in Cleveland. Then, yes, this record was all about sex, the ability to go on for 60 minutes, or in African American slang terms, rockin' and rollin' them all night long. Freed also knew that this black slang term for sex went at least as far back as the 1920s, at least on record, and it had probably been in use as a slang term for much longer. And so, the story goes that Freed decided to call what he did, and the music he played on his radio show, "Rock and Roll." He knew what it meant, the kids in the audience knew what it meant, but white parents had no clue, so it was the perfect secret code, and it worked great. Freed was monstrously popular in New York, and because he declared that he played rock and roll records, all this new music, and remember it was brand new, was branded as rock and roll. He even tried to trademark the term, so no one else could use it, but that didn't work up. From Freed's radio show, the term spread everywhere, and thus a new genre was born that endures today. So, the next time you go to a rock concert, and they have "Pyro," just remember that all this began, with the Chinese firing flaming rats at their enemies. Our next connection stories involves another long and winding road. In 1805, a Swiss physician named Gaspart Viseau was inundated with patients suffering from a sudden high fever, a stiff neck, and very bad headaches and seizures and confusion. Many of them died. Autopsies revealed that the protective membranes that covered the brain and spinal cord, membranes known as meninges, were terribly inflamed. Viseau was also a student of the history of medicine, so he may have realized that this was a condition first described by Hippocrates. But this 1805 outbreak in Geneva seems to be the first widespread epidemic. Viseau called the disease meningitis. Meningitis was a ferocious disease, with a mortality rate as high as 90%. If a patient did recover, there was inevitable damage to the nervous system, which included deafness, epilepsy, and changes in behavior. It wasn't until 1944 that penicillin proved to work against bacterial meningitis, but it was powerless against viral meningitis. The disease can spread easily, too, coughing, sneezing, using shared utensils and cigarettes. They can all transmit meningitis from person to person. Sometime in 1963, a seven-year-old boy from a rough part of London named John fell ill. He was always playing outside with his friends. And because it was London, it was always raining, which left pools of standing water. And because it was a rough part of London, there were rats. And those rats loved those pools of water. John contracted spinal meningitis, probably from playing in those puddles invested with rats in his yard. He got very, very sick. Hallucinations, headaches, nausea. He was taken to St. Anne's Hospital, and John slipped into a coma that lasted for seven months. He didn't make it home for an entire year. When he was finally discharged, John just wasn't the same. Not only did the illness wipe out four years of his memories. He couldn't remember his name, he couldn't remember his mom, his dad, or anything. But the constant spinal taps he had to endure as part of his treatment left him with a permanent curvature of the spine. He also, eventually, remembered the indifferent and sometimes cruel treatment he received in the hospital. So imagine coming home and not remembering anything. You're now about eight years old. John says that it was a struggle, a fight to figure out who he was. His memories did come back over a period of about four years, but the whole time shaped him for the rest of his life. He suffered tremendous guilt for not knowing everything his parents did for him during the time he was ill. One of the neurological legacies of meningitis, along with a slight hunch from the curved spine, was a piercing stare. And personality-wise, it was a changing behavior. John became a contrarian, a questioner of the status quo, and fiercely independent. Those were the behavioral side effects of the disease. He was bullied in school, something that taught him to fight back. At 15, he was kicked out of school because he wouldn't listen to any of his teachers. His father hated his long hair, so while he did cut it as ordered, he also died at green. Meanwhile, John was determined to reclaim the forgotten parts of his life. So he became a voracious reader, spending time alone in his room or at the library. His other passion became music, the Stooges, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Captain B.Fart, they were all favorites. By 1975, John was hanging around with a bunch of other misfits at a clothing shop called "Sex." It just so happened that the place was run by a wannabe fashion mogul and music manager named Malcolm McLaren, and he had the idea of forming a band that would become a living breathing advertisement for his store. McLaren was impressed not only by John's self-made "I Hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt, but by his stare, that hunch, and his slightly green teeth. John auditioned for lead singer of the band by singing along to Alice Cooper's "I'm 18" on the storage jukebox. He got the gig, was put together with three other hangers on, and they became known as the "Sex Pistols." And we all know the massive effect they had on not just punk, but rock music, period. How different would our music have turned out, had it not been for a bunch of rat infested puddles in the Holloway area of North London? I want you to hold on to that thought about now. Malcolm McLaren and his clothing shop on the King's Road in London. Our next connection story involves that. When you need mealtime inspiration, it's worth shopping Kroger for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices. Plus, extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week, and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points, so you can get big flavors and big savings. Kroger, fresh for everyone, fuel restrictions apply. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Back in the late 90s, I was a co-founder of Beetleology Magazine. We interviewed people who knew the Beatles and celebrities who collected the Beatles. We're releasing those recordings for the first time, and you'll hear Mark Hamill tell a classic story about meeting George Harrison on a plane. You'll hear Springsteen drummer Max Weinberg talk about what happened backstage the night John Lennon was assassinated, and why Bill Maher admired Lennon's political incorrectness. It's a fascinating collection of interviews. Catch our special Beatles series on the Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly podcast feed. This is another episode in an occasional series I call Connections. The goal is to bring together seemingly unrelated bits of history to explain why things are the way they are today, and as we pull on some of these threads, we're led down some interesting rat holes, and here's another one. Back in perhaps the 14th century BC, the Mycenians of the ancient Greek civilization invented something called a fibula. It was a metal device consisting of a pin used by both men and women to keep their tunics in place. They worked, but they often fell off leading to some, well, embarrassing moments. The fibula endured for centuries pretty much unchanged. Then, in 1849, an American mechanic and inventor named Walter Hunt had a problem. He owed $15, a huge sum at the time, for services rendered by a draftsman who drew up plans for some of his inventions, and this guy demanded to be paid. Hunt was forced to devote any profits from his next invention to paying off that debt. Fortunately, he had an idea. He took a fibula design and added a clasp that covered the point and kept it from opening. The pin itself was bent in a circular twist in the middle, creating a spring, and that spring and that clasp kept the fibula from opening. No more getting stuck, no more clothing falling off, and he called it the safety pin. To raise money to pay off that debt, he sold the patent to a company called WR Grace for $400. That's about $15,000 in today's money. The draftsman was paid, and Hunt went off to invent a new type of shirt collar, a machine for making nails, and a boat that could be used in icy waters. Every time, he sold off the patent's cheap, meaning that despite his prolific output, he never became rich. Meanwhile, WR Grace made millions off his safety pin. He pins are extremely useful, especially for tailors and seamstresses, parents with children and diapers, and anyone who needs to hold a couple of pieces of cloth together without having to resort to a needle and thread. Specialized versions even became useful in certain areas of medicine and surgery. Fast forward to the very late 1960s. Richard Myers, dropped out of high school after his father died, and moved from Kentucky to New York City with a dream of becoming a poet. And while some of his works did get published, even in Rolling Stone, being a poet isn't exactly what you'd call a lucrative gig. By 1972, he was playing guitar in a band called the Neon Boys. In 1973, they convinced the owner of a country in blues bar to give them a Sunday night residency. That bar was CBGB, and over the next half-dozen years, it became ground zero for the birth of punk rock. Soon, Richard Myers was going by the name Richard Hell, and the Neon Boys had morphed into a group called Television. Richard's attitude and image were very punk, even for anyone who had started to apply that word to a certain type of music. Richard was also desperately poor. Again, there wasn't a lot of money coming in from the poet gig, and the Neon Boys and Television weren't exactly cash cows. With absolutely no choice, Richard began wearing his clothes until they fell apart. Actually beyond that. And after they started tearing and the stitching wore out, he would hold together his shirts and whatever else with, you guessed it, safety pins. This is where we come back to Malcolm McLaren. He'd come to New York with the idea of scouting a band that he could manage, and as he was making friends with the New York Dolls, the group that would become his first client, he spotted Richard and his safety pin heavy wardrobe. Malcolm thought this was brilliant, a fashion statement like no other, and when he went back to his clothing shop in London called Sex, he told his partner, the future superstar designer Vivian Westwood, about what he'd seen. And together, they started making clothes for the customers that used a lot of deliberately and strategically torn fabric held together with safety pins. These outfits were a huge hit with their clientele, the very same people who were part of the still coalescing punk rock scene in London, punk rock fashion started to involve liberal use of safety pins, something that continues today. So the next time you see a punk kid decked out in gear featuring safety pins, know that none of that would have happened without the ancient Mycenians, an inventor who consistently sold himself short, and a very poor poet musician from Lexington, Kentucky. Blank generation from the Voidoids featuring Richard Hale, the punk who accidentally made the safety pin fashionable. For our next set of connections, we're going to link a deadly volcanic explosion to the cure. Okay, here's how it's done. The Earth's crust is broken up into a series of tectonic plates that are slowly rubbing against each other. Along the fault lines, we see active volcanoes that periodically lose their minds. Mount Tambora is in Indonesia's Ring of Fire, a highly active volcanic zone caused by strong tectonic activity. Before 1815, Mount Tambora was over 14,000 feet high, but then on April 5, 1815, a series of eruptions began, followed by a massive boom on April the 10th. It was the largest volcanic explosion in recorded human history and the biggest of the last 10,000 years. It was heard 2,000 kilometers away, and the resulting shockwaves travel around the world several times. The top 1500 meters of the mountain were blown off, injecting 129 cubic kilometers of dirt and dust and whatever into the atmosphere. This was very bad for the people of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, but it was also bad for the climate of the planet in general. There was so much CO2, sulfur, dust, ash, and various aerosols introduced into the atmosphere that a significant amount of solar radiation was blocked as this cloud drifted everywhere. 12 months later, the entire planet saw the year without a summer where temperatures dropped between 1 and 4 degrees Celsius. That meant cold, dreary, and rainy summers. Crops failed. Rivers that normally flowed all year round froze over in the winter, and when the sun did come out, the sun rises and sunsets were wild displays of red, orange, and yellow thanks to all the dust. It was during this summer, on the shore of Lake Geneva, that 18-year-old Mary Shelley, and her future husband, the poet Percy Bischelli, visited some friends in a mansion called Villa Diodari. While it was supposed to be a nice warm summer vacation, it was cold, stormy, and wet. It was awful. It was nothing to do but sit around inside. During a particularly bad stretch in June, the group entertained themselves by telling ghost stories, and was during those dark, miserable nights that Mary came up with the plot for a novel that she would call Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus. There's an argument to me made that Frankenstein was the first science fiction novel, but it also laid the foundations for gothic literature, stories of horror, romance, and the supernatural. Other authors picked up on that threat, setting their stories in gloomy, isolated castles featuring melodramatic characters who were in the throes of madness and death, Dracula and Wuthering Heights are just two examples. Beginning in the 1920s, stories of vampires, Dracula, and Frankenstein were made into movies, kicking off an endless supply of monster and horror movies for the next several decades. By the time we got to the 1960s, this ultra-noir look at the world had begun to affect music. Jim Morrison and the Doors were definitely influenced by gothic styles. Others think of songs like The End when their first album. The Velvet Underground went in this direction, and even Alice Cooper brought a cartoonish view of gothic thinking to the mainstream. When punk rock started to blow up in 1976, young artists began looking for inspiration beyond blues-based rock. Given the tough economic times in the UK, many drifted toward the dark thoughts they were having about their prospects in life in general. At the same time, rock had become more theatrical. Think David Bowie and all his characters, the British glam scene, Lou Reed in this shifting image and the New York Dolls and their whole shtick. What we got was a lot of costumes and makeup. Dramatic and overwrought Victorian era clothing, the kind of clothes Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker might have worn, came into vogue, and it paired well with some of the music being made. In January 1979, Bajaus released a nine-minute debut single entitled Bella Lugosi's Dead, with lyrics about vampires and bats and bell towers. Around the same time, Joy Division emerged out of Manchester with dark songs sung in a deep and dramatic way by singer Ian Curtis, who of course died by suicide in May 1980, adding even more drama and gloom. There were plenty of other like-minded groups too, Susan the Banshees, magazine, Alien Sex Fiend, the first single from Kate Bush, called Wuthering Heights in case you forgot, and The Cure. It only seemed natural to describe these groups and their music as gothic, or goth for short. Writers like Dave Marsh and Nick Kent began to use the term, and more groups followed, Adam and the Ants, Nick Cave and the Birthday Party, sex gang children. And fans, always looking for a little bit of fun, started adopting uniforms made of velvet, capes, collars, ruffles and makeup, largely drawn from gothic Victorian England. Clubs with names like The Bat Cave gave them a place to gather. Today, Gothrock is one of the largest subgenres of music on the planet, stretching around the globe, including Indonesia. I visited a club there once, and the first song I heard was from the Sisters of Mercy. And I wonder how many people in that dark room realized that this song was only possible because of one of their volcanoes that exploded, just over there, back in 1815. Two more connection stories to go. We'll speak of how a harvesting machine resulted in the birth of rock, plus how something from our world made music possible in the first place. You will definitely want to hear these stories. Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator, facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from HistoryHit, twice a week leading experts and academics delve into our distant past and discover secrets thought lost to the sands of time. And me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the Ancients from HistoryHit. This is another show about how everything in the universe is connected, if you look hard enough. I have two more stories that look at music from a height of about 35,000 feet, and even higher. Let's start with a man named Eli Whitney. Starting in 1619, Africans were brought to America to work as slaves. Many ended up on the cotton plantations in the deep self. It was cruel, inhuman, back-breaking work that all had to be done by hand. And as demand for American cotton increased, so did the demand for slaves to do all the unpaid labor. But then technology intervened, and a machine called the Shurka, a cotton picking machine from India, was introduced into the United States. This idea was taken up by Eli Whitney to create the "Cotton Gin", a shortened version of "The Cotton Engine", which he patented on March 14, 1794. His invention could clean up to 50 pounds of cotton lint per day, then 100 pounds, then 200 pounds. It was much faster and more efficient than what slaves could do. Then on January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, stating that "All persons held as slaves in the South are and henceforth shall be free." This of course happened as the Civil War was raging, which was all about the South wanting to keep slavery. Part of the deal was that each former slave got a plot of land, the 40 acres in a mule concept. It was great in theory, but because of the cotton gin and because of the world's demand for cotton fabric, plantation owners had the opportunity to use this technology to scale up. And the only way to scale up was to acquire more land. And where did they grab a lot of that land from? The former slaves were their 40 acres. They were either bought out for a pittance or chased off their property. Meanwhile, there were former slaves who never got any land, or had no interest in staying on a farm in the deep south, thanks to pervasive racism and institutional barriers like the Jim Crow laws. This led to something known as the Great Migration. At least 6 million blacks moved from the American South to northern, midwestern, and western states. This began in the late 1800s and really kicked off by about 1910. It was a major, major demographic shift with major, major social implications. Just one of those implications has to do with music. Some of these people relocated from the countryside to cities like New Orleans, where old black music, some of it dating from hundreds of years earlier, continued to morph and evolve. And the result was jazz. Others moved to places like Memphis and St. Louis, where blues traditions took root and became their own thing. Similar resettlement to Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Detroit also resulted in vibrant and exciting black music scenes. These sounds eventually mixed with other genres, country, western, hillbilly, and folk. Those arrangements became more sophisticated and elaborate. New rhythms were introduced, resulting in what we now call rhythm and blues. And by the time we get to the early 1950s, all these sounds are commingling. And this was the birth of rock and roll. Three other things happened at the same time. First, the big radio networks from New York that used to provide programming for radio stations all across the United States turned their attention to a new thing called television. Those national radio shows were canceled, leaving hours of the broadcast day empty. So the cheapest way was to fill those hours was to hire a guy for $50 a week to spin records. As a result, the number of radio DJs went from about 250 in the entire country to more than 5,000 by the end of the 1950s. Most of them got to pick their own music, and many of them were into rock and roll and rhythm and blues. With so many DJs and so many radio stations, big and small, playing this music, it spread fast. And there was a new audience. Before World War II, the standard path of growing up was, "You were a child, and then, boom, you were an adult." After the war, a new demographic group was invented, the teenager. Not quite children, not quite adults, but somewhere in between. And there were a lot of them. These were the young baby boomers, and after the horrors of the war, they wanted their own world, and that included their own music. And that music was rock and roll. The fact that their parents hated it made it even better. Still not done. Then something happened in a lab. Engineers were looking to replace the Vacuum Tube, the device that powered radios, TVs, and virtually every other electronic device. Vacuum tubes were fragile, power-hungry, generated a lot of heat, and took up a lot of space. In 1948, a team at Bell Labs unveiled the transistor, a miraculous replacement for the Vacuum Tube. It allowed for bulky electronic devices to be made much smaller and more reliable. The first transistor-powered device was a hearing aid. The second was a radio. The transistor radio was a game-changer. For the first time ever, music was completely portable. You could take your radio anywhere with zero hassle. Teenagers demanded them so they could hear their rock and roll on their terms and schedule, and most importantly, away from the prying ears of their parents. Now consider this. Rock and roll on the radio was the social media of its day. New ideas and concepts and messages traveled far and wide, reaching every corner of North America and beyond. So this means the transistor radio was a delivery mechanism for the musical revolution, the social revolution, the political revolution, and the sexual revolution that followed through the late '50s and into the 1960s. And now, rock is one of the dominant drivers of culture on planet Earth. For this time to happen, we needed the transistor, the teenager, the cross-pollination of music, the great migration, the cotton gin, and when you get right back to the beginning, the horrors of slavery. So it seems appropriate that we play a song about the cotton gin, and believe I think I found one. At least that's the title of this song by a band called swear jar. I can't make out what they're singing, but sure. One more connection story. And like I said a while ago, this one could really blow your mind. It starts about 40,000 years ago. For the previous 260,000 years, homo sapiens lived out a primitive lifestyle. And they shared the planet with a number of other humanoid species, like the Neanderthals, the Deadosovians, Homo Floriensis, and Homo erectus. But 400 centuries ago, not a long time considering the age of the Earth, chromagnes suddenly evolved into modern homo sapiens. Modern humans, while all the other species disappeared. Humans may have had an advantage because our brains quickly got bigger. Well, okay, why? This is wild. It's just a theory, but it's also backed by a lot of science. So let me walk you through it. About 1,000 years earlier, we're now at 41,000 years before today. A star, 200 light years away, went supernova. We're not sure which one because there doesn't seem to be any trace of it left. But we know it existed and we know it blew up because of records left in ancient tree rings indicating spikes in radiocarbon. Those humans on the side of the planet facing the part of the sky where this star blew up would have seen a sudden dazzling flash of light creating a whole new thing in the heavens larger than the full moon. It remained in the sky day and night for almost a month and then slowly got dimmer before fading away entirely after about a decade. Craziness followed. The explosion masked with the oort cloud, that area on the outer edge of the solar system with an infinite number of rocks and comets. Many of them were disturbed by this explosion and sent on trajectories towards our sun. Many, many of them struck the Earth for centuries after and the climate changed, making the Earth cooler than it had been in 150,000 years. But that's not the only thing that happened. The supernova emitted a massive burst of gamma rays that produced reactions in our atmosphere. Tremendous amounts of deadly radiation, seven times the worst exposure at Chernobyl, rain down silently on Earth for decades. The ozone layer was greatly damaged, allowing for more radiation from our sun to reach the surface. Every living thing on the planet was subject to DNA damage, cell mutations, sickness and death. Many species went extinct. Those who survived underwent a series of mutations. Some of those mutations seemed to have taken place with Homo sapiens in a beneficial way. During the time all this cosmic radiation was hitting the Earth, there seems to have been a change in a key human gene called microcephalin, which regulates brain size. This change allowed for humans to be born with larger brains. Scientists have uncovered evidence of other specific mutations to our DNA that may be able to be traced back to the time of this alleged supernova, and it seems that these mutations made us capable of more complex thought thanks to our bigger brains. This is exactly when ancient cave paintings began to appear. We suddenly started to get very good at making tools. Language began to develop. We made friends with wolves who embarked on the journey to becoming dogs. Religions developed. And is it a coincidence that after these mutations settled in, humans began to develop art and music? The earliest musical instruments archaeologists have found, flutes made from the bones of vultures, date back to at least 30,000 years, maybe more. Today, evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists tell us that for some reason our brains come pre-wired for music in very, very specific ways. There doesn't seem to be any evolutionary need for it, yet we all come equipped this way. So, could it be that all our music can be traced back to the mutations that were caused by an exploding star 200 light years away 41,000 years ago? Don't bet against it. I'll be enjoying this connections episode. I love this sort of stuff, so I'm going to keep searching and reading to find unrelated data points that are somehow, you know, related. I love how this knowledge gives us new perspectives on why things are the way they are. And by all means, if you've made your own connections, tell me about them. Site sources, drop maps, and then let me know through allen@allencross.ca. And thank you to the BBC's James Burke for his original connection science show. There are other places we can meet up. I'm on virtually all the social media networks. There's my website, a journal of musicalthings.com. It comes with a free daily newsletter, and it's always full of interesting and useful fun bits of music news and information. You should subscribe. Technical productions by Rob Johnston. We'll talk to you next time. I'm Alan Cross. Every season of Survivor starts the same way, build the challenges, and we hide the advantages, and then we turn it over to the players. I am ready to forge my own path. And no matter how many times we do it, I'm still surprised. Survivor has evolved all these advantages, all these ways, it has to be victory or glory is death. That's why we watch. Because every season of Survivor is a new adventure. Survivor. New season, Wednesdays on Global, stream on Stack TV.
