Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one is part one of our series on the Bean, which was a way weirder and spookier series than I think we expected it to be. All kinds of uh strange beliefs from the ancient world about beans come up, though I don't recall if they're in Part one or or later on, but anyway, we think it should be a great treat for you. This episode originally published on May eleven. Uh So, I hope you're ready for beans, because we are welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're gonna be kicking off the first of a two part series where we're going to be looking at one of my favorite things in nature, the bean. Uh you might say the humble being. A child chanting in the playground might say the magical fruit, or wait, was it the magical fruit of the musical fruit? I think both variations are valid, and my own musical I've heard you're probably you you're you're probably combining the idea in your head with the idea of magic beans, which of course are sometimes sold to unspecting fairy tale characters. Oh yeah, Jack and the bean Stalk. There. You know, there's a thing about the magic beans and the Jack and the bean Stalk legend that I wonder about. I wonder if the beans have more significance than just being you know, magic anything that he could have planted in the ground. I mean, I guess, of course it is biologically significant that their seeds, right, so they go in the ground and they grow up a vine or a stalk or something. But there's an interesting thing that I was becoming more and more aware of, uh as I was reading a book about beans that will talk out in this first part today, which is that historically and a lot of cultures, beans have associations with with poverty or with like sort of rustic or regular life. Whereas like the elites of a society might have more access to meet to get their protein, regular people to get protein, they get a lot of that protein from beans. So beans are often associated with being working class, or in the case of the Jack and the Beanstalk story, being somebody who's you know, just struggling to get along with regular life. Yeah. One thing that came out of of my part of the research here was that on one level, beans, beans are kind of boring. Beans are I mean, don't get me wrong, beans are I disagree, But I mean from a culinary standpoint, beans are exciting. I love beans. I think that you and I both I think both fans of Rancho Gordo beans free plug there. Um So, So beans, beans are wonderful. But but I think beans don't always have the most exciting place in various mythologies and stories because they do have this association with the common man. They have this association with um uh with sometimes the lower tiers of society in in a given culture, at least until the the upper um uh levels of society then rediscover it and and start getting curious about what the lower levels of society are cooking. Um So, at times it feels like you they don't get the respect that they deserve in terms of our our myth making and our story making. Like I think that's probably the reason that that we have this idea of the magic being right because it seems like a stupid thing to buy. Why would you buy a magic being a bean can't be magic beans a bean? And yet if we did not have beans, just imagine the state we would be in, Like beans are vitally important for feeding the planet. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And one of the things I want to talk about today is how it's not only true in the modern era, but is is true in a historical sense. There are a couple of different places at least I want to talk about where beans play probably a pivotal role in in leading to humanity as it is today. But yeah, in the Jack and the Beanstalk story, I kind of wonder if getting a bag of magic beans is like, you know, it's just like an extremely common and not special food item. It's like getting a bag of magical bugles. But actually, I think it turns out that there's a lot of interest in beings strange ideas that people have, where people have connected the concepts of beings to two souls and magical beliefs and uh, and what a beans relationship to meet is as well as the beans relationship to our evolutionary history and uh, and early human civilization. And so we'll be exploring these things as we go on, but I want to start off today by looking at beans in early human civilization. Now, of course, beans are seeds biologically, that that is the role they play in a plant. There their seeds and the seeds that we call beans come from a family of flowering plants called fabasi that's spelled f A B A C E A E, which is one of those fun, you know, Latin things to say. But one of the main characteristics of these plants is that they have these distinctive pods which contain their seeds. And the seeds, of course are the beans we know. Now there are different genera of beans that that that sort of feed into the different culinary traditions around the world. You've got the fava beans. You've got the genus Faziola's, which is the sort of progenitor of many of the common beans we know today, like pinto beans and stuff. All all come from that family. Of course, you have soybeans, you have lentils, Yes, lentils are beans, and all these different beans have played important roles in the sort of nutritional package that has been developed along with different cultures of the world over the past few thousands of years. I was reading about this in a book that an e book that I downloaded called Beans a History by an author named Ken Albala or Albala A L. B. A. L A from Bloomsbury Publishing in and This author, Ken Albola, is a history professor at the University of the Pacific. It seems like he has written a lot of books about the history of food, and in this book he goes into a lot of depth about the often overlooked role of beings in the history of the human species. For example, we've spoken at length before about the importance of the domestication of grain crops leading to the rise of the first settled civilizations, but in that context, I don't think we ever really discussed the role of beans. Uh, the role of beings such as lentils, and Albala makes a lot of this. He has a whole chapter on the domestication of wild lentils and argues that they played an extremely important role in the nutritional foundation of human civilization. So I just want to read a selection from from one of his early chapters that gets into this. Elbolow Wrights quote The story of what is called the Neolithic Revolution has been told many times. The crucial role of wheat, goats, and sheep is always emphasized. Legumes, not just lentils, but chickpeas, vetches, and later pas somehow gets short shrift, but it is likely they play as great or even a greater role than meat and dairy in supplying protein to the growing population. This is a simple matter of efficiency. Per acre, lentils provide more calories than grazing cattle. Just as important, Rhizobium bacteria, which thrive on the root nodules of legumes, draw nitrogen from the atmosphere and fix it in the soil. They provide a kind of natural fertilizer which would have in turn made the wheat grow better. Furthermore, the stems and husks of the plant can be fed to cattle, which of course in turn provides more fertilizer. As in many early agricultural societies, the combination of plants works synergistically in the soil, and so does the combination of starches and legumes in the human diet. The amino acids lacking in lintels are supplied by grains and the lycene missing from the grains is supplied by the legumes. That is, a person can subsist mainly on this vegetable based diet, and it will support a large population in a way that gathering and hunting cannot. Without the beans, it is certainly less likely that these early civilizations would ever have arisen. Yeah. That that that really summarizes it well. I think, yea, this this idea especially that it may be hard for for I guess some folks too to understand in the modern era when you when you look at our it's you know, the modern love of meat, and and often this idea that meat is something that you're going to consume not just every day, but like three times a day. You know, meat for breakfast, meat for lunch, meat for dinner. Um, when this is meat tea in the afternoon. Yeah, um yeah, the meat, coffee, etcetera. Um. But this was not this was certainly not always something that that was that could be obtained. I mean, and uh, and and and certainly you would have to have ways to fill that that protein gap in your diet. And and that's where beans come in. I mean, I think anyone who's work to limit the amount of meat in your diet. You you quickly realize how important beans are. Um, like my my, uh, my son, uh, you know, decided pretty pretty early on that he didn't know he basically wanted to be a pesketarian or a vegetarian. But for a little while he was like, I'm not sure I'm that into beans. And we're like, well, we got news for you if you're if if you're gonna you know, be a pesctarian or vegetarian. Uh, you need to love the being. You need to to realize how great beans are. And uh, and and understanding like they're varied ways to consume beans, you know. And I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of the Greatest Being dishes come from culinary traditions that have less emphasis on meat than than some other ones. Like, uh, I think you know how how well lentils are used in so much Indian cuisine, Like I love Indian lentils. Yeah. I feel like if you take take any culinary tradition and you and you look at how they're preparing beans, you're you're gonna find some treasures in there as long as you dig deeply enough, you know. And it's um, because yeah, there's just there's just such a long tradition of of utilizing them and figuring out the ways to maximize their their flavor. You know, another way that beans are real maximizer type food is in efficiency maximization. Not just in terms of calories per acre of arable land, which Elbowa talked about in that section we just discussed. You know, there's there's more calorie density and growing a field of beans than in grazing cattle on that same amount of area. But also beans can be dried and stored in a state that is essentially indestructible. And this is another thing that I think people who have access to modern preservation, canning, refrigeration, freezers, things like this might not appreciate about how important it was in the ancient world to have foodstocks that would last you through the winter at the time when the harvest was not going on, you know, when when access to new fresh foods was was down to a minimum or down to nothing. You had to have something to live off of. And of course, you know, this comes into food traditions in a lot of different ways. Comes in with like pickling and fermentation and that kind of stuff. But Also, beans are an amazing protein source because they can be dried and you can move them around, you can store them through the winter or even across more ultiple seasons. Uh that that it's an indispensable resource for that reason. Yeah, yeah, absolutely so, it's really it's really kind of a shame that I think, you know, particularly in American culinary history, at least of the last I mean, I guess we're getting out of it to to to a fair degree. But for a while, there is this idea like beans were a side item, and that's all beans were. But but beans are ultimately bigger than that. They're they're not just the little, you know, black or brown or white puddle next to your meat. You know, they're the thing that that that can can more than dominate the plate when the meat is not available or the meat is is just not utilized in the household. Do you think it helps to sort of lure people into being appreciation by giving them a little slightly more decadent versions of beings like the examples I'm thinking of our our falafel, which of course is being based that's based on chickpeas mashed up with certain spices and other ingredients, but then you deep fry it, of course, so it's going to be ice and crunchy and all that on the outside. Or another example I was thinking of is I mean, it is hard to beat the sort of decadent luxury of some refried beans, which are actually in many ways much like the mashed potatoes that Americans love on American Thanksgiving and stuff, where you know, the primary way of making these is you're gonna be mashing up this starchy thing with a bunch of fat. In the case of refried beans, it might be lard or it might be oil, kind of like the butter that you would mix up with your classic mashed potatoes. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. I mean, you can also say the same for a lot of being based imitation meats. You know that sometimes some of these in particular are not and they're not health food exactly, but they're they're really good as as long as you're not hanging too much on the meat Moniker in some cases. But I think some of the invitation meat today is it's gotten extremely good. I mean, it's it's to the point where I feel like someone would have a hard time guessing. Uh, you know, what's real and what is imitation? Um. But but I think the same goes for like for for tofu, for like soft tofu. Uh. You just present soft tofu playing to somebody and it might not win them over. But cut it up into cubes, um, fry it up with a pair of extra long chopsticks like I like to do. Put a copious amount of salt and pepper on those, and I feel like that should satisfy most appetites because you've got your your crunchy, you're soft in the middle, you're salty, maybe a little bit of spice to it if you put something else on it. You know. I think anybody who's like a big fan of like rich, big flavor, meaty stews and all that, give them some mapo tofu. I mean, you can't turn it down. It's amazing. Yeah, thank But actually I want to go deeper into history. So that's the role that Albula argues that beans played in the history of human civilization. I want to go farther back. Because I was reading a something I thought was very interesting. I came across this in a New York Times article from October of twenty nineteen by Nicholas st. Fleur called Colorado fossils show how mammals race to fill dinosaurs void. And this article was covering a fossil fine from Colorado from a place called Originally I think I was calling it Coral Bluffs, but I believe it's Corral Bluffs. Ceo r r A L. That's corral. Is that the word? Okay, okay, my cowboy bona fideys are not strong, but but I think that is what that is, which, anyway, are discussed in a paper that was published in twenty nineteen in the journal Science by License at All called Exceptional Continental Record of Biotic Recovery after the Cretaceous Paleo Gene mass Extinction. Now that extinction event reference there the Cretaceous paleo gene mass extinction. We we also sometimes shorten that to the KPg extinction. UM was a mass extinction roughly sixty six million years ago, probably caused in large part by a giant impact from space. The leading hypothesis is that that was driven by this impact that left what's today the cheek Schlob Crater in the Yucatan Peninsula. And this mass extinction, you know, we've talked about many times on the show before. It was, of course not the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history, but one of the greatest. It led to the extinction of the non avian dinosaurs and more broadly, roughly three quarters of the species on Earth. But of course this event is not just relevant to the dinosaurs who died in it, but it's highly relevant to us because in the ecological void left when dinosaurs were wiped out, suddenly there was a lot of room. There was a lot of room for another order of terrestrial animals to take over the space evacuated by the dead dinosaurs. Of course, that was the mammals, our ancestors. UH. And we've talked before about some of the interesting biological dynamics that were in play during this time. One of the things I remember us talking about was the role of fungus in allowing mammals to ascend during this period. I think this was covered in our episode on prototax I d s these giant uh, these giants potentially fungus, you know, stalks that would have been found hundreds of millions of years ago. UM. I remember us talking about a CBC documentary that was discussing how in the wake of the KPg extinction event. So of course the space impact would kick up tons of dust into the atmosphere that would darken the skies, and this would lead to tons tons of dead, decaying plant matter under this darkened sky. And so in this world of sort of darkened skies and dead decaying plant matter, this is a perfect invitation for fungi to thrive. And of course all of this fungus around would represent a threat to the survival of some of the remaining animals, but it and affect all animals equally because suddenly our mammalian ancestors, by having warm blooded bodies, would have much better protection against fungal infections than cold blooded animals such as the then dominant reptiles. It's a this this world is is interesting to try and imagine. It's kind of a so again, it's a world of of of rot and decay and fungus. It's a world of of of rats on the ascent uh it um. I'm tempted to compare it to the in in the the Warhammer fantasy setting. There's this chaos god that's uh this name Nergal, which I guess is you know, derived from Nergal, the the ancient deity that we've discussed recently on the Mespotamian. Yeah. And but anyway, this chaos god is a god of of decay and u and disease. But but often, more often than not, this symbology is that of decay and mushrooms and fungus. Uh. But then also occasionally these hordes of of of rats, like bipedal rats with with blades and such. So, uh, this would be a fitting time for for fans of of that faction. I think, I don't know about sword wielding rats. It must be a time of rats swordsman. But but but they're on the move, They're on the ascent, you know. So it's it's almost like the modern idea of rats taking up weapons and and and gaining our spot in the world. And I mean that's basically what's going on here. Like these these small, in many ways pitiful organisms when you compare them to the previous lords of the earth. Uh, they have this chance to rise up and take their spot, and they do. And we are we are the descendants of that that revolution. Yeah, because of this adaptation of having warm blooded bodies that would help fight off fungal infection. Like I actually found a quote that we featured in that previous episode. That was from our truro Casa Devol, who is a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, who said, quote, the reptiles are quite susceptible to fungal diseases. But your typical mammal, which maintains a temperature in the mid thirties or so, that would be celsius, creates a thermal exclusionary zone for fungi. So we have like the invisible armor. It's not a shell on the outside, it's not scales, we've got heat armor. But anyway, so this time that spelled doom or at least a suppression for many reptile or cold blooded species, gave gave an opportunity for mammals to really thrive. And so that's one way that the wake of the KPg extinction was a pivotal time for mammal ascendency. They were just suddenly all these opportunities. So some of these things would be opportunities for new ecological niches, new ways to get food that previously were monopolized by you know, better competitive species in the dinosaur clade, and it would be new habitats to explore and things like that. Also, no more dinosaurs eating you all the time, that's a plus. I was actually reading a Reuter's article by right named Will Dunham about the same research from the journal Science in twenty nineteen, and it's talking about the how mammals got bigger after the KPg extinction, and so talking about mammals, Dunham rights quote, within seven hundred thousand years of the mass extinction, their body mass had become one hundred times bigger than the mammals living immediately after the mass extinction, and so charting the increase is pretty amazing. Uh. To to read another section from the article here from Reuter's here quote the mammals that survived the asteroid were mainly small omnivores, the largest being the size of a rat and weighing about a pound or about half a kilogram. So here again we got rat world, right is you know, it's fungus all over the place, mold rat world, that kind of thing. Dead dinosaurs and then um. Within a hundred thousand years of the extinction event, mammals reached about thirteen pounds or six kilograms. By three hundred thousand years after the extinction, they got to fifty five pounds or with the first purely herbivorous mammalian species. By seven hundred thousand years after the asteroid, some mammals weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds or fifty rams. So this is talking about how like, you know, within like less than a million years, you've got mammals growing from from rat size to like wolf size. Yeah, I mean again swords and cloaks aside, it sounds like, yeah, uh so it's because of this extinction that we exist. This is an important thing to remember, like we are the descendants of these mammals. At some point, our ancestor you go back through your parents, and way way down the line we trace back to some kind of rat like creature that survived the KPg extinction. But one of the interesting things is that scientists don't have a whole lot of fossils from the time right after this mass extinction, at least not as many fossils as they would like to get a fully fleshed out picture of how the mammal world recovered after this been. And so this New York Times article in the Reuter's article that I've been talking about or about this paper from Science about a fossil cash discovered in Colorado that gives us more insight into the ecology and local mammal life from right after that time. It catalogs a bunch of different mammal species that are all kind of interesting, some growing to the size of like a like a prehistoric copy Bara. But one of the interesting things about this record is how it connects to the subject of beans, because this fossil site also can tell us a lot about what was going on with plants right around the same time, and the stages in which plants recovered after the Great Dying sixty six million years ago. So I want to read a section here from the New York Times article by st Fleur that the catalogs this progression of plants, so you've got the mass extinction and then quote, first came the ferns with their feather like leaves. They proliferated across the waste land for many hundreds of years to a couple of thousand years, paving the way for worists to rebound. Next, the palms paraded in, dominating the green scene for hundreds of thousands of years. Then around three hundred thousand years after the catastrophe, a diverse array of walnuts appeared that coincided with the jump in diversity and body size of herbivorous mammals, which suggests they were an important food source. We call that world the pecan pie world, said Ian Miller, a paleobotanist at the Denver Museum of Natural Science. He added that this epic also coincided with a warming period in the fossil record, which could indicate that a shifting climate played a role in the development of plants and animals following the extinction event. But then it gets to another interesting plant development after this discovery, the world's first known bean pod. So now I want to read a sections from this article published in Science. This again is by license at all and the author's here right quote. The corral Bloo section provides the oldest known occurrence of the legumento say or being family, represented by fossil seed pods and leaflets, dated sixty five point three five million years ago. The oldest previously recognized legume is based on wood and leaflets from early Paleocene rocks of Argentina, whereas the earliest legumes seed pods are not recognized until the late paleo scene roughly fifty eight million years ago of Columbia. Our discovery supports a nearly synchronous first appearance of legumes in North America and southern South America, a rapid diversification for the group in the earliest paleo scene, and their apparent origination in the western hemisphere. So to summarize, they found this bean pod. I think actually they talk about how, um, the record of this bean pod was discovered by a high school student who was helping excavate the site. And I believe there's a documentary that you can find that PBS did about this fossil record dicovery and uh that might get into more detail about the discovery process. But this bean ancestor was dated to something like seven hundred thousand years after the mass extinction event, and it was also timed in synchronization with this warming pulse in the Earth's atmosphere as well as, as we pointed out, earlier to the appearance of wolf sized mammals. So the authors here suggest that, well, maybe these beans were helping to provide calorie dense food sources to these mammals as they're getting bigger. This is not known for sure, but this seems like a quite reasonable hypothesis to be explored more. Uh. Dr Miller, who I quoted earlier, said, quote, we liken them to the protein bars of the ancient world. So the appearance of these first beans, this bean pot ancestor, appears to be time to a sudden shift upward in mammalian body mass. And this makes it look at least possible and worthy of further explanation that protein reach beans were a nutritional driver for mammal ascendency. So beans were the protein bars, and then these various mammals they were the lift they were the power lifters, they were they were the ones putting on mass. Okay, well at least potentially well right, Well, what we've established so far is just this interesting correlation in the appearance of the of these species. We don't know for sure that like what was eating what, but uh but yeah, it definitely seems worth looking into more, because you know, as I think I've established by this point, I'm all in favor of being propaganda whatever, whatever makes beans look good than now. Next year I did have a section about beans and flatulence, but I'm actually thinking maybe I'm gonna save that for part two. Yeah, maybe we can hold that and uh and release it in the next episode. I think that's a good idea. So I think I'm just gonna clench down and see if we we can save that for the next one, give you incentive to return. But next time we're gonna be talking about all kinds of crazy being stuff, beans and souls, beans and farts. It's going to be it'll be a blast. So but wait, we're not done yet. No, no, no, We've got We've got more stuff to discuss here, more early early being history. Um are our attempts to understand early being history and uh, I think a little bit of magic and mythology related to beans, so as usual for for all things ancient. One of my first stops in looking at this topic was to start flipping around in the seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient World. That's the book by anthropologist Brian M. Fagan. But the different sections of it, uh, he'll work with with other experts, and in in the section dealing with ancient cereal crops, he worked with Stephen Mythin, professor of prehistory at the University of Reading. And this mostly uh, mostly focused and focused on various cereal crops. But there's a really good part of this that deals with um with the domestication of beings and other plants in the America's and they point out that there there seemed to have been two centers of plant domestication in the America's. First of all, there was the There was the the Andes, and this would have focused mostly on keenoa, but also on the potato. And then in Central Mexico you have that trifecta of maize or corn, beans and squash. Now, in both of these cases, the domestications were undertaken by unsettled mobile peoples. And we've touched on this before about the idea. You know, sometimes we have this sort of this rough, simple version in our head of of what it means for people to stop moving around and start growing crops. You know, the idea is like, should we hunt and gather anymore? No, let's just settle here and grow some beans. It it doesn't seem to quite work like that in history, right that it seems hard to imagine a scenario when somebody who like grew up as a hunter gatherer was just like, okay, now we're planting crops. You know, it seems like there's a more gradual transition of uh, sort of the slow partial domestication of wild grains and crops. Overtime, this leads to the realization that this could become a full time living Yeah, And ultimately I think this is a more realistic um we have looking at it and understanding it, because otherwise, if you if you have that that that full stop and then shift to plant domestication or animal domestication, I feel like there's a gap there in the in in our brains, and then it's a gap that some of us may want to insert aliens in. You know, you start thinking like, well, how did we How did we get the idea to grow and domesticate beans or turn wheat into flour um. Something must have told us how to do it. There must have been some magic flame or some gimmi god or some sort of alien being. And of course there are there are plenty of tremendous myths and folk tales that kind of deal with that exact situation, And we'll get to a couple of examples in a bit. You know, those stories are good enough that you don't need to make up a new one. That's right, you don't need to say, oh, it's aliens that gave us farming. Alright. So wild beings grow throughout Central America, and a cluster of wild beans around Guadalajara seemed to be the common ancestor of the common domesticated being that we mentioned earlier. This was what a Faziolus vulgaris. And this species comes in in many different forms, including red beans, pinto beans, and kidney beans. A lot of the beans weet today are our variations on faziolas. Faziolus the genus more broadly, and Faziolis vulgaris the common being. Now you might wonder, well, what what's the difference between between this wonderful being and the various wild beans. What's the main difference. Well, it has to do with how the bean pods split open in the wild. The bean pod just eventually splits open, spills the seeds so that maybe it maybe spread, you know, by largely by various organisms. But this was gradually bred out of domesticated beans, as people repeatedly picked bean pods that were less prone to splitting apart. And it's unsure to what degree this was intentional or accidental. You know, maybe mixes of both at different times, but the results were domesticated, being species that could not spread their seeds without the aid of human harvesters. Interesting, now, you might wonder, Okay, when does this take place? Well, Fagan and Mythn wrote that that the dating at the least of the time of their writing was patchy at best, uh, and they did not provide a rough estimate for the for these beans in Central America, though the squash seems to have undergone biological domestic change by UM hundred BC and maze bytwo hundred BC. Quinoa, again in the south, dates roughly to five thousand BC. I love this kind of puzzle in human history, of like putting together what kind of like human activity could have led to the like changes in the evolution of a plant species like this that, like without even necessarily intending to Yeah, yeah, what sorts of choices be they? You know, is very direct choices or just sort of sort of you know, uh, gradual selections take place by humans interacting with the natural world. Now, I think you promised me some bean myths from ancient meso America, didn't you. Yes, yes, so so again, like we said, it doesn't need to be that gap in which you insert the divine. But it's it's often it's it's often very interesting and entertaining and uh and and and also you know the sacred when you have uh have a god slip into that role. And indeed, there's a wonderful Aztec myth that I came across about the bringing of grains and seeds into the human diet, which I read about in Aztec and Maya Myths by Carl Tobb. This is from UM. Now, now I should be clear that there are several different myths about the origins of maize, in particular because maze or corn is just vitally important uh to uh to Central American cultures, and at times there ascribed as a kind of sacred flesh or the precursor to human flesh or the flesh of the gods. Maze is life. But beans are nice to beans, maybe less flashy as maze or corn, I feel, and I feel like that's even the case today. You know, it's Children of the Corn by Stephen King None children of the beans. Um Like maze is maybe just a little sexier uh than beans, But the beans are vitally important too, and so they get looped into some of these myths as well. Well, I mean this goes back to something that I was talking about when I read that section from ken Albola earlier about how I think he was talking about some of the domestication of lentils in particular, but you know, he talks about how together the grains and the and the beans form a nutritional package that supplies things that the other doesn't have and it doesn't have or doesn't have in the same abundance. So the example here was that combining starches and legumes, where the amino acids that are not in the lentils are supplied by the grains, but the lycene that's missing from the grains is supplied by the legumes. And that when you have these different crops coming together to form a sort of like diet package, they fill the gaps of the other. Yeah. Yeah, so you need them both, even if one is if one takes on slightly more sacred connotations. And the myth making Now this myth in particular was recorded in Legends of the Suns, and this was found in the fifteen fifty eight Codex Chimo Popoca, and this was written in the novel language. So in this myth, I'm gonna I'm gonna mostly just summarizing here. So humans have been created, and I'm and I'm not entirely sure from the context if if IF like a lot or most of the humans are actual infants in this scenario. But the gods are unsure what the humans are going to eat, Like, okay, the humans exist now, but they have to eat something. So the gods go out in search. The aztect gods go out in search of things humans can consume. And during his own search, while we have a familiar character here, we have Quetzalkdal, the plume serpent god that we've discussed on previous episodes. Um, he's involved in the search. He goes out looking for sustenance for the new humans, and he comes across a red ant carrying a single grain of maze and he realizes, well, this might be the very grain that humans need in order to survive. So the Plume, the serpent god sweeps, you know, sweeps down from from the sky and he he just starts talking to the aunt and he says, hey, that's that's some wonderful, wonderful foods you got there on your back can you tell me where you got it? And the aunt says no, which I which I love Aunt defiance, Yeah, but quetzal Cotal is insistent. So the Aunt finally reveals the source of this and many other precious grains, including beans, and it's the interior vault of Mount tona Catptl, the Mountain of Sustenance. So Quetzalcota is impressed by this, transforms his own body into that of a black ant and he infiltrates the Mountain of Sustenance, and indeed he finds it just feel it's like this hollowed out vault and it's just filled with seeds and grains. Uh, there's maze there, their beings um. So he steals some of the maze, brings it back, and the other gods they take the maze, they chew it up, and they feed it to these human infants to make them strong. So already, I think it's interesting that instead of some demigod or hero stealing a secret resource from the gods and bringing it to humanity, we instead having we we seem to have something more like a god stealing a secret resource from nature itself, from this treasure trove hidden within the mountain. It almost it almost makes me wonder if this, uh, this in some way inspired the hobbit. Well, yeah, it when you think of of of mountain depths filled with riches, you do kind of think of the dwarves. But I also wonder if it, you know, if it is also ultimately telling about trends and Mesoamerican um religion and considerations of the natural environment. You know that that that that that ultimately that nature sort of stands apart from the gods to a certain extent. Oh that's interesting. So you're saying, like not identifying the gods with nature. The gods are not the forces of nature, but another thing like humanity that sort of must wrestle with the forces of nature, maybe in some ways to a certain degree. That though, on the other hand, you do have gods that are very much associated with aspects of nature as well in these systems, so uh, you know, I wouldn't say it's a clear cut division. So anyway, Quetzalcodal took on the form of an aunt brought out like a few pieces of corn to help feed humanity. But clearly this is not going to hold up in the long run. So what they need to do is they need to bring the Mountain of sustenance to the humans. So Quetzalcode slings a rope around the mountain and tries to drag it to the human nursery camp. But it's too big because it's a mountain. Another plan is needed, so they decided to bring in a little a little counseling on this, and they turned to Oximoco and sit bac Tonal. This is the first human couple and the goddess of night and the god of astrology and calendars, though I think both of them are considered gods of astrology and calendars. Okay, so that sounds like that they would have some wisdom or maybe predictive power. Yeah. Yeah. And so these two individuals divine that they must turn to another god for help to help them plunder the riches of the mountain. The diseased god and future sun deity Nana Hudson, whose whose name apparently means full of sores. That's a good god name. This is funny that we were just talking about Nercle earlier with that sort of disease god. Yeah. Well, um, it's it's slightly different. I think that this god is not necessarily a manifestation of disease. But is he himself is diseased and then is faded to become a sun deity. But yeah, again we see this kind of element of plague and disease, if we it's tempting to want to compare that to this this history of of mold world and the and the rise of the bean and the rat. So anyway, um U Nana Hudson moves in and with the aid of blue, white, yellow and red play locks the directional gods of the storms, um Nana Hudson breaks open this the Mountain of sustenance. The grains spill out, and then the taie locks. They gather up the maze the beans other culinary treasures from the depths of the mountain, and they dispense them to the people. Oh you know, I I love this for multiple reasons. I mean, this is just a great story, but also there's a certain kind of plausibility to it that uh that you know, is it's not just the sort of myth logic of breaking open a mountain full that's a corny copy of food that can then feed everyone. I mean, as we've talked about again with like grains and beans, A really wonderful thing about these types of foods is that they can be stored and transported in dried form, unlike a lot of other foods. And because of this quality that they can be stored and transported dry with their nutritional content intact in order to be resurrected later through cooking. Uh. They they have so much, so much sort of like versatility as a civilization founding food source than a lot of other types of food would have foods that generally need to be uh preserved in some way specially or kept fresh or something like that. But also because of this, like they remind me more of the physical treasures that you would see in other types of stories where there's a mountain full of gold coins or something, and here it's like you can have dried grains, literal beans or grains. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Like this is the true, the true larger worth rating here. Um. I also love the idea of the calendar gods being involved of then in cracking it open, because ultimately, like being able to being people of the calendar aids you in the domestication of plants and in the management of your crops and your ability to you know, to know when to plant, when to harvest, when to seal away, and then when to uh you know, bring it back and plant once more. That is interesting. I didn't make that connection. Yeah, okay, well, I think maybe we're gonna have to call part one there. But we've got so much more interesting stuff to talk about. Next time, we're going to talk about beans and souls, ancient religious beliefs about beans from other parts of the world. We're going to talk about soybeans, which yes they're also beans. Uh, it's it's going to be the bee's knees. So join us again next time. That's right. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, maybe some of our past treatments of food related topics like tomatoes for example. Uh, you can find all of those in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. You'll find that wherever you get your pot casts. We have our our core science episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have artifact episodes on Wednesday's Listener Mail on Mondays, and on Fridays, we do uh weird House Cinema, which is uh not so science e and more about just us geeking out over some some weird movie from the past. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio with the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. Three twinty thy part Practical Chara

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one is part one of our series on the Bean, which was a way weirder and spookier series than I think we expected it to be. All kinds of uh strange beliefs from the ancient world about beans come up, though I don't recall if they're in Part one or or later on, but anyway, we think it should be a great treat for you. This episode originally published on May eleven. Uh So, I hope you're ready for beans, because we are welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're gonna be kicking off the first of a two part series where we're going to be looking at one of my favorite things in nature, the bean. Uh you might say the humble being. A child chanting in the playground might say the magical fruit, or wait, was it the magical fruit of the musical fruit? I think both variations are valid, and my own musical I've heard you're probably you you're you're probably combining the idea in your head with the idea of magic beans, which of course are sometimes sold to unspecting fairy tale characters. Oh yeah, Jack and the bean Stalk. There. You know, there's a thing about the magic beans and the Jack and the bean Stalk legend that I wonder about. I wonder if the beans have more significance than just being you know, magic anything that he could have planted in the ground. I mean, I guess, of course it is biologically significant that their seeds, right, so they go in the ground and they grow up a vine or a stalk or something. But there's an interesting thing that I was becoming more and more aware of, uh as I was reading a book about beans that will talk out in this first part today, which is that historically and a lot of cultures, beans have associations with with poverty or with like sort of rustic or regular life. Whereas like the elites of a society might have more access to meet to get their protein, regular people to get protein, they get a lot of that protein from beans. So beans are often associated with being working class, or in the case of the Jack and the Beanstalk story, being somebody who's you know, just struggling to get along with regular life. Yeah. One thing that came out of of my part of the research here was that on one level, beans, beans are kind of boring. Beans are I mean, don't get me wrong, beans are I disagree, But I mean from a culinary standpoint, beans are exciting. I love beans. I think that you and I both I think both fans of Rancho Gordo beans free plug there. Um So, So beans, beans are wonderful. But but I think beans don't always have the most exciting place in various mythologies and stories because they do have this association with the common man. They have this association with um uh with sometimes the lower tiers of society in in a given culture, at least until the the upper um uh levels of society then rediscover it and and start getting curious about what the lower levels of society are cooking. Um So, at times it feels like you they don't get the respect that they deserve in terms of our our myth making and our story making. Like I think that's probably the reason that that we have this idea of the magic being right because it seems like a stupid thing to buy. Why would you buy a magic being a bean can't be magic beans a bean? And yet if we did not have beans, just imagine the state we would be in, Like beans are vitally important for feeding the planet. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And one of the things I want to talk about today is how it's not only true in the modern era, but is is true in a historical sense. There are a couple of different places at least I want to talk about where beans play probably a pivotal role in in leading to humanity as it is today. But yeah, in the Jack and the Beanstalk story, I kind of wonder if getting a bag of magic beans is like, you know, it's just like an extremely common and not special food item. It's like getting a bag of magical bugles. But actually, I think it turns out that there's a lot of interest in beings strange ideas that people have, where people have connected the concepts of beings to two souls and magical beliefs and uh, and what a beans relationship to meet is as well as the beans relationship to our evolutionary history and uh, and early human civilization. And so we'll be exploring these things as we go on, but I want to start off today by looking at beans in early human civilization. Now, of course, beans are seeds biologically, that that is the role they play in a plant. There their seeds and the seeds that we call beans come from a family of flowering plants called fabasi that's spelled f A B A C E A E, which is one of those fun, you know, Latin things to say. But one of the main characteristics of these plants is that they have these distinctive pods which contain their seeds. And the seeds, of course are the beans we know. Now there are different genera of beans that that that sort of feed into the different culinary traditions around the world. You've got the fava beans. You've got the genus Faziola's, which is the sort of progenitor of many of the common beans we know today, like pinto beans and stuff. All all come from that family. Of course, you have soybeans, you have lentils, Yes, lentils are beans, and all these different beans have played important roles in the sort of nutritional package that has been developed along with different cultures of the world over the past few thousands of years. I was reading about this in a book that an e book that I downloaded called Beans a History by an author named Ken Albala or Albala A L. B. A. L A from Bloomsbury Publishing in and This author, Ken Albola, is a history professor at the University of the Pacific. It seems like he has written a lot of books about the history of food, and in this book he goes into a lot of depth about the often overlooked role of beings in the history of the human species. For example, we've spoken at length before about the importance of the domestication of grain crops leading to the rise of the first settled civilizations, but in that context, I don't think we ever really discussed the role of beans. Uh, the role of beings such as lentils, and Albala makes a lot of this. He has a whole chapter on the domestication of wild lentils and argues that they played an extremely important role in the nutritional foundation of human civilization. So I just want to read a selection from from one of his early chapters that gets into this. Elbolow Wrights quote The story of what is called the Neolithic Revolution has been told many times. The crucial role of wheat, goats, and sheep is always emphasized. Legumes, not just lentils, but chickpeas, vetches, and later pas somehow gets short shrift, but it is likely they play as great or even a greater role than meat and dairy in supplying protein to the growing population. This is a simple matter of efficiency. Per acre, lentils provide more calories than grazing cattle. Just as important, Rhizobium bacteria, which thrive on the root nodules of legumes, draw nitrogen from the atmosphere and fix it in the soil. They provide a kind of natural fertilizer which would have in turn made the wheat grow better. Furthermore, the stems and husks of the plant can be fed to cattle, which of course in turn provides more fertilizer. As in many early agricultural societies, the combination of plants works synergistically in the soil, and so does the combination of starches and legumes in the human diet. The amino acids lacking in lintels are supplied by grains and the lycene missing from the grains is supplied by the legumes. That is, a person can subsist mainly on this vegetable based diet, and it will support a large population in a way that gathering and hunting cannot. Without the beans, it is certainly less likely that these early civilizations would ever have arisen. Yeah. That that that really summarizes it well. I think, yea, this this idea especially that it may be hard for for I guess some folks too to understand in the modern era when you when you look at our it's you know, the modern love of meat, and and often this idea that meat is something that you're going to consume not just every day, but like three times a day. You know, meat for breakfast, meat for lunch, meat for dinner. Um, when this is meat tea in the afternoon. Yeah, um yeah, the meat, coffee, etcetera. Um. But this was not this was certainly not always something that that was that could be obtained. I mean, and uh, and and and certainly you would have to have ways to fill that that protein gap in your diet. And and that's where beans come in. I mean, I think anyone who's work to limit the amount of meat in your diet. You you quickly realize how important beans are. Um, like my my, uh, my son, uh, you know, decided pretty pretty early on that he didn't know he basically wanted to be a pesketarian or a vegetarian. But for a little while he was like, I'm not sure I'm that into beans. And we're like, well, we got news for you if you're if if you're gonna you know, be a pesctarian or vegetarian. Uh, you need to love the being. You need to to realize how great beans are. And uh, and and understanding like they're varied ways to consume beans, you know. And I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of the Greatest Being dishes come from culinary traditions that have less emphasis on meat than than some other ones. Like, uh, I think you know how how well lentils are used in so much Indian cuisine, Like I love Indian lentils. Yeah. I feel like if you take take any culinary tradition and you and you look at how they're preparing beans, you're you're gonna find some treasures in there as long as you dig deeply enough, you know. And it's um, because yeah, there's just there's just such a long tradition of of utilizing them and figuring out the ways to maximize their their flavor. You know, another way that beans are real maximizer type food is in efficiency maximization. Not just in terms of calories per acre of arable land, which Elbowa talked about in that section we just discussed. You know, there's there's more calorie density and growing a field of beans than in grazing cattle on that same amount of area. But also beans can be dried and stored in a state that is essentially indestructible. And this is another thing that I think people who have access to modern preservation, canning, refrigeration, freezers, things like this might not appreciate about how important it was in the ancient world to have foodstocks that would last you through the winter at the time when the harvest was not going on, you know, when when access to new fresh foods was was down to a minimum or down to nothing. You had to have something to live off of. And of course, you know, this comes into food traditions in a lot of different ways. Comes in with like pickling and fermentation and that kind of stuff. But Also, beans are an amazing protein source because they can be dried and you can move them around, you can store them through the winter or even across more ultiple seasons. Uh that that it's an indispensable resource for that reason. Yeah, yeah, absolutely so, it's really it's really kind of a shame that I think, you know, particularly in American culinary history, at least of the last I mean, I guess we're getting out of it to to to a fair degree. But for a while, there is this idea like beans were a side item, and that's all beans were. But but beans are ultimately bigger than that. They're they're not just the little, you know, black or brown or white puddle next to your meat. You know, they're the thing that that that can can more than dominate the plate when the meat is not available or the meat is is just not utilized in the household. Do you think it helps to sort of lure people into being appreciation by giving them a little slightly more decadent versions of beings like the examples I'm thinking of our our falafel, which of course is being based that's based on chickpeas mashed up with certain spices and other ingredients, but then you deep fry it, of course, so it's going to be ice and crunchy and all that on the outside. Or another example I was thinking of is I mean, it is hard to beat the sort of decadent luxury of some refried beans, which are actually in many ways much like the mashed potatoes that Americans love on American Thanksgiving and stuff, where you know, the primary way of making these is you're gonna be mashing up this starchy thing with a bunch of fat. In the case of refried beans, it might be lard or it might be oil, kind of like the butter that you would mix up with your classic mashed potatoes. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. I mean, you can also say the same for a lot of being based imitation meats. You know that sometimes some of these in particular are not and they're not health food exactly, but they're they're really good as as long as you're not hanging too much on the meat Moniker in some cases. But I think some of the invitation meat today is it's gotten extremely good. I mean, it's it's to the point where I feel like someone would have a hard time guessing. Uh, you know, what's real and what is imitation? Um. But but I think the same goes for like for for tofu, for like soft tofu. Uh. You just present soft tofu playing to somebody and it might not win them over. But cut it up into cubes, um, fry it up with a pair of extra long chopsticks like I like to do. Put a copious amount of salt and pepper on those, and I feel like that should satisfy most appetites because you've got your your crunchy, you're soft in the middle, you're salty, maybe a little bit of spice to it if you put something else on it. You know. I think anybody who's like a big fan of like rich, big flavor, meaty stews and all that, give them some mapo tofu. I mean, you can't turn it down. It's amazing. Yeah, thank But actually I want to go deeper into history. So that's the role that Albula argues that beans played in the history of human civilization. I want to go farther back. Because I was reading a something I thought was very interesting. I came across this in a New York Times article from October of twenty nineteen by Nicholas st. Fleur called Colorado fossils show how mammals race to fill dinosaurs void. And this article was covering a fossil fine from Colorado from a place called Originally I think I was calling it Coral Bluffs, but I believe it's Corral Bluffs. Ceo r r A L. That's corral. Is that the word? Okay, okay, my cowboy bona fideys are not strong, but but I think that is what that is, which, anyway, are discussed in a paper that was published in twenty nineteen in the journal Science by License at All called Exceptional Continental Record of Biotic Recovery after the Cretaceous Paleo Gene mass Extinction. Now that extinction event reference there the Cretaceous paleo gene mass extinction. We we also sometimes shorten that to the KPg extinction. UM was a mass extinction roughly sixty six million years ago, probably caused in large part by a giant impact from space. The leading hypothesis is that that was driven by this impact that left what's today the cheek Schlob Crater in the Yucatan Peninsula. And this mass extinction, you know, we've talked about many times on the show before. It was, of course not the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history, but one of the greatest. It led to the extinction of the non avian dinosaurs and more broadly, roughly three quarters of the species on Earth. But of course this event is not just relevant to the dinosaurs who died in it, but it's highly relevant to us because in the ecological void left when dinosaurs were wiped out, suddenly there was a lot of room. There was a lot of room for another order of terrestrial animals to take over the space evacuated by the dead dinosaurs. Of course, that was the mammals, our ancestors. UH. And we've talked before about some of the interesting biological dynamics that were in play during this time. One of the things I remember us talking about was the role of fungus in allowing mammals to ascend during this period. I think this was covered in our episode on prototax I d s these giant uh, these giants potentially fungus, you know, stalks that would have been found hundreds of millions of years ago. UM. I remember us talking about a CBC documentary that was discussing how in the wake of the KPg extinction event. So of course the space impact would kick up tons of dust into the atmosphere that would darken the skies, and this would lead to tons tons of dead, decaying plant matter under this darkened sky. And so in this world of sort of darkened skies and dead decaying plant matter, this is a perfect invitation for fungi to thrive. And of course all of this fungus around would represent a threat to the survival of some of the remaining animals, but it and affect all animals equally because suddenly our mammalian ancestors, by having warm blooded bodies, would have much better protection against fungal infections than cold blooded animals such as the then dominant reptiles. It's a this this world is is interesting to try and imagine. It's kind of a so again, it's a world of of of rot and decay and fungus. It's a world of of of rats on the ascent uh it um. I'm tempted to compare it to the in in the the Warhammer fantasy setting. There's this chaos god that's uh this name Nergal, which I guess is you know, derived from Nergal, the the ancient deity that we've discussed recently on the Mespotamian. Yeah. And but anyway, this chaos god is a god of of decay and u and disease. But but often, more often than not, this symbology is that of decay and mushrooms and fungus. Uh. But then also occasionally these hordes of of of rats, like bipedal rats with with blades and such. So, uh, this would be a fitting time for for fans of of that faction. I think, I don't know about sword wielding rats. It must be a time of rats swordsman. But but but they're on the move, They're on the ascent, you know. So it's it's almost like the modern idea of rats taking up weapons and and and gaining our spot in the world. And I mean that's basically what's going on here. Like these these small, in many ways pitiful organisms when you compare them to the previous lords of the earth. Uh, they have this chance to rise up and take their spot, and they do. And we are we are the descendants of that that revolution. Yeah, because of this adaptation of having warm blooded bodies that would help fight off fungal infection. Like I actually found a quote that we featured in that previous episode. That was from our truro Casa Devol, who is a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, who said, quote, the reptiles are quite susceptible to fungal diseases. But your typical mammal, which maintains a temperature in the mid thirties or so, that would be celsius, creates a thermal exclusionary zone for fungi. So we have like the invisible armor. It's not a shell on the outside, it's not scales, we've got heat armor. But anyway, so this time that spelled doom or at least a suppression for many reptile or cold blooded species, gave gave an opportunity for mammals to really thrive. And so that's one way that the wake of the KPg extinction was a pivotal time for mammal ascendency. They were just suddenly all these opportunities. So some of these things would be opportunities for new ecological niches, new ways to get food that previously were monopolized by you know, better competitive species in the dinosaur clade, and it would be new habitats to explore and things like that. Also, no more dinosaurs eating you all the time, that's a plus. I was actually reading a Reuter's article by right named Will Dunham about the same research from the journal Science in twenty nineteen, and it's talking about the how mammals got bigger after the KPg extinction, and so talking about mammals, Dunham rights quote, within seven hundred thousand years of the mass extinction, their body mass had become one hundred times bigger than the mammals living immediately after the mass extinction, and so charting the increase is pretty amazing. Uh. To to read another section from the article here from Reuter's here quote the mammals that survived the asteroid were mainly small omnivores, the largest being the size of a rat and weighing about a pound or about half a kilogram. So here again we got rat world, right is you know, it's fungus all over the place, mold rat world, that kind of thing. Dead dinosaurs and then um. Within a hundred thousand years of the extinction event, mammals reached about thirteen pounds or six kilograms. By three hundred thousand years after the extinction, they got to fifty five pounds or with the first purely herbivorous mammalian species. By seven hundred thousand years after the asteroid, some mammals weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds or fifty rams. So this is talking about how like, you know, within like less than a million years, you've got mammals growing from from rat size to like wolf size. Yeah, I mean again swords and cloaks aside, it sounds like, yeah, uh so it's because of this extinction that we exist. This is an important thing to remember, like we are the descendants of these mammals. At some point, our ancestor you go back through your parents, and way way down the line we trace back to some kind of rat like creature that survived the KPg extinction. But one of the interesting things is that scientists don't have a whole lot of fossils from the time right after this mass extinction, at least not as many fossils as they would like to get a fully fleshed out picture of how the mammal world recovered after this been. And so this New York Times article in the Reuter's article that I've been talking about or about this paper from Science about a fossil cash discovered in Colorado that gives us more insight into the ecology and local mammal life from right after that time. It catalogs a bunch of different mammal species that are all kind of interesting, some growing to the size of like a like a prehistoric copy Bara. But one of the interesting things about this record is how it connects to the subject of beans, because this fossil site also can tell us a lot about what was going on with plants right around the same time, and the stages in which plants recovered after the Great Dying sixty six million years ago. So I want to read a section here from the New York Times article by st Fleur that the catalogs this progression of plants, so you've got the mass extinction and then quote, first came the ferns with their feather like leaves. They proliferated across the waste land for many hundreds of years to a couple of thousand years, paving the way for worists to rebound. Next, the palms paraded in, dominating the green scene for hundreds of thousands of years. Then around three hundred thousand years after the catastrophe, a diverse array of walnuts appeared that coincided with the jump in diversity and body size of herbivorous mammals, which suggests they were an important food source. We call that world the pecan pie world, said Ian Miller, a paleobotanist at the Denver Museum of Natural Science. He added that this epic also coincided with a warming period in the fossil record, which could indicate that a shifting climate played a role in the development of plants and animals following the extinction event. But then it gets to another interesting plant development after this discovery, the world's first known bean pod. So now I want to read a sections from this article published in Science. This again is by license at all and the author's here right quote. The corral Bloo section provides the oldest known occurrence of the legumento say or being family, represented by fossil seed pods and leaflets, dated sixty five point three five million years ago. The oldest previously recognized legume is based on wood and leaflets from early Paleocene rocks of Argentina, whereas the earliest legumes seed pods are not recognized until the late paleo scene roughly fifty eight million years ago of Columbia. Our discovery supports a nearly synchronous first appearance of legumes in North America and southern South America, a rapid diversification for the group in the earliest paleo scene, and their apparent origination in the western hemisphere. So to summarize, they found this bean pod. I think actually they talk about how, um, the record of this bean pod was discovered by a high school student who was helping excavate the site. And I believe there's a documentary that you can find that PBS did about this fossil record dicovery and uh that might get into more detail about the discovery process. But this bean ancestor was dated to something like seven hundred thousand years after the mass extinction event, and it was also timed in synchronization with this warming pulse in the Earth's atmosphere as well as, as we pointed out, earlier to the appearance of wolf sized mammals. So the authors here suggest that, well, maybe these beans were helping to provide calorie dense food sources to these mammals as they're getting bigger. This is not known for sure, but this seems like a quite reasonable hypothesis to be explored more. Uh. Dr Miller, who I quoted earlier, said, quote, we liken them to the protein bars of the ancient world. So the appearance of these first beans, this bean pot ancestor, appears to be time to a sudden shift upward in mammalian body mass. And this makes it look at least possible and worthy of further explanation that protein reach beans were a nutritional driver for mammal ascendency. So beans were the protein bars, and then these various mammals they were the lift they were the power lifters, they were they were the ones putting on mass. Okay, well at least potentially well right, Well, what we've established so far is just this interesting correlation in the appearance of the of these species. We don't know for sure that like what was eating what, but uh but yeah, it definitely seems worth looking into more, because you know, as I think I've established by this point, I'm all in favor of being propaganda whatever, whatever makes beans look good than now. Next year I did have a section about beans and flatulence, but I'm actually thinking maybe I'm gonna save that for part two. Yeah, maybe we can hold that and uh and release it in the next episode. I think that's a good idea. So I think I'm just gonna clench down and see if we we can save that for the next one, give you incentive to return. But next time we're gonna be talking about all kinds of crazy being stuff, beans and souls, beans and farts. It's going to be it'll be a blast. So but wait, we're not done yet. No, no, no, We've got We've got more stuff to discuss here, more early early being history. Um are our attempts to understand early being history and uh, I think a little bit of magic and mythology related to beans, so as usual for for all things ancient. One of my first stops in looking at this topic was to start flipping around in the seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient World. That's the book by anthropologist Brian M. Fagan. But the different sections of it, uh, he'll work with with other experts, and in in the section dealing with ancient cereal crops, he worked with Stephen Mythin, professor of prehistory at the University of Reading. And this mostly uh, mostly focused and focused on various cereal crops. But there's a really good part of this that deals with um with the domestication of beings and other plants in the America's and they point out that there there seemed to have been two centers of plant domestication in the America's. First of all, there was the There was the the Andes, and this would have focused mostly on keenoa, but also on the potato. And then in Central Mexico you have that trifecta of maize or corn, beans and squash. Now, in both of these cases, the domestications were undertaken by unsettled mobile peoples. And we've touched on this before about the idea. You know, sometimes we have this sort of this rough, simple version in our head of of what it means for people to stop moving around and start growing crops. You know, the idea is like, should we hunt and gather anymore? No, let's just settle here and grow some beans. It it doesn't seem to quite work like that in history, right that it seems hard to imagine a scenario when somebody who like grew up as a hunter gatherer was just like, okay, now we're planting crops. You know, it seems like there's a more gradual transition of uh, sort of the slow partial domestication of wild grains and crops. Overtime, this leads to the realization that this could become a full time living Yeah, And ultimately I think this is a more realistic um we have looking at it and understanding it, because otherwise, if you if you have that that that full stop and then shift to plant domestication or animal domestication, I feel like there's a gap there in the in in our brains, and then it's a gap that some of us may want to insert aliens in. You know, you start thinking like, well, how did we How did we get the idea to grow and domesticate beans or turn wheat into flour um. Something must have told us how to do it. There must have been some magic flame or some gimmi god or some sort of alien being. And of course there are there are plenty of tremendous myths and folk tales that kind of deal with that exact situation, And we'll get to a couple of examples in a bit. You know, those stories are good enough that you don't need to make up a new one. That's right, you don't need to say, oh, it's aliens that gave us farming. Alright. So wild beings grow throughout Central America, and a cluster of wild beans around Guadalajara seemed to be the common ancestor of the common domesticated being that we mentioned earlier. This was what a Faziolus vulgaris. And this species comes in in many different forms, including red beans, pinto beans, and kidney beans. A lot of the beans weet today are our variations on faziolas. Faziolus the genus more broadly, and Faziolis vulgaris the common being. Now you might wonder, well, what what's the difference between between this wonderful being and the various wild beans. What's the main difference. Well, it has to do with how the bean pods split open in the wild. The bean pod just eventually splits open, spills the seeds so that maybe it maybe spread, you know, by largely by various organisms. But this was gradually bred out of domesticated beans, as people repeatedly picked bean pods that were less prone to splitting apart. And it's unsure to what degree this was intentional or accidental. You know, maybe mixes of both at different times, but the results were domesticated, being species that could not spread their seeds without the aid of human harvesters. Interesting, now, you might wonder, Okay, when does this take place? Well, Fagan and Mythn wrote that that the dating at the least of the time of their writing was patchy at best, uh, and they did not provide a rough estimate for the for these beans in Central America, though the squash seems to have undergone biological domestic change by UM hundred BC and maze bytwo hundred BC. Quinoa, again in the south, dates roughly to five thousand BC. I love this kind of puzzle in human history, of like putting together what kind of like human activity could have led to the like changes in the evolution of a plant species like this that, like without even necessarily intending to Yeah, yeah, what sorts of choices be they? You know, is very direct choices or just sort of sort of you know, uh, gradual selections take place by humans interacting with the natural world. Now, I think you promised me some bean myths from ancient meso America, didn't you. Yes, yes, so so again, like we said, it doesn't need to be that gap in which you insert the divine. But it's it's often it's it's often very interesting and entertaining and uh and and and also you know the sacred when you have uh have a god slip into that role. And indeed, there's a wonderful Aztec myth that I came across about the bringing of grains and seeds into the human diet, which I read about in Aztec and Maya Myths by Carl Tobb. This is from UM. Now, now I should be clear that there are several different myths about the origins of maize, in particular because maze or corn is just vitally important uh to uh to Central American cultures, and at times there ascribed as a kind of sacred flesh or the precursor to human flesh or the flesh of the gods. Maze is life. But beans are nice to beans, maybe less flashy as maze or corn, I feel, and I feel like that's even the case today. You know, it's Children of the Corn by Stephen King None children of the beans. Um Like maze is maybe just a little sexier uh than beans, But the beans are vitally important too, and so they get looped into some of these myths as well. Well, I mean this goes back to something that I was talking about when I read that section from ken Albola earlier about how I think he was talking about some of the domestication of lentils in particular, but you know, he talks about how together the grains and the and the beans form a nutritional package that supplies things that the other doesn't have and it doesn't have or doesn't have in the same abundance. So the example here was that combining starches and legumes, where the amino acids that are not in the lentils are supplied by the grains, but the lycene that's missing from the grains is supplied by the legumes. And that when you have these different crops coming together to form a sort of like diet package, they fill the gaps of the other. Yeah. Yeah, so you need them both, even if one is if one takes on slightly more sacred connotations. And the myth making Now this myth in particular was recorded in Legends of the Suns, and this was found in the fifteen fifty eight Codex Chimo Popoca, and this was written in the novel language. So in this myth, I'm gonna I'm gonna mostly just summarizing here. So humans have been created, and I'm and I'm not entirely sure from the context if if IF like a lot or most of the humans are actual infants in this scenario. But the gods are unsure what the humans are going to eat, Like, okay, the humans exist now, but they have to eat something. So the gods go out in search. The aztect gods go out in search of things humans can consume. And during his own search, while we have a familiar character here, we have Quetzalkdal, the plume serpent god that we've discussed on previous episodes. Um, he's involved in the search. He goes out looking for sustenance for the new humans, and he comes across a red ant carrying a single grain of maze and he realizes, well, this might be the very grain that humans need in order to survive. So the Plume, the serpent god sweeps, you know, sweeps down from from the sky and he he just starts talking to the aunt and he says, hey, that's that's some wonderful, wonderful foods you got there on your back can you tell me where you got it? And the aunt says no, which I which I love Aunt defiance, Yeah, but quetzal Cotal is insistent. So the Aunt finally reveals the source of this and many other precious grains, including beans, and it's the interior vault of Mount tona Catptl, the Mountain of Sustenance. So Quetzalcota is impressed by this, transforms his own body into that of a black ant and he infiltrates the Mountain of Sustenance, and indeed he finds it just feel it's like this hollowed out vault and it's just filled with seeds and grains. Uh, there's maze there, their beings um. So he steals some of the maze, brings it back, and the other gods they take the maze, they chew it up, and they feed it to these human infants to make them strong. So already, I think it's interesting that instead of some demigod or hero stealing a secret resource from the gods and bringing it to humanity, we instead having we we seem to have something more like a god stealing a secret resource from nature itself, from this treasure trove hidden within the mountain. It almost it almost makes me wonder if this, uh, this in some way inspired the hobbit. Well, yeah, it when you think of of of mountain depths filled with riches, you do kind of think of the dwarves. But I also wonder if it, you know, if it is also ultimately telling about trends and Mesoamerican um religion and considerations of the natural environment. You know that that that that that ultimately that nature sort of stands apart from the gods to a certain extent. Oh that's interesting. So you're saying, like not identifying the gods with nature. The gods are not the forces of nature, but another thing like humanity that sort of must wrestle with the forces of nature, maybe in some ways to a certain degree. That though, on the other hand, you do have gods that are very much associated with aspects of nature as well in these systems, so uh, you know, I wouldn't say it's a clear cut division. So anyway, Quetzalcodal took on the form of an aunt brought out like a few pieces of corn to help feed humanity. But clearly this is not going to hold up in the long run. So what they need to do is they need to bring the Mountain of sustenance to the humans. So Quetzalcode slings a rope around the mountain and tries to drag it to the human nursery camp. But it's too big because it's a mountain. Another plan is needed, so they decided to bring in a little a little counseling on this, and they turned to Oximoco and sit bac Tonal. This is the first human couple and the goddess of night and the god of astrology and calendars, though I think both of them are considered gods of astrology and calendars. Okay, so that sounds like that they would have some wisdom or maybe predictive power. Yeah. Yeah. And so these two individuals divine that they must turn to another god for help to help them plunder the riches of the mountain. The diseased god and future sun deity Nana Hudson, whose whose name apparently means full of sores. That's a good god name. This is funny that we were just talking about Nercle earlier with that sort of disease god. Yeah. Well, um, it's it's slightly different. I think that this god is not necessarily a manifestation of disease. But is he himself is diseased and then is faded to become a sun deity. But yeah, again we see this kind of element of plague and disease, if we it's tempting to want to compare that to this this history of of mold world and the and the rise of the bean and the rat. So anyway, um U Nana Hudson moves in and with the aid of blue, white, yellow and red play locks the directional gods of the storms, um Nana Hudson breaks open this the Mountain of sustenance. The grains spill out, and then the taie locks. They gather up the maze the beans other culinary treasures from the depths of the mountain, and they dispense them to the people. Oh you know, I I love this for multiple reasons. I mean, this is just a great story, but also there's a certain kind of plausibility to it that uh that you know, is it's not just the sort of myth logic of breaking open a mountain full that's a corny copy of food that can then feed everyone. I mean, as we've talked about again with like grains and beans, A really wonderful thing about these types of foods is that they can be stored and transported in dried form, unlike a lot of other foods. And because of this quality that they can be stored and transported dry with their nutritional content intact in order to be resurrected later through cooking. Uh. They they have so much, so much sort of like versatility as a civilization founding food source than a lot of other types of food would have foods that generally need to be uh preserved in some way specially or kept fresh or something like that. But also because of this, like they remind me more of the physical treasures that you would see in other types of stories where there's a mountain full of gold coins or something, and here it's like you can have dried grains, literal beans or grains. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Like this is the true, the true larger worth rating here. Um. I also love the idea of the calendar gods being involved of then in cracking it open, because ultimately, like being able to being people of the calendar aids you in the domestication of plants and in the management of your crops and your ability to you know, to know when to plant, when to harvest, when to seal away, and then when to uh you know, bring it back and plant once more. That is interesting. I didn't make that connection. Yeah, okay, well, I think maybe we're gonna have to call part one there. But we've got so much more interesting stuff to talk about. Next time, we're going to talk about beans and souls, ancient religious beliefs about beans from other parts of the world. We're going to talk about soybeans, which yes they're also beans. Uh, it's it's going to be the bee's knees. So join us again next time. That's right. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, maybe some of our past treatments of food related topics like tomatoes for example. Uh, you can find all of those in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. You'll find that wherever you get your pot casts. We have our our core science episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have artifact episodes on Wednesday's Listener Mail on Mondays, and on Fridays, we do uh weird House Cinema, which is uh not so science e and more about just us geeking out over some some weird movie from the past. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. 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