Tristan Hughes explores Ancient America's true age; how 19th-century fossil discoveries across North America revealed a history far older than previously believed, challenging the notion that the Americas were a 'New World.'Tristan is joined by Professor Caroline Winterer as they discuss walking on 4 billion-year-old rocks in Eastern Canada, uncovering the first trilobites and the sensational dinosaur discoveries like the T-Rex and Brontosaurus that mesmerised the public and scientific community alike.More on:Ice Age America:https://open.spotify.com/episode/4KZruCMwpO7TakuiMs7DMp?si=2b1fdca8b18c4ef4The Ancient Amazon:https://open.spotify.com/episode/5YxnzfGa4x4Z8l4JE6Uwmh?si=0ec9d00afb0b476eTyrannosaurus Rex:https://open.spotify.com/episode/3uxH3HHjSuEk0mHmjFU9k7?si=1f57b9a555ac4bffPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.All music from Epidemic SoundsSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here
Chapter 1: What is the story of Deep Time America?
Now, I'm used to on the podcast sometimes delving into particular monuments or focusing in on a particular period of ancient history or prehistory. This one feels like we're going to be talking in millions of years and so on. Is this the story of actually how old North America is and the misconceptions there were about that in previous centuries?
Yeah, there were a lot of misconceptions until very recently, actually, 200 years ago, people around the world thought that the Americas were only about 6,000 years old, which was the age of the Earth. And within the space of a mere century, they absolutely changed their minds about it, thinking it was a billion or even more years old. So that was quite a change of their minds.
And is it this idea of deep time? So what is that?
Yes. Deep time is the view that actually probably most of your listeners carry around with them without knowing it. And that is the view that the planet Earth itself is billions of years old and life upon it several hundred million of years old.
That view, even though it's broadly accepted today, is in fact a very new idea and it emerges in the space of a mere century between around 1800 and 1900 when people in Europe and the Americas began to imagine that the Earth was quite old and not the 6,000 years that a literal reading of the Bible would suggest.
Yes, absolutely. Well, let's focus in on North America. And first off, how old do we therefore think the North American continent is understood to be?
So today, scientists believe that the North American continent is over 4 billion years old.
Whoa.
Yeah, whoa. And also, you can walk on some of those 4 billion years old rocks if you go to the eastern part of Canada, where the so-called Canadian shield of extremely ancient rocks is visible at the surface. So you can walk on 4 billion year old rocks.
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Chapter 2: How old is North America according to scientists?
I mean, how can you tell that particular rocks could be some four billion years old?
Well, this is such a great question. So in fact, they didn't know how old the rocks actually were until the early 1900s. And that's when they discovered radiometric dating, which is dating rocks by the decay of electrons and protons and all the chemists out there.
Chapter 3: What can we learn from 4 billion-year-old rocks?
Chapter 4: What is deep time and why is it significant?
Yes. Well, and actually, I should say, so do parts of the British Isles. If you go to Scotland, you can see some very, very ancient rocks, actually rock formations that are shared with North America. But yes, deep in the Grand Canyon are rocks that are also billions of years old. And you have to work a little harder than on the Canadian Shield.
But if you hike all the way down to the bottom to the Colorado River, you will encounter very, very ancient rocks. And it was It was these rocks that Americans began to discover over the course of the 19th century and to imagine that they were not 6,000 years old, that they were in fact quite a bit older than that.
And that's what my book is calling the deep time revolution, because it really is revolutionary to think about time in such expansive terms. essentially how big the stage is for the story of Earth and for the story of life upon it.
And with this unravelling of thought, as you say, as more information comes to light and the technological advancements that come with it, so that these people can start realising just how old the North American continent was, what were the main types of materials that they had available to learn more about this stuff and just how old some of these things were?
I mean, how can you tell that particular rocks could be some four billion years old?
Well, this is such a great question. So in fact, they didn't know how old the rocks actually were until the early 1900s. And that's when they discovered radiometric dating, which is dating rocks by the decay of electrons and protons and all the chemists out there.
Science. Science, yes.
Fill in with science. So that's what we call actual dates is assigning an actual year value like how old you are, how old I am, how old the Earth is. They did not have this before 1900. And so what I'm calling the deep time revolution unfolds only with relative dates. So that's saying that a layer of rock that lies on top of another one is younger, right?
Because we imagine that things are deposited in order, right, as you would make a sandcastle at the beach. The layer on the bottom was put down at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. The layer on the top was put down at 3 o'clock. But you actually have no idea how old the layers are. And so what's extraordinary about the deep time revolution is that it unfolds precisely in the absence
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Chapter 5: How did the discovery of fossils change perceptions of America's history?
Some of them have American names, the Hadrosaurus named after Haddonfield, New Jersey, but also they love to ship them to Europe to say, hey, you know, you guys think that we're inferior Americans, right? We had the chutzpah to seek independence from Mother Britain 50 years ago. We think, you know, we're so great. And in fact, we are so great because here,
Here on this ship is a giant fossil of a dinosaur that is bigger than your puny little English fossils.
It's almost kind of a reversal, isn't it? That at the time, there were a lot of people who were collecting antiquities from Egypt and Greece and Disney and bringing them to Britain or France or whatever, and they become part of the exhibitions. And America is almost a bit late. But it is almost a contrast to that.
Now America is front of the queue with things that actually they're discovering in their own land. Look what we can bring to the party kind of thing, I guess.
It is exactly that. It is no more sophisticated than four-year-olds in the playground. My bucket is bigger.
No, no, no.
Look what I've got. Americans have a terminal inferiority complex. Many carry it still today. The Greeks and Romans had never been inferior. to the New World, no matter what you read on the web. Romans and Greeks had never been to the New World. And they didn't have the Middle Ages in the sense of crumbling castles and monarchies and all these things.
But now they had dinosaur fossils that were bigger and also that were older. So what they couldn't win on the culture front, they won on the antiquity and size front. And they continue to do that today. You know, if you come to American natural history museums, all you ever read is how much older they are than European fossils. So it's not like Americans got over it.
You mentioned in passing earlier Cretaceous. So with those key dinosaur periods in deep time, so millions of years ago, is it in America? Because it feels like the main areas, aren't they? It's the Cretaceous, the last period, which ends with the meteorite, the Jurassic beforehand, Jurassic Park and so on. Triassic before that, but that's more the rise of the dinosaurs.
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Chapter 6: What were the major dinosaur discoveries in the 19th century?
And he realizes that some of these strata, for example, the Cretaceous and the Jurassic are more visible in North America than they were anywhere in Europe. So Europe had had those time periods, but they weren't sitting on the surface, easily accessible in the same quantity as they were in the giant space of North America. So America becomes the great fossil hunting ground for Europeans.
And in some sense, it still remains so today, although now, of course, many other areas of the world have been opened up for fossil hunting like China and North Africa, et cetera.
We'll definitely go back to explore more of that fossil hunting story and some particular really interesting examples of that race to unearth these fossils and who these people were. But as you hinted at there, deep time, it doesn't end with the end of the dinosaurs. Obviously, it continues there millions of years before... the first humans in North America.
So far, you've given the sense that it's almost layer upon layer upon layer, and then you get to the dinosaurs. But then you mentioned there that some dinosaur bones were at the surface. So what about the animals that follow the dinosaurs? How easy were they to discover as well? What do we know about their story in the 19th century discoveries?
Yeah, well, again, taking us into the American Midwest in the dry landscape of the Dakotas of Nebraska, sort of the upper Midwest, right under Canada, Americans begin to build the transcontinental railroads in the decades after the Civil War.
We can imagine it as a kind of zipper relinking the continent that had been shorn in two by the Civil War, that in order to build the railroads, you need to bring the geologists. And the geologists, of course, are going to find bones of various kinds.
In especially the Badlands of the Dakotas, where you have these deep gullies, you find on top of the dinosaur bones, suddenly the dinosaurs are gone. vanished. And you have a new kind of creature, which turns out to be mammals. And they find these enormous, crazy mammals, like giant rhinoceroses on drugs, you know, things the size of rhinos, but with crazy horns all over their skulls.
They find tiny little monkeys and every kind of creature in between. So being Victorians, everything is the age of this and the reign of that. So they christened this the age of mammals, and they realized that the age of the dinosaurs had seeded to the age of mammals.
and that they were going to show the world once again that American mammals were bigger than any other mammals around the world, but also that significantly some of the mammals, like the horse that had been associated with the European conquest of the world, had in fact originated in the Americas.
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Chapter 7: How did fossil discoveries impact American identity?
It's not obvious either, when we think of Jurassic America, it's not immediately obvious that this had to be a bloodthirsty land of gore and rapine, right? These creatures had teeth, but we have teeth and we're not gnashing our way through forests, you and I, normally. And so it was very much a product of the Victorian mindset that they imposed on an ancient time period
the capitalist values of their own day. This is the era of the robber barons and unfettered capitalism with no safety net and no unions, but they wanted to think of themselves as civilized human beings. And so they thought that any ancient time period must have been a lawless era of blood and gore. And the first paintings of T-Rex were very gore-filled.
And so that's what they impose on the Jurassic. And that's what we carry around with us today. We don't remember, we don't think about the gentle parts of the Jurassic. There were gentle little creatures in the Jurassic, but that wouldn't be any fun for us. So we populate it with these big, scary and fun dinosaurs. You know, don't give me a small, boring vegetarian dinosaur.
I want a big, bloodthirsty one. It is because we have inherited the Victorian dinosaurs of 150 years ago. So that's worth remembering.
So by the early 20th century, just how different have people's, not just in America, but also in Europe and elsewhere, have people's perception of North America? How significantly in that hundred years or so have mindsets, attitudes changed towards North America because of that discovery of deep time?
Yeah. Well, Europeans came around, some of them, to the idea that North America and then South America had a legitimate place on the international stage of science, that they were producing scientists and they were producing interesting scientific finds. So it's a really kind of
Declaration of Independence for American science as a result of deep time, even though Americans would never win on the stage of the Greek and Roman high culture that we see in European museums. So it was very significant as a chapter in American history.
Lastly, it seems very important and timely to bring it up today. Is this rich prehistoric history of the North American continent and its varying environments, is this part of the reason why North America is so rich in minerals and fossil fuels today? Natural resources that continue to be used aplenty in North America today?
Yeah, that is accidental. The first white settlers of North America didn't know that the mineral riches of North America were there for the taking. But it is a product of this deep time revolution between 1800 and 1900 that the full realization of the industrial uses of the oil and minerals of North America, all of that came into focus. We are sitting on this extraordinary opportunity
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