Today you’ll learn about how psychedelics may be making their way to the States, the longest necked animal that we know of, and how donkeys have been helping humanity for longer than we previously knew.
Today you’ll learn about how psychedelics may be making their way to the States, the longest necked animal that we know of, and how donkeys have been helping humanity for longer than we previously knew.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/psychedelic-brain-health-giant-dinosaur-donkey-family-tree
Psychedelic Brain Health
Giant Dinosaur
Donkey Family Tree
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NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today you’ll learn about how psychedelics may be making their way to the States, the longest necked animal that we know of, and how donkeys have been helping humanity for longer than we knew.
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Here’s a good thought to start your day: many psychedelic drugs like magic mushrooms or MDMA are actually good for you.
CALLI: We’ve talked about this a little bit before, right? You told me they used magic mushrooms, which contain psilocybin, in Switzerland to make lonely people feel less socially anxious?
NATE: As a refresher, when someone consumes mushrooms, it’s psilocybin that causes the hallucinations. As long as they’re taken in a supervised way, mushrooms can actually help patients that have depression or other psychiatric disorders. On the other end, we have methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine, or which you might know as MDMA… which is up for review right now with the FDA as a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. If approved, we might start seeing MDMA as a treatment by the end of 2023.
CALLI: Okay but how? Aren’t both of them illegal in the United States?
NATE: Fun fact: psilocybin is actually legal in a number of cities, territories, and even states across the US now. It started with Denver, Colorado, back in 2019, which led to a few more cities across the country over the next two years. But the biggest place was the state of Oregon, which in 2020 became the first state to not only decriminalize the substance, but legalize it altogether as a therapeutic drug. On the other hand, MDMA is still illegal in the US… but perhaps not for long, as a new bill was proposed in March of 2023 in the state of Nevada to decriminalize both psilocybin and MDMA, because of their potential health benefits. At this point, it doesn’t seem to be a question of “IF” these substances will become legal everywhere. It’s a matter of “WHEN.”
CALLI: I feel like just a few years ago both of these drugs were still being touted as being dangerous and in need of being banned. So what changed?
NATE: It’s the medicinal qualities of both. A recent study by researchers Anna Wexler and Dominic Sisti said that due to MDMA being such an effective PTSD treatment and psilocybin being such an excellent depression treatment, the FDA has labeled both as “breakthrough therapies” and put them on the fast track to a quick approval process. On top of that, there’s a lot of commercial interest in a pair of drugs that, yes, are used quite often for recreational purposes, too. There are countless companies that no doubt want to capitalize on what Wexler and Sisti say will be a “multibillion-dollar market.”
CALLI: Cool! Okay. Is there a downside to all of this?
NATE: Of course there is. Anybody using MDMA or psilocybin for fun isn’t going to be the same person who needs it as a treatment. But Dominic Sisti co-authored another study with Andrew Beswerchij on how we can use medical language to draw the line between how these drugs can be USED as treatments or ABUSED recreationally. Instead of saying “magic mushrooms” or “shrooms,” we can use the official designation of psilocybin when referring to treatment. Instead of referring to MDMA as “ecstasy,” the drug that MDMA is a primary component in, we can call it MDMA, which will help keep the focus on the treatment instead of the ways it can be abused - which will help destigmatize the topic of decriminalizing helpful drugs. However, there is an even bigger downside that… sorta combines all of these into one thing.
CALLI: Use, abuse, recreational, AND therapeutic? How?
NATE: Wexler and Sisti call them “brain wellness clinics and spas,” which are basically places that provide you with substances meant as treatments for your mental health. To be fair, they’re supposed to be in “controlled environments” like hospitals or community centers, but Wexler and Sisti worry that throwing psilocybin or MDMA into the mix could backfire for a number of reasons. The biggest reason being this could create a sort of boom for off-label, generic MDMA and psilocybin - and because each drug would be INCREDIBLY available, it could actually harbor a situation where people could recreationally take far more than what is medically safe.
CALLI: Obviously, if the drugs passed, there would be some kind of limitations or regulations in place right?
NATE: Yep. And no disrespect whatsoever to Wexler and Sisti, but the same can be said for any legalized treatment, drug, or substance. It will ultimately be up to the government on how the substances are regulated once they’re decriminalized. Right now, we’re in the middle of what the website Psychology Today calls a “second psychopharmacologic revolution.” Similar but less effective drugs to MDMA and psilocybin have already been approved by the FDA, like neurosteroids or other ketamine-based drugs. And as psychotherapy progresses, so too will the treatments we use to treat psychiatric conditions.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Quick Nate - what animal has the longest neck in existence? And don't say giraffe!
NATE: DON’T say giraffe? Uhhhh uhhhhh uhhhhh is it a……………. Giraffe?
CALLI: That’s what I told you NOT to say! Time’s up - the answer is Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum, which was a dinosaur that lived in eastern Asia over 160 million years ago. We’re not 100% sure if this is the longest necked animal in existence… but it’s the longest neck we know about.
NATE: Dinosaurs! Of course, the answer should always be dinosaurs!
CALLI: Oh my gosh. Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum. But Mamenchisaurus is a loose translation of “Mamenchi lizard” after where the original fossils were found, so we can call it that. These fossils were actually found in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China back in 1987 and date back at least 162 million years; back then, we didn’t really have much to go off of. A few bones, including a couple vertebrae and one rib. But more modern researchers were able to take a stab at the length of the Mamenchi lizard by comparing the bones they had to more complete skeletons of other Sauropods, which are the subspecies of this particular dinosaur.
NATE: What did they find?
CALLI: Well, they looked at another sauropod’s 44-foot-long neck. That sauropod is known as Xinjiangtitan, and was found back in 2013. Even today, that’s the longest COMPLETE neck we’ve ever found in fossils. But the Mamenchi lizard is a different story. You see, Xinjiangtitan had 18 vertebrae in its neck - and the Mamenchi lizard likely did too. Based off of the bone mass, they figured the Mamenchi lizard was… a bit bigger.
NATE: By how much?
CALLI: It’s very likely that the Mamenchi lizard was a whopping 164 feet from its snout down to the tail, and weighed seventy freaking tons.
NATE: 164 feet long… jeez, how long is this thing’s neck, Calli?
CALLI: Almost 50 feet. For perspective, you thought I was talking about a giraffe at first, whose neck is usually anywhere from six to ten feet at the biggest. Now, you know when you’re driving on the freeway and you pass one of those huge semi-trucks with a trailer attached? Those trailers are 53 feet long on average; so imagine something with a neck as long as a semi-truck trailer… that is also a huge freaking dinosaur.
NATE: Oy vey. Should I be scared if I ever run into the Mamenchi lizard?
CALLI: No, and for two reasons. Number 1, you won’t run into a Mamenchi lizard. It’s extinct. The sauropod subspecies, which is the type of dinosaur a Mamenchi lizard is, had a VERY long life from early in the days of dinosaurs, all the way through the asteroid event 66 million years ago that made all dinosaurs extinct. The only survivors of that event were the creatures that eventually evolved into modern birds - none of which have semi-truck necks. But even if it weren’t extinct, the creature was an herbivore. That neck was actually how a sauropod could eat a lot of grass in one sitting without ever leaving a location. Big reward for low energy and all that.
NATE: Okay, but how could you even survive with a neck that long? Wouldn’t someone collapse under that kind of weight? If the neck is 50 feet long, and the Mamenchi lizard is 164 feet long, that neck is almost a third of its entire length!
CALLI: That’s actually still a mystery to the scientific community at large. Scientists DID do x-rays of the fossils that revealed their vertebrae were hollow and weighed very little. We can find skeletal structures like that in modern birds, whose light bones enable swift flight. That kind of structure would make an earthbound creature susceptible to bones easily breaking, but the Mamenchi lizard had a trick up its sleeve, or I guess down its collar: it had neck ribs that were rod-like in shape that made its neck stiffer and more stable.
NATE: I just can’t believe there’s something with a neck this long.
CALLI: There’s a very real chance that we haven’t seen anything yet. Andrew Moore is a paleontologist based out of New York’s Stony Brook University, and he thinks this is going to be the FIRST of an even bigger set of finds. He said, and I quote, “Unless we’re willing to believe that we just so happened to discover the largest single individual sauropod that ever existed, our default assumption should always be that there were larger animals out there.” So long story short, we may have discovered the longest necked creature on Earth that we know about… but we’re really gonna need to place some stock in emphasizing the part that says “that we know about.”
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: I was watching that movie The Banshees of Inisherin on HBO Max the other night, and found myself becoming a REALLY huge fan of Colin Farrell’s donkey. It got me thinking: where does the donkey even come from?
CALLI: Don’t remind me of the donkey from Banshees of Inisherin, Nate. I’m still crying at the thought of that little guy. But what do you mean by “where the donkey comes from”?
NATE: I mean, I feel like we take the donkey for granted. When we think of animals being used for transportation, we think of horses. When we think of lovable pets, we think of dogs or cats. And even though donkeys have been BOTH around the world for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, they haven’t really received too much attention from scientists, and therefore their family tree has always been a little incomplete. Or it WAS, because for certified donkey fans like myself, Christmas came a little early this year with the arrival of a new genetic study being touted as “the most comprehensive study of donkey genomics yet.”
CALLI: Ooooh okay, interesting. Now I’ll finally know Donkey from Shrek’s true story. How did they do this?
NATE: It was a study led by Ludovic Orlando, a French researcher. Orlando’s been studying horse domestication for years, but he admits that the study is inspired by a lack of available information on the donkey’s history. So he teamed up with 37 labs from around the world to look into the genomes of 207 living donkeys across a number of countries, and also analyzed the DNA from 31 ancient donkey skeletons. Some of these bones are over 4,000 years old, so they went deep on this one.
CALLI: Apparently! What did they find?
NATE: Well, starting at the very beginning, the only clue they had to work with was that donkeys began their domestication journey in one of three places. Orlando discovered that the donkeys had to have been domesticated in what today is known as Kenya as the world’s first form of transportation - sometime near the year 5,000 BC. That’s actually 400 years prior to the earliest known evidence of tamed donkeys, which were found near Cairo - and practically three THOUSAND years before horses were tamed.
CALLI: How can you even tell, on archaeology alone, that a donkey was tamed?
NATE: From the bones. An Oxford archaeologist named Peter Mitchell describes domestication as a “process,” one you can find by looking at donkey bones. For example, 10 donkey skeletons were found in southern Egypt that showed damage to their vertebrae and joints. This signified that the donkeys hauled things around, especially when compared to wild donkey bones. This actually checks out with donkey bones found all over the region.
CALLI: Wow! Why do they think Africa is where donkeys were tamed?
NATE: Kenya’s just below the Sahara desert. If traders needed to cross the Sahara desert for any reason, the donkey would have been quite valuable. The Sahara is huge. Very arid. Very DRY. And donkeys are quite good at retaining water for long periods of time. From there, the donkey branches out a few ways. First, across the desert to what we know today as Sudan, as well as Egypt, eventually leaving Africa and heading into parts of Europe and Asia. And, for the first time, this team also found a type of donkey nobody ever knew about before.
CALLI: Really?
NATE: At a dig site located on a former Roman villa that’s now a modern village 175 miles east of Paris, there was evidence found of what appears to be a “donkey breeding center.” Remnants were found that matched with western African donkeys, European donkeys… and a hybrid of the two that Orlando calls proof of a “giant-donkey bloodline.”
CALLI: Giant donkeys?! We JUST talked about the giant dinosaurs in the last segment, is this thing going to be just as big?
NATE: No, but they’re still pretty big. The giant donkeys were a whopping 61 inches from floor to the donkey’s withers, which is the space below its shoulders. So uh… five feet tall. NOT including its head. For perspective, most modern donkeys are 51 inches… just over four feet.
CALLI: Why would you want to breed some kind of super donkey?
NATE: We’ll probably never know for sure, but Orlando thinks it’s because at this time, mules were important to the Roman economy and military. Mules are the result of breeding a male donkey and a horse mare and are incapable of breeding themselves, but are also stronger, faster, and able to carry more goods than an average sized donkey. This super donkey breeding center very likely came after the fall of the Roman empire, though, meaning they wouldn’t need to focus as much on intense traveling. Thus, the super donkey would be cheaper AND more efficient for local business.
CALLI: This is all kinda fascinating. Why am I just now learning about where the donkey came from?
NATE: Beats me. The donkey has always been a HUGE DEAL throughout history, especially in myth and religious spaces. The New York Times points out that you can see a donkey in Ancient Egyptian mythology as one of the sacred animals of Seth, lord of Chaos. Or in the New Testament, where Jesus traveled to Jerusalem on a donkey on a day that modern Christians call “Palm Sunday.” And even at certain points in history, like the Bronze Age, beloved donkeys were buried alongside their humans. Oxford archaeologist Peter Mitchell has a theory though: “out-of-sight, out-of-mind.”
CALLI: What do you mean?
NATE: Donkeys simply aren't important to North American, or even European, economies anymore. They’re considered a dirty and lesser animal, and are even depicted in the media as being something the lower class really only used in medieval times. The truth is, the donkey has a really rich history dating far, far back in time, and the work of people like Dr. Orlando helps us remember that the donkey isn’t some outdated relic of the past. The donkey is an essential part of the history of humanity - and even the entire world!
CALLI: Donkey.
NATE: Donkey.
CALLI: Inky binky bonky, daddy had a donkey. Donkey died, daddy cried, inky binky bonky.
NATE: Science.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Soon, psilocybin and MDMA are probably going to become legal - and that’s a good thing. No, this isn’t an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, this is Curiosity Daily, and today we talked about how recently, MDMA and psilocybin’s psychoactive properties are revealed to be VERY effective at treating conditions like PTSD and depression. This has put both on the fast track to decriminalization, but what will help this process along is deSTIGMAtization - learning the difference between using the substances as a treatment and abusing them recreationally.
CALLI: If you thought the giraffe’s neck was impressive, wait till you get ahold of Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum, an extinct dinosaur with a whopping 50 foot long neck. The creature was an herbivore, so no need to be scared by a dinosaur reaching over 50 feet to eat you, but the discovery opens the door to more discoveries of potentially BIGGER creatures with even LONGER necks!
NATE: We all know what a donkey IS - but where did it come from? New research suggests that the donkey’s domestication actually began THOUSANDS of years before the horse, and has been a very essential part of human history for just as long. Even though now we see images of the donkey as a sign of poverty or a sort of symbol of a “weaker animal,” the donkey helped us with everything from trade to travel to even companionship for thousands of years. It’s high time we put some respect on the donkey’s name!
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NATE: Have you ever heard of The Amber Room? It was a room in Russia, decorated in amber and gold, and during WWII, the Nazi’s stole the entire room. To this day, the whereabouts of The Amber Room remain unknown.
CALLI: On Expedition Unknown, you’ll travel the globe with Josh Gates as he investigates some of humanity’s greatest feats and most iconic legends… like the missing items of the Amber Room.
Listen to Expedition Unknown wherever you get your podcasts.