- 1 week ago
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00:00What a strange world we live in.
00:12Enormous rodents, acting like engineers.
00:18Or bears, fanning up and then bedding down for half the year.
00:25And trees just going, okay, don't need these leaves anymore.
00:33It's crazy.
00:36We're so used to bears and beavers and fall colors.
00:39We don't even see how really weird they are.
00:43But it's amazing what they do.
00:45Where do these behaviors come from?
00:48Well, everything alive in our world comes from ancestors
00:53that lived in a hotter past.
00:57Some of them would really surprise you.
01:05I study that ancient world.
01:07I'm a paleobiologist.
01:09But I'm not like most scientists.
01:13Just like beavers, I'm a little weird too.
01:17Ten years ago, I lost part of myself.
01:20That didn't stop me, but it changed everything.
01:23I'm going to tell you about it.
01:25Because what's weirder than a scientist who loses control of her brain?
01:31This world we build, it seems to change at light speed.
01:49We're moving all the time.
01:51Nothing stays the same.
01:53But the natural world seems to dance to a different tune.
02:03Maybe it changes with the seasons.
02:05But it always returns to where it was.
02:07Right?
02:09That's not true at all.
02:11I remember in grade school, there was this film about the Great Lakes.
02:21It was amazing.
02:28There was this man in a canoe, and he's like a time traveler.
02:33He'd set his camp up, and then he'd magically go back in time, like 10,000 years.
02:38And suddenly, he's on a mountaintop.
02:42Or he's paddling along the shore of Lake Superior.
02:47And then, suddenly he's paddling next to a mile-high glacier.
02:55I always remember how they dropped him in his canoe out of an airplane.
03:02I love that.
03:08But the filmmaker, Bill Mason, he's making a point.
03:15You don't have to go far back in time to find yourself in a completely different natural environment.
03:29Thanks to his crazy film, that lesson really sank in.
03:33As a little girl, I thought, okay, if the past was so totally different, what were those ancient worlds actually like?
03:50What strange animals lived here before, before the ice ages?
03:54That, for me, was completely fascinating.
04:03Nat and I were nerds together in the Gifted Kids program.
04:06It goes way, way, way back.
04:13We met in grade two.
04:14She was in my grade two class.
04:15And we shared little hobbies.
04:17At that time, we would have this thing during the summers where she's burying roadkill in her backyard that I would find, but also digging up last year's stuff.
04:28And it drove her parents crazy because sometimes if I brought over roadkill during the wintertime, you can't dig into frozen ground, right?
04:35You'd have to store these squirrels and these groundhogs in the freezer.
04:39Yeah, when I was in high school, I knew I wanted to do paleontology.
04:43Fossil insects, there's fossil dinosaurs, you know, plants and microfossils.
04:47There's lots of different ways to study the past.
04:50And so I sought out a mentorship program to narrow that down.
04:55If anybody gets to have a destiny, she had one.
04:59I mean, in high school, she's already made contacts with the big movers and shakers of the Canadian Museum and is doing field projects for them.
05:08First time I went to the Arctic was 1994, when I was a Carleton undergraduate student.
05:13I just remember flying up there and looking down on the tundra and we were like flying for hours and you're just watching tundra go by, you know, in the Arctic Ocean.
05:22And you're like, wow, I hope I brought my toothbrush, right?
05:26I had no idea.
05:28Yeah, not having done camping before.
05:32I was completely hooked then, for sure.
05:37Once you start research in the Arctic, you just have to get back.
05:40And there's so many questions and it's so hard to get to and it's so beautiful.
05:47I was definitely on the path.
05:51I lost track.
05:52And by the time I get back to sort of rediscover where her career has gone, she's already been named in Canadian Geographic.
05:59Like, this is the big time.
06:02And I'm like, holy crow.
06:03I gave that girl her first dead groundhog.
06:08After I graduated, I had an opportunity at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
06:12So it's like coming home, right?
06:15So I found myself working in the Canadian high Arctic again, which before the ice age was about 22 degrees warmer than it is today.
06:23So much more like what you'd see in a modern boreal forest in Canada.
06:27When you're a geologist, one thing you know is that the Earth is always changing.
06:38There's no such thing as the status quo.
06:40So most people are surprised to hear we're in an ice age now.
06:48For about the last two and a half million years, the Greenland ice sheet has periodically grown so large that it's covered most of Canada.
06:59It's even covered New York, where I'm speaking from now.
07:02Between those advances of the ice sheets, we have these short warm periods.
07:10We call them interglacial periods.
07:13We're in an interglacial right now.
07:16We call it the Holocene.
07:18But in the big picture, we're still living on an ice age planet.
07:24Before the ice age, the planet was in a much warmer state.
07:28That period was called the Pliocene.
07:32The place where a human would notice the biggest change before the ice ages is in the high latitudes.
07:39The high latitudes were much warmer.
07:42Places where we have tundra today, there were dense forests.
07:47And we see the physical evidence, Pliocene fossils from that ecosystem today.
07:53So my first really big fossil discovery was Puyela Darwinai, a missing link between land walking mammals and seals.
08:07That really put Natalia on the map.
08:10You know, as a paleontologist, you work with the fossil record.
08:17But the fossil record gives us many gaps.
08:20So when actually a gap can be filled with one particular find, that's a huge success.
08:28As a young researcher, that sets you on a very great trajectory in your scientific career.
08:39And she certainly did that with this fossil find.
08:46The seal was exciting, but for Natalia, that was just the start.
08:51It was a summer day in 2006 at a site on Ellesmere Island called the Files Leaf Beds.
09:01And that's just about 1,300 kilometres north of the modern tree line.
09:08It was a day just like any other day, right?
09:11So you've got your backpack on and your bug net.
09:13And you're just scanning the earth all day long, looking for any signs of anything that looks like it might be a fossil.
09:19Then at the end of one of these days, I saw a sort of orange coloured piece of something.
09:29And I thought it looks cool. It could be wood.
09:33I thought I was looking at a piece of possibly petrified wood initially.
09:38When I got back to camp that night, I got out a hand lens and looked a little closer.
09:44So looking at the broken edge for tree rings, because that would be a sure sign it's a piece of tree,
09:47but there were no tree rings.
09:51So I'm thinking that's odd, right?
09:53It might be a preservation thing.
09:55But my mind is now going more towards thinking this might actually be bone.
10:00So at that point in the field, that's where it ends.
10:02I have this tiny fragment, might be bone.
10:04It's kind of weird colour.
10:07Can't even tell how old it is.
10:09That's a really big problem.
10:10And remember, in terms of remoteness, Ellesmere Island is about the closest thing to going to Mars that we have on Earth.
10:19Like so far up there.
10:21But for the next four years, every time we get back to the site in the summer, we're collecting more pieces.
10:26And by 2010, we've got about 30 fragments.
10:31Enough to fill a small Ziploc bag.
10:35So now it's jigsaw puzzle time.
10:37You've got all these pieces.
10:39It's from the same site and thinking it's probably the same bone.
10:43So I'm trying to piece them all together.
10:45But it's not looking good.
10:46We don't have much of the bone.
10:48So then in parallel, we had this breakthrough.
10:52In the lab, we sawed off a little edge of the bone.
10:56And it created this distinctive burning smell.
11:02Like a bit like burnt hair or burnt bone.
11:05It's the smell of burning collagen.
11:07And collagen is that soft tissue that's really abundant in our body and also in bone.
11:12And the important point is that it turns out collagen protein is like a fingerprint.
11:17So it's time for CSI, Ellesmere Island.
11:22We did the proteomics on this bone.
11:25That's a fancy word for the collagen fingerprinting.
11:28And what we discover is that we have a 4 million year old high arctic camel.
11:38A giant camel, way above the arctic circle.
11:42It's mind blowing.
11:43So just think about this.
11:47Before the ice ages, it was over 20 degrees warmer and forested in the high arctic.
11:53But that doesn't mean there weren't winters.
11:56There were definitely winters.
11:58Cold, snow and months of 24 hour darkness.
12:02And then a 9 foot tall arctic camel in this place.
12:06When you think about camels today, it's really easy to imagine that they evolved to live in the desert.
12:13Right?
12:15And this is where the finding of the high arctic camel is so mind blowing, right?
12:20Because it's not in a desert, right?
12:23It's living a complete opposite to a desert.
12:26It's in a forest.
12:27Ever notice how huge a camel's eye is?
12:32Well, it turns out they have incredible vision, including night vision.
12:36That's pretty useful when it's dark six months of the year.
12:40And one of the most dramatic features of the camel is it's the hump, right?
12:46Well, it's actually a specialized fat deposit.
12:48And when you think about the importance of fat energy storage, this is something that's also very important for animals that survive through harsh winters, right?
12:59And so this then makes you wonder what if the evolution of a specialized fat deposit is actually something that originated in the far north.
13:08The wide feet of camels listed as one of the traits that helps them walk over sand also would function well in soft snow.
13:19It's amazing, actually, when you think how life in the Arctic may have set camels up for life in the desert.
13:25As a young scientist, the camel is a really big story.
13:40With 30 pieces of bone, I could help rewrite the history of camels.
13:47I could kind of feel the presence of the paleontologists who came before me,
13:52the people who'd so far written the great story of the past.
13:58And now I had some red ink on those pages.
14:01I was adding to the story, changing that story.
14:05We all have imposter syndrome, right?
14:08And I guess my own imposter syndrome was beginning to fade.
14:12It was January 2011.
14:22I was out on a ski in the Gatineau Hills.
14:26It's a night ski, and it was really slippery.
14:29It's freezing rain.
14:30It was freezing rain the day before.
14:31And I remember looking down, adjusting my headlamp.
14:38And I looked up.
14:40I had this floaty feeling.
14:41And there was a moment that I lost in there.
14:45And then a waking up kind of feeling.
14:48I got back up on my skis.
14:50I could do that.
14:52And ski all the way back to the car.
14:55I didn't have the sense that anything really bad had happened.
14:56But something bad had happened, actually.
14:57In that moment, my life changed forever.
14:58And I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
15:00And I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
15:13I didn't have the sense that anything really bad had happened.
15:17But something bad had happened, actually.
15:22In that moment, my life changed forever.
15:31I remember the headache, nausea.
15:36But there were strange things, too.
15:41The morning after the accident, I remember standing in front of my bathroom mirror,
15:48trying to find the toothpaste.
15:53Yeah, my husband would walk in and be like, it's right there, Nat.
15:57It's right on the counter on the left.
16:00Like normal.
16:05I didn't have a family doctor, like everyone.
16:10And so I was just doing walk-in clinics.
16:15I ended up going to an emergency room, eventually.
16:18And I remember this room had these huge windows.
16:22It was a bright, sunny day.
16:24And the light streaming in was just so painful.
16:26The message I was getting was I had mild concussion, and symptoms would go away in 10 days to a couple of weeks.
16:37And plus, I was too busy to be sick.
16:39I was taking a group of students on a trip to Antarctica, and I wasn't going to miss that.
16:50I should never have set foot on that ship.
16:52The Drake Passage is the roughest sea which you can find on Earth.
17:05And every ship which goes to Antarctica has to go there.
17:09There is no other way.
17:11Our journey down there was, for the Drake Passage, reasonable.
17:18However, on the way back, we were not so lucky.
17:21So it was a very violent storm.
17:26Your body is just being tossed around inside this tin can.
17:31I have good sea legs, so I'm not seasick.
17:36But I was scared.
17:38At the height of the storm, the waves were 8 to 9 meters, swelling to 10 meters.
17:43And the whole ship is shuddering from that impact.
17:48The waves just spilling over the ship.
17:52You're seeing any minute the ship breaks apart.
17:56It did occur to me that maybe this wasn't a great thing for my brain.
18:00Yeah.
18:01I remember very clearly that this was too much for Natalia.
18:10She just became silent.
18:13That's what I remember.
18:16She was not responsive to me either.
18:20In terms of understanding concussions, 2011 might as well have been a century ago.
18:25The medical profession just didn't understand the seriousness of head injuries in the way we do now.
18:31For reasons that we don't yet fully understand, an injured brain is very, very vulnerable.
18:41A second injury, or even a failure to recover from a first one, can really make a concussion a more severe event.
18:49And this is because there are two phases in the recovery.
18:52One is when you have the headaches, the nauseas, the dizziness.
18:57But then we have a second phase of recovery.
19:00This time that the brain needs to really heal.
19:04And that's the most crucial, the most important for recovery.
19:08It's invisible to us.
19:10So oftentimes we may have a second injury when we are the most vulnerable.
19:19We can never know for sure, but for Natalia, it's very likely that going to Antarctica was the clincher.
19:28I can't ever really know, but I think that may have been my fork in the road.
19:38So not just the ski accident, so much as what came after.
19:42And it was all so innocent.
19:52I was doing my best.
19:55I followed the doctor's advice.
19:57I really just wish someone had said, stop, you shouldn't go.
20:04This is a serious injury, and you've got to take it easy.
20:08You've got to rest and heal.
20:10Because it was then, having come back from the trip, that I realized something was wrong.
20:18Something was wrong with my brain.
20:19It's very unsettling when the world around you doesn't sound, doesn't look the same as what you're used to.
20:34So one of the weird things that happens is a kind of noise sensitivity and distortion.
20:42The frequencies are all wrong, and it's a bit disturbing.
20:46So a bird singing in the spring is like an arrow through your body.
20:52I remember closing the window, because it just hurt, and it's a bird, right?
20:56It's not even a loud bird, it's a robin.
20:59Music that I enjoyed before just sounded like a mess.
21:03Like, I just don't know why people would put those instruments together.
21:06Or even if there's two voices in a song, I'm just like, ugh, it's just awful.
21:11Or when my husband John would be eating next to me, and there's a sound of cutlery.
21:18And it's unbearable, and I'm trying not to scream.
21:22The fatigue level, and the nausea level, and the headache level.
21:28It's a whole body experience, right?
21:30And you're really sick.
21:33Like, every day being sick, and just hoping the next day you'll feel maybe less sick.
21:40For years.
21:42I had doctors say things like, well, I get tired too, you know, at the end of the day.
21:51They just weren't getting it.
21:53One doctor told me that it had nothing to do with brain injury, that my symptoms were caused by anxiety.
22:00Others believed me, but they didn't offer me any tools.
22:04Before the injury, in my day, I would always know, you know, roughly what time of day it was, what I'd been doing, what my options are for doing next, what I had to do next, what was the most important thing to do next.
22:21Like, all that was clear.
22:24But, after the injury, it was like that just started collapsing in chunks around me, and I'd be just stuck on this little island in one moment, without connection to what was happening before, or anything ahead of me.
22:41So there's always these, like, little moments of, like, being trapped, of not knowing, like, how you got there, and what you're supposed to do next.
22:48So, early on, I was trying to be as active as I could.
22:53Exercise was my therapy, but I kept running into problems with the exercise.
23:00My symptoms would be getting worse, but I was very determined that this was an important part of what I needed to do to get better, so I kept pushing myself and getting worse, trying to do more.
23:12This is the thing about Natalia, is that in her former life, toughing it out was her game.
23:19Back to her career as a cross-country skier, she would always place the best in bad weather, and grinding it out is fine if you're an elite in sport.
23:28Grinding it out is not okay if you've got a brain injury.
23:30I just kept thinking, this will pass, I'm young, I'm healthy, I will get better.
23:38So none of us could imagine that this could go on.
23:42It's temporary, so we thought, let's just step in and cover for Nat for a while.
23:47So I had been with Nat on Ellesmere Island, and I was doing the dating work for the Camel Project.
23:58We were looking forward to maybe another decade of this for other fossils, and nothing was going to stop us from publishing in top journals.
24:07So the Arctic Camel Discovery came out in the journal Nature at the beginning of 2013.
24:16Nature, for a scientist, that's like when you start a band and end up in Rolling Stone magazine.
24:26And to be clear, at that time I could barely read, never mind write.
24:30So it was really John and the team, just closing ranks around me and picking up what I couldn't hold.
24:45At that time, in the early years of the concussion, I'm trying really hard to keep my job, to keep things going.
24:53And it's sort of like watching a train wreck in slow motion, because things are kind of falling apart.
25:15Within a couple of months, I got a note from my doctor that I was not expected to recover.
25:21I was declared by the insurance company totally disabled.
25:28And the museum indicated to me that, you know, I lost my job.
25:32Yeah.
25:35It was beginning to dawn on me, this is a forever injury.
25:41I have a disability.
25:43I can't be a scientist anymore.
25:52There didn't seem a way out, right?
25:55I thought, like, how many years do I want to live like this?
25:59If they don't think I'm going to get better, right, then like, what's the point?
26:04I would say the hardest was, like, year three.
26:11It was just, like, too much pain all the time.
26:15Like, I could not walk without feeling sick.
26:18I could not think without feeling sick.
26:21I could not think without feeling sick.
26:23So it was just, like, waking up sick, going to bed sicker.
26:29Every day.
26:31And we put my dog down, and I wished I could have been put down, too.
26:36Because I couldn't do it.
26:37It was too hard.
26:43This is not the Natalia that I knew.
26:45This gal runs across the tundra with a shotgun on her back normally.
26:48Maybe, and again, no disrespect, maybe she's just some gal with headaches.
27:07Yeah, so these glasses are an adaptation.
27:10I put tape here at the middle, and that helps stabilize the world for me.
27:16This is Natalia.
27:22She's got stuff to get done.
27:24And she's got that grit and that resolve which pulls her forward.
27:28Even a decade later, she's pushing and pushing, pushing, trying to say,
27:31is this where I land, or is it the next thing?
27:35She's got pull.
27:36She wants to be somewhere.
27:38Bit by bit, I learned to live in new ways.
27:42So my brain stayed injured, but I got smarter.
27:46And I got greedy with my energy so that I would have energy to do the important stuff.
27:51I stayed off my feet so I could keep moving ahead.
27:58I learned to drive again.
27:59I started to write again, bit by bit.
28:03So nothing is the same as it was before.
28:07It's always with little pieces of energy through the day.
28:11I have to learn to catch them, to use those.
28:13But the thing that never changed was all the resting.
28:23Lying on the couch, eyes closed, quiet.
28:28Go for a walk, have to lie down.
28:40Read a page, then have to lie down.
28:45Visit the doctor, that's all I can do in the day.
28:48Eat supper, lie down.
28:55Yeah, you just feel like you're missing life.
29:00Yeah.
29:02So you lose a lot of time.
29:03I felt like whole seasons were going by.
29:15And I was lying down and missing it.
29:17A brain injury steals your time.
29:28The thing is, all the knowledge, all the unanswered questions,
29:45all that existed before the brain injury, never left.
29:56I still had the paleontologist mind.
30:01And as I rested, those ideas turned and turned in my imagination.
30:10I still wanted to travel back in time.
30:12Back to the distant past.
30:15I still had questions.
30:25I thought about camels in the endless Arctic night with their night vision superpowers.
30:32I thought about beavers building their dams, being in their lodges under the ice all winter long.
30:47About how amazing that behaviour is, actually.
30:49I thought about plies and bears, just like giving up and saying, that's it, I'm going to bed, wake me up in six months when the sun comes out.
31:01And trees, doing the same thing the bears did.
31:04Just going, well there goes the sun, I guess we don't need these leaves until spring.
31:08My injured brain never stopped thinking about the last forests of the Arctic.
31:17But now I also had time to think.
31:19Lots of time to think.
31:21I guess, to think about what those weird ancient forests mean for us today.
31:26I realized, the scientist in me was still alive.
31:36But to keep her alive, I needed my friends in science.
31:41I needed people in my life who could meet me where I am.
31:45Which obviously is a different place than where I was.
31:51And more than anything, I felt I needed to return to the Arctic.
32:01Just like I had taken others earlier in my career, now I needed to be taken back to Elgmere Island.
32:15The mysteries of lost worlds, that existed before the ice age, they're waiting for us, up here.
32:31What's invisible, down south, buried under forests or scraped away by glaciers, here it's just lying on the surface.
32:39And I'm so grateful, I can come back.
32:53Setting up camp is a lot of work.
32:56It's a lot of preparation, so essentially we start over a year in advance.
33:02I used to run these trips and oversee everything, but now I'm not leading, I'm advising.
33:09So that I can save my energy and my thinking to do the science, and I am relying on other people a lot.
33:17Well Natalia, she knows this area way better than anybody else.
33:22She has a super understanding of the environment here, and the layers we are digging in.
33:28So without her, we would be screwed. That's the reality.
33:32For me, this is like going home.
33:35Field work is where we learn, right?
33:38And to make discoveries, you have to be in the field.
33:42Ooh, this is something good.
33:43I love it out here.
33:44This is my favourite place in the world.
33:46We've discovered these amazing mammals up here.
33:49The giant arctic camel, for example.
33:58We've discovered these amazing mammals up here.
33:59The giant arctic camel, for example.
34:02place in the world we've discovered these amazing mammals up here the giant arctic camel for example
34:18we can see that features that make camels today such specialized creatures of the desert
34:24actually evolved in the last forest of the pliocene
34:27excellent night vision for the arctic night the fat hump to get through the long winter
34:35the feet broad like snowshoes and it was that realization the idea that these high arctic
34:43forests could create an animal that could so easily survive in a completely different environment
34:50that got me thinking what else that is so familiar to us today might come from this ancient world
34:57the answer is potentially quite a lot
35:04compared with what we see around us in the world today these forests were really weird environment
35:10for half the year the sun never set and then it was dark for the other half
35:16so every living organism microbes plants animals had to survive half the year without light without
35:24photosynthesis without food we don't have any forests like those today they were the last of the polar
35:31forests the world had been hot for tens of millions of years and now as the ice age began this was ending
35:40the pliocene was ending yeah it's actually a little bit sad
35:49but while it lasted this forest was so extreme it must have had extreme adaptations
35:55in science speak this was huge natural selection can we see the results today of course
36:05what if hibernation in some mammals today actually came from when they were living at these high
36:12latitudes in these dark you know winter forests right maybe this is where hibernation evolved for
36:18some lineages such as bears for example when we're looking at at the bears today this is a really
36:26important strategy for bears to survive winter right they in the fall they put on fat they eat a lot of
36:32food that helps them build up their fatty layer and then this allows them to survive in this dormant
36:37state through the winter than to come out again in the spring so in a forest where it's dark for six
36:47months of the year hibernation could be a perfect adaptation in these extreme pliocene forests it could
36:54have been critical what would canada be without its beavers right
37:00beavers today are ecosystem engineers and very important for the development and maintenance of
37:10wetlands right so these are keystone species very important part of the ecology beavers we know are
37:18very sensitive to for example the sound of running water will make them build a dam these are instinctive
37:24behaviors the motor patterns right the pinning of the sticks and the pushing together of the branches
37:30and the mud and all that those all appear in the animal without any coaching from the parents so
37:36you can rear a baby beaver and it'll do all these behaviors and then when it's about two years old
37:41it'll build a dam so this suggests these are hardwired behaviors building dams so you have a lake you can
37:49swim in when the surface freezes in the winter putting your home your fortress we call it the lodge right
37:55in the middle of your artificial lake with an underwater entrance accessible even in winter
38:01and raising the kits inside it's an extraordinary solution for getting through a long dark winter
38:08so did beavers become forest engineers to survive in those pliocene arctic forests
38:16and it's not just about the animals think about the boreal forest going to sleep in the fall
38:20big hint we call it fall right without photosynthesis for half the year why would you hold on to your
38:28photosynthesizing parts the leaves so maybe even fall colors are a remnant of high arctic forests
38:38for me it's hard to stop imagining all those natural features of our environment all passed down
38:56from a hotter past when forests could grow in the arctic
39:00this big idea only really crystallized in my mind in the years after the brain injury
39:11that in so many ways the last forests of the high arctic were kind of like a garden of eden
39:18the cradle of our boreal forest ecosystem today
39:21i made a career looking for fossils it took me four expeditions to find 30 fragments of a camel leg bone
39:36reconstructing the pliocene arctic is slow slow work and i don't work as fast as i used to
39:44but our tools for understanding the past are changing
39:49it's not just fossil bones we're hunting for anymore okay this is really good it's worth the whole trip
39:57today i have colleagues who can recover molecules of ancient dna from the dirt
40:03they're finding things we only dreamed of
40:07what we're finding here is frozen sediments right that are four million years old potentially even five
40:14million years if we can retrieve the dna sequenced it will give us an idea of the entire ecosystem
40:22from before the last ice age that far back in time everything from bacterias you know fungi
40:30plants animals the first glimpse of that world from a molecular perspective it would be amazing it would be
40:37so it's a great story this is the next frontier
40:47the time before the ice age may seem very far away but that's just an illusion
40:54the arctic forests of the pliocene are coming back this barren arctic tundra it's just a phase
41:00seriously now we have more than 400 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere it has never
41:08been that high while humans have been on earth but if you go further back in time there you had
41:14naturally those levels of carbon in the atmosphere and guess what this was during the pliocene right
41:22three million years ago exactly the period we're looking at here so this lost world that has fascinated
41:31me all of my life isn't just a distant past it's a vision of the future we need to ask is this a world
41:39where we could survive i think the surprise has been that i function a lot better when it's really cold
41:49so when i'm on the edge of hypothermia and my speech is slightly slurred i'm actually feeling a lot
41:56better and the cold somehow is removing some of my headache issues cognitively that's still a challenge
42:03but physically super thrilled that i can actually walk around
42:10for the last 10 years i've been using my brain to figure out my life
42:14i used to think the past was complicated while living in the present with a brain injury that's
42:22a way bigger puzzle the brain i started with i'm probably never getting it back
42:28but it's better than i thought it would be i can still do science just differently oh my god look at
42:38that there's something bigger here it has a tooth on it yes this is really great even if we don't have
42:49all the teeth i think we should be able to tell what this is holy cow that's really nice five six
42:57fragments and a mandible right on good day okay i've had to adapt and isn't that what nature teaches us
43:09that nothing stays the same tomorrow is never like yesterday life adapts of all people a paleontologist
43:17should know that
43:47so
43:58so
44:04you
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