SHOW NOTES

Officially recognised as "The Kingdom of Cambodia", we're talking in this episode about a country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Thailand to the west, Laos to the north, and Vietnam to the east.

In general, Cambodia is mostly forest, so think jungles, wildlife, and ancient ruins – most people will have heard of Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world, and the inspirational location for Indiana Jones type tomb raiding adventurers.

Cambodia covers an area of approximately 181,000 square kilometres (70,000 square miles), which is roughly three Cambodia’s to a France.

Around 17 million people live in Cambodia, the vast majority living in the capital city, which is called Phnom Penh – a city where traffic lights are just a suggestion, and you can buy wine flavoured with tarantulas.

Comprising 90% of the population, most of the people are ethnically Khmer (a culture that dates back thousands of years), but more recently there has been a growing influx of Vietnamese and Chinese communities too.

The official religion is Buddhism, the currency is the Cambodian riel (KHR), and the national dish is a steamed fish curry in coconut-milk served in banana leaves.

The flag has a red stripe sandwiched between two blue stripes, and in the middle is a depiction of Angkor Wat - making it the only flag in the world to feature a building.

The national anthem is called "Nokor Reach" which translates as "Majestic Kingdom".
Composed in 1938 by the then Prince, Norodom Suramarit he had help from two of the Royal Palace’s musical instructors (guys called Jekyll and Perruchot). The lyrics weren’t completed until 2 years later in 1941, when it was adopted as the national anthem to celebrate King Norodom’s coronation.

Side note: The current king of Cambodia, King Norodom Sihamoni, is a trained ballet dancer. Apparently, he studied classical dance and music in Europe, performing professionally across the continent, before returning to Cambodia to take up the throne

He’s also fluent in Czech, French, and English.


CAMBODIA FACTS!

Don’t enter a Cambodian spelling bee! There are 74 letters in the Cambodian language, 33 consonants and 41 vowels. Apparently, it is such a complex language that even native speakers struggle with spelling.

Watch out for pizza that makes you happy! In one of the tourist areas in Phnom Penh, you can buy yourself a slice of pizza topped with cannabis called, “Happy Pizza”.

Apparently, it was first created a few decades ago when Cambodia was home to a much more relaxed series of drug laws.

Technically illegal now, some places still quietly offer it to adventurous eaters. It’s unclear how much Happy Pizza costs, but I would hope its 420.


Vampires and Zombies and Ghosts – oh my!
In some areas of Cambodia, there’s a tradition called “ghost marriage,” where a living person marries a dead corpse by placing a ring on an image of the deceased.

Apparently, this is done to make sure that the spirits of the dead aren’t lonely in the afterlife.

If ever there should be a movie made about something it should be about the real-life group of Cambodian monks who go around hunting vampires. The monks are said to have knowledge of black magic and can easily identify a vampire disguised as a human.

Rather than garlic and crucifixes, the monks perform rituals to banish the creatures.

Ancient Khmer warriors were said to use a mysterious substance called Khmaoch Saa (Ghost Powder) to turn their enemies into zombies. The powder, made from a secret blend of herbs and animal parts, was sprinkled on battlefields to paralyze foes and make them easier to defeat. While there’s no scientific evidence to support this, some rural healers still claim to know the recipe—but they’ll never share it.

Talking of the supernatural.. there is an old Cambodian superstition called the ‘Night of the Shrinking Shadows’ where it’s believed that on moonless nights, your shadow can detach itself from your body and wander off on its own. The thing is, if your shadow doesn’t return by sunrise, you lose your soul. So. to prevent this, people have been known to tie string around their wrists and ankles to help keep their shadows attached.

History of Cambodia

The Neogene
The Neogene is a geologic period of 20 million years that came after the Paleogene Period 23 million years ago (Mya) and before the Quaternary Period, which started 2.5 million years ago and is the period we are in today.
It is sub-divided into two epochs, the first is the Miocene which is followed by the Pliocene.
It’s notable for the continents fallilng into basically the positions we are familiar with today, with the Himalayas pushing up, Australia heading out to the open ocean and, most significantly North and South America joined together at the Isthmus of Panama which was important because t cut off the warm ocean currents from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.
Globally, the climate was cooling and drying, and life-wise mammals and birds continued to evolve into modern forms, with the rest of the creatures staying relatively unchanged.
Possibly the biggest news from our point of view, however, is that the Neogene sees a variety of apes dropping out of the trees and trying walking around on their hind legs for a change, in the process creating the first humans, who appear in Africa near the end of the period.

History of Cambodia
Around 6000 to 7000 BCE, careless early men leave behind their stone tools in a cave at Laang Spean in northwest Cambodia, to be found by modern man and radiocarbon dated.
The Iron Age period of the region begins around 500 BCE and lasts about a thousand years, a time which also provided the first evidence of established maritime trade and interaction with India and South Asia.
By the 1st century complex societies have developed with the most advanced groups lived along the coast and in the lower Mekong River valley and the delta. They cultivated rice, fished and kept domesticated animals.
From the 1st century – 550CE or thereabouts Chinese records refer to what is believed to be the first real kingdom or state - the Kingdom of Funan. This was a loose collection of communities, seemingly a Hindu culture showing Indian influences and is the period to which the current Cambodian royal family trace their lineage.
As with all empires, Funan came to an end, although nobody seems to be quite certain as to how. Options suggested include conquest by neighbours or shifting trade patterns.
The next couple of centuries saw the existence of another kingdom called the Chenla.
But then came the real powerhouse and a golden age of Cambodian history – from 802–1431 the Khmer empire.
In the words of Wikipedia, the Khmer empire was “ characterised by unparalleled technical and artistic progress and achievements, political integrity and administrative stability.”
The agricultural development was so good, the area known Angkor apparently maintained the largest pre-industrial settlement complex worldwide during the 12th and 13th centuries.
And to celebrate the area’s peak success, king Suryavarman II commissioned a temple that would go on to be a world-renowned site for visitors - the temple of Angkor Wat.
But again the empire faded, and again without a clear and present storming of the gates and ongoing debate as to what caused the decline, with ecological, military, religious and environmental causes all having their champions.
The next period of Cambodian is so meh it’s just called the "Middle Period" and takes us from the early 1600s to 1863 without anything too very interesting taking place apart from, intriguingly in Wikipedia, “a Siamese intervention of some undisclosed nature around the year 143” which saw Siam become their main rivals.
To keep the sneaky Siamese at bay, in August 1863 the nation signed an agreement with none other than the French. This put the kingdom under the protection of France.
Although it started with their own sovereignty, but can I shock you, French control gradually increased. So the French stuck around, ‘helping out’ aka being in charge up until the second world war where it gets a bit confusing.
Vichy France was the puppet government of Germany and Cambodia was a protectorate of that puppet. In 1940 and 41 they fought and lost a war with the neighbouring Thais, losing a large chunk of territory.
Then the Japanese moved in and occupied the country, but leaving the French in their administrative posts until 1945 when they decided to finally kick the French out – possibly because things were not looking so good for the Axis powers in Europe.
So then the Japanese, in an attempt to gain a bit of popularity, suggested that Cambodia declare its own independence and on 13 March 1945, they proclaimed the independent Kingdom of Kampuchea.
But then Japan went on to lose the war later that year, and the French made a heck of a comeback, reimposing colonial administration.
But once ignited, the fire of independence is hard to quench and a declaration and agreement of independence was achieved in October 1953.
In the 1960s Cambodia got rather caught up in the Vietnam war with North Vietnamese troops setting up bases within the country, and the USA, in response, dropping bombs on Cambodia to try to destroy them, giving the nation the worst of both worlds.
Leftist opposition to the government grew, including a man named Saloth Sar who would later become known as Pol Pot. He led an insurgency under the Communist Party banner known as the Khmer Rouge, literally the "Red Khmer".
In 1968 and 1969, the insurgency worsened and in 1970 a coup but not by the Khmer Rouge but their opponents.
This triggered the North Vietnames to full on invade, supporting their communist Khmer Rouge friends and triggering a civil war which saw the Khmer Rouge come out on top, quite possibly in large part because the average Cambodian peasant didn’t really love the United States supported opposition, because they had spent the last couple of years dropping tonnes of ordnance on their heads.
Khmer Rouge popularity was not to last long. Their main policy was basically to destroy everything and start from scratch – or year zero as it was known.
All cities and towns were evacuated and the entire urban population shipped to the country to work as farmers. Religion was suppressed and agriculture was collectivised.
Cambodia had neither a currency nor a banking system.
Intellectualism was discouraged and intellectuals pursued and executed, and when I say intellectuals, I mean almost anybody, as crimes included speaking a foreign language, and, unbelievably, wearing glasses.
This genocide, is truly mind-boggling, resulting in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly 25% of Cambodia's population.
In 1979 the Vietnamese invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge and the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was established which immediately descended into multi party civil war which was finally ended in 1991.
May 1993 saw some pretty contentious elections which resulted in a coalition government resulted with two co-prime ministers including one Hun Sen of the Cambodian People's Party.
Since then, his party has become pretty much the only game in town in a one-party state with Sen accused of cracking down on opponents and critics.
In the July 2023 election, they won again, but this time a new Prime Minster emerged, a man named Hun Manet.
Is this a breath of fresh air for Cambodia, probably not, because Hun Manet is in fact the son of Hun Sen, keeping it in the family, at least for now.

Psychology in Cambodia in the Neogene
Obviously, to talk about psychology in Cambodia during the Neogene, we’re going to be talking about bears. Specifically, the Sun Bear, a member of the bear family found in Cambodia and across South East Asia.
In fact if you wanted to see a sun bear, you could do worse than visit the Cambodia Sanctuary located in the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Centre, just outside of the capital city of Phnom Penh.
Established in 1997 this sanctuary provides a home to over 120 rescued bears and is said to be the world's largest sanctuary for sun bears.
Sun bears are so called thanks to their characteristic orange or cream coloured patch on their chest, which some people say resemble a rising sun, although I would observe Ryan that those people are quite wrong.
They the smallest of the bear species, and they are keen climbers, they love to get up a tree and are the most arboreal of all the bears.

They spend a lot of time in trees, munching on bug like ants, beetles, termites, as well as plant material in the form of seeds and fruits and sometimes even birds and deer.
They don’t hibernate, possibly because all these delicious things are available year round, but being bears of course the love honey.
But are they really bears?
This bear is sufficiently unusual looking, especially when it stands on its hind legs, that in 2023 when visitors to Hangzhou Zoo took video of one of these bears and it went viral viewers and commentators insisted that it looked weird until the Chinese officials were forced to issue an official statement that their bear was not, in fact, a man in a bear suit.
So why are they so odd to us – well partly the answer lies in the Neogene period and bear evolution.
I found an excitingly titled paper called “Mitochondrial genomes reveal an explosive radiation of extinct and extant bears near the Miocene-Pliocene boundary” (remembering that the Miocene and Pliocene are both halves of our Neogene period).
In this, scientists took a bunch of bear DNA to try to recreate the evolutionary tree.
And not just current bear DNA either. They took 8 current bear types we have today –Brown bear, American black bear, Asian black bear, polar bear, sun bear, sloth bear, spectacled bear and giant panda AND they managed to scrape together DNA from the extinct North American giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus), as well as pulling some from the also extinct European cave bear using a 44,000 year old bone found in an Austrian cave and they did some science and tried to recreate the bear evolutionary tree.
And what did they find?
Well, the first bear to step outside the evolutionary tree trunk was the Giant Panda, making them what is known as a basal species. They made their own way in the world in the early Miocene, or the start of the Neogene.
The mid Miocene sees the spectacled bear and the now-extinct American Giant Short Faced bear separate from the other bear groups.
Then in the early Pliocene the Sun bear and the American and Asian Black bears part company with the brown, polar cave and sloth bears.
So what does it all mean? In the words of the paper “This analysis has allowed the phylogenetic topology of the bear family to be resolved with high support values. Interestingly, it places the sloth bear basal to all other ursine bear species and the sun bear in a sister group related to the two black bear species.”
“the Miocene-Pliocene global changes had a major impact on the radiation of bears and other species, both between and within the Old and New Worlds. It is interesting to note that African apes experienced a similar species turnover at the end of the Miocene, including the divergence of the chimpanzee and human lineages.”
But what does all this have to do with psychology, you’re wondering.
Well, I’m glad you asked that.
Because as part of their evolution, Sun Bears have evolved various psychological behaviours, and recently Dr Marina Davila-Ross and Derry Taylor, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, published a study in Scientific Reports, in 2019.
It’s entitled “Facial Complexity in Sun Bears: Exact Facial Mimicry and Social Sensitivity” in which they found bears can use facial expressions to communicate with others.
Now you are probably wondering, like I was, quite how vivid these bear expressions are and I’ve got to tell you they are mostly open mouth and closed mouth and various degrees of tooth visibility – we’re not saying ‘bear a had an expression that could only be described as quizzical, whereas bear b was more pensive’
Although I’d also observe in the published paper for the data they’ve got these cute little bear face icons representing the various different expressions.
However, they did find facial mimicry at work.
Dr Davila-Ross explains why this is important, she said: "Mimicking the facial expressions of others in exact ways is one of the pillars of human communication. Other primates and dogs are known to mimic each other, but only great apes and humans were previously known to show such complexity in their facial mimicry.