May 28, 2025 • 47 mins
On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, Clay Newcomb travels to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas to meet with archaeologist Dr. David Meltzer. Dr. Meltzer discusses what has been learned through recent advancements in research of prehistoric human’s lives, diet, and travel routes in North America through the use of DNA sequencing. These discoveries have led to new theories of how the first people came to North America.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
In nineteen sixty eight in central Montana, construction workers digging
with a backo discovered human bones. It was a child
buried twelve thousand, nine hundred years ago in the Pleistocene
the Ice Age, which is a time period that has
remained a mystery for archaeologists until now, because in twenty fourteen,
(00:29):
forty six years after the discovery, a new technology emerged
that told us who this child was, as it became
the first and only Clovis era human DNA to be
fully sequenced, giving us insight into the first Americans. In
(00:50):
this episode, doctor David Meltzer will tell us what we
learned from America's oldest bones. I doubt that you're gonna
want to miss this one.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
We've got enzac in Montana, We've got these individuals in
southeastern Brazil. It's a site called Lego Asanta, and we
can see a tight connection between the two in a
genetic sense. But there's also something lurking in those genomes
at Lego Asanta. Geneticists refer to it as a ghost population.
(01:25):
Does this possibly represent a pre Clovis population that has
simply disappeared and the only record we have of it
was that there was some sort of gene flow or
interaction and why is it only in South America?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
And hey, don't forget that.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
On June ninth, there will be a new drop on
the bear Grease feed to go along with bear Grease.
What you're listening to now the Bear Grease Render Brent's
this country life podcast. But now you'll be able to
listen to Lake Pickles Backwoods Universe. This is our wildlife
biology podcast and it's really good. We're going to learn
(02:06):
a lot. But now we're on to the peopling of America.
Roll the intro Reba. My name is Klay Nukem, and
this is the bear Grease Podcast where we'll explore things
(02:26):
forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and
where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their
lives close to the land. Presented by FHF gear, American
made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to
be as rugged as the place.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
As we explore, there's a whole sort of new synthesis emerging,
a new view emerging about the peopling of the Americas,
which is making it clear that the traditional interpretations that
(03:06):
we had people get to Alaska, they come through the
ice free corridor.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Boom, it's all done. It's Clovis. It just doesn't work anymore.
And it really hasn't worked for quite some time, right,
because we've had these pre Clovis age sites now for
the better part of fifteen twenty years. But what's happening
now is that we're getting a much better picture, a
more nuanced picture of the process itself and the routes
(03:30):
that they may have taken, and getting back to the
DNA who they were.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
I want to learn about the peopling of America, about
who were the first people that came here. This is
a conversation that's been heated since the late eighteen hundreds.
The technology in the last ten years has changed the conversation.
This is doctor David Meltzer, an archaeologist, author and from
(04:00):
SMU in Dallas, Texas. He's a great communicator.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
It used to be that I had lots of questions
as an archaeologist, who are these folks, where did they
come from? Who are they related to? These are not
questions I could answer with archaeological remains. Right, I can
look at a projectile point over here, and I can
look at a projectile point over there, and I can
infer that they're made in a similar fashion, they have
a similar style. Maybe they're related, but I'd never know
(04:30):
that for sure. Right, But with ancient DNA, if I
have skeletal material that we can extract the DNA from
an ancient individual, which we do very carefully and with
considerable respect. There's a lot of ethical issues tied with
ancient DNA, As you might imagine, I can identify ad mixture, ancestry,
(04:54):
who these people are, where they came from, who their
ancestors were in Northeast Asia and the like. And it's
been it's been an absolute sea change in terms of
our understanding of the peopling process. So we know from
the ancient genetic record, ancient genomic record, that we had
groups that were living in Eastern Asia China today, forty
(05:16):
thousand years ago, very distinctive genomically. They've been isolated for
some time. When we say distinctive genomically, we're not talking
about them being you know, superior or inferior or anything
like that. What we're actually measuring are genetic traits that
have absolutely no bearing on their fitness. These are parts
(05:37):
of your genome that actually don't do anything. So you
can look at two different populations and there will be
a certain amount of genetic distance between them. So we
can use we can use DNA as a clock. This
is just wild stuff. Is this would not have been imaginable,
you know, forty years ago.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
How long have we had this technology?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Well, so the first ancient North American genome was twenty fourteen,
just a shade over ten years ago, ten years ago,
ten years ago. Yeah, no, Clay, if we had had
this conversation in twenty ten, it'd be over in about
five minutes because I'd have nothing else to say.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Really. Yeah, it's exciting to live in the times of
new technology being developed that's solving ancient mysteries. But it
can also be a little unnerving as it up ends
long held philosophies, and I sometimes wonder if our certainty
at some point won't be disrupted again in the future
(06:32):
by even more cryptic technology. But we need to understand
what we are certain about. We need to talk about bones.
So what discovery of human remains was found that opened
the key to these place to see people?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Well so, in terms of North America, right, the first
ancient genome was the Anzik child. So The Antik child
was discovered in the nineteen sixties, and the story, as
I understand it, was a rancher was sort of doing
some dirt work on his property with some heavy equipment,
Montana and just outside of Wilson, Montana. In fact, it
(07:13):
was quite close to where we did the bison butchering experiment,
and I kept looking off in that distance thinking I'm close.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And the Anzik child was interred with grave goods some
really distinctive Clovis points, so we know that the Anzick
child was a member of that Clovis cultural group.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
How this came about was that a backo operator was
digging gravel off a ranch owned by a family named Anzik.
He hit an unusual layer of dirt and recognized his
stone point. He got off, and he discovered human bones
there too. What he'd later learn is that he found
a formal burial of a one to two year old
(07:56):
male child, buried with one hundred and twenty stone own
tools in six non human bone adladal four shafts, and
some elk antlers dusted with red ochre, and the human
bones appeared to have red ochre on them as well.
It makes you wonder if they buried the child with
(08:19):
the things they thought it would need for the afterlife,
the things they relied on most stone tools.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
But here is what they learned.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Subsequent radiocarbon dating demonstrated that Anazik was around twelve seven
hundred years ago, so late Pleistocene, Late Ice Age, and
when Eski's group did the sequencing, what they discovered, what
we discovered and published in twenty fourteen was that that
individual was part of a population movement into the Americas
(08:53):
that we subsequently identified as Southern Native Americans. Now we
all know that Montana's not in southern portion of the continent.
But what Anzik signified was this was one member of
a population that subsequently would spread throughout the hemisphere. Whereas
the other sort of fork in the road, right, so
(09:14):
one fork goes south, the other stays north. Those are
Northern Native Americans.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
So Anzik all connected anzimatically to this Anzik child.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
It all sort of gets channeled back through Anzik or
through others of that population, right, So Anzik is not
sort of the founding population per se, It's a member
of that early population.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
This discovery of this Anzik child was is the only
pliest scene human remains that we were able to extract
good enough DNA from to really do the type of
genetic research and discovery that you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Fact, that's correct so far, So all.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
This is based upon one really good specimen.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Well, there's actually more to it, okay. So anzik Is
so far are the oldest genome that we have in
the Americas. However, we have others that come along pretty
soon thereafter, and that help fill in the picture of
the dispersal of these populations throughout the hemisphere. We have
some in southeastern Brazil that date to so anziic is
(10:20):
twelve seven. We've got ones in South America, southeastern Brazil
that are around ten and a half. We've got in
Spirit Cave and Nevada that's about ten to seven. What's
really striking about the genetic data, so again, you know
we've got data from Montana, we've got Nevada, we've got Brazil,
we've got various other places in South America. Is how
(10:43):
closely linked they are and how similar they are at
the genetic level. What that tells us is that this
is a population that was actually moving pretty fast because
there hasn't been that much change in the time from
Anazik down to southeastern percent.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Yes, so it wasn't like five thousand years no, no, no, yeah,
so it's literally people generations, maybe a little more than that,
but yeah, that's that's the tendency, right, is that it
happened really fast.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
We call them quick waivers. They you know, it's just
a fast moving radiation throughout the hemisphere.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Can you imagine moving on foot from Montana to Brazil?
What was pushing these people? Why did they move? These
are answers we will never know. But maybe one day
they'll have a technology that can read the thoughts and
understand the motivations of people by the DNA.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Extracted from their bones.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
One of the most interesting things about the Anazac child
was recorded in a peer review paper in the Science
Advances journal, in which an isotope analysis was done on
the bones and in that they can determine and the
type of protein that the mother ate when she nursed
the young child, and they found that her diet was
(12:08):
more closely related to a scimitar cat, a carnivore, than
anything else. They use this study to say that these
people were eaten a lot of big mammal meat that
is pretty durned crazy. But our next question is what
did these bones tell us about where these people came from.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
So we've got these two populations, one in Eastern Asia
and one sort of in the region around Lake Baikal,
probably around twenty five twenty three thousand years ago. There's
there's interaction. These groups or members of these groups kind
of bump into one another and then split off as
(12:53):
a sort of combined entity. A combined population. That's the
group that will become ancestor to Native Americans. That's the
group that will make their way across the land bridge.
They'll do it in at least a couple of different pulses.
They'll be the initial one, and those will be the
folks that will make it all the way down into
(13:14):
the lower forty eight, throughout South America and so on.
Then there'll be a slightly later one which will come
into Alaska and stay and not go any further south
and ultimately disappear from the genetic and archaeological record. Okay, wow,
we could never see disappearance in the archaeological record. Before
(13:35):
we could see artifacts, but we had no idea who
made them and whether the people who made them had
descendants among modern groups. All modern people have ancestors, there's
no question about that, right, But not all ancient people
that we see in the ancient DNA record necessarily had descendants,
because some populations disappeared others were replaced, either you know,
(13:58):
locally or regionally or whatever. Humans move and humans been
moving for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, so we can
start to see that kind of thing. We can see
people and populations disappearing.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
All from basically finding bits of DNA and.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Well bones in bones exactly right. So when you're doing
ancient DNA on skeletal remains, what you're doing is you're
getting that individual's genome. But it's more than just that individual,
because your genome, my genome. All of these things are
a record of all of our ancestors and the big picture.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
This would be like sorcery to someone one hundred years ago.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Oh, no question.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Like if you said, I can tell you everything about
where you're from, who your people were, I mean.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Really, well, it's a scale thing though, right. I mean,
by the way, don't buy any of those things that
the genetic ancestry testing companies are telling you about. We
can tell you exactly who your ancestors. No, there's a
lot of arm weaving with a lot of that stuff. Really, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Now what we're looking at are population level trends, right, Okay,
(15:12):
so we're not able to take your DNA and precisely show.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Who your ancestors were.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
That makes sense, But we can look at it as
a population and we do.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
What if you told a human living in the Pleistocene
that inside their bones were the inscriptions of their ancestors.
I think they tell you that they already knew that.
I find this bizarre and oddly circular. Author Barry Lopez
and his book Arctic Dreams, raises the question of how
far modern man has actually come. He questions whether all
(15:45):
we've accomplished is quote a more complicated manipulation of materials,
more astounding display of his grasp.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
Of the physical principles of matter.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
We are dazzled by mere styles of expression end of quote.
I think what he's saying is that modernity has produced
a very technical quote style of expression like sequencing DNA,
where previous humans might have been more spiritually acute and
expressed life in different ways.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
I like thinking about this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
This is the perfect time to stop for just a
second and review some basic stuff that will help all
this make sense. The Clovis era is a term used
to describe a group of people that we're here in
what is now America roughly thirteen thousand years ago. They
spanned the continent and made uniquely fluted stone points. That's
(16:52):
basically the only way that we know who they are
is because of their technology. For decades, people thought that
these the Clovis people, crossed the burying land bridge out
of Asia in the Pleistocene and came through an ice
free corridor between the glaciers into the interior of North America.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
But through this.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Ice core technology that we learned about on episode two
ninety eight of Bear Grease, we're realizing that that ice
free corridor travel path wouldn't be possible. All that information
is going to be valuable in just a little bit.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
But I'm gonna throw a wrinkle in here, anazak is Clovis.
We still don't have a pre Clovis genome, so we
don't know whether the earlier population that comes into the Americas,
who are they and how do they relate to Clovis,
and were they part of that quick wave? Will presumably
(17:49):
not because that quick wave is Clovis down to you know,
South America. We're looking.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
So it's just so hard to find human remains that
are over ten thousand years old. I mean, that's what
we're dealing with. Like there were hundreds, clearly hundreds for sure,
even thousands of people, oh yeah, across the landscape, across
all spread out, all across North America, and we can't
find any of their bones because it's organic matter, it deteriorates.
(18:23):
What we find is what you specialize in, which is
stone points and archaeological like physical evidence that humans were here.
And so just these really unique situations where something happened,
where bones were preserved. It's like literally searching for a
needle in a thousand haystacks.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
It's a challenge. So throughout the hemisphere North and South America,
there's maybe twenty five thirty human remains older than about
eight thousand years. That's a hell of a small population
on which to you know, create any sort of inferential
basis for what the first people look like. Now, the
(19:10):
thing that's really interesting is that at this time in
Europe we've got all sorts of skeletal remains, right, So, yeah,
it's a preservation issue, but obviously, you know, Europe must
have preservation issues there as well. But the difference is
is that their base population of individuals that were living
at that time is so much larger that if you
(19:32):
take one percent of that population and then one percent
of the population that's living in the America's which is
a lot smaller, you know, what are the odds that
you're going to get well preserved human vas Yeah, yeah,
I mean it is the case that throughout most of
eastern North America, bone does not preserve in sediments.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Eastern North America being the eastern deciduous forest where have
a lot of rainfalls at a lot of biological a
lot of soils and all that stuff. In the West,
it would be better.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Better chances, absolutely absolutely, But you know, preservation depends on
just so many things. You know, was the individual interred,
what was the context of the burial, you know, where
scavenger is able to get to the you know, the
remains or you know, these people were highly mobile. They
did not have cemeteries, you know, at this period of time.
(20:24):
Actually the first cemetery we see is probably around ten
thousand years ago. But as I mentioned earlier, you know,
this is something that is now being done much more
in concert with Native American groups, because these are the
ancestors of these individuals, right. The people today are descended
from these first Americans, and so a lot of the
(20:46):
you know, the first decade or so of ancient DNA work,
and this is true globally, there was a bone rush, right.
Every time you found a bone, somebody wanted to sequence
it and say, you know, because you learn something new
with each new specimen. We're starting to calm down a
little bit because, you know, we're starting to get the
picture together. We're filling in you know, it's much more
filling in the details rather than creating the whole canvas.
(21:10):
But we're also doing much more collaborative work with the
native groups because you know, they're interested. They might not
necessarily be interested in the same kinds of things we're
interested in, but we find that out right, we do
what we can to sort of respect the descendants, the
descendant communities, and at the same time sort of look
(21:34):
into and try and understand their history. And really, this
is this is human history, right, This is the story
of people essentially coming out of Africa and making their
way around the globe. It's an amazing story, because one
of the things that's always struck me is the vanity
of Europeans when they started sailing around the globe. You know,
(21:56):
they talked about exploring all these places and going where
no man has gone before, throwing in a star trek
reference here. But the reality is is every place they
landed there was somebody there, right. Yeah, you know, so
hunter gatherer groups, foraging groups leaving Africa managed to pretty
much populate the entire globe, with the exception of Antarctica,
(22:18):
and even then there's some question about whether indigenous groups
got to Antarctica before James Cook approached it in the
late seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Humans seem to be really good at dividing up based
upon really the quite small cosmetic and cultural differences within
our species. But doctor Meltzer makes a good point, this
is the story of mankind. As I learned about archaeology,
what is most astonishing to me is how random the
(22:52):
data points seemed to be for because I mean, like
we talk about Clovis this well, first of we talk
about Folsome, this incredible archaeological discovery discovered by George mcjenkin,
who you know, is just this cowboy get out on
his ranch and he finds these bones and he gets
old there. And then the Clovis site is basically a
(23:13):
commercial gravel pit where they're digging up stuff and they
and they find it. The Anzik child is discovered when
they're doing excavation on just some rancher's random place. And
I mean it feels like as a species, we would
be like globally like, okay, everyone, we're gonna grid off
(23:34):
the earth and we want every man, woman and child
to go out and excavate the land that they own
and look for evidence of deep human antiquity. Ready, go
report back to us in a month, and we we
grid off the whole earth and we find everything that
is not even remotely I mean that's a fairy tale,
(23:56):
like like you know, how much has been destroyed? How
much is there? Is there an archaeological site under my
house in Arkansas that would change the world and the
whole story, But we're never gonna dig it up in
my lifetime because my house is.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
There, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, funny fact. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Well, I think you should move your house and we
can see what's on it.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
I do find stone points in my yard.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Okay, Well there you go, then it really is good.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Reason to move to your house find stone points in
my yard.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
So there's there's a bunch of things. First off, you're
absolutely right in that it's complicated. Sites are found randomly.
Sites are found owing to construction erosion, dumb luck. The
person happened to be walking along at the moment that
something eroded out, and if they'd come twenty minutes later,
(24:47):
it would have washed downstream and they'd never know. This
is why we as archaeologists when we're out in the field,
we're talking to ranchers, we're talking to farmers, we're talking
to people who are following you orders and surveying that
you know, one square mile around their house, and they're
the ones his eyes are on the ground all the time. Okay,
(25:10):
But at the same time, we're also thinking, and we're
also using techniques like remote sensing, techniques like understanding the
local geology, like understanding erosional and depositional processes. The best example,
wonderful example of this is fellow by name of Reed
Firing at the University of North Texas. Reid has two PhDs,
(25:33):
one an anthropology, one in geology, and reads a pretty
savvy guy, and he was looking at the geology in
his neighborhood literally, and he got to thinking, you know,
the ice age stuff is now buried under about eight
to nine meters a sediment, and he got it into
his head that well, they're digging a dam and they're
(25:56):
cutting an overflow sluice way by that dam, and he
just decided, well, that's a really good opportunity to go
look eight meters below the surface. He starts walking down
that contact between the end of the place to scene
and the Cretaceous. Right, So you've got twelve thousand year
old sediments sitting on top of sixty million year old rock,
(26:19):
and what does he discover? The Clovis point, right, So
just like walking around yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you
take that sort of knowledge and apply it, it's not
a completely random thing. But you know, the prepared mind
will find things, and Reed certainly was. And that's it's
so called. It's the Aubry site. So it's one of
(26:41):
the oldest Clovi sites we have while and it was
discovered because he was savvy enough to know where to look.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
I bet those damn builders wish he hadn't found.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
It did not have anything, it did not slow the
dam It all worked out just fine for all concern.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
The bones have answered the question of where Clovis people
came from. But now I want to try to understand
how they got here. Meltzer is going to bring up
something called the Kelp Highway, which is the theory that
after crossing the Burying land bridge, humans moved down the coast,
utilizing the rich ecosystems provided by Kelp.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Well, okay, so we've now established that people came down
the coast, and the question is, well, what resources were
they using? There is an interesting theory about the so
called Kelp Highway that would have provided a rich resource
base for groups. Certainly there's a lot of help out
there today. The obvious question is what did it look
(27:46):
like at the Pleisto scene sixteen thousand years ago when
people were coming down that coast. I don't know. I
don't know that any of us know, because you know,
these are sea plants where we haven't got a really
good geological record of the history of Kelp along the coat.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
You can't do the core.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Well, you know what we have we again this.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Is I thought maybe I gave him a new idea. Well,
I was going to be like call it the clay
Nucombe core because I told you to get a core
of the Kelp.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Well, the problem is, you know what the Pacific Northwest
coast looks like, right, it's constantly getting pounded. Uh, the
odds are against you. I would tell you, by the way,
that the fellow who found the Titanic years ago, one
of his people contacted me and they said, you know,
he was thinking, now that he's found the Titanic, that
(28:35):
maybe he would do some work on the Bearing Land
Bridge and look for sites and would be interested. And
I said, sure, nothing everything side, Yeah, nothing, nothing happened.
I told him that, you know, the odds were actually
not very.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Good, just because the ocean would have just yeah yeah,
well volatile down there.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
You can do bathometric studies, right, you can. You can
map the seafloor and you can see valleys, you can
see river drainages in the like. But are you going
to find an archaeological site. I mean it's hard enough
to find stuff on land and doing it in sixty
meters of water icy water. Yeah. So yeah, that one
never came to pass. It would have been kind of
(29:15):
fun though. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
So okay, so you're telling me about what we know
about the water route.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, well, don't think of it as a water route,
think of it as a coastal route. Okay. I suspect
they were taking small animals and maybe even plant material
out of tide pools. They were probably hunting animals that
would have been in that same ribbon of dry land
along the ice sheet. And before you get into the water,
(29:45):
large mammal hunting, large sea mammal hunting is a much
later thing and it usually requires boats, and we don't
Now we don't have any evidence of boats. Does that
mean they didn't have boats? No? I mean we just
don't have any boats. Yeah, yeah, or exactly. I mean,
what are the odds that you would actually find something
like that?
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Now, so there are archaeological sites along that coast, no
kind of.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
No, No, that's that's another challenge.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
So we just have So what are the data points,
like like Cooper's Ferry is inland, yep, off of the
it's off the Snake the Snake River, Like, we'll think
about it.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Think about it. You're coming down the coast, right, so
you've got this ribbon of land. You can make your
way down the coast and once you get south of
that ice sheet. Now mind you that ice sheet comes
into Seattle really late. You had ice in Seattle as
recently as fourteen and a half fifteen thousand years ago
before it starts to retreat. But once you get south
(30:48):
of that ice sheet, you get to the Columbia, make
a left turn that takes you into the interior. Right,
and then right there you go, and you're gonna find
your way to a place like Cooper Ferry. So you
could either continue south, you could make a left turn,
go into the interior, go a little further south, make
another left turn. Yeah. So once once you get south
(31:12):
of the ice it's open season, it's open plans.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
And so the data points then become like we have
this Anzik child in Montana that we can genetically trace.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
To populations in Northeast Asia.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
And we know they didn't come down the ice free
corridor because there was a it was closed up until it.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Was not biologically viable until after they got here.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
And so I mean the only thing left is they
either flew airplanes or they came down the.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Coast exactly right.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
And so there's no paleolithic archaeological sites like on the
coast of Alaska and British Columbia.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
It would be lovely if there were that we could
sort of, you know, if they left behind like Hansel
and Gretel, right, a trail of breadcrumbs, a trail of
archaeological sites. There is one site that based around thirteen
that's off the coast of British Columbia, where they actually
have some ancient footprints literally footprints coming into this continent.
But that's one of the only ones that's and that's
(32:12):
still not old enough, right, because if people are at
Cooper's Ferry at fifteen and a half, then a site
this thirteen thousand is, yeah, that's that's long after.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Wow. It's currently believed that the first people arriving in
what is now the Lower forty eight got here using
a coastal route, and sites like Cooper's Ferry, which is
along the Salmon River near Cottonwood, Idaho, force us to
believe in the water route. At Cooper's Ferry, they've found
(32:40):
stone points and burned animal bones that radio carbon date
back to fifteen thousand, five hundred years ago. This is
two thousand years before Clovis, thousands of years before the
ice free corridor was biologically viable for a thirteen hundred
mile journey. Paleo's sites are just hard to come by,
(33:02):
so it's difficult to piece it all together.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Well, I mean, think about this in terms of numbers.
We are not talking about a lot of people. Not
only is there not a lot of people in absolute terms,
in terms of density, You've got relatively few people on
a vast continent and they're not and they're highly mobile,
(33:27):
they're moving all the time. Archaeological sites accumulate when people
slow down and stop, and especially if you've got a
large number of people slowing down and stopping.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
And these people weren't making impact. I mean, like today,
like you think about the impact that a human would
leave on the planet in a week's time period. I'm
producing trash, controducing tire tracks and mud when I drive
my truck to where I hunt. And these people didn't
(33:58):
have plastics, they didn't have metal.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Oh god, no, yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Every everything they had was organic matter that would rot
in a period of years at most. So it just
took these like really special circumstances for something to be preserved.
It's just astonishing to me how how this like these
little breadcrumbs that we have, But also how much we
(34:22):
know off these small data points, right.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
No, we we specialize in getting large amounts of information
from tiny amounts of data. Yeah, because we have to.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
It's astonishing to me to think about, like who these
people would have really been. They were humans, just like
a same mental capacity. They could have learned to fly
an airplane, they could have learned complex math. We just
have to assume that they wouldn't have had any sense
of their uniqueness in the world. I mean in terms
of like we now look back from this place in
(35:05):
twenty twenty five, where we have this incredible technology and
we have these like what we perceive as modern lives
right on the cutting edge of time. Well, they were
on the cutting edge of time fifteen thousand years ago.
It was it's hard for me to think about a
place to sene man waking up, getting the fire going,
(35:25):
and just thinking, man, it's just another Tuesday, and I
gotta figure out what we're gonna eat, and I gotta
go out and you know, kill a deer, kill a mammoth,
or I've got a We're gonna head south today and
maybe we'll run into some other group of people. I mean,
they didn't know they were They just thought this is
what human life was.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And then now fifteen thousand years later, we have, because
of technology, because of history, because of written languages, because
of communication, at this high level that we have, we're
able to see this huge slice of the pie and go,
holy smokes, those guys were just so unique.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
And yes, I think you're absolutely right. The only point
that I would add is that I suspect at some level,
at some degree, they must have realized looking around that
there's not a lot of people here, right, there's wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
That have been normal to them?
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Exactly right, exactly right. But think about it in terms
of the first people coming into the Americas, where you know,
they'd seen people in Siberia, they'd interacted with folks along
the way, and suddenly they realize, you know, it's been months,
it's been a really long time since we've seen smoke
on the horizon, or a freshly killed animal, or bumped
(36:41):
into somebody else.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
The place is uninhabited. Exactly They would have recognized.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
It, right, They may have recognized it or just thought,
you know, maybe I just need to keep moving and
I'm going to find somebody else.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Right, What if they thought that was a positive or negative.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Well, now that's if you're looking at your kids and
they're getting to be a marriageable la you're thinking, boy,
I hope we run into somebody really quick. Yeah, And
that's actually one of the other things that's come out
of the genetic record is that there's no evidence whatsoever
of incest or I don't know if you necessarily want
to talk about that. Sure, but with Neanderthals toward the
(37:17):
end of their their string by you know, fifty thousand
years ago, there was a lot of inbreeding really with
modern human population, and they basically were running out of
mates for their kids. With modern humans, you do not
see that. So these folks, again, this goes back to
if you're on an empty landscape, it pays to recognize
(37:40):
strangers as friends.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Wow, that's fascinating. It's mind boggling to think of so
few humans on such a huge continent, especially as planet
Earth now has over eight billion people. It's tempting to
think that it would be nice to go back, but
I'm sure all those people from the Pleistocene would like
(38:03):
to be in our shoes, with excess food, air conditioning,
and hospitals. This next section reveals one of the biggest
mysteries of the Americas. Here, doctor Meltzer is going to
introduce us to what they refer to as the ghost population.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
So one of the really interesting things, as we've talked about,
we've got Anzac in Montana, we've got these individuals in
southeastern Brazil. It's a site called Lego Asanta, and we
can see a tight connection between the two in a
genetic sense, but there's also something lurking in those genomes
at Lego Asanta a well. Geneticists refer to it as
(38:48):
a ghost population, and by that what we mean is
that we've got segments of DNA that are clearly unrelated
to everything else that are part of the genome of
those individuals, and it's a signal that bears a resemblance
to austral Asian populations, so Australia, New Guinea, that region
(39:12):
of the world. So we've got these chunks, these odd
chunks of DNA in these populations in southeastern Brazil that
are part of the genome. But what's really puzzling about
this stuff is that we don't see that austral Asian
signal in any of the North American individuals that we've sequenced.
(39:35):
We don't see it in any of the Alaskan individuals
that we've sequenced. We don't see them in the Northeast
Asian ones. So clearly there's ancestral genetic components and segments
that are coming into the Americas, and we don't know
does this possibly represent a pre Clovis population that has
(39:57):
simply disappeared? And the only record we have of it
was that there was some sort of gene flow or interaction.
And why is it only in South America? If it
came across the land bridge and into North America, you
would expect to see this signal all the way down
into the continent. R So we haven't quite figured out that.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Do they not think that it's it potentially came from
the South into South America?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Not really, And let me tell you why we don't
think that. And again with the caveat that with archaeology,
you know, we're never at one hundred percent sure, but
I'm going to say ninety nine point ninety nine on
this one. We know when people start moving out across
the Pacific, and we do know in fact that groups
that moved out across the Pacific ultimately will touch down
(40:46):
in coastal South America. They won't really spend much time there, right,
But that's only about three thousand years ago, and that's
only after folks developed the ocean going technology this, you know,
the big outrigger canoes and that sort of thing to
do that in the place to scene, No, I think
it's pretty much again.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
So just to clarify, there's there's a genetic signal in
South America that's not in North America. That it's from Australia.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
In that region, and that and that, and that's in
South America and no place else.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
So what what do you think? This complete mystery?
Speaker 2 (41:23):
It's absolutely I mean, these are the things that make
this fun. Right said, there's still so many questions to answer,
and that's a big one.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
The ghost population of South America is some wild stuff.
But it's worth noting that not all of the scientific
community is an agreement that it's real. But that's how
all this stuff works. Usually takes a generation or two
to sort it all out. Potentially one day we'll understand
even more as new information and technology unfolds, and this
(41:57):
exact thing uncertainty spurs My last question to doctor Meltzer,
with your career how do you manage the uncertainty because
you have to be starting like there's I'm sure you've
done stuff in your career where you said like, hey,
this is the best information we have and here's what
(42:18):
we believe, and then later that was proven wrong.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
Yeah, but that's the fun of it, right. I Mean,
our hypotheses, our theories, our inferences are not like our children.
We're more than happy to discover something new that shows
us oh okay, now we have a much better idea.
What I thought before was wrong. I mean, you don't
(42:43):
want it to happen too often, sure, sure, right, yeah,
but it's really it's refreshing in a way because you're
constantly learning stuff and by virtue of the sort of
dearth of data. I mean, we have a tremendous amount
of data. Yeah, but in the grand scheme of things,
do we want more? Do we wish we had more? Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (43:04):
But there there definitely are are things that you can
say with certainty that will never be pretty much reversed.
I mean, like I'm thinking, like if we'd had this
conversation in the year nineteen hundred, we would this would
be an entirely different conversation. If we had this conversation
in the nineteen forties. Oh yeah, it would be entirely different.
(43:25):
We'd say, oh man, we got Clovis and fulsome and
people have been here for thirteen thousand years. We also,
through the you know, the latter part of the nineteen hundreds,
would have thought that people came across the Burying land
Bridge through the Ice Free Corridor and that's how they
got here. And then now we're saying, well, it's a
it's a coastal route. Yeah, Like, how twenty years from
(43:48):
now will we still be saying that.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Okay, I see we are route Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
think there are anchor points that we can use. I
don't think the ice Free Corridor is going to open
any earlier than we thought.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Yeah, that's like pretty that's like I saw.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
I'm confident on that one. So let's have this conversation
in twenty years and find out if I was right
or not. Yeah, but I think that's good.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
We're going to book this as a calendar.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Of let's anchor that one right there. That's good. Was
Clovis dating to you know, around thirteen thousand plus minus. Yeah,
that's good. Have we found the earliest people in the Americas. No,
I don't think. So is it going to go much
before around fifty thousand years ago? I also don't think so.
Here's what we're doing, This is this is really what
(44:29):
science is all about. We are worrying away our ignorance.
So I can say, just having this conversation here today,
that I think the first people came into the Americas
sometime between about sixteen and say twenty five thousand years ago. Okay,
(44:49):
Do I think people could have come here one hundred
thousand years ago? No? I don't, not at all, just
because of the evidence that we have today suggests that's
not the case. I don't even think they were or
as early as fifty or forty or maybe even thirty.
But that's just based on the evidence that we have today.
Am I willing to accept the possibility that I could
(45:10):
be wrong, Absolutely, because as you know, it's sort of
alluded to the fact that I've been in this business
for a while, and it's true, I've seen a lot
of changes in the time that I've been in this business,
you know. I mean, we all used to believe that
it was Clovis first, and then it wasn't. We used
to believe the ice free quarter was the way in
and that it wasn't. So yeah, I've seen those changes. Yeah,
(45:33):
and I've also you know, and it's it's humbling in
the sense that it makes you realize, do not be
too confident about what you know, because with archaeology there's
always the potential for surprises.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
We're worrying away our ignorance.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Attempting to answer these questions of the deep andiquity of
man in North America is a grand intellectual feed and
I think it's important and it adds weight to our
modern human story of driving on paved roads and living
in brick, air conditioned homes. I can't imagine living in
modern times and having little curiosity about where people came from.
(46:22):
To me, this curiosity is respect, and in this case,
it's respect for these people that lived here, but also
respect for the land itself.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
This is its story.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease
Brince this country life podcast, and I know that you're
gonna enjoy Lake's Backwoods University. Please share our podcast feed
with a friend this week and keep the wild places wild,
because that's where the bears live.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Fe
In nineteen sixty eight in central Montana, construction workers digging
with a backo discovered human bones. It was a child
buried twelve thousand, nine hundred years ago in the Pleistocene
the Ice Age, which is a time period that has
remained a mystery for archaeologists until now, because in twenty fourteen,
(00:29):
forty six years after the discovery, a new technology emerged
that told us who this child was, as it became
the first and only Clovis era human DNA to be
fully sequenced, giving us insight into the first Americans. In
(00:50):
this episode, doctor David Meltzer will tell us what we
learned from America's oldest bones. I doubt that you're gonna
want to miss this one.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
We've got enzac in Montana, We've got these individuals in
southeastern Brazil. It's a site called Lego Asanta, and we
can see a tight connection between the two in a
genetic sense. But there's also something lurking in those genomes
at Lego Asanta. Geneticists refer to it as a ghost population.
(01:25):
Does this possibly represent a pre Clovis population that has
simply disappeared and the only record we have of it
was that there was some sort of gene flow or
interaction and why is it only in South America?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
And hey, don't forget that.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
On June ninth, there will be a new drop on
the bear Grease feed to go along with bear Grease.
What you're listening to now the Bear Grease Render Brent's
this country life podcast. But now you'll be able to
listen to Lake Pickles Backwoods Universe. This is our wildlife
biology podcast and it's really good. We're going to learn
(02:06):
a lot. But now we're on to the peopling of America.
Roll the intro Reba. My name is Klay Nukem, and
this is the bear Grease Podcast where we'll explore things
(02:26):
forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and
where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their
lives close to the land. Presented by FHF gear, American
made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to
be as rugged as the place.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
As we explore, there's a whole sort of new synthesis emerging,
a new view emerging about the peopling of the Americas,
which is making it clear that the traditional interpretations that
(03:06):
we had people get to Alaska, they come through the
ice free corridor.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Boom, it's all done. It's Clovis. It just doesn't work anymore.
And it really hasn't worked for quite some time, right,
because we've had these pre Clovis age sites now for
the better part of fifteen twenty years. But what's happening
now is that we're getting a much better picture, a
more nuanced picture of the process itself and the routes
(03:30):
that they may have taken, and getting back to the
DNA who they were.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
I want to learn about the peopling of America, about
who were the first people that came here. This is
a conversation that's been heated since the late eighteen hundreds.
The technology in the last ten years has changed the conversation.
This is doctor David Meltzer, an archaeologist, author and from
(04:00):
SMU in Dallas, Texas. He's a great communicator.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
It used to be that I had lots of questions
as an archaeologist, who are these folks, where did they
come from? Who are they related to? These are not
questions I could answer with archaeological remains. Right, I can
look at a projectile point over here, and I can
look at a projectile point over there, and I can
infer that they're made in a similar fashion, they have
a similar style. Maybe they're related, but I'd never know
(04:30):
that for sure. Right, But with ancient DNA, if I
have skeletal material that we can extract the DNA from
an ancient individual, which we do very carefully and with
considerable respect. There's a lot of ethical issues tied with
ancient DNA, As you might imagine, I can identify ad mixture, ancestry,
(04:54):
who these people are, where they came from, who their
ancestors were in Northeast Asia and the like. And it's
been it's been an absolute sea change in terms of
our understanding of the peopling process. So we know from
the ancient genetic record, ancient genomic record, that we had
groups that were living in Eastern Asia China today, forty
(05:16):
thousand years ago, very distinctive genomically. They've been isolated for
some time. When we say distinctive genomically, we're not talking
about them being you know, superior or inferior or anything
like that. What we're actually measuring are genetic traits that
have absolutely no bearing on their fitness. These are parts
(05:37):
of your genome that actually don't do anything. So you
can look at two different populations and there will be
a certain amount of genetic distance between them. So we
can use we can use DNA as a clock. This
is just wild stuff. Is this would not have been imaginable,
you know, forty years ago.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
How long have we had this technology?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Well, so the first ancient North American genome was twenty fourteen,
just a shade over ten years ago, ten years ago,
ten years ago. Yeah, no, Clay, if we had had
this conversation in twenty ten, it'd be over in about
five minutes because I'd have nothing else to say.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
Really. Yeah, it's exciting to live in the times of
new technology being developed that's solving ancient mysteries. But it
can also be a little unnerving as it up ends
long held philosophies, and I sometimes wonder if our certainty
at some point won't be disrupted again in the future
(06:32):
by even more cryptic technology. But we need to understand
what we are certain about. We need to talk about bones.
So what discovery of human remains was found that opened
the key to these place to see people?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Well so, in terms of North America, right, the first
ancient genome was the Anzik child. So The Antik child
was discovered in the nineteen sixties, and the story, as
I understand it, was a rancher was sort of doing
some dirt work on his property with some heavy equipment,
Montana and just outside of Wilson, Montana. In fact, it
(07:13):
was quite close to where we did the bison butchering experiment,
and I kept looking off in that distance thinking I'm close.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And the Anzik child was interred with grave goods some
really distinctive Clovis points, so we know that the Anzick
child was a member of that Clovis cultural group.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
How this came about was that a backo operator was
digging gravel off a ranch owned by a family named Anzik.
He hit an unusual layer of dirt and recognized his
stone point. He got off, and he discovered human bones
there too. What he'd later learn is that he found
a formal burial of a one to two year old
(07:56):
male child, buried with one hundred and twenty stone own
tools in six non human bone adladal four shafts, and
some elk antlers dusted with red ochre, and the human
bones appeared to have red ochre on them as well.
It makes you wonder if they buried the child with
(08:19):
the things they thought it would need for the afterlife,
the things they relied on most stone tools.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
But here is what they learned.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Subsequent radiocarbon dating demonstrated that Anazik was around twelve seven
hundred years ago, so late Pleistocene, Late Ice Age, and
when Eski's group did the sequencing, what they discovered, what
we discovered and published in twenty fourteen was that that
individual was part of a population movement into the Americas
(08:53):
that we subsequently identified as Southern Native Americans. Now we
all know that Montana's not in southern portion of the continent.
But what Anzik signified was this was one member of
a population that subsequently would spread throughout the hemisphere. Whereas
the other sort of fork in the road, right, so
(09:14):
one fork goes south, the other stays north. Those are
Northern Native Americans.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
So Anzik all connected anzimatically to this Anzik child.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
It all sort of gets channeled back through Anzik or
through others of that population, right, So Anzik is not
sort of the founding population per se, It's a member
of that early population.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
This discovery of this Anzik child was is the only
pliest scene human remains that we were able to extract
good enough DNA from to really do the type of
genetic research and discovery that you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Fact, that's correct so far, So all.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
This is based upon one really good specimen.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Well, there's actually more to it, okay. So anzik Is
so far are the oldest genome that we have in
the Americas. However, we have others that come along pretty
soon thereafter, and that help fill in the picture of
the dispersal of these populations throughout the hemisphere. We have
some in southeastern Brazil that date to so anziic is
(10:20):
twelve seven. We've got ones in South America, southeastern Brazil
that are around ten and a half. We've got in
Spirit Cave and Nevada that's about ten to seven. What's
really striking about the genetic data, so again, you know
we've got data from Montana, we've got Nevada, we've got Brazil,
we've got various other places in South America. Is how
(10:43):
closely linked they are and how similar they are at
the genetic level. What that tells us is that this
is a population that was actually moving pretty fast because
there hasn't been that much change in the time from
Anazik down to southeastern percent.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Yes, so it wasn't like five thousand years no, no, no, yeah,
so it's literally people generations, maybe a little more than that,
but yeah, that's that's the tendency, right, is that it
happened really fast.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
We call them quick waivers. They you know, it's just
a fast moving radiation throughout the hemisphere.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Can you imagine moving on foot from Montana to Brazil?
What was pushing these people? Why did they move? These
are answers we will never know. But maybe one day
they'll have a technology that can read the thoughts and
understand the motivations of people by the DNA.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Extracted from their bones.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
One of the most interesting things about the Anazac child
was recorded in a peer review paper in the Science
Advances journal, in which an isotope analysis was done on
the bones and in that they can determine and the
type of protein that the mother ate when she nursed
the young child, and they found that her diet was
(12:08):
more closely related to a scimitar cat, a carnivore, than
anything else. They use this study to say that these
people were eaten a lot of big mammal meat that
is pretty durned crazy. But our next question is what
did these bones tell us about where these people came from.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
So we've got these two populations, one in Eastern Asia
and one sort of in the region around Lake Baikal,
probably around twenty five twenty three thousand years ago. There's
there's interaction. These groups or members of these groups kind
of bump into one another and then split off as
(12:53):
a sort of combined entity. A combined population. That's the
group that will become ancestor to Native Americans. That's the
group that will make their way across the land bridge.
They'll do it in at least a couple of different pulses.
They'll be the initial one, and those will be the
folks that will make it all the way down into
(13:14):
the lower forty eight, throughout South America and so on.
Then there'll be a slightly later one which will come
into Alaska and stay and not go any further south
and ultimately disappear from the genetic and archaeological record. Okay, wow,
we could never see disappearance in the archaeological record. Before
(13:35):
we could see artifacts, but we had no idea who
made them and whether the people who made them had
descendants among modern groups. All modern people have ancestors, there's
no question about that, right, But not all ancient people
that we see in the ancient DNA record necessarily had descendants,
because some populations disappeared others were replaced, either you know,
(13:58):
locally or regionally or whatever. Humans move and humans been
moving for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, so we can
start to see that kind of thing. We can see
people and populations disappearing.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
All from basically finding bits of DNA and.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Well bones in bones exactly right. So when you're doing
ancient DNA on skeletal remains, what you're doing is you're
getting that individual's genome. But it's more than just that individual,
because your genome, my genome. All of these things are
a record of all of our ancestors and the big picture.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
This would be like sorcery to someone one hundred years ago.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Oh, no question.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Like if you said, I can tell you everything about
where you're from, who your people were, I mean.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Really, well, it's a scale thing though, right. I mean,
by the way, don't buy any of those things that
the genetic ancestry testing companies are telling you about. We
can tell you exactly who your ancestors. No, there's a
lot of arm weaving with a lot of that stuff. Really, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Now what we're looking at are population level trends, right, Okay,
(15:12):
so we're not able to take your DNA and precisely show.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Who your ancestors were.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
That makes sense, But we can look at it as
a population and we do.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
What if you told a human living in the Pleistocene
that inside their bones were the inscriptions of their ancestors.
I think they tell you that they already knew that.
I find this bizarre and oddly circular. Author Barry Lopez
and his book Arctic Dreams, raises the question of how
far modern man has actually come. He questions whether all
(15:45):
we've accomplished is quote a more complicated manipulation of materials,
more astounding display of his grasp.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
Of the physical principles of matter.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
We are dazzled by mere styles of expression end of quote.
I think what he's saying is that modernity has produced
a very technical quote style of expression like sequencing DNA,
where previous humans might have been more spiritually acute and
expressed life in different ways.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
I like thinking about this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
This is the perfect time to stop for just a
second and review some basic stuff that will help all
this make sense. The Clovis era is a term used
to describe a group of people that we're here in
what is now America roughly thirteen thousand years ago. They
spanned the continent and made uniquely fluted stone points. That's
(16:52):
basically the only way that we know who they are
is because of their technology. For decades, people thought that
these the Clovis people, crossed the burying land bridge out
of Asia in the Pleistocene and came through an ice
free corridor between the glaciers into the interior of North America.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
But through this.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Ice core technology that we learned about on episode two
ninety eight of Bear Grease, we're realizing that that ice
free corridor travel path wouldn't be possible. All that information
is going to be valuable in just a little bit.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
But I'm gonna throw a wrinkle in here, anazak is Clovis.
We still don't have a pre Clovis genome, so we
don't know whether the earlier population that comes into the Americas,
who are they and how do they relate to Clovis,
and were they part of that quick wave? Will presumably
(17:49):
not because that quick wave is Clovis down to you know,
South America. We're looking.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
So it's just so hard to find human remains that
are over ten thousand years old. I mean, that's what
we're dealing with. Like there were hundreds, clearly hundreds for sure,
even thousands of people, oh yeah, across the landscape, across
all spread out, all across North America, and we can't
find any of their bones because it's organic matter, it deteriorates.
(18:23):
What we find is what you specialize in, which is
stone points and archaeological like physical evidence that humans were here.
And so just these really unique situations where something happened,
where bones were preserved. It's like literally searching for a
needle in a thousand haystacks.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
It's a challenge. So throughout the hemisphere North and South America,
there's maybe twenty five thirty human remains older than about
eight thousand years. That's a hell of a small population
on which to you know, create any sort of inferential
basis for what the first people look like. Now, the
(19:10):
thing that's really interesting is that at this time in
Europe we've got all sorts of skeletal remains, right, So, yeah,
it's a preservation issue, but obviously, you know, Europe must
have preservation issues there as well. But the difference is
is that their base population of individuals that were living
at that time is so much larger that if you
(19:32):
take one percent of that population and then one percent
of the population that's living in the America's which is
a lot smaller, you know, what are the odds that
you're going to get well preserved human vas Yeah, yeah,
I mean it is the case that throughout most of
eastern North America, bone does not preserve in sediments.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Eastern North America being the eastern deciduous forest where have
a lot of rainfalls at a lot of biological a
lot of soils and all that stuff. In the West,
it would be better.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Better chances, absolutely absolutely, But you know, preservation depends on
just so many things. You know, was the individual interred,
what was the context of the burial, you know, where
scavenger is able to get to the you know, the
remains or you know, these people were highly mobile. They
did not have cemeteries, you know, at this period of time.
(20:24):
Actually the first cemetery we see is probably around ten
thousand years ago. But as I mentioned earlier, you know,
this is something that is now being done much more
in concert with Native American groups, because these are the
ancestors of these individuals, right. The people today are descended
from these first Americans, and so a lot of the
(20:46):
you know, the first decade or so of ancient DNA work,
and this is true globally, there was a bone rush, right.
Every time you found a bone, somebody wanted to sequence
it and say, you know, because you learn something new
with each new specimen. We're starting to calm down a
little bit because, you know, we're starting to get the
picture together. We're filling in you know, it's much more
filling in the details rather than creating the whole canvas.
(21:10):
But we're also doing much more collaborative work with the
native groups because you know, they're interested. They might not
necessarily be interested in the same kinds of things we're
interested in, but we find that out right, we do
what we can to sort of respect the descendants, the
descendant communities, and at the same time sort of look
(21:34):
into and try and understand their history. And really, this
is this is human history, right, This is the story
of people essentially coming out of Africa and making their
way around the globe. It's an amazing story, because one
of the things that's always struck me is the vanity
of Europeans when they started sailing around the globe. You know,
(21:56):
they talked about exploring all these places and going where
no man has gone before, throwing in a star trek
reference here. But the reality is is every place they
landed there was somebody there, right. Yeah, you know, so
hunter gatherer groups, foraging groups leaving Africa managed to pretty
much populate the entire globe, with the exception of Antarctica,
(22:18):
and even then there's some question about whether indigenous groups
got to Antarctica before James Cook approached it in the
late seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Humans seem to be really good at dividing up based
upon really the quite small cosmetic and cultural differences within
our species. But doctor Meltzer makes a good point, this
is the story of mankind. As I learned about archaeology,
what is most astonishing to me is how random the
(22:52):
data points seemed to be for because I mean, like
we talk about Clovis this well, first of we talk
about Folsome, this incredible archaeological discovery discovered by George mcjenkin,
who you know, is just this cowboy get out on
his ranch and he finds these bones and he gets
old there. And then the Clovis site is basically a
(23:13):
commercial gravel pit where they're digging up stuff and they
and they find it. The Anzik child is discovered when
they're doing excavation on just some rancher's random place. And
I mean it feels like as a species, we would
be like globally like, okay, everyone, we're gonna grid off
(23:34):
the earth and we want every man, woman and child
to go out and excavate the land that they own
and look for evidence of deep human antiquity. Ready, go
report back to us in a month, and we we
grid off the whole earth and we find everything that
is not even remotely I mean that's a fairy tale,
(23:56):
like like you know, how much has been destroyed? How
much is there? Is there an archaeological site under my
house in Arkansas that would change the world and the
whole story, But we're never gonna dig it up in
my lifetime because my house is.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
There, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, funny fact. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Well, I think you should move your house and we
can see what's on it.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
I do find stone points in my yard.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Okay, Well there you go, then it really is good.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Reason to move to your house find stone points in
my yard.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
So there's there's a bunch of things. First off, you're
absolutely right in that it's complicated. Sites are found randomly.
Sites are found owing to construction erosion, dumb luck. The
person happened to be walking along at the moment that
something eroded out, and if they'd come twenty minutes later,
(24:47):
it would have washed downstream and they'd never know. This
is why we as archaeologists when we're out in the field,
we're talking to ranchers, we're talking to farmers, we're talking
to people who are following you orders and surveying that
you know, one square mile around their house, and they're
the ones his eyes are on the ground all the time. Okay,
(25:10):
But at the same time, we're also thinking, and we're
also using techniques like remote sensing, techniques like understanding the
local geology, like understanding erosional and depositional processes. The best example,
wonderful example of this is fellow by name of Reed
Firing at the University of North Texas. Reid has two PhDs,
(25:33):
one an anthropology, one in geology, and reads a pretty
savvy guy, and he was looking at the geology in
his neighborhood literally, and he got to thinking, you know,
the ice age stuff is now buried under about eight
to nine meters a sediment, and he got it into
his head that well, they're digging a dam and they're
(25:56):
cutting an overflow sluice way by that dam, and he
just decided, well, that's a really good opportunity to go
look eight meters below the surface. He starts walking down
that contact between the end of the place to scene
and the Cretaceous. Right, So you've got twelve thousand year
old sediments sitting on top of sixty million year old rock,
(26:19):
and what does he discover? The Clovis point, right, So
just like walking around yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you
take that sort of knowledge and apply it, it's not
a completely random thing. But you know, the prepared mind
will find things, and Reed certainly was. And that's it's
so called. It's the Aubry site. So it's one of
(26:41):
the oldest Clovi sites we have while and it was
discovered because he was savvy enough to know where to look.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
I bet those damn builders wish he hadn't found.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
It did not have anything, it did not slow the
dam It all worked out just fine for all concern.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
The bones have answered the question of where Clovis people
came from. But now I want to try to understand
how they got here. Meltzer is going to bring up
something called the Kelp Highway, which is the theory that
after crossing the Burying land bridge, humans moved down the coast,
utilizing the rich ecosystems provided by Kelp.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Well, okay, so we've now established that people came down
the coast, and the question is, well, what resources were
they using? There is an interesting theory about the so
called Kelp Highway that would have provided a rich resource
base for groups. Certainly there's a lot of help out
there today. The obvious question is what did it look
(27:46):
like at the Pleisto scene sixteen thousand years ago when
people were coming down that coast. I don't know. I
don't know that any of us know, because you know,
these are sea plants where we haven't got a really
good geological record of the history of Kelp along the coat.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
You can't do the core.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Well, you know what we have we again this.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Is I thought maybe I gave him a new idea. Well,
I was going to be like call it the clay
Nucombe core because I told you to get a core
of the Kelp.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Well, the problem is, you know what the Pacific Northwest
coast looks like, right, it's constantly getting pounded. Uh, the
odds are against you. I would tell you, by the way,
that the fellow who found the Titanic years ago, one
of his people contacted me and they said, you know,
he was thinking, now that he's found the Titanic, that
(28:35):
maybe he would do some work on the Bearing Land
Bridge and look for sites and would be interested. And
I said, sure, nothing everything side, Yeah, nothing, nothing happened.
I told him that, you know, the odds were actually
not very.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Good, just because the ocean would have just yeah yeah,
well volatile down there.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
You can do bathometric studies, right, you can. You can
map the seafloor and you can see valleys, you can
see river drainages in the like. But are you going
to find an archaeological site. I mean it's hard enough
to find stuff on land and doing it in sixty
meters of water icy water. Yeah. So yeah, that one
never came to pass. It would have been kind of
(29:15):
fun though. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
So okay, so you're telling me about what we know
about the water route.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, well, don't think of it as a water route,
think of it as a coastal route. Okay. I suspect
they were taking small animals and maybe even plant material
out of tide pools. They were probably hunting animals that
would have been in that same ribbon of dry land
along the ice sheet. And before you get into the water,
(29:45):
large mammal hunting, large sea mammal hunting is a much
later thing and it usually requires boats, and we don't
Now we don't have any evidence of boats. Does that
mean they didn't have boats? No? I mean we just
don't have any boats. Yeah, yeah, or exactly. I mean,
what are the odds that you would actually find something
like that?
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Now, so there are archaeological sites along that coast, no
kind of.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
No, No, that's that's another challenge.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
So we just have So what are the data points,
like like Cooper's Ferry is inland, yep, off of the
it's off the Snake the Snake River, Like, we'll think
about it.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Think about it. You're coming down the coast, right, so
you've got this ribbon of land. You can make your
way down the coast and once you get south of
that ice sheet. Now mind you that ice sheet comes
into Seattle really late. You had ice in Seattle as
recently as fourteen and a half fifteen thousand years ago
before it starts to retreat. But once you get south
(30:48):
of that ice sheet, you get to the Columbia, make
a left turn that takes you into the interior. Right,
and then right there you go, and you're gonna find
your way to a place like Cooper Ferry. So you
could either continue south, you could make a left turn,
go into the interior, go a little further south, make
another left turn. Yeah. So once once you get south
(31:12):
of the ice it's open season, it's open plans.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
And so the data points then become like we have
this Anzik child in Montana that we can genetically trace.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
To populations in Northeast Asia.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
And we know they didn't come down the ice free
corridor because there was a it was closed up until it.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
Was not biologically viable until after they got here.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
And so I mean the only thing left is they
either flew airplanes or they came down the.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Coast exactly right.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
And so there's no paleolithic archaeological sites like on the
coast of Alaska and British Columbia.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
It would be lovely if there were that we could
sort of, you know, if they left behind like Hansel
and Gretel, right, a trail of breadcrumbs, a trail of
archaeological sites. There is one site that based around thirteen
that's off the coast of British Columbia, where they actually
have some ancient footprints literally footprints coming into this continent.
But that's one of the only ones that's and that's
(32:12):
still not old enough, right, because if people are at
Cooper's Ferry at fifteen and a half, then a site
this thirteen thousand is, yeah, that's that's long after.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Wow. It's currently believed that the first people arriving in
what is now the Lower forty eight got here using
a coastal route, and sites like Cooper's Ferry, which is
along the Salmon River near Cottonwood, Idaho, force us to
believe in the water route. At Cooper's Ferry, they've found
(32:40):
stone points and burned animal bones that radio carbon date
back to fifteen thousand, five hundred years ago. This is
two thousand years before Clovis, thousands of years before the
ice free corridor was biologically viable for a thirteen hundred
mile journey. Paleo's sites are just hard to come by,
(33:02):
so it's difficult to piece it all together.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Well, I mean, think about this in terms of numbers.
We are not talking about a lot of people. Not
only is there not a lot of people in absolute terms,
in terms of density, You've got relatively few people on
a vast continent and they're not and they're highly mobile,
(33:27):
they're moving all the time. Archaeological sites accumulate when people
slow down and stop, and especially if you've got a
large number of people slowing down and stopping.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
And these people weren't making impact. I mean, like today,
like you think about the impact that a human would
leave on the planet in a week's time period. I'm
producing trash, controducing tire tracks and mud when I drive
my truck to where I hunt. And these people didn't
(33:58):
have plastics, they didn't have metal.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Oh god, no, yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Every everything they had was organic matter that would rot
in a period of years at most. So it just
took these like really special circumstances for something to be preserved.
It's just astonishing to me how how this like these
little breadcrumbs that we have, But also how much we
(34:22):
know off these small data points, right.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
No, we we specialize in getting large amounts of information
from tiny amounts of data. Yeah, because we have to.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
It's astonishing to me to think about, like who these
people would have really been. They were humans, just like
a same mental capacity. They could have learned to fly
an airplane, they could have learned complex math. We just
have to assume that they wouldn't have had any sense
of their uniqueness in the world. I mean in terms
of like we now look back from this place in
(35:05):
twenty twenty five, where we have this incredible technology and
we have these like what we perceive as modern lives
right on the cutting edge of time. Well, they were
on the cutting edge of time fifteen thousand years ago.
It was it's hard for me to think about a
place to sene man waking up, getting the fire going,
(35:25):
and just thinking, man, it's just another Tuesday, and I
gotta figure out what we're gonna eat, and I gotta
go out and you know, kill a deer, kill a mammoth,
or I've got a We're gonna head south today and
maybe we'll run into some other group of people. I mean,
they didn't know they were They just thought this is
what human life was.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And then now fifteen thousand years later, we have, because
of technology, because of history, because of written languages, because
of communication, at this high level that we have, we're
able to see this huge slice of the pie and go,
holy smokes, those guys were just so unique.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
And yes, I think you're absolutely right. The only point
that I would add is that I suspect at some level,
at some degree, they must have realized looking around that
there's not a lot of people here, right, there's wouldn't.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
That have been normal to them?
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Exactly right, exactly right. But think about it in terms
of the first people coming into the Americas, where you know,
they'd seen people in Siberia, they'd interacted with folks along
the way, and suddenly they realize, you know, it's been months,
it's been a really long time since we've seen smoke
on the horizon, or a freshly killed animal, or bumped
(36:41):
into somebody else.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
The place is uninhabited. Exactly They would have recognized.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
It, right, They may have recognized it or just thought,
you know, maybe I just need to keep moving and
I'm going to find somebody else.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Right, What if they thought that was a positive or negative.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Well, now that's if you're looking at your kids and
they're getting to be a marriageable la you're thinking, boy,
I hope we run into somebody really quick. Yeah, And
that's actually one of the other things that's come out
of the genetic record is that there's no evidence whatsoever
of incest or I don't know if you necessarily want
to talk about that. Sure, but with Neanderthals toward the
(37:17):
end of their their string by you know, fifty thousand
years ago, there was a lot of inbreeding really with
modern human population, and they basically were running out of
mates for their kids. With modern humans, you do not
see that. So these folks, again, this goes back to
if you're on an empty landscape, it pays to recognize
(37:40):
strangers as friends.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Wow, that's fascinating. It's mind boggling to think of so
few humans on such a huge continent, especially as planet
Earth now has over eight billion people. It's tempting to
think that it would be nice to go back, but
I'm sure all those people from the Pleistocene would like
(38:03):
to be in our shoes, with excess food, air conditioning,
and hospitals. This next section reveals one of the biggest
mysteries of the Americas. Here, doctor Meltzer is going to
introduce us to what they refer to as the ghost population.
Speaker 2 (38:23):
So one of the really interesting things, as we've talked about,
we've got Anzac in Montana, we've got these individuals in
southeastern Brazil. It's a site called Lego Asanta, and we
can see a tight connection between the two in a
genetic sense, but there's also something lurking in those genomes
at Lego Asanta a well. Geneticists refer to it as
(38:48):
a ghost population, and by that what we mean is
that we've got segments of DNA that are clearly unrelated
to everything else that are part of the genome of
those individuals, and it's a signal that bears a resemblance
to austral Asian populations, so Australia, New Guinea, that region
(39:12):
of the world. So we've got these chunks, these odd
chunks of DNA in these populations in southeastern Brazil that
are part of the genome. But what's really puzzling about
this stuff is that we don't see that austral Asian
signal in any of the North American individuals that we've sequenced.
(39:35):
We don't see it in any of the Alaskan individuals
that we've sequenced. We don't see them in the Northeast
Asian ones. So clearly there's ancestral genetic components and segments
that are coming into the Americas, and we don't know
does this possibly represent a pre Clovis population that has
(39:57):
simply disappeared? And the only record we have of it
was that there was some sort of gene flow or interaction.
And why is it only in South America? If it
came across the land bridge and into North America, you
would expect to see this signal all the way down
into the continent. R So we haven't quite figured out that.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Do they not think that it's it potentially came from
the South into South America?
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Not really, And let me tell you why we don't
think that. And again with the caveat that with archaeology,
you know, we're never at one hundred percent sure, but
I'm going to say ninety nine point ninety nine on
this one. We know when people start moving out across
the Pacific, and we do know in fact that groups
that moved out across the Pacific ultimately will touch down
(40:46):
in coastal South America. They won't really spend much time there, right,
But that's only about three thousand years ago, and that's
only after folks developed the ocean going technology this, you know,
the big outrigger canoes and that sort of thing to
do that in the place to scene, No, I think
it's pretty much again.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
So just to clarify, there's there's a genetic signal in
South America that's not in North America. That it's from Australia.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
In that region, and that and that, and that's in
South America and no place else.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
So what what do you think? This complete mystery?
Speaker 2 (41:23):
It's absolutely I mean, these are the things that make
this fun. Right said, there's still so many questions to answer,
and that's a big one.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
The ghost population of South America is some wild stuff.
But it's worth noting that not all of the scientific
community is an agreement that it's real. But that's how
all this stuff works. Usually takes a generation or two
to sort it all out. Potentially one day we'll understand
even more as new information and technology unfolds, and this
(41:57):
exact thing uncertainty spurs My last question to doctor Meltzer,
with your career how do you manage the uncertainty because
you have to be starting like there's I'm sure you've
done stuff in your career where you said like, hey,
this is the best information we have and here's what
(42:18):
we believe, and then later that was proven wrong.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
Yeah, but that's the fun of it, right. I Mean,
our hypotheses, our theories, our inferences are not like our children.
We're more than happy to discover something new that shows
us oh okay, now we have a much better idea.
What I thought before was wrong. I mean, you don't
(42:43):
want it to happen too often, sure, sure, right, yeah,
but it's really it's refreshing in a way because you're
constantly learning stuff and by virtue of the sort of
dearth of data. I mean, we have a tremendous amount
of data. Yeah, but in the grand scheme of things,
do we want more? Do we wish we had more? Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (43:04):
But there there definitely are are things that you can
say with certainty that will never be pretty much reversed.
I mean, like I'm thinking, like if we'd had this
conversation in the year nineteen hundred, we would this would
be an entirely different conversation. If we had this conversation
in the nineteen forties. Oh yeah, it would be entirely different.
(43:25):
We'd say, oh man, we got Clovis and fulsome and
people have been here for thirteen thousand years. We also,
through the you know, the latter part of the nineteen hundreds,
would have thought that people came across the Burying land
Bridge through the Ice Free Corridor and that's how they
got here. And then now we're saying, well, it's a
it's a coastal route. Yeah, Like, how twenty years from
(43:48):
now will we still be saying that.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Okay, I see we are route Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
think there are anchor points that we can use. I
don't think the ice Free Corridor is going to open
any earlier than we thought.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Yeah, that's like pretty that's like I saw.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
I'm confident on that one. So let's have this conversation
in twenty years and find out if I was right
or not. Yeah, but I think that's good.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
We're going to book this as a calendar.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Of let's anchor that one right there. That's good. Was
Clovis dating to you know, around thirteen thousand plus minus. Yeah,
that's good. Have we found the earliest people in the Americas. No,
I don't think. So is it going to go much
before around fifty thousand years ago? I also don't think so.
Here's what we're doing, This is this is really what
(44:29):
science is all about. We are worrying away our ignorance.
So I can say, just having this conversation here today,
that I think the first people came into the Americas
sometime between about sixteen and say twenty five thousand years ago. Okay,
(44:49):
Do I think people could have come here one hundred
thousand years ago? No? I don't, not at all, just
because of the evidence that we have today suggests that's
not the case. I don't even think they were or
as early as fifty or forty or maybe even thirty.
But that's just based on the evidence that we have today.
Am I willing to accept the possibility that I could
(45:10):
be wrong, Absolutely, because as you know, it's sort of
alluded to the fact that I've been in this business
for a while, and it's true, I've seen a lot
of changes in the time that I've been in this business,
you know. I mean, we all used to believe that
it was Clovis first, and then it wasn't. We used
to believe the ice free quarter was the way in
and that it wasn't. So yeah, I've seen those changes. Yeah,
(45:33):
and I've also you know, and it's it's humbling in
the sense that it makes you realize, do not be
too confident about what you know, because with archaeology there's
always the potential for surprises.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
We're worrying away our ignorance.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Attempting to answer these questions of the deep andiquity of
man in North America is a grand intellectual feed and
I think it's important and it adds weight to our
modern human story of driving on paved roads and living
in brick, air conditioned homes. I can't imagine living in
modern times and having little curiosity about where people came from.
(46:22):
To me, this curiosity is respect, and in this case,
it's respect for these people that lived here, but also
respect for the land itself.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
This is its story.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease
Brince this country life podcast, and I know that you're
gonna enjoy Lake's Backwoods University. Please share our podcast feed
with a friend this week and keep the wild places wild,
because that's where the bears live.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
Fe
Host
Clay Newcomb
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