May 20, 2025 • 65 mins
Thirteen-thousand years ago the first human culture to colonize all of North America, in this case from Pacific to Atlantic shores, was the Clovis culture of highly-proficient Siberian hunters. While they may not have been the first humans in America, the 1930s discovery of this “Clovisia the Beautiful” launched a century-long debate about their role in a remarkable series of extinctions – the loss of most of America’s African-like megafauna – coinciding with their arrival. Are Clovis and later Folsom cultures the American architects of the early stages of today’s Sixth Extinction?
Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck.
Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon.
MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips
Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men"
Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube
Shop MeatEater Merch
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Humans belonging to Clovis and Folsome cultures entered in America,
teeming with a remarkable diversity of Africa like creatures, but
confronted an extinction crisis that was possibly precipitated by their
own arrival. I'm Dan Florries, and this is the American West,
brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in Barrel, Velvet
(00:25):
Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season
that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports
backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and
wildlife enjoy responsibly Clovisia the Beautiful. We hardly know our
(00:58):
actual beginnings America, even when the stories are set in
places we recognize. The characters of our deep time history
can be alien to the point of fantasy. But while
it may sound unlikely in the twenty twenties, there's no
place quite like downtown Los Angeles for acquiring some sense
of how the human story began on the continent. Rancho
(01:23):
Librea Tarpits, just off Wiltshire Boulevard in the heart of
a sprawling Pacific coast city, is today the most successible
place in the country for picturing in the minds eye
the wild new world migrating humans found when they first
saw America. True enough, there's a sense of time travel shock,
having your lift drop you in the middle of swirling,
(01:45):
honking la traffic, only to stand face to face minutes
later with Columbian mammos fatally mired in tar, trumpeting their despair.
Even if the mammoths are robots and their forlorn cries
don't drown out the traffic, they and Librea and the
Page Museum still work a kind of magic. Twenty thousand
(02:05):
years drops away if you let it, because Librea preserves
tangible remnants of a world at the far ends of
the earth for ancestors of ours whose migrations had begun
in Africa. The Page Museum is a working laboratory of paleontology,
where visitors can watch scientists labor over the site's latest discoveries.
(02:27):
Many of those are the remains of scavenger predators once
lured by the cries of snagged mammoths, or the scin
of decomposing horses, camels, or ground sloths trapped by surface
tar near what was once a water source and a
dry landscape. The skulls and tusks of the elephants extracted
from Librea are impressive, but anyone who tours the museum
(02:50):
has to admit the most stunning display is the wall,
backlit and yellow of hundreds of dire wolf skulls. The
strapping cane. It's indigenous to America, but memorably revived as
fictional wester ROAs fauna and Game of Thrones left the
most remains here of any species, eighteen hundred individuals. The
(03:13):
fossils of hundreds of coyotes, a brawnier version than our
modern animal, make up the third most common species here,
But in second place are those ultimate ambush predators of
the Pleistocene, the western subspecies of sabertooths, heavily built cats
with a fearsome snake like jaw, gape and enormous fangs.
(03:37):
The replica skull of a sabertooth from Librea sits a
few feet away as I write this. Its rapier sharp
canines capable of tearing open a sloth or mammoth calf,
gleaming in rich afternoon light, Each fang measures a full
eight inches from gumline to tip. The vast assemblages of
(03:58):
hyperconnivore bones at Las joined the skeletal remains of mega herbivores,
mammoths and macedons, giant bison, pronghorns, lamas, California turkeys, and
many more. The predator list is lengthier than just wolves, coyotes,
and sabretooths as well. The cats whose remains have come
(04:20):
out of the tar include American cheetahs, step lions, and
giant jaguars. Immense, hyperactive short faced bears twice the weight
of a grizzly died in the asphalt. So did the
enormous Miriam's terratorn applies to seeing bird of prey with
a ten and a half foot wingspan. The remains span
(04:44):
indigenous creatures spawned by continental evolution and migrants from Asia,
some ancient to America, some recent arrivals. The mammals and
birds may seem alien are vaguely African, but in fact
this bestiary was purely classically American, the America of the Pleistocene.
(05:08):
The Rancho Librea victims that left their bones and skulls
in Casinar were once representatives of one of the grand
ecologies of planet Earth. This was a different America than
most of us conjured. When we imagine the continent Europeans
found five hundred years ago. But this libreal world wasn't
like the pre chick Salube age of the dinosaurs absent
(05:31):
of humans either. Late in the Pleistocene, our human forebears
joined American ecologies as the newest predator.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Here.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
These first Americans lived their lives among Librea creatures and
created the first coast to coast human societies in American history.
Their presence began to leave the continent, and this rich
aggregate of impressive animals forever changed. The first time we
(06:06):
became aware that humans were actually in America during the
Pleistocene was barely one hundred years ago, and the place
that happened was along the New Mexico Colorado border. In
the days following a flood in the dry Cimarron River,
an African American cowboy named George mcjunkin was riding through
grassy parkland a few hundred yards below the rim rock
(06:29):
of a miles long mesa that extended eastward from the
rocky mountains, checking for ranch fence lines damaged by the flood.
Suddenly mcjenkin's horse braced its hoofs, furrowing into foot deep
mud at the edge of a ragged scar. Floodwaters had
cut into the slope below the Mesa. Mcjenkin leaned out
(06:51):
of his saddle to peer into a fresh chasm sliced
into the brown shale. What he saw changed the story
of America forever. On a similar rainy August day in
twenty eighteen, some thirty five of us are stepping through
the lush grass of that same slope as it angles
up towards the rim rock of Johnson Mesa. We're following
(07:15):
David Eck, a New Mexico State Lands archaeologist with a
long ponytail halfway down his back, who is leading us
towards the very spot where George mcjenkin's horse had pulled
up one hundred and ten years before. The topography is
now a grassy, shallow drain called wild Horse Arroyo, and
(07:37):
as we crowd around its edges, it seems somehow too
commonplace to be the scene of one of the continent's
most significant historical finds. Nonetheless, this in the flesh is
the legendary fulsome archaeological site. What mcjunkin had done about
where we now stood talking was to spot in the
(08:00):
flood gashed arroyo bones of an immense size. They turned
out to be from a herd of bison antiquis, an
extinct form of giant bison, but the bones themselves weren't
the pas de raisi sants. At the time, the sciences
of ethnology and archaeology in the United States were firmed
(08:21):
that American Indians had arrived in North America only a
couple thousand years prior to the coming of Europeans. In
nineteen twenty six, the Black Cowboys plea to have a
scientist look at his bone pit reached Jesse Figgins, director
of the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver. Something
(08:42):
of an amateur himself, Figgins was mostly interested in fossil
bison that might make exhibits in his museum. His team
began an excavation of the site in May of nineteen
twenty six and quickly began finding the skeletal remains of
bison of a monstrous size. That was exciting enough, but
in their second season of work, on August twenty ninth,
(09:06):
nineteen twenty seven, Figgins's crew traveled up Big History pay dirt.
As David Eck was gesturing to the dimensions of this
near century old dig in the pocket of my light
Patagonia jacket, my fingers closed over an object that I
could fit into my palm. In shape, it was oblate,
(09:29):
think a flattened football, but with an end bitten off.
Beneath my fingers, I could feel an irregular surface, made
so by labor intensive flaking to create a pointed blade
that dwindled to a remarkably thin base. The delicacy of
that base was a result of matching flutes skillfully popped
(09:51):
from the flint on both sides, and that first summer
of digging, Figginson's paleontologists had on earthed two of these
points in the loose dirt of the site. Eventually, the
Denver team would find eight of these stunning fluted points
scattered amongst the bones. But it wasn't just the bones
(10:11):
and not the points that made folsome what American Museum
of Natural History scientists Henry Fairfield Osborne labeled the greatest
event in American discoveries. When the second season crew at
Folsom flicked the dirt from the ribs of an extinct bison,
they were greeted by the sight of one of these
fluted points embedded to two thirds its length in the bone.
(10:36):
The bar for proof that humans were part of the
American places scene had always been an extinct animal, preserving
evidence that as a living creature, it had been killed
by human technology. Now outside the tiny berg of Folsom,
New Mexico, that bar was hurdled. America two had an antiquity.
(10:58):
How much of an antiquity was still in question because
radiocarbon dating was yet three decades in the future. Figgins
claimed the site was four hundred thousand years old. Eventually,
archaeology and paleontology would agree that on an October day,
a band of three dozen humans had driven into a
(11:19):
Box canyon, killed and butchered thirty two giant bison of
the species Bison antiquis in the spot where I was
now standing, and they had done this twelve thousand, four
hundred and fifty years ago. No one knows now what
these ancient bison hunters call themselves or their weapons. Their
(11:40):
beautiful fluted points were likely attached to darts thrown by
at adults or spear throwers. But not knowing much about
these early Americans didn't prevent the scientists from naming both
the points and the people Fulsome after the nearby town.
(12:00):
Yet Fulsome wasn't the book of genesis for America's human history.
Six years after the Fulsome discovery, there was another dramatic revelation.
How on the featureless sweeps of the southern Great Plains,
an ordinary gravel excavation near a tiny farming town named
Clovis exposed the bones of long extinct American elephants, a
(12:22):
remarkable twenty eight of them. Science in the reading public
knew that America had harbored various kinds of giant elephants
in the deep past, But unlike nineteenth century mastodon finds
in the East, this time the skeletons were intermixed with
large five to six inch long projectile points and tools
of an unknown and apparently even more ancient population than
(12:46):
the Fulsome people. We now know that even these elephant
hunters were not the first. What has very recently produced
certain evidence for even more ancient arrivals in America, likely
in boats following shoreline out of Asia. Are human footprints
to be precise sixty one footprints left primarily by children
(13:09):
or adolescents, in the soft mud of a lake shore
some twenty three thousand years before the area became New
Mexico's White Sands National Park. That blockbuster find by a
park employee in twenty nineteen ultimately drew a team of
researchers from the US Geological Survey to date the seeds
(13:31):
of a species of grass crushed by the footprints. Their
dating indicates a time frame at the height of the
glacial maximum, when it would have been impossible to come
overland to America. The human footprints aren't the only tracks
researchers are finding. There are also mammoth tracks and prints
of dire wolves and giant ground sloths. In one fascinating interaction,
(13:56):
the tracks appear to show that a young woman carrying
a child on her hip, who she occasionally put down,
walked a stretch of lake shore and returned by the
same path, which in the interval both a mammoth and
a ground sloth crossed. The mammoth paid no obvious attention,
but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs and
(14:17):
what may have been alarm. So far as we now know,
only a scant few intrepid souls came to America this early.
They remind me of Viking visitors to America. A thousand
years ago, their numbers must have been small, with much
of America still empty of humans. So ten thousand years later,
(14:42):
the elephant hunters we now call Clovis made up the
first human culture to spread across all the Americas, an
overlan arrival that became a rapidly advancing wave thirteen thousand
years ago. The rapidity of their spreads suggesting that they
uncomp hundred few, if any, other human cultures along the way.
(15:04):
Clovis people occupied every American state from Alaska to Florida
for more than three centuries until a mature United States
spread coast to coast. In fact, Clovis stood as the
sole human culture that once draped across our entire country.
So for three centuries, a very long time ago, America
(15:26):
was Clovisia the Beautiful. We are still struggling to understand them.
They left no oral or written histories of their monarchs
or any defining events. We have no sense of their
gods or the philosophies they believed in, or what language
or family of languages they spoke. We know a great
deal about their tools, and we're developing a sense of
(15:49):
them from their bones and more recently, from their genetics,
but starting thirteen thousand and fifty years ago and lasting
until twelve thousand, seven hundred and fifty years ago, the
Clovisians placed their stamp on the country and its animals
and changed the continent. Their name comes from the place
where we first became aware of their existence, an ancient
(16:12):
arroyo on the outskirts of the small town of Clovis,
New Mexico, on the windswept southern high Plains. Getting in
(16:33):
close to wild creatures holds a fascination that resonates because
it taps ancient imperatives still within us. The relationship between
prey and their predators involves learning curves, and each side
is very good at the algorithm, but prey do have
to learn. Numerous examples from around the world testify that
(16:55):
upon initially encountering humans, many wild creatures did not associate
us with a threat. There is a term of art
for this biological first contact. Wild animals had to learn
to be afraid of us. Many died standing and looking,
never absorbing the lesson. Finding naive animals that were easy
(17:18):
for human hunters was a powerful motive for our species
migrations around the world. But just who were these Clovis
people who left so many sites across America, more than
twenty excavated ones so far, including some seventy butchered elephants.
One recent theory that briefly achieved traction in places like
(17:40):
National Geographic came from the Smithsonian's Dennis Stanford, who believed
that the direct ancestors of the Clovist people reached America
eighteen thousand years ago from Europe. To say that the
scientific community scoffed at Stanford's across Atlantic ice claims barely
does justice to the profound skepticism that followed it. While
(18:02):
Paleolithic hunters in Europe and America did pursue similar megafauna
and flint points crafted by Western Europe's soul Utrean culture
superficially resembled Clovis points, other researchers dismissed Stanford's claims that
the two groups were the same people. Linguistic and genetic
conclusions have since refuted Stanford's argument. Once scientists were able
(18:27):
to analyze genomic evidence from archaeological sites, they quickly confirmed
a trail of genetic kinship stretching from Siberia rather than
Europe into the Americas. We now suspect that the people
who ultimately swept into America first spent several thousand years
on the bearing Land Bridge itself, the so called Baringian standstill,
(18:51):
apparently awaiting more favorable conditions to move southward. That long
pause in Beringia may have produced humanity's first domestic cication
of another animal engaged in their own return to America
twenty five thousand years ago, gray wolves were abundant in Beringia.
Since human hunters only ate the fattest parts of the
(19:12):
animals they killed, they had left over lean portions they
were willing to share. Some of the wolves had a
mutation that made them hyper social, and puppies with that
gene may have been able to bond with humans. There
probably also were wolf puppies, known today as gifted word
(19:33):
learning animals capable of picking up human language. By the
time the two species got to America, humans and their
tamed wolves had formed a partnership for the rest of history,
or so goes one theory about dog domestication. Clovis genetics
(19:54):
are best represented by a male toddler from a twelve thousand,
eight hundred year old burial in Montana. He's known as
the Anzac Child, and he's from a site not far
from today's Bozeman. The Clovis Child was buried with a
large cache of artifacts that included eight Clovis points painted
(20:14):
in red ochre after he played an epic role in
reconstructing a history of two continents. In twenty fourteen, the
Onzac Boy was reburied by local tribes in Montana's Shields River,
near where he had lain for nearly thirteen thousand years.
While we have no surviving mammoth or mastodon populations to study,
(20:37):
we do know a good deal about Asian elephant natural history,
and if this closest living relative of mammos offers clues,
America's ancient elephants would have been highly intelligent creatures, especially
acute in what biologists called situational intelligence. Their trunks were
elephant analogus, who are opposable thumbs with as many as
(21:00):
one hundred and fifty thousand muscle subunits, as ecological keystone
creatures whose activities shaped landscapes. Mammos and masdons foraged in
ways that likely transformed American vegetation the way modern elephants
do in Africa. They traveled their huge ranges with an
(21:21):
unusually powerful geographic memory, as a recent study of a
wooly mammos lifetime movements through Alaska seventeen thousand years ago,
reconstructed by analyzing strontium isotope ratios that reference geography in
its tusks, now indicate all elephants are what biologists refer
(21:42):
to as case species, meaning they do not come into
sexual maturity until they're fifteen years old or older, a
state brought on by periodic must The pacoderm version of
sexual heat from insemination to giving birth probably took two years,
a generational turnover slow enough to make population recovery difficult
(22:05):
in the face of a new threat, and by the
time humans were entering America, mammoths, mastodons, and other archaic
elephant species were already suffering from a background rate of
extinctions that had been going on for seventy five thousand years.
But as the Rancho, Librea, Folsome and Clovis sites show,
(22:28):
elephants and big cats and many other remarkable creatures still
occupied the ground where we now commute and go to
sleep in our suburbs. Only they all disappeared quite suddenly
and mysteriously long long ago. That disappearance is one of
the most profound ecological and aesthetic events of continental history.
(22:53):
As Darwin's ally. In The Breakthrough to Understanding Natural Selection
and Evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, in fact, we present
day Americans live in a zoological impoverished world from which
all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared.
(23:15):
Wallace was using recently in a big history sense. All
those hugest, fiercest, and strangest animals vanished from America between
about thirteen thousand and nine thousand years ago. In fact,
we lost thirty genera and forty species. All of them
are very largest creatures right down to our present moment.
(23:38):
These ancient losses make up the most dramatic extinction event
since humans have been in North America. But science has
never grouped the so called Pleistocene extinctions with the five
great planetary extinctions of Earth history. It's different from all
of those, which were global extinguished life on both land
(23:59):
and in the oceans, and showed no size bias in
the creatures they marked for disappearance. The Pleistocene losses didn't
happen in oceans in Africa or in Southern Asia. They
devastated life on Earth only in Eurasia, North America, South
America and Australia. Something very odd seemed to be unfolding
(24:22):
in specific parts of the planet during the late Pleistocene,
but there is a common thread. Those were all places
where human predators out of Africa seeking out large animals
to hunt, were arriving for the first time. The Pleistocene extinctions,
in other words, looked very much like the first act
(24:43):
of the anthroposcene, the beginnings of what we now called
the sixth Extinction. This has been a prelude to introducing
you to a scientist who was able to imagine how
(25:05):
this might have happened. Paul Martin, who passed away in
twenty ten, was one of the country's late twentieth century
intellectual giants. He was also lucky enough to have a
brand new tool to play with, radiocarbon dating, invented in
nineteen forty six by Willard Libby, who won the Nobel
(25:26):
Prize for it. That new tool, almost overnight allowed an
understanding of something very crucial about the Pleistocene extinctions. When
did the various animals disappear? Exactly, and how did the
arrival of humans in America line up with those dates.
I got to meet Martin at a point in his
(25:47):
career when he seemed to bear a resemblance to a
target at a shooting range. At a time when politics
and many university departments embraced the idea of ancient peoples
as ecological examples for the modern world, there were those
who saw Martin's argument that early humans were responsible for
extinctions as politically incorrect. The popular Native American writer Vine
(26:11):
Deloria Junior was vitriolic in his condemnation of Martin, which
I could tell mortified and baffled the paleobiologists. Between eighteen
thousand and twelve thousand years ago, the Solutrean culture had
similarly wiped out Europe's remaining Plecesne creatures. Clovis and Folsom
were not Indian stories, Martin insisted, they were big history
(26:35):
human stories. Martin and I arranged to get together on
his visit to the University of Montana, where I taught.
After two days of wide ranging conversations, I began to
think about Martin in the manner of a Stephen Hawking.
When his body had slowed from Polio. His vast energy
(26:56):
had lit a turbocharger that accelerated his mind. The crux
of the Pleistocene story Martin told me was that North
America was a continental island remote from the evolution of humans,
and when we finally arrived in numbers in the form
of the Clovisians, the well known slaughter humans had made
on island biologies all over the world came to America.
(27:21):
We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs
and fire and baggage like rats. The predation we engaged
in changed local ecologies so substantially that animals evolved in
our absence couldn't survive once we arrived. I realized Martin
was giving me a command performance of his Planet of
(27:43):
Doom theory, a modern version now buttressed with science, history
and details. As Martin put it in his two thousand
and six Twilight of the Mammos, I argue that virtually
all extinctions of wild animals in the last fifty thousand
years are anthropose. By the time the destruction was over,
(28:03):
only a handful of America's biggest animals remained, and those
were either European or Asian like caribou or bison that
had prior experience with humans, or they were native ones
like pronghorns that carried so little fat they offered little
inducement for hunters. Otherwise, the Clovisians erased millions of years
(28:27):
of evolution. In two thousand and one, independently of Martin,
an Australian paleobiologist at the Smithsonian, John Alroy developed a
computer model to test this American extinction story. Alroy's computer's
modeled an absolutely classic ecological release by fifteen hundred years
(28:50):
after the human arrival, accepting a few scattered remnants hunters
had overlooked, but were now too separated to exchange their
genes and dying out from lack of genetic diversity. Seventy
five percent of America's Pleistocene bestiari had been gutted. Alroy's
computer model predicted the extinction or survival of thirty two
(29:12):
of forty one Clovis prey species. He concluded, long before
the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for
a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe. Southeast
of present day Tucson along the Santa Cruz River, there
(29:32):
are three famous Clovis sites, you suspect and long ago
Clovis Lord. This may have been a legendary event, or
given that many similar stories follow it in the historical
record of America, maybe what transpired here wasn't legendary at all,
just the way things were done. What seems to have
happened is that at the most westerly location now call
(29:55):
the Leaner site, a Clovis band surrounded a family group
of fifteen mammoths. The herd apparently huddled together for defense
against the assault, but thirteen of them, all adolescents and calves,
died in the spot. Archaeologists found exactly thirteen Clovis points
in their remains, but it must not have been an
(30:18):
easy thing. In different locations a few miles away, the
Escapool and Naco sites, archaeologists found two adult mammoths who
had apparently fled the slaughter. The large male had died
with two Clovis points in his body, but the female
must have put up a tremendous fight to protect her
(30:38):
young before mortally wounded. She had fled, and her remains
there were no fewer than eight embedded Clovis points. The
hunters who killed those mammoths appeared to have been absolute professionals.
Our best strategy for understanding America's pleistocenic distinctions may be
(31:01):
on an animal by animal basis. Clovis hunters almost certainly
wiped out the elephants and folsome people the giant bison,
but animals like dire wolves, giant beavers, and big cats
may have simply been out competed by gray wolves and
modern beavers and cougars. Smaller size and earlier sexual maturity
(31:23):
fitted the replacements better for an America now inhabited by
human predators. The first examples on the continent for what
biologists called anthropogenic evolution. Horses and camels do remain enigmas.
Sites of Clovis age in southern Alberta and Colorado show
(31:44):
horse and camel kills, but nothing like the vast number
of horses from Solutrean sites in Europe. And why did
various camelids survive in South America, providing later native people
domestic possibilities, but not farther north. As for the Clovisians themselves,
(32:10):
they remained maddenly elusive. They are us, of course, but
it's difficult even to know your recent relatives at all.
You have to go on are their tools and diet preferences.
We know that with the fluted point, a purely American
invention not found in Siberia, their thinkers had solved the
ancient technology hurdle of affixing points solidly to wooden spears
(32:35):
or darts. We also know that they were consumer connoisseurs
of the best the world had to offer. Clovis artisans
fashion their toolkit from the hardest, sharpest, most vividly colored
flints and church in North America whose outprops existed as
a geographic atlas in their heads. They journeyed hundreds of
(32:57):
miles to those sources, as if on quests special magic.
Some of their tool caches featured multiple gorgeous, unused points
of eight to nine inches in leaked with sacred red
ochre still adhering to them. One Clovis mystery has always
been why no art? Why nothing? Like the grand paintings
(33:18):
of animals on the cave walls of Chauvet, Lasco and
Alzamira in Europe, there are pebbles in size with crosshatching.
There's an elephant carved into a piece of ivory. Otherwise
we had no hints what they thought of the animals
they hunted, of America, of their lives in general. That
(33:39):
may be changing with a new twenty nineteen to twenty
twenty investigation of the rock art of a region in
the Colombian Amazon known as Sarania La Lindosa. But we'll
have to wait to see if the images there really
are Clovis or fulsome ones. One recent theory is that
the Clovisians may have been a Northern Hemisphere wild type,
(34:04):
a group of hyper aggressive Siberian vikings. According to modern science,
a high fat diet is a strong trigger for enhanced testosterone.
But who they were really is us. My twenty three
ande meters profile shows three percent of my genes are
Native Americans, a common figure for those of us whose
(34:26):
European ancestors arrived in America three hundred or more years ago.
Clovis heredity is within us. The Clovis story resonates because
we imagine them as ancient versions of ourselves, explorers of
hidden continents, the last of the masterful hunters of enormous animals,
(34:47):
the culmination of forty thousand generations of hunters. They must
have had a sense of that timeless tradition But to me,
the biggest question is this, what did they think? What
did they do when so many of the animals they
lived among began to disappear, to dwindle to a last
(35:09):
few scattered survivors until there were none. What they faced
is mirrored by our own twenty first century circumstances. Like
us then lived as their ancestors did, and no doubt
had every expectation that the world would continue as it
always had, and so long as there was a Siberia
(35:30):
or a Baringia or an America out there, it did.
But Earth proved finite, and so did its animals, much
as we are doing today. The Clovisians ran into a
wall of limits.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
When I think about certain areas of inquiry, I think
that in a lot of spaces there's room for huge discoveries,
meaning we can find life on another planet. Right, Yeah,
there could be huge medical you know, you can picture
(36:24):
where we have some medical breakthrough and like increased life
expectancy by twenty five percent or fifty percent, Like I
wouldn't be shocked. But do you feel that our our
understanding of pre human and early human North America is
like down to the details now, like it's kind of
(36:47):
all there, it's just details.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Well, I tend to think that there are some big
discoveries yet to be made.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Now, I will say that the advent of genomic research,
you know, on human remains all over the world is
telling us a lot of stuff that we've never known before.
And that's kind of the modern version of you know,
radiocarbon dating in the nineteen fifties and stuff. We've now
(37:21):
got a way to analyze human remains that is giving
us a sense of how people spread around the world
and what connections they had with one another. So my
guess is, and you know, it's probably a pretty easy
thing to guess, is that there's got to be something
big out there, and it's likely to involve something technological
(37:45):
like those two where you have a sudden breakthrough and
it's possible to do something you've not been able to
do before.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
I mean, you find somewhere in South America, you find
a genetic marker from twelve thousand years ago, and it
doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
It doesn't make sense, and you have to and people
have to explain it, you know, and it may take
a while. It takes science often a lot of time
to explain things, and there are a lot of kind
of false leads and ideas that are put out there
that don't last. I mean that's just the way you know,
human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, works. But yeah, I think
there's going to be you know, we're going to know
(38:23):
in the case of the pleciscene extinctions, I think in
another thirty or forty years, there's going to be something,
some kind of technological breakthrough that enables us to suddenly
know a lot more about this than we've known. I mean,
one to me is the is, you know, the our
sudden realization that a lack of genetic diversity can be
(38:43):
pretty murderous on a on a species, because if you
start separating a population out so it's not possible for
them to breed anymore and exchange genes, they become they
become weak. I mean, there are instances where you know,
it's impossible for them to reproduce, and so I think
all of that that's another variation obviously of the genetic revolution.
(39:07):
But I think all those things point to some new
breakthrough in the future that's you know, it's going to
be fun to see.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
I mean, I of things like that, and I'm glad
to hear this, because I was starting to worry that
it was going to get boring. These questions were going
to get boring as things just got more like here's
the story.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, No, I don't think they're going to get boring.
I think it's going to be it's going to be fun,
and we're going to still be interested. Uh, you know,
just like all of us are still interested in this.
I mean, none of us is really trained in the
fields of paleold biology or anything like that, but we
find it fascinating to want to understand how this happened,
(39:50):
and uh, we want to know more about ourselves, and
that's what a lot of this is about.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Do you remember the writer, Uh, he's very fun. Any guy,
the writer Jack hit Oh yeah, yeah. He once observed
he was taught about that he has a hard time
taking palaeontology seriously because it was a discipline that he
found the most knowledge about it was held by thirteen
(40:15):
year olds. He's talking about dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Yeah, it's true. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
And this is a feel like this stuff like like
ice age. America is definitely a hobbyist RealD you know,
I mean, there's a lot of room for hobbyists right, like, like,
I'm a hobbyist. There's a lot of room for hobbyists.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Yeah, well, that's right.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
You can stay up breast, you know, you can stay
abreast of the subject.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
I think what's what's there's sort of a tension in
this subject for me between like when you describe people
seeking out a new frontier or moving across the landscape
and being you know, drawn in by certain topographical features.
It's something that reson with me, and I find it
(41:01):
sort of part of the human condition. On the other hand,
there's certain things about these people that are totally unknowable,
Like you know, even with all of the technological advances
we have ahead of us, we don't have their voices,
and we don't even know what their voices sounded like,
(41:22):
you know. And so whenever I'm playing with this subject
in my mind, I always get stuck on that sort
of contradiction between what's very familiar and what is and
will probably always remain totally alien.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Well, that part probably will remain completely alien. I mean
we call you know, we have named these paleol cultures
in North America, things like Folsome and plain View and Clovis,
and those are all names of towns near which paleontological
and archael logical sites were found. I mean, we have
(42:02):
no idea what they called themselves. They for sure probably
didn't call themselves Clovisians, you know, or Fulsomites or whatever
the fulsome term for the people would be. I mean
they So we don't know that, and we're very likely
not ever to know that. What I am still a
little disappointed by, and I'm hoping that this side in
(42:22):
South America pans out as a as an actual rock
imagery site for clovis In fulsome is the lack of art,
especially in comparison to Western Europe, where there's there are
all these marvelous cave paintings that I mean tell you
(42:43):
so much about. I mean, they're One of the pieces
I read when I was researching Well in the World
was about how the artists at chove A Cave got
the rhythm of the foot footprints, the feet hitting the
ground of quadrupeds exactly right. And this particular article said
(43:05):
it wasn't until the eighteen nineties that modern painters were
able to get the rhythm of how horse hoofs hit
the ground when they were running at the same level
of expertise that these guys did fifteen sixteen thousand years ago,
and so that's very exciting and tells us a little
bit about those people. And it's just disappointing that, you know,
(43:29):
we have nothing like that in North America.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I'll correct my kids now and then where they'll talk
about they'll say when cave people were here, and I'll say,
be careful, because it seems like what you're imagining, like
it seems like the Ice age people that were here
didn't have a real affinity for caves.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Well they probably had, ye.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
They weren't like, they weren't like they're not quite contemporaries.
But what was happening here twelve thirteen thousand years ago
was a very similar lifestyle in Western Europe thirty thousand
years ago. And there are parallels, but there also seems
to be differences. Like you're saying, like, where's all the
cave art?
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah, where's the art? And I mean, and it's interesting
to me since you brought that up that the first
archaeologists in North America who were looking for evidence of
human antiquity here looked in caves. They went to places
like Carlsbad and stuff and looked in caves because this
was the I mean, they were thinking by analogy, this
was the example they had in Western Europe, this is
(44:33):
where these people are, and so they were looking in
places like Carlsbad caverns for evidence that early humans in
North America would have done the same kind of thing.
And of course, accidentally, on the way back, a guy
by the name of Edgar Hewett, on the way back
from one of those expeditions happened to go past the
Clovis site and had some cowboys say, well, you know,
(44:57):
we've been finding these kind of strange looking a lot
urge two like objects here on the ground. No caves
anywhere around, but they're just kind of lying out here on.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
The plains on what was a wetland.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Yeah, what was a wetland? And you know, no caves
around anywhere. So it's kind of one of those ways.
I think that the people of antiquity, the paleo hunters
in particular in North America, are pretty damn distinctive from
the people in Western Europe, And in this particular case,
(45:31):
I wish the distinction weren't so great, because I would
love to be able to find some art that they
did but so far not much.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Along the lines of like preconceived notions that people have
when they sort of look at this era of prehistory
as just sort of one block and then all of
a sudden, you know, the Stone Age goes to the
the Bronze Age, something like that. I think one of
the things that you've always opened my eyes to is
(46:03):
paying attention to these advancements in technology, which I think
most people wouldn't think of them as technology. But you know,
we were just looking at stone points at the Archaeological
Repository and Laramie, and you look at the level of
artistry and mastery in these in these objects, and it
(46:24):
very much is like a technology. It's not like these
people were trapped in some era, right, there's this there's
this long history that's played out in just the material
objects that they leave behind.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, I mean, and you know, things that to us
do not look particularly significant, like the flute on the
sides of Clovis and fulsome points. I mean that you
can almost miss that when you look at those points,
but that very clearly was a major technological innovation because
(46:58):
it finally allowed the you're fastening of a point to
a dart an add addle dart or a spear, and
so it was. It was one of those human genius
breakthroughs where someone realized, if I just you know, make
a flute, make an indentation running down each side of
(47:18):
this point, I can now secure my adlett dart to
it and it won't pop off upon hitting an animal.
It will stay secure and penetrate through the skin. And
that's kind of you know, as I said, it's not
something that you look at and go wow, this is
like the invention of the model T. Nonetheless, Yeah, for
(47:41):
these people, it effectively was a huge leap forward. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
I want to return for a minute to a comment
you made about as the picture becomes clear or the
picture changes about this error we're discussing that you look
too technological enhancements, technological improvements which might upend some of
our notions.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
After you said that, it made me think about a
conversation I had with an anthropologist who focused on the
like the prices scene Holocene transition at Colorado State, and
I was kind of saying to him in a discussion,
I was kind of saying to him like, well, as
we find more sites, it'll get clearer. And he's really
(48:29):
pessimistic about about that about sites. I'm like, well, you know,
some guy building the road and he's like, how many
roads have we built? I mean, like, look at all
the roads we built, Look at all the farm fields
we cleared, and we have a handful. Like I don't
think increasing road building, you know, at the at the
decrease rate that we're building roads and clearing fields that
(48:50):
I don't think it's going to be that it's new sites.
You know, he really wasn't optimistic about finding crazy sites.
I think that what I think that we've kind of
found what is there to find, you know, barring some
unforeseen thing. But I think that I don't think you
can go and say the same thing about South America, right,
(49:11):
especially all that like like areas that are heavily forested
and jungle areas, like places that haven't been through like
our dust bowl when we had a good chance to
see the western landscape stripped clean of top soil and vegetation, Like,
there could be some amazing stuff laying there. Yeah, it
rots quicker, but it could be there.
Speaker 1 (49:30):
Yeah, it could be. And I mean, you know, and
so Lidar, I suppose at this stage of the game,
I mean that's certainly a technological breakthrough. This enable to
discovery of all sorts of new particularly buildings mayan structures
that are suddenly now visible from above in a way
that they never are on the ground but lightar's, as
(49:51):
far as I am aware of it, it probably is
not fine grained enough to do something like the sort
of archaeological sites that that you're talking about, but I
kind of wouldn't think so now I tend to agree
with the anthropologists you were talking to. I think we've
got the sites. I think what we probably can improve
(50:14):
the interpretation of those sites with is going to be
something like these big leaps forward we had with radiocarbon dating,
which was you know, that was a huge game changer
seventy five years ago, and now the genomic revolution, the
genetic revolution, which is another enormous game changer for all
(50:36):
kinds of things, including these sort of extinctions from the
Pleistocene Holocene boundary. So I think it's going to be
something like that. I don't know exactly what it is,
but it's probably going to be something that subtenly enables
us to interpret what we have in a way we've
not been able to.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah, I think what we're talking about here a lot
is how we can change your understanding of this subject
looking forward. But I also wonder if you can look
backward at your own career, just in your lifetime, how
much has changed in terms of knowledge about this subject,
(51:16):
and also how conversations have evolved over time.
Speaker 1 (51:21):
Well, I would say, you know, I mean, I may
look as if I come from the early twentieth century,
but I'm actually more a mid twentieth century artifact. And
so I was born at about the time that radiocarbon
dating won the Nobel Prize for a guy, and I
(51:45):
have not I will say that during the sixties and
especially the seventies, the late seventies, when I was in
graduate school, there was a strong disinclination to believe that
humans had played much of a role at all. And
what it reminded is, i've looked back on it now,
(52:08):
it reminds me of the sort of reluctance that a
lot of people feel about climate change. It's that humans
couldn't have done that. We couldn't have done that. I mean,
a bunch of animals became extinct. That had to have
been climate That had to have been a comet strike
that had to have been something other than humans, because
(52:30):
I mean, there's just no way that's not possible. People
armed only with ad adomles and spears and so forth
could not do those sorts of things, And that of
course played into and went along with this sensibility back
in those same years where we were kind of in
a way first discovering native ecology and indigenous knowledge about
(52:53):
the world, and we were of course looking for some examples,
looking desperately for some examples of human beings to say,
these people did it right, here's the way you do it.
We're not on the right track, we're doing it wrong,
but they did it correctly. And of course, arguing that
you know, early arrivals in North America like Clovis and
(53:16):
fulsome people may have wiped out species that ran against
that sentiment that, well, we're trying to find in the
past some humans who really lived well on the environment,
and so that change I think sometime I don't know,
probably in the early two thousands, when after one kind
(53:40):
of alternative explanation after another was advanced and none of
them really seemed to work. They never did manage to
convince many people. I mean, you know, Ross McFee of
the American Museum and Natural History advanced. Well, maybe some
new disease swept through North America and killed everything. Well,
of course there was no candidate disease. And then the
(54:03):
other problem was, most diseases don't kill everything. I mean,
they usually leave some piece of a population that often
rebuilds with immunity. I mean, all of us are examples
of Old World diseases that killed many of those that
our ancestors survived and allowed us to be born today.
So alternative explanations have not so far really worked. And
(54:27):
what I've kind of been noticing in the last ten
or fifteen years has been a kind of a reluctant
I would say, reluctant, but still a sort of a
growing consensus that the human arrival in North America still
seems to be the best explanation we have for what
happened to all those animals. And what I ended up
(54:50):
arguing in Wild New World is that I think, you know,
we talk a lot about the sixth extinction today. I
think the six extinction started thirty five thousand years ago.
I mean when human started spreading around the world. Yeah,
I mean, it's just in contrast to an asteroid strike
which wipes out seventy five percent of Earth's life in
(55:10):
a matter of a few weeks. This has just been
a thirty five thousand sort of slow motion extinction that's
been going on for a very very long time, and
so it's good for us to be alarmed about a
six extinction. I just sometimes try to point out to
people I think this has actually been happening for a
long time.
Speaker 3 (55:31):
I recently had a discussion with an attorney who's Native
American and he works in repatriation, and his particular focus
is on getting the remains of his ancestors back from museums. Yeah,
I said to him, I said, would you ever strike
(55:53):
a deal where they get a gram of each of
those bones and then you get the bones back? And
he said, we would never even consider something like that.
I don't expect you to answer this, but like, what
(56:14):
would be some things that you consider when you think
of the tension around a desire to study apply modern
analytics to human remains, and where that rubs against cultural
sensitivities about playing with remains of someone that you rightfully
(56:40):
or wrongfully consider to be your ancestor, even if you're
separated by nine thousand and ten thousand years from them.
Speaker 1 (56:48):
Yeah, that's really like what kind.
Speaker 3 (56:50):
Of things bounce around in your head. I'm not asking
you to say what we ought to do, but like,
how do you even approach that?
Speaker 1 (56:55):
Right? Well, what, here's what I kind of suspect. I
think we're living through a moment, and I think the
moment has been caused by the previous lack of respect
that so many bone merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth
(57:18):
and twentieth centuries brought to the game of archaeology, where
they paid not the slightest attention to the desires wants
of the local people, who very well could be connected
to the ruins or the excavations that they're doing on
(57:39):
human remains. And so what I think is that we're
experiencing a moment that's kind of a backlash against that.
And I tend to be one of these kind of
people who thinks that, you know, we're really kind of
all the same, actually, and what we're interested in is
the human story, the big story of all of us,
(58:01):
which is why I'm intrigued by humans coming out of Africa,
spreading through Asia, coming to North America, going to South America,
and I know that people get hung up on the
idea of Okay, this particular culture has this view of
how the world should be conducted and how scientific research
could be conducted. But I am very much interested in
(58:21):
the big story of humanity, and I think ultimately most
people are interested in that. And so I think when
we get past this moment where we're sort of boomeranging
from centuries where we had no respect for the remains
of these people, that in another who knows how long,
(58:44):
but in another century. In fact, I know need of
people who have already reached this position where they too
are intrigued and interested and they want to know. And
so I think that at some point in the future,
I don't know how far out it is, that there
will be some relaxing of that kind of reluctance to
allow science to try to answer some of these great questions.
(59:07):
I just think it's a you know, the pendulum has
swung at the moment at a to a degree that
Native people are they don't want this to happen. Yeah,
but I think it'll swing back. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (59:24):
I think on Steve's on Steve's question, there there's implicit
in that, is this question about the scope of time
that we're talking about when we talk about people arriving
in North America and from the place to scene extinctions
(59:46):
up until just say fifteen hundred, and I wonder if
you can just sort of put that. I always have
a hard time wrapping my mind around big time, and
so I wonder if you can kind of contextualize that
at what we're talking about versus the broader story of
humans spreading around the world.
Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
Well, when I mean, you guys all know this as
well as I do. But you know, when you're doing history,
history we always think of history, especially professionally and in
the academy, we think of that as being something you
do from written sources. And of course written sources only
(01:00:29):
exist for the human story back to about thirty five
hundred and four thousand years ago, and beyond that we
have no written stories, and so that sort of implies that. Okay,
so if you're interested in history, that's the end of it.
Four thousand years back, you don't have any history anymore.
There's no way. I'm not satisfied with that, obviously, because
(01:00:50):
that's a very small slice of the human story, and
the human story goes way way farther back in time,
and so I mean my whole take on something like
writing that chapter about what I call Native America. After
(01:01:11):
the Pleistocene extinctions and the Holycene period began in North America,
I tried to write a chapter about the next ten
thousand years, which takes you down to five hundred years ago,
when Europeans and Old Worlders began arriving in North America.
I was trying to sort of satisfy my own curiosity
about that, because I couldn't really find very many people
(01:01:33):
who had ventured a guess as to how that story
had unfolded. And in a book like that, where I
was interested primarily in the relationship between animals and people,
I was trying to figure out how did it happen
that when Europeans get here five hundred years ago, they
land on a continent that they're so impressed with. Now,
(01:01:57):
maybe it's just in comparison to what they had done
to Europe, but they're really impressed with the biological diversity
of North America. It's kind of an Eden for the animals.
And so the question was, how did we get from
ten thousand years ago down to five hundred years ago?
Where Native people managed to preserve all that, and that
presented obviously a lot of a lot of questions to
(01:02:19):
try to answer. And I'm sure there'll be people who
improve on that story that I told, But that was
kind of my own attempt to do something about the
Native American story that I didn't see anybody else really
making a stab at trying to interpret, probably because it's
too dawning.
Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
But I think you did a phenomenal job because you
distilled it down into an observation that here's nine five
hundred years of history and there's maybe like one.
Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
Yeah, one extinction, one extinction in that time we've done.
Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
Yeah, the last five hundred years has been a real ripper.
Speaker 1 (01:02:56):
Yes, and a real ripper, there's no question about it.
I mean, one piece I read in the National Academy
of Sciences from about twenty nineteen argued that we have
sacrificed in the last five hundred years about a half
a million years of evolved genetics on planet Earth as
(01:03:19):
a consequence of all the destruction that we've made to
creatures around the world. And most of the animals that
have disappeared have been really charismatic and very common, like
passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons survived in North America for fifteen
million years, and they couldn't last three hundred years after
(01:03:39):
we got here. So there's certainly been that. And then
there's that ten thousand year period we were just talking
about where I could find evidence for only one extinction,
and that was a flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast.
But then of course there's the period before that, the Pleistocene,
where if anything, truction was even on more massive a scale.
(01:04:02):
And in that instance, not only do we sacrifice an
enormous amount of biological diversity and genetics evolved genetics, but
it was the genetics of most of the really large
and impressive animals of the globe. And so that's a
story in other words, that doesn't have it doesn't travel
(01:04:26):
just in one direction. It's as if humans realizing, wow,
we may have really screwed things up, or things got
screwed up for some reason, because I'm not sure they
quite understood what had happened, but it seems to have
produced a kind of a reaction where for nearly ten
(01:04:47):
thousand years they are very careful about things. And you know,
as I said, that's a story that I really had
to put together because I couldn't find anyone that was
willing to make to venture a guess about how that
it all played out, and yet it's obviously a really
(01:05:07):
big part of American history.
Speaker 3 (01:05:09):
Well, Dan, I want to thank you for sitting and
having this post chat with us.
Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
You best see. Thanks thanks to both of you guys. Randall,
you guys were you know, many years ago, uh, terrific
students in the classes that I taught at the University
of Montown. It's fun to sit down and do this again.
What
Humans belonging to Clovis and Folsome cultures entered in America,
teeming with a remarkable diversity of Africa like creatures, but
confronted an extinction crisis that was possibly precipitated by their
own arrival. I'm Dan Florries, and this is the American West,
brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in Barrel, Velvet
(00:25):
Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season
that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports
backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and
wildlife enjoy responsibly Clovisia the Beautiful. We hardly know our
(00:58):
actual beginnings America, even when the stories are set in
places we recognize. The characters of our deep time history
can be alien to the point of fantasy. But while
it may sound unlikely in the twenty twenties, there's no
place quite like downtown Los Angeles for acquiring some sense
of how the human story began on the continent. Rancho
(01:23):
Librea Tarpits, just off Wiltshire Boulevard in the heart of
a sprawling Pacific coast city, is today the most successible
place in the country for picturing in the minds eye
the wild new world migrating humans found when they first
saw America. True enough, there's a sense of time travel shock,
having your lift drop you in the middle of swirling,
(01:45):
honking la traffic, only to stand face to face minutes
later with Columbian mammos fatally mired in tar, trumpeting their despair.
Even if the mammoths are robots and their forlorn cries
don't drown out the traffic, they and Librea and the
Page Museum still work a kind of magic. Twenty thousand
(02:05):
years drops away if you let it, because Librea preserves
tangible remnants of a world at the far ends of
the earth for ancestors of ours whose migrations had begun
in Africa. The Page Museum is a working laboratory of paleontology,
where visitors can watch scientists labor over the site's latest discoveries.
(02:27):
Many of those are the remains of scavenger predators once
lured by the cries of snagged mammoths, or the scin
of decomposing horses, camels, or ground sloths trapped by surface
tar near what was once a water source and a
dry landscape. The skulls and tusks of the elephants extracted
from Librea are impressive, but anyone who tours the museum
(02:50):
has to admit the most stunning display is the wall,
backlit and yellow of hundreds of dire wolf skulls. The
strapping cane. It's indigenous to America, but memorably revived as
fictional wester ROAs fauna and Game of Thrones left the
most remains here of any species, eighteen hundred individuals. The
(03:13):
fossils of hundreds of coyotes, a brawnier version than our
modern animal, make up the third most common species here,
But in second place are those ultimate ambush predators of
the Pleistocene, the western subspecies of sabertooths, heavily built cats
with a fearsome snake like jaw, gape and enormous fangs.
(03:37):
The replica skull of a sabertooth from Librea sits a
few feet away as I write this. Its rapier sharp
canines capable of tearing open a sloth or mammoth calf,
gleaming in rich afternoon light, Each fang measures a full
eight inches from gumline to tip. The vast assemblages of
(03:58):
hyperconnivore bones at Las joined the skeletal remains of mega herbivores,
mammoths and macedons, giant bison, pronghorns, lamas, California turkeys, and
many more. The predator list is lengthier than just wolves, coyotes,
and sabretooths as well. The cats whose remains have come
(04:20):
out of the tar include American cheetahs, step lions, and
giant jaguars. Immense, hyperactive short faced bears twice the weight
of a grizzly died in the asphalt. So did the
enormous Miriam's terratorn applies to seeing bird of prey with
a ten and a half foot wingspan. The remains span
(04:44):
indigenous creatures spawned by continental evolution and migrants from Asia,
some ancient to America, some recent arrivals. The mammals and
birds may seem alien are vaguely African, but in fact
this bestiary was purely classically American, the America of the Pleistocene.
(05:08):
The Rancho Librea victims that left their bones and skulls
in Casinar were once representatives of one of the grand
ecologies of planet Earth. This was a different America than
most of us conjured. When we imagine the continent Europeans
found five hundred years ago. But this libreal world wasn't
like the pre chick Salube age of the dinosaurs absent
(05:31):
of humans either. Late in the Pleistocene, our human forebears
joined American ecologies as the newest predator.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Here.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
These first Americans lived their lives among Librea creatures and
created the first coast to coast human societies in American history.
Their presence began to leave the continent, and this rich
aggregate of impressive animals forever changed. The first time we
(06:06):
became aware that humans were actually in America during the
Pleistocene was barely one hundred years ago, and the place
that happened was along the New Mexico Colorado border. In
the days following a flood in the dry Cimarron River,
an African American cowboy named George mcjunkin was riding through
grassy parkland a few hundred yards below the rim rock
(06:29):
of a miles long mesa that extended eastward from the
rocky mountains, checking for ranch fence lines damaged by the flood.
Suddenly mcjenkin's horse braced its hoofs, furrowing into foot deep
mud at the edge of a ragged scar. Floodwaters had
cut into the slope below the Mesa. Mcjenkin leaned out
(06:51):
of his saddle to peer into a fresh chasm sliced
into the brown shale. What he saw changed the story
of America forever. On a similar rainy August day in
twenty eighteen, some thirty five of us are stepping through
the lush grass of that same slope as it angles
up towards the rim rock of Johnson Mesa. We're following
(07:15):
David Eck, a New Mexico State Lands archaeologist with a
long ponytail halfway down his back, who is leading us
towards the very spot where George mcjenkin's horse had pulled
up one hundred and ten years before. The topography is
now a grassy, shallow drain called wild Horse Arroyo, and
(07:37):
as we crowd around its edges, it seems somehow too
commonplace to be the scene of one of the continent's
most significant historical finds. Nonetheless, this in the flesh is
the legendary fulsome archaeological site. What mcjunkin had done about
where we now stood talking was to spot in the
(08:00):
flood gashed arroyo bones of an immense size. They turned
out to be from a herd of bison antiquis, an
extinct form of giant bison, but the bones themselves weren't
the pas de raisi sants. At the time, the sciences
of ethnology and archaeology in the United States were firmed
(08:21):
that American Indians had arrived in North America only a
couple thousand years prior to the coming of Europeans. In
nineteen twenty six, the Black Cowboys plea to have a
scientist look at his bone pit reached Jesse Figgins, director
of the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver. Something
(08:42):
of an amateur himself, Figgins was mostly interested in fossil
bison that might make exhibits in his museum. His team
began an excavation of the site in May of nineteen
twenty six and quickly began finding the skeletal remains of
bison of a monstrous size. That was exciting enough, but
in their second season of work, on August twenty ninth,
(09:06):
nineteen twenty seven, Figgins's crew traveled up Big History pay dirt.
As David Eck was gesturing to the dimensions of this
near century old dig in the pocket of my light
Patagonia jacket, my fingers closed over an object that I
could fit into my palm. In shape, it was oblate,
(09:29):
think a flattened football, but with an end bitten off.
Beneath my fingers, I could feel an irregular surface, made
so by labor intensive flaking to create a pointed blade
that dwindled to a remarkably thin base. The delicacy of
that base was a result of matching flutes skillfully popped
(09:51):
from the flint on both sides, and that first summer
of digging, Figginson's paleontologists had on earthed two of these
points in the loose dirt of the site. Eventually, the
Denver team would find eight of these stunning fluted points
scattered amongst the bones. But it wasn't just the bones
(10:11):
and not the points that made folsome what American Museum
of Natural History scientists Henry Fairfield Osborne labeled the greatest
event in American discoveries. When the second season crew at
Folsom flicked the dirt from the ribs of an extinct bison,
they were greeted by the sight of one of these
fluted points embedded to two thirds its length in the bone.
(10:36):
The bar for proof that humans were part of the
American places scene had always been an extinct animal, preserving
evidence that as a living creature, it had been killed
by human technology. Now outside the tiny berg of Folsom,
New Mexico, that bar was hurdled. America two had an antiquity.
(10:58):
How much of an antiquity was still in question because
radiocarbon dating was yet three decades in the future. Figgins
claimed the site was four hundred thousand years old. Eventually,
archaeology and paleontology would agree that on an October day,
a band of three dozen humans had driven into a
(11:19):
Box canyon, killed and butchered thirty two giant bison of
the species Bison antiquis in the spot where I was
now standing, and they had done this twelve thousand, four
hundred and fifty years ago. No one knows now what
these ancient bison hunters call themselves or their weapons. Their
(11:40):
beautiful fluted points were likely attached to darts thrown by
at adults or spear throwers. But not knowing much about
these early Americans didn't prevent the scientists from naming both
the points and the people Fulsome after the nearby town.
(12:00):
Yet Fulsome wasn't the book of genesis for America's human history.
Six years after the Fulsome discovery, there was another dramatic revelation.
How on the featureless sweeps of the southern Great Plains,
an ordinary gravel excavation near a tiny farming town named
Clovis exposed the bones of long extinct American elephants, a
(12:22):
remarkable twenty eight of them. Science in the reading public
knew that America had harbored various kinds of giant elephants
in the deep past, But unlike nineteenth century mastodon finds
in the East, this time the skeletons were intermixed with
large five to six inch long projectile points and tools
of an unknown and apparently even more ancient population than
(12:46):
the Fulsome people. We now know that even these elephant
hunters were not the first. What has very recently produced
certain evidence for even more ancient arrivals in America, likely
in boats following shoreline out of Asia. Are human footprints
to be precise sixty one footprints left primarily by children
(13:09):
or adolescents, in the soft mud of a lake shore
some twenty three thousand years before the area became New
Mexico's White Sands National Park. That blockbuster find by a
park employee in twenty nineteen ultimately drew a team of
researchers from the US Geological Survey to date the seeds
(13:31):
of a species of grass crushed by the footprints. Their
dating indicates a time frame at the height of the
glacial maximum, when it would have been impossible to come
overland to America. The human footprints aren't the only tracks
researchers are finding. There are also mammoth tracks and prints
of dire wolves and giant ground sloths. In one fascinating interaction,
(13:56):
the tracks appear to show that a young woman carrying
a child on her hip, who she occasionally put down,
walked a stretch of lake shore and returned by the
same path, which in the interval both a mammoth and
a ground sloth crossed. The mammoth paid no obvious attention,
but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs and
(14:17):
what may have been alarm. So far as we now know,
only a scant few intrepid souls came to America this early.
They remind me of Viking visitors to America. A thousand
years ago, their numbers must have been small, with much
of America still empty of humans. So ten thousand years later,
(14:42):
the elephant hunters we now call Clovis made up the
first human culture to spread across all the Americas, an
overlan arrival that became a rapidly advancing wave thirteen thousand
years ago. The rapidity of their spreads suggesting that they
uncomp hundred few, if any, other human cultures along the way.
(15:04):
Clovis people occupied every American state from Alaska to Florida
for more than three centuries until a mature United States
spread coast to coast. In fact, Clovis stood as the
sole human culture that once draped across our entire country.
So for three centuries, a very long time ago, America
(15:26):
was Clovisia the Beautiful. We are still struggling to understand them.
They left no oral or written histories of their monarchs
or any defining events. We have no sense of their
gods or the philosophies they believed in, or what language
or family of languages they spoke. We know a great
deal about their tools, and we're developing a sense of
(15:49):
them from their bones and more recently, from their genetics,
but starting thirteen thousand and fifty years ago and lasting
until twelve thousand, seven hundred and fifty years ago, the
Clovisians placed their stamp on the country and its animals
and changed the continent. Their name comes from the place
where we first became aware of their existence, an ancient
(16:12):
arroyo on the outskirts of the small town of Clovis,
New Mexico, on the windswept southern high Plains. Getting in
(16:33):
close to wild creatures holds a fascination that resonates because
it taps ancient imperatives still within us. The relationship between
prey and their predators involves learning curves, and each side
is very good at the algorithm, but prey do have
to learn. Numerous examples from around the world testify that
(16:55):
upon initially encountering humans, many wild creatures did not associate
us with a threat. There is a term of art
for this biological first contact. Wild animals had to learn
to be afraid of us. Many died standing and looking,
never absorbing the lesson. Finding naive animals that were easy
(17:18):
for human hunters was a powerful motive for our species
migrations around the world. But just who were these Clovis
people who left so many sites across America, more than
twenty excavated ones so far, including some seventy butchered elephants.
One recent theory that briefly achieved traction in places like
(17:40):
National Geographic came from the Smithsonian's Dennis Stanford, who believed
that the direct ancestors of the Clovist people reached America
eighteen thousand years ago from Europe. To say that the
scientific community scoffed at Stanford's across Atlantic ice claims barely
does justice to the profound skepticism that followed it. While
(18:02):
Paleolithic hunters in Europe and America did pursue similar megafauna
and flint points crafted by Western Europe's soul Utrean culture
superficially resembled Clovis points, other researchers dismissed Stanford's claims that
the two groups were the same people. Linguistic and genetic
conclusions have since refuted Stanford's argument. Once scientists were able
(18:27):
to analyze genomic evidence from archaeological sites, they quickly confirmed
a trail of genetic kinship stretching from Siberia rather than
Europe into the Americas. We now suspect that the people
who ultimately swept into America first spent several thousand years
on the bearing Land Bridge itself, the so called Baringian standstill,
(18:51):
apparently awaiting more favorable conditions to move southward. That long
pause in Beringia may have produced humanity's first domestic cication
of another animal engaged in their own return to America
twenty five thousand years ago, gray wolves were abundant in Beringia.
Since human hunters only ate the fattest parts of the
(19:12):
animals they killed, they had left over lean portions they
were willing to share. Some of the wolves had a
mutation that made them hyper social, and puppies with that
gene may have been able to bond with humans. There
probably also were wolf puppies, known today as gifted word
(19:33):
learning animals capable of picking up human language. By the
time the two species got to America, humans and their
tamed wolves had formed a partnership for the rest of history,
or so goes one theory about dog domestication. Clovis genetics
(19:54):
are best represented by a male toddler from a twelve thousand,
eight hundred year old burial in Montana. He's known as
the Anzac Child, and he's from a site not far
from today's Bozeman. The Clovis Child was buried with a
large cache of artifacts that included eight Clovis points painted
(20:14):
in red ochre after he played an epic role in
reconstructing a history of two continents. In twenty fourteen, the
Onzac Boy was reburied by local tribes in Montana's Shields River,
near where he had lain for nearly thirteen thousand years.
While we have no surviving mammoth or mastodon populations to study,
(20:37):
we do know a good deal about Asian elephant natural history,
and if this closest living relative of mammos offers clues,
America's ancient elephants would have been highly intelligent creatures, especially
acute in what biologists called situational intelligence. Their trunks were
elephant analogus, who are opposable thumbs with as many as
(21:00):
one hundred and fifty thousand muscle subunits, as ecological keystone
creatures whose activities shaped landscapes. Mammos and masdons foraged in
ways that likely transformed American vegetation the way modern elephants
do in Africa. They traveled their huge ranges with an
(21:21):
unusually powerful geographic memory, as a recent study of a
wooly mammos lifetime movements through Alaska seventeen thousand years ago,
reconstructed by analyzing strontium isotope ratios that reference geography in
its tusks, now indicate all elephants are what biologists refer
(21:42):
to as case species, meaning they do not come into
sexual maturity until they're fifteen years old or older, a
state brought on by periodic must The pacoderm version of
sexual heat from insemination to giving birth probably took two years,
a generational turnover slow enough to make population recovery difficult
(22:05):
in the face of a new threat, and by the
time humans were entering America, mammoths, mastodons, and other archaic
elephant species were already suffering from a background rate of
extinctions that had been going on for seventy five thousand years.
But as the Rancho, Librea, Folsome and Clovis sites show,
(22:28):
elephants and big cats and many other remarkable creatures still
occupied the ground where we now commute and go to
sleep in our suburbs. Only they all disappeared quite suddenly
and mysteriously long long ago. That disappearance is one of
the most profound ecological and aesthetic events of continental history.
(22:53):
As Darwin's ally. In The Breakthrough to Understanding Natural Selection
and Evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, in fact, we present
day Americans live in a zoological impoverished world from which
all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared.
(23:15):
Wallace was using recently in a big history sense. All
those hugest, fiercest, and strangest animals vanished from America between
about thirteen thousand and nine thousand years ago. In fact,
we lost thirty genera and forty species. All of them
are very largest creatures right down to our present moment.
(23:38):
These ancient losses make up the most dramatic extinction event
since humans have been in North America. But science has
never grouped the so called Pleistocene extinctions with the five
great planetary extinctions of Earth history. It's different from all
of those, which were global extinguished life on both land
(23:59):
and in the oceans, and showed no size bias in
the creatures they marked for disappearance. The Pleistocene losses didn't
happen in oceans in Africa or in Southern Asia. They
devastated life on Earth only in Eurasia, North America, South
America and Australia. Something very odd seemed to be unfolding
(24:22):
in specific parts of the planet during the late Pleistocene,
but there is a common thread. Those were all places
where human predators out of Africa seeking out large animals
to hunt, were arriving for the first time. The Pleistocene extinctions,
in other words, looked very much like the first act
(24:43):
of the anthroposcene, the beginnings of what we now called
the sixth Extinction. This has been a prelude to introducing
you to a scientist who was able to imagine how
(25:05):
this might have happened. Paul Martin, who passed away in
twenty ten, was one of the country's late twentieth century
intellectual giants. He was also lucky enough to have a
brand new tool to play with, radiocarbon dating, invented in
nineteen forty six by Willard Libby, who won the Nobel
(25:26):
Prize for it. That new tool, almost overnight allowed an
understanding of something very crucial about the Pleistocene extinctions. When
did the various animals disappear? Exactly, and how did the
arrival of humans in America line up with those dates.
I got to meet Martin at a point in his
(25:47):
career when he seemed to bear a resemblance to a
target at a shooting range. At a time when politics
and many university departments embraced the idea of ancient peoples
as ecological examples for the modern world, there were those
who saw Martin's argument that early humans were responsible for
extinctions as politically incorrect. The popular Native American writer Vine
(26:11):
Deloria Junior was vitriolic in his condemnation of Martin, which
I could tell mortified and baffled the paleobiologists. Between eighteen
thousand and twelve thousand years ago, the Solutrean culture had
similarly wiped out Europe's remaining Plecesne creatures. Clovis and Folsom
were not Indian stories, Martin insisted, they were big history
(26:35):
human stories. Martin and I arranged to get together on
his visit to the University of Montana, where I taught.
After two days of wide ranging conversations, I began to
think about Martin in the manner of a Stephen Hawking.
When his body had slowed from Polio. His vast energy
(26:56):
had lit a turbocharger that accelerated his mind. The crux
of the Pleistocene story Martin told me was that North
America was a continental island remote from the evolution of humans,
and when we finally arrived in numbers in the form
of the Clovisians, the well known slaughter humans had made
on island biologies all over the world came to America.
(27:21):
We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs
and fire and baggage like rats. The predation we engaged
in changed local ecologies so substantially that animals evolved in
our absence couldn't survive once we arrived. I realized Martin
was giving me a command performance of his Planet of
(27:43):
Doom theory, a modern version now buttressed with science, history
and details. As Martin put it in his two thousand
and six Twilight of the Mammos, I argue that virtually
all extinctions of wild animals in the last fifty thousand
years are anthropose. By the time the destruction was over,
(28:03):
only a handful of America's biggest animals remained, and those
were either European or Asian like caribou or bison that
had prior experience with humans, or they were native ones
like pronghorns that carried so little fat they offered little
inducement for hunters. Otherwise, the Clovisians erased millions of years
(28:27):
of evolution. In two thousand and one, independently of Martin,
an Australian paleobiologist at the Smithsonian, John Alroy developed a
computer model to test this American extinction story. Alroy's computer's
modeled an absolutely classic ecological release by fifteen hundred years
(28:50):
after the human arrival, accepting a few scattered remnants hunters
had overlooked, but were now too separated to exchange their
genes and dying out from lack of genetic diversity. Seventy
five percent of America's Pleistocene bestiari had been gutted. Alroy's
computer model predicted the extinction or survival of thirty two
(29:12):
of forty one Clovis prey species. He concluded, long before
the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for
a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe. Southeast
of present day Tucson along the Santa Cruz River, there
(29:32):
are three famous Clovis sites, you suspect and long ago
Clovis Lord. This may have been a legendary event, or
given that many similar stories follow it in the historical
record of America, maybe what transpired here wasn't legendary at all,
just the way things were done. What seems to have
happened is that at the most westerly location now call
(29:55):
the Leaner site, a Clovis band surrounded a family group
of fifteen mammoths. The herd apparently huddled together for defense
against the assault, but thirteen of them, all adolescents and calves,
died in the spot. Archaeologists found exactly thirteen Clovis points
in their remains, but it must not have been an
(30:18):
easy thing. In different locations a few miles away, the
Escapool and Naco sites, archaeologists found two adult mammoths who
had apparently fled the slaughter. The large male had died
with two Clovis points in his body, but the female
must have put up a tremendous fight to protect her
(30:38):
young before mortally wounded. She had fled, and her remains
there were no fewer than eight embedded Clovis points. The
hunters who killed those mammoths appeared to have been absolute professionals.
Our best strategy for understanding America's pleistocenic distinctions may be
(31:01):
on an animal by animal basis. Clovis hunters almost certainly
wiped out the elephants and folsome people the giant bison,
but animals like dire wolves, giant beavers, and big cats
may have simply been out competed by gray wolves and
modern beavers and cougars. Smaller size and earlier sexual maturity
(31:23):
fitted the replacements better for an America now inhabited by
human predators. The first examples on the continent for what
biologists called anthropogenic evolution. Horses and camels do remain enigmas.
Sites of Clovis age in southern Alberta and Colorado show
(31:44):
horse and camel kills, but nothing like the vast number
of horses from Solutrean sites in Europe. And why did
various camelids survive in South America, providing later native people
domestic possibilities, but not farther north. As for the Clovisians themselves,
(32:10):
they remained maddenly elusive. They are us, of course, but
it's difficult even to know your recent relatives at all.
You have to go on are their tools and diet preferences.
We know that with the fluted point, a purely American
invention not found in Siberia, their thinkers had solved the
ancient technology hurdle of affixing points solidly to wooden spears
(32:35):
or darts. We also know that they were consumer connoisseurs
of the best the world had to offer. Clovis artisans
fashion their toolkit from the hardest, sharpest, most vividly colored
flints and church in North America whose outprops existed as
a geographic atlas in their heads. They journeyed hundreds of
(32:57):
miles to those sources, as if on quests special magic.
Some of their tool caches featured multiple gorgeous, unused points
of eight to nine inches in leaked with sacred red
ochre still adhering to them. One Clovis mystery has always
been why no art? Why nothing? Like the grand paintings
(33:18):
of animals on the cave walls of Chauvet, Lasco and
Alzamira in Europe, there are pebbles in size with crosshatching.
There's an elephant carved into a piece of ivory. Otherwise
we had no hints what they thought of the animals
they hunted, of America, of their lives in general. That
(33:39):
may be changing with a new twenty nineteen to twenty
twenty investigation of the rock art of a region in
the Colombian Amazon known as Sarania La Lindosa. But we'll
have to wait to see if the images there really
are Clovis or fulsome ones. One recent theory is that
the Clovisians may have been a Northern Hemisphere wild type,
(34:04):
a group of hyper aggressive Siberian vikings. According to modern science,
a high fat diet is a strong trigger for enhanced testosterone.
But who they were really is us. My twenty three
ande meters profile shows three percent of my genes are
Native Americans, a common figure for those of us whose
(34:26):
European ancestors arrived in America three hundred or more years ago.
Clovis heredity is within us. The Clovis story resonates because
we imagine them as ancient versions of ourselves, explorers of
hidden continents, the last of the masterful hunters of enormous animals,
(34:47):
the culmination of forty thousand generations of hunters. They must
have had a sense of that timeless tradition But to me,
the biggest question is this, what did they think? What
did they do when so many of the animals they
lived among began to disappear, to dwindle to a last
(35:09):
few scattered survivors until there were none. What they faced
is mirrored by our own twenty first century circumstances. Like
us then lived as their ancestors did, and no doubt
had every expectation that the world would continue as it
always had, and so long as there was a Siberia
(35:30):
or a Baringia or an America out there, it did.
But Earth proved finite, and so did its animals, much
as we are doing today. The Clovisians ran into a
wall of limits.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
When I think about certain areas of inquiry, I think
that in a lot of spaces there's room for huge discoveries,
meaning we can find life on another planet. Right, Yeah,
there could be huge medical you know, you can picture
(36:24):
where we have some medical breakthrough and like increased life
expectancy by twenty five percent or fifty percent, Like I
wouldn't be shocked. But do you feel that our our
understanding of pre human and early human North America is
like down to the details now, like it's kind of
(36:47):
all there, it's just details.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
Well, I tend to think that there are some big
discoveries yet to be made.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Now, I will say that the advent of genomic research,
you know, on human remains all over the world is
telling us a lot of stuff that we've never known before.
And that's kind of the modern version of you know,
radiocarbon dating in the nineteen fifties and stuff. We've now
(37:21):
got a way to analyze human remains that is giving
us a sense of how people spread around the world
and what connections they had with one another. So my
guess is, and you know, it's probably a pretty easy
thing to guess, is that there's got to be something
big out there, and it's likely to involve something technological
(37:45):
like those two where you have a sudden breakthrough and
it's possible to do something you've not been able to
do before.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
I mean, you find somewhere in South America, you find
a genetic marker from twelve thousand years ago, and it
doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
It doesn't make sense, and you have to and people
have to explain it, you know, and it may take
a while. It takes science often a lot of time
to explain things, and there are a lot of kind
of false leads and ideas that are put out there
that don't last. I mean that's just the way you know,
human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, works. But yeah, I think
there's going to be you know, we're going to know
(38:23):
in the case of the pleciscene extinctions, I think in
another thirty or forty years, there's going to be something,
some kind of technological breakthrough that enables us to suddenly
know a lot more about this than we've known. I mean,
one to me is the is, you know, the our
sudden realization that a lack of genetic diversity can be
(38:43):
pretty murderous on a on a species, because if you
start separating a population out so it's not possible for
them to breed anymore and exchange genes, they become they
become weak. I mean, there are instances where you know,
it's impossible for them to reproduce, and so I think
all of that that's another variation obviously of the genetic revolution.
(39:07):
But I think all those things point to some new
breakthrough in the future that's you know, it's going to
be fun to see.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
I mean, I of things like that, and I'm glad
to hear this, because I was starting to worry that
it was going to get boring. These questions were going
to get boring as things just got more like here's
the story.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, No, I don't think they're going to get boring.
I think it's going to be it's going to be fun,
and we're going to still be interested. Uh, you know,
just like all of us are still interested in this.
I mean, none of us is really trained in the
fields of paleold biology or anything like that, but we
find it fascinating to want to understand how this happened,
(39:50):
and uh, we want to know more about ourselves, and
that's what a lot of this is about.
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Do you remember the writer, Uh, he's very fun. Any guy,
the writer Jack hit Oh yeah, yeah. He once observed
he was taught about that he has a hard time
taking palaeontology seriously because it was a discipline that he
found the most knowledge about it was held by thirteen
(40:15):
year olds. He's talking about dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
Yeah, it's true. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
And this is a feel like this stuff like like
ice age. America is definitely a hobbyist RealD you know,
I mean, there's a lot of room for hobbyists right, like, like,
I'm a hobbyist. There's a lot of room for hobbyists.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
Yeah, well, that's right.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
You can stay up breast, you know, you can stay
abreast of the subject.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
I think what's what's there's sort of a tension in
this subject for me between like when you describe people
seeking out a new frontier or moving across the landscape
and being you know, drawn in by certain topographical features.
It's something that reson with me, and I find it
(41:01):
sort of part of the human condition. On the other hand,
there's certain things about these people that are totally unknowable,
Like you know, even with all of the technological advances
we have ahead of us, we don't have their voices,
and we don't even know what their voices sounded like,
(41:22):
you know. And so whenever I'm playing with this subject
in my mind, I always get stuck on that sort
of contradiction between what's very familiar and what is and
will probably always remain totally alien.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Well, that part probably will remain completely alien. I mean
we call you know, we have named these paleol cultures
in North America, things like Folsome and plain View and Clovis,
and those are all names of towns near which paleontological
and archael logical sites were found. I mean, we have
(42:02):
no idea what they called themselves. They for sure probably
didn't call themselves Clovisians, you know, or Fulsomites or whatever
the fulsome term for the people would be. I mean
they So we don't know that, and we're very likely
not ever to know that. What I am still a
little disappointed by, and I'm hoping that this side in
(42:22):
South America pans out as a as an actual rock
imagery site for clovis In fulsome is the lack of art,
especially in comparison to Western Europe, where there's there are
all these marvelous cave paintings that I mean tell you
(42:43):
so much about. I mean, they're One of the pieces
I read when I was researching Well in the World
was about how the artists at chove A Cave got
the rhythm of the foot footprints, the feet hitting the
ground of quadrupeds exactly right. And this particular article said
(43:05):
it wasn't until the eighteen nineties that modern painters were
able to get the rhythm of how horse hoofs hit
the ground when they were running at the same level
of expertise that these guys did fifteen sixteen thousand years ago,
and so that's very exciting and tells us a little
bit about those people. And it's just disappointing that, you know,
(43:29):
we have nothing like that in North America.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I'll correct my kids now and then where they'll talk
about they'll say when cave people were here, and I'll say,
be careful, because it seems like what you're imagining, like
it seems like the Ice age people that were here
didn't have a real affinity for caves.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
Well they probably had, ye.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
They weren't like, they weren't like they're not quite contemporaries.
But what was happening here twelve thirteen thousand years ago
was a very similar lifestyle in Western Europe thirty thousand
years ago. And there are parallels, but there also seems
to be differences. Like you're saying, like, where's all the
cave art?
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah, where's the art? And I mean, and it's interesting
to me since you brought that up that the first
archaeologists in North America who were looking for evidence of
human antiquity here looked in caves. They went to places
like Carlsbad and stuff and looked in caves because this
was the I mean, they were thinking by analogy, this
was the example they had in Western Europe, this is
(44:33):
where these people are, and so they were looking in
places like Carlsbad caverns for evidence that early humans in
North America would have done the same kind of thing.
And of course, accidentally, on the way back, a guy
by the name of Edgar Hewett, on the way back
from one of those expeditions happened to go past the
Clovis site and had some cowboys say, well, you know,
(44:57):
we've been finding these kind of strange looking a lot
urge two like objects here on the ground. No caves
anywhere around, but they're just kind of lying out here on.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
The plains on what was a wetland.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Yeah, what was a wetland? And you know, no caves
around anywhere. So it's kind of one of those ways.
I think that the people of antiquity, the paleo hunters
in particular in North America, are pretty damn distinctive from
the people in Western Europe, And in this particular case,
(45:31):
I wish the distinction weren't so great, because I would
love to be able to find some art that they
did but so far not much.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Along the lines of like preconceived notions that people have
when they sort of look at this era of prehistory
as just sort of one block and then all of
a sudden, you know, the Stone Age goes to the
the Bronze Age, something like that. I think one of
the things that you've always opened my eyes to is
(46:03):
paying attention to these advancements in technology, which I think
most people wouldn't think of them as technology. But you know,
we were just looking at stone points at the Archaeological
Repository and Laramie, and you look at the level of
artistry and mastery in these in these objects, and it
(46:24):
very much is like a technology. It's not like these
people were trapped in some era, right, there's this there's
this long history that's played out in just the material
objects that they leave behind.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, I mean, and you know, things that to us
do not look particularly significant, like the flute on the
sides of Clovis and fulsome points. I mean that you
can almost miss that when you look at those points,
but that very clearly was a major technological innovation because
(46:58):
it finally allowed the you're fastening of a point to
a dart an add addle dart or a spear, and
so it was. It was one of those human genius
breakthroughs where someone realized, if I just you know, make
a flute, make an indentation running down each side of
(47:18):
this point, I can now secure my adlett dart to
it and it won't pop off upon hitting an animal.
It will stay secure and penetrate through the skin. And
that's kind of you know, as I said, it's not
something that you look at and go wow, this is
like the invention of the model T. Nonetheless, Yeah, for
(47:41):
these people, it effectively was a huge leap forward. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
I want to return for a minute to a comment
you made about as the picture becomes clear or the
picture changes about this error we're discussing that you look
too technological enhancements, technological improvements which might upend some of
our notions.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
After you said that, it made me think about a
conversation I had with an anthropologist who focused on the
like the prices scene Holocene transition at Colorado State, and
I was kind of saying to him in a discussion,
I was kind of saying to him like, well, as
we find more sites, it'll get clearer. And he's really
(48:29):
pessimistic about about that about sites. I'm like, well, you know,
some guy building the road and he's like, how many
roads have we built? I mean, like, look at all
the roads we built, Look at all the farm fields
we cleared, and we have a handful. Like I don't
think increasing road building, you know, at the at the
decrease rate that we're building roads and clearing fields that
(48:50):
I don't think it's going to be that it's new sites.
You know, he really wasn't optimistic about finding crazy sites.
I think that what I think that we've kind of
found what is there to find, you know, barring some
unforeseen thing. But I think that I don't think you
can go and say the same thing about South America, right,
(49:11):
especially all that like like areas that are heavily forested
and jungle areas, like places that haven't been through like
our dust bowl when we had a good chance to
see the western landscape stripped clean of top soil and vegetation, Like,
there could be some amazing stuff laying there. Yeah, it
rots quicker, but it could be there.
Speaker 1 (49:30):
Yeah, it could be. And I mean, you know, and
so Lidar, I suppose at this stage of the game,
I mean that's certainly a technological breakthrough. This enable to
discovery of all sorts of new particularly buildings mayan structures
that are suddenly now visible from above in a way
that they never are on the ground but lightar's, as
(49:51):
far as I am aware of it, it probably is
not fine grained enough to do something like the sort
of archaeological sites that that you're talking about, but I
kind of wouldn't think so now I tend to agree
with the anthropologists you were talking to. I think we've
got the sites. I think what we probably can improve
(50:14):
the interpretation of those sites with is going to be
something like these big leaps forward we had with radiocarbon dating,
which was you know, that was a huge game changer
seventy five years ago, and now the genomic revolution, the
genetic revolution, which is another enormous game changer for all
(50:36):
kinds of things, including these sort of extinctions from the
Pleistocene Holocene boundary. So I think it's going to be
something like that. I don't know exactly what it is,
but it's probably going to be something that subtenly enables
us to interpret what we have in a way we've
not been able to.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah, I think what we're talking about here a lot
is how we can change your understanding of this subject
looking forward. But I also wonder if you can look
backward at your own career, just in your lifetime, how
much has changed in terms of knowledge about this subject,
(51:16):
and also how conversations have evolved over time.
Speaker 1 (51:21):
Well, I would say, you know, I mean, I may
look as if I come from the early twentieth century,
but I'm actually more a mid twentieth century artifact. And
so I was born at about the time that radiocarbon
dating won the Nobel Prize for a guy, and I
(51:45):
have not I will say that during the sixties and
especially the seventies, the late seventies, when I was in
graduate school, there was a strong disinclination to believe that
humans had played much of a role at all. And
what it reminded is, i've looked back on it now,
(52:08):
it reminds me of the sort of reluctance that a
lot of people feel about climate change. It's that humans
couldn't have done that. We couldn't have done that. I mean,
a bunch of animals became extinct. That had to have
been climate That had to have been a comet strike
that had to have been something other than humans, because
(52:30):
I mean, there's just no way that's not possible. People
armed only with ad adomles and spears and so forth
could not do those sorts of things, And that of
course played into and went along with this sensibility back
in those same years where we were kind of in
a way first discovering native ecology and indigenous knowledge about
(52:53):
the world, and we were of course looking for some examples,
looking desperately for some examples of human beings to say,
these people did it right, here's the way you do it.
We're not on the right track, we're doing it wrong,
but they did it correctly. And of course, arguing that
you know, early arrivals in North America like Clovis and
(53:16):
fulsome people may have wiped out species that ran against
that sentiment that, well, we're trying to find in the
past some humans who really lived well on the environment,
and so that change I think sometime I don't know,
probably in the early two thousands, when after one kind
(53:40):
of alternative explanation after another was advanced and none of
them really seemed to work. They never did manage to
convince many people. I mean, you know, Ross McFee of
the American Museum and Natural History advanced. Well, maybe some
new disease swept through North America and killed everything. Well,
of course there was no candidate disease. And then the
(54:03):
other problem was, most diseases don't kill everything. I mean,
they usually leave some piece of a population that often
rebuilds with immunity. I mean, all of us are examples
of Old World diseases that killed many of those that
our ancestors survived and allowed us to be born today.
So alternative explanations have not so far really worked. And
(54:27):
what I've kind of been noticing in the last ten
or fifteen years has been a kind of a reluctant
I would say, reluctant, but still a sort of a
growing consensus that the human arrival in North America still
seems to be the best explanation we have for what
happened to all those animals. And what I ended up
(54:50):
arguing in Wild New World is that I think, you know,
we talk a lot about the sixth extinction today. I
think the six extinction started thirty five thousand years ago.
I mean when human started spreading around the world. Yeah,
I mean, it's just in contrast to an asteroid strike
which wipes out seventy five percent of Earth's life in
(55:10):
a matter of a few weeks. This has just been
a thirty five thousand sort of slow motion extinction that's
been going on for a very very long time, and
so it's good for us to be alarmed about a
six extinction. I just sometimes try to point out to
people I think this has actually been happening for a
long time.
Speaker 3 (55:31):
I recently had a discussion with an attorney who's Native
American and he works in repatriation, and his particular focus
is on getting the remains of his ancestors back from museums. Yeah,
I said to him, I said, would you ever strike
(55:53):
a deal where they get a gram of each of
those bones and then you get the bones back? And
he said, we would never even consider something like that.
I don't expect you to answer this, but like, what
(56:14):
would be some things that you consider when you think
of the tension around a desire to study apply modern
analytics to human remains, and where that rubs against cultural
sensitivities about playing with remains of someone that you rightfully
(56:40):
or wrongfully consider to be your ancestor, even if you're
separated by nine thousand and ten thousand years from them.
Speaker 1 (56:48):
Yeah, that's really like what kind.
Speaker 3 (56:50):
Of things bounce around in your head. I'm not asking
you to say what we ought to do, but like,
how do you even approach that?
Speaker 1 (56:55):
Right? Well, what, here's what I kind of suspect. I
think we're living through a moment, and I think the
moment has been caused by the previous lack of respect
that so many bone merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth
(57:18):
and twentieth centuries brought to the game of archaeology, where
they paid not the slightest attention to the desires wants
of the local people, who very well could be connected
to the ruins or the excavations that they're doing on
(57:39):
human remains. And so what I think is that we're
experiencing a moment that's kind of a backlash against that.
And I tend to be one of these kind of
people who thinks that, you know, we're really kind of
all the same, actually, and what we're interested in is
the human story, the big story of all of us,
(58:01):
which is why I'm intrigued by humans coming out of Africa,
spreading through Asia, coming to North America, going to South America,
and I know that people get hung up on the
idea of Okay, this particular culture has this view of
how the world should be conducted and how scientific research
could be conducted. But I am very much interested in
(58:21):
the big story of humanity, and I think ultimately most
people are interested in that. And so I think when
we get past this moment where we're sort of boomeranging
from centuries where we had no respect for the remains
of these people, that in another who knows how long,
(58:44):
but in another century. In fact, I know need of
people who have already reached this position where they too
are intrigued and interested and they want to know. And
so I think that at some point in the future,
I don't know how far out it is, that there
will be some relaxing of that kind of reluctance to
allow science to try to answer some of these great questions.
(59:07):
I just think it's a you know, the pendulum has
swung at the moment at a to a degree that
Native people are they don't want this to happen. Yeah,
but I think it'll swing back. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (59:24):
I think on Steve's on Steve's question, there there's implicit
in that, is this question about the scope of time
that we're talking about when we talk about people arriving
in North America and from the place to scene extinctions
(59:46):
up until just say fifteen hundred, and I wonder if
you can just sort of put that. I always have
a hard time wrapping my mind around big time, and
so I wonder if you can kind of contextualize that
at what we're talking about versus the broader story of
humans spreading around the world.
Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
Well, when I mean, you guys all know this as
well as I do. But you know, when you're doing history,
history we always think of history, especially professionally and in
the academy, we think of that as being something you
do from written sources. And of course written sources only
(01:00:29):
exist for the human story back to about thirty five
hundred and four thousand years ago, and beyond that we
have no written stories, and so that sort of implies that. Okay,
so if you're interested in history, that's the end of it.
Four thousand years back, you don't have any history anymore.
There's no way. I'm not satisfied with that, obviously, because
(01:00:50):
that's a very small slice of the human story, and
the human story goes way way farther back in time,
and so I mean my whole take on something like
writing that chapter about what I call Native America. After
(01:01:11):
the Pleistocene extinctions and the Holycene period began in North America,
I tried to write a chapter about the next ten
thousand years, which takes you down to five hundred years ago,
when Europeans and Old Worlders began arriving in North America.
I was trying to sort of satisfy my own curiosity
about that, because I couldn't really find very many people
(01:01:33):
who had ventured a guess as to how that story
had unfolded. And in a book like that, where I
was interested primarily in the relationship between animals and people,
I was trying to figure out how did it happen
that when Europeans get here five hundred years ago, they
land on a continent that they're so impressed with. Now,
(01:01:57):
maybe it's just in comparison to what they had done
to Europe, but they're really impressed with the biological diversity
of North America. It's kind of an Eden for the animals.
And so the question was, how did we get from
ten thousand years ago down to five hundred years ago?
Where Native people managed to preserve all that, and that
presented obviously a lot of a lot of questions to
(01:02:19):
try to answer. And I'm sure there'll be people who
improve on that story that I told, But that was
kind of my own attempt to do something about the
Native American story that I didn't see anybody else really
making a stab at trying to interpret, probably because it's
too dawning.
Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
But I think you did a phenomenal job because you
distilled it down into an observation that here's nine five
hundred years of history and there's maybe like one.
Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
Yeah, one extinction, one extinction in that time we've done.
Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
Yeah, the last five hundred years has been a real ripper.
Speaker 1 (01:02:56):
Yes, and a real ripper, there's no question about it.
I mean, one piece I read in the National Academy
of Sciences from about twenty nineteen argued that we have
sacrificed in the last five hundred years about a half
a million years of evolved genetics on planet Earth as
(01:03:19):
a consequence of all the destruction that we've made to
creatures around the world. And most of the animals that
have disappeared have been really charismatic and very common, like
passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons survived in North America for fifteen
million years, and they couldn't last three hundred years after
(01:03:39):
we got here. So there's certainly been that. And then
there's that ten thousand year period we were just talking
about where I could find evidence for only one extinction,
and that was a flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast.
But then of course there's the period before that, the Pleistocene,
where if anything, truction was even on more massive a scale.
(01:04:02):
And in that instance, not only do we sacrifice an
enormous amount of biological diversity and genetics evolved genetics, but
it was the genetics of most of the really large
and impressive animals of the globe. And so that's a
story in other words, that doesn't have it doesn't travel
(01:04:26):
just in one direction. It's as if humans realizing, wow,
we may have really screwed things up, or things got
screwed up for some reason, because I'm not sure they
quite understood what had happened, but it seems to have
produced a kind of a reaction where for nearly ten
(01:04:47):
thousand years they are very careful about things. And you know,
as I said, that's a story that I really had
to put together because I couldn't find anyone that was
willing to make to venture a guess about how that
it all played out, and yet it's obviously a really
(01:05:07):
big part of American history.
Speaker 3 (01:05:09):
Well, Dan, I want to thank you for sitting and
having this post chat with us.
Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
You best see. Thanks thanks to both of you guys. Randall,
you guys were you know, many years ago, uh, terrific
students in the classes that I taught at the University
of Montown. It's fun to sit down and do this again.
What
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.