June 3, 2025 • 55 mins
For 10,000 years, from the end of the Pleistocene to the coming of Old Worlders to America, a diverse population of Native people lived in North America while somehow managing to preserve almost all its biological riches. In contrast to the period when the prior Paleolithic hunters dominated America and the West, this 10,000 year phase of American history featured only one human-caused extinction that science has so far discovered. Was this some strange accident of continental history? Or were their concrete reasons for why, and how, Native America achieved this kind of environmental success?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Native America existed for ten thousand years in a west
marked by many prior extinctions, but somehow found it possible
to preserve almost all the biological richness of the continent
until the arrival of Europeans. I'm Dan Flores, and this
is the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck.
(00:22):
Still in barrel. Velvet 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 ravens and coyotes.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
America.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Walking the edge of a sharp rimmed cliff in out
back Montana before sunrise, moving through a twilight of grays
and blacks and outlines, large graceful birds. Sandhill cranes are
fluting their strange, plisty scene cries in the pastel sky overhead.
(01:21):
But I'm focused on the lines of the topography in
front of me, especially the way the mesa I'm walking
narrows up ahead, seeing that my walking pace quickens. This
is a historic piece of ground, starting some two thousand
(01:42):
years in the past and continuing down to two hundred
years ago. It was the scene of frenzied, albeit sporadic
human activity. Like most historic places, there is something maddeningly
mute about the spot.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
It's why we often stand and gawk numbly in such places,
unable to connect to the events we're supposed to marvel over.
But this morning, I'm not going to be stymied by
lack of imagination. I'm here with a purpose, my intent
to experience at least some part of what a Buffalo
jump drive was all about. It was fully dark when
(02:20):
I arrived here an hour earlier, parked my car at
an interpretive sign, finished a cup of coffee, then slowly
worked through the boulders to the top of this mesa.
While I walked eastward to the luxuriant grassland of a
high meadow, the sky had gradually lightened. Now turning back
towards the car and the cliff I'd climbed in the dark,
(02:41):
I'm becoming caught up in what I tell myself are
echoes of the place. Pointing myself down the narrowing mesa
towards the far Rimrock, I start to jog. I'm running
a track that men and other animals have run many
times in the past, But in contrast to my lope
(03:03):
beneath the fluting cranes, then there would have been the
pounding thunder of sharp black hoofs cutting through the grass,
and the alarmed grunning of animals, their huge forms wrapped
in billowing clouds of dust. That must have made for
a ghostly stampede. Now I hear only my footfalls and
(03:24):
my breathing, But in the real thing, the air would
have been rent by the exultant shouts of the drivers,
urging on runners wearing the skins of wolves and red
coated bison calves leading the herd to its destiny. They're
costuming a ruse to fool buffalo cows into thinking that
wolves were selecting out defenseless young ones. Listening to the
(03:49):
rhythm of my feet, I wonder if the herd's noise
wouldn't have been so overwhelming, it would have morphed into silence,
adding a surreal quality to the ghostliness. The whole affair
would have commenced days earlier with a religious ceremony and
careful maneuvering of a bison herd in that high meadow
(04:09):
into position for a stampede. Then if all went well,
and it went well enough times in the past to
accumulate a bone layer five feet deep at the base
of the cliff. I'd climbed. The runners who led the
herd to the cliff edge would escape if they could,
by darting aside at the last moment, dodging the relentless
brown river of animals hurtling into space in a dream
(04:32):
of wild frozen action. Where I've begun my run is
a half mile back from the cliff, and soon enough
I crossed to descending benches and realize I am on
the point of no return in this bison jump. Get
the animals here and have them running, And the downhill
(04:53):
pitch steepened so quickly there would be no way for
the herd leaders either to stop or turn aside. I'm
running harder now, pulled faster by the angling slope, and
I registered that out in the valley, dawn color has arrived.
Chrome yellow light cast by the rising sun is lighting
(05:13):
the white cliffs on the far side of the river,
a scene of great beauty, one last soothing side of earth, perhaps,
as the lip of the plunge is scarcely one hundred
and twenty feet away. Now beyond that is windmilling motion
and the silence of forty feet of free space. Then
the jarring stop amongst the boulders. I slide to a
(05:38):
stop a few feet from the cliff edge and stand
panting for a few minutes, looking down on the slope below.
By modern standards, the scene would not have been pretty.
In seventeen ninety seven, the British trader Peter Fiddler described
such a concluding set piece. The young men killed the
crippled animals with arrows, bayonets tied upon them, the end
(06:00):
of a pole in etc. The hatchet is frequently used,
and it is shocking to see the poor animals thus
pin up without any way of escaping. However, pod like
their behavior as classic herd animals. All these bison were individuals,
of course, and that is the way they died. Slanting sunlight,
(06:22):
throwing morning shadows hundreds of feet long across the Madison
Valley of Montana, lights my face over the mountains. I
see a jet glending silver, a mobile diamond slicing through
the blue, Its motion fetching me back to my climb
down to the car, back to my commitments. But before
I start, I stand for a moment, thinking of the
(06:44):
bison that died among the boulders below. Humans drove buffalo
off cliffs in America for twelve thousand years, and despite
knowing something about it, I find it a shock to
be in this space where it happened, this close to
how it worked. I visited head smashed in jump in
Alberta and absorbed archaeologist friends accounts of Bonfire Shelter Jump
(07:09):
in the gray limestone canyons of the Pacos River in Texas.
Hearing at the visitor center in Canada that Indians carefully
utilized every part of the animals. Yet knowing that in
Texas the cliff at Bonfire Shelter is scorched hundreds of
feet high from the spontaneous combustion of an enormous, mangled
(07:31):
heap of unutilized bison Native hunters drove off the rim above.
Those two sides beg a big question, putting aside whatever
fantasies of the past we have, what kind of relationship
did humans in animals fashion over the one hundred centuries
of Native America that followed the Pleistocene, And if it
(07:53):
was different, more ecologically benign, or balanced than what came before,
and what came after then, why Clovisia the Beautiful ended
with the demise of elephants and the majority of America's
(08:14):
big animals. People were here, but most of the original
animals were not. The haunting stories of losses must have
lasted because having so many charismatic creatures disappear seems to
have shifted human behavior. The ten thousand years that followed
wasn't entirely extinction free, but thousands of years later, arriving
(08:38):
Old Worlders described the wild new world that greeted them
as a paradise of animals. The image of America as
an animal eaten out of prehistory has shaped the country's
sense of itself ever since. But was that actually the
reality of Native America? When nineteenth century ethnographers began to
(08:59):
assemble a lie linguistic map of Native America, the conclusion
anyone would draw is that over ten thousand years there
had been a tremendous movement of peoples around the continent.
Athabaskan speakers lived in interior Alaska, and also way down
in the Southwest. There were pools of Algonquin speakers in
(09:20):
New England, in the Ohio Valley, and in the foothills
of the Rocky Mountains. All this was in contrast to Australia,
for example, where aboriginal populations have stayed in place for
fifty thousand years. The American story implies significant experimentation with
different locales and ways of life. Some of those human
(09:42):
migrations may have been related to the resheffling of American
nature that took place in the echoes of the Pleisscene extinctions.
The biology of the conton was reinventing itself. The vegetation
was changing. Without ground slows to disperse their seeds, the
range of Joshua trees now began to contract, and without
(10:03):
mammoths succurbed them, honey mesquite began to spread. There were
so many missing animals that a remarkable number of ecological
niches either were vacant or newly filling. The ecological rebirth
was most dramatic in the western half of America. The
loss of mammoths, giant bison, horses, camels, ground sloths, direwolves,
(10:29):
short faced bears, scavenging birds, and a range of cat
predators opened niches at every level. In cases like wolves
and bears, there were ready replacement species, with direwolves now
extinct gray wolves and ancient American wolves emerged as the
primary caned predators, But with seventy percent of America's grazers gone,
(10:53):
niches for replacements were wide open with almost no competition.
A new small ball or bison, supplanted horses, mammoths, and
its huge bison ancestors. Within a few centuries, this new
dwarf bison grew into a biomass of animals that had
almost no analog anywhere else on Earth. Biologists now believe
(11:18):
modern bison are a classic example of anthropogenic selection, their
size and rapid reproduction shaped by human predation. Seals, sea otters,
and sea lions excepted, along with the one prong horn
species that survived to browse the forbes that camels once ate.
(11:38):
Most of the large animals west of the Mississippi were
Asian immigrants. In some parts of the planet, the warmer
climate that marked the end of the Ice Ages allowed
hard pressed humans to try out some new things. But
since humans had extensively settled America only thirteen thousand years
(11:58):
ago rather than forty five thousand, North America didn't yet
call for an agricultural revolution the way the Old World did.
America's human cultures segued to a stage where animals were
still of primary importance, but plants were taking on a
more significant role. Archaic is the term anthropologist and archaeologists
(12:22):
have long used for humans living this way, by which
they mean people existing as hunter gatherers. So, while the
Old World experimented with agriculture and domestication, in North America,
the hunting gathering lifestyle continued over vast spans of time
and diverse geographies all the way into modern history. Clearly,
(12:47):
we ancient hunters of animals surrendered our oldest LifeWay with reluctance.
America wasn't just in the throes of bio logical recreation.
Around eighty five hundred years ago, there was another potent change.
The warming cycle that ended the Last Ice Age didn't relent,
(13:10):
and America's climate swung into a hot, dry phase that
stayed in place for a mind blowing thirty seven hundred years.
This was the depths of the last entered Glacial, the
long slide out of the frozen Wisconsin Ice Age. Now,
the Earth's rotational wobble had the northern hemisphere slightly closer
(13:31):
to the Sun, and for almost forty centuries some parts
of America cooked, the Alta thermal, as it's called, came
close to turning large parts of the continent into a
true desert and a vacant one. Many species of animals
left for wetter settings. So did many human groups, like
other animals, shifting eastward and westward out of the interior. West,
(13:55):
the country where Clovis and folsome people thrived nearly emptied
of humans during the Alta thermal, But once the Alta
thermal subsided, generations of hunter gatherer people's returned to occupy
the same landscapes for centuries. That kind of close familiarity
gave them bodies of handed down ecological insights about how
(14:16):
to live in particular places. The feedbacks they read from
place based living enable humans to come up with a
striking epiphany, one allowing them to live well without using.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Up their world.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
The breakthrough, a key to success in Native America, sprang
from the realization that there was no longer a wild
new world empty of other people out there. Clovis like
expansion across a virtually uninhabited continent was over. Humans now
had to learn to deliberately carefully manage their own numbers
(14:55):
to avoid overshooting local resources when times turned bad. In
a variable world, good times inevitably give way to bad times.
That was an ancient lesson. Basing your numbers on the
good times could set you up for disaster. How did
these ancient Americans manage to pull off controlling their populations
(15:16):
so they could live well on local resources. Birth spacing
was one common strategy. Breastfeeding suppresses ovulation during a mother's
fertile years, preventing a rapid succession of pregnancies. Child mortality
was high among ancient humans anyway, but most hunter gatherers
practice forms of abortion to control their populations, and the
(15:40):
evidence is that as an ecological strategy it worked well.
But for the women who carried babies to term or
close to it, infanticide in particular, was a psychological burden. Ultimately,
many hunter gatherers sought to escape it, but the larger
equation was relentless. The hunting gathering economy was still the
(16:02):
predator's economy, and predators of whatever kind were always few
compared to prey. Hunting and gathering required space to roam
habitats for birds and mammals. Living the good life meant
you could not overburden the world with people. There was
one possibility to increase human numbers, but it meant giving
(16:25):
up much of humanity's ancient life and investing in an
entirely new economy. Around five thousand years ago, an agricultural
revolution similar to the one that swept the Old World
began to spread into North America from the south, the
selection and domestication of wild plants emerged where human populations
(16:47):
were densest and animal population's lowest, namely crowded Meso America.
Unknown traders and travelers first carried ideas about domestication northward
about four thousand years ago, and later the actual seed
stocks of Mexican agriculture. So over the ensuing millennia, crop
(17:08):
fields and farming towns began to dot Native America from
the south to southern New England, then along the river
valleys of the Midwest, and even in scattered locations in
the desert southwest. Once the agricultural transformation took root, populations
began to grow, and sometimes centralized governing bodies, usually religious ones,
(17:32):
organized towns into regional empires we know as Kahokia, Spiro Mounds, Hooho,
Kom and the Chaco and Empire, which I talked about
in our first podcast. All of these were very late
experiments in the last thousand years of Native America, but
in vast regions of America, agriculture never replaced hunting a gathering.
(17:57):
So wetted were Native people to the hunt that eat
even his agricultural towns emerged. Many of the farmers continued
to hunt, at least seasonally. Some returned exclusively to hunting
when circumstances allowed. What sort of human existence could be better?
(18:27):
All the evidence indicates that America's Native people lived immersed
in art, stories, and observations designed around the grand theme
of understanding themselves in a sometimes impenetrable world. A fundamental
way to probe those kinds of understandings is through stories
of gods. The oldest named characters in North American history,
(18:52):
in fact, are the deities who created the continent and
its life, and set in motion human life with all
of its victories and tragedy. Stories of these deities make
up the continent's oldest literature, with few exceptions. Ancient America,
and gods were animals, although the stories described some as
anthropomorphic animals. In Western America, for example, the deity who
(19:17):
acquired the universal epithet coyote stood upright on its legs
and brandished human hands, but had the fur, sharp nose,
erect ears, and the tale of a coyote. The deities
who made it into modern English as Coyote, Raven, spider Man,
Skeleton Man, Master Rabbit all shared a basic human nature
(19:41):
with their followers. Our vices, our lusts and our jealousies,
our selfishness and our narcissism resided in America's ancient gods.
There to writtness and there for good reason. More about
this in a later episode. But the deities not only
explained to listeners why North America was the kind of
(20:01):
world it was, they taught lessons, often uncomfortable or funny ones,
about human behavior and motives. They were gods, creators, also thieves, liars,
and lettres, classic professors of human nature. Coyote, who emerges
from the stories as a kind of world win biol,
(20:23):
physical force with an enormous appetite for pleasure and sensuality,
was one of the most widely known gods out of
ancient America and avatar for humans in the world, and
we'll devote much of an episode to him and his stories.
Like Raven, He is the un theseeen conductor of a
master plan set in motion by an aloof first cause.
(20:47):
This more knowable, approachable god was common in Native America,
and if there are mysteries in the world you've wondered about,
let Raven's adventures explain them. Raven one was yet another
merged animal human deity who told the clinkets I was
born before this world was known, uttering his monosyllabic go.
(21:12):
Raven proceeds to shape each animal in a slightly different
way and to name them all whale, seal, eagle, bear, caribou, beaver, salmon, sea, otter, land,
otter wolf. The birds he paints in bright colors because
he wants them to be pretty. There is one worrisome
(21:33):
thread that runs through Raven and Coyote stories, though in
early times the Inuit explained, Raven becomes concerned that humans
are becoming too numerous. Human villages are growing too large,
and subsequently their residents are killing too many animals. The
Inuit first man agrees and tells Raven, if the people
(21:56):
do not stop killing so many animals, they will kill
everything you've made. In Coyote's case, as both the yanas
of California and the Navajoes of the Southwest told the
story humans have to die because if they do not,
human overpopulation will result in the destruction of all the
(22:17):
animals and even of earth itself. In the early nineteen thirties,
a historian of religion named Joseph Epps Brown became fascinated
by Native religions. He interviewed traditional Lakota elders, including the
(22:39):
legendary black elk, and ultimately set down the ideas that
made up part of hunter gatherer knowledge about America's animals.
Brown's informants perceive the essential nature of animal species as
much through dreams and visions as through native science. Bears
ruled the underground, as bison did the surface, and eagles
(23:00):
the air. Certain animals illustrated particular traits useful to the
human Animal members of a wolf clan sought to invoke
the wolf's cooperative skills in hunting and killing. If a
young man on a vision quest heard a bull elk
bugle for cows in the crisp air of autumn, he
might then regard the elk as a totem whose potent
(23:22):
sexuality he could internalize. These elders also recalled a connection
involving energy flow between creatures. These were connections neither eighteenth
century Lenaean science or twenty first century genetic science would
ever think to link together. What the Lakotas called Umi
(23:43):
or yum was world wind power, the unrestrained residue of
the energy of the four winds. They remembered WorldWind power
as much sought, in part because possessing it made one
difficult to attack in battle, But only a small number
of special animals spiders, also, moths, dragonflies, and bears, elk
(24:06):
and bison possessed the world winds secret. As for bison,
seasonal winds coming from the north or south seemed part
of their mystery, bringing them or taking them away. A
south wind might produce herds that blanketed the landscape from
horizon to horizon, but they could entirely disappear, which led
(24:27):
to a widespread belief in Native America that bison had
their origins underground, and sometimes they returned there, as had
been true of our first hunting ancestors in Africa, true
of the Neanderthals, true of the Clovis people. Native ceremonial
lives centered on an ancient human desire to control nature,
(24:50):
but they did so primarily as part of a religious philosophy,
not a scientific one. Managing animals based on population modeling,
carrying capacity of landscapes are selective. Sustainable harvests, as modern
ecologists and biologists do, would have been incomprehensible because Native
(25:10):
cause effect explanations for why things happened relied on completely
different premises. The religions through which Native people understood animals were, however,
superb at apprehending the kinship between animals and humans. Crucial
in Native America was knowledge about how to influence animals
(25:33):
in a rim usually defined as supernatural, an essential part
of religion. A friend from my years in Montana, professor
Roslin Lapierre, has done the best insider account so far
of the invisible reality that was central to this ten
thousand year old world. Roslin's own Black people possessed what
(25:56):
she calls a powerful worldview that suggests, yes, the Blackfeet
desire to manipulate animals and nature is a deep seated
human impulse, available through the assistance of supernatural allies. The
degree of power, when possessed to call on those allies
determine how much you could make happen. Human beings could
(26:18):
become vectors of power from these supernatural realms if a
sacred being sought them out, are through a vision quest
or other effort to find a sympathetic animal ally, or
even by purchasing power from someone who already had it.
Another intriguing look at Native religious traditions with respect to
animals comes from the work of an anthropologist who lived
(26:41):
with the Athabaskan speaking Coyukon peoples of Alaska. The Coyucons
preserve an ideology with powerful echoes of how life in
the ten millennia span of Native America must have worked.
Keen observational naturalists with a highly refined knowledge of animal behavior,
the Coyukons traced their link with animals back to what
(27:04):
they called distant time, when animals were human and spoke
human languages. The deity animal was ever watching raven. Raven
rarely missed anything and was always alert to violations of
taboos about how to treat animals and respect them. Many
raven stories were about the bad luck that befell people
(27:27):
who transgressed against the animal world. Animals were critical to
a major life force, luck that could make or break
a person's life. Luck was an award from ever watching
raven as a result of correct behavior towards animals, and
the most correct behavior of all was treating them as kin.
(27:54):
Ten thousand years ago, the entire human population of planet
Earth numbered only about four million across all the Americas,
Humans then likely made up only a quarter of that number.
North America probably had barely five hundred thousand people, then
fewer than a single large city in our time. Agriculture
(28:18):
changed that, but because big parts of the continent were
unsuited to farming, and because farming was a new development,
America wasn't entirely remade by agriculture the way Europe or
Asia were. By five hundred years ago, the best guess
is that America north of Mexico had grown its population
(28:39):
to just under four million people. Four million people spread
across the landscape that in the twenty first century supports
four hundred million seems explanation enough for why humans and
wild animals coexisted well for so long in Native America.
That might be an argument that for hunting and gathering
(28:59):
and subsistence farming economies, four million people was just about
the carrying capacity of the American landscape. The effects accumulated.
Though across the final fifteen hundred years of Native America
before Old Worlders arrived, a cumulative total of one hundred
(29:19):
and fifty to two hundred million people lived out their
lives north of Mexico. America was no howling wilderness. It
was a long inhabited, lived in world. Humans are biological,
after all, and no species gets a free ride in nature.
In some American archaeological sites, animal remains show a significant
(29:41):
decline over time. The massive Emeryville Mound site on the
shore of San Francisco Bay portrays a steady decline in
the bones of sturgeon, salmon, deer, elk, and pronghorns, demonstrating
a drawdown of local wildlife as human populations grew. In
Native ca California, elk remains and many continental archaeological sites
(30:04):
are so scarce that some scientists suggest that elk numbers
must have been suppressed, and the almost certain cause was
human hunting. There was also at least one human caused
wildlife extinction in Native America. As humans spread around the world,
flightless birds were always particularly vulnerable, and the Pacific coasts
(30:26):
of California and Oregon, along with the Channel Islands held
one a flightless sea duck and the genus Chindites in
the past decade. Researchers dating the remains of these goose
sized ducks from six coastal sites concluded that humans began
killing them ten thousand years ago, just as the plies
(30:48):
to see and gave way to Native America. Wiping them
out was hardly the three century blicks creeds that took
out mammos or later passenger pigeons or bison, but by
twenty four hundred years ago, people had hunted Pacific flightless
sea ducks to extinction. Judging from the stories people preserved
(31:08):
of their cultural heroes. The most common environmental overreach, though,
was what the Inuit raven story feared over hunting brought
on by growing human numbers. Coyotes and ravens. America existed
for seventy five times longer than the United States has
(31:29):
so far, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a
history reaching beyond human memory would provoke a religious awe
from its human inhabitants. Native America's culture heroes taught that
the key to the animal human relationship was kinship. Animals
were people, They had families and societies, opinions and cultural memories.
(31:56):
Like people, they also possessed something essential to them, a
breath or a spirit that survived death. Respect came from
honoring that humans and animals were kin and acknowledging that
we and they could move between one another's cultures because
we sprang from the same source. This became the key
(32:17):
when because of some human hubrists that violated the arrangement,
the animals retaliated by withdrawing from human's presence, pleading with
bison elk dear to return and rebalance the world. Thus
became a focus of some of the grand ceremonies Native
peoples developed in North America. When Old World has arrived
(32:40):
in America five hundred years ago, Central and South America
held more than fifty million people, but in what is
now the United States and Canada, hunting and gathering culture
still prevailed across vast stretches, and here the human population
had not yet reached five million. With human numbers seemingly
(33:01):
so slight, five hundred generations of humans had physically transformed
North America to the native peoples. The continent was occupied,
settled its birds and reptiles and mammals, all intimately known
and considered ken. Even with fewer than five million inhabitants,
parts of America held large enough numbers of people that
(33:24):
wild animals weren't always abundant. But save one, all the
species that had survived the Pleiscenstine extinctions still existed. Beavers
continued to engineer a watery landscape, shore birds and ducks
filled the skies, and bears, wolves and other predators still
played their crucial roles in American ecologies. Even with thousands
(33:48):
of years of human harvest. Bison and passenger pigeons were
still among the most numerous species on Earth. But the
change that was coming was on a scale no one
could possibly fathomed. Since the Ice Age ebbed and northern
seas flooded Boringia, America's animals and humans had lived in
(34:08):
near total isolation from the rest of Earth. No one
on either side of the Atlantic had any inkling the
other existed, or that such biological isolation sat ready to
deliver one of the most profound tragedies in history when
the planet's human population finally rejoined after parting thousands of
(34:30):
generations earlier. The America of Clovis and Folsom and Choco
of bison and passenger pigeons confronted a staggering transformation, raven
and coyote would never be able to turn things back
to the way they had been.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Dan last time we talked about, you know, in the
nineteen seventies, they're being this very popular conception of native
people as being inherently environmentalist, and I think in a
lot of ways we've sort of moved past that. And
(35:31):
I think from a historical perspective, we recognize that not
all human actions on the landscape prior to European contact
were environmentally sustainable.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
But then in this.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Lecture you describe a long swath of time that does
appear to be relatively stable or sustainable, and I wonder,
not necessarily asking if it was sustainable, but more sort
of how you begin to untangle the contradictions there.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Well, I had to look for some explanations for what
appeared to be a fairly obvious premise, which is that
when people from the Old World arrive five hundred years ago,
they find a North American continent that seems to be
(36:29):
ecologically healthy, with you know, a pretty wide diversity of
animals and birds and fishes, And I mean we know
that to some extent, that description was based on a
kind of an ecological release of animals and birds and
(36:50):
other species that came about as a result of the
suppression of Indian population through this sort of, you know,
inadvertent introduction of Old World disease, and so the Indian
population drops from nearly five million, which is what it
was we think at about the time of contact, down
to about nine hundred thousand in what is now the
(37:11):
United States and Canada as a result of those disease epidemics.
And so a lot of the descriptions we get of
kind of what a marvelous eden of nature North America
was kind of based on that, on this rapid ecological release.
But on the other hand, when you sort of try
(37:31):
to survey the range of species that were present we
think were present, say ten thousand years ago, and the
ones that were still present five hundred years ago, there's
not really a substantial difference in the range. Now there
would have been. There's no question there's evidence here and
there that there were reductions in numbers of particular species.
(37:53):
But as we talked last time, I mean, when I
was doing the research on this particular chapter, which is
out a wild New world. I can only find evidence
of one entire and complete extinction during that ten thousand
year period, which is course, is very different from the
pless scene that preceded it, and it's very different from
(38:16):
the five hundred years since then. So I was tasked
with trying to figure out, so why how did this happen?
How is it possible to do this? And I came
up with two or three explanations really that I relied
on and I think have some explanatory power. And one
(38:37):
of them has to do with the fact that North
America is colonized by people at a far later date
than much of the rest of the world, and in
a lot of the rest of the world, like in Eurasia,
for example, the human population reaches the point where it
becomes pretty difficult to live as hunters and gatherers because
(38:58):
the numbers of creatures are gradually being reduced, and so
at the end of the Pleististine that sort of stimulates
what we call the Neolithic revolution in the Old World,
the agricultural revolution, where you start relying a lot on
grown crops. People start living in towns rather than hunting
across the landscape, and they start domesticating a lot of
(39:21):
the animals that they had hunted, so hogs and sheep
and goats and cattle and horses and all get domesticated.
But because North America was settled a lot later, although
agriculture does get a start in North America about four
or five thousand years ago, it never reaches the kind
of epic level that it does in the Old World,
(39:43):
so that a lot of America is still inhabited by
populated by hunter gatherer groups. I mean, there's agriculture certainly
in the south and as far north as southern New England.
There's of course a big agricultural region in the Southwest
based on irrigated crops and Mexican cultivars, but a lot
(40:05):
of say the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains of the
Pacific northwest California, which has a very dense population of
Native people, they never become agricultural. And so what that
ultimately translates to is that the population of North America,
as far as we can tell, never grows beyond about
five million people, and that relatively low population obviously doesn't
(40:32):
put as much stress on wildlife populations as a larger
population would. Then I also came to the conclusion that
by not having domesticated animals and native people, I mean
they had obviously dogs and a lot of groups domesticated
wild turkeys, especially in the Southwest, because they were kind
(40:56):
of starving for protein, and turkeys as domesticated provided a
possibility for that. But it's kind of a strategy of
living that allows a lot of ecological functions to continue.
So there's no need to make war on predators. For example,
(41:18):
you don't have to go after wolves and coyotes and
lions and bears because you don't have domesticated herd animals
to protect the way old worlders did, So that provides
a kind of an ecological continuity I think that Europeans find.
Then the last thing that I dealt with was this distinction,
(41:41):
and it really becomes a distinction after Europeans ride in
how native people and native religions viewed their relationship with
other animals. They continued to think of themselves, and I
think this is a very old human idea. I think
it goes back beyond Neanderthals, maybe far back in our history.
We considered ourselves to be kin, coming to come from
(42:04):
the same sources, same origins as other creatures. And so
that kinship idea sort of with the idea that other
creatures were, they had families, they were they were just
like us. In fact, you could even some people could
even go back and forth from being bears to people.
(42:24):
And that sort of belief system about animals as being
keen is strikingly different from the one that Europeans bring
to bear, because they arrive with the idea that humans
are completely exceptional, We are above everything else, and all
the other creatures on Earth were placed here by a
deity for us to use, and so we stand in
(42:46):
one spot and everything else stands in a lower position.
And that distinction I think probably has some role to
play in trying to explain this. But as I said,
you have to operate from the premise that here's the evidence.
When Europeans arrived, the place looks pretty damned healthy. It
(43:07):
looks like it's got the pretty full complement for the
previous ten thousand years of all the animals and birds
and fishes that were there ten thousand years before.
Speaker 4 (43:21):
You just straight into a question I had. You kind
of invertently walked into a question I had, which was
I know that in North America there were dozens probably
hundreds of religions of some sort right belief systems around
a theme of animism. Right, if you go to Western Europe,
(43:50):
do you kind of said that you think of this,
But if you expand out, if you go to Western.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Europe back to some point, I don't know when.
Speaker 4 (43:58):
Was it that religions mirrored that there as well, or
was it a totally different belief system that made this
sort of primed them for like the Abrahamic religions meaningly Islam, Judaism, Christianity.
I mean, did they go from animism and thinking that
they were related to bears and that mountains had a
(44:22):
spirit and a personality into monotheism or do you think
that the path was more gradual and they just developed
a sort of different worldview that made Christianity eventually appealing.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yeah, well, I think I think it's more gradual, and
it is there is a progression from that, and there's
no doubt that not long ago in Western Europe fifteen
hundred years maybe certainly by for areas like say Scotland, Ireland,
outback regions of Germany and France, people are still you know,
(45:02):
the Druids are still considered to be They're not only
non Christian, but they're considered to be nature worshipers, and
so I mean, and that's seen years ago. Yeah, that's
still evident, you know, at a time when Christianity is
attempting to convert all these outback pockets of Europe. But
(45:25):
even by that point fifteen hundred years ago, say the Vikings,
for example, some of those Viking groups share this idea
that they are related still to deities that are found
in mountains and to various animals. But there's been a
progression already, and you can see it from this kind
(45:46):
of animistic religious tradition in the Greeks, because the Greeks
began about twenty five hundred years ago sort of steadily
moving from the idea of polytheistic animal or animal deities
and deities that are found in landscapes. Two human gods,
(46:12):
but they don't have a single one. They will have
they will have Demeter, for example, who becomes the goddess
of the crops, and they'll have Poseidon, and they'll have Artemis,
who is the goddess of the wild creatures and so.
But Artemis and Poseidon and Demeter are all in human form.
(46:34):
So there's been a progression from the idea that you
have a creature like say Coyote, who is a paleolithic
deity in North America who can stand on his hind
legs and may have opposable thumbs, but he also has
coyote snout, erect ears, he has coyote tail, So Coyote
(46:55):
is sort of in the process of doing the same
thing in North America, sort of becoming here. So the
Greeks do that so that their deities ultimately become human
like deities, and then ultimately, of course, in Judeo Christianity ideas,
there is a single narrow it down to a single
deity who lives in the sky rather than in a
(47:16):
mountain or in a population of animals.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
I think when I was looking at this episode, it's
it's an episode about a long period of time from
the place of scene extinctions up until first contact essentially,
and it treats it almost as a whole, and I
think that has a lot of explanatory power. But also
(47:46):
there's moments in it where you can drill down and say,
like Kahokia, you know, there are these stories of these
rise and fall of civilization, which on its own is
sort of this epic historical tale, right, even if we
don't have all the details. But I kind of wonder
(48:08):
how you think about that the big picture compared to
the small pictures, of what you gain by looking at
the big picture and what you lose without zeroing in
on these like sort of epic human stories.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Yeah, well, I mean that's obviously a great question. And
what I will say is that the episode here that
we're talking about is a highly distilled version of a
chapter in one of my books, which is about four
or five times longer than what we presented here in
(48:44):
the podcast. And even that comes from a book that
was in its entirely four hundred pages long. And I
realized that I could have easily written a two thousand
page book while I was working on this, And so
it becomes, you know, sort of a matter of all, right,
(49:07):
in terms of the book and the chapter particularly, and
to a certain extent of the podcast as well. How
many people are interested in reading a two thousand page book,
you know, So I've got to make the book four
hundred pages, and how many people are interested in listening
to a three and a half hour podcast. I've got
to make the podcast. It's got to be only thirty
(49:28):
five or forty minutes or something or an hour or
whatever we're doing.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
So, yeah, it's very human that you keep your audience
in mind.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Well, I mean yeah, I mean I started out as
a writer for magazines and I had editors who drilled
that into me when I was in my early twenties,
that you had to think about in the audience. And
so I've always kind of as a result of that,
I think I've never kind of gotten over the notion
of I got to think about, you know, the readers,
and I can't lay you know, an enormous kind of
(49:57):
thing on top, especially today where people you know are
not committed to the idea necessarily of reading.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
Oh yeah, no, I didn't. I didn't mean that to
be a question of like why didn't you do this
or why'd you leave this out? But it's more like
that story is comprehensible read at a certain level, right
and then and you gain a lot from the big, broad,
sweeping history. But yeah, there's also all of this drama
(50:27):
that sort of lies beneath the surface of that.
Speaker 1 (50:30):
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right, And there are so
the truth is, you know, with a story like that,
I mean that's an attempt to cover ten thousand years
in sort of one quick sweep, And I mean it
does give I think, some narrative power to it doing
(50:52):
it that way. But I would hope that for a
lot of people who are fascinated, for example, by whatever
one says about Kahokia or Choco, that they would dig deeper,
because yeah, the stories are phenomenal and they are far
richer than one can tell in an attempt to kind
(51:15):
of do a broad coverage.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
I got one last one for you.
Speaker 4 (51:22):
With your book while New World, where you do you
tell the story of wildlife in America and you start,
you know with the chicks Lube impact or like the
destruction of the dinosaurs, which happened just off the coast
of our you know, kind of the coast of our
current day country, and then you track all the way
(51:44):
through to the present, and then you kind of dabble
in the future for a minute. Like I'm not going
to go read one of those for every continent right now,
but I'm dying to read that for South America, Like
do there's the language barrier? But does that kind of
work exist?
Speaker 2 (52:04):
Like does what you do?
Speaker 4 (52:05):
Are you aware of your like a South American counterpart,
an Asian counterpart, an African counterpart? Who are who are
saying like? Who are doing that type of work in
those places?
Speaker 3 (52:19):
Or is there something particular about the North American story
that makes it nor Americans?
Speaker 2 (52:27):
Does that book exist about South America.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
I am not aware of a book like that existing
for South America. I mean, I think probably Australia may
come the closest to having work like that, But I
do think North America lends itself and probably South America
would too. But the Americas lend themselves to a particularly
(52:57):
powerful kind of story in this form because they're the
last parts, except for some of the islands out in
the oceans. They're the last parts of the Earth that
humans find and come to. And so by the time
we find the America's, I mean, we're pretty much who
we are now, But we had also been living forty
(53:21):
five thousand generations as hunters, and so we're really really
good at that. And the other thing, of course, that
I think makes it a powerful story is that it's
fairly evident. At least I think it's evident. I argue
that in Wild New World that one of the things
(53:41):
that propels our migration around the world is that we're
doing something that you know, all of us today still do.
We all love getting out to a spot where man, okay,
there's not a single other car at the trailhead. I'm
looking over this valley, I do not see a single
other campfire. We're the only ones. My buddies and I
the only ones that are going to be backpacking into
(54:02):
this mountain valley this weekend. And what I think people
were doing as they moved out of Africa into the
Middle East, into Europe, into Asia is they were propelled
constantly by looking for places that other humans hadn't been
because that implied to them that the resources were going
(54:23):
to be just rich and available, the animals were going
to be innocent of humans as hunters, I mean, And
it propelled us around the world. And it's probably one
of the reasons, you know, without us really being conscious
of it, we still tend to be fascinated with exploration
(54:44):
and with going to the Moon, going to the Mars,
going to you know, Titan Saturn's moons, or Europa one
of Jupiter's moons. I mean, we're still fascinated by this
idea of going into new places and as I said,
you know, I certainly experienced this all the time, and
I know I'm pretty sure probably you guys do as well.
(55:07):
This is something we always feel good about as man,
I'm looking out over this country and I don't see
evidence of anybody else in it.
Speaker 2 (55:15):
Yeah, well, Dan, thanks man. Look for to jumping into
the next episode.
Speaker 1 (55:19):
Thanks Steven Randall, appreciate it.
Native America existed for ten thousand years in a west
marked by many prior extinctions, but somehow found it possible
to preserve almost all the biological richness of the continent
until the arrival of Europeans. I'm Dan Flores, and this
is the American West, brought to you by velvet Buck.
(00:22):
Still in barrel. Velvet 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 ravens and coyotes.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
America.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Walking the edge of a sharp rimmed cliff in out
back Montana before sunrise, moving through a twilight of grays
and blacks and outlines, large graceful birds. Sandhill cranes are
fluting their strange, plisty scene cries in the pastel sky overhead.
(01:21):
But I'm focused on the lines of the topography in
front of me, especially the way the mesa I'm walking
narrows up ahead, seeing that my walking pace quickens. This
is a historic piece of ground, starting some two thousand
(01:42):
years in the past and continuing down to two hundred
years ago. It was the scene of frenzied, albeit sporadic
human activity. Like most historic places, there is something maddeningly
mute about the spot.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
It's why we often stand and gawk numbly in such places,
unable to connect to the events we're supposed to marvel over.
But this morning, I'm not going to be stymied by
lack of imagination. I'm here with a purpose, my intent
to experience at least some part of what a Buffalo
jump drive was all about. It was fully dark when
(02:20):
I arrived here an hour earlier, parked my car at
an interpretive sign, finished a cup of coffee, then slowly
worked through the boulders to the top of this mesa.
While I walked eastward to the luxuriant grassland of a
high meadow, the sky had gradually lightened. Now turning back
towards the car and the cliff I'd climbed in the dark,
(02:41):
I'm becoming caught up in what I tell myself are
echoes of the place. Pointing myself down the narrowing mesa
towards the far Rimrock, I start to jog. I'm running
a track that men and other animals have run many
times in the past, But in contrast to my lope
(03:03):
beneath the fluting cranes, then there would have been the
pounding thunder of sharp black hoofs cutting through the grass,
and the alarmed grunning of animals, their huge forms wrapped
in billowing clouds of dust. That must have made for
a ghostly stampede. Now I hear only my footfalls and
(03:24):
my breathing, But in the real thing, the air would
have been rent by the exultant shouts of the drivers,
urging on runners wearing the skins of wolves and red
coated bison calves leading the herd to its destiny. They're
costuming a ruse to fool buffalo cows into thinking that
wolves were selecting out defenseless young ones. Listening to the
(03:49):
rhythm of my feet, I wonder if the herd's noise
wouldn't have been so overwhelming, it would have morphed into silence,
adding a surreal quality to the ghostliness. The whole affair
would have commenced days earlier with a religious ceremony and
careful maneuvering of a bison herd in that high meadow
(04:09):
into position for a stampede. Then if all went well,
and it went well enough times in the past to
accumulate a bone layer five feet deep at the base
of the cliff. I'd climbed. The runners who led the
herd to the cliff edge would escape if they could,
by darting aside at the last moment, dodging the relentless
brown river of animals hurtling into space in a dream
(04:32):
of wild frozen action. Where I've begun my run is
a half mile back from the cliff, and soon enough
I crossed to descending benches and realize I am on
the point of no return in this bison jump. Get
the animals here and have them running, And the downhill
(04:53):
pitch steepened so quickly there would be no way for
the herd leaders either to stop or turn aside. I'm
running harder now, pulled faster by the angling slope, and
I registered that out in the valley, dawn color has arrived.
Chrome yellow light cast by the rising sun is lighting
(05:13):
the white cliffs on the far side of the river,
a scene of great beauty, one last soothing side of earth, perhaps,
as the lip of the plunge is scarcely one hundred
and twenty feet away. Now beyond that is windmilling motion
and the silence of forty feet of free space. Then
the jarring stop amongst the boulders. I slide to a
(05:38):
stop a few feet from the cliff edge and stand
panting for a few minutes, looking down on the slope below.
By modern standards, the scene would not have been pretty.
In seventeen ninety seven, the British trader Peter Fiddler described
such a concluding set piece. The young men killed the
crippled animals with arrows, bayonets tied upon them, the end
(06:00):
of a pole in etc. The hatchet is frequently used,
and it is shocking to see the poor animals thus
pin up without any way of escaping. However, pod like
their behavior as classic herd animals. All these bison were individuals,
of course, and that is the way they died. Slanting sunlight,
(06:22):
throwing morning shadows hundreds of feet long across the Madison
Valley of Montana, lights my face over the mountains. I
see a jet glending silver, a mobile diamond slicing through
the blue, Its motion fetching me back to my climb
down to the car, back to my commitments. But before
I start, I stand for a moment, thinking of the
(06:44):
bison that died among the boulders below. Humans drove buffalo
off cliffs in America for twelve thousand years, and despite
knowing something about it, I find it a shock to
be in this space where it happened, this close to
how it worked. I visited head smashed in jump in
Alberta and absorbed archaeologist friends accounts of Bonfire Shelter Jump
(07:09):
in the gray limestone canyons of the Pacos River in Texas.
Hearing at the visitor center in Canada that Indians carefully
utilized every part of the animals. Yet knowing that in
Texas the cliff at Bonfire Shelter is scorched hundreds of
feet high from the spontaneous combustion of an enormous, mangled
(07:31):
heap of unutilized bison Native hunters drove off the rim above.
Those two sides beg a big question, putting aside whatever
fantasies of the past we have, what kind of relationship
did humans in animals fashion over the one hundred centuries
of Native America that followed the Pleistocene, And if it
(07:53):
was different, more ecologically benign, or balanced than what came before,
and what came after then, why Clovisia the Beautiful ended
with the demise of elephants and the majority of America's
(08:14):
big animals. People were here, but most of the original
animals were not. The haunting stories of losses must have
lasted because having so many charismatic creatures disappear seems to
have shifted human behavior. The ten thousand years that followed
wasn't entirely extinction free, but thousands of years later, arriving
(08:38):
Old Worlders described the wild new world that greeted them
as a paradise of animals. The image of America as
an animal eaten out of prehistory has shaped the country's
sense of itself ever since. But was that actually the
reality of Native America? When nineteenth century ethnographers began to
(08:59):
assemble a lie linguistic map of Native America, the conclusion
anyone would draw is that over ten thousand years there
had been a tremendous movement of peoples around the continent.
Athabaskan speakers lived in interior Alaska, and also way down
in the Southwest. There were pools of Algonquin speakers in
(09:20):
New England, in the Ohio Valley, and in the foothills
of the Rocky Mountains. All this was in contrast to Australia,
for example, where aboriginal populations have stayed in place for
fifty thousand years. The American story implies significant experimentation with
different locales and ways of life. Some of those human
(09:42):
migrations may have been related to the resheffling of American
nature that took place in the echoes of the Pleisscene extinctions.
The biology of the conton was reinventing itself. The vegetation
was changing. Without ground slows to disperse their seeds, the
range of Joshua trees now began to contract, and without
(10:03):
mammoths succurbed them, honey mesquite began to spread. There were
so many missing animals that a remarkable number of ecological
niches either were vacant or newly filling. The ecological rebirth
was most dramatic in the western half of America. The
loss of mammoths, giant bison, horses, camels, ground sloths, direwolves,
(10:29):
short faced bears, scavenging birds, and a range of cat
predators opened niches at every level. In cases like wolves
and bears, there were ready replacement species, with direwolves now
extinct gray wolves and ancient American wolves emerged as the
primary caned predators, But with seventy percent of America's grazers gone,
(10:53):
niches for replacements were wide open with almost no competition.
A new small ball or bison, supplanted horses, mammoths, and
its huge bison ancestors. Within a few centuries, this new
dwarf bison grew into a biomass of animals that had
almost no analog anywhere else on Earth. Biologists now believe
(11:18):
modern bison are a classic example of anthropogenic selection, their
size and rapid reproduction shaped by human predation. Seals, sea otters,
and sea lions excepted, along with the one prong horn
species that survived to browse the forbes that camels once ate.
(11:38):
Most of the large animals west of the Mississippi were
Asian immigrants. In some parts of the planet, the warmer
climate that marked the end of the Ice Ages allowed
hard pressed humans to try out some new things. But
since humans had extensively settled America only thirteen thousand years
(11:58):
ago rather than forty five thousand, North America didn't yet
call for an agricultural revolution the way the Old World did.
America's human cultures segued to a stage where animals were
still of primary importance, but plants were taking on a
more significant role. Archaic is the term anthropologist and archaeologists
(12:22):
have long used for humans living this way, by which
they mean people existing as hunter gatherers. So, while the
Old World experimented with agriculture and domestication, in North America,
the hunting gathering lifestyle continued over vast spans of time
and diverse geographies all the way into modern history. Clearly,
(12:47):
we ancient hunters of animals surrendered our oldest LifeWay with reluctance.
America wasn't just in the throes of bio logical recreation.
Around eighty five hundred years ago, there was another potent change.
The warming cycle that ended the Last Ice Age didn't relent,
(13:10):
and America's climate swung into a hot, dry phase that
stayed in place for a mind blowing thirty seven hundred years.
This was the depths of the last entered Glacial, the
long slide out of the frozen Wisconsin Ice Age. Now,
the Earth's rotational wobble had the northern hemisphere slightly closer
(13:31):
to the Sun, and for almost forty centuries some parts
of America cooked, the Alta thermal, as it's called, came
close to turning large parts of the continent into a
true desert and a vacant one. Many species of animals
left for wetter settings. So did many human groups, like
other animals, shifting eastward and westward out of the interior. West,
(13:55):
the country where Clovis and folsome people thrived nearly emptied
of humans during the Alta thermal, But once the Alta
thermal subsided, generations of hunter gatherer people's returned to occupy
the same landscapes for centuries. That kind of close familiarity
gave them bodies of handed down ecological insights about how
(14:16):
to live in particular places. The feedbacks they read from
place based living enable humans to come up with a
striking epiphany, one allowing them to live well without using.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Up their world.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
The breakthrough, a key to success in Native America, sprang
from the realization that there was no longer a wild
new world empty of other people out there. Clovis like
expansion across a virtually uninhabited continent was over. Humans now
had to learn to deliberately carefully manage their own numbers
(14:55):
to avoid overshooting local resources when times turned bad. In
a variable world, good times inevitably give way to bad times.
That was an ancient lesson. Basing your numbers on the
good times could set you up for disaster. How did
these ancient Americans manage to pull off controlling their populations
(15:16):
so they could live well on local resources. Birth spacing
was one common strategy. Breastfeeding suppresses ovulation during a mother's
fertile years, preventing a rapid succession of pregnancies. Child mortality
was high among ancient humans anyway, but most hunter gatherers
practice forms of abortion to control their populations, and the
(15:40):
evidence is that as an ecological strategy it worked well.
But for the women who carried babies to term or
close to it, infanticide in particular, was a psychological burden. Ultimately,
many hunter gatherers sought to escape it, but the larger
equation was relentless. The hunting gathering economy was still the
(16:02):
predator's economy, and predators of whatever kind were always few
compared to prey. Hunting and gathering required space to roam
habitats for birds and mammals. Living the good life meant
you could not overburden the world with people. There was
one possibility to increase human numbers, but it meant giving
(16:25):
up much of humanity's ancient life and investing in an
entirely new economy. Around five thousand years ago, an agricultural
revolution similar to the one that swept the Old World
began to spread into North America from the south, the
selection and domestication of wild plants emerged where human populations
(16:47):
were densest and animal population's lowest, namely crowded Meso America.
Unknown traders and travelers first carried ideas about domestication northward
about four thousand years ago, and later the actual seed
stocks of Mexican agriculture. So over the ensuing millennia, crop
(17:08):
fields and farming towns began to dot Native America from
the south to southern New England, then along the river
valleys of the Midwest, and even in scattered locations in
the desert southwest. Once the agricultural transformation took root, populations
began to grow, and sometimes centralized governing bodies, usually religious ones,
(17:32):
organized towns into regional empires we know as Kahokia, Spiro Mounds, Hooho,
Kom and the Chaco and Empire, which I talked about
in our first podcast. All of these were very late
experiments in the last thousand years of Native America, but
in vast regions of America, agriculture never replaced hunting a gathering.
(17:57):
So wetted were Native people to the hunt that eat
even his agricultural towns emerged. Many of the farmers continued
to hunt, at least seasonally. Some returned exclusively to hunting
when circumstances allowed. What sort of human existence could be better?
(18:27):
All the evidence indicates that America's Native people lived immersed
in art, stories, and observations designed around the grand theme
of understanding themselves in a sometimes impenetrable world. A fundamental
way to probe those kinds of understandings is through stories
of gods. The oldest named characters in North American history,
(18:52):
in fact, are the deities who created the continent and
its life, and set in motion human life with all
of its victories and tragedy. Stories of these deities make
up the continent's oldest literature, with few exceptions. Ancient America,
and gods were animals, although the stories described some as
anthropomorphic animals. In Western America, for example, the deity who
(19:17):
acquired the universal epithet coyote stood upright on its legs
and brandished human hands, but had the fur, sharp nose,
erect ears, and the tale of a coyote. The deities
who made it into modern English as Coyote, Raven, spider Man,
Skeleton Man, Master Rabbit all shared a basic human nature
(19:41):
with their followers. Our vices, our lusts and our jealousies,
our selfishness and our narcissism resided in America's ancient gods.
There to writtness and there for good reason. More about
this in a later episode. But the deities not only
explained to listeners why North America was the kind of
(20:01):
world it was, they taught lessons, often uncomfortable or funny ones,
about human behavior and motives. They were gods, creators, also thieves, liars,
and lettres, classic professors of human nature. Coyote, who emerges
from the stories as a kind of world win biol,
(20:23):
physical force with an enormous appetite for pleasure and sensuality,
was one of the most widely known gods out of
ancient America and avatar for humans in the world, and
we'll devote much of an episode to him and his stories.
Like Raven, He is the un theseeen conductor of a
master plan set in motion by an aloof first cause.
(20:47):
This more knowable, approachable god was common in Native America,
and if there are mysteries in the world you've wondered about,
let Raven's adventures explain them. Raven one was yet another
merged animal human deity who told the clinkets I was
born before this world was known, uttering his monosyllabic go.
(21:12):
Raven proceeds to shape each animal in a slightly different
way and to name them all whale, seal, eagle, bear, caribou, beaver, salmon, sea, otter, land,
otter wolf. The birds he paints in bright colors because
he wants them to be pretty. There is one worrisome
(21:33):
thread that runs through Raven and Coyote stories, though in
early times the Inuit explained, Raven becomes concerned that humans
are becoming too numerous. Human villages are growing too large,
and subsequently their residents are killing too many animals. The
Inuit first man agrees and tells Raven, if the people
(21:56):
do not stop killing so many animals, they will kill
everything you've made. In Coyote's case, as both the yanas
of California and the Navajoes of the Southwest told the
story humans have to die because if they do not,
human overpopulation will result in the destruction of all the
(22:17):
animals and even of earth itself. In the early nineteen thirties,
a historian of religion named Joseph Epps Brown became fascinated
by Native religions. He interviewed traditional Lakota elders, including the
(22:39):
legendary black elk, and ultimately set down the ideas that
made up part of hunter gatherer knowledge about America's animals.
Brown's informants perceive the essential nature of animal species as
much through dreams and visions as through native science. Bears
ruled the underground, as bison did the surface, and eagles
(23:00):
the air. Certain animals illustrated particular traits useful to the
human Animal members of a wolf clan sought to invoke
the wolf's cooperative skills in hunting and killing. If a
young man on a vision quest heard a bull elk
bugle for cows in the crisp air of autumn, he
might then regard the elk as a totem whose potent
(23:22):
sexuality he could internalize. These elders also recalled a connection
involving energy flow between creatures. These were connections neither eighteenth
century Lenaean science or twenty first century genetic science would
ever think to link together. What the Lakotas called Umi
(23:43):
or yum was world wind power, the unrestrained residue of
the energy of the four winds. They remembered WorldWind power
as much sought, in part because possessing it made one
difficult to attack in battle, But only a small number
of special animals spiders, also, moths, dragonflies, and bears, elk
(24:06):
and bison possessed the world winds secret. As for bison,
seasonal winds coming from the north or south seemed part
of their mystery, bringing them or taking them away. A
south wind might produce herds that blanketed the landscape from
horizon to horizon, but they could entirely disappear, which led
(24:27):
to a widespread belief in Native America that bison had
their origins underground, and sometimes they returned there, as had
been true of our first hunting ancestors in Africa, true
of the Neanderthals, true of the Clovis people. Native ceremonial
lives centered on an ancient human desire to control nature,
(24:50):
but they did so primarily as part of a religious philosophy,
not a scientific one. Managing animals based on population modeling,
carrying capacity of landscapes are selective. Sustainable harvests, as modern
ecologists and biologists do, would have been incomprehensible because Native
(25:10):
cause effect explanations for why things happened relied on completely
different premises. The religions through which Native people understood animals were, however,
superb at apprehending the kinship between animals and humans. Crucial
in Native America was knowledge about how to influence animals
(25:33):
in a rim usually defined as supernatural, an essential part
of religion. A friend from my years in Montana, professor
Roslin Lapierre, has done the best insider account so far
of the invisible reality that was central to this ten
thousand year old world. Roslin's own Black people possessed what
(25:56):
she calls a powerful worldview that suggests, yes, the Blackfeet
desire to manipulate animals and nature is a deep seated
human impulse, available through the assistance of supernatural allies. The
degree of power, when possessed to call on those allies
determine how much you could make happen. Human beings could
(26:18):
become vectors of power from these supernatural realms if a
sacred being sought them out, are through a vision quest
or other effort to find a sympathetic animal ally, or
even by purchasing power from someone who already had it.
Another intriguing look at Native religious traditions with respect to
animals comes from the work of an anthropologist who lived
(26:41):
with the Athabaskan speaking Coyukon peoples of Alaska. The Coyucons
preserve an ideology with powerful echoes of how life in
the ten millennia span of Native America must have worked.
Keen observational naturalists with a highly refined knowledge of animal behavior,
the Coyukons traced their link with animals back to what
(27:04):
they called distant time, when animals were human and spoke
human languages. The deity animal was ever watching raven. Raven
rarely missed anything and was always alert to violations of
taboos about how to treat animals and respect them. Many
raven stories were about the bad luck that befell people
(27:27):
who transgressed against the animal world. Animals were critical to
a major life force, luck that could make or break
a person's life. Luck was an award from ever watching
raven as a result of correct behavior towards animals, and
the most correct behavior of all was treating them as kin.
(27:54):
Ten thousand years ago, the entire human population of planet
Earth numbered only about four million across all the Americas,
Humans then likely made up only a quarter of that number.
North America probably had barely five hundred thousand people, then
fewer than a single large city in our time. Agriculture
(28:18):
changed that, but because big parts of the continent were
unsuited to farming, and because farming was a new development,
America wasn't entirely remade by agriculture the way Europe or
Asia were. By five hundred years ago, the best guess
is that America north of Mexico had grown its population
(28:39):
to just under four million people. Four million people spread
across the landscape that in the twenty first century supports
four hundred million seems explanation enough for why humans and
wild animals coexisted well for so long in Native America.
That might be an argument that for hunting and gathering
(28:59):
and subsistence farming economies, four million people was just about
the carrying capacity of the American landscape. The effects accumulated.
Though across the final fifteen hundred years of Native America
before Old Worlders arrived, a cumulative total of one hundred
(29:19):
and fifty to two hundred million people lived out their
lives north of Mexico. America was no howling wilderness. It
was a long inhabited, lived in world. Humans are biological,
after all, and no species gets a free ride in nature.
In some American archaeological sites, animal remains show a significant
(29:41):
decline over time. The massive Emeryville Mound site on the
shore of San Francisco Bay portrays a steady decline in
the bones of sturgeon, salmon, deer, elk, and pronghorns, demonstrating
a drawdown of local wildlife as human populations grew. In
Native ca California, elk remains and many continental archaeological sites
(30:04):
are so scarce that some scientists suggest that elk numbers
must have been suppressed, and the almost certain cause was
human hunting. There was also at least one human caused
wildlife extinction in Native America. As humans spread around the world,
flightless birds were always particularly vulnerable, and the Pacific coasts
(30:26):
of California and Oregon, along with the Channel Islands held
one a flightless sea duck and the genus Chindites in
the past decade. Researchers dating the remains of these goose
sized ducks from six coastal sites concluded that humans began
killing them ten thousand years ago, just as the plies
(30:48):
to see and gave way to Native America. Wiping them
out was hardly the three century blicks creeds that took
out mammos or later passenger pigeons or bison, but by
twenty four hundred years ago, people had hunted Pacific flightless
sea ducks to extinction. Judging from the stories people preserved
(31:08):
of their cultural heroes. The most common environmental overreach, though,
was what the Inuit raven story feared over hunting brought
on by growing human numbers. Coyotes and ravens. America existed
for seventy five times longer than the United States has
(31:29):
so far, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a
history reaching beyond human memory would provoke a religious awe
from its human inhabitants. Native America's culture heroes taught that
the key to the animal human relationship was kinship. Animals
were people, They had families and societies, opinions and cultural memories.
(31:56):
Like people, they also possessed something essential to them, a
breath or a spirit that survived death. Respect came from
honoring that humans and animals were kin and acknowledging that
we and they could move between one another's cultures because
we sprang from the same source. This became the key
(32:17):
when because of some human hubrists that violated the arrangement,
the animals retaliated by withdrawing from human's presence, pleading with
bison elk dear to return and rebalance the world. Thus
became a focus of some of the grand ceremonies Native
peoples developed in North America. When Old World has arrived
(32:40):
in America five hundred years ago, Central and South America
held more than fifty million people, but in what is
now the United States and Canada, hunting and gathering culture
still prevailed across vast stretches, and here the human population
had not yet reached five million. With human numbers seemingly
(33:01):
so slight, five hundred generations of humans had physically transformed
North America to the native peoples. The continent was occupied,
settled its birds and reptiles and mammals, all intimately known
and considered ken. Even with fewer than five million inhabitants,
parts of America held large enough numbers of people that
(33:24):
wild animals weren't always abundant. But save one, all the
species that had survived the Pleiscenstine extinctions still existed. Beavers
continued to engineer a watery landscape, shore birds and ducks
filled the skies, and bears, wolves and other predators still
played their crucial roles in American ecologies. Even with thousands
(33:48):
of years of human harvest. Bison and passenger pigeons were
still among the most numerous species on Earth. But the
change that was coming was on a scale no one
could possibly fathomed. Since the Ice Age ebbed and northern
seas flooded Boringia, America's animals and humans had lived in
(34:08):
near total isolation from the rest of Earth. No one
on either side of the Atlantic had any inkling the
other existed, or that such biological isolation sat ready to
deliver one of the most profound tragedies in history when
the planet's human population finally rejoined after parting thousands of
(34:30):
generations earlier. The America of Clovis and Folsom and Choco
of bison and passenger pigeons confronted a staggering transformation, raven
and coyote would never be able to turn things back
to the way they had been.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Dan last time we talked about, you know, in the
nineteen seventies, they're being this very popular conception of native
people as being inherently environmentalist, and I think in a
lot of ways we've sort of moved past that. And
(35:31):
I think from a historical perspective, we recognize that not
all human actions on the landscape prior to European contact
were environmentally sustainable.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
But then in this.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Lecture you describe a long swath of time that does
appear to be relatively stable or sustainable, and I wonder,
not necessarily asking if it was sustainable, but more sort
of how you begin to untangle the contradictions there.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Well, I had to look for some explanations for what
appeared to be a fairly obvious premise, which is that
when people from the Old World arrive five hundred years ago,
they find a North American continent that seems to be
(36:29):
ecologically healthy, with you know, a pretty wide diversity of
animals and birds and fishes, And I mean we know
that to some extent, that description was based on a
kind of an ecological release of animals and birds and
(36:50):
other species that came about as a result of the
suppression of Indian population through this sort of, you know,
inadvertent introduction of Old World disease, and so the Indian
population drops from nearly five million, which is what it
was we think at about the time of contact, down
to about nine hundred thousand in what is now the
(37:11):
United States and Canada as a result of those disease epidemics.
And so a lot of the descriptions we get of
kind of what a marvelous eden of nature North America
was kind of based on that, on this rapid ecological release.
But on the other hand, when you sort of try
(37:31):
to survey the range of species that were present we
think were present, say ten thousand years ago, and the
ones that were still present five hundred years ago, there's
not really a substantial difference in the range. Now there
would have been. There's no question there's evidence here and
there that there were reductions in numbers of particular species.
(37:53):
But as we talked last time, I mean, when I
was doing the research on this particular chapter, which is
out a wild New world. I can only find evidence
of one entire and complete extinction during that ten thousand
year period, which is course, is very different from the
pless scene that preceded it, and it's very different from
(38:16):
the five hundred years since then. So I was tasked
with trying to figure out, so why how did this happen?
How is it possible to do this? And I came
up with two or three explanations really that I relied
on and I think have some explanatory power. And one
(38:37):
of them has to do with the fact that North
America is colonized by people at a far later date
than much of the rest of the world, and in
a lot of the rest of the world, like in Eurasia,
for example, the human population reaches the point where it
becomes pretty difficult to live as hunters and gatherers because
(38:58):
the numbers of creatures are gradually being reduced, and so
at the end of the Pleististine that sort of stimulates
what we call the Neolithic revolution in the Old World,
the agricultural revolution, where you start relying a lot on
grown crops. People start living in towns rather than hunting
across the landscape, and they start domesticating a lot of
(39:21):
the animals that they had hunted, so hogs and sheep
and goats and cattle and horses and all get domesticated.
But because North America was settled a lot later, although
agriculture does get a start in North America about four
or five thousand years ago, it never reaches the kind
of epic level that it does in the Old World,
(39:43):
so that a lot of America is still inhabited by
populated by hunter gatherer groups. I mean, there's agriculture certainly
in the south and as far north as southern New England.
There's of course a big agricultural region in the Southwest
based on irrigated crops and Mexican cultivars, but a lot
(40:05):
of say the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains of the
Pacific northwest California, which has a very dense population of
Native people, they never become agricultural. And so what that
ultimately translates to is that the population of North America,
as far as we can tell, never grows beyond about
five million people, and that relatively low population obviously doesn't
(40:32):
put as much stress on wildlife populations as a larger
population would. Then I also came to the conclusion that
by not having domesticated animals and native people, I mean
they had obviously dogs and a lot of groups domesticated
wild turkeys, especially in the Southwest, because they were kind
(40:56):
of starving for protein, and turkeys as domesticated provided a
possibility for that. But it's kind of a strategy of
living that allows a lot of ecological functions to continue.
So there's no need to make war on predators. For example,
(41:18):
you don't have to go after wolves and coyotes and
lions and bears because you don't have domesticated herd animals
to protect the way old worlders did, So that provides
a kind of an ecological continuity I think that Europeans find.
Then the last thing that I dealt with was this distinction,
(41:41):
and it really becomes a distinction after Europeans ride in
how native people and native religions viewed their relationship with
other animals. They continued to think of themselves, and I
think this is a very old human idea. I think
it goes back beyond Neanderthals, maybe far back in our history.
We considered ourselves to be kin, coming to come from
(42:04):
the same sources, same origins as other creatures. And so
that kinship idea sort of with the idea that other
creatures were, they had families, they were they were just
like us. In fact, you could even some people could
even go back and forth from being bears to people.
(42:24):
And that sort of belief system about animals as being
keen is strikingly different from the one that Europeans bring
to bear, because they arrive with the idea that humans
are completely exceptional, We are above everything else, and all
the other creatures on Earth were placed here by a
deity for us to use, and so we stand in
(42:46):
one spot and everything else stands in a lower position.
And that distinction I think probably has some role to
play in trying to explain this. But as I said,
you have to operate from the premise that here's the evidence.
When Europeans arrived, the place looks pretty damned healthy. It
(43:07):
looks like it's got the pretty full complement for the
previous ten thousand years of all the animals and birds
and fishes that were there ten thousand years before.
Speaker 4 (43:21):
You just straight into a question I had. You kind
of invertently walked into a question I had, which was
I know that in North America there were dozens probably
hundreds of religions of some sort right belief systems around
a theme of animism. Right, if you go to Western Europe,
(43:50):
do you kind of said that you think of this,
But if you expand out, if you go to Western.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Europe back to some point, I don't know when.
Speaker 4 (43:58):
Was it that religions mirrored that there as well, or
was it a totally different belief system that made this
sort of primed them for like the Abrahamic religions meaningly Islam, Judaism, Christianity.
I mean, did they go from animism and thinking that
they were related to bears and that mountains had a
(44:22):
spirit and a personality into monotheism or do you think
that the path was more gradual and they just developed
a sort of different worldview that made Christianity eventually appealing.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yeah, well, I think I think it's more gradual, and
it is there is a progression from that, and there's
no doubt that not long ago in Western Europe fifteen
hundred years maybe certainly by for areas like say Scotland, Ireland,
outback regions of Germany and France, people are still you know,
(45:02):
the Druids are still considered to be They're not only
non Christian, but they're considered to be nature worshipers, and
so I mean, and that's seen years ago. Yeah, that's
still evident, you know, at a time when Christianity is
attempting to convert all these outback pockets of Europe. But
(45:25):
even by that point fifteen hundred years ago, say the Vikings,
for example, some of those Viking groups share this idea
that they are related still to deities that are found
in mountains and to various animals. But there's been a
progression already, and you can see it from this kind
(45:46):
of animistic religious tradition in the Greeks, because the Greeks
began about twenty five hundred years ago sort of steadily
moving from the idea of polytheistic animal or animal deities
and deities that are found in landscapes. Two human gods,
(46:12):
but they don't have a single one. They will have
they will have Demeter, for example, who becomes the goddess
of the crops, and they'll have Poseidon, and they'll have Artemis,
who is the goddess of the wild creatures and so.
But Artemis and Poseidon and Demeter are all in human form.
(46:34):
So there's been a progression from the idea that you
have a creature like say Coyote, who is a paleolithic
deity in North America who can stand on his hind
legs and may have opposable thumbs, but he also has
coyote snout, erect ears, he has coyote tail, So Coyote
(46:55):
is sort of in the process of doing the same
thing in North America, sort of becoming here. So the
Greeks do that so that their deities ultimately become human
like deities, and then ultimately, of course, in Judeo Christianity ideas,
there is a single narrow it down to a single
deity who lives in the sky rather than in a
(47:16):
mountain or in a population of animals.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
I think when I was looking at this episode, it's
it's an episode about a long period of time from
the place of scene extinctions up until first contact essentially,
and it treats it almost as a whole, and I
think that has a lot of explanatory power. But also
(47:46):
there's moments in it where you can drill down and say,
like Kahokia, you know, there are these stories of these
rise and fall of civilization, which on its own is
sort of this epic historical tale, right, even if we
don't have all the details. But I kind of wonder
(48:08):
how you think about that the big picture compared to
the small pictures, of what you gain by looking at
the big picture and what you lose without zeroing in
on these like sort of epic human stories.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Yeah, well, I mean that's obviously a great question. And
what I will say is that the episode here that
we're talking about is a highly distilled version of a
chapter in one of my books, which is about four
or five times longer than what we presented here in
(48:44):
the podcast. And even that comes from a book that
was in its entirely four hundred pages long. And I
realized that I could have easily written a two thousand
page book while I was working on this, And so
it becomes, you know, sort of a matter of all, right,
(49:07):
in terms of the book and the chapter particularly, and
to a certain extent of the podcast as well. How
many people are interested in reading a two thousand page book,
you know, So I've got to make the book four
hundred pages, and how many people are interested in listening
to a three and a half hour podcast. I've got
to make the podcast. It's got to be only thirty
(49:28):
five or forty minutes or something or an hour or
whatever we're doing.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
So, yeah, it's very human that you keep your audience
in mind.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Well, I mean yeah, I mean I started out as
a writer for magazines and I had editors who drilled
that into me when I was in my early twenties,
that you had to think about in the audience. And
so I've always kind of as a result of that,
I think I've never kind of gotten over the notion
of I got to think about, you know, the readers,
and I can't lay you know, an enormous kind of
(49:57):
thing on top, especially today where people you know are
not committed to the idea necessarily of reading.
Speaker 3 (50:04):
Oh yeah, no, I didn't. I didn't mean that to
be a question of like why didn't you do this
or why'd you leave this out? But it's more like
that story is comprehensible read at a certain level, right
and then and you gain a lot from the big, broad,
sweeping history. But yeah, there's also all of this drama
(50:27):
that sort of lies beneath the surface of that.
Speaker 1 (50:30):
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right, And there are so
the truth is, you know, with a story like that,
I mean that's an attempt to cover ten thousand years
in sort of one quick sweep, And I mean it
does give I think, some narrative power to it doing
(50:52):
it that way. But I would hope that for a
lot of people who are fascinated, for example, by whatever
one says about Kahokia or Choco, that they would dig deeper,
because yeah, the stories are phenomenal and they are far
richer than one can tell in an attempt to kind
(51:15):
of do a broad coverage.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
I got one last one for you.
Speaker 4 (51:22):
With your book while New World, where you do you
tell the story of wildlife in America and you start,
you know with the chicks Lube impact or like the
destruction of the dinosaurs, which happened just off the coast
of our you know, kind of the coast of our
current day country, and then you track all the way
(51:44):
through to the present, and then you kind of dabble
in the future for a minute. Like I'm not going
to go read one of those for every continent right now,
but I'm dying to read that for South America, Like
do there's the language barrier? But does that kind of
work exist?
Speaker 2 (52:04):
Like does what you do?
Speaker 4 (52:05):
Are you aware of your like a South American counterpart,
an Asian counterpart, an African counterpart? Who are who are
saying like? Who are doing that type of work in
those places?
Speaker 3 (52:19):
Or is there something particular about the North American story
that makes it nor Americans?
Speaker 2 (52:27):
Does that book exist about South America.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
I am not aware of a book like that existing
for South America. I mean, I think probably Australia may
come the closest to having work like that, But I
do think North America lends itself and probably South America
would too. But the Americas lend themselves to a particularly
(52:57):
powerful kind of story in this form because they're the
last parts, except for some of the islands out in
the oceans. They're the last parts of the Earth that
humans find and come to. And so by the time
we find the America's, I mean, we're pretty much who
we are now, But we had also been living forty
(53:21):
five thousand generations as hunters, and so we're really really
good at that. And the other thing, of course, that
I think makes it a powerful story is that it's
fairly evident. At least I think it's evident. I argue
that in Wild New World that one of the things
(53:41):
that propels our migration around the world is that we're
doing something that you know, all of us today still do.
We all love getting out to a spot where man, okay,
there's not a single other car at the trailhead. I'm
looking over this valley, I do not see a single
other campfire. We're the only ones. My buddies and I
the only ones that are going to be backpacking into
(54:02):
this mountain valley this weekend. And what I think people
were doing as they moved out of Africa into the
Middle East, into Europe, into Asia is they were propelled
constantly by looking for places that other humans hadn't been
because that implied to them that the resources were going
(54:23):
to be just rich and available, the animals were going
to be innocent of humans as hunters, I mean, And
it propelled us around the world. And it's probably one
of the reasons, you know, without us really being conscious
of it, we still tend to be fascinated with exploration
(54:44):
and with going to the Moon, going to the Mars,
going to you know, Titan Saturn's moons, or Europa one
of Jupiter's moons. I mean, we're still fascinated by this
idea of going into new places and as I said,
you know, I certainly experienced this all the time, and
I know I'm pretty sure probably you guys do as well.
(55:07):
This is something we always feel good about as man,
I'm looking out over this country and I don't see
evidence of anybody else in it.
Speaker 2 (55:15):
Yeah, well, Dan, thanks man. Look for to jumping into
the next episode.
Speaker 1 (55:19):
Thanks Steven Randall, appreciate it.
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