Ep. 178: Hunting Mammoths

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is me eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
bug bitten in my case, underwear listening un podcast. You
can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
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(00:29):
where you stand with on X David J. Meltzer. You
know it's the writer named David Meltzer. That's gonna be disappointing.
There's a poem named David Meltzer. There's a medical doctor
named David Meltzers. If someone goes to if you go
into Google and you write David Meltzer a auto phills

(00:53):
David Meltzer anthropologist. Okay, so not David Meltzer, the wrestling writer. No,
a victory from me. Uh, this is gonna this is
gonna break some people's some dear friends of mine's hearts.
But you're the favorite. Yeah, we haven't even started yet.
You're the favorite guests that I've ever had on this show.

(01:13):
We can stop right now. I'm good you haven't started.
I uh um, I'm gonna flatter you a little bit.
You know how people will have in a in a home.
You'll have a coffee table right in your sign up
your living room, and people will position books there which
are a combination of what the person likes and how

(01:36):
the person likes to be perceived. I keep I rotate. Well,
there's there's a couple that aren't yours. I'm a little
sorry to hear that. We go ahead. Well it's the
photographer Um Hoffman. So I rotate Hoffman's book of photography
with I sage people in a New World with your

(01:57):
fulsome book. I rotate them and I and I put
them there, and it's meant to be like this is
my my this is like mikes. You know. My expression
of myself is that that I value David J. Melzer's books.
All I can say is, you've just earned yourself the
next two books. Really, sure you get them on the
house now, if they're gonna be, if they're gonna be

(02:17):
on the table, you got them. I almost brought them
to have you sign them. But they're but they're big
sons of bitching books. Yeah, I do tend to, right,
don't I know? Just they're they're they're they're full of
maps and color, imagery, everything you could want from everything.
I know when I finished with a book, I know nothing.
It's all just poured out onto the page, nothing left. No,
they're yeah, they're amazing, and you do. Um, we'll get

(02:38):
into what you're working. We haven't. We're telling people all this,
all them knowing what you do. But UM, a wonderful
job of of explaining really complicated things in a way
that don't They don't feel remotely dumbed down, but they're
still accessible and you still feel like you have like

(03:00):
you're getting a very scholarly understanding of something that would
be easy to trivialize. All of us in the business
have an obligation to speak to the public that both
pays for people like me and is interested in the
kinds of things that I'm lucky enough to do, and
so I really feel that obligation strongly. Uh to write

(03:23):
in good American that people can understand, which actually is
a hell of a lot harder than writing for my colleagues.
It's a whole lot easier just to use jargon because
I know everybody knows what that is. And then when
I have to explain something, especially in regard to some
of the high tech stuff that we're involved in now,
it's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun.

(03:44):
It's a lot of fun. I hope you keep at it.
Um not. I want to tell people. Let's say you're
at You're at a one of your faculty parties. We're
here at Southern Methodist Universe. You're at a faculty party.
You meet like an English professor, and you you meet
an English professor's husband, and he says, so, what do
you do? You say, so, I work on ice age

(04:09):
hunter gatherers. That's the sort of boring tagline. Dude, that's
that's titillating to me. Okay, So what follows is I
work on the people who are the first to come
into the America's Imagine what it must have been like
to look around one day and see no smoke on
the horizon, no freshly killed animals, no sign of any

(04:32):
other human being, and realize, oh, we're all alone here,
and this place is kind of looking different than where
we came from. And what's over the next hill, and
what's over the hill next to that. Imagine what it
must have been like to be that person, to be
in that group, to see a landscape teeming with animals

(04:54):
that some of which you've never seen before. And you
don't know which ones are going to feed you, which
ones are going to cure you. The plants I think
you raised in one of your books which ones are
going to hurt you? When which ones are going to
try and kill you? Exactly. You have a hypothetical scenario
and one of your books where you point out something
that's interesting is that people are coming from the north

(05:14):
and had been were thousands of years, perhaps separated from
tropical climates. And you're coming from the north and there
there's a guy, we don't know, a woman, a man,
whoever it was, that was like the first one to
encounter a rattlesnake. No awareness, no even ancestral awareness of
what that was. You kind of wonder though, Um, I mean,

(05:37):
you guys surely have encountered rattlesnakes in your travels. And
there is something that that that hits your reptilian brain
that says, oh, it's kind of an interesting noise, but
oh dear, that looks like that could be that could
be trouble. Um. But yeah, imagine that and imagine all
these these trees, these plants that you know you kind

(06:01):
of recognize them. I mean, you know what a tree
looks like for grind out loud, But what can that
do for you? And that's one of the really amazing
things about the peopling processes that after getting onto the
continent and being here for ten thousand years, there's virtually
not a single plant that Native Americans hadn't figured out.
It's medicinal properties, it's food properties, its use as tools.

(06:26):
I mean, it's really quite remarkable how folks learned about
this new land. And I suspect they had to learn
on the go, and they had to learn fairly quickly
because they were moving with remarkable speed, archaeologically breathtaking speed
across the continent. Uh, and they were able to figure
things out. Can you can you explain that? Well? You know,

(06:47):
let me ask you this, what's the best way if
we're gonna get in, if we want to do a
good fly over of the peopling of the New World,
where's the best way to begin? Because I have in
thinking about talking to you, there's all these things I
wanted you to explain. I wanted he was playing like
Clovis pre Clovis, sort of the moving like our best

(07:12):
guests of Well, here's nothing I want to explain. How
for a while the oldest accepted site in the New World,
correct me if I'm wrong. For a while, the oldest
one we knew about rock solid was down monta Verde
right in Chili. Still is, so what happened between that?

(07:35):
If they're coming from Siberia, what happened between Bryngia in Chili?
Where's all their stuff? Fair question? Absolutely, these are all
questions I want to ask you, So you tell me, like,
what's the best place to begin what we used to
think was the beginning or what we now think is
the beginning. Well, so it used to be tough because

(07:56):
with archaeological material, you're getting what's preserved, and it's a
crapshoot because we are talking about a relatively small population
on a vast continent. They're going to be flying below
archaeological radar for centuries, if not millennia. There's simply not
enough of them producing enough sites that the odds are

(08:19):
that you'll find them. Right, So we always knew that
the archaeological record, the oldest site you find is never
going to be the oldest site in America. I mean,
the odds are simply infinitestainally small. But now we've got
genetics and genomics, And what genetics and genomics can tell
us is the point at which ancestral Native Americans separated

(08:40):
from Northeast Asian populations and started to make their way here. Now,
the moment they split from their Asian cousins is not
necessarily the moment they headed to the Americas, but it
gives us a maximum age. And we now know based
on ancient danna and genomics. And this is work that's
been done by quite a number of but most especially

(09:01):
my colleague Eski Willerslev at the GeoGenetics Center in Copenhagen,
and our work has shown that around twenty three thousand
years ago twenty three you know, plus or minus a
thousand were archaeologists, right, Plus and minus a thousand years
is nothing does around twenty three thousand years ago, we
have that initial split. So we know that at some

(09:22):
point after that they're coming this way and there was
no longer exchange. Correct. We also know that, as you
just said, we've got Monte verd A and the dates
they're around fourteen thousand, seven hundred calibrated years. So we
now have a window within which we can real quick
explain for people what that means. Ah, okay, So radiocarbon
years radiocarbon dating. Basically, you're looking at the amount of

(09:45):
C four team that still resides in a sample after
a certain period of time. And we know the half life,
we know how long it takes to disintegrate in a sample. Yeah,
I'm gonna annoy you here. Okay, go even deeper the sun.
Like notice, tell peop real quick, because people get this
is stuff you here their whole lives. They never know
like what it means. So the sun comes down, it
hits our atmosphere. Yeah right, okay. So basically, nitrogen gets blasted,

(10:08):
turns into a stabile isotope of carbon, normal garden variety
carbon is carbon twelve, right, and then you've got this
isotope carbon four team. Carbon four team behaves just like
carbon twelve in that it joins up with oxygen forms.
CEO two gets absorbed into living matter. When it's no
longer being absorbed, when that organism dies, the amount of

(10:29):
CEO two begins to decay back to basically it's zeros out, okay,
and it decays at a known rate. It's called a
half life, and a half life of radio carbon is
about five thousand seven hundred and thirty years. So if
you've got half of the amount, not even looking at notes, No,
I'm just making it up. Um. If you've got half, um,

(10:52):
half the radio carbon is gone. Five thousand, seven thirty
years has elapsed, right, okay, So and it just halves halves, halves,
halves halves. Okay. Here's the problem. The very mechanism that
creates the C fourteen in the atmosphere in the first place,
which is the sun bombarding the upper atmosphere and and
creating all the C fourteen, It's varying. So at certain

(11:13):
points in the past more C fourteen is being produced.
At other points in the past, less C fourteen is
being produced. What that means is that when you get
a radio carbon date, you've got to say to yourself, Okay,
if this was a period when excess carbon was being
produced in the atmosphere, it's going to give me a
funky date. I've got to calibrate it. And how do

(11:34):
you calibrate it? Tree rings? Tree rings. When a tree
grows and you guys cut down trees, right, Um, you
see all the growth rings. Those growth rings come on
one year at a time. Okay. If you date an
individual growth ring on a tree that you've counted back,
and we now have a tree ring sequence that goes

(11:55):
back thirteen thousand years in change. I don't know the
exact number. If I were to look it up, I
could tell you. Uh, you date those individual rings, you
know that that ring should be eleven thousand, three and
forty eight years old, But your radio carbon date tells
you something else. That's how you know how much it's off, right,

(12:15):
And so we have these really elaborate calibration curves. There's
a there's a difference. So a radio carbon date of
ten thousand years is actually equivalent to a real year
date about eleven thousand seven d okay. And when you
and today we're speaking in count well let's speaking and

(12:39):
basically like we're you're arranging it into years as we
understand that exactly right, I'm gonna give you real years.
And the reason I'm doing that is a bit because
the estimates that we get from genetics and genomics are
in essentially real years, right, Okay, So we've got the
genetic estimates at twenty three, Monte Verde has a date

(12:59):
of four teen seven, fourteen thou seven hundred real years.
It's radio carbon years. Just to kind of finish up
with the example is twelve five, Okay, so you can
see what the discrepancy is between a radio carbon in
a real year. Okay. So in that window between twenty
three and fourteen seven, we know people showed up. Now

(13:21):
there's an issue there because that window is downtown. Last
glacial maximum, right, the coldest period of the last hundred
thousand years was between about twenty three thousand and nineteen
thousand years ago. That's when we had these massive ice
sheets covering basically Canada. Okay, two big ice sheets. One

(13:43):
that goes from Newfoundland and lapse up against the eastern
flank of the Rocky Mountains Lauren Tied ice sheet. It
goes as far south as Ohio, Central Ohio and Pennsylvania.
It goes as far north as well. It actually connects
up with an ice eat that makes it over to Greenland.
Is there a point when a glacier turns into an

(14:04):
ice sheet or absolutely um. It all starts with snow,
and it all starts with summer temperatures. And this was
figured out actually by a guy sitting in a prisoner
of war camp in World War One. He was a
he was a mathematician, and he understood that if you

(14:26):
play around with the amount of sunlight and heat hitting
the Earth, you can either grow a glacier or make
one go away. And the reason this happens is that UM,
and it has to do with a whole bunch of
sort of astronomical physics UM, where basically all the planets
are constantly getting jostled. We like to sort of think

(14:46):
of our Earth is is orbiting in a particular way,
and it's always been that way and it's never going
to change. And that's just not right right because we've
got all these other planets out there, so we've got
the gravitational effects of the Sun. But then there's Jupiter
parked a few orbits out there, and it's also affecting us.
So at times in the past, the northern hemisphere has

(15:07):
been closer or further away from the Sun, which meant
there's been more or less solar radiation hitting the surface.
When you reduce the amount of solar radiation hitting the
surface in um the summer, last year's winter snow doesn't melt,

(15:28):
The next year snow piles up, and if it doesn't
melt again, well you pile that up to a certain
depths or so, it compresses, it packs, it turns to ice,
and it starts to flow. Okay, it used to be
that there was about a three week window in the

(15:51):
far North between the last of the spring um freezing
temperatures and the first of the fall freeze. If you
close that two to three week window, you could start
another ice age. I mean you have to close it
sort of consistently for many, many years, right, um. But

(16:11):
that's how it works. And so we had this period
between twenty three thousand, nineteen thousand years ago where you
had these massive ice sheets that had built up starting
probably around twenty nine thirty thousand years ago and reached
their maximum extent between that twenty three and nineteen thousand,
covering up ground upon which now lives millions and millions

(16:35):
of Americans. There's a reason Minnesota's the land of ten
thousand lakes. Those are all glacial puddles, right. Uh. Seattle
had um an ice sheet basically in downtown Seattle. That's
why it's a great port. Right. The ice basically created
these fiords Chesapeake Bay wise, Chesapeake Bay a bay. Well,

(16:56):
the Susquehanna River had to because and you grow that
much ice on land, and we are talking about an
ice sheet that again east coast to the Rocky Mountains,
and then from the Rocky Mountains to the coast range
there was a second major ice sheet, the Quardier and
Ice sheet. You put that much ice on land, where's
all the water coming from the ocean, right, So all

(17:19):
of that precipitation, like oceans evaporate, precipitation clouds move over land,
falls its snow, and then it freezes. It doesn't get
back to the ocean. So when that happens, you're basically
locking up about five percent of the world's water. When
that happens, sea levels drop, and we know that sea
levels dropped, and this becomes part of the people in

(17:41):
America story. Right, sea levels drop about a hundred and
thirty meters, so you know, put it in defeat, uh
several hundred feet in depth. So you could walk from
Asia to America and you would have no idea that
you were walking from one hemisphere to another. And the

(18:02):
reason you would have no idea is that don't think
of the bearing Land bridge. Is this sort of skinny
rope bridge over the Amazon River somewhere. No, it's a
thousand miles and you know, you look around and it's
just a continent to you. That's that was one of
the things that really started to interest me in this
world a little bit, was when I started to get
that because in every every like American school child's imagination,

(18:26):
the Bearing Land Bridge is this thing where you like,
it's like Moses going through right the part of red seat,
Like you pack your ship up and it's this narrow
little thing. Everybody's like, okay, ready, and then you run
across it. You know, it's like you're you're sort of
impression of it. And then to go up at what's
now the would be the foot of it now and
just you're your Northwest Alaska and you stand there and

(18:48):
be like, you don't have any you don't understand where
the oceans sit. You're just out on this massive thing.
And that's what life on the Bearing the Bearing Land
Bridge wasn't any more than when you're in Michigan. You're
very aware of that you're on a peninsula. You're just
somewhere exactly look at the map, and you also put
it together. Right. No, that's a great analogy because it's
a scale issue. You know, humans are small and the

(19:10):
bearing land Bridge was really large, and you would have
had no idea. And in fact, you know, there's no
reason to think that people were only coming in one
direction either. You know, they could go east, they could
go west, And we're starting to see some of that
evidence genetically that these populations are moving back and forth
across the land Bridge. It was trafficking in humans, plants,

(19:30):
animals for thousands of years. Yeah, but you're right. But
there's a point you bring up in one of your
I think it's I say, people in the New World.
You bring up a thing and I mentioned I quote
you on this a lot, and I hope but I'm
not over emphasizing it. But you bring up a thing
where you said the movement of people. As people are

(19:54):
moving around, they're moving quickly. And I can't remember if
you say this that I added it to it. But
they're not like running from warfare necessarily, like they're they're
they're leaving there, They're leaving places they're sparsely populated, four
places that are sparsely or not populated at all. And
and you I do know this part. You to the

(20:16):
point where like you can't rule out some amount of curiosity, absolutely,
like someone like they're Maybe they weren't like saying, hey
we're headed America. We're headed of what will become America.
But they are saying they're thinking something or else. You
can't account for that they would have gone as far
as they went. Well, let's put it this way, when

(20:38):
when Europeans started sailing around the globe, did they find
a single habitable landmask that wasn't already inhabited. No, everywhere
they got to there was already somebody living there. Humans
have been moving for millions of years, but humans, modern humans,
anatomically modern humans, they've been moving all over the globe
for the last fifty thousand years. Um. Do we know

(21:02):
the exact motives? Not really, But I think curiosity had
to have something to do with it, right. I mean,
in any group, somebody's gonna say, hey, let's go over there. Uh,
but let's go over there also has a good um My,
My now deceased colleague lue Binford always used to say,

(21:23):
for hunter gatherers, insurance is not knowing what you have
right in front of you, it's knowing where you go next.
When things go bad right in front of you, there's
an incentive to look over that next hill, because especially
when things are okay, because that's when you have the
time and the resources and the teenage sons who are

(21:44):
just driving you insane, and you say, why don't you
go do a walk about and come back in a
month and tell us what you've found. I mean, one
of the really interesting things about where we do have
oral history records, like in the colonization of the Pacific
on these remote islands, and the civic inevitably it's younger brother.
It's like, get him out of the house. He's not

(22:05):
going to inherit anything anyway. Let's let him get into
boat and go someplace and and find new things. Uh.
And so you know there's an advantage to that. Humans
are also very good at surviving, and that was part
of that buying that insurance policy. Did you bring up
like do you address this or here to somewhere else
that there's that there's yet the idea of expansion and

(22:28):
you could say that you know, every hill I come over,
there's more game and right, and the wood sources are
down by the rivers and no one's burned it yet,
and it's just good living. But when you look at
the landscape in the ice sheets, you're talking about there
had people had to have come up with up against
what would be perceived as like a hostile environment perhaps

(22:50):
and then jumped it without question. And in fact, one
of the things that's really striking about the earliest archaeological
record that we have is that we've got stuff all
over the place in a very short period of time.
So we know people are moving in their tracking great distances,
but their distribution was broad, it was not deep. We
are not seeing every single spot being filled in. What

(23:13):
we're seeing is that these people were probably leap frogging
right because they are paying attention to what's over the
next hill. Um, and if it looks bad that way,
we'll go someplace else, go in another direction. So in fact,
they are moving, um, not necessarily in a nice wave,
expanding out, washing out across the continent. Um. They're looking

(23:37):
for sweet spots. They're looking for the places that the
hunting is good, the gathering is good. Um, it's a
decent place to spend the winter, those kinds of places.
I mean, they're all like us. They want to have comfort,
they want to have food, they want to have security.
If you're knowing what you now know, um, I don't
know why I would ask you two any other way,

(23:59):
but no, you now, now, if you imagine a colonizing
group wherever, whether it's in northwest Alaska, whether it's you know,
here in Texas, fur the South, a colonizing group, a
group that's not likely to be bumping up against people
who are already inhabiting lands ahead of them. How big
are the groups? So um, This is one of the

(24:21):
things that we've actually been spending a lot of time
trying to get a better handle on. We actually now
have again because of the genetics record, we're getting a
sense of how large these populations are. And uh, well,
let me answer it in a couple of ways. First off,
the direct answer to your question, you're probably going to disperse.

(24:43):
If a hundred of you come into the New World,
you're not going to stay together as a group of
a hundred and move all around. Why Why Why do
you assume that? Because it's well, a couple of things. One,
if disaster strikes, that's it, end of story. But to
one of them, it's important things for hunter gatherers is
information by dispersing your group, by sending out I don't

(25:07):
want to say pods, right, but by sending out smaller
units of say, kind of an extended family group. Why
don't you folks go that way, You go that way,
We'll go this way and never see each other again. No, no, no,
that's one of the really important things. It's not just
um when you're coming into a new world. Is one

(25:27):
of my colleagues that says, it's not just what to eat,
it's who to meet. At a certain point, your kids
are going to be a marriageable age and you're gonna
need to find mates for them. Okay. So one of
the things that we've been looking for for a very
long time, which um must be out there, but we
really haven't found a lot of them, are rendezvous sites

(25:48):
where folks, you know, half a dozen years down the road,
ten years down the road, they get together to exchange information,
to exchange mates, to talk to one another. I mean,
we're fundamentally social beings, right are you? Are you going
to weave into talking about the lynden Meyer site, Well,
we could get there. Lyndenmeyer is one of the very
don't need to I just know the idea of that

(26:10):
that when you say goodbye, you're not always just saying
goodbye for forever. Oh never, never, never never. But then
again this gets back to you're on a landscape that
nobody else's is around. And one of the things that
UM and again I keep harping on the genomics because
it's been so amazing in terms of telling us about
population history. At the end of their string, Neanderthals were

(26:31):
becoming fairly incestuous and in breeding a lot, and they
were doing that because their populations were shrinking and they
were scattered over a wide area. We now have this
latest genome that Eski's group published, that we published UM
just a few weeks back. One of the sites is
in remote northern Siberia, literally right on the Arctic Ocean. Uh.

(26:56):
These guys are out in literally it's the end of
the world. These are early modern humans. These are not
neander Tolls, and yet we see absolutely no sign of
inbreeding or anything like that. They are going long distance
to find mates. They are ensuring that they're keeping a
healthy gene pool. So yeah, that's very important for humans

(27:16):
on on an empty landscape, is that you maintain these connections.
So there's no understanding of a gene pool. Absolutely not.
But but humans but humans have but humans have a
tendency to they get that, they get that, um and
you know, the tendency to not unless cultures tend to
not want to be incestuous, unless they're the Royal family

(27:37):
of England. We'll strike that from the record keeping it in.
So the group size or the rendezvous site where you
want to get to. Okay, so you want a rendezvous site,
um that these are These are mobile hunter gatherers. They

(28:00):
can only carry so much, right, so this is not
like a potluck dinner where everybody brings a roast or something.
So you want to have a site that is easily located.
You want to have a site that's on an ecotone
where you've got several different ecological units that are sort
of coming together eco tone, and it's basically where ecological

(28:20):
um bioms ecotone ecological zones overlap. And when you have
overlapping zones, you've got greater richness because you've got all
the animals and plants from this area and all the
animals and plants from that area, and they're all in
the same spot in our in our vernack. There we
would say like we're a bunch of good ship comes
together something like that. You said so um, because that

(28:43):
way you've got because everybody's gonna be showing up and
they're gonna hang out there for what three weeks a month?
Who knows, right, Um, but that way there's a food source.
You want to have springs nearby, you want to have
water stone handy thing to have nearby as well, because
when you get together, you know, you're sitting around your
man stone tools. You're teaching the young. Oh hey, you know,

(29:03):
we've learned this new technique of manufacturing these particular tools.
Here's how you do it. And you brought up the
Lindenmeyer site. It's a really important site because it might
be one of the few instances that we have of
a genuine bona fide um rendezvous site. Aggregation site is
the fancy jargon term that we use rendezvous a lot better,

(29:24):
and with linden Meyer, it's fantastic because it's sitting in
a spot, a geological spot where you've got this very
nice exposure of a wall that has um white rock,
it's got red rock. It looks like a barber pole
and you can see it from twenty miles away. We
should point out that this site sits between Denver and

(29:45):
Fort Collins actually just north of for Collins, nor Collin,
about sixteen miles north of four Collins. And it's now
a what's the Colorado Program of Parks umlife, Yeah, um,
or it's not. It's not a private ranch anymore. No, no, no, no,
you can visit it. I visited it. I visited as

(30:07):
a private ranch. No you can. You can now visit it.
There's a little guest area there that you're kind of
stand and look out over the site. It's very cool. Yeah,
but you can see this thing if you just you know,
if you're if you're there ten thousand years ago, you
just tell your buddies, we'll meet you at that giant
rock barber pole. They didn't know what a barber pole was,
but we'll go with it, um, and we'll be there
in two years. Right. And it's at that katone where

(30:32):
there's a whole bunch of springs, there's a lot of animals,
there's good stone sources and the archaeology there. This is
fulsome age. So we're not going to go back to
our radio carbon dates. The radio carbon dates are about
ten thousand four. The calibrated ages are about twelve four
twelve three twelve four h twelve three thousand, twelve thousand,

(30:54):
three hundred. Um. We've got projectile points made out of
raw material that are coming from different points on the map.
So clearly it looks like the way is the Texas Panhandle, right.
It looks as though people are converging on that spot
from great distances, absolutely carrying with them toolstone. Yeah, because
one of the things that you're gonna do when you
meet up with people that you haven't seen in six years. UM.

(31:15):
One of the currencies, and I don't want to use
that term in any literal sense, but you say, hey,
you know I made I made these really lovely points
out of this really nice material that I have access
to down in you know, a hundred miles away. I'd
like you to have it, right, Um, it's it's a bond,
it's a gift. Now. Obviously, all sorts of other things
are being exchanged that we're never going to pick up archaeologically, um,

(31:39):
but certainly stone because the amount of effort that these
folks put in to making their stone was well beyond
the necessities of the weapon reef for the hunt we're
So here's another problem. I'm still stacked u with things
I wanted to tell people about we haven't got to

(32:00):
I want to get to that. You can write it now.
We haven't got to what the world looked like then
the critters running around? What was happening to those critters? Extinction?
Yeah okay? Um, and the diagnostic qualities of their spear
points projectile points. All right, got it? Got it? Okay.

(32:24):
Quick question about the Lindenmeyer site. Does it does it
fit the bill of the perfect like katone? Oh? Absolutely, yeah.
You go there and you're like, man year round this
place to be bitch and I could give them see
your back planes to your front Oh yeah, no, you
you just it's a great place, with the exception of
the rattlesnakes, and they were they were they used they

(32:45):
eight turtles and rattlesnakes and stuff at the site. Then
the camel does there are camel bones? There's camel bones there,
but they're they're archaeological association is questionable. It was there
was a bison kill there, that were at least bison
that were killed there. Um, and turtles. I would I

(33:05):
would be surprised if they didn't remember. Yeah, I think
that this is what I'm that you have whatever is
happening in the years that they're not camping there. I
mean that a rabbit dies whatever. You turn up with
bones and it's probably hard to unless you see knife marks,
it's hard to know that. That's. Actually one of the
challenges when you're excavating a site is that um all

(33:27):
sorts of extraneous things end up in a site, and
sometimes those extraneous things are rodents um. And you've got
to decide, Okay, I've got a bunch of dead bison here.
So when we excavated the Fulsome site, we had a
bunch of dead bison, but we also had small mammal remains.
And the question is where they also eating the small mammals. Well,
you look to see is there evidence that they've been butchered?

(33:50):
You know, can you see cut marks on the bone? Uh?
Is there evidence that they were burned? Well, if the
bones were burned, where they burned because the rodent got
too close to the fire um? Or or was it
actually cooked um. So sometimes it's difficult to decide whether
species in an archaeological site were prey or just background noise. UM.

(34:12):
And in the case of Falsome, it was pretty obvious
that those bison were prey because well, we've got the
cut marks on the inside of the jaws where the
tongues were cut out, probably right at the moment to
kill tongue being a delicacy, not to me. What are
the what are the cut mark What are the cut marks? Oh?
From the stone tools that sliced the attachment of the

(34:33):
tongue and you can actually see on the inside of
the mandible. Uh, slices. We can go off to my
lab after this and I'll show them to you. I've
got them in the lab. Really, I've seen the photos
of them. Oh. Yeah, no, I got the real thing. Um,
did they do it the same way every time? Like
they were good at it? Oh? I assume. So, I
mean people when you look at um, planes, bison hunters. Uh.
Certainly in the in the more recent groups, tongue is

(34:57):
a delicacy and that was one of the first things
that went at a at a bison kill eat it tongue. Yeah,
like I say, not for me, I understand. I don't know.
I don't like lungs, I don't like brains. Tongues. Okay,
so what did it look like? Alright, imagine this, You've

(35:17):
you've made your way over from Siberia into Alaska. You
don't actually know that, but you're there and you're looking,
and what you notice is there's all these birds and
they're flying off in a different They're flying off in
a direction, and you're thinking to yourself, well, all I
see is ice, and maybe there's a little bit of

(35:38):
margin along that Pacific coast. Those birds are heading in
that direction. That tells me that there must be something
down there. And this gets to the question you were
asking about earlier. Are there places that people don't want
to go? Well, getting from Alaska down to the lower
forty eight in those days would have been a challenge, right,
because you've got two options. One is that you come

(36:02):
down the Pacific coast and there you're dealing with ice
that is calving off into the sea. Um, it's going
to have outlet channels coming off of these ice fields
that are gonna be choked with sediment. You've got to
cross these things. You've got to work your way around
these ice sheets. Um. And there may not be a

(36:25):
whole lot of food resources. But that that route south
actually opens pretty early. That route south is opened by
around sixteen thousand years ago. So you remember now let's
go back to we've got that window between twenty three
thousand and fourteen seven. If that route south from Alaska
opens at sixteen that's pretty good timing free relatively ice free.

(36:51):
You're gonna have to wait another probably several thousand years
before that interior. So there's another route south in that
route south opens when the ice sheets that basically met
at the crest of the Rockies start to melt back,
they start to retreat, So the one that sort of
spread out from around Hudson Bay heads back east. The

(37:14):
other one starts to work its way down the west
slope of the Rockies. And now you've got what's called
the ice free corridor opening between them. We now know, however,
that that ice free corridor and this was environmental ancient DNA.
This is DNA pulled out of sediment in a lake,
in a lake that was at a pinch point right

(37:36):
in the dead center of this ice free corridor. And
let me see if I can create a mental picture
for everybody. You've got a you've got two massive ice
sheets butting one another. As they start to pull back,
they open at the northern end and at the southern
end like a coat that has a zipper that goes
both ways, okay, and so if you you you raise

(37:58):
your lower zipper and you lower your upper zipper, they're
going to meet in the middle. And that's gonna be
the last place that opens up where approximately like was
that that pinch point on the continent. So we're in
um at about fifty six degrees north in Alberta. It's
in the Peace River drainage for those of the folks

(38:18):
that have Google Maps want to kind of check it out,
and those lakes. We cord the sediment at the base
of the lake and you can recover DNA from all
the animals and plants that were around that area and
right it about twelve in a in a dust like
sediment form. It's mud. Yeah, you're not finding you're not

(38:40):
tapping into bones and stuff. No, no, no, it's amazing
you can find out um. And actually this is really
going to revolutionize our our understanding of these extinct fauna,
which I'm gonna get to in a moment, because you
can see them even if their bones aren't there. It's
just wild. And what we found in this particular core

(39:02):
was right around twelve thousand, six hundred boom. You've got mammoth,
you've got bison, you've got moose, you've got some species
of fish. There's a seahawk that ends up it's DNA
ends up in this lake. Now, well that's happening right
at about twelve six. So what that tells you if

(39:24):
you prior to that, not not much is going on exactly,
so that that corridor actually physically opens probably several thousand
years earlier. But because you've still got two ice sheets
parked nearby, nothing's growing there and it takes a while
for it to get you know, you've got to get
the grass there, you've got to get the plants growing,
and the animals are going to follow. And that was
a study that we did. But a study that Beth

(39:46):
Shapiro's group did, she's fantastic and and her studies showed
that bison that were separated by these ice sheets during
the ice Age, so you had a northern herd in
a southern herd, they get together around thirteen thousand years ago.
So her dates are thirteen thousand, ours are about twelve six.

(40:06):
So that's pretty consistent. That's pretty consistently telling you that
that passageway opens around thousand plus or minus I mean,
while you already have people down in South America exactly exactly,
so that tells you people might have been using that corridor,
but they weren't the first ones there. And in fact,
the really interesting story is is that that corridor was used,

(40:28):
but it wasn't by groups going southbound. It was by
groups going northbound. They were heading back up to Alaska.
We have archaeological evidence that and it's based on these
kind of distinctive kinds of projectile points that that we
see and that's it's indeed on that list. Uh that
is telling us that, you know, the movement in that

(40:51):
corridor is principally on the north bound lane, perhaps not
perhaps not intent like not like, man, let's go back
up north, because there are probably people who have been
that had been for hundreds of years to the south exactly.
But this gets back to those bison. Right at the

(41:13):
end of the ice age, you've got a H. Dale Guthrie,
well known, remarkable University of Alaska scientist paleocologist. Dale called
it the Great Bison Belt. At the end of the
ice Age, you could walk from Texas to well Mike,
Kansas site on the north slope of Alaska, and you'd

(41:35):
be on grass the entire time. If you're living in
Montana eleven thousand years ago. I'm sorry, I'm in radio
carbon um old school. Do you think in radio carbon?
I think in radio carbon, I always have to pause
and get it into calibrated. You're like someone like you're
like someone from Europe who's talking to Americans, and they're

(41:57):
like they do They're like, let me think, uh yeah,
x feet ten ft. Well, and here's the issue for
me on that, and that is that calibrations have changed
over the years. So the first calibration, okay, it gave
us one answer, and then when the next calibration set
came out five years later, thou wasn't eleven seven anymore.

(42:17):
It was eleven five. And so I'm thinking, Okay, when
you guys get that settled, I'll start using calibrated all
the time. But until then, radio carbon doesn't change over
the years, these dates, don't. Do you talk to your
colleagues and radio carbon. It depends what I'm talking to.
If I'm talking to a geneticist, I've got to go calibrated.
If I'm talking to a geologist, depends what kind of geologist.
I'll go calibrated if I have. Do you guys identify

(42:38):
each other? Oh, it's a signal? Yeah, No, you tuck
on your ear so you don't ask. Yeah, yeah, you know.
You don't want to embarrass somebody by asking on that.
That's right, Yeah, I see fourteen radar goes off. Um
what were we talking about? Oh? Right, So what does
the world look like? Okay, so you get into northern

(43:00):
North America and um, it looks a whole lot different
than it does today. You've got this vast landscape opening
up before you. You've got aircraft carriers of the animal
kingdom wandering past. Right, You've seen mammoth before, but these
mammoths don't quite look like the ones that you've been

(43:20):
seeing in Alaska. They're slightly different. You've got large predators
on the landscape. Um, you've got a smile it on Faytalis,
which is the best scientific name ever devised. It's the
deadly claw, It's the saber tooth cat. You've got Arctotis Simus,
the giant short faced bear. And I had a TV

(43:46):
role once where I started with an animated Arctotis Simus.
My kids, I lost all credibility with them. Even with them.
Look that's on TV with a cartoon bear. Not my
best moment. Um and thirty eight genera altogether that are
on their way to extinction. Now, some of them were

(44:07):
keep keep going with the list, because like multiple species
of camel ITTs, camels, horses, tapers, peckery's um of hunter
pound beaver. Oh yeah, kind of kind of like a beaver,
kind of like a beaver. Yeah. Um. And then you
had my favorite was the um the glyptodont, which was
basically I think submersible um Volkswagen with an armored tail.

(44:33):
And you've got a cliptod on it's about that big
h You've got um giant ground slots, four genera of
them that way three four tons uh. And of course
you've got multiple species of elephant. Uh. It's a spectacular thing.
And the thing that had always struck people was it

(44:57):
looked as though they all went extinct at the same
moment in time. Now, if you're going to have thirty
eight different genera of animals going extinct, explain genera people. Ah.
So that goes back to the Lenaean hierarchy that you
may have remembered from high school biology. Um, species, genus,

(45:20):
family all that. Uh and genus uh yeah, um, it's
it's a word. There's a word that you use as
an there's a pnemonic. Yeah, but King Philip sits on yeah. Uh.
And so genera is simply the plural of genus. Okay,

(45:43):
So you've got thirty eight genera. They all appear to
have gone extinct simultaneously. And you think as many people
did define simultaneously, I mean on Tuesday, right, I mean, well, no,
that's the issue is that people thought that they all
just died at the same geological moment. Now, a geological moment,
you know, plus or minus a hundred years. Okay, but
that's really fast. Oh they thought it was plus or

(46:04):
minus a hundred years. Um, well, actually three hundred years.
I was exaggerating. But still that's still oh no question, No, yeah,
that's that's that's a that's a lot of narrow, mighty
narrow chunk of time. Well, and especially if you're talking
anywhere from a hundred to two hundred million animals. Yeah, okay,
So can climate do that? Can climate wipe out an

(46:26):
entire well literally a hemisphere? Because you had thirty eight
genera in North America and fifty two in South America
so extinct. Could climate have done all that simultaneously, given
that you were dealing with animals that live in arid
and semi art environments, animals that live in the forest,
animals that live as hurt animals, animals that have basically

(46:47):
live isolated lives in the woods. Umfer absolutely very different physiology,
adaptation habitats. Can climate a single climate change wipe them
all out? And the answer is, well, it's kind of
hard to aim. But here's the thing. This is like
a this is a where the logic a little bit
falls apartners It didn't wipe them all out. Chipmunks were here.

(47:08):
There's chipmunks. You know, it's like an annoyance of me
when people say an ice age relic, So like we're
ice age relics, raccoons or ice age relics, mice or
ice age relics. And and actually a number of those
small rodents are still responding to recent climate changes from
the last ice age. No, but see, this is this
is where this needs to go. Everything died down to

(47:29):
the size of a bison. Yeah, no, except for the
spruce tree that also went extinct, and the snakes that
went extinct, and Oh yeah, No, I shouldn't say down
to like and then then the end of there. But
I mean there were many animals that were bigger than that.
We'll see this is this is where we're going. Because
all of these animals thought to have gone extinct simultaneously,

(47:50):
it couldn't have been climate. Therefore it had to be people.
It had to be fast moving hunters blasting out across
the contin Blitz Creek, the overkill hypothesis, all that nutting
this right, you've got a bunch of people are gonna
call that? Not now, a bunch of people with sharp
sticks and pointy rocks at the end are going to
wipe out a hundred million animals in the space of

(48:11):
several hundred years. Um well, what we've what we've the
end of a Rambo movie. Yeah, Adrian, sorry, wrong movie.
Um At, what we've now realized is that those thirty
eight genera didn't all go extinct simultaneously. So immediately that
takes the pressure off of finding a single cause. Okay,

(48:36):
so now we can say, well, what's happening at the
end of the Ice Age? See, there's always been this
confluence of potential causes. The end of the Ice Age
brings people into the Americas and animals go extinct, and
so the assumption always was, well, Okay, people come in,
animals go extinct. They had to be related. Well, no,
maybe they're both related to that larger trigger, which is

(48:59):
the end of the ice age. That's an interesting point.
Rather than one being a symptom of the other, there
are symptoms of the same thing. And what we now
know is that some of these animals were probably gone
twenty thousand years ago, long before people show up, and
in fact, the majority of those thirty eight genera we
don't have any evidence that they were around when people

(49:21):
got here, so they've all disappeared, so there's no association.
So we do have evidence that people hunted some of
these animals. There are a grand total of fifteen fifteen
sites in which we have reasonably secure evidence that people
prayed on mammoth. There's about a dozen of those sites.

(49:43):
Masted on. It's someone that's pretty iron clad, like projectile
points stuck in its skull. Still no question mammoth mastered
on horse and camel. Mammoth masthed on horse, camel and
gampath here, so we've got it's it's another l pant
it's a it's a sort of um more southern um

(50:04):
elephant that is related to mammoth mastodon. They're all in
the Proposidian family. Okay, so so tell me the ones again.
Mammoth mastodon, gampathyre, horse, camel five Now, no kill site
of a saber tooth. No, no hemia, kenya kills, No
camel kills, no horse kills, ground cloth no, yeah, no

(50:27):
ecliptodont kills. Yeah. But that's the thing, is that stuff none.
I I never read about him. I never thought about it.
I never thought about the omissions. If you're gonna yeah that.
And that's the key thing is that people always point
to mammoth kills. Well, yeah, okay, so somebody killed an elephant,
but you've still got another hundred million animals you gotta
get rid of, and you've got another thirty seven genera
that you've got to kill off. But here's the other thing.

(50:48):
When you look at the extinctions process in isolation, you've
got thirty eight large animals that go extinct. Well, there's
nine large animals that are still around today, moose, cariboo,
must cox. You know, things that you guys have probably
hunted over the years, those are megafauna in that definition.
But more importantly, not only do we have these nine

(51:09):
genera that survive, we've also got other genera that go
extinct that are not megafauna. And in fact, even one
of the megafauna is the astaland rabbit. The astland rabbit
was the size of a bunny. There's no way that's
a megafauna. But it went extinct, right, So how do
you explain that they absolutely how do you explain why
bison didn't go extinct? So here we have thirty eight genera, Oh,

(51:33):
no question, right, And we've got thirty eight genera for
which we have virtually no evidence of human hunting and predations.
Oh yeah, And and bison get hunted for eleven twelve
thirteen thousand years and in mass kills, right, I mean
there are single kills of two hundred animals and bison.
I mean you can still order it ted Turner's Montana Restaurant,

(51:57):
Montana Grill, Montana Grill, and it's it's really good stuff. Right. Uh.
So here we have intensive hunting of an animal for
eleven twelve thousand years, and they don't go extinct, virtually
no evidence of any hunting of any of these thirty
eight genera and they do go extinct. Why do we
think humans were responsible for that? Okay, but when you
were a younger man, not that your old man. Now,
when you were a younger man, were you and uh,

(52:21):
what's what I'm trying to look for an apostle. Were
you a believer in were you a blitz Creek hypothesis? Man,
your history isn't tarnished by blitz Creak hupp I liked
it because of how tidy it was. Oh well, that's
why a lot of people liked it. And in fact,
we're like, okay, cool, Now let's move on to the
next question. Because no, I mean, I do archaeology, and

(52:43):
I know how many sites killed sites there are. I
just I never bought it because the evidence wasn't there.
And people love people love the idea, and nothing they
liked about the idea, and this is gonna take us
way astray, and don't you don't need even pursue this thought.
I think one of the reasons people liked about it
is because when you look at other when you look
at examples of human cause environmental destruction, it's nice to

(53:07):
get It's nice you look at all these horrible things
are going on. Now, it's nice to be like, this
is nothing. Those those people, but the ancestors of the the
Native Americans, they were horrible. They killed everything off. Therefore,
we should really give ourselves a pat on the back
for not being so destructive. Um, I think there's a
little bit of that at play. There's a lot of that.
And know that this is probably way outside of your no, no, no.

(53:29):
In two thousand three, Don Grayson and I wrote a
paper in which we said one of the things that
made the overkill hypothesis attractive was in the nineteen sixties.
It came out really in a big way in the
nineteen sixties when everybody was all about Earth Day and
important things like that, and they used it as a
as a homily, as a lesson of look at all
the horrible things humans have done. Well, wait a minute,
this is one thing humans didn't do. Right. They are

(53:51):
not guilty of murdering the place to see, right, So
you're absolutely right. I mean, this is something that people
were using for and that the evidence didn't warrant being
used in that way. In the tidiness, and because it's
so baffling, it's nice, like, you know, when you're trying
to comprehend infinity, like in space. It's comforting if someone

(54:14):
was say like, oh, no, it does end, that ends
there's a wall. Yeah yeah, and then you'd be like, well,
what's past the wall? It would be nice to just
have to be able to stop thinking about it. Yeah. No,
I've seen men in black I know, you know at
the end where they and everything there's a wall in there. Yeah. No, absolutely.
It was a tidy explanation, but a wrong one, and

(54:34):
a badly wrong one. So how broad was for how many? Okay,
is there is there sort of I know that species
beginning to end all the time, Like, there's things right,
we're creating them, not we. Evolution is happening, yeah, the
earth is whatever. You're producing things and things are dying.

(54:55):
If you were going to sort of put some brackets
around this mass extinction, where do the brackets set? Well,
it does, knowing that there's that it's not hard edged,
right the edges are yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I
mean the process was probably starting um as the last
glacial maximum was beginning. Okay, so some of them are

(55:16):
disappearing really early on, and some of them are in
fact making it up until twelve thousand years ago, eleven
thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago. It's smeared over time.
It's smeared over time. Why wasn't it happening during the
other cycles. Well, now that's that's the gotcha question that
I always get. So I give a talk was trying
to do, but I'm I'm glad you did. In fact,

(55:37):
you can phrase it as I got your question. I
give a talk about plisuscene extinctions, and I give all
the evidence as to why humans weren't blamed. In Inevitably,
somebody raises her hand at the end says, what about
what about previous? Right? So I make the point that
there's all sorts of climate changes that are happening at
different levels that would have impacted different different animals in

(56:01):
different ways at different times, and so on and so forth.
So we really need to get a better understanding of
how climate change affected individual species rather than treat everything
is a block. It was alive when extinct. Let's try
and figure out what was it about glyptodonts that they
couldn't handle at the end of the Palistocene. So I
do all this well, and then here's the gotcha. Come around.
I know you, Yeah, what was it about those? Or

(56:24):
take something else like a mammoth. I don't know. I
don't know. They're extinct animals, and because we don't know
their physiology, their adaptation, we know something about their habitats.
But here's where we're going to get past the impast
We're gonna get past the impast with ancient DNA because
now we're sequencing their their genomes and we know now well,

(56:46):
for some species, we know now that their genetic diversity
was collapsing towards the end of the Palistocene. We know
now that their populations were collapsing towards the end of
the Palistocene. We're still not entirely sure why this is happening,
but it has nothing to do with people, because it's
happening pre people. Okay, so we are going to start

(57:07):
to get those answers. This is a hundred and fifty
year old question that people have been struggling with. I mean,
Charles Lyell, the British geologist who was here in the
eighteen forties, wrote about this saying, you know, why do
all these big animals go extinct? We're going to have
an answer in the next couple of decades, I would predict, man,
I don't want to do this. It's not a gotcha.

(57:28):
You ask me the gotcha question, but it's not. It's
not meant to be like a bad gotcha? What about?
What about? What about? Right? What about? This is? What
about is m what about? I don't want to get
two sidetracked here. But when when they were laying who
was the guy that laid out the famous he published
blitz Creek hypothesis. Wonderful guy, the terrific guy. When it

(57:49):
was so you don't have animosity? Oh no, no, I
liked Paul when it was laid out. There were examples
like Rangle Island in this Okay, Rangle Island, the Bearing
Sea held on to him until four thousand years ago.
And it just so happens that mugs hadn't showed up.

(58:09):
They still went extinct. They weren't extinct before people ever
made it there. I thought it was like contemporary people
eventually did. In fact, there's some really interesting research that
um Well Best Shapiro and Russ Graham were just involved
in on St. Paul's Island, um where basically they showed that, uh,
these these mammoths were surviving past the end of the

(58:30):
ice age. Um, they were shrinking because basically they had
the shrinking, shrinking body size. Yeah, there simply wasn't enough
to support them. Sea levels were coming up, the island
was getting smaller, um, they were running out of fresh water.
There were all sorts of things, and basically they ultimately vanished.
And I think it's around well ahead of here's part

(58:53):
two of the got you okay? Good? And then then
leave it's rest. Then they point out that humans have
always been in Africa and humans co evolved with what
makes you think animals didn't go extinct in Africa as well?
I'm just I'm talking. We're talking about we're talking about elephants. Okay,
I am sure. That's a great point. That's a great point.

(59:16):
That's but that's the thing people say, I'm about arguing
this to you. Tell me, I'm relating to you like
an argument you're very familiar with. It's always like, okay,
so elephants vanished virtually everywhere, um that they exist except
these elephant species in Alaska or I'm sorry, in Africa.
Hang on, it must be because they were used to
people and that people couldn't kill them all because they

(59:37):
co evolved. That's the thing folks say. Yeah, Okay, I'm
not quite sure that it really has much meaning. But
in any case, you don't even like the Well, can
you do a better job of saying what I'm trying
to say? Um? Well, let me put it this way.
My my colleague Jim O'Connell, who worked with the Hazza

(59:59):
in Africa, the Hadza don't describe elephants as animals. They
describe them as enemies. They don't mess with elephants. Go
back and read Teddy Roosevelt's encounter with a bull elephant.
When he got out of the White House, he went
on a murderous spree in Africa collecting. That's a big
word for sure. Go ahead. He didn't my favorite food.

(01:00:24):
He was stuffing it and sending it to New York.
But on display, Um and read his encounter with a
bull elephant and he darn near died uh in the encounter. Okay, Uh,
these are nasty animals, and whether people were hunting them
or not, uh, it's pretty doubtful. Okay, But let's get

(01:00:45):
to the sort of larger question about the climate. If
you put the extinctions in context, what you see is
that all sorts of things are happening at the end
of the place to see in North America. But you
almost started saying something he did. Did a bunch of
stuff go extinct in Africa? Some did? Yeah? Yeah, not
as not as massive and as constrained geologically in geological

(01:01:08):
time as in the Americas. Okay, Um, what happened in
Europe in parts of Europe and parts of Eurasia. Absolutely no,
we lose mammoths in Eurasia. Yeah, Um, you have massive
range changes. Caribou don't live in the southeast US anymore,
Muskoks don't live in Tennessee anymore, and so you've got

(01:01:33):
these ecological changes that are taking place. Um, Biota are dissolving,
plants and animals are moving all. That's a really interesting
point about muskox I've never thought about then. I mean,
if you okay, if they found muskoks remains in Tennessee,
you're saying, and you look at the fringe that they
inhabited at the time of European contact, you were it's

(01:01:56):
like you had ten fingers, they were down to a pinky,
you know what I'm saying. It's interesting thing like they
were probably close. Yeah, it could have been close to
being gone or something, you know, uh well, or they
just found their niche. Uh and it's a very good niche.
And in fact, they would have been highly vulnerable human hunting.
And they're still around. I mean, what's there. What's their
defensive strategies? They all get heads out, heads out, butts in. Right,

(01:02:19):
it's like a faculty. And and it works with wolves.
But if a bunch of hunters show up and they
want to kill off all the muscocks, they're they're just
standing targets, right. Okay, But let's get back to the
larger picture. Massive range changes, massive ecological changes, um, lots
of extinctions. Birds go extinct, You've got snakes going extinct.

(01:02:41):
You've got reptiles going extinct. You've got turtles going extinct.
You've got a spruce tree going extinct. There's and Paul
Martin actually tried to come up with an explanation as
to why humans would have overkilled a spruce tree. No, Um,
it has something to do with forest burning or something.
It didn't work this tree, oh yeah, uh oh yeah,

(01:03:02):
And and so all of these things are happening. So extinctions,
if you rip it out of its context, it looks.
Oh my god, this is horrible. Humans showed up. They
must be the cause. Well, did humans also cause all
these other kinds of things going on? No, it was
the end of the Pleistocene. Now let's get to the
gotcha question that I wanted you to ask me. Just
going to ask, So, why is it that they didn't

(01:03:23):
go extinct during the previous interglacial? Okay, we've been cycling
through ice ages for the last two plus million years. Okay,
So why is it that all these animals didn't go
extinct and twenty five thousand years ago the last time
we had a warming event. Why did they only wait
until ten thou plus years ago to go extinct? And

(01:03:47):
the answer is is that, well, some of them did disappear.
A lot of those species weren't around during the previous interglacial.
We actually don't know that much about the previous intergl acial.
In terms of what we know about the last previous
interglacial is from deep sea cores. We have no idea

(01:04:07):
what's going on in the landscape. We don't have good
records of changes in the vegetation, changes in the ecosystem,
changes in the environment. It was all demolished by the
ice sheets. Well, because we just don't have good we
don't have good samples of it. I mean, this is
stuff that's a hundred and twenty five years old. You
can probably count on one hand the number of pollen

(01:04:27):
cores vegetation records that we have from a hundred and
years ago. There's just no data, right, So you can't say, well,
they should have all gone extinct in the previous interglacial
if it was climate. We don't know what that looked like, right,
We still don't know what this interglacial, this transition from
the ice Age to the not ice Age. We're still

(01:04:47):
not fully aware of this, and we won't be aware
of its effects on these animals until we do each
of these animals individually, because we've got to figure out
what is it about a glyptodont that it couldn't handle?
What is it about the giant ever that it couldn't handle?
What might be an example, like any example, okay, and
then then we'll move on to our checklist. But what
may be any example when you say that it couldn't

(01:05:09):
handle it? So one of the things that happens at
the end of the ice age is that obviously it
gets warmer, and there's a change in the composition of
the plains grassland, grasses grass right when you look at it,
when it's on your lawn or whatever. But in fact,
there's very distinctive kinds of grass species that occupy that

(01:05:32):
that create that landscape of the Great Plains um and
they're designated by particular carbon pathways. Their CE three grasses,
Sea four grasses. These are grasses that grow predominantly in
the summer, and then there's winter grasses. Well at the
end of the plaista scene Sea four grasses. And this
is a hypothesis that I've sort of kicked around for

(01:05:52):
a few years and and I'm still not convinced it's
correct and definitely needs testing. But you wanted a for instance,
at the end of the place to see the plains
grassland becomes dominantly C four Now Sea four grasses um
have anti herbivory toxins. It taste terrible and um they

(01:06:16):
are not easily digested unless well, one of the principal
Sea four grasses is buffalo grass. Buffalo love the stuff mammoth.
They don't have the same kind of gut systems that
bison do, and so they're on a landscape where the

(01:06:36):
resources to them, the food forage to them is shrinking, right,
and it's becoming more toxic to them. Well, the expanding
grasses are becoming more toxic to them. H And suddenly
they're getting out competed by bison. Bison populations are expanding, mammoth, horse, camel.

(01:06:57):
They can't cope. One other assibility that people have suggested,
which um Again, it's gonna be hard to tell and
test until we get that really high resolution data. But
imagine this. You're in the middle of an ice age,
and for a variety of reasons ice age um climates

(01:07:19):
were more equable. And by that what we mean is
that you had cooler summers, warmer winters. Nowadays, out on
the central part of North America we have really hot
summers and really cold winters. Okay, during the Pleistocene actually
wasn't so bad for a variety of reasons, not least
that you had this massive ice sheet parked over Canada,

(01:07:40):
blocking cold Arctic air from coming south. Yeah. When you
say the extremes, I mean you could live in a
northern tier state and you live in uh, you live
in something that can very consistently swing hundred twenty degree
temperature swings absolutely, like it's not unusual to get a
negative twenty winter day, and it's not unusual to get
over a hundred summer day. You've been in North Dakota.

(01:08:01):
So now what that means is that if if you're
an elephant and you've been producing calves and it takes
you twenty two months to grow another elephant and and
have that elephant child, Um, you've been used to having
that elephant in, say March. Well, during the Pleistocene, March
wasn't so bad. But what happens when that climate shifts

(01:08:25):
from a more equable to a more continental, big swing
and temperature suddenly March instead of being you know, it's
kind of almost spread. Is the word you're saying when
you say equable equable e q U a B equator
Like exactly. I thought you were saying equitable meaning equal. Yeah,
and then continental continental is really strong swings in temperature.

(01:08:48):
So San Francisco versus North Dakota. Okay, so you've been
you've been birthing baby mammoths all this time in March,
and suddenly March damn cold freezing, there's nothing to eat
and the baby dies, Well, it takes you another twenty
two months to make another one. You can't respond that quickly.
And then how many every years to bring it for

(01:09:10):
to achieve sexual maturity? Right? Well, exactly right? And how
many are you going to have over the course of
a reproductive lifetime? Four five? You know you you sort
of knocked them, knock the knees out from under them
in terms of their reproductive cycle. And yeah, you can
drive mixed in pretty quickly, but these are just you know,
sort of arm wavy things. Well, no, I understand that.
You're like, yeah, we don't know upon request, you're taking

(01:09:32):
shots at what what sorts of things? Yeah? I know
him the first to admit. You know, people say, well,
you've got to have a climate alternative. If you're gonna
say it's not overkill, well no, I don't because we
don't have the evidence. We know the kinds of things
that we need, but we don't have any of that
evidences yet and we need to get it. So there's
pressure to to cleanly replace the blitz creek or the

(01:09:55):
overkill hypothesis. Someone would want to be like, okay, if
not that, then prove oh no, I'd love to have
an answer for him. But this is this is the
thing I think in in ten years down the road,
twenty years down the road, we are going to have
those answers and it's going to come at the molecular level.
It's going to come out of the DNA. Yeah, that's
the cool thing, not hout narrowheads. No, No, we're still

(01:10:17):
gonna be doing it. But that's not where the answer
is gonna be. Can can we jump to projectile points? Okay?
Lay it out the the obsession with them in the
early years of your discipline, I was it was like
this diagnostic tool, and talked about that a little bit

(01:10:41):
to approach. You know, that's a really good way to
describe it, to use the term diagnostic, because um, these
are artifacts. I mean, these books had all sorts of tools, right,
we have fixated on that class of projectile points their
weaponry because they invested a lot of effort in it.
They invested a lot of effort in the manufacturer, They

(01:11:03):
invested a lot of effort in finding the right stone,
uh in hafting it, attaching it to the end of
a spear um and they were doing as as I
mentioned earlier, they spent more effort on it than was
warranted by the task at hand. Okay, you feel that's

(01:11:24):
you feel that's true. You know, Um, it was fancier
than it needed to be. You can't help but look
at some of the stonework and some of the ways
in which they flaked their artifacts too match up with
you know, lines in the stone or bands or anything
like that, and you can't help but think that's a
human on the other side of that. Somebody was looking

(01:11:45):
at that and had I mean, look, when you guys
go out hunting, you have particular weapons, you take care
of them. You might I don't know what do you
do to sort of dress up your your guns or
your bows. I mean you accessor rise, but nothing that well,
I'm probably not looking at it right. Someone else might
look at it and think that there are esthetic modifications,

(01:12:08):
but off top of my head, I don't think of Yeah. Okay,
but if you're if you're living on a landscape where
you have relatively little material culture around you, right, and
one of the things that's emblematic of your group is
to make these protect these projectile points in a particular way. Um,
you're going to invest in those things because you want

(01:12:29):
people to see you remember the group. You're a good
flint napper, You've been places, You've collected this really cool stone.
And because you're investing in that you as an ancient
hunter gatherer, we as archaeologists can use that because the
style and the stylistic attributes that they are adding to

(01:12:51):
their weaponry, the stuff that goes beyond what's necessary to
kill that animal is diagnostic of time and of group.
Enough space. Yeah, because someone's listening and you grab your
phone and look, you know, type up folesome point, go
to images and it's it's distinctive, it's it's Yeah, the

(01:13:14):
minute you look, you'd be like, oh, I get it. Yep,
there's nothing that looks like that, nothing at all, and
so um, it's helpful to us. So the reason we
have this fixation, and it's it's not always a healthy fixation,
but the reason we have this fixation on their projectile
points is that they tell us so much. Okay, and
especially in the absence of radiocarbon dating, you know you've

(01:13:34):
got a falsome side if you've got these points, unless
you know, you were just darn unlucky and somebody happened
to have found a falsome point and brought it into
a pueblo, in which case you're gonna have to say, well,
that probably doesn't belong there. Um. The downside of that
is that we've been neglectful of all the other tools

(01:13:54):
in the tool kit which you're doing most of the work.
You know, the scrapers, the knives, the gravers, the drills,
the alls. How many tools might someone have had, like
like like an ice age family, what they what might
they have had? Um? You know, the answer is probably
in some of the burial caches that we have where uh,

(01:14:18):
individuals had died and somebody basically left their tool kit
with them. Uh. And there's a well known site, uh
Crowfield in Ontario, and off the top of my head,
I'm thinking several dozen um, and I could be quite
mistaken about the number uh by faces and scrapers and

(01:14:39):
points were found with the no no actual physical human
remains were found, but there was a kind of a
burned area, so it looked as though it was a
a cremation burial and the only thing that survives is
the stone. And of course the stone got put in
the cremation, so it it popped and crazed and and broke. UM.
But yeah, you could probably. I mean, stone may actually

(01:15:02):
have been the least of the things that you had
to deal with this year. As you're slepping across the landscape. Uh,
you know, are you bringing material for building structures, are
you carrying children? All that stuff? Yeah, cordage clothing as
you bone bone products. And I'm glad you mentioned cordage
because in fact, um we may be missing the vast
majority of their tools. There are sites that where preservation

(01:15:27):
is really really good, and the number of non stone
artifacts would artifacts in particular by a factor of six
six times more of that stuff than there is of
stone tools. We get fixated on stone tools because that's
all we got. One of the things you you get at,

(01:15:50):
uh in your book Folsome is you talk about the
Folsome type site and what the people who first dug
it will looking for. They wanted big bones and big
stone tools. Well, first they just everything else went into
a pile right because it wasn't of interest. And then
then later became like really like all the stuff that

(01:16:12):
they weren't paying attention to that was so instructive. They
this was the nine twenties, and what they really wanted
first off was just a a bison to put on display.
So these were museum folks out of Denver and they
just wanted to find a bison that they could rearticulate
and put on display. And up until about ten it

(01:16:34):
doesn't look like the ones we have now, much bigger,
much bigger, And up until about ten years ago you
could see it at at what was then the Colorado
Museum in Natural History which is now the Denver Museum
of Nature and Science. And then when they realized artifacts
were there, uh, the site became especially important to a
broader audience because those bison were extinct, and in those

(01:16:56):
pre radio carpon days when you had no way of
determining how old something was, if you found an artifact
wedged between the ribs of a now extinct animal, you
knew that somebody had been around at the time that
animal was alive. And so fulsome became terribly important in
n seven because it was the very first site where

(01:17:17):
you could definitively say there was a hunter, there was
an ice age animal, and that hunter killed that ice
age animal, and then they just you know, that's it,
We're done. Uh. And seventy years later when we went
back to the site, there were so many fundamental questions
that hadn't been answered in the nineteen twenties because well,

(01:17:38):
they just wanted to find out how old it was.
I wanted to find out what was the environment like,
what was the site like, what were the activities that
took place there? How many animals were killed? What was
the season of the year. Uh, did they camp there?
Did they spend a winter there? Uh? And ultimately uh,

(01:17:58):
when we spent three years excavating there and got a
lot out of the site. The site's very famous, not
because of what we did there, but because of its
role in the history of archaeology. But we were really
pleased to be able to go back there and learn
a lot more about it. We're off, we're way off
rejectile points. But you tell the story. But in your book,
you tell the story of George mcjunkin. Yes, the guy

(01:18:20):
that that that found it. He was a am I
right that he was. He was a freed slave or
the son of a freed's. George mcjunkin was born a
slave in pre Civil War Texas, and he took the
name mcjunkin from his owner. And after the Civil War
he made his way into northeastern New Mexico and George.

(01:18:40):
George must have been a remarkable man because after the
great flood of Fulsome which cut this arroyo in, sized
it deeply and exposed the bones, George was doing what
every good cowboy does after a storm. He went out
and he was checking his fence lines, and he looked

(01:19:01):
down in what was probably about a twelve ft deep
cut and saw bones. Now, um, I think a lot
of cowboys looking down seeing bones would have just said, oh,
bones and kept going. George got off his horse and
he went down into the arroyo and he looked at
the bones and he said to himself, we assume these

(01:19:25):
are not cowbones. These are buffalo bones, and they're really big.
And we know he thought something about him because he
told people about him. George was an amateur naturalist. When
you see pictures of George, there's very few of them,
but in one of them he's on his horse and
in the um scabbard where you keep your rifle. He
had a telescope. He wasn't interested in shooting coyotes. He

(01:19:47):
was interested in seeing what he could see with his telescope.
So he made frequent trips over to Ratone and there
was a sort of a kindred spirit there. Fellow by
name of Karl Schwaheim who was the blacksmith in the
village of her Tone, and Carl had a wonderful fountain
outside his house where two male bull elks had gotten

(01:20:08):
into Mortal Kombat. Their antlers had locked and they died,
and Carl thought that was pretty cool, so he made
a fountain out of it out of the racks. And
George would stop by and and talk to Carl, and
he told Carl, he said, you know, on this ranch,
on the crow Foot ranch where I've been working, where
on the ranch, foreman, I've I found these old bones.

(01:20:29):
And it took years, but Carl finally got up there.
Uh sadly after um mcjunkin died. Yeah, I I uh
went to this site and wrote a piece about mcjunkin
And this kind of thing that happens is that he
so desperately wanted someone to come look, and then he
dies and they finally go look, and then like, holy ship,

(01:20:50):
this guy found something really others well, so they took
the bones up to Denver and they said, you know, hey,
there's there's a bunch of bison bones. And so that's
when Denver got interested them museum to say, oh, sure
we could use one for display. Uh. And so that's
they subsequently went down there but again a few years
later uh and started excavating and then realized, oh, this

(01:21:12):
isn't just a bunch of bones, there's actually stone tools
down here. What's going on? That's when they started. In fact,
Karl Schwaheim, our village blacksmith, was hired to do the excavations.
So he was He spent the summer of working largely
by himself. And I can tell you from having dug
that site that it was hard work. He had to

(01:21:34):
dig through about nine or ten ft of lake clay's
which if you've ever tried to shovel that stuff, it's hard,
hard work. But he got down to the bone bed. Uh.
He exposed it. Unfortunately that first summer, Uh, the artifact
that he found popped out of the ground before he
had a chance to see where it came from. But
everybody got all excited and they said next year go

(01:21:57):
back excavate again, but be more careful. And and that
was the year that he exposed something, realized it was
in place, realized it was literally between two ribs and
stopped the presses or stop all activity, alert the press,
get everybody out here, and folks came and witnessed it
in place. It was literally one of those things where

(01:22:18):
you sort of you lay your hands on it and say, okay,
this is real. Uh. And one of the people that
came to see it was a fellow miham A vy Kidder,
who was at the time a god in the discipline.
He was one of the most famous archaeologists in North America.
He came, he saw, he blessed it. And and it's
a comment about the way science works when somebody of

(01:22:40):
that status looks at that site and says, I'm a believer.
What are you going to say? What you say is
I'm with him. I agree. Uh. And so from that
moment on, Fulsome became sort of the anchor point of
the first people into the Americas with their very distinctive
Falsome point. You know what, you still old it because

(01:23:00):
I was gonna do I was gonna do a remarkable
bit of hosting where I brought us back to projectile points,
but point by by pointing out that that name, the
town of Falsom, New Mexico, was then bestowed upon the
projectile point that was found there, the very diagnostic falsome

(01:23:22):
point exactly right well down on it as a host. Yeah,
well I was gonna do that, and then you did it.
Yeah sorry, um, so fulsome point in the projectile point
conversation people used to there there was falsome point. Everyone
agreed that fulsome came after Clovis. They didn't know that yet.
They didn't know that, okay. So Clovis gets discovered about

(01:23:43):
half a dozen years later, and at first they weren't
sure what to do with it because they looked at
Clovis points. Now, Falsome points are really nice and thin,
they're very sharp, they're very well made. You look at
Clovis points and they're kind of larger and clunkier and thicker,
and you think to yourself, it's fe horse exactly. So
you think, okay, well, the clunkier ones they must have

(01:24:05):
maybe they came later. Everybody sort of forgot what they
were doing. No, um, they didn't. They didn't know the
relative age of these things. And it wasn't until about
five years into the excavations at the Clovis site, which
took place between nineteen thirty three and about nineteen thirty
eight that they finally realized that Clovis points were being

(01:24:25):
found below the levels in which Falsome points were being found,
and so therefore where are they both found at the
Clovis gravel pit? What were people doing there? Hanging out?
Someone dropped a fulsome point and then thousands of years
later a guy drops the Clovis point. Now, first they

(01:24:48):
dropped the Clovis point, then several thousand years later, Yeah, yeah, um, okay,
So you're out on the high plains. You've been out
on the high plains, right. It's not a lot of water.
The Clovis site is one of those wonderful spring fed
o a c's in the middle of a vast, semi
arid environment. Every animal, you know, within a certain radius

(01:25:13):
is going to come out there for a drink. Hunters
were using that spot for thousands and thousands of years,
and so they were drawn to it, and the first
folks that were drawn to it we're Clovis people. And
then they killed some mammoths in there. Uh, they scavenged
some mammoths and some of them they killed. One of

(01:25:34):
the things that's really interesting. People make a big deal
about folks hunting elephants, and you know, you get this
romantic image in your head of a bunch of brave
guys with sharp pointy sticks killing this trumpeting animal. Oh
there you go. Burn Well, several of the mammoths at
um at the Clovis site had already died. And we

(01:25:55):
know this because they were literally prying apart their feet
after the rigor mortis had set in. They were scavenging
the carcasses. They weren't killing these things. Now, some of
them were genuinely killed, right, we have we have absolutely
unequivocal evidence that people did kill these l because there
was there was a skull well the projectile point. But

(01:26:17):
then that was questioned, right, like project like a thing
stuck in its eye socket. But then later people thought
that it was just someone just did it after the
fact they came out of the black Water draw site.
That doesn't I mean, you know better me? Yeah, I know,
You're gonna have to home a few more bars before
I get that one. I'm not sure. I okay. What

(01:26:37):
I had heard there was like that there was somehow
in the history of this site someone had produced skull
that has a Clovis point stuck in the eye socket
and then someone later felt, I think that that projectile
point was added to that skull nowadays, Yeah, that would
be a pretty stupid place. If you can get to

(01:26:58):
reach the offense, I you're probably in bigger trouble than
it was. Whatever the story I heard was, it was
it was questionable. Yeah, there was no questionable in C. Two.
Is that the word you guys use institution associated? Um? No,
these guys were literally prying apart already did elephants, and

(01:27:19):
and they're only partially butchered because they're in a pond. Right,
if you're gonna drop a big animal, are you going
to drop a big animal in the mud? And if
you do, how are you getting it out of the mud?
That's a problem. Oh, this kind of thing happens. But
sure it's not ideal. It's definitely not ideal, and especially
if the animal weighs four tons and you know, so,
what are you gonna do? Well, parts of it are

(01:27:40):
kind of sticking out above the mud. You slice off
some steaks and you're done. Or you come onto a
recently dead animal and you think, yeah, it doesn't smell
that bad and you kind of get some meat out
of it. Now again, I emphasize that there are a
few sites where it's absolutely clear that that people were
that we're praying on live animals. But then there's also

(01:28:03):
sites where some of these animals got away, they got shot.
There's a very famous mammoth site in southern Arizona, the
Nacho site. It's got eight Clovis points stuck in it.
It's like a pincushion. But it wasn't butchered. It must
have escaped some carnage somewhere and went off to die
at eight points in it. Who's got those points? Uh?

(01:28:26):
The Arizona State Museum man pay it late night visits. Really,
I never heard that story. But they never got it butcher,
they never butchered it. Yeah, there's there's several others that
are like that. So people were losing stuff too. Yeah, well,
you know the animal I mean, these are highly mobile.
These these animals can travel. These animals can book it

(01:28:48):
and you know, if you're not. Uh well. One of
the things that we think about the Nachos site is
that it was an escape ee from another kill, so
that they were busy chowing down on the animals that
they had killed and saying, yeah, I forget him, got
him eight times. Yeah, I realized now we're gonna have

(01:29:11):
to have a part two. But I wanna, um, because
one of the things I want to talk about was,
and it's nothing you talk about your books, is the
don't even answer because this is part two. Sometimes we
can will bother you, wait a year, and then bother
you again. Um. That the love affair with these guys
being these like big hunters and missing and I was

(01:29:33):
kind of alluding to it when I got to what
what they were interested in at the fulsome site and
your argument of that they probably had like an enormously
very diet shellfish, plant matter, small mammals that just isn't
we don't see it. And then when people would find sites,

(01:29:54):
they weren't looking for it. Yeah, I mean they didn't
know what to say, like, oh, yeah, they're like eating
little turtles, they're cracking clams open, you know whatever. Um,
I'll answer you now, but we'll save it for part two.
That's fine, because I do have one more question I'm
gonna ask about for part one for part one. It
has to do with the projectile points. Fair enough, So
the anticipation of the question in part two is that

(01:30:16):
you know we've got so many of these mammoth kills. Well,
those are really easy to find archaeologically. Um. I I
spent quite a number of years working on the high
plains of West Texas, and I can tell you how
many times I climbed a windmill to look out across
the landscape and I could see an old pluvial lake
basin a quarter of a mile away, and I could

(01:30:39):
see an elephant tusk eroding out on the surface. It
just gleamed white. Does happened to you? Oh yeah, And
so I would just get down off the windmill and
I'd go hike over there through the dunes to look
at the lake basin and sure enough, oh, there's an
elephant here, and then I look around for artifacts. Well
that's how most of these sites were found. There's a
reason these guys were big game hunters. It's because archaeologists

(01:31:02):
we're only looking for the big bones. But it's it's
excusable because what the hell is here supposed to go?
By George mcjunkin, You know, I mean, you're just explaining
George mac junkin saw a bunch of big bones. Yeah. No,
I'm not going to climb up that that windmill tower
and see, Oh look there were a bunch of mice
that were killed over there. Yeah, it's not gonna be
visible to you. So it creates this little bit of it.

(01:31:27):
When I was looking into this um and in writing
about some of the stuff I encountered, I can't remember
who it was. I do remember who it was, but
I don't want to. I don't want to say who
it was because she didn't say it in the nicest
possible way. It was It was a It was a
woman um who spoke somewhat negatively of the Bison boys,

(01:31:52):
and she had it in her head as she explained
to me, that it was like this these big, macho
western guy cowboys who love the story of the big
bison hunters, the mammoth hunters, and it that's and they
all like to hunt and oh yeah. And then it

(01:32:12):
was like they're there's sort of like their dream of
these like hunters. And it caused just in this mindset,
caused to miss all these other things that maybe weren't
is romantic to think about, which people like traveling down
the coast eating clams. Right. No, she's not wrong, she's
not wrong at all. Um. There's a I mean we
all bring our own particular baggage to our science, and

(01:32:35):
you know, we try and subvert the subjectiveness in in
our inquiries, right we want to go where the evidence
will take us, um. In my case, so I started
doing archaeology when I was fifteen, and I was working
on a Clovis site in Virginia, and I remember how
desperate we were to find mammoth bones, because well, if

(01:32:56):
it's a legitimate Clovis site, there's gotta be a dead
elephant here or something, because they are never more intent
from elephants, right um. And it was a spectacular site
because it was sitting literally right on a church source,
and they were making all these fabulous stone tools, and
we had detailed records of literally individuals sitting there cross legged,
napping a stone tool, standing up and walking away, and

(01:33:16):
you could still see the artifacts that had rained down
on either side of their crossed legs, and they got
covered up almost immediately, and it still preserved ten thousand
plus years later, and I thought, well, this is really cool,
but no elephants. And I remember this was nineteen so
this was the second season of their nineteen seventy two
Hurricane agnes Is bearing down on the East coast and

(01:33:38):
we are down in a pit ten twelve feet below
the surface and we found what that's how deep this
stuff is? Oh yeah, well in that particular site, Yeah,
we found what we thought was a mammoth vertebrae. And
I remember how excited everybody was and how how anxious
everybody was because you know the hurricanes coming. We're literally
right on the edge of the Shanandoah River, rivers rising fast, um,

(01:34:00):
and everybody works late into the night to get this
thing out of the ground. We get it back to
the lab and in the sort of smoky glow of
these lanterns, it gets cleaned up and we discover it's
a piece of court site doing a really good imitation
of a mammoth vertebrae. And I remember how how just
busted everybody was. Yeah, and all the older kids got

(01:34:20):
to go off and get stoned and drink and you know,
I'm just sixteen. What am I doing? Um? And it
really it It was a memory for me that I
thought to myself, why were we so disappointed? What was
it about it? And what what was it that made
this site somehow inadequate? That we didn't have a dead
elephant in it. And so I mean you asked earlier,

(01:34:43):
was I ever an over killer? Well, no, I mean
that was part of my my growing up experience as
an archaeologists was I thought to myself, you know, maybe
we've been letting our expectations drive the way we do
our field work, or the kinds of anticipations that we
have for what we're going to mind at an archaeological site.
Maybe we need to sort of clear all that clutter

(01:35:04):
out of our heads and try and think, you know,
what does the record actually tell us? And to what
degree is that record biased by what we're looking for
as opposed to seeing what's in front of us. Before
I get to my last question, uh, the thing I'd
like to think about is that our thinking is still
riddled with them. And you know, in in in in

(01:35:29):
your fifty years from now, people will be laughing. I
don't mean this isn't any I don't mean it's as
an insult. Five years now, if you will be laughing
at some of your assumptions, I I will be disappointed.
If they don't, I will be disappointed they got lazy. Yeah,
It's like, come on, people work hard, There's there's mistakes
in here. You just gotta find them. Yeah. No, I

(01:35:50):
mean you want science to improve, you want our understanding
of the past to get better, and the only way
to do that is to question your assumptions. Historical inertia
is a very powerful force. You think what your teachers
told you to think. Um, you you go with what
the conventional wisdom is, and you don't cross examine it enough.

(01:36:13):
You've got to cross examine that conventional wisdom. The thing
I found with the people who are remarkable in this space,
and I'll put you and I feel Bath Shapiro. I mean,
you guys probably don't think of yourself in the same space,
but you know, interesting old stuff. That's a good space. Um,
they're not, You're not. She's not that in love with

(01:36:34):
their ideas. It can be the ideas of Like it's
like a thing I'm holding, I'm checking it out, I'm
curious about it, but I'm not cradling it close to
my you know, chest, so no one can come near it. Well,
that's that's probably a hard position to hold. Well. That
was the thing that was so wonderful and frustrating about

(01:36:54):
Paul Martin, who again wonderful character. He was so good
at ropa dope that when you'd pin him down on
pleistocene overkill, he very quickly move away and he'd give
you another counter argument. Oh damn it. Okay, so wait
a minute, can counter your counter And he was so
great at defending his argument um that in some ways

(01:37:16):
it was kind of a caricature because it wasn't dead.
Yeah he passed away gosh a while ago, no um,
but again a lovely man and and very clever, And
he was so fixated on defending his theory that he
didn't say, Okay, well what is the alternative. I'm right,

(01:37:38):
you should never be in the position of defending your theory.
You should always be in the position of trying to
kill it. Yeah, that's good advice. See it kind of
messes up the flow. But I can't resist asking the
last question. You want? That be a great place to end,
you know, I was talking about remarkable hosting a remarkable
holes would just be like we just end. I'm not uh,

(01:37:59):
because one lasting I want to I want you want
to go back. I want to get a better understanding,
and I want you to explain to people that, uh,
we just we make some different things. We we have
a shirt, we just came out with UM, and it's
it's like a very rough it's it's a very rough,
like history of North American projectile points all way have

(01:38:21):
to like a modern mechanical modern LK crunting point is
it's really rough, right, And I knew that when we
put the shirt out, um that all the know it
alls to be like, oh you you forgot this, and
you're so stupid you forgot that. And so I in
unveiling the design, um, which it did on on a
platform I'm guessing you don't spend a ton of time

(01:38:43):
on called Instagram, and unveiling the design, four followers, Oh
I'm gonna blow you up. We're gonna blow you up.
So in unveiling the design, uh, I headed the naysayers
off by saying, um, this is an approximation. There were

(01:39:04):
many there were many false starts. Oh go ahead, can
you pull it up? Oh you want to see it? Yeah,
you're easy to find. We're gonna find the wrestling writer.
So I say, like the shirts an approximation. These some
of these technologies, um, some of these technologies, uh even
like modern ones, like they kind of started and didn't

(01:39:25):
catch on. And so this shirt just kind of shows
like a rough outline of how these things came about.
And I said, for instance, you could make a week's
worth of T shirts showing what happened from pre Clovis
to like the Woodland or whatever point I made, And
a lot of guys on they were like, so glad
you are not acknowledged pre Clovis, which is funny because

(01:39:46):
I'm sure you guys are way beyond that. But there
was a debate when I was like, when I was
getting curious about this, and I met a mutual a
guy that you were friends with, and I became friends
with him, Tony Baker. Um. When we met, I like it,
he are you reviewing the shirt? Like, yeah, but it's
it's not in stratigraphic order. You have to have the
oldest at the bottom, youngest at the top. Yeah, when

(01:40:09):
you dig into a site, you don't get the oldest
stuff at the top. So you got your clothes point
right there. I'm not going to complain about anything else
about that shirt. It's your shirt. You do whatever you
want anyone. So when when I was dabbling in this stuff,
there was this sort of debate where there was like
people who argued right Clovis. First that this idea that

(01:40:32):
that Clovis hunters were the ones that found the closed arms,
were the ones that the first were the first Americans.
And then the counter argument, which I think one which
one right, is that Clovis emerged as this distinctly American culture.

(01:40:53):
That's absolutely true, from some other group or some some
people who had we don't know, from some other technology.
It's the part we don't know. So you're absolutely right.
The Clovis point is the very first American invention. Right.
There's nothing in Siberia like this. There's nothing in Asia
like this. Okay, so that was made here, made in America.

(01:41:15):
Who made it? Do you think they stamped it made
in America? Well, um, we're not going to go political,
but it was made by immigrants, dam it. Um. So
you've got this, uh, this Clovis point. But you've also
got pre Clovis people here making stuff. And the real

(01:41:35):
question is in terms of populations, what's the relationship between
the Clovis folks and the people who were here before Clovis.
Are they ancestor descendant? Are they two different groups? Um?
And here's where once again that's interesting, man, that there
was that there were groups that coexisted, but we actually

(01:41:56):
don't know that, um to be sure, because is you know,
pre Clovis stuff. We've got back now to fourteen seven,
let's just say, fifteen thousand, rounded on, and they didn't
make that point, and Clovis folks are making this point.
Was your point cooler or less cool? Um? It just
vary depending on where you were it was. It was

(01:42:16):
it as crafty? Um, well, the ones at Montaverti are
pretty crafty. Yeah, you look at me like, wow, oh absolutely, no,
that's serious stonework. Um. So yeah. So the question is
we as archaeologists can look at the points at a
place like monta Verde and say, okay, well that doesn't
look at all like Clovis, but could they be historically related?

(01:42:38):
We have no way of telling, right, just a couple
of different kinds of rocks and they're separated by two
thousand years and several thousand miles. If we could get
a genome of a pre Clovis person, we would know
for sure what the relationship was between pre Clovis and Clovis,
because at the moment we have a Clovis genome, and
we know we've got lots of genoe him out of

(01:43:00):
Montana exactly right. And we've got lots of genomes that
are younger than Clovis. And we know basically everybody in
the America's at the genomic level is related. Now they
can be more or less distantly related, but they're all related.
So the real, you know, the sixty dollar question that's
still lnkering out there is what about earlier than Clovis? Um?

(01:43:23):
We actually tried Eskis group tried to get um d
NA out of some of the material from Monte Verde
and was unsuccessful. Ah, so we're still looking. Uh, I'm
gonna ask you what the odds are that we'll find someone,
and if we do, what are the odds that it's

(01:43:44):
gonna melt out of the perma frost in Alaska? And
I'll point out by another person we both know, Mike
cons Sure. I was describing him like, what would be
the coolest thing that you could find? And he says,
I remember him painting a picture of I'm flying along,
you know, and his helicopter absolutely, and they're sticking out

(01:44:06):
of a glacier. Is a damn hand you know? That
actually sounded like my um, yeah, that would actually be
pretty cool. Um, do you think we'll find something? You know,
you never say never in archaeology, but it's but we've
got I guess the problem is right, there's one, you

(01:44:28):
got one good Clovis one. Yeah. But here's the thing
about d n A. When you're looking at a genome,
you're actually looking at thousands of ancestors because each of
those letters in that DNA alphabet, the gees, the seas,
the tse, the as um, are getting inherited from an

(01:44:51):
expanding network of ancestors. So with a single genome, you're
actually seeing lots of different populations that have contributed to
the DNA of that individual. So we actually now we
just published last fall um a paper which had some
genomes from South America which have a signal which we

(01:45:15):
think is real of UM, a distant austral Asian ancestor.
So we know that there are other folks that are
out there that are contributing to the d n A
of Native Americans. What we don't have at the moment
is a full genome of somebody who is not on

(01:45:35):
that direct um that is pre Clovis in age right,
and that may or may not be on that same
Native American chain of ancestry back to Asia. My my
gut feeling, uh is my gut is I don't know. Actually,
I'm not going to make any predictions. You know, the

(01:45:57):
archaeology of pre Clovis versus Clovis is so different. Do
you think to yourself, Oh, there's gotta be different people.
But one of the things that we found out is
that you can have very distinctive archaeological records and yet
genomically these populations are closely related. So yeah, people do
different things. Some people drive one car, some people drive
another style of car, same thing. How much time has

(01:46:18):
to go by before I email you come back on
and you'd be like really receptive to do it? A year? Um,
sure we can talk in a year. I can call
you a year, to email a year in a year,
when I in a year and whatever in a year,
in three months, when I get young June and when

(01:46:38):
you come out here. Something I'm gonna ask about. I
want to ask you about, uh, some of the discredited
theories that have come up about who the first Americans were.
I want to ask you about the idea of successional waves,
that it wasn't like one group that showed up and
then all Native Americans. But there could have been groups

(01:46:59):
have showed up in, they petered out, they got killed off,
they starved to death, and then other groups came in
and replaced them. The thing about that ancient people were
interested in what they regarded as ancient people and moved
their stuff around a little bit, meaning they're like, oh,
that's a cool looking projectile point, and they bring it
home and to their TV and lay it with their

(01:47:20):
special ship that they like. Um, this is a handful
things I want to talk about next time we have you.
All right, here's here's the deal that we can cut. Um.
I'm just now finished the new edition of First Peoples
in the New World. So you told me mine's obsolete. Now,
Oh it's horribly obsolete. Yeah, no, it's don't even read it.

(01:47:41):
It's too late. Now sit out on my coffee table. Well,
forget everything you knew about it. Block it out of
your mind. Um, when it comes out, let's have a conversation.
How's that. That's a good time. And I'll be prompted
to because I'll see it and I'll be like, that's right,
that guy, that's right, that's right. I got a coffee
table that needs a book. Thank you seriously this uh

(01:48:03):
and I'm still gonna stand by my earlier statement. My
favorite guest we've ever had on Dr David J. Meltzer
s M. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, everyone,

(01:48:38):
thanks for listening. Again. And if I said it once,
I staid a thousand times. Please go check out our
feature length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars
in the Sky. You can find it at Stars in
the Sky film dot com. It is available for streaming
and download. Again, do us yourself a good turn, do

(01:48:59):
us a good turn Stars in the Sky. Find it
at Stars in the Sky film dot com. You can
stream it, you can download it, and you can watch
it again and again. Thank you.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 178: Hunting Mammoths