Ep. 693: Did Clovis Hunters Kill All the Mammoths?

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast, you
can't predict anything.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every
hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
dot com. F I R S T L I T
E dot com. All Right, everybody, Today we're gonna dive

(00:41):
in once again on my favorite subject of all subjects
on the planet, which is First Americans. Who got here first?
What were they doing when they come? How'd they get here?
Did they kill everything? Did they kill all the mammoths?
All this question? And uh, we have found I'm gonna
explain in a all in greater detail, we have found

(01:02):
some fresh perspectives coming out of fresh to me at
least because I'll explain the whole controversy. This is a
very this is a controversial subject the First Americans, and
we have had on in the past a number of times,
David Meltzer uh to talk about the peopling of the Americas.
And today we're going to hear from. Is it fair

(01:22):
to call you guys all colleagues because you talk about
the same stuff. Oh yeah, enemies enemies And I'm trying
to soup it up.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
We have enemies, we have disagreements, but we work well together.

Speaker 4 (01:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
No, he respects you guys, and he says he does
do good work. So who I'm talking about here today
in the in the studio with this is Todd Serravell,
who is the director of the George C. Frison Institute
of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. If
you're interested in the peopling of the Americas and Clovis
hunters and stuff, you might go in and check out

(01:55):
the late George C. Frison because he did a lot
of I guess you call experimental archaeology, right, Like, he
went to Africa.

Speaker 4 (02:03):
And experiments stuck some some of the most major sites.
He's just kind of like what we call him the
godfather of Wyoming archaeology.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
And and and he went to Africa to test out
stone tools on elephants.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Correct, Yeah, he did. In Zimbabwe, they were they had
an overpopulation problem of elephants and they were calling them
so he took advantage of that opportunity to test Clovis
weapons on actual African elephants alive, sensibly dead, and dying.
Is my understanding, got finish them off.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, he just wanted to see how it would perform.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah, was it a functional weapon for killing an elephant?

Speaker 2 (02:40):
And what did he determined?

Speaker 3 (02:41):
Absolutely, he had no doubt. He's the only guy in
recent time who's hit an elephant with a Clovis weaponry. Yeah,
a lot of people have done it, actually with deceased elephants,
but George did it with living elephants.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah. Nowadays, you guys are constrained by the the ethics folks.
That's a hard one to get across.

Speaker 4 (03:10):
Here's what I'd like to do.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
I'm gonna stab some elephants. Uh. And Spencer Pelton from
the he's the Wyoming State archaeologist and an adjunct at
the University of Wyoming's Archaeology and Anthropology department.

Speaker 4 (03:24):
That's correct. We should also clarify Todd was my major advisor.
This is like, this is kind of like your Matt
and Meltzer relationship. Oh, a little bit of uh, you know,
he brainwashed me into thinking like like he did.

Speaker 5 (03:36):
Yeah, so now you have strengthen numbers.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Man, I'm reading a book right now. We're trying it
was a guy we had on the show. Do you remember,
remember the gun writer And he's a big Safari dude.
I'm trying to get him to come back on Thomas
uh McIntyre. But his name doesn't look quite like McIntire.
Thomas McIntyre, you know him. He's like a gun like
a like a gun writer. Yeah, you know what I'm
talking about. I remember listening to that. Yeah, Like what's

(04:04):
super interesting about him is I mean a bunch of things.
But he went he got super into Africa and spent
his whole life hunting in Africa. And a lot of
the places he hunted in Africa has now been taken
over by Islamic radicals, Islamic fundamentalists. So like like he
used to hunt and there's a country no one's ever
heard of in Africa called see.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
Eritre no no.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
West, not on the coast. But it's like, uh damn.

Speaker 4 (04:34):
Democratic Republic of Condo.

Speaker 3 (04:36):
Cameras, humiliating, come.

Speaker 4 (04:41):
On, come on.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Here, you can't do that, Hey, you can't bring it up.
It's like it's like, okay, Africa countries map uh right
where it is.

Speaker 6 (04:55):
This should go quick.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
It's uh no, it is got some coasts.

Speaker 5 (05:03):
Yes, yeah, yeah, see, no one's ever heard of it.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
You can't hunt there anymore. And those same dudes that
those green brays were mixing it up with, like in Chad,
are in that area. Anyhow. In his book, he has
a long thing. The book is called Rain without Thunder
or Thunder without Rain, Thunder without rain. It's about it's
like a history of the Cape Buffalo. But in there
he's got a lot of stuff about human history. And

(05:29):
he's in this big section right now about poisons, like
poisoning spear points. Oh well, you you might think that
til you read the book. It was very important to
poison the shaft.

Speaker 4 (05:44):
Hum hmm.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Not the point anyhow, The stuff they could take down
with plant poisons, plant toxins and quick hmm. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
There's a there's a classic anthropological video of the conkson
of the jo Uonci the bushmen in the Kalahari no
hunting giraffe with these tiny little arrows. They just got
to get a couple of arrows in it and then
track it till it dies. I thought their poison was
insect based, though.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
He gets into the No, there's three. He gets into
the three plant genuses. This is a big, thick book.
He gets into the like the dead, the big sort
of the Big three, the Big three of plant poisons,
and he kind of juxtaposes those to the toxins that
they use, the South American toxins, which are more of

(06:33):
like a paralyzing toxin, and then these different plant toxins
they use. But it just gave him like tremendous efficacy
on huge ship killing, huge shit, and some of his
stuff just tips right over.

Speaker 6 (06:46):
You're trying to interview him again. Yeah, I don't think
it'll happen. He's dead. No, yeah, when twenty twenty.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Two, his book, he came dead in twenty twenty two.
His book came out in twenty three.

Speaker 6 (06:58):
No More Canvas Safari's No Outdoor writer Thomas McIntyre dies
at seventy That is November seven, twenty two. We're gonna
need to do it.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
This book come out in twenty three.

Speaker 4 (07:12):
I don't know.

Speaker 6 (07:13):
We talked about Yeah, Chris hart Fardley's last movie came
out six months after he was dead. No shit, really, Yeah,
I don't think it's that uncommon. Well, he Fledger's joker
came out how long philed?

Speaker 2 (07:26):
I'm just talking about did he die? I feel like
we should in the studio. We should have a picture
of people be passed on.

Speaker 4 (07:32):
Okay, show there.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
I don't know, you shouldn't be We'll all be there someday, Spencer.
It's good little bit of research right there.

Speaker 4 (07:44):
Yeah. Damn.

Speaker 5 (07:46):
When I was doing my uh my research in graduate school,
I came across articles from like the sixties and seventies
where they were saying the next big thing in archery
hunting was going to be poison.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Well they use it in Mississippi, you know, yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
And that.

Speaker 5 (08:02):
But they were like a spade of law after this
became like a thing, there's a spade of laws passed
to prevent you from using.

Speaker 6 (08:10):
Yeah, a lot of stories explicitly.

Speaker 7 (08:12):
Say blood clotting, what poison?

Speaker 3 (08:14):
Didn't they Who does?

Speaker 7 (08:17):
I think that's what?

Speaker 2 (08:18):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (08:18):
They do?

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, yeah, you can still use that poison. It's real.
It's common there. Like I got a buddy, I got
a buddy. You look at him, you just think he's
a normal guy walking down the street, but he's poison
arrows that deer. What what? What? The late Tom the
late Thomas McIntire gets into that's really heartbreaking me.

Speaker 4 (08:40):
I like that guy.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Well he gets into is that there's this other book. See,
I'm going to be going to Africa this summer, so
I'm kind of going to move in. I've been reading
a lot about the World War two Pacific theater, but
I'm gonna start moving into Africa stuff. There's a book
called White Hunter, Black Poacher that I want to read next,
and it kind of gets in to this with like,

(09:03):
as whites were coming in and Safari culture was taken off,
there was this effort to sort of like demonize indigenous
hunting methods and so because they were pushing this like
the only humane way is shooting these large boar rifles
and poisons, are that all these methods they use are
inhumane and this is more humane and like and then

(09:26):
this effort too to declare these big game ranges and
if you're like a white dude hunting the game ranges,
you're like on Safari. If you're a black dude hunting
the game ranges, you're not doing conservation. You're a poacher.
You're this, you're that, And this sort of ethical battle
over who has access to the resources, which I'm just
now digging into. But I was I wanted to have

(09:48):
Mono talk about Kate Buffalo.

Speaker 6 (09:50):
I'm looking at his Goodreads page. His last published work,
according to them as twenty twelve. They're pretty thorough.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
That's a bald faced live buddy. Because did you type
in second edition? Did you type in thunder without rain?

Speaker 4 (10:03):
No?

Speaker 2 (10:03):
But you're lying bald facedly. Well, Spencer's not lying, then,
that's what I meant. Well, no, because I feel like
if you read lies and put them out, you're a
liar too. You're a liar too. All Right, moving on,
we're gonna get We're gonna die. We gotta have plenty
of time to talk about Clovis Clovis hunters. But real quick,
someone wrote in mad because I have there's a few problems.

(10:24):
I always have that like it would take like electroshock
treatment to have you quit having the problems. One problem
is the whole Roosevelt Roosevelt thing, which like Franklin Ruse
Theodore Rose, did you know there's a split in the family. No,
I didn't. That screws me up. And the other thing

(10:47):
is what else screws me up? Is one of my
one of the the proper name for my highest honor,
not referring to my honorary PhD, but refer to me
being a National Wild Turkey or like to me being
a Royal Slam holder, which I often refer to as
a Super Slam holder. The guy wrote in Very Mad

(11:13):
that I routinely get wrong what it is and insult
the good folks at National Wild Turkey Federation. It's a
Royal Slam.

Speaker 7 (11:26):
And you're saying, what a super Slam?

Speaker 2 (11:29):
I always say super Slam, which is like less than
what I have.

Speaker 4 (11:32):
No, it's not.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
This guy's wild.

Speaker 7 (11:36):
It's harvesting one wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
No, no, no, no, no, dude, it's right here. The Royal Slam.
According to this joker, if you'll get on Goodreads, what's
his name? According to Brett, Brett says just it just
seems like that this is the kind of thing you
don't need to argue about since the internet came out.
But like, mmmm, it's like, I.

Speaker 6 (12:02):
Will read you what nd n w TF. Let's go
with n WTF. Grand Slam is all for us subspecies.
Royal Slam is the Grand Slam. Plus the Goulds got
it World Slam, Royal Slam plus the oscillated wild turkey.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
That's where I'm That's where I that's where i'm. That's
where I'm not Hill.

Speaker 6 (12:23):
And then what Brody was talking about, the US Super
Slam harvest one wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
So you're you so Brett is right, you say that
you're a super Slam holder or well, I but I
say it wrong.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
I am a Royal.

Speaker 6 (12:42):
Slam holder, which is all four U s subspecies plus
the goul.

Speaker 5 (12:47):
So does that change hot matches up against your honorary
doctorate roy royal?

Speaker 2 (12:55):
You know the problem with having an honorary doctor as
opposed to regular one. You're like, if you do your
I don't have a resume. But we're at to make
a resume. You're not allowed to put it under education.

Speaker 6 (13:05):
Oh where do you put it?

Speaker 4 (13:06):
Honors award? And that's a problem. It's a tell.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
It's a real tell. Yeah, because then people look and
they're like, uhh yeah, I don't like that. But if
I had an honors thing in my resume, it would
be like Royal Slam holder, And then okay, we're not
going to talk about these artifacts. It just came out
of just not even going to talk about it. The artifact,
the six thousand year old hunting kit which is in

(13:34):
like pretty nice shape coming out of a cave in
Big Ben National Park in Texas, because on Radio Live,
Spencer's gonna be talking about the guy that did the work.

Speaker 6 (13:45):
In a few weeks, we're going to interview the guy
who found it.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Can't talk about it now, Okay, hold on, hold that
thought for a minute. There's one nice thing I wanted
to talk about because this is gonna segue forget. I
said that because I want to segue that into these boys.
But you know what's really funny they've been laughing about
is uh a word choice thing. Alaska Fish and Game Department.

(14:11):
You know, they're doing like they're doing like a tag lottery,
and they referred to a tag. I can't get enough
of this. They referred to a big game tag as prestigious.
Mm hmmm, as though holding it like if you look up,
like look up the word prestigious. Just read it real quick.
What does prestigious mean? I'd be like holding the tag,

(14:32):
you'd put it in the honor section of your resume.

Speaker 6 (14:36):
Inspiring respect and admiration, having high status.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yes, so you're like, yeah, you'd be like that would
be like a like a thing you had, like you'd
bring if you're on a date. Yeah, it's good marketing
if someone is a little bit out of your league, prestigious,
like you know, you might be curious to know that
I own a that I hold a keen eye caribou
tag in Alaska, you know, And she'd be like, prestige.

(15:04):
I thought that was a great word choice, prestigious. It's
a prestigious caribou tag. Oh so back to this Adelado
kit the other I want to hear what you guys
think about this. This will be our this will be
how we get into it. You guys know meton Aaron
who's been on the show.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Recently, one of our one of our esteemed colleagues, one
of our esteemed colleagues, Clay Nukeombe, did a Bear Grease
podcast about some of the ins and outs of the
Clovis first uh idea and you know, the peopling of
the Americas. He did a little thing on that. A
lot of the guys we work with are all equally
fascinated by this subject. And in there, uh, Clay is

(15:46):
at with Metton, and Clay is observing that what I
always tell him, which is during the ice age period,
we're talking about whether you go back. Let let's just
for just for convenient memory sake, we go back like
like ten thousand years ago they weren't shooting bows. And

(16:06):
he's like, well, how do you know they weren't? And
he see he correct so he cracks playing like, oh
tell me more, like, how do you know that there
were no bows? And he said, well because I told him.

Speaker 4 (16:16):
Man.

Speaker 2 (16:19):
So when this six thousand year old hunting kit comes
out of this cave in Texas and lo and behold,
it's not a damn bow. I sent it to Clay
to say, no notice, no bow, it's an ad a
laddle n B. And are you guys at a laddle
or at laddle?

Speaker 4 (16:37):
Guys add a laddle all the way, I.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Say a little oh wow.

Speaker 4 (16:43):
Getting heated interview?

Speaker 2 (16:49):
So am I?

Speaker 3 (16:50):
Uh?

Speaker 4 (16:51):
Who's right?

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Is it just impossible to say what? What?

Speaker 3 (16:55):
Like?

Speaker 2 (16:55):
If someone when when when humans and what is now
the United States of America interacted with with mammoths, is
it impossible to say that they were Is it impossible
to say they weren't shooting bows at them.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
I don't think it's impossible. I mean, those those projectiles
are just so big. I just don't think they would
work very well on a boat. And I think that's
the assumption, right. Also, like what the oldest direct evidence
for bos in the world is probably the Mesolithic.

Speaker 3 (17:29):
In europeith twenty thousand. That's real.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
Probably, Oh really, they haven't that long ago.

Speaker 3 (17:35):
Well, it depends. I mean the way we infer bows
is usually based on the size of the stone point
because we very rarely find the bows themselves. Actually found
one once in Denmark that was six thousand years old.
That's incredibly rare.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Right, So what was that boat made out of?

Speaker 3 (17:52):
I don't know. I was a kid at the time.
I was maybe twenty two. Is my first archaeological field experience.
It was a It was a about a ten inch
piece of a bow that had broken and it was
recycled as part of a fish trap. But yeah, we
were digging in this like they call it Gutcha. It's
like this really muddy sediment and they would make these

(18:14):
fish traps that were like V shaped fences that went
to a woven fish trap and the tide would come in,
then would go out, and the fish would get funneled
into that trap. So that we were coming across all
these little round pieces of wood standing vertically that were
the posts for that fence, and I came down on
one that was d shaped, and that the old guy
who had been doing archaeology over there forever took one

(18:36):
look at it and he's like, that's a bow, and
he dug it out and sure enough it was nice
shaped and piece of a bow. Yeah, it was wild,
but that's really rare. Like normally we're inferring the technology
from the hard parts that are preserved, right, so finding
bows themselves is really really uncommon. We do have at lattles.
We do have bows, but the basic argument that's usually

(18:58):
made and distinguishing between bow and arrow and at lattle
is the size of the point. Once they get really small,
we say, well arrow said there, we have bow and arrow.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
But that's testable, right, I mean, like, I'm sure people
could mess around and see can you shoot a Clovis point.

Speaker 4 (19:13):
I think people have done like polatics experiments.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
David did that for his thesis.

Speaker 4 (19:17):
Yeah, David Howe, one of our master students, has a
great he's a great public science communicator in his own right.
But he did some holistic experiments with like a crossbow
and it's basically made points of you know, from that
big like you know, say a centimeter long, up to
the size of like a Clovis point mm hmm, and
tested the accuracy of those things the further like according

(19:38):
to size. And I don't remember his conclusions, but.

Speaker 3 (19:42):
He concluded that you get to a certain size and
the accuracy declines dramatically with bow.

Speaker 4 (19:46):
Yeah. And if you look, so, if you look in
like a stratified archaeological site, like a rock shelter that's
just got layers and layers of stuff in it. If
you map out the wits of those projectiles through time,
there's usually this dramatic decrease in width. In Wyoming, for instance,
it's like fifteen hundred years ago or so, and that's
generally assumed to be demarketing the transition to bow and arrow.

(20:08):
Or you've been using spear throwers, spear throwers, spear throws,
and all of a sudden you get a bow and
your projectiles just decrease in size really rapidly.

Speaker 3 (20:16):
Got it?

Speaker 2 (20:16):
You know that, dude, I was talking about Clay nukembe Yeah,
he killed it. He put a he put a fullsome
point on an arrow and killed a bear with it,
and the bear piled up in twenty yards.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
I think was there was that on YouTube? Yeah, I
think I saw that.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
I mean he shot what he shot it from my
three yards or something like that. He dug a underground
he dug an underground pit and then had a bait
pile because he knew he wanted to, like he wanted
to almost be shooting up into the bear, so he
was underground because he wanted a good angle on it.

Speaker 4 (20:49):
That's the next level shit man.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Yeah, you know full some points are interesting because it's
really really fine, like a nice, really well made fallso
points really light. I think it would work just fine
as an arrow point.

Speaker 4 (21:02):
Let me hit.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
I want I want to do something real quick. I'm
trying to do it quick. I want I want to
lay out the current. I want to lay out the
what is the debate?

Speaker 3 (21:15):
Which debate? There's many debates, the big debate.

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah, the big debate. I want to lay out the
or let maybe you guys, what do you guys want
to do? It lay out to me? But I want
you to give the other side a fair shake. No,
I want to do it because I don't want to
make I don't want I don't want to make you
argue someone else's argument.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
Yeah, yeah, I don't mind making that argument.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Okay, layout the debate unless you want me to do.

Speaker 4 (21:42):
Well. You did just get this on a a PhD.
Maybe this is your oral examples.

Speaker 3 (21:46):
It was.

Speaker 4 (21:50):
All right.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
For most of my life. The for most of my
life that the dominant narrative about the first peoples to
come into what is now the United States of America
was that sometime, you know, thirteen thousand years ago, some
big game hunters came over the Bearing Land Bridge, not

(22:17):
thinking they were probably not thinking they were going somewhere
like the Bearing Land Bridge was not a narrow It's
not like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was like
a body of land the size of Texas. Generations probably
lived and died on it without knowing they were going anywhere.
Came into Alaska, were prevented from going south because there

(22:38):
was just massive ice sheets. This is like the Ice Age,
big glacial ice sheets. Eventually this thing opened up, it's
been described like an ice free cordor opened up and
it's been subscribe described as if you imagine a long
coat that has a zip around the bottom and a
zip around the top. The glaciers melted, created this thing

(22:59):
called the ice free Corridor, and these hunters kind of
spilled down onto the American Great Plains around the site
of Edmonton, Alberta, and then raised hell on mammoths, killed, wipe,
managed to wipe out mammoths and a bunch of other megafauna.
And it was this like distinct culture. They had a
distinct projectile point they made and with stunning speed, colonized

(23:27):
the United States down in New Mexico. They were everywhere.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
They were to Florida, South America too.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah, they were in Florida, They're in Washington State, their
points are up in Michigan. They were just everywhere. And
then out of that group eventually like came all these
different cultures and then you start seeing these distinctive cultural markings.
In the last I don't know a handful of years,
it's become these these new archaeological sites have thrown this

(23:56):
into question, putting forward the idea that people were here
much longer, that the people that were here earlier weren't
Clovis and that Clovis kind of came Clovis evolved here
from other peoples that showed up here. The ice free
corridor thing isn't true, and these new people seem these

(24:18):
new people instead came earlier. They came in boats down
the coast, and then they somehow morphed into these mammoth
hunting Clovis people.

Speaker 4 (24:29):
How is that?

Speaker 3 (24:30):
It's pretty good?

Speaker 4 (24:31):
Really, that's a good synopsis.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
Well, yeah, I mean there's a number of different issues there, right,
Like there's the date of arrival to Alaska. There's the
date of getting south of the ice sheets. There's the
issue of how did they make a living? Did they
drive this extinction event? There's a number of separate issues there.
Did they take the coastal route versus the inland route?
And you're right that we've sort of tied up Clovis

(24:52):
with ice free corridor, pre Clovis with coastal We don't
necessarily have to tie these things together or like Clovis
with over kill at pre Clovis with not overkill. Right,
all these things we can sort of view independently.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Let's start with this. When I say, like what is
tell people like what is Clovis? When we say Clovis,
what are we talking about?

Speaker 4 (25:17):
The stone tool technology at the most basic level. But
I think it's also come to be associated with a LifeWay,
highly mobile, use of really high quality raw materials, seemingly
a preference towards hunting large bodied animals, widespread across North America,
and you know something sitting in South America if you're

(25:38):
looking at like fluted sales, cave points.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Fishtail points.

Speaker 4 (25:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
And another really clear attribute of Clovis is wherever you
find it, it dates within a very very narrow time range.
Depending on who you ask. The Clovis period is three
hundred to five hundred years m and that was it. Yeah, Yeah,
that like that the really consistent day across the country.
What Spencer mentioned that it's sort of a pan continental phenomenon.

(26:05):
I think that's a really important part of the story
because that's not really a thing. After Clovis, you do
get this regional differentiation and never again do you see it. Right,
So it suggests that there's really something special about Clovis.
And right, the traditional explanation was is that this was
the technology made by the first people and they're spreading
this technology across the continent. That's why it's everywhere. It's

(26:27):
interesting because it's a really unique kind of spear point.
It wasn't used as fluted points right where they take
these flakes from the base. We're used for a very
brief period of time and never again. So it's like
this really really good cultural marker of this particular time period,
and it is a pan continental phenomenon. So how does
that happen if people are already here? Well, the argument

(26:49):
I suppose is it's like a really popular stylistic idea
of how to make a point that spreads among existing populations.

Speaker 5 (26:57):
Can you describe what you mean by a flute and
a point? Like if someone's never if they picture a
stone point, they have one image in their mind, maybe
a couple images, but like, what is a flute? What's
what does a Clovis point look like if you're going
to draw it?

Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, So the I would say when most people think
of an arrowhead or spear point, right, they're thinking sort
of a notched variety. We've got sort of a triangular,
bifacially flaked piece of stone that have not just coming
in from the corners or the sides. That's a later
invention that comes a few thousand years after Clovis. With Clovis,
we're talking about what we call a lanceolate point. So

(27:38):
it's it's it's long, it's narrow, it comes to a
tapered and in the base is basically indented. It's concaves old.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
I thought, Brodie, would you mean mega favor?

Speaker 3 (27:46):
Sure?

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Can you run in my office and grab my Clovis
thrusting spear in the corner. And then I got on
my desk. I got some clover, some poles and points.

Speaker 3 (27:53):
Yep, and then and then the flute. The word comes
from like the flute. It's in a column, right, It's
like it's a groove. So the really special thing about
Clovis points and similar points that follow like folsome points
and other regional varieties of Spencer's got something.

Speaker 4 (28:11):
That's badass. You met this dude when this is a
good visual aid? Tyson Arnold drew that wanted me to
hand it off to you as a gift for your studio.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
So where do I hold this film?

Speaker 4 (28:23):
That's right? There is great the line drawing of one
of the points from a psych called the East win At.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
What's nuts is this is? This is like the size
that's yeah, that's like a giant.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
That's a really big one. Usually they're like a big
Clovis point is usually half that long. That's that's exceptionally large.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
But when we're talking about for for folks watch it
on YouTube, this is the that's a real if you're
a flint nap, it's really hard to do that, like
a high failure rate.

Speaker 5 (28:55):
Yeah, it's almost like if you picture a blade, if
you were to be able to pin sort of on
the back end, that's sort of the shape, right.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
Yeah, yeah, you know they when they were first found
that archaeologists sort of made analogies to blood grooves some banets,
and I've never read that. Yeah, that was like one
of the original ideas as to why they were doing that.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
Uh, that three to five hundred to your period, can
I U I want to take a stab at like
a little bit, just trying to describe what you're saying about.
Did that mean that everybody caught on or did that
mean like, does it make more sense that the reason
everybody was I can't say everybody. Well, let me ask

(29:42):
this question. During this three to five hundred to year period,
if you find a Clovis point, you date it, it's
this three to five hundred of your period. Can do
you go anywhere else? Can you go anywhere in the
US and find other technologies that sit right inside that too?
Like there was different? Or is everything from that window Clovis.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
It's a really good question. Generally speaking, everything from that
window is Clovis except for the site we just dug.

Speaker 4 (30:13):
Yeah, I mean there's a little bit of evidence that
Great Basin has some different stuff going on. Some stem
point components, but by standpoints, I mean they're not fluted,
they're kind there's more of a stem so at the
bottom the base of the point kind.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
Of constricts more as a shoulder.

Speaker 4 (30:32):
Some of those components seem to overlap with Clovis a
little bit from the Great Basin, very different technology, and
you look in some of those rock shelters there and
the lowest most components there seem to overlap with Clovis slightly,
although Clovis still seems to have some some slightly older
dates in that stuff.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Got it, And then we talked about this spence. We
talked about this work. What's kind of upset this idea
that clobus the Clovis first idea was it they keep
they find these older sites. And I don't know if
you're gonna regret your word choice, but you said a
problem with these really old archaeological sites is they're not

(31:12):
normal sites.

Speaker 4 (31:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Like there's been tons of stuff in the media, you know,
or it was at a time, like the footprints in
White Sands. Okay, you got that. You got the dude
out in Chesapeake Bay. Who's who's finding claiming to find
really old stuff? Or roading out of banks in Chesapeake Bay.
I know you're only here. Oh, here's the points. See

(31:37):
we wound up having this picture show up. Brody, Oh well,
this is like an actual size. Would you guys say
that's a more normal Yeah, that's a I can't remember
what one. That's a repel club, that's a replic club, No, no, no,
this is a handmade one. And then here's one half
to to a knife these met and met in pieces.

(32:01):
And here's one a half to two a dangle that
spear right in front of this built Phil's picture. Here's
a here's a Clovis point half to and it's like
gripping it like imagine there's that that the wood is
grabbing it like this and it's bound.

Speaker 4 (32:18):
Got the hell flapper.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
Yeah, split shaft we call it.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah. Uh, tell me about these really old sites.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
And and and well let's I mean, if we're going
to talk about them not being normal, let's talk about
what is normal.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Tell me what what's a normal site?

Speaker 3 (32:38):
So, you know a lot of Clovis sites. Many of
the early ones were large mammal kill sites. The first
excavated Clovis site was actually the Dent site in Colorado.
It's mammoth kill. A few years later Clovis points flakes, tools,
bone rod. It's found with mammoth bones at Blackwater Draw,
the Clovi site that gives the Clovis Complex its name.

(33:00):
That pattern has been repeated over and over and over
again at depending on who you ask, fifteen to twenty
sites where we have Clovis artifacts associated with mammoths, mastenons,
and gomphathiers. You know what gomphathias are.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
No, oh, yeah, it's that kind of They got those
big armored plates on them. No oh, that's not it. Okay, No,
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
Gomfatheer is related to a masdon. They're in Central America
and South America. So in northern Sonora, Mexico. The last
twenty years or so a Clovis Gomfithear kill site was found.
So this pattern people, phil, you put one of those
on the screen, they have a shorter trunk.

Speaker 4 (33:41):
I am not an expert in They oftentimes have two
tusks too. Write I can't, there's some difference.

Speaker 5 (33:47):
That's what I was for whatever reason, That's what I
was picturing in my head.

Speaker 3 (33:51):
That the early ones definitely have strange cranium morphology things
going on.

Speaker 4 (33:58):
You want to spell that for me if you can't,
A G O M P H.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
O T H E R E. So that's one aspect
of Clovis. We also have Clovis bison kills, at least
two of those, one in Oklahoma, one in Arizona. And
then we have Clovis campsites, and these are basically you
have heart features, fire pits, people working around them, and

(34:25):
you have butchered remains of usually large mammals. The site
we recently dug a lot of bison. And this is
sort of typical hunter gathering archaeology. Right. You have the
things that hunter gatherers do. You have heart, yeah, they
have the downward facing tusks and upward Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
Man, I'd get after one of those, man that'd be
a sweet school to have. Look at that thing.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
Was that called again gomfa there? Yeah, the genus star
wars looking.

Speaker 6 (35:00):
That's a good way to describe it.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
So that was like an elephant species down in South America.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
Yeah, and in Central America. They probably made it in
the southern US because because this this one clove is
Gonfitthier killed. It's called Elphine del Mundo. It's it's not
far from the Arizona border, maybe one hundred miles south
in Sonora.

Speaker 4 (35:19):
Hm.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
Wow.

Speaker 6 (35:22):
It says they were on all continents except Australia and Antarctic.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:29):
So so clove is archaeology is pretty typical for hunter
gathered archaeology. I mean, you have these domestic sites where
people are camping, sitting around fires, making and repairing tools, cooking, scrape,
scraping hides. Then we have bone beds, and we also,
of course have the Anzac Burial not far from here, right,
we have human remains. Uh.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Is it is it true that no? Is it true
that no one's ever found a cloves point actually stuck
into mammoth bone?

Speaker 3 (35:58):
That is true?

Speaker 4 (35:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
Now, there was a case from Brazil somewhere where there
was a some kind of lithic stuck and I want
to say gonfity or skull. But I saw that a
long time ago. I need to check that.

Speaker 4 (36:12):
Are you do you know that?

Speaker 2 (36:12):
There was a rumor at the close type site for
a long time peop were just hauling that stuff away.
And I went there once and did a lot of
reading about it. And there was like a rumor that
some bus driver that like they took kids out to
see it, and some bus driver allegedly took home a

(36:33):
mama's school that had a point embedded in his eye socket.
But it's just like, it's just it's just rumor.

Speaker 4 (36:39):
I've never heard that.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
You never heard that rumor.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
I've heard that rumor twice because I listened to your conversations.
I think both times it came from you, dude.

Speaker 2 (36:49):
Everybody find I'm going to find where I'm gonna find, Like,
I couldn't have made that up. A bus driver like
did a bus driver took some kids to see in
the hall of thing home with them. I wouldn't have
made that up. It's too like much detail. I gotta
find where I read that. Wherever I read it, I
think is on my bookshelf.

Speaker 3 (37:10):
I know if you find let me know, I don't
want to see that.

Speaker 4 (37:13):
Yeah, I mean, I think when I made that comment
to you about Clovis sites looking normal and everything before
it not, this is exactly what I'm meaning. Like, you
can dig a site that's two thousand years old, five
thousand years old, six thousand years old, it all has
roughly the same characteristics as like a Barry Clovis campsite,

(37:34):
because hunter gathered campsites look a certain way. There's like
concentrations of artifacts where people flint napped, and there's hard
features that people congregated around to talk and eat and work,
hide and things like that. The pre Clovis record to
this point has nothing like that. It's all weird stuff.

(37:55):
And I think in a more general sense, like the
burden approved for this stuff for like over a hundred
years now has simply been find obvious human made artifacts
in a sealed geologic context, just a good stratigraphic context.
And I think in our view, you can point to
any number of these sites that date before Clovis, and

(38:16):
you can and you can say either the artifacts look
a little weird or there was some kind of stop.

Speaker 7 (38:22):
When you say weird, what do you mean, I.

Speaker 4 (38:25):
Mean not obviously human made. There's a lot of natural
processes that can produce things that look like artifacts and
rocks falling off a cliff and striking something, getting entrained
in a watercourse and breaking up that way. This is
one of the brilliant projects that met and actually initiated,
looking at rocks and Antarctica where we know there wasn't

(38:47):
people and seeing the range of variation and how rock
is just naturally modified by the by the environment. Really
great idea that that's why he's doing that is because
there's a lot of natural process as as they can
break up rock to make them look like maybe they
were broken by people when they actually weren't.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
So these old old sites, well what is okay? At
what date does it become in your mind? When does
it when does it like tail off? Like you got
really good sights up to what date and then and
then you got your weird sites thirteen thousand and that's
all the calibration stuff is that, like as we understand you.

Speaker 3 (39:27):
Calendar yeares, and we're talking about south of the ice sheets.
North of the ice sheets, it's a different story. But
south of the ice sheets thirteen thousand and onward, beautiful
normal typical hunter gather archaeology. To give you an example
of the kind of thing Spencer was talking about, he
and I and Sarah Lawn excavated a mammoth two three

(39:49):
years ago. That mammoth was thirteen thousand, two hundred years old.
We were really excited to excavate it because you know,
it's right on the cusp of Clovis, and we thought, eyah,
maybe this is a mammoth by people. Right above the mammoth,
Benmouths was strangely kind of near the top of a
hill on this on this slope, on the top of
that hill, there's a bunch of shirt or flint, like

(40:10):
really good material for making stone tools, and that mammoth
is buried down on these old gravels, kind of like
in a base of a little draw and we kept
finding little flakes but all of this local raw material,
and they're all tiny, like you know, two millimeters, And
this is this is like a perfect scenario for producing
things that you could interpret as human made artifacts that

(40:32):
clearly aren't. All of the local material most of it
has cortex, meaning it's just like a little chip taken
off of a natural cobble, looked nothing like a typical
mythic assemblage, and that there are pre Clovis sites like
that where you have these things that looks sort of
like artifacts, but they're they're probably not, but they're interpreted
to be artifacts. And there's also a lot of really

(40:55):
strange things that show up in pre Clovid sites that
are argued to be evidence of humans that aren't the
typical things like chipstone artifacts. And I made a list
of those kinds of things. If you're curious, hit me
with the list.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah, all right, so.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
Footprints, drag marks, fingerprints, copper lights, copper lights are cross poops, seaweed,
balls of seaweed. Uh, underwater meat caches, Spencer pointed. That
went out to me, there's three cases. Yeah I do.

(41:37):
There are no no underwater meat caches after Clovis to
my mind, they're only a pre Clovis thing.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Oh really, Yeah, I'm gonna stop telling people about underwater.

Speaker 3 (41:49):
Meat cut marks. So, like Mark's on bone, right, you
guys know about that.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
Can we back up to the underwater meat cash? What
was the site that was interpreted to be this. There's
a site somewhere where someone had piled up mammoth meat
under a pond filled the intestines full of gravel and
then use these gravel filled intestines to weigh it down
under that pond. That's badass.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
That site is in the Midwest. I think it's the
Burning Tree mas it On. It's one that Dan Fisher
at the University of Michigan published. Okay, yeah, I think
that's the one. I'm not sure that certain.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
And obviously the intestine rotted away, so it's just gravel
in a line. You're not buying it.

Speaker 3 (42:33):
I mean weird stuff, right, this is this is our point.
I don't even keep going now, Okay, bone embedded and bone.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
What does that mean?

Speaker 3 (42:43):
Like you have a mass it on bone and there's
like another piece of bone like stuck into the rib.

Speaker 4 (42:48):
That was healed around it that they argued was a spear.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Point and not to not two of them duking it out.

Speaker 3 (42:56):
That's what other people have said. Yeah, their bone modifications,
like the ways that bones have been fractured, Like you
have no artifacts, but bones are fractured in weird ways.
It seemed like only humans could do it. And the
last one on the list is a pit full of grasshoppers. Okay,

(43:16):
so this is I just told you about probably twenty
pre Clovis claims, right, all this weird stuff as opposed
to like, what I'd like to see is like, let's
just say some flakes from from napping Stone around a
heart feature and a really good stratigraphic context. It's well dated.

(43:36):
There are millions of those on this continent. There are
zero of those in pre Clovis. Mm hmm.

Speaker 4 (43:45):
That's it.

Speaker 5 (43:46):
When you're talking about stratigraphic stratigraphic context, like we're talking
about eroading banks, you're talking about digging out a hillside,
like what are what are you when you're thinking about
where to look.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
For a site?

Speaker 5 (44:00):
Sort of what are the considerations in mind? What is
like a normal site versus what makes things unusual?

Speaker 4 (44:08):
I can speak to Wyoming at least the best place
is define buried archaeology in Wyoming or like rock shelters
and floodplains in Wyoming and Montana. You walk around the landscape,
which you guys do a lot, hunting, fishing, whatever, most
of the landscape that you're walking across has basically zero
potential to preserve an archaeological site. If you're on the

(44:29):
side of a hill, if you're on a really high
surface that gets wind scoured. All those areas you can
drop artifacts there, but if they aren't buried immediately with
like datable material or whatever, you can't really preserve that
archaeological site. Right, you have no idea how old it is.
But if you drop that stuff in a floodplain that

(44:49):
receives annual flood events, it's going to get buried slowly
over time and get sealed within that. That's your tigraphy
and allows us to go back later and actually have
with some degree of certainty an idea of how old
that stuff is and that it's not say, mixed with
something that's like ten thousand years younger or ten thousand
years older. It it was just laid down in a

(45:12):
really specific location conduced with the preservation. It's actually kind
of rare. Like if you think about just the range
of human behaviors that you do every day, even if
you're out hunting or whatever, most of the stuff you
do is not going to be preserved in the archaeological record.
It has to be this confluence of like behavior and
geologic context coming together to really preserve that activity.

Speaker 6 (45:34):
When Clovis was happening in the America, is what did
the technology look like on the rest of the planet,
like during that three to five hundred year window.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
Well, that's a lot of planet.

Speaker 6 (45:46):
What about where they just came from, like the last
place they were before the America.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Yeah, that Slana River site where they had that badass
wooly rhinoceros.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Yanayana rights way up and yeah on bought that those guys.
That's that's twenty thousand years before Clovis in the High
Arctic and in a warm period in the Middle Last
Glaciation where they've got I think spear shafts made out
of rhinoceros, horn bow needles, beads, amazing things.

Speaker 6 (46:17):
But what about during that same era as Clovis.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
So if we go north to Alaska, just prior to Clovis,
there's plenty of good archaeology starting with about fourteen thousand,
it looks similar to Clovis. I mean, people are making
bifacial projectile points. The one big difference is they're making
a lot of microblades. It's really tiny, really long, skinny,
sharp flakes that then they you know, they'll have in

(46:43):
a long piece of bone to make a really deadly
spear point. You have end scrapers, pretty typical hunter gatherer stuff. Really.
Maybe the biggest difference at that time is if you're
to go, say to Israel, Middle East, you're right on
the cusp of the origins of agriculture around clover times,
and within a thousand years people are growing crops.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
I think, what's your take on the overkill hypothesis.

Speaker 3 (47:16):
I think there's a lot of really strong evidence for it.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
I love it, and you know I love it. It's
not not light more than the overkill hypothes you're talking
about the blitz kreeg. Right, Yeah, the idea, well, the
idea that there's a there's again there's an ongoing debate
about what role did humans have in wiping out everything

(47:42):
that was bigger than a modern American buffalo like when
it was over like now that during this period of time,
like let's say, from twenty thousand years ago to ten
thousand years ago, I think nine genuses, So nine genera
of animals when extinct, thirty five genera thirty five genera

(48:03):
in North America.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
And forty some genera in South America. So let me
let me be caun.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
I hate you. What can I want to add? The
little wrinkle before you start. Yeah, folks will say, we
have thirteen, fourteen, fifteen mammoth kill sites. We have zero
giant groundsloft kill sites, we have zero. What was that

(48:31):
big ass one hundred pound beaver catch?

Speaker 3 (48:35):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (48:36):
Where are all the kill sites of those? Like, where
are all the short faced bear kill sites? If they
were killing all this, where.

Speaker 4 (48:45):
Is it all?

Speaker 3 (48:45):
Yeah, that's the right question, you know that. I I
was telling Spencer this this morning that I started out
incredibly skeptical of overkill for exactly that reason, right, Like,
as archaeologists, we work at a material world and we
look at material evidence, and when there's no material evidence,
it's like, how do you believe something actually happened if
there's no evidence for it? So, yeah, it's a sticky

(49:09):
problem when we talk about mammoths. Is actually a huge
number of mammoth kill sites. When you say only fourteen,
it's actually a huge number given the amount of time
and space we're talking about, Like you feel that that
is a lot, It's it's a gigantic number. We did
a study comparing the density of mammoth kill sites in
Clovis times to all other elephant kill sites from the

(49:30):
rest of the world. Elephants are interesting, right because, as
you mentioned, they used to occupy every part of the
world except places they couldn't swim to, Right, So you
have them in Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America.
It's really their absence that's the unusual thing, even like
Wrangle Island, Yeah, the Greek Islands Islands dwarf mammoths, and
the Mediterranean Islands Channel Islands. Yeah. And if you look

(49:55):
at it in terms of the density of mammoth kills
in time, especially a four hundred year time period, I mean,
it's a huge number of sites that it's really surprising
to me that we're questioning whether Clovis people were hunting
moments and whether they affected their populations, given to the
absolute incredible abundance of evidence that we have for it. Yeah,

(50:17):
fourteen is not a very big number, but given the
total number of Clovi sites that actually speak to what
Clovis people were doing, what they were hunting, it's a
huge number.

Speaker 7 (50:29):
Is there any guesses, like during that Clovis period, Is
there any guesses how many of them were, like, say,
in North America in that time.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
How many clothes people? Yeah, sure, we can we can
sort of estimate that by looking at modern hunter gatherer
population densities, it's a it's a really complicated problem because
you know, first, if they're first they started basically a
population of zero, and then they grow to some presumably
some caring capacity or some environmental limit, right, and the

(50:59):
number of people is going to very across the continent.
But when I tried to estimate it once, I got
numbers in the neighborhood of thirty thousand to one hundred
thousand people.

Speaker 6 (51:06):
What about mammoth's populations.

Speaker 3 (51:08):
We can estimate that too. I'm not going to make
up numbers, but I don't know. I don't know off
the top of my head. But it's a lot. It's
a lot.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Is it fair when you talk about that? Fourteen is
a lot of sights. As you're saying that, I'm kind
of thinking in my head of you know, I've done
a lot of hunting throughout my life. I'm trying to
think about ever made if I ever made a archaeological site, Well,
you absolutely have know what I'm saying, Like that I
made a discernible that was preserved. Like we're they're like, oh,

(51:41):
a guy killed a deer and then left his like
like bullet fragments, a knife blade, and it's all sealed
up in some river bottom somewhere.

Speaker 4 (51:52):
I think it'd be. I think it's probably pretty rare.

Speaker 2 (51:54):
I mean, you've probably had so that's what I'm thinking.

Speaker 4 (51:56):
It is like most of the animals you've butchered out right,
You've you've left some stuff. The coyotes have dispersed it.
So what was an archaeological site in the moment now
becomes just kind of a scatter of chewed up deer
bone or whatever, and it's no longer really discernible as
an archaeological site. So yeah, I mean, just like the
preservation of archaeological sites period is kind of a miraculous

(52:19):
thing and to have That's why I taught saying fourteen
mammoth kills, given all the ravages of time and the
unlikelihood for these things to be preserved, and the very
small number of sites from that time period, in general,
it's a lot. It's like a substantial percentage of the
Clovis sites that have ever been excavated are mammoth kills.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
It's the most common animal in Clovis funnel assemblage is mammoth,
which is which is shocking right, because if you just
go out there hunting, you and you sort of if
you take the attitude I'm gonna kill whatever I come across,
You're not gonna encounter mammoths a lot, right, You're gonna
have funnel asemblages dominated by rabbits, squirrels. It's gonna be

(53:00):
way more dear kills than mammoth kills. The bigger the
animal is, the less common they are in the landscape. Right,
So when you see this real focus on these large animals,
it tells you they're going after those things and they're
ignoring opportunities to go after these smaller animals. Not to
say they didn't occasionally take them, but they're really specializing
in the predation of these large animals. Why, because you

(53:21):
get the most bang for your buck. I mean, you
bring down a mammoth, let's say it takes you two days,
you get enough food to feed thirty people for a month.
It's sort of like wow, yeah.

Speaker 7 (53:32):
Yeah, I was gonna ask, is there any evidence like
average size of like a Clovis group, Like how many
people would be.

Speaker 3 (53:41):
Eh, this guy just tried to answer that question.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
How many.

Speaker 4 (53:46):
We've been working on this laprel Clovis site in Wyoming
for how we worked on it for a decade, opened
up the site in twenty fourteen. A few years ago
we decided we try to actually chase out how big
this is. The site's very ten to fifteen feet deep,
so it's not like you can just walk over and
chase out the artifacts and say like, okay, the site's

(54:06):
right here. So we ended up sinking all these really
deep augurs and this systematic grid over the site, screening
all the dirt out of it, and finding these little
tiny artifacts. We ended up finding a site that was
a couple of acres big. If you compare that to
the size of ethnographic we documented campsites where we have
known numbers of people. It's somewhere between thirty and fifty people.

(54:29):
So in that site in particular, too, it looks like
there's it's kind of these clusters of houses kind of
around this mammoth kill got at least three of these
pretty big clusters east of which might contain say two
to four houses, so it all kind of adds up
to about that number. We might not have found the

(54:49):
edge of the site. I think we did our best,
but it seemed like it seemed like we about chased
the edge of it out. So if you compare just
the amount of space that hunter gatherers use in the
campsite to the space of that site, we land on
this number of about thirty five people or so hm.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
Hm and nothing could feed them for a month.

Speaker 3 (55:08):
Yeah, but that mammoth, I don't think they ate much
of it. That's that's my interpretation was that this mammoth,
it was largely an anatomical order when it was excavated,
meeting the bones, it's still sort of laid out in
anatomical order, So it wasn't heavily butchered if they if

(55:30):
they did butcher it, they did not move any bones.
So it's possible like and all these.

Speaker 2 (55:35):
Called gauntless methods.

Speaker 3 (55:37):
Yeah, yeah, no, they certainly the certainly could have filated
a lot of meat off of this mammoth. But in
all these house areas that we dug, we dug four
of them, the only mammoth we got was ivory, and
they were working the ivory. But we have no no
rib fragments, no footbones. And we also have a lot
of evidence for use of other big animals, mostly bison

(55:59):
around these in these houses. So they're sitting next to
this big dead elephant. It's a subadult's probably in its twenties.
It's probably I don't know, five ton animal. It seems
barely butchered and they're not really moving the bones around
except for the ivory, and they're and they're eating bison.

Speaker 2 (56:16):
So what do you big of that? I guess you don't.
Who knows.

Speaker 4 (56:20):
There's a lot of animals, And I mean, like when
you all butcher animals, right, like, you can kind of
stop whenever you can. You can always get a little
bit more marrow out of the animal or do or
you can like maybe you want to take the liver
or whatever. Well, a lot of times you don't do
that right because you don't need to same thing here.
If you have animals at your disposal and you don't
need to go to all that crazy effort to get

(56:42):
every last calorie out of that animal, then you're just
gonna take what.

Speaker 3 (56:44):
You want and move on do the gourmet butchery.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
Yeah, you know, you hear people talk about and when
I say people, I mean like people in the discipline
that you're in. Right now, I'm holding in my hand.
If you're watching, I'm holding my hand a Clovis point
that's half to don d a knife blade. So I'm
doing some devil's advocacy here. So what we know if
you look at the archaeological record, this is half the

(57:09):
DOWNTO wouldn't handle with sinews. Okay, the sinews ride away,
the wood rots away, and all you have is the
stone left and some bone. Earlier, I mentioned that they've
never found one of these points embedded into mammoth bone,
and I don't even know how possible that is. I'm
sure you could study it, whether it's some pot like

(57:30):
if you took a mammoth femur and jabbed it with this,
do you ever get it to actually stick and dry
in there or not? I don't know. So you have
bones and you have stone. We assume because the stone's there,
were like, oh they stabbed it. They stabbed it, and
these are stuck in there because that's how they killed it,
all right. Someone else, who's pushing a narrative that they

(57:53):
weren't mammoth hunters, says, well, they found it lay in dead,
and then they not that the stone. The point didn't
get there on the end of a spear shaft. It
was there because it was on their little knife which
they cut this dead one up with. As a like
as an outdoorsman. What I always laugh about about that

(58:14):
explanation is, and you guys could bat me up on this,
when you're out wandering around the mountains or out wandering
around the woods, you do not often encounter fresh dead stuff.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
Like it.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
It vert like I can almost go out and say, like,
it doesn't happen the ju lane highway. Yes, yeah, but
I'm saying out right out yeah, encountering all this fresh
dead stuff, if you wanted me to produce a dead thing,
it'd be much more like I would be much quicker
at producing a dead thing by killing it than I
would wander around. So I found it, you know what

(58:53):
I'm saying. So I've always laughed at but that's like
an idea, is that is that they were just finding
them laying around.

Speaker 4 (58:59):
Everyone And if you did find one, would you go
shoe that's a good eating I don't think so.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
Yeah. I mean I've had this argument with colleagues, right
they're like this this this site we're digging laprell, there's
this dead mammoth there. There's not a clovise point in it.
There's a Clovis Point about forty feet away from it.
You're yeah, people said, yeah, somebody we paid to dig.

Speaker 4 (59:24):
Seriously, yeah, in an excavation, know, yeah, forty ft away.

Speaker 3 (59:29):
It's a big sight. Is this camp. There's this dead
mammoth in this really cool camp around it, right, and
that the the Clovise point is in the camp area.
But people were not in with it, not in the mammoth.
People will say to me, how do you know that
mammoth wasn't scavenge? And the argument I make is exactly
what you just made, which is there a hell of
a lot more opportunities to exploit a live mammoths than

(59:52):
dead ones. Also, you know this this this sort of
this divide in the discipline about whether we see Clovis
hunters a sort of living in this land of abundance.
As Spencer sort of just described, why eat this really
lean mammoth if I can access bison any time I want?
Sort of the idea, I'm the first person in this
land and these animals are naive to me and like

(01:00:13):
it's easy living versus these are the first people in
the land. They're kind of lost, they're scared of these
big animals. They don't know the animal behavior. It's dangerous
to hunt them, so they're being really cautious, right, mammoths
are too dangerous.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
But that Yeah, but they've been dealing with them for
They've been dealing with them for generations and thousands of miles.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
I'm on your side, man, I mean, I think people
they were they but their right, they have like one
hundred year generation.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
Because they were there's mamoson Siberia. Absolutely, they'd know no like,
they would know no reality. They would know no reality
in which even their most distant ancestor wasn't dealing with them.

Speaker 3 (01:00:57):
I would say even if they came into the America's
and had never seen a mammoth, they would really quickly
learn learn how to expertly prey on that animal, and
they would enjoy the hell out of it, in part
because of the danger, in part because you bring down
all this meat. You can make your life for all
your friends better. You can use that for social capital.
You get a lot of prestige you bring down an

(01:01:18):
animal like that. Right, So yeah, I very much think
this was a good time to be a human. When
you're the first first person in a place, you guys
understand that as hunters, right, you want to hunt where
nobody else hunts. Yeah, so the big animals are so
we have the best opportunities, So we have the most animals.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Right, we see this. This is how I've explained at
various times of people is like you can find isolated
instances of what it might have been like for them.
Because when you look at when whaler's or like as
soon as trans oceanic shipping and whalers started hitting these
islands that no one had ever been on, like, no

(01:01:55):
one found the say shells until transoceanic shipping, Like no
one found it. There's one mammal of fruit bat like one.
It's so far out there, like no mammal had found
it except for a flying mammal. When dudes get on
these islands, they're just picking shit up. They're walking around us,
grabbing birds by the neck, birds are trying to land
on them. They're like literally carrying just like picking up

(01:02:19):
and carrying turtles and stacking them in their boats upside down.

Speaker 4 (01:02:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:22):
This the survival of giant tortoises on the Seychelles, the
survival of giant tortoises and the Galapagos, both things and
both both the same thing in both cases. Right, no humans,
no historic period.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
We just filled our boat like with live ones.

Speaker 3 (01:02:39):
So we about the knife question. You know, I did
a study with Dave Kilby and Bruce Huckle and others
looking at this question of Clovis's knives and the idea
of whether you know, Clovis points could actually kill a
mammoth or not. And and one thing we looked at
was where you find complete points versus broken points. Complete
points and people generally don't discard functional tools, right, And

(01:03:04):
we know from the like later bison kills that you
really commonly find complete points and bison kills because you
kill this big mass of animals, you lose the points,
You lose them in the mess, and you don't get
them back. It's like a really commonplace to find complete points.
In camps. You find the broken points when they do
retrieve the weapons, they're broken and they retooled. You find
the broken ones in camps and the complete ones and kills.

(01:03:25):
So we looked at this for Clovis and we find
absolutely in these mammoth kills you have a lot of
complete points. If these are knives, you have to ask yourself,
why are these people discarding six inch beautifully functional.

Speaker 5 (01:03:39):
Well, it takes in their hand the whole time, presuming right, like.

Speaker 3 (01:03:44):
At the Knocko mammoth, you've got eight of these inside
the animal. And by the way, you keep asking about
like artifacts embedded in the bone, and mammoth bone that
has been found twice I think in the Upper Paralytic
of Europe. At the layer site, which is a mammoth
kill in Arizona, there are two Clovis points right between
the ribs of them, right, we'd expect them to find them,
you know. So yeah, not embedded in the bone, but

(01:04:04):
pretty much in a place where you shouldn't be questioning
what this association between a weapon and a dead animal is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
Right. That is a good point that if you got
that big old pile on them, guts and shit, you
know that if you had stabbed them in there, you
might not retrieve them out. I mean, I've cut my
hand on broad heads I couldn't find inside deer.

Speaker 3 (01:04:24):
Yeah, and especially if they have a foreshaft, right, because
the fore shaft detaches in its way in the body cavity.
And if you know one thing interesting about butchering mamot's,
if they fall on one side. Forget about that stiff. Yeah,
it really only but like one side of the animal,
because if you can't turn it over right, so if
you shot it from that side, you might lose every
weapon that went in from that side.

Speaker 6 (01:04:46):
What are their tools did Clovis people have? Like was
there anything that would be redundant if you were to
use that as a knife? Like do we already know?

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
Oh?

Speaker 6 (01:04:53):
They had a knife sort of thing.

Speaker 4 (01:04:56):
Yeah, it's it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:57):
I mean, oh, Brodie, can you can you run me
another hair and do?

Speaker 3 (01:05:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:05:02):
You didn't grab did you bring my bone? My bone
shafts down?

Speaker 7 (01:05:06):
The little white ones?

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
Keep grabbing those, see you guys in a minute. Brody's
getting the workout. We've got a why don't sit in
that chair.

Speaker 4 (01:05:16):
It's a pretty great sample of Clovis tools from this
Laprell site we keep talking about, Uh, you know, stone
age toolkits don't actually change a ton between Clovis and
like the recent pass on the planes. You need the
same stuff. You need stuff to cut things with, you
need stuff to poke holes with, you need stuff to
scrape with. It's like basically the three things that stone
tools do. So stone knives and Clovis as sandwiches and

(01:05:39):
my experience are just really large flakes. Sometimes they're retouched
on one edge and in my experience just messing with
hides and to find quart site to be the best
medium to use it. I think it's because it got
a little grit to it. It kind of cuts into
the meat a little better. There's also at the laprel
site of big chopper. I watched you guys as bison
butchery experiment. One thing you're missing it met and tried

(01:06:03):
to make you as a big chopper to get those
ribs off. Got it. But at La probably have this cobble.
We have two of them, two choppers. Yeah, cobble that
fits just perfectly in your hand with like three flakes
taken off of the edge of it. Something you can
just bash with really common tool type, like in any
large mammal butcherings with a hand axe basically. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
In fact, you find them in an old one like
one point eight million years old, the oldest choppers, and
you find them in Clovis too.

Speaker 4 (01:06:27):
I'd say one underappreciated aspect of these hunter gathered toolkits,
the stuff to they close with. This is what I
studied primarily for my dissertation and that's scrapers, so you
just a stone scraper retouched it on one end. You
stick it into a handle to get some leverage, and
it's what used to scrape dry high to make it
more pliable. Also perforating tools that you'd use to prepare

(01:06:48):
seams to sew clothing with, because you're using using these
bone needles right and with bone needles don't have really
the tensile strength to perforate leather all the time, so
you prepare a scene with little perforators and stitch it up.
It's really kind of the the bread and butter of
a stone age tool gets these things where you scrape things,
a scrape hide, perforate hide, and cut up animals with.

Speaker 3 (01:07:10):
I would say there is one knife form possibly which
is the ultra thin Byface, which is a really really
beautifully made, super thin bifacial knife that we've found a
few of, the prowl. They're more commonly associated with Folsom,
which follows Clovis in the West, but there are non
Clovis examples, probably knives.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Oh yeah, I have a confession to make in all
my casual Joe below reading about Clovis hunters and fulsome
hunters I had never heard of what I'm holding in
my hand until I was looking at that chart hanging
at your office. Like then Meton sends me some of

(01:07:54):
these these are out of Uh, these are replicas of
some pieces that came out.

Speaker 3 (01:08:05):
Of Ohio, I believe Sheridan Cave.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Yeah, I'd never even heard of this. When I opened
the package up, I thought it was some kind of
little point. But this is like a piece. This is
a piece of a Clovis toolkit. That is, people debate
what the hell this was?

Speaker 4 (01:08:21):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
Yeah, talk about that. Can you get a good on that?
Phil You're getting it looks great? Uh, just to give
it quick a little more analysis. It's there's this bevel
cut into it and it's strided like it's caught like
you wanted to just going out on a limb here,
like you wanted to make it a little more grippy.

(01:08:43):
All right, Michael.

Speaker 4 (01:08:46):
So these are bone rods, commonly called bone rods. They've
been found in a lot of clovi including the Clovis
Typesite has a really beautiful example of one of these.
I've only found one in my career, was that the
powers to hematite.

Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
Corey, what kind of bones.

Speaker 4 (01:09:02):
I'm guessing it was a piece of cortical bone, like
a long bone from a bison. Not exactly sure. I
don't know what these are, but my assumption is that
it has something to do with the weaponry system powers Too.
This okre mine is, for whatever reason, just completely filled
with paleo Indian weaponry. We found like one hundred and

(01:09:22):
seventy points at this site set an okre mine, an
ochre mine in Southeast Wyoming, and we found one of
these associated with the Clovis fulsome layer at powers Too,
which is also filled with projectile points and flakes and stuff.
So my assumption is that it has something to do
with the weaponry system. What that is. I don't think

(01:09:43):
anybody has really ever satisfactorily explained that.

Speaker 7 (01:09:45):
When you say weaponry system, you mean it was linked
to the Clovis point somehow, or.

Speaker 4 (01:09:51):
Perhaps using the hafting system or something like that.

Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
Yeah, you could see this as a four cheft somehow, right,
the Clovis point there and then some other kind of
wedge on the other side.

Speaker 2 (01:10:00):
Yeah, a guy online figured it out. I was that
guy figures out a lot I saying, So I got
to about different dudes debating it, right, and there's a
dude saying that, like if you wedge that thing and
when you're trying to I couldn't. He didn't have any visuals,
but basically saying like he wedged it on the hafting

(01:10:22):
process and then as you lash that piece it like titans.

Speaker 4 (01:10:27):
That was his take on it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
It like it tightens the spear point. But he didn't
have any pictures to explain what the hell he was
talking about. But it's like, I had never heard of
that thing.

Speaker 3 (01:10:38):
They're not common, you know. There's in nineteen thirty six
in the Clovis site when they found the first mammoth
remains in Clovis Points, they had one of these in
the mammoth bone bed, but it's not common to find
them in mammoth bum beds. That that might be the only.

Speaker 2 (01:10:50):
Case because it's like also I imagine, because it's organic
and ship hauls it away or it rots.

Speaker 3 (01:10:57):
If you have bone preserved, these will be deserved if
they were there and they were left there. But again,
like nice functional implements, which these appear to be right,
they don't appear to be broken. People tend not to
leave these things behind. Pretty sure there were some of
these in the Anziki.

Speaker 4 (01:11:12):
Yeah, and then the East Winnachi site. There's several of
these associated with, like, I don't know how many points
are from there, a couple dozen Clovis points. It seems
to be consistently associated with weaponry, though. The only other
theory I've heard about these is dog sleds or something.

Speaker 3 (01:11:30):
That's That was Gramley's argument about East and I think
those were bi beveled, so they didn't have a point
on one end. They had a bevel this way and
a bevel an alternate bevel on the other side. And
Gramley argued that they were lashed together to make it
the runner on the heads. That's really silly idea.

Speaker 6 (01:11:50):
Come on, do you ever find evidence of clodest points
being picked up by ancient humans, like five thousand years
later and they find a use for them in all
of a sudden, there's a clothes point in with like
a woodland site somewhere.

Speaker 4 (01:12:04):
Yes, I know one example off the top of my head,
and I'm pretty sure everybody cites this one example. I've
actually never tracked down the citation to it, but I've
heard over and over again my entire career that somebody
found a fulsome point of Pueblo.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
Yes, yeah, that's what I mean.

Speaker 6 (01:12:20):
That's the one example of that like happening like.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
An Sazi what what so the so called honestas your
ancient puebloans that some pueblo had one where some dude's like,
look at that, brought it home.

Speaker 4 (01:12:33):
M I think everyone's everyone's into old stuff, right, That's
why I'm into archaeology. I think we have to assume
people had a fascination for the past.

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
Yeah, I bring home old shell casings. It wouldn't bring
home a new shell casing from If I find a
straight ball shellcasing that's got some holes rotten through it,
I'm going to bring that sucker homered percent. Man, you
got if I found one of my buddies, I'm not
bringing it home.

Speaker 4 (01:12:58):
I got a spot in your garage where you just
stack your old or your treasures.

Speaker 5 (01:13:02):
Look at there's a twenty seven nozzler case. It's got
to be you know, we could be up to fifteen
years old.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
Yeah, I'm bringing that home.

Speaker 3 (01:13:09):
Steve, Like, like twenty minutes ago, you asked about the
absence of evidence for like hunting all these megafaunas. Yeah,
can I say something about that?

Speaker 2 (01:13:18):
Say everything you want to say about that.

Speaker 3 (01:13:21):
So when you talk about like the giant beaver, right,
those guys, my understanding is are living in the northeast,
in the Midwest. In terms of what are evidence for
Clovis subsistence in that part of the world, we have
about two bones that happen to preservative fire and they're
both caribou. Bottom line is there's this huge blank spot
in what Clovist people were doing in that part of

(01:13:42):
the country where that animal lives. We basically have no
evidence for anything any subsistence.

Speaker 2 (01:13:46):
At all because it's not suitable to preserve.

Speaker 3 (01:13:49):
Right, right, So is the absence of evidence of hunting
of giant beaver meaningful? Probably not right. We can't really
interpret it one way or another. And a lot about
the Clovis record of finnel uses that way. Like if
you say, well, there's no evidence for Clovis use of sloth, well,
would you expect to see it in a mammoth kill site?
Probably not right, And that's what most of our sites are.

(01:14:10):
So is the absence of sloth and mammoth kill sites interesting?
Probably not. Now, if we go to the Aubrey site
in Texas, this big Clovis campsite. They do have sloth
dermal oscacles, which are these little like pieces of bone
embedded in the skin that armored these giant ground sloths.
Is that evidence for Clovis hunting of ground sloth? A
couple of derm oscles and a Clovis campsite. It's pretty ambiguous, right,

(01:14:35):
so the record is really hard to interpret. I will
say there is recently published a sloth kill from Argentina
called Campo Laborde. It's late places seen big. I think megathereum.
I'm not sure which sloth. So there is some evidence
for sloth use in South America. But just maybe to
end this this big train of thought, the most damning

(01:14:57):
evidence for human causation of the megaphonal extinctions to me
is you didn't have to do archaeology if you just
did paleontology around the world, everywhere that people went to,
and you you just looked for a big extinction event
in the last eighty thousand years, and you find one

(01:15:20):
in every case, in every land mass that marks human
arrival percent And it's not just the North American thing, right,
It's not just a South American thing. It's an Australian thing.
It's a New Zealand thing. It's a Europe thing. It's
an Asia thing. It's all the islands Hawaii, it's a
Polynesia thing. It's the Caribbean. They were a giant ground
slaws in Caribbean that survived the places in a hall
of same transition until six thousand years ago.

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
That that, that's one of the biggest smoke and guns
in my view on the overkill hypothesis. We get Wrangle
Island off Siberia. No one found it man and man
stayed there till four thousand years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:15:58):
I remember reading uh, Paul Martin's book Twilight of the Mammoths,
and I don't I forget where it is in the book.
It's either at the beginning or the end. But he
tracks the spread of humans around the globe and lists
all the stuff that went missing at the exact same time,

(01:16:18):
and he get through to the end of it. I
just remember reading that segment and just being like, God,
it's almost too.

Speaker 3 (01:16:23):
Perfect, Like how did It's remarkable?

Speaker 2 (01:16:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (01:16:27):
I mean like I put that book down and it
was like you just watched a video on YouTube that's
meant to convince you of something.

Speaker 3 (01:16:35):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:35):
It was just like I don't nothing else makes sense
to me. Now you know what else is great about it?
As you say, what about Africa? Doesn't happen in Africa?
And it's cause get like co evolution.

Speaker 4 (01:16:49):
Was.

Speaker 2 (01:16:49):
Yeah, there was no there was no sudden arrival. Yeah,
the animals there had been like hey that little thing,
you see something walking around two feet watch your ass?
Like word got out.

Speaker 7 (01:16:59):
So what would you guys say then, if you're leaning
towards human cause, what would you say to the people
that are like, well, it was like the climate was changing,
the environment was changing, Like these animals just couldn't adapt.

Speaker 4 (01:17:13):
The climate environment had been changing for millions of years
prior to that. That'd be my response.

Speaker 3 (01:17:23):
You know, the North American and South American cases, they're
especially tricky because it happens at this really wild time
when we're coming out of the glaciation. Right, these massive
mile mile thick sheets of ice are melting, back sea
levels rising, all these ecological communities are reorganizing. You can
imagine that could wreak havoc on animal populations, right, and

(01:17:44):
at the same time, you bring in this highly effective
cultural predator that these animals have no experience with, and
it's the coincidence of all this stuff in time that
has made it such like a difficult problem to answer,
and it's why we're still debating about it. But I
would say, tell me, tell me a climatic or ecological
explanation that can drive an extinction event over two continents

(01:18:08):
from the Arctic to the tropics and back to the
sub arctic in South America, from the arid west to
the humid east. What climate change can do that? What
is the actual mechanism that could drive an extinction event
so severe? And I don't know of one.

Speaker 2 (01:18:24):
And there's the other thing is that as dramatic as
that seemed, these species had survived other cycles.

Speaker 3 (01:18:31):
Like that, dozens of them.

Speaker 2 (01:18:33):
I mean, there were there were interglacial periods where sea
levels were hot, like right now you hear a lot
about rising sea levels. There were there were periods between
glaciations during the Ice Age when like the Pedestal, when
the Statue of Liberty would be standing in water, like
the Pedestal would be underwater during some of these periods,
and the ship didn't go extinct then yep, yeah, And that.

Speaker 3 (01:18:57):
Was that was the most recent interglacial we call Stage
five E one hundred and twenty thousand years ago was
warmer than today. There are hippos living in England, for example. Yeah, yeah,
and that was one of many previous interglacials. It happened
over and over and over and over again. The ice
sheets oscillated back and forth and back and forth, and
there are ecological transitions with all these These animals made

(01:19:19):
it through, that's right, And tell people show up and
if we look at the last dates and these animals,
at least the ones that we have good samples for,
they all go extinct within three hundred years of Clovis arrival,
except for caribou. Caribou make it through, bison making moose
make it through, el Caa make it through. We can
talk about why if you want to talk about that. Why.

(01:19:44):
So I think there's a single unifying explanation for all
large mammals survival that even applies to sub Saharan Africa
and Southeast Asia, which is that large animals survive in
places where people can't reach the fishing populations in cities
to drive them to extinction. Okay, so let's just take
the case of bison, right, Bison survived, but actually bison

(01:20:05):
went extinct over most of their range at the end
of the place to see and they live coast to coast.
You find bison and the rivers in Florida, you find
them at the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, you find them
in Mexico. Rocha Libreae full of bison. Right today, bison
pretty much limited to the Mid Continent, or at least
historically they were. Why is that, Well, when people don't

(01:20:28):
have other foods to fall back on. Basically, the only
way a predator can drive a prey to extinction is
if they have another food to fall back on. This
is why a lynx can't drive snowshoe hair to extinction,
right because as soon as they that hair population goes down,
the lynx population goes down with them, and the hair
rebounds and the lynx rebound.

Speaker 2 (01:20:46):
That's a good point, man, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:47):
Right, So it's hard for a predator to drive its
prey to extinction. It can only do that if it
can switch to something else. Right. So, what I would
argue if we're talking about bison is that in the
Great Plains, there really weren't good switching options for people
who lived in this part of the world that could
really sustain, Like you couldn't drive bison to extinction and
then switch and basically make your entire economy based on

(01:21:10):
pronghorn or something else. And that's also I think the
general story that explains like the survival of animals in
the hierarchic Let's say in you know, muskox and caribou.
There's no real switching options there, right, So if you
really slam those populations, your population gets slammed right behind them.
If we're going to talk about Southeast Asia, we're talking

(01:21:32):
about dense tropical forests that there are very few people
in until very recently. If we're talking about sub Saharan Africa,
we're talking about a massive, absolutely massive semi arid desert
that people have been living in in very very low
population densities for a long time. You didn't really have
pastoralists people hurting until the last two thousand years, and
that's really when those animals started getting slammed in Africa.

(01:21:56):
So in general, I would say, you know, you have
these large mammals, cases of large mammals survival and environments
where people simply couldn't reach sufficient densities to drive them
to extinction.

Speaker 2 (01:22:05):
Mhmm. You know what comes out of like contemporary biology
that what you're talking about makes me think of is
if you look at the Southern caribou herds. So we
used to have cariboo. I mean when I say used to,
I mean even in the nineteen hundreds, right, Yeah, you
know in nineteen twenty, nineteen thirty, you had I don't

(01:22:26):
want to say decent numbers, but you had caribou in Washington,
you had caribou and the Idaho Panhandle. You had caribou
in Montana.

Speaker 7 (01:22:35):
Minnesota, and Maine.

Speaker 2 (01:22:38):
And I've heard biologist when talking about like, well, what
was different? Is it be as human landscape development and
landscape changes happened, it allowed whitetail deer and moose from
logging practices and road building. It allowed whitetail deer and

(01:22:58):
moose to move into these areas. And it made it
that wolves could sustain themselves because in these areas they
had like very limited number of caribou and there wasn't
like a wolf predation problem. And it was what you're
talking about, there's nothing for them to fall back on.
So as caribou numbers would dwindle, wolf pressure would just
go away. But now wolves don't move out because they're like,

(01:23:20):
they're still picking away on white tailed deer, they're still
picking away on moose, and any caribou that turns up,
they're going to hammer it because they're always present.

Speaker 4 (01:23:28):
Yeah, that's super interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:23:30):
It's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to have
something to fall back on, yep, right, otherwise you get
stuck in that predator prey cycle.

Speaker 4 (01:23:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:38):
And I really think you can explain large mammals survival
across the globe with that one principle. I mean, you
guys live in a place. When we live in a
place where large mammal we're famous for large mammals, right,
We've got bison and elk and moose, prong horn deer.
Why are these spaces famous for large animals. Well, because

(01:23:58):
it's hardly anybody who lives here. That's that's really always
been the case in this part of the world, the
Rocky Mountains, because it's high, it's dry, it's a hard
place for people to make a living, and it's and
it's those places that these large animals can really thrive
because the predation pressure from humans is really is really low.

Speaker 2 (01:24:14):
Yeah, that's an interesting points you look at like Appalachi
or whatever. They had bison, they had elk, they had wolves,
they had cougars, and for a long time they didn't.
And then you have these like spots, like you know,
the Northern Rockies, which was able to hang onto like
a relatively intact ecosystem, and you go up to Alaska

(01:24:36):
and they were able to hang on to like their
their like suite of megafauna survive the initial human Pulse's
good theory.

Speaker 3 (01:24:44):
I like that.

Speaker 6 (01:24:46):
What percentage of people in your field believe in the
blitzkrieg hypothesis and how has that changed during your career?

Speaker 3 (01:24:53):
So I'd like to I wish we could answer this independently,
So I'd love to hear what has to say.

Speaker 6 (01:25:03):
You can both write down a number.

Speaker 3 (01:25:05):
The first thing I'll say is that when I was
in graduate school, Paul Martin, who was the real champion
of that, was a friend of mine. He was retired.
He was really nice to me, and I go and
I'd go up to his office and I'd argue with
him all the time about this. I didn't believe in
it at all until I left and did some science,
and I ultimately decided Paul was right.

Speaker 6 (01:25:22):
It wasn't because he was nice to you.

Speaker 5 (01:25:26):
What I wrote a review on that Twilight of the
Mammoth for Dan's class. I remember, you know, you'd write
the book reviews and he'd write a couple of sentences
at the bottom and the first I'll always remember this,
The first thing he wrote on there was Paul Martin
was a delightful dinner companion.

Speaker 3 (01:25:41):
Enough, he was a great guy. I'm going to answer.
I'm going to say somewhere between one and two percent
and believe this. Oh wow, what would you say, Spencer?

Speaker 2 (01:25:55):
No, yeah, I mean that's it.

Speaker 4 (01:25:58):
You're talking to it in dangerous She's here, Steve right
in the studio.

Speaker 6 (01:26:01):
So the numbers going down.

Speaker 4 (01:26:03):
I think.

Speaker 3 (01:26:06):
You know. The point you raised of where's the evidence?
Like if people drove horse to extinction, why do you
have two horse kill sites? Is an argument that really
resonates with a lot of people. Uh huh, they don't really.
I would say a lot of people haven't thought about
the nature of the sample and the sample size that
we have. Yeah, and that maybe that's actually quite a
bit of evidence for horse hunting.

Speaker 4 (01:26:26):
But yeah, I'll say, like I mean to start with,
like very a very low percentage of archaeologists actually study
this stuff, right, like Paley Indians. There's a very small
segment of archaeology alongside all the complex of people and
just the people that do everything else. So like, for instance,
in my experience, I didn't really think about this stuff
at all until I went to Colorado State University for

(01:26:47):
my master's and my advisor there, Jason Lebel, was invested
in Paley Indian stuff and kind of trained me up
on that. But even then I was like, you know,
that sounds good, like Monte Verde looks solid. All these
pre Clovists. We need to be going out there and
digging deeper, I guess, And it really wasn't until Todd
brainwashed me at Wyoming. But it is true that when

(01:27:08):
you actually buckle down and start thinking critically about this
stuff and really invest your intellectual energy into understanding it,
it just kind of comes into focus. I mean, it's
really obvious to me that Clovis was basically the first
people when they drove the Negafont to extinction. But I
don't think that that's a very popular view for a
number of reasons. I mean, one, it's just a small
percentage of archaeologists that are invested in this stuff. And

(01:27:30):
then among those that do. I just got to say, like,
archaeology prioritizes discovery and newness, right, and we can't really
escape that.

Speaker 3 (01:27:40):
I do.

Speaker 4 (01:27:40):
I love discovering stuff, and so everyone's constantly wanting to
push it back. And I think there's a little bit
of wishful thinking there, like did we really find the oldest?
It's kind of a bummer, right, It's like an existential
crisis for people that have invested a lot of their
time and energy into finding the oldest thing to be like,
well we did it. Now what it's a bit of
a it's a bit of a bumber to some folks.

Speaker 5 (01:28:01):
I think, now, if the number is one or two
percent of that ninety eight ninety nine percent, how divided
is that block of thinking?

Speaker 3 (01:28:14):
Like are they in terms of the cause? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (01:28:17):
Like like are there could you subdivide that quickly into
a couple of different camps or well, I'm just curious about.

Speaker 3 (01:28:25):
The I don't think so. I mean, I think Spencer's
right that, like most people aren't invested in this. Like
if you if you're a Maya archaeologist studying you know,
pyramids and things in the Guatemalan jungle, your experience with overkills.
You know what you learned as a graduate student, then
what you're teaching your intro archaeology class.

Speaker 4 (01:28:42):
Right, Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (01:28:44):
Would guess that most of those people believe there's some
sort of climatic and ecological explanation. The other contenders, by
the way, is something called hyper disease. Have you heard
about this? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:28:54):
What about what about that?

Speaker 7 (01:28:57):
It was just like a combination of factors that Yeah,
that's all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:29:02):
It's a really good point, right, Like these are not
what we call mutually exclusive. They're all they all could
be operating simultaneously. And and there's a fourth.

Speaker 2 (01:29:12):
Who's that dude that's real into those little micro blasts
or whatever. He's micro glass.

Speaker 3 (01:29:16):
Richard Firestone was the original guy.

Speaker 2 (01:29:18):
You know, it's funny. I did a tour of the
Lindenmeyer site, and the day I was at Lindenmeyer, linden
Meyer's big, folesome site. I'm just telling the audience here
it's kind of cool because it's right on there. It's
it's north it's between Denver Fort Collins nor is it
North Fork cons And it's a huge they argue a

(01:29:39):
huge fulsome winter camp site, and some people argue that
it's this sounds a little out there because of the
rock faces on the mountains, it's easy to explain where
it is, and that you could have had that this
might have been a place where fullsome hunters from all

(01:30:00):
across the Great Plains. You could say, no, no, no,
just follow you'll know, look for the big white slash
on the peak and if you've never been there, that's
where we'll be. Sounds fantastful.

Speaker 4 (01:30:13):
So the guy that came up with that idea, I
think is what was my master's advisor, Jason LaBelle. I
believe him. The big exposure of White River group there,
it's visible for miles in every direction. And yeah, it's
right at the margin of the you know the high
planes in the Colorada Piedmont. It's kind of at this
eco tone. It makes it all makes sense to me.
It's like it's the biggest it's the biggest folsome site

(01:30:35):
that exists.

Speaker 2 (01:30:36):
Capital When I was there, there was a dude because
they've done all this stratigraphy there, so they've done a
lot of dating on stuff, and there was a guy
there collecting those little things. He's looking forward to prove
that it was like that the place to scene extinctions
were some kind of bombardment of comets. Comets killed them all.

Speaker 3 (01:30:57):
The list What god, I did a study of that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:01):
Okay, tell me tell people about that idea.

Speaker 3 (01:31:04):
Oh, go ahead, well where yeah comments?

Speaker 2 (01:31:08):
Okay, then we can get into the Brody's idea about
a bunch of shit was happening all at once.

Speaker 3 (01:31:12):
I think it was the I think it was two
thousand and seven. This paper was published in what we
call pen ASS Proceedings sounds like proceedings in the National
Academy of Sciences PNASS, where they they had they had
taken these collected sediments from a bunch of terminal places,

(01:31:33):
the end of the ice age sites, and they would
take these sediment columns. So they just collect sediments, you know,
in very fine intervals through sort of the place to
see Holocene transition.

Speaker 2 (01:31:41):
What year was this going on?

Speaker 3 (01:31:43):
Was published in two thousand and seven.

Speaker 2 (01:31:44):
See that's when I was there two thousand and six,
two I was working on I was there around two
thousand and five, two thousand and six.

Speaker 3 (01:31:52):
So they found consistently at a certain time point I
want to say, twelve thousand and seven hundred years before
present approximately, they claim to find high concentrations of weird things.
Those things included little tiny metallic spheres. They call them
titano magnetites. It's like iron oxides with titanium, little tiny

(01:32:15):
spheres like the diameter of your hair. They said they
had high concentrations of magnetic particles, so they would literally
like put this sediment in water and then run a
super strong magnet through it, collect the magnetic particles and
count them up through these sediment columns. They say they'd
peak right at this this horizon. They did the same
thing for what are called platinum group elements like iridium

(01:32:36):
that's used to identify the extinction of the dinosaurs. When
that meteorite hit and there's this high iridium concentration, all
this weird stuff, and all of us, a lot of
us who have been digging sites like this and digging
through sediments of this age, were like, Oh my god,
it's all this weird extraterrestrial stuff that we had never
seen before. We'd been digging through it our whole life.
I just wanted to just see it myself. And I

(01:32:59):
was working on the site at the time, and I
had friends who were working on sites where we could
collect these samples and just replicate do what they did,
and replicate their analyzes, and we failed to replicate any
of them. We didn't find high concentrations of microspherreals, magnetic particles,
or platinum group elements. Completely failed.

Speaker 2 (01:33:16):
For what that's worth, Where does that idea stand right now?
Is it fashionable in your community?

Speaker 3 (01:33:22):
No? No, it's complete. It's funny. You know. We thought
that their early kind of pushback against it would make
it go away. It it didn't. They're still publishing papers
and support of it. And I would say the vast
majority of people in geology and archaeology don't take it seriously.
I mean, a massive extraterrestrial impact that drives an extinction

(01:33:43):
over two continents doesn't leave like a whisper of dust.
There ought to be like massive geologic evidence for craters
and tsunamis and fires, and it's just not there.

Speaker 6 (01:33:55):
If it's two percent right now, believe in Blitzkreek, what
was it twenty years ago? What do you think it'll
be twenty years from now.

Speaker 4 (01:34:02):
That's a good.

Speaker 3 (01:34:04):
It's a really good question.

Speaker 4 (01:34:06):
When I break down these these arguments and you kind
of look at the timing, I would say that we're
like in a post a post Clovis first world longer
than we were ever in a Clovis first world. At
this point, the Clovis First paradigm was basically like let's
say nineteen seventy three with Paul Martin's paper that was.

Speaker 3 (01:34:22):
The height up to, like a pinnacle up to basically.

Speaker 4 (01:34:24):
Like nineteen ninety seven when Monte Verde became accepted as
a pre Clovis site, that was kind of like the
Clovis First era. Ever since monte Verde came out, it's
basically just been gaining more acceptance that there was stuff
before Clovis.

Speaker 6 (01:34:40):
So guys aren't a endangered species.

Speaker 5 (01:34:42):
You're like the guys at the record store saying there's
no good music anymore.

Speaker 4 (01:34:46):
We're are habitat fragmented. There's like a relic population in Kansas,
some in Alaska.

Speaker 3 (01:34:51):
I have this of maybe schizophrenic perspective about it, Like
sometimes I look at the record and I kind of
feel like Neo in the matrix, like I can see
something that nobody else can see, like, oh my god,
it's so obvious that Clovis is first. And then half
the time I feel like a guy with a tenfoil hat,

(01:35:12):
like believing in crazy conspiracies, like why the hell can
I see what everybody else sees?

Speaker 6 (01:35:17):
What would need to happen you convince everyone else to
agree with you.

Speaker 3 (01:35:22):
Oh no, that'll never happen. I mean archaeology, the record
is too crappy. We all look at the same evidence
and interpret it like completely differently. It's pretty amazing. That way,
we're never gonna get consensus.

Speaker 2 (01:35:32):
There's a thing that could happen that would work the
other way for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:35:35):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):
The thing that could happen work that a way is
someone finds a bulletproof seventeen thousand year old site. Yeah bulletproof, Yeah, yeah,
they sure absolutely.

Speaker 4 (01:35:44):
I would love for that to happen. Honestly, it would
be great to open up this whole other world and
we knew nothing about a whole other record to study.
I just I don't think that's happened yet.

Speaker 2 (01:35:52):
You know, if I had to crystal ball it now,
I always put it like this, just to make a graphic,
like God has a gun to your head and he
says what happened to the megafauna? And he knows he's ominiscient,
and you have to guess right or else you die.
So the So the screws are to you, there's no
room for playing games. I would say, in that moment,

(01:36:17):
my life's on the line, right, I would say, something
was going on where there was turmoil, numbers were depressed,
there was some upheaval, and into this upheaval came humans
and and uh and and tipped it, tipped it to extinction.

(01:36:40):
But something was going on where it wasn't like peak. Yeah,
and then but maybe it would be like forsake me, sure,
you know, but I'm saying if I had to make
a life or death.

Speaker 3 (01:36:57):
So vans Haynes made that argument, and he had good
He worked on these sites in the San Patrio rebellion, Arizona,
these beautiful Clovi sites, really well preserved surfaces, and he
thought there's really clear evidence that when people were there
at Murray Springs and Laner and Blackwater draw that there
was a drought and that these these mammoth populations were depressed.
They're kind of stuck to these water holes and people

(01:37:17):
were just basically the coupd of gra And it's a
it's a it's a really good argument for the Southwest.
But we're talking about the Southwest into massive continents, right,
So again, if we're going to have some kind of
ecological upheaval that spans two continents from the Amazon to
the East Coast, what is it.

Speaker 4 (01:37:38):
I also feel like we should We haven't talked about
Alaska yet.

Speaker 2 (01:37:41):
Oh him, use some Alaska stuff, man.

Speaker 4 (01:37:43):
So like there are pre Clovia sites in the Western Hemisphere,
they're in Alaska.

Speaker 2 (01:37:48):
That's what it makes sense.

Speaker 4 (01:37:50):
There's clear evidence of human occupations, clear camp sites about
fourteen years old. They contained mammoth remains, they contained these
little microblades, seemingly among the first technologies that people brought
here from Northeast Asia.

Speaker 3 (01:38:05):
You see the same technology in Northeast Asia.

Speaker 4 (01:38:07):
Yeah, it's exactly what you'd expect for the first people
in the Western Hemisphere. They're carrying Asian technology and living
in Alaska.

Speaker 3 (01:38:15):
And exactly when you'd expect to sam too.

Speaker 4 (01:38:18):
And that's a good point, man, And it coincides with
what we did a study back in twenty fifteen looking
at when megafaunal populations decline between Alaska, United States south
of the ice sheets in South America, basically slightly before
we find archaeological evidence for human occupation in Alaska, megafauna

(01:38:39):
starts to decline to extinction. And that's important because when
you look at the archaeological survey in Alaska that's been
done compared to that that's been done south of the
ice sheets, it's very slim. There's like two highways and
a few little patches of archaeological research and lo and behold.
Everywhere people look in Alaska they find pre club A sites,
especially in this place called then in a valley and

(01:39:01):
outside of Fairbanks, just a lot of pre Clovius evidence there.
And we haven't really looked that hard in Alaska. It's
super difficult place to do archaeology, but we found pre
Clovid sites immediately, despite the one hundred and fifty years
of research we've done south of the ice sheets very little.

Speaker 3 (01:39:15):
And they're normal.

Speaker 4 (01:39:16):
Yeah, and they're normal.

Speaker 3 (01:39:18):
It's not weird shit. It's like chipstone around hearth features,
butchered animal bones. It's normal stuff. And what we call
distreet discrete stratigraphic levels, meaning they're just like really clear
occupations if you're to look through them.

Speaker 2 (01:39:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:39:31):
Yeah, So those Do you think those people hit Alaska
and just stayed or did they, like.

Speaker 2 (01:39:37):
Some states, get absorbed into Clovis or.

Speaker 3 (01:39:42):
I would say the ancestors of Clovis, Some stayed and
some move south.

Speaker 2 (01:39:47):
Yeah, have you ever been to or looked at the
stuff from the MASA site?

Speaker 3 (01:39:53):
I have the book. I've never seen this stuff. That's cool.

Speaker 2 (01:39:57):
That's not as old though.

Speaker 3 (01:39:59):
No cool.

Speaker 2 (01:40:00):
I went to that masa. It's badass, man.

Speaker 3 (01:40:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:03):
You can just picture people wanting to get up on
that thing and look around.

Speaker 3 (01:40:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:40:06):
I didn't go on top of my sat and looked
at it, you know. But that's not old, right.

Speaker 3 (01:40:11):
It's place to see it. It's it's like maybe twelve.

Speaker 2 (01:40:17):
Seven sticks in my head or I don't know something.

Speaker 3 (01:40:19):
Yeah, maybe two thousand years after people arrive in Alaska
and it's probably you know, the argument is those are
planes bison hunters coming back back north fist in the
fact form.

Speaker 2 (01:40:29):
That's what That's what they had introduced me to, is
this idea of backfill. Ye like that you get the
initial waves of people coming through, but then at some
point in time people move back to their direction.

Speaker 4 (01:40:42):
Yeah, migrations kind of like quitous clouds up the record.

Speaker 6 (01:40:49):
What part of the America has moved on from Clovis
the quickest, in which ones held out the longest.

Speaker 3 (01:40:55):
Probably the Great Basin was the quickest. It's Spencer. Spencer
mentioned this some really old stemmed projectile points that that
some Great Basin archaeologists argue are as old, if not
older than Clovis. You also have Clovis points in the
Great Basin, but there's some very old old dates on
these stemmed projectile points in the Great Basin. I don't

(01:41:19):
know that we have really good age control on post
Clovis projectile point types except in the Rocky Mountains. And
we you know, I had Laprel. Another really cool thing
we found is a fulsome point and we have we
we appear to have a single occupation where people killed

(01:41:41):
killed mammos, killed bison. It was buried by a flood
probably ten years after they killed that mammoth. And on
the same surface we've got one Clovis point and one
fulsome point. This would be the oldest case of fulsome
ever found, so and that would probably be you know,
that's pretty early. We know Clovis persists after that. So
this like this long period of overlap where both are

(01:42:01):
being made.

Speaker 7 (01:42:02):
So there was this you know, major extinction event with
large animals like what happened to the Clovis culture, Like
when that extinction event happened, did they just what happened
to them? Did they evolve into other cultures?

Speaker 2 (01:42:17):
Did they?

Speaker 4 (01:42:18):
I think it's pretty clear now. I mean it's it's
Fulsome in the Rocky Mountains at least, and then other
regions the United States have these other post Clovis fluted
point traditions.

Speaker 7 (01:42:25):
Because when you talk, when you give them these different names,
like Clovis Falsome, it's like there was this people and.

Speaker 4 (01:42:31):
Then there was this Yeah, we should you know what
I make that distinction? I mean they weren't Clovis wasn't
a people. It was a stone tool technology.

Speaker 3 (01:42:38):
Where did cell phone people come from?

Speaker 4 (01:42:43):
Yeah? And the way I look at it and like
this is like getting into the realm of handwaving. But
fullso points are a lot smaller than Clovis points if
you put them side by side. You oftentimes don't get
that when you're just looking at books and illustrations of
this stuff. But full some points are generally at least
half the size of Clovis points.

Speaker 2 (01:43:00):
I'm not gonna make it.

Speaker 7 (01:43:03):
Demanded something smaller than.

Speaker 4 (01:43:07):
Well, right here, Clovis points have a distinct function from
Folsome points. Maybe they're a thrusting Spearit not an Atlatal dart.
You introduce another weaponry system into your toolkit and they're
used at the same time.

Speaker 7 (01:43:21):
And that also effect the culture, right Like, so, I.

Speaker 4 (01:43:25):
Mean Clovis points basically disappear when when the mamos disappeared,
So they're probably a pretty closely linked thing that Clovis
points were used to haunt mammas, and then once mammos
were gone, didn't have much need for him anymore, and
people started making these little falsome points a lot more often.

Speaker 2 (01:43:43):
You don't need to hold I was just showing it.

Speaker 4 (01:43:44):
I want to look at you.

Speaker 3 (01:43:46):
You very quickly start seeing regional diversification and in the
way people are making a living right. And one thing,
I visited this site fiendal Mundo in Mexico, and I
visited another site where they found some Clovis points in
the surface. One thing that really struck me there was here,
you're looking at this Mexican Clovis point. Right. You drop
that in Wyoming, you wouldn't know it's in Mexico. You

(01:44:09):
drop it in South Carolina, you wouldn't know it's from Mexico.
And they find them right with these gomfit these with
these elephants. But in this same site, which is this
really highly eroded surface site, I'm seeing marine shells brought
in from the Gulf of Sea of Cortes and ceramics.

Speaker 4 (01:44:25):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:44:25):
You start to see this super regional specialization. But in Clovis,
everybody's doing the same damn thing everywhere, and it's it's
really really striking. You go to Missouri at the Kimswick site,
you've got a dead mast, it on full big Clovis points, Mexico, Wyoming.

Speaker 2 (01:44:43):
Dudes had it figured out that.

Speaker 3 (01:44:46):
Was the main way to make a living.

Speaker 7 (01:44:47):
Apparently what was going on on the west coast, you
know with the kel you had the Kelp Highway theory,
Like what archaeology is there at the same time as closed.

Speaker 3 (01:44:57):
Yeah, that's a really good question. So the first thing
I should note is, you know, the coastal migration thing
has been around for a long time. The idea has
been around since least the nineteen forties that this was
another way to get around the glaciers. It really became
in vogue in nineteen ninety seven when mona verity was
accepted to be pre Clovis and real because the argument

(01:45:19):
was in order to get them down there that early.
The ice ree corder simply wasn't an option to the
coast had to be the case, right. So Ever since then,
like everybody has assumed it's the coast, I should say
that these again aren't mutually exclusive. You could take both roots, right,
But there's been a huge amount of work now on
the West coast because of that, because everybody's kind of

(01:45:41):
assumed that that's the entry point. And my understanding is
that there is very little archaeological evidence from the place
to seen at all, Like.

Speaker 7 (01:45:50):
You're not seeing different technologies at the same time as
Clovis was.

Speaker 3 (01:45:54):
Going on, or we don't really have anything Clovis age
over there. The closest thing is maybe on the Channel
Island in California. There's very early humans are getting out
there pretty early.

Speaker 4 (01:46:04):
I don't think there's any weaponry associated. Now.

Speaker 3 (01:46:06):
There's some really funky points out there, but but that
stuff's kind of hard to date because you're dating off
in marine shells and there's a lot of old carbon
in the ocean, so these dates tend to be too old.
There's there's a very famous human remains.

Speaker 2 (01:46:21):
From Prince Wales.

Speaker 3 (01:46:25):
Well not you're thinking about Alaska. No, I'm talking about
on the Channel Islands. Oh yeah, Arlington Springs woman. But
she had a lot of marine resources in her diet,
which means the dates are too old. But it was
kind of like it was basically a Clovis age date
before you did the correction for that. But we really
don't have a good a good sample of dated stuff
from the Pacific coast. I will say there are Clovis

(01:46:46):
points that have been found basically on the beach. There's
one from an island off the coast of Mexico a
Clovis point.

Speaker 2 (01:46:55):
But you're also looking for sites and coastal rainforest.

Speaker 3 (01:46:58):
Yeah, it's a really challenging environment.

Speaker 2 (01:47:00):
You know, you know it makes me optimistic though. I
was with the geologist up there who works in Alaska,
and you know, you always heard when people talk about
the Kelp Highway theory or the coastal migration theory, everybody's like, yeah,
but all that stuff's underwater. But he was, he has
these shoreline maps, tons of it's not because the ice

(01:47:21):
a static rebound, that's right. So when you had all
that ice on top of the I'm not telling you,
I'm telling folks at home when all that ice was
on the laying on the earth. It's so heavy to
push the crust down and sank it. And there's still
like seismic activity in southeast Alaska from as the ice

(01:47:42):
melted off, the land pops back up. So when you
look at these shorelines, it's this like it's this wave
like undulating thing where some of that ice age shoreline
is one hundred feet up the hill.

Speaker 4 (01:47:54):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:47:55):
So it's like there could be stuff there. Well, I
mean yeah, I mean, like, like what I'm saying is
you can't just say, well, it's all underwater.

Speaker 4 (01:48:04):
Yeah, I have no doubt that there's some archaeology underwater.
I think it's true they've.

Speaker 2 (01:48:09):
Found some underwater, but I'm saying it's not uniformly all
at the same depth. It's like a real hodgepodge of
of like you know, the the geological history is a
real hodgepodge of stuff that's way up in the forest
or down underwater. So what I'm saying is I might
find me an old ass site.

Speaker 4 (01:48:26):
Well, there's that notion, right that some of some of
the isostatic rebounds kind of kept some of these coastal
areas above water, but also why would you expect that
people would never maybe go in inland for a night
and form a campsite, right, I mean, basically the assumption
is that people are just living on the beach because, yeah, dude,

(01:48:51):
have you been there? The beach is nice. Sometimes Like
it's not that it's nice, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:48:57):
It's an overwhelming abundance of food.

Speaker 3 (01:49:02):
It's not easy to get, not easy to it's in
the water.

Speaker 6 (01:49:06):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:49:07):
All right, but but dude, listen, I'm telling you, get
into the shellfish and the salmon. Go talk to anybody
who lives there now.

Speaker 3 (01:49:17):
All right, but but picture yourself at the end of
the ice age, and you know, you come down into Seattle,
and that's like, we could live on shellfish and ignore
these mastodons and bison. Ye or after these big animals
have a shellfish.

Speaker 2 (01:49:32):
Don't hurt. But they've had coastal No. But but they've
had coastal cultures there. They've had coastal cultures there continuously.

Speaker 3 (01:49:40):
I get that's the argument.

Speaker 2 (01:49:41):
Always more abundant, who were always more abundant than interior peoples,
and even many of the interior peoples and were going
to Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, many of the interior peoples
are still reliant on anadromous fish like marine resources. You
can't ignore it.

Speaker 3 (01:49:57):
And that part of the world is a good reason
why you do that. Now, Yeah, I'm saying in the
place to see, that's probably not your best option. Also,
if we're talking about that, look, let's let's look at
this first argument. Let's look at this idea. People are
have thousands of years of coastal adaptation. Where's that the
archaeological record. That's an assumption. Two people are living in

(01:50:20):
high population densities. Where are they? Why can't we find them? Three?
We don't really see intensive use submarine resources. And tell
let's say four or five thousand years after Clovis in
that part of the world. Yeah, part of that is
sea level rise.

Speaker 4 (01:50:34):
Still hm.

Speaker 3 (01:50:36):
You know, I think part of the success of the
Kelp Highway hypothesis is that it's a good marketing campaign.
And I want to I want to I want to
rebrand the Ice Free Corridor to the Meat Highway.

Speaker 4 (01:50:46):
Oh. I was pretty enamored by the Kelp Highway thing too.
I mean, it's a really elegant theory and I'm not
I'm really not shitting on it at all. It's it's
a cool it's cool.

Speaker 2 (01:51:00):
Yeah, it makes a ton of sense when you think
about I mean, plus, here's the thing. You can like
the life in kelp beds, and then you can eat
the kelt.

Speaker 4 (01:51:08):
I mean it makes sense until you look at the
until you look at the evidence.

Speaker 7 (01:51:12):
But meat versus shellfish? But what what what's saying that
they weren't killing large marine mammals.

Speaker 3 (01:51:22):
Yeah, in fact that if there's a coastal thing, that's
what I think they would be doing is focusing their
effort on large marine mammals mostly you know, seals, maybe
some whales.

Speaker 4 (01:51:32):
And being reminded of like Ben Potter's study, that of
city and sourcing study. You probably know more details about
it than I do. But basically, an archaeologist in Alaska,
great archaeologists out of out of Fairbanks named Ben Potter,
did a big subsidian sourcing study of all the oldest
sites that they know about in Alaska. The hypothesis was
basically like, if people were tied to coastal regions, then

(01:51:54):
we should have coastal obsidian in these sites because there
are obsidian sources kind of right on where that corridor
would be. Okay Lo and behold, every single piece of
obsidian used in these oldest sites in Alaska. The people
that are the ancestors of the first Americans, they're from
interior sources, from mountain sources, and the interior of Alaska,
and really no evidence that people are utilizing the coastal

(01:52:16):
regions of Alaska.

Speaker 2 (01:52:20):
Oh, I'll settle on this. If I took your ass
and dropped you off somewhere on like wherever, Okay, some
remote area in southeast Alaska, I've been there well, and
you know what, you know where, I wouldn't wind up
finding you up in the mountains. I would reach down
on the beach, getting fat off, kept green, laying and clams.

Speaker 3 (01:52:43):
Until I got enough expertise to effectively hunt bear and caribou.

Speaker 2 (01:52:50):
Dude, that's a great point. Yeah, No, I got you. No,
what you're saying is good, but it is. It is
an enticing idea. And then I don't want to go
I don't want to go too deep in this. But
then I don't know, if you know, like Meltzer's whole
deal with going up and all that, trying to put
the trying to figure out is there any kind of

(01:53:12):
like plant pollen evidence of an ice free corridor, and
so they go up to these places on the you know,
where the ice free corridor supposedly existed, and they go
into these ponds and pull up sediments and try to
go find sediments that would be at the right time.
So you go thirteen thousand years ago, and he'd be like, Okay,
show me evidence at thirteen thousand years ago that there

(01:53:34):
were mammoths and vegetation. And he's like, it's a rock garden, right,
it was water and rock. Yeah, But I don't know,
I don't know. I'm just saying how he explained it.
I never read anything in.

Speaker 3 (01:53:50):
Terms of the availability of both migration roots.

Speaker 2 (01:53:53):
Yeah, like, was there a green verdant ice free corridor?

Speaker 3 (01:53:57):
It's a really there is now, right, So at some
point there had to be. And the question is when
does that go from being a barrier something that humans
can actually traverse. That's a question for both migration corridors.
It's a really challenging thing to answer because you know,
if we're thinking about a ten mile space, we can
study that by drilling a core in a lake and
studying the DNA or the pollen out of it. We're

(01:54:17):
talking about something that's twelve hundred miles long? Is that
what we decided the Ice Free Corridor.

Speaker 4 (01:54:22):
Nine to twelve hundred is what we looked at.

Speaker 3 (01:54:24):
That's a length. That's a length of it, right, So like,
how do you know when that thing is open versus
closed over a stretch that humans can actually migrate? It's
incredibly challenging, and if you date different geologic deposits in
different places, you get different answers, and there's a lot
of disagreement. The dates that I generally see are anywhere

(01:54:45):
from it was open from fourteen thousand, five hundred, or
some people say it's open around thirteen thousand. What is
really clear to me is that it's open right around
the time Clovis explodes across North America.

Speaker 2 (01:54:58):
Can I bolster your Can I bolster your argument?

Speaker 4 (01:55:02):
I'd love that.

Speaker 2 (01:55:04):
Think about this, man. This is the thing I think
about when I think about the Kelp Highway too, is
let's say, let's okay, let's say the Ice Free Corridor
was real shitty and it wasn't great, but you were
just you were making a moon shot, right. You're dying
of curiosity, so you start picking into there, and why
would someone do that? You'd like why would anyone take
the risk. They wouldn't want to go into marginal habitat.

(01:55:27):
But think about this, let's go back to the coastal theory.
You go to like Glacier Bay, or any number of
areas in BC, any number of areas in southeast Alaska,
we're still today, still today, that ocean land interface is
a wall of ice. So people coming down in the

(01:55:49):
boat had to have been okay with the idea that, like,
it's true, as far as they could see, it was
a wall of ice.

Speaker 4 (01:56:00):
Yeah, it's fart.

Speaker 2 (01:56:01):
And they would have had calving, like calving glaciers, and
it would have been like, let's go in the north,
let's check it up. Yeah, So someone there has to
be a thing where someone's like so dying of curiosity
that they have and they have to have the faith
to be like, I have a feeling I don't know why,
I just have a feeling that if you go and

(01:56:23):
in thirty miles, maybe we'll find a place where it's
not a hundred wall foot wall of ice.

Speaker 4 (01:56:29):
Yeah. Maybe the elephant in the room is also that
it would have required a pretty sophisticated technology of maritime travel,
right that we really don't have any evidence that existed
at that time. We found Australia, though that's a much
smaller task than circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean, the North Pacific.

Speaker 3 (01:56:50):
Yeah, Australia. We're talking about maybe fifty kilometers of tropical yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:56:55):
Chip Shaw swim that.

Speaker 4 (01:56:58):
The other thing I think about with this with coastal
versus inland is I've like, I've only watched one season
of that show alone, but it was a season where
this dude, it spent some time with some Siberian rangdeer herders.
He was an excellent outdoorsman, ended up building like a
drift fence and killing a moose on this show and
subsisting off this moose, and all the while, there's somebody
else on the show that is just like meekly checking

(01:57:19):
like a little fish trap every day, and they're getting
out these little graylings or something and just starving to
death eating these tiny fish, while this dude's sitting high
on like this fatty moose meat man, and that guy
devoted his energy towards the correct en deva. I would
say you won that season, yeah, but you're not.

Speaker 7 (01:57:37):
If you could string up a net and catch a
hundred salmon and.

Speaker 2 (01:57:40):
One you thinking of salmon runs, you're not thinking of
clam beds. Like it's two different arguments. What people did
I don't know, but like you're not thinking of clam beds,
you're not thinking of celt beds, and you're not thinking
of salmon runs.

Speaker 3 (01:57:54):
All these things live in the water and really cold.

Speaker 2 (01:57:58):
What no, No, in that area and that area clam beds. Yeah,
but there's a twenty foot tide swing.

Speaker 7 (01:58:07):
You could walk across a mile of some of that
stuff without hitting water.

Speaker 2 (01:58:11):
You know, it's nothing but food. It is nothing but
food on those clam beds.

Speaker 3 (01:58:20):
I think that people are driven by package size.

Speaker 2 (01:58:23):
Giant clan beds. I don't think it was. Yeah, there's
a lot to it. There's a lot to it, like
the date stuff, But the food abundance thing. I think
that the food abundance thing, I think is overwhelming amounts
of food. So I don't think that that was the problem.

Speaker 3 (01:58:43):
You know what's interesting about this right is we're arguing
about evidence that doesn't exist in both cases.

Speaker 2 (01:58:49):
That's what makes it to stop.

Speaker 7 (01:58:55):
Is there any explanation for what would have kept that
ice free corridor open.

Speaker 4 (01:59:01):
Just the end of the ice age, there was Lauren
Tide and the cordieron sheets just kind of gradually received
from each other, received completely until six thousand years ago
or something because they grew out of Hudson Bay and
eventually the last of it disappear on that time ago.
But yeah, basically by the time it reached a certain

(01:59:21):
point like winter temperatures wouldn't have pushed it together again,
and then it was open.

Speaker 6 (01:59:26):
Do we have any Clovis age skeletons of humans?

Speaker 2 (01:59:29):
Yes, what he's talking about?

Speaker 3 (01:59:30):
What are they like?

Speaker 2 (01:59:31):
The Anzi boy from just West My apologies for asking
two years old, the anti child and they just found
out he was His mother had a diet that was
very similar to what they find with large cats. Mm hmm,
choosing big game.

Speaker 6 (01:59:49):
So how many Clovis humans do we have?

Speaker 2 (01:59:51):
One that's it?

Speaker 3 (01:59:53):
There's there's one from Mexico that's roughly that age from
a cave in Mexico, Is there, daw Steve? But it's
not clearly it's not clearly Clovis and Antik is the one.

Speaker 2 (02:00:05):
Yeah, it was found in the sixties or seventies and
Will saw Montana and a bunch of ochre and a
bunch of projectile points.

Speaker 3 (02:00:12):
Yeah, so her mother the reconstruction was at least forty
percent mammoth in her in his mother's diet, which is
a huge amount.

Speaker 2 (02:00:20):
And this pisses off met and Aaron and Meltzer because
people are like, see, they killed all the mammoths, and
they're like, well, no, I can see that they were
eating mammoths, but how is this telling me they killed
them all.

Speaker 4 (02:00:36):
For the record, we liked both Meton and Meltzer a
whole lot, And it's good to contextualize, like we're literally
talking about like a couple thousand years and maybe a
half dozen sites of disagreement, right, It's just that those, yeah,
a couple thousand years and half dozen sites have really
big implications for these two issues about how people got
here and whether or not they killed off these animals.

(02:00:58):
And so that's why we talk about it so much. Right,
even though like it's like kind of a tempest in
a teacup, if you know that phrase. Yeah, a couple
of people arguing about yeah, half dozen sights in a
couple of thousand years, they do have pretty big implications
for the people of the Americans.

Speaker 2 (02:01:12):
Well, I already told you that this is the primary
thing I think about was that quote. Was that Dan
Flore's quote. It wasn't his quote, but he told us
that quote. The reason the reason they're fighting so much
is there's so.

Speaker 5 (02:01:23):
Little yeah, exactly talking about academics. The reason that arguments
are so impassionate because there's so little.

Speaker 3 (02:01:32):
I've heard that attributed to.

Speaker 2 (02:01:36):
But there is a lot. But here I want to
like this should we should have said at the beginning,
at the very end. But where this becomes political, and
where it becomes social, and where it becomes cultural, well
it's a lot of places. But one of the places
it becomes this is is it innately human that we
destroy our environment? Right? Is it sort of this lately

(02:02:00):
human ancient practice that we drive things to extinction? Is
it just who we are and we've always done it
that way? Or did we like become evil later? And
so people will look and like blitz Creek hypothesis, people
can look at, let's say, extinctions we're driving now with

(02:02:23):
certain human activities. Isn't it nice to be able to
go like, oh, we've always done that. Where do you
think happened all to the mambis? This is nothing new?
It's always how it's.

Speaker 4 (02:02:32):
Been just because something's human universally human, which I think
that tendency is, doesn't make it. It doesn't addicate us
from more responsibility to deal with it.

Speaker 2 (02:02:41):
No, of course, not like slavery is inherently human.

Speaker 4 (02:02:45):
It's a universal practice that because we live in a
liberal democracy that decided it was a bad thing we
got rid of. I should know, like, how many places
in the world, for instance, have thriving large game populations
outside of the American West Many. And the only reason
we have him here right is because there's state sanctioned
conservation laws that have allowed that to happen. Otherwise we'd

(02:03:06):
be in the same boat we have no big animals left. Yeah,
So I think that argument that, like, by acknowledging this,
we're kind of surrendering our moral obligation to do something
about it. It's not a good argument to make just
because something has happened forever doesn't mean we need to
keep doing it. Kay.

Speaker 2 (02:03:23):
He with one more way, this where the rubber meets
the road. If you turn around and look above your head,
you're going to see a war club. That war club
was given to us by a guest. It didn't sit
where you're sitting, but he sat in that seat in
our old studio named Taylor Keene. Okay, and Taylor Kean
felt that part of this thing of like he would

(02:03:48):
argue that human history in the New World goes back
fifty thousand years, okay, he thinks it's way older. And
he thinks that this like thirteen thousand year Clovis story
is a way of is a way of He thinks

(02:04:08):
that helped fuel Manifest Destiny to say, well, they haven't
been here that long, like the people were displacing our
new arrivals too, We're just another new arrival. I don't
agree with him because I think that if you had
gone to sort of like the architects of Manifest Destiny,
whether you go back to Jackson, you go back to Jefferson,

(02:04:32):
and you had said, hey, before you do this, bear
in mind Native Americans have been on the landscape fifty
thousand years, not thirteen thousand years. They wouldn't have been like, yeah,
you're right, you're right, we better all leave and go
back to Europe. And also they wouldn't have been able
to comprehend the timeline anyways because they weren't living on

(02:04:52):
that timeline. So I think that his argument is false,
but he feels that this thirteen thousand year arrival thing,
and I've encountered this perspective from a handful of friends
of mine are Indigenous friends of mine, that it that
it's meant to sort of it's meant to kind of

(02:05:13):
d it's meant to kind of deflate or call into
question indigenous ownership of the landscape, to be like your
people showed up, Our people showed up, Like no one's
from here. People just showed up, and they've always been
fighting over it anyways, and we're just the latest of
another people to come here and fight for it.

Speaker 4 (02:05:33):
It's an interesting debate. Let me contextualize it a little bit. So,
until the Fulsome site was discovered, the widespread notion among
people that studied this stuff was the Native Americans have
only been here about three or four thousand years. Yeah,
And when the Fulsome site came out and there's this
revelatory thing that people have been here since the Ice Age,

(02:05:54):
it was of enormous benefit to Native Americans because it
established that they'd been here a very long time. Thirteen
thousand years is a really long time.

Speaker 3 (02:06:03):
Six hundred and fifty human generations approximately.

Speaker 4 (02:06:08):
So yeah, fast forward almost a century now, Now that
thirteen thousand years old is no longer old enough, old enough,
you have to keep pushing it back a little further.
I just I think thirteen thousand years is a really
long time, and it's certainly enough time to establish that
you have some sort of patrimony over the land of
this country. I don't quite understand the argument that it's

(02:06:32):
not quite long enough to establish that. It's a really
long time.

Speaker 3 (02:06:35):
Yeah, the scientific study of the human past in North
America has confirmed that the descendant communities today their ancestors
were these people that they arrived six hundred and fifty
human generations ago.

Speaker 4 (02:06:50):
Anzik showed that.

Speaker 3 (02:06:51):
Yeah, Anzick did show that another human remains. You know,
if we look at if we go back to I
assume you guys have ancestry in Europe, and we asked
how long do we have ancestry in Europe? It's almost
certainly less than that, because there have been multiple populations
that have run over Europe repeatedly. So thirteen thousand years
is longer than anybody in Europe. Most people in Europe

(02:07:15):
could truly lay claim to some you know, places of homeland.
It's a long damn time.

Speaker 2 (02:07:19):
That's an interesting point. Do you know what two percent African?

Speaker 3 (02:07:23):
I didn't know that? Who told me?

Speaker 2 (02:07:24):
My wife tells me to keep that down because she's
guy kind of oversell.

Speaker 4 (02:07:27):
It's to get away with any linguistic turn the phrase.

Speaker 2 (02:07:35):
She's like, I keep it under you keep it under
your head. She doesn't wanted to impact my worldview.

Speaker 3 (02:07:42):
You know.

Speaker 2 (02:07:45):
Okay again, join today. I'm going to have you, guys
tell people. I'm gonna remind everybody who you are. Then
I'm going to have you tell people how to find
your work and how to follow what you guys work on.
So Todd Surrevel, the director of the Georgie C. Frison
Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming,
and Spencer Pelton, the Wyoming State Archaeologist and an adjunct

(02:08:10):
at University of Wyoming. So, if you find cool stuff
in Wyoming, if you're like, good lord, it's a man
of school, the stone point stuck in its forehead.

Speaker 4 (02:08:21):
I'm going to get so many photos off.

Speaker 2 (02:08:25):
You know, I gotta tell people's story. So I walk
into I walk into Spencer's office and the first thing
that greets me, just laying on the floor is a
giant the end of a giant dinosaur fever. So I said,
what's that. He goes, that's a rock, and I said,
I thought it was a big dinosaur bony. So that's
what the guy that brought it to me thought was.

(02:08:46):
And then he said, I gonna have it if I wanted.
The guy that brought it just left it there. So
it was not the dude that brought it.

Speaker 3 (02:08:57):
But it was a very convincing dinosaur. Not a dinosaur,
but it was very convincing.

Speaker 2 (02:09:03):
Sitting there, sitting there on his floor. As it's not
in the collections.

Speaker 7 (02:09:08):
He didn't ask you to come out to his truck
to look at it first.

Speaker 2 (02:09:16):
I would have been so excited you would this thing.
I would have been like, holy cow man, No, I
got it. I'm rich. So how do people find your work?
What should they check out? I have one of your
books upstairs. The badger wa just got barker gulch. Yeah,
I had to buy that sucker.

Speaker 3 (02:09:32):
I brought one for you.

Speaker 2 (02:09:33):
You did, Yeah, bought it on him.

Speaker 3 (02:09:37):
I searched my name. You can find my website. Spell
your name out, serve L s U r O v
e LLL Okay, I do want to say that that
my job is as director of the Prison Institute, is
raising money to support archaeological research in our department, mostly
other people, students, faculty, people like Spencer. So if you're

(02:09:58):
interested in supporting the last breath of last dying breath
of Clovis first archaeology, and people who believe in licensing extinctions,
search of Prison Institute. We're happy to take donations. Every
dollar goes to research.

Speaker 4 (02:10:12):
Oh excellent, Yeah, you can just google me too. I've
got some talks on YouTube. I got a research gate
page where all my research goes. Also write a newsletter
on substack called Social Stigma. It's about basically political issues
and archaeology and anthropology. That's free. You want to subscribe
to that.

Speaker 3 (02:10:30):
That's interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:10:31):
Good, Thanks guys, appreciate you coming on. Man, it's been fascinating.

Speaker 4 (02:10:34):
Yeah, thank you, thank you,

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Steven Rinella

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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. 693: Did Clovis Hunters Kill All the Mammoths?