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Speaker 1: This is me eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely

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Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear listening un podcast. You

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Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are

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Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the

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Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor

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Speaker 1: where you stand with on X David J. Meltzer. You

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Speaker 1: know it's the writer named David Meltzer. That's gonna be disappointing.

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Speaker 1: There's a poem named David Meltzer. There's a medical doctor

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Speaker 1: named David Meltzers. If someone goes to if you go

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Speaker 1: into Google and you write David Meltzer a auto phills

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Speaker 1: David Meltzer anthropologist. Okay, so not David Meltzer, the wrestling writer. No,

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Speaker 1: a victory from me. Uh, this is gonna this is

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Speaker 1: gonna break some people's some dear friends of mine's hearts.

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Speaker 1: But you're the favorite. Yeah, we haven't even started yet.

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Speaker 1: You're the favorite guests that I've ever had on this show.

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Speaker 1: We can stop right now. I'm good you haven't started.

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Speaker 1: I uh um, I'm gonna flatter you a little bit.

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Speaker 1: You know how people will have in a in a home.

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Speaker 1: You'll have a coffee table right in your sign up

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Speaker 1: your living room, and people will position books there which

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Speaker 1: are a combination of what the person likes and how

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Speaker 1: the person likes to be perceived. I keep I rotate. Well,

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Speaker 1: there's there's a couple that aren't yours. I'm a little

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Speaker 1: sorry to hear that. We go ahead. Well it's the

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Speaker 1: photographer Um Hoffman. So I rotate Hoffman's book of photography

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Speaker 1: with I sage people in a New World with your

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Speaker 1: fulsome book. I rotate them and I and I put

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Speaker 1: them there, and it's meant to be like this is

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Speaker 1: my my this is like mikes. You know. My expression

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Speaker 1: of myself is that that I value David J. Melzer's books.

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Speaker 1: All I can say is, you've just earned yourself the

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Speaker 1: next two books. Really, sure you get them on the

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Speaker 1: house now, if they're gonna be, if they're gonna be

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Speaker 1: on the table, you got them. I almost brought them

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Speaker 1: to have you sign them. But they're but they're big

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Speaker 1: sons of bitching books. Yeah, I do tend to, right,

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Speaker 1: don't I know? Just they're they're they're they're full of

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Speaker 1: maps and color, imagery, everything you could want from everything.

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Speaker 1: I know when I finished with a book, I know nothing.

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Speaker 1: It's all just poured out onto the page, nothing left. No,

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Speaker 1: they're yeah, they're amazing, and you do. Um, we'll get

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Speaker 1: into what you're working. We haven't. We're telling people all this,

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Speaker 1: all them knowing what you do. But UM, a wonderful

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Speaker 1: job of of explaining really complicated things in a way

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Speaker 1: that don't They don't feel remotely dumbed down, but they're

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Speaker 1: still accessible and you still feel like you have like

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Speaker 1: you're getting a very scholarly understanding of something that would

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Speaker 1: be easy to trivialize. All of us in the business

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Speaker 1: have an obligation to speak to the public that both

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Speaker 1: pays for people like me and is interested in the

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Speaker 1: kinds of things that I'm lucky enough to do, and

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Speaker 1: so I really feel that obligation strongly. Uh to write

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Speaker 1: in good American that people can understand, which actually is

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Speaker 1: a hell of a lot harder than writing for my colleagues.

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Speaker 1: It's a whole lot easier just to use jargon because

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Speaker 1: I know everybody knows what that is. And then when

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Speaker 1: I have to explain something, especially in regard to some

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Speaker 1: of the high tech stuff that we're involved in now,

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Speaker 1: it's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun.

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Speaker 1: It's a lot of fun. I hope you keep at it.

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Speaker 1: Um not. I want to tell people. Let's say you're

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Speaker 1: at You're at a one of your faculty parties. We're

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Speaker 1: here at Southern Methodist Universe. You're at a faculty party.

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Speaker 1: You meet like an English professor, and you you meet

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Speaker 1: an English professor's husband, and he says, so, what do

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Speaker 1: you do? You say, so, I work on ice age

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Speaker 1: hunter gatherers. That's the sort of boring tagline. Dude, that's

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Speaker 1: that's titillating to me. Okay, So what follows is I

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Speaker 1: work on the people who are the first to come

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Speaker 1: into the America's Imagine what it must have been like

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Speaker 1: to look around one day and see no smoke on

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Speaker 1: the horizon, no freshly killed animals, no sign of any

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Speaker 1: other human being, and realize, oh, we're all alone here,

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Speaker 1: and this place is kind of looking different than where

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Speaker 1: we came from. And what's over the next hill, and

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Speaker 1: what's over the hill next to that. Imagine what it

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Speaker 1: must have been like to be that person, to be

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Speaker 1: in that group, to see a landscape teeming with animals

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Speaker 1: that some of which you've never seen before. And you

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Speaker 1: don't know which ones are going to feed you, which

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Speaker 1: ones are going to cure you. The plants I think

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Speaker 1: you raised in one of your books which ones are

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Speaker 1: going to hurt you? When which ones are going to

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Speaker 1: try and kill you? Exactly. You have a hypothetical scenario

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Speaker 1: and one of your books where you point out something

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Speaker 1: that's interesting is that people are coming from the north

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Speaker 1: and had been were thousands of years, perhaps separated from

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Speaker 1: tropical climates. And you're coming from the north and there

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Speaker 1: there's a guy, we don't know, a woman, a man,

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Speaker 1: whoever it was, that was like the first one to

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Speaker 1: encounter a rattlesnake. No awareness, no even ancestral awareness of

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Speaker 1: what that was. You kind of wonder though, Um, I mean,

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Speaker 1: you guys surely have encountered rattlesnakes in your travels. And

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Speaker 1: there is something that that that hits your reptilian brain

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Speaker 1: that says, oh, it's kind of an interesting noise, but

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Speaker 1: oh dear, that looks like that could be that could

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Speaker 1: be trouble. Um. But yeah, imagine that and imagine all

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Speaker 1: these these trees, these plants that you know you kind

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Speaker 1: of recognize them. I mean, you know what a tree

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Speaker 1: looks like for grind out loud, But what can that

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Speaker 1: do for you? And that's one of the really amazing

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Speaker 1: things about the peopling processes that after getting onto the

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Speaker 1: continent and being here for ten thousand years, there's virtually

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Speaker 1: not a single plant that Native Americans hadn't figured out.

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Speaker 1: It's medicinal properties, it's food properties, its use as tools.

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Speaker 1: I mean, it's really quite remarkable how folks learned about

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Speaker 1: this new land. And I suspect they had to learn

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Speaker 1: on the go, and they had to learn fairly quickly

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Speaker 1: because they were moving with remarkable speed, archaeologically breathtaking speed

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Speaker 1: across the continent. Uh, and they were able to figure

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Speaker 1: things out. Can you can you explain that? Well? You know,

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Speaker 1: let me ask you this, what's the best way if

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Speaker 1: we're gonna get in, if we want to do a

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Speaker 1: good fly over of the peopling of the New World,

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Speaker 1: where's the best way to begin? Because I have in

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Speaker 1: thinking about talking to you, there's all these things I

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Speaker 1: wanted you to explain. I wanted he was playing like

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Speaker 1: Clovis pre Clovis, sort of the moving like our best

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Speaker 1: guests of Well, here's nothing I want to explain. How

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Speaker 1: for a while the oldest accepted site in the New World,

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Speaker 1: correct me if I'm wrong. For a while, the oldest

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Speaker 1: one we knew about rock solid was down monta Verde

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Speaker 1: right in Chili. Still is, so what happened between that?

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Speaker 1: If they're coming from Siberia, what happened between Bryngia in Chili?

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Speaker 1: Where's all their stuff? Fair question? Absolutely, these are all

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Speaker 1: questions I want to ask you, So you tell me, like,

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Speaker 1: what's the best place to begin what we used to

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Speaker 1: think was the beginning or what we now think is

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Speaker 1: the beginning. Well, so it used to be tough because

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Speaker 1: with archaeological material, you're getting what's preserved, and it's a

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Speaker 1: crapshoot because we are talking about a relatively small population

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Speaker 1: on a vast continent. They're going to be flying below

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Speaker 1: archaeological radar for centuries, if not millennia. There's simply not

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Speaker 1: enough of them producing enough sites that the odds are

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Speaker 1: that you'll find them. Right, So we always knew that

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Speaker 1: the archaeological record, the oldest site you find is never

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Speaker 1: going to be the oldest site in America. I mean,

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Speaker 1: the odds are simply infinitestainally small. But now we've got

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Speaker 1: genetics and genomics, And what genetics and genomics can tell

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Speaker 1: us is the point at which ancestral Native Americans separated

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Speaker 1: from Northeast Asian populations and started to make their way here. Now,

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Speaker 1: the moment they split from their Asian cousins is not

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Speaker 1: necessarily the moment they headed to the Americas, but it

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Speaker 1: gives us a maximum age. And we now know based

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Speaker 1: on ancient danna and genomics. And this is work that's

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Speaker 1: been done by quite a number of but most especially

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Speaker 1: my colleague Eski Willerslev at the GeoGenetics Center in Copenhagen,

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Speaker 1: and our work has shown that around twenty three thousand

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Speaker 1: years ago twenty three you know, plus or minus a

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Speaker 1: thousand were archaeologists, right, Plus and minus a thousand years

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Speaker 1: is nothing does around twenty three thousand years ago, we

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Speaker 1: have that initial split. So we know that at some

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Speaker 1: point after that they're coming this way and there was

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Speaker 1: no longer exchange. Correct. We also know that, as you

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Speaker 1: just said, we've got Monte verd A and the dates

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Speaker 1: they're around fourteen thousand, seven hundred calibrated years. So we

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Speaker 1: now have a window within which we can real quick

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Speaker 1: explain for people what that means. Ah, okay, So radiocarbon

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Speaker 1: years radiocarbon dating. Basically, you're looking at the amount of

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Speaker 1: C four team that still resides in a sample after

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Speaker 1: a certain period of time. And we know the half life,

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Speaker 1: we know how long it takes to disintegrate in a sample. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna annoy you here. Okay, go even deeper the sun.

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Speaker 1: Like notice, tell peop real quick, because people get this

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Speaker 1: is stuff you here their whole lives. They never know

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Speaker 1: like what it means. So the sun comes down, it

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Speaker 1: hits our atmosphere. Yeah right, okay. So basically, nitrogen gets blasted,

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Speaker 1: turns into a stabile isotope of carbon, normal garden variety

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Speaker 1: carbon is carbon twelve, right, and then you've got this

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Speaker 1: isotope carbon four team. Carbon four team behaves just like

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Speaker 1: carbon twelve in that it joins up with oxygen forms.

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Speaker 1: CEO two gets absorbed into living matter. When it's no

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Speaker 1: longer being absorbed, when that organism dies, the amount of

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Speaker 1: CEO two begins to decay back to basically it's zeros out, okay,

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Speaker 1: and it decays at a known rate. It's called a

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Speaker 1: half life, and a half life of radio carbon is

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Speaker 1: about five thousand seven hundred and thirty years. So if

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Speaker 1: you've got half of the amount, not even looking at notes, No,

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Speaker 1: I'm just making it up. Um. If you've got half, um,

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Speaker 1: half the radio carbon is gone. Five thousand, seven thirty

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Speaker 1: years has elapsed, right, okay, So and it just halves halves, halves,

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Speaker 1: halves halves. Okay. Here's the problem. The very mechanism that

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Speaker 1: creates the C fourteen in the atmosphere in the first place,

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Speaker 1: which is the sun bombarding the upper atmosphere and and

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Speaker 1: creating all the C fourteen, It's varying. So at certain

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Speaker 1: points in the past more C fourteen is being produced.

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Speaker 1: At other points in the past, less C fourteen is

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Speaker 1: being produced. What that means is that when you get

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Speaker 1: a radio carbon date, you've got to say to yourself, Okay,

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Speaker 1: if this was a period when excess carbon was being

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Speaker 1: produced in the atmosphere, it's going to give me a

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Speaker 1: funky date. I've got to calibrate it. And how do

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Speaker 1: you calibrate it? Tree rings? Tree rings. When a tree

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Speaker 1: grows and you guys cut down trees, right, Um, you

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Speaker 1: see all the growth rings. Those growth rings come on

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Speaker 1: one year at a time. Okay. If you date an

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Speaker 1: individual growth ring on a tree that you've counted back,

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Speaker 1: and we now have a tree ring sequence that goes

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Speaker 1: back thirteen thousand years in change. I don't know the

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Speaker 1: exact number. If I were to look it up, I

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Speaker 1: could tell you. Uh, you date those individual rings, you

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Speaker 1: know that that ring should be eleven thousand, three and

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Speaker 1: forty eight years old, But your radio carbon date tells

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Speaker 1: you something else. That's how you know how much it's off, right,

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Speaker 1: And so we have these really elaborate calibration curves. There's

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Speaker 1: a there's a difference. So a radio carbon date of

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Speaker 1: ten thousand years is actually equivalent to a real year

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Speaker 1: date about eleven thousand seven d okay. And when you

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Speaker 1: and today we're speaking in count well let's speaking and

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Speaker 1: basically like we're you're arranging it into years as we

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Speaker 1: understand that exactly right, I'm gonna give you real years.

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Speaker 1: And the reason I'm doing that is a bit because

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Speaker 1: the estimates that we get from genetics and genomics are

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Speaker 1: in essentially real years, right, Okay, So we've got the

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Speaker 1: genetic estimates at twenty three, Monte Verde has a date

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Speaker 1: of four teen seven, fourteen thou seven hundred real years.

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Speaker 1: It's radio carbon years. Just to kind of finish up

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Speaker 1: with the example is twelve five, Okay, so you can

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Speaker 1: see what the discrepancy is between a radio carbon in

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Speaker 1: a real year. Okay. So in that window between twenty

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Speaker 1: three and fourteen seven, we know people showed up. Now

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Speaker 1: there's an issue there because that window is downtown. Last

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Speaker 1: glacial maximum, right, the coldest period of the last hundred

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Speaker 1: thousand years was between about twenty three thousand and nineteen

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Speaker 1: thousand years ago. That's when we had these massive ice

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Speaker 1: sheets covering basically Canada. Okay, two big ice sheets. One

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Speaker 1: that goes from Newfoundland and lapse up against the eastern

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Speaker 1: flank of the Rocky Mountains Lauren Tied ice sheet. It

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Speaker 1: goes as far south as Ohio, Central Ohio and Pennsylvania.

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Speaker 1: It goes as far north as well. It actually connects

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Speaker 1: up with an ice eat that makes it over to Greenland.

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Speaker 1: Is there a point when a glacier turns into an

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Speaker 1: ice sheet or absolutely um. It all starts with snow,

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Speaker 1: and it all starts with summer temperatures. And this was

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Speaker 1: figured out actually by a guy sitting in a prisoner

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Speaker 1: of war camp in World War One. He was a

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Speaker 1: he was a mathematician, and he understood that if you

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Speaker 1: play around with the amount of sunlight and heat hitting

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Speaker 1: the Earth, you can either grow a glacier or make

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Speaker 1: one go away. And the reason this happens is that UM,

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Speaker 1: and it has to do with a whole bunch of

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Speaker 1: sort of astronomical physics UM, where basically all the planets

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Speaker 1: are constantly getting jostled. We like to sort of think

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Speaker 1: of our Earth is is orbiting in a particular way,

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Speaker 1: and it's always been that way and it's never going

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Speaker 1: to change. And that's just not right right because we've

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Speaker 1: got all these other planets out there, so we've got

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Speaker 1: the gravitational effects of the Sun. But then there's Jupiter

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Speaker 1: parked a few orbits out there, and it's also affecting us.

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Speaker 1: So at times in the past, the northern hemisphere has

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Speaker 1: been closer or further away from the Sun, which meant

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Speaker 1: there's been more or less solar radiation hitting the surface.

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Speaker 1: When you reduce the amount of solar radiation hitting the

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Speaker 1: surface in um the summer, last year's winter snow doesn't melt,

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Speaker 1: The next year snow piles up, and if it doesn't

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Speaker 1: melt again, well you pile that up to a certain

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Speaker 1: depths or so, it compresses, it packs, it turns to ice,

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Speaker 1: and it starts to flow. Okay, it used to be

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Speaker 1: that there was about a three week window in the

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Speaker 1: far North between the last of the spring um freezing

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Speaker 1: temperatures and the first of the fall freeze. If you

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Speaker 1: close that two to three week window, you could start

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Speaker 1: another ice age. I mean you have to close it

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Speaker 1: sort of consistently for many, many years, right, um. But

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Speaker 1: that's how it works. And so we had this period

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Speaker 1: between twenty three thousand, nineteen thousand years ago where you

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Speaker 1: had these massive ice sheets that had built up starting

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Speaker 1: probably around twenty nine thirty thousand years ago and reached

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Speaker 1: their maximum extent between that twenty three and nineteen thousand,

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Speaker 1: covering up ground upon which now lives millions and millions

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Speaker 1: of Americans. There's a reason Minnesota's the land of ten

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Speaker 1: thousand lakes. Those are all glacial puddles, right. Uh. Seattle

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Speaker 1: had um an ice sheet basically in downtown Seattle. That's

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Speaker 1: why it's a great port. Right. The ice basically created

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Speaker 1: these fiords Chesapeake Bay wise, Chesapeake Bay a bay. Well,

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Speaker 1: the Susquehanna River had to because and you grow that

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Speaker 1: much ice on land, and we are talking about an

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Speaker 1: ice sheet that again east coast to the Rocky Mountains,

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Speaker 1: and then from the Rocky Mountains to the coast range

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Speaker 1: there was a second major ice sheet, the Quardier and

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Speaker 1: Ice sheet. You put that much ice on land, where's

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Speaker 1: all the water coming from the ocean, right, So all

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Speaker 1: of that precipitation, like oceans evaporate, precipitation clouds move over land,

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Speaker 1: falls its snow, and then it freezes. It doesn't get

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Speaker 1: back to the ocean. So when that happens, you're basically

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Speaker 1: locking up about five percent of the world's water. When

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Speaker 1: that happens, sea levels drop, and we know that sea

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Speaker 1: levels dropped, and this becomes part of the people in

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Speaker 1: America story. Right, sea levels drop about a hundred and

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Speaker 1: thirty meters, so you know, put it in defeat, uh

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Speaker 1: several hundred feet in depth. So you could walk from

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Speaker 1: Asia to America and you would have no idea that

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Speaker 1: you were walking from one hemisphere to another. And the

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Speaker 1: reason you would have no idea is that don't think

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Speaker 1: of the bearing Land bridge. Is this sort of skinny

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Speaker 1: rope bridge over the Amazon River somewhere. No, it's a

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Speaker 1: thousand miles and you know, you look around and it's

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Speaker 1: just a continent to you. That's that was one of

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Speaker 1: the things that really started to interest me in this

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Speaker 1: world a little bit, was when I started to get

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Speaker 1: that because in every every like American school child's imagination,

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Speaker 1: the Bearing Land Bridge is this thing where you like,

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Speaker 1: it's like Moses going through right the part of red seat,

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Speaker 1: Like you pack your ship up and it's this narrow

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Speaker 1: little thing. Everybody's like, okay, ready, and then you run

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Speaker 1: across it. You know, it's like you're you're sort of

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Speaker 1: impression of it. And then to go up at what's

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Speaker 1: now the would be the foot of it now and

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Speaker 1: just you're your Northwest Alaska and you stand there and

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Speaker 1: be like, you don't have any you don't understand where

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Speaker 1: the oceans sit. You're just out on this massive thing.

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Speaker 1: And that's what life on the Bearing the Bearing Land

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Speaker 1: Bridge wasn't any more than when you're in Michigan. You're

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Speaker 1: very aware of that you're on a peninsula. You're just

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Speaker 1: somewhere exactly look at the map, and you also put

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Speaker 1: it together. Right. No, that's a great analogy because it's

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Speaker 1: a scale issue. You know, humans are small and the

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Speaker 1: bearing land Bridge was really large, and you would have

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Speaker 1: had no idea. And in fact, you know, there's no

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Speaker 1: reason to think that people were only coming in one

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Speaker 1: direction either. You know, they could go east, they could

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Speaker 1: go west, And we're starting to see some of that

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Speaker 1: evidence genetically that these populations are moving back and forth

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Speaker 1: across the land Bridge. It was trafficking in humans, plants,

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Speaker 1: animals for thousands of years. Yeah, but you're right. But

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Speaker 1: there's a point you bring up in one of your

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Speaker 1: I think it's I say, people in the New World.

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Speaker 1: You bring up a thing and I mentioned I quote

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Speaker 1: you on this a lot, and I hope but I'm

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Speaker 1: not over emphasizing it. But you bring up a thing

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Speaker 1: where you said the movement of people. As people are

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Speaker 1: moving around, they're moving quickly. And I can't remember if

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Speaker 1: you say this that I added it to it. But

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Speaker 1: they're not like running from warfare necessarily, like they're they're

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Speaker 1: they're leaving there, They're leaving places they're sparsely populated, four

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Speaker 1: places that are sparsely or not populated at all. And

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Speaker 1: and you I do know this part. You to the

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Speaker 1: point where like you can't rule out some amount of curiosity, absolutely,

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Speaker 1: like someone like they're Maybe they weren't like saying, hey

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Speaker 1: we're headed America. We're headed of what will become America.

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Speaker 1: But they are saying they're thinking something or else. You

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Speaker 1: can't account for that they would have gone as far

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Speaker 1: as they went. Well, let's put it this way, when

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Speaker 1: when Europeans started sailing around the globe, did they find

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Speaker 1: a single habitable landmask that wasn't already inhabited. No, everywhere

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Speaker 1: they got to there was already somebody living there. Humans

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Speaker 1: have been moving for millions of years, but humans, modern humans,

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Speaker 1: anatomically modern humans, they've been moving all over the globe

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Speaker 1: for the last fifty thousand years. Um. Do we know

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Speaker 1: the exact motives? Not really, But I think curiosity had

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Speaker 1: to have something to do with it, right. I mean,

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Speaker 1: in any group, somebody's gonna say, hey, let's go over there. Uh,

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Speaker 1: but let's go over there also has a good um My,

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Speaker 1: My now deceased colleague lue Binford always used to say,

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Speaker 1: for hunter gatherers, insurance is not knowing what you have

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Speaker 1: right in front of you, it's knowing where you go next.

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Speaker 1: When things go bad right in front of you, there's

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Speaker 1: an incentive to look over that next hill, because especially

359
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Speaker 1: when things are okay, because that's when you have the

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Speaker 1: time and the resources and the teenage sons who are

361
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Speaker 1: just driving you insane, and you say, why don't you

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Speaker 1: go do a walk about and come back in a

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Speaker 1: month and tell us what you've found. I mean, one

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Speaker 1: of the really interesting things about where we do have

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Speaker 1: oral history records, like in the colonization of the Pacific

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Speaker 1: on these remote islands, and the civic inevitably it's younger brother.

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Speaker 1: It's like, get him out of the house. He's not

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Speaker 1: going to inherit anything anyway. Let's let him get into

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Speaker 1: boat and go someplace and and find new things. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And so you know there's an advantage to that. Humans

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Speaker 1: are also very good at surviving, and that was part

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Speaker 1: of that buying that insurance policy. Did you bring up

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Speaker 1: like do you address this or here to somewhere else

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Speaker 1: that there's that there's yet the idea of expansion and

375
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Speaker 1: you could say that you know, every hill I come over,

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Speaker 1: there's more game and right, and the wood sources are

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Speaker 1: down by the rivers and no one's burned it yet,

378
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Speaker 1: and it's just good living. But when you look at

379
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Speaker 1: the landscape in the ice sheets, you're talking about there

380
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Speaker 1: had people had to have come up with up against

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Speaker 1: what would be perceived as like a hostile environment perhaps

382
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Speaker 1: and then jumped it without question. And in fact, one

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Speaker 1: of the things that's really striking about the earliest archaeological

384
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Speaker 1: record that we have is that we've got stuff all

385
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Speaker 1: over the place in a very short period of time.

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Speaker 1: So we know people are moving in their tracking great distances,

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Speaker 1: but their distribution was broad, it was not deep. We

388
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Speaker 1: are not seeing every single spot being filled in. What

389
00:23:13,320 --> 00:23:16,080
Speaker 1: we're seeing is that these people were probably leap frogging

390
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Speaker 1: right because they are paying attention to what's over the

391
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Speaker 1: next hill. Um, and if it looks bad that way,

392
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Speaker 1: we'll go someplace else, go in another direction. So in fact,

393
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Speaker 1: they are moving, um, not necessarily in a nice wave,

394
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Speaker 1: expanding out, washing out across the continent. Um. They're looking

395
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Speaker 1: for sweet spots. They're looking for the places that the

396
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Speaker 1: hunting is good, the gathering is good. Um, it's a

397
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Speaker 1: decent place to spend the winter, those kinds of places.

398
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Speaker 1: I mean, they're all like us. They want to have comfort,

399
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Speaker 1: they want to have food, they want to have security.

400
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Speaker 1: If you're knowing what you now know, um, I don't

401
00:23:55,840 --> 00:23:59,080
Speaker 1: know why I would ask you two any other way,

402
00:23:59,160 --> 00:24:03,160
Speaker 1: but no, you now, now, if you imagine a colonizing

403
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Speaker 1: group wherever, whether it's in northwest Alaska, whether it's you know,

404
00:24:08,400 --> 00:24:11,040
Speaker 1: here in Texas, fur the South, a colonizing group, a

405
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Speaker 1: group that's not likely to be bumping up against people

406
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Speaker 1: who are already inhabiting lands ahead of them. How big

407
00:24:17,119 --> 00:24:21,000
Speaker 1: are the groups? So um, This is one of the

408
00:24:21,040 --> 00:24:23,320
Speaker 1: things that we've actually been spending a lot of time

409
00:24:23,359 --> 00:24:25,960
Speaker 1: trying to get a better handle on. We actually now

410
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Speaker 1: have again because of the genetics record, we're getting a

411
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Speaker 1: sense of how large these populations are. And uh, well,

412
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Speaker 1: let me answer it in a couple of ways. First off,

413
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Speaker 1: the direct answer to your question, you're probably going to disperse.

414
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Speaker 1: If a hundred of you come into the New World,

415
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Speaker 1: you're not going to stay together as a group of

416
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Speaker 1: a hundred and move all around. Why Why Why do

417
00:24:49,600 --> 00:24:53,480
Speaker 1: you assume that? Because it's well, a couple of things. One,

418
00:24:54,119 --> 00:24:58,960
Speaker 1: if disaster strikes, that's it, end of story. But to

419
00:24:59,560 --> 00:25:01,919
Speaker 1: one of them, it's important things for hunter gatherers is

420
00:25:02,040 --> 00:25:07,120
Speaker 1: information by dispersing your group, by sending out I don't

421
00:25:07,119 --> 00:25:09,800
Speaker 1: want to say pods, right, but by sending out smaller

422
00:25:09,920 --> 00:25:15,679
Speaker 1: units of say, kind of an extended family group. Why

423
00:25:15,720 --> 00:25:18,440
Speaker 1: don't you folks go that way, You go that way,

424
00:25:18,600 --> 00:25:22,720
Speaker 1: We'll go this way and never see each other again. No, no, no,

425
00:25:22,840 --> 00:25:25,000
Speaker 1: that's one of the really important things. It's not just

426
00:25:25,520 --> 00:25:27,280
Speaker 1: um when you're coming into a new world. Is one

427
00:25:27,280 --> 00:25:29,720
Speaker 1: of my colleagues that says, it's not just what to eat,

428
00:25:29,760 --> 00:25:32,120
Speaker 1: it's who to meet. At a certain point, your kids

429
00:25:32,119 --> 00:25:34,960
Speaker 1: are going to be a marriageable age and you're gonna

430
00:25:34,960 --> 00:25:39,480
Speaker 1: need to find mates for them. Okay. So one of

431
00:25:39,480 --> 00:25:41,640
Speaker 1: the things that we've been looking for for a very

432
00:25:41,640 --> 00:25:44,720
Speaker 1: long time, which um must be out there, but we

433
00:25:44,760 --> 00:25:47,359
Speaker 1: really haven't found a lot of them, are rendezvous sites

434
00:25:48,119 --> 00:25:51,760
Speaker 1: where folks, you know, half a dozen years down the road,

435
00:25:51,840 --> 00:25:55,760
Speaker 1: ten years down the road, they get together to exchange information,

436
00:25:55,840 --> 00:25:58,320
Speaker 1: to exchange mates, to talk to one another. I mean,

437
00:25:58,320 --> 00:26:00,719
Speaker 1: we're fundamentally social beings, right are you? Are you going

438
00:26:00,760 --> 00:26:03,160
Speaker 1: to weave into talking about the lynden Meyer site, Well,

439
00:26:03,280 --> 00:26:07,359
Speaker 1: we could get there. Lyndenmeyer is one of the very

440
00:26:07,400 --> 00:26:10,720
Speaker 1: don't need to I just know the idea of that

441
00:26:10,720 --> 00:26:12,640
Speaker 1: that when you say goodbye, you're not always just saying

442
00:26:12,640 --> 00:26:15,719
Speaker 1: goodbye for forever. Oh never, never, never never. But then

443
00:26:15,760 --> 00:26:18,000
Speaker 1: again this gets back to you're on a landscape that

444
00:26:18,040 --> 00:26:21,560
Speaker 1: nobody else's is around. And one of the things that

445
00:26:21,840 --> 00:26:24,520
Speaker 1: UM and again I keep harping on the genomics because

446
00:26:24,520 --> 00:26:26,560
Speaker 1: it's been so amazing in terms of telling us about

447
00:26:26,600 --> 00:26:31,120
Speaker 1: population history. At the end of their string, Neanderthals were

448
00:26:31,160 --> 00:26:35,000
Speaker 1: becoming fairly incestuous and in breeding a lot, and they

449
00:26:35,040 --> 00:26:39,320
Speaker 1: were doing that because their populations were shrinking and they

450
00:26:39,320 --> 00:26:43,000
Speaker 1: were scattered over a wide area. We now have this

451
00:26:43,160 --> 00:26:47,719
Speaker 1: latest genome that Eski's group published, that we published UM

452
00:26:47,840 --> 00:26:50,879
Speaker 1: just a few weeks back. One of the sites is

453
00:26:50,920 --> 00:26:56,320
Speaker 1: in remote northern Siberia, literally right on the Arctic Ocean. Uh.

454
00:26:56,359 --> 00:26:58,800
Speaker 1: These guys are out in literally it's the end of

455
00:26:58,800 --> 00:27:01,840
Speaker 1: the world. These are early modern humans. These are not

456
00:27:01,920 --> 00:27:05,520
Speaker 1: neander Tolls, and yet we see absolutely no sign of

457
00:27:05,640 --> 00:27:09,560
Speaker 1: inbreeding or anything like that. They are going long distance

458
00:27:09,640 --> 00:27:12,280
Speaker 1: to find mates. They are ensuring that they're keeping a

459
00:27:12,280 --> 00:27:16,360
Speaker 1: healthy gene pool. So yeah, that's very important for humans

460
00:27:16,560 --> 00:27:20,719
Speaker 1: on on an empty landscape, is that you maintain these connections.

461
00:27:20,800 --> 00:27:24,360
Speaker 1: So there's no understanding of a gene pool. Absolutely not.

462
00:27:24,920 --> 00:27:27,280
Speaker 1: But but humans but humans have but humans have a

463
00:27:27,320 --> 00:27:31,240
Speaker 1: tendency to they get that, they get that, um and

464
00:27:31,440 --> 00:27:35,159
Speaker 1: you know, the tendency to not unless cultures tend to

465
00:27:35,200 --> 00:27:37,680
Speaker 1: not want to be incestuous, unless they're the Royal family

466
00:27:37,720 --> 00:27:44,760
Speaker 1: of England. We'll strike that from the record keeping it in.

467
00:27:46,400 --> 00:27:51,359
Speaker 1: So the group size or the rendezvous site where you

468
00:27:51,400 --> 00:27:54,520
Speaker 1: want to get to. Okay, so you want a rendezvous site,

469
00:27:54,880 --> 00:28:00,239
Speaker 1: um that these are These are mobile hunter gatherers. They

470
00:28:00,240 --> 00:28:02,800
Speaker 1: can only carry so much, right, so this is not

471
00:28:02,840 --> 00:28:05,639
Speaker 1: like a potluck dinner where everybody brings a roast or something.

472
00:28:06,200 --> 00:28:09,160
Speaker 1: So you want to have a site that is easily located.

473
00:28:09,760 --> 00:28:12,159
Speaker 1: You want to have a site that's on an ecotone

474
00:28:12,240 --> 00:28:15,840
Speaker 1: where you've got several different ecological units that are sort

475
00:28:15,880 --> 00:28:20,280
Speaker 1: of coming together eco tone, and it's basically where ecological

476
00:28:20,560 --> 00:28:25,119
Speaker 1: um bioms ecotone ecological zones overlap. And when you have

477
00:28:25,200 --> 00:28:28,400
Speaker 1: overlapping zones, you've got greater richness because you've got all

478
00:28:28,400 --> 00:28:30,359
Speaker 1: the animals and plants from this area and all the

479
00:28:30,359 --> 00:28:32,440
Speaker 1: animals and plants from that area, and they're all in

480
00:28:32,480 --> 00:28:34,720
Speaker 1: the same spot in our in our vernack. There we

481
00:28:34,760 --> 00:28:36,720
Speaker 1: would say like we're a bunch of good ship comes

482
00:28:36,760 --> 00:28:43,000
Speaker 1: together something like that. You said so um, because that

483
00:28:43,040 --> 00:28:45,560
Speaker 1: way you've got because everybody's gonna be showing up and

484
00:28:45,560 --> 00:28:48,080
Speaker 1: they're gonna hang out there for what three weeks a month?

485
00:28:48,120 --> 00:28:51,400
Speaker 1: Who knows, right, Um, but that way there's a food source.

486
00:28:52,000 --> 00:28:53,600
Speaker 1: You want to have springs nearby, you want to have

487
00:28:53,640 --> 00:28:57,240
Speaker 1: water stone handy thing to have nearby as well, because

488
00:28:57,280 --> 00:28:59,840
Speaker 1: when you get together, you know, you're sitting around your

489
00:28:59,840 --> 00:29:03,440
Speaker 1: man stone tools. You're teaching the young. Oh hey, you know,

490
00:29:03,480 --> 00:29:06,479
Speaker 1: we've learned this new technique of manufacturing these particular tools.

491
00:29:06,520 --> 00:29:09,120
Speaker 1: Here's how you do it. And you brought up the

492
00:29:09,200 --> 00:29:13,360
Speaker 1: Lindenmeyer site. It's a really important site because it might

493
00:29:13,400 --> 00:29:16,440
Speaker 1: be one of the few instances that we have of

494
00:29:16,480 --> 00:29:21,720
Speaker 1: a genuine bona fide um rendezvous site. Aggregation site is

495
00:29:21,760 --> 00:29:24,480
Speaker 1: the fancy jargon term that we use rendezvous a lot better,

496
00:29:24,960 --> 00:29:29,680
Speaker 1: and with linden Meyer, it's fantastic because it's sitting in

497
00:29:29,760 --> 00:29:32,960
Speaker 1: a spot, a geological spot where you've got this very

498
00:29:33,040 --> 00:29:38,240
Speaker 1: nice exposure of a wall that has um white rock,

499
00:29:38,880 --> 00:29:41,600
Speaker 1: it's got red rock. It looks like a barber pole

500
00:29:41,760 --> 00:29:43,440
Speaker 1: and you can see it from twenty miles away. We

501
00:29:43,440 --> 00:29:45,680
Speaker 1: should point out that this site sits between Denver and

502
00:29:45,680 --> 00:29:48,800
Speaker 1: Fort Collins actually just north of for Collins, nor Collin,

503
00:29:48,960 --> 00:29:51,360
Speaker 1: about sixteen miles north of four Collins. And it's now

504
00:29:51,400 --> 00:30:01,360
Speaker 1: a what's the Colorado Program of Parks umlife, Yeah, um,

505
00:30:01,480 --> 00:30:04,920
Speaker 1: or it's not. It's not a private ranch anymore. No, no, no, no,

506
00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:07,520
Speaker 1: you can visit it. I visited it. I visited as

507
00:30:07,560 --> 00:30:09,920
Speaker 1: a private ranch. No you can. You can now visit it.

508
00:30:09,920 --> 00:30:12,360
Speaker 1: There's a little guest area there that you're kind of

509
00:30:12,400 --> 00:30:15,000
Speaker 1: stand and look out over the site. It's very cool. Yeah,

510
00:30:15,200 --> 00:30:17,600
Speaker 1: but you can see this thing if you just you know,

511
00:30:17,680 --> 00:30:19,640
Speaker 1: if you're if you're there ten thousand years ago, you

512
00:30:19,680 --> 00:30:21,440
Speaker 1: just tell your buddies, we'll meet you at that giant

513
00:30:21,480 --> 00:30:24,720
Speaker 1: rock barber pole. They didn't know what a barber pole was,

514
00:30:24,800 --> 00:30:27,240
Speaker 1: but we'll go with it, um, and we'll be there

515
00:30:27,440 --> 00:30:32,080
Speaker 1: in two years. Right. And it's at that katone where

516
00:30:32,920 --> 00:30:36,160
Speaker 1: there's a whole bunch of springs, there's a lot of animals,

517
00:30:36,200 --> 00:30:40,120
Speaker 1: there's good stone sources and the archaeology there. This is

518
00:30:40,240 --> 00:30:42,920
Speaker 1: fulsome age. So we're not going to go back to

519
00:30:42,920 --> 00:30:46,360
Speaker 1: our radio carbon dates. The radio carbon dates are about

520
00:30:46,400 --> 00:30:49,600
Speaker 1: ten thousand four. The calibrated ages are about twelve four

521
00:30:49,800 --> 00:30:54,560
Speaker 1: twelve three twelve four h twelve three thousand, twelve thousand,

522
00:30:54,560 --> 00:30:58,320
Speaker 1: three hundred. Um. We've got projectile points made out of

523
00:30:58,400 --> 00:31:00,920
Speaker 1: raw material that are coming from different points on the map.

524
00:31:01,120 --> 00:31:03,959
Speaker 1: So clearly it looks like the way is the Texas Panhandle, right.

525
00:31:04,040 --> 00:31:06,080
Speaker 1: It looks as though people are converging on that spot

526
00:31:06,080 --> 00:31:10,440
Speaker 1: from great distances, absolutely carrying with them toolstone. Yeah, because

527
00:31:10,520 --> 00:31:12,239
Speaker 1: one of the things that you're gonna do when you

528
00:31:12,240 --> 00:31:15,800
Speaker 1: meet up with people that you haven't seen in six years. UM.

529
00:31:15,880 --> 00:31:18,160
Speaker 1: One of the currencies, and I don't want to use

530
00:31:18,200 --> 00:31:21,520
Speaker 1: that term in any literal sense, but you say, hey,

531
00:31:21,720 --> 00:31:24,560
Speaker 1: you know I made I made these really lovely points

532
00:31:24,720 --> 00:31:27,280
Speaker 1: out of this really nice material that I have access

533
00:31:27,320 --> 00:31:29,600
Speaker 1: to down in you know, a hundred miles away. I'd

534
00:31:29,640 --> 00:31:33,440
Speaker 1: like you to have it, right, Um, it's it's a bond,

535
00:31:33,480 --> 00:31:35,600
Speaker 1: it's a gift. Now. Obviously, all sorts of other things

536
00:31:35,640 --> 00:31:39,440
Speaker 1: are being exchanged that we're never going to pick up archaeologically, um,

537
00:31:39,480 --> 00:31:43,920
Speaker 1: but certainly stone because the amount of effort that these

538
00:31:43,920 --> 00:31:48,000
Speaker 1: folks put in to making their stone was well beyond

539
00:31:48,040 --> 00:31:51,560
Speaker 1: the necessities of the weapon reef for the hunt we're

540
00:31:51,600 --> 00:31:55,680
Speaker 1: So here's another problem. I'm still stacked u with things

541
00:31:55,720 --> 00:31:59,640
Speaker 1: I wanted to tell people about we haven't got to

542
00:32:00,440 --> 00:32:03,120
Speaker 1: I want to get to that. You can write it now.

543
00:32:04,160 --> 00:32:06,560
Speaker 1: We haven't got to what the world looked like then

544
00:32:06,800 --> 00:32:12,000
Speaker 1: the critters running around? What was happening to those critters? Extinction?

545
00:32:12,480 --> 00:32:17,960
Speaker 1: Yeah okay? Um, and the diagnostic qualities of their spear

546
00:32:18,000 --> 00:32:23,920
Speaker 1: points projectile points. All right, got it? Got it? Okay.

547
00:32:24,040 --> 00:32:26,600
Speaker 1: Quick question about the Lindenmeyer site. Does it does it

548
00:32:26,600 --> 00:32:30,800
Speaker 1: fit the bill of the perfect like katone? Oh? Absolutely, yeah.

549
00:32:30,880 --> 00:32:32,520
Speaker 1: You go there and you're like, man year round this

550
00:32:32,560 --> 00:32:34,400
Speaker 1: place to be bitch and I could give them see

551
00:32:34,440 --> 00:32:37,440
Speaker 1: your back planes to your front Oh yeah, no, you

552
00:32:37,440 --> 00:32:40,040
Speaker 1: you just it's a great place, with the exception of

553
00:32:40,040 --> 00:32:45,080
Speaker 1: the rattlesnakes, and they were they were they used they

554
00:32:45,080 --> 00:32:47,440
Speaker 1: eight turtles and rattlesnakes and stuff at the site. Then

555
00:32:47,560 --> 00:32:53,920
Speaker 1: the camel does there are camel bones? There's camel bones there,

556
00:32:53,960 --> 00:32:58,479
Speaker 1: but they're they're archaeological association is questionable. It was there

557
00:32:58,520 --> 00:33:00,480
Speaker 1: was a bison kill there, that were at least bison

558
00:33:00,520 --> 00:33:05,840
Speaker 1: that were killed there. Um, and turtles. I would I

559
00:33:05,840 --> 00:33:09,080
Speaker 1: would be surprised if they didn't remember. Yeah, I think

560
00:33:09,120 --> 00:33:12,760
Speaker 1: that this is what I'm that you have whatever is

561
00:33:12,800 --> 00:33:15,720
Speaker 1: happening in the years that they're not camping there. I

562
00:33:15,800 --> 00:33:18,200
Speaker 1: mean that a rabbit dies whatever. You turn up with

563
00:33:18,280 --> 00:33:20,600
Speaker 1: bones and it's probably hard to unless you see knife marks,

564
00:33:20,640 --> 00:33:23,600
Speaker 1: it's hard to know that. That's. Actually one of the

565
00:33:23,640 --> 00:33:27,000
Speaker 1: challenges when you're excavating a site is that um all

566
00:33:27,040 --> 00:33:29,760
Speaker 1: sorts of extraneous things end up in a site, and

567
00:33:29,880 --> 00:33:34,440
Speaker 1: sometimes those extraneous things are rodents um. And you've got

568
00:33:34,440 --> 00:33:36,800
Speaker 1: to decide, Okay, I've got a bunch of dead bison here.

569
00:33:37,160 --> 00:33:39,760
Speaker 1: So when we excavated the Fulsome site, we had a

570
00:33:39,760 --> 00:33:43,959
Speaker 1: bunch of dead bison, but we also had small mammal remains.

571
00:33:44,000 --> 00:33:46,840
Speaker 1: And the question is where they also eating the small mammals. Well,

572
00:33:46,880 --> 00:33:50,040
Speaker 1: you look to see is there evidence that they've been butchered?

573
00:33:50,200 --> 00:33:52,800
Speaker 1: You know, can you see cut marks on the bone? Uh?

574
00:33:52,880 --> 00:33:54,920
Speaker 1: Is there evidence that they were burned? Well, if the

575
00:33:54,920 --> 00:33:57,640
Speaker 1: bones were burned, where they burned because the rodent got

576
00:33:57,680 --> 00:34:00,400
Speaker 1: too close to the fire um? Or or was it

577
00:34:00,440 --> 00:34:05,320
Speaker 1: actually cooked um. So sometimes it's difficult to decide whether

578
00:34:06,320 --> 00:34:11,960
Speaker 1: species in an archaeological site were prey or just background noise. UM.

579
00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:14,760
Speaker 1: And in the case of Falsome, it was pretty obvious

580
00:34:14,760 --> 00:34:17,200
Speaker 1: that those bison were prey because well, we've got the

581
00:34:17,239 --> 00:34:21,360
Speaker 1: cut marks on the inside of the jaws where the

582
00:34:21,360 --> 00:34:23,719
Speaker 1: tongues were cut out, probably right at the moment to

583
00:34:23,800 --> 00:34:27,120
Speaker 1: kill tongue being a delicacy, not to me. What are

584
00:34:27,120 --> 00:34:30,160
Speaker 1: the what are the cut mark What are the cut marks? Oh?

585
00:34:30,280 --> 00:34:33,680
Speaker 1: From the stone tools that sliced the attachment of the

586
00:34:33,719 --> 00:34:36,000
Speaker 1: tongue and you can actually see on the inside of

587
00:34:36,040 --> 00:34:38,880
Speaker 1: the mandible. Uh, slices. We can go off to my

588
00:34:38,960 --> 00:34:40,520
Speaker 1: lab after this and I'll show them to you. I've

589
00:34:40,520 --> 00:34:42,560
Speaker 1: got them in the lab. Really, I've seen the photos

590
00:34:42,600 --> 00:34:44,200
Speaker 1: of them. Oh. Yeah, no, I got the real thing. Um,

591
00:34:44,400 --> 00:34:46,040
Speaker 1: did they do it the same way every time? Like

592
00:34:46,080 --> 00:34:48,319
Speaker 1: they were good at it? Oh? I assume. So, I

593
00:34:48,320 --> 00:34:52,640
Speaker 1: mean people when you look at um, planes, bison hunters. Uh.

594
00:34:52,760 --> 00:34:57,560
Speaker 1: Certainly in the in the more recent groups, tongue is

595
00:34:57,560 --> 00:34:59,759
Speaker 1: a delicacy and that was one of the first things

596
00:34:59,840 --> 00:35:05,399
Speaker 1: that went at a at a bison kill eat it tongue. Yeah,

597
00:35:05,520 --> 00:35:08,200
Speaker 1: like I say, not for me, I understand. I don't know.

598
00:35:08,280 --> 00:35:13,320
Speaker 1: I don't like lungs, I don't like brains. Tongues. Okay,

599
00:35:13,400 --> 00:35:17,440
Speaker 1: so what did it look like? Alright, imagine this, You've

600
00:35:17,719 --> 00:35:21,160
Speaker 1: you've made your way over from Siberia into Alaska. You

601
00:35:21,160 --> 00:35:24,480
Speaker 1: don't actually know that, but you're there and you're looking,

602
00:35:24,719 --> 00:35:29,400
Speaker 1: and what you notice is there's all these birds and

603
00:35:29,440 --> 00:35:31,960
Speaker 1: they're flying off in a different They're flying off in

604
00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:35,360
Speaker 1: a direction, and you're thinking to yourself, well, all I

605
00:35:35,440 --> 00:35:38,640
Speaker 1: see is ice, and maybe there's a little bit of

606
00:35:38,719 --> 00:35:43,480
Speaker 1: margin along that Pacific coast. Those birds are heading in

607
00:35:43,520 --> 00:35:45,760
Speaker 1: that direction. That tells me that there must be something

608
00:35:45,840 --> 00:35:48,640
Speaker 1: down there. And this gets to the question you were

609
00:35:48,680 --> 00:35:51,319
Speaker 1: asking about earlier. Are there places that people don't want

610
00:35:51,320 --> 00:35:54,279
Speaker 1: to go? Well, getting from Alaska down to the lower

611
00:35:54,360 --> 00:35:58,399
Speaker 1: forty eight in those days would have been a challenge, right,

612
00:35:58,520 --> 00:36:02,640
Speaker 1: because you've got two options. One is that you come

613
00:36:02,640 --> 00:36:07,160
Speaker 1: down the Pacific coast and there you're dealing with ice

614
00:36:07,320 --> 00:36:11,600
Speaker 1: that is calving off into the sea. Um, it's going

615
00:36:11,680 --> 00:36:15,720
Speaker 1: to have outlet channels coming off of these ice fields

616
00:36:15,760 --> 00:36:18,040
Speaker 1: that are gonna be choked with sediment. You've got to

617
00:36:18,080 --> 00:36:20,480
Speaker 1: cross these things. You've got to work your way around

618
00:36:20,520 --> 00:36:25,279
Speaker 1: these ice sheets. Um. And there may not be a

619
00:36:25,320 --> 00:36:30,520
Speaker 1: whole lot of food resources. But that that route south

620
00:36:30,719 --> 00:36:33,880
Speaker 1: actually opens pretty early. That route south is opened by

621
00:36:33,920 --> 00:36:37,040
Speaker 1: around sixteen thousand years ago. So you remember now let's

622
00:36:37,080 --> 00:36:39,359
Speaker 1: go back to we've got that window between twenty three

623
00:36:39,400 --> 00:36:43,680
Speaker 1: thousand and fourteen seven. If that route south from Alaska

624
00:36:43,719 --> 00:36:50,959
Speaker 1: opens at sixteen that's pretty good timing free relatively ice free.

625
00:36:51,560 --> 00:36:54,799
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to wait another probably several thousand years

626
00:36:54,840 --> 00:36:59,160
Speaker 1: before that interior. So there's another route south in that

627
00:36:59,239 --> 00:37:03,839
Speaker 1: route south opens when the ice sheets that basically met

628
00:37:04,280 --> 00:37:07,440
Speaker 1: at the crest of the Rockies start to melt back,

629
00:37:07,920 --> 00:37:10,480
Speaker 1: they start to retreat, So the one that sort of

630
00:37:10,520 --> 00:37:14,759
Speaker 1: spread out from around Hudson Bay heads back east. The

631
00:37:14,800 --> 00:37:17,560
Speaker 1: other one starts to work its way down the west

632
00:37:17,600 --> 00:37:20,080
Speaker 1: slope of the Rockies. And now you've got what's called

633
00:37:20,080 --> 00:37:25,040
Speaker 1: the ice free corridor opening between them. We now know, however,

634
00:37:25,120 --> 00:37:29,360
Speaker 1: that that ice free corridor and this was environmental ancient DNA.

635
00:37:29,800 --> 00:37:32,600
Speaker 1: This is DNA pulled out of sediment in a lake,

636
00:37:33,560 --> 00:37:36,440
Speaker 1: in a lake that was at a pinch point right

637
00:37:36,440 --> 00:37:38,920
Speaker 1: in the dead center of this ice free corridor. And

638
00:37:38,960 --> 00:37:40,760
Speaker 1: let me see if I can create a mental picture

639
00:37:40,800 --> 00:37:45,480
Speaker 1: for everybody. You've got a you've got two massive ice

640
00:37:45,520 --> 00:37:48,600
Speaker 1: sheets butting one another. As they start to pull back,

641
00:37:49,120 --> 00:37:51,880
Speaker 1: they open at the northern end and at the southern

642
00:37:52,040 --> 00:37:54,319
Speaker 1: end like a coat that has a zipper that goes

643
00:37:54,400 --> 00:37:58,080
Speaker 1: both ways, okay, and so if you you you raise

644
00:37:58,120 --> 00:38:01,359
Speaker 1: your lower zipper and you lower your upper zipper, they're

645
00:38:01,400 --> 00:38:03,239
Speaker 1: going to meet in the middle. And that's gonna be

646
00:38:03,280 --> 00:38:08,120
Speaker 1: the last place that opens up where approximately like was

647
00:38:08,200 --> 00:38:11,400
Speaker 1: that that pinch point on the continent. So we're in

648
00:38:11,600 --> 00:38:15,239
Speaker 1: um at about fifty six degrees north in Alberta. It's

649
00:38:15,239 --> 00:38:18,160
Speaker 1: in the Peace River drainage for those of the folks

650
00:38:18,200 --> 00:38:20,319
Speaker 1: that have Google Maps want to kind of check it out,

651
00:38:20,840 --> 00:38:24,799
Speaker 1: and those lakes. We cord the sediment at the base

652
00:38:24,800 --> 00:38:28,279
Speaker 1: of the lake and you can recover DNA from all

653
00:38:28,360 --> 00:38:32,920
Speaker 1: the animals and plants that were around that area and

654
00:38:33,040 --> 00:38:35,839
Speaker 1: right it about twelve in a in a dust like

655
00:38:36,000 --> 00:38:39,839
Speaker 1: sediment form. It's mud. Yeah, you're not finding you're not

656
00:38:40,080 --> 00:38:43,480
Speaker 1: tapping into bones and stuff. No, no, no, it's amazing

657
00:38:43,800 --> 00:38:46,799
Speaker 1: you can find out um. And actually this is really

658
00:38:46,800 --> 00:38:50,959
Speaker 1: going to revolutionize our our understanding of these extinct fauna,

659
00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:53,880
Speaker 1: which I'm gonna get to in a moment, because you

660
00:38:53,880 --> 00:38:57,120
Speaker 1: can see them even if their bones aren't there. It's

661
00:38:57,160 --> 00:39:01,720
Speaker 1: just wild. And what we found in this particular core

662
00:39:02,440 --> 00:39:08,040
Speaker 1: was right around twelve thousand, six hundred boom. You've got mammoth,

663
00:39:08,440 --> 00:39:12,760
Speaker 1: you've got bison, you've got moose, you've got some species

664
00:39:12,800 --> 00:39:17,040
Speaker 1: of fish. There's a seahawk that ends up it's DNA

665
00:39:17,200 --> 00:39:21,080
Speaker 1: ends up in this lake. Now, well that's happening right

666
00:39:21,120 --> 00:39:24,120
Speaker 1: at about twelve six. So what that tells you if

667
00:39:24,160 --> 00:39:26,680
Speaker 1: you prior to that, not not much is going on exactly,

668
00:39:26,800 --> 00:39:30,880
Speaker 1: so that that corridor actually physically opens probably several thousand

669
00:39:31,000 --> 00:39:33,760
Speaker 1: years earlier. But because you've still got two ice sheets

670
00:39:33,800 --> 00:39:37,200
Speaker 1: parked nearby, nothing's growing there and it takes a while

671
00:39:37,239 --> 00:39:38,799
Speaker 1: for it to get you know, you've got to get

672
00:39:38,800 --> 00:39:40,920
Speaker 1: the grass there, you've got to get the plants growing,

673
00:39:41,000 --> 00:39:43,640
Speaker 1: and the animals are going to follow. And that was

674
00:39:43,760 --> 00:39:46,520
Speaker 1: a study that we did. But a study that Beth

675
00:39:46,560 --> 00:39:51,960
Speaker 1: Shapiro's group did, she's fantastic and and her studies showed

676
00:39:52,000 --> 00:39:56,160
Speaker 1: that bison that were separated by these ice sheets during

677
00:39:56,200 --> 00:39:57,960
Speaker 1: the ice Age, so you had a northern herd in

678
00:39:58,000 --> 00:40:02,400
Speaker 1: a southern herd, they get together around thirteen thousand years ago.

679
00:40:03,120 --> 00:40:06,440
Speaker 1: So her dates are thirteen thousand, ours are about twelve six.

680
00:40:06,920 --> 00:40:11,200
Speaker 1: So that's pretty consistent. That's pretty consistently telling you that

681
00:40:11,200 --> 00:40:15,080
Speaker 1: that passageway opens around thousand plus or minus I mean,

682
00:40:15,120 --> 00:40:19,400
Speaker 1: while you already have people down in South America exactly exactly,

683
00:40:19,480 --> 00:40:21,960
Speaker 1: so that tells you people might have been using that corridor,

684
00:40:22,000 --> 00:40:24,120
Speaker 1: but they weren't the first ones there. And in fact,

685
00:40:24,280 --> 00:40:27,720
Speaker 1: the really interesting story is is that that corridor was used,

686
00:40:28,160 --> 00:40:30,480
Speaker 1: but it wasn't by groups going southbound. It was by

687
00:40:30,520 --> 00:40:33,880
Speaker 1: groups going northbound. They were heading back up to Alaska.

688
00:40:34,719 --> 00:40:39,200
Speaker 1: We have archaeological evidence that and it's based on these

689
00:40:39,280 --> 00:40:42,040
Speaker 1: kind of distinctive kinds of projectile points that that we

690
00:40:42,160 --> 00:40:46,479
Speaker 1: see and that's it's indeed on that list. Uh that

691
00:40:46,920 --> 00:40:51,040
Speaker 1: is telling us that, you know, the movement in that

692
00:40:51,120 --> 00:40:57,040
Speaker 1: corridor is principally on the north bound lane, perhaps not

693
00:40:58,480 --> 00:41:03,080
Speaker 1: perhaps not intent like not like, man, let's go back

694
00:41:03,120 --> 00:41:05,839
Speaker 1: up north, because there are probably people who have been

695
00:41:05,880 --> 00:41:09,160
Speaker 1: that had been for hundreds of years to the south exactly.

696
00:41:09,200 --> 00:41:12,920
Speaker 1: But this gets back to those bison. Right at the

697
00:41:13,040 --> 00:41:16,520
Speaker 1: end of the ice age, you've got a H. Dale Guthrie,

698
00:41:16,760 --> 00:41:22,759
Speaker 1: well known, remarkable University of Alaska scientist paleocologist. Dale called

699
00:41:22,800 --> 00:41:25,239
Speaker 1: it the Great Bison Belt. At the end of the

700
00:41:25,280 --> 00:41:31,040
Speaker 1: ice Age, you could walk from Texas to well Mike,

701
00:41:31,160 --> 00:41:35,600
Speaker 1: Kansas site on the north slope of Alaska, and you'd

702
00:41:35,600 --> 00:41:39,440
Speaker 1: be on grass the entire time. If you're living in

703
00:41:40,320 --> 00:41:45,600
Speaker 1: Montana eleven thousand years ago. I'm sorry, I'm in radio

704
00:41:45,640 --> 00:41:49,840
Speaker 1: carbon um old school. Do you think in radio carbon?

705
00:41:49,960 --> 00:41:51,840
Speaker 1: I think in radio carbon, I always have to pause

706
00:41:51,880 --> 00:41:54,799
Speaker 1: and get it into calibrated. You're like someone like you're

707
00:41:54,800 --> 00:41:57,000
Speaker 1: like someone from Europe who's talking to Americans, and they're

708
00:41:57,040 --> 00:41:59,640
Speaker 1: like they do They're like, let me think, uh yeah,

709
00:42:00,320 --> 00:42:03,000
Speaker 1: x feet ten ft. Well, and here's the issue for

710
00:42:03,080 --> 00:42:05,920
Speaker 1: me on that, and that is that calibrations have changed

711
00:42:05,960 --> 00:42:09,120
Speaker 1: over the years. So the first calibration, okay, it gave

712
00:42:09,239 --> 00:42:12,520
Speaker 1: us one answer, and then when the next calibration set

713
00:42:12,680 --> 00:42:17,560
Speaker 1: came out five years later, thou wasn't eleven seven anymore.

714
00:42:17,600 --> 00:42:20,759
Speaker 1: It was eleven five. And so I'm thinking, Okay, when

715
00:42:20,760 --> 00:42:23,560
Speaker 1: you guys get that settled, I'll start using calibrated all

716
00:42:23,560 --> 00:42:26,719
Speaker 1: the time. But until then, radio carbon doesn't change over

717
00:42:26,760 --> 00:42:29,279
Speaker 1: the years, these dates, don't. Do you talk to your

718
00:42:29,280 --> 00:42:31,320
Speaker 1: colleagues and radio carbon. It depends what I'm talking to.

719
00:42:31,360 --> 00:42:33,680
Speaker 1: If I'm talking to a geneticist, I've got to go calibrated.

720
00:42:33,840 --> 00:42:36,680
Speaker 1: If I'm talking to a geologist, depends what kind of geologist.

721
00:42:36,719 --> 00:42:38,640
Speaker 1: I'll go calibrated if I have. Do you guys identify

722
00:42:38,680 --> 00:42:41,440
Speaker 1: each other? Oh, it's a signal? Yeah, No, you tuck

723
00:42:41,520 --> 00:42:45,960
Speaker 1: on your ear so you don't ask. Yeah, yeah, you know.

724
00:42:46,040 --> 00:42:49,200
Speaker 1: You don't want to embarrass somebody by asking on that.

725
00:42:49,200 --> 00:42:54,040
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, I see fourteen radar goes off. Um

726
00:42:54,120 --> 00:42:57,120
Speaker 1: what were we talking about? Oh? Right, So what does

727
00:42:57,120 --> 00:43:00,000
Speaker 1: the world look like? Okay, so you get into northern

728
00:43:00,080 --> 00:43:04,479
Speaker 1: North America and um, it looks a whole lot different

729
00:43:04,480 --> 00:43:09,040
Speaker 1: than it does today. You've got this vast landscape opening

730
00:43:09,120 --> 00:43:13,680
Speaker 1: up before you. You've got aircraft carriers of the animal

731
00:43:13,760 --> 00:43:18,600
Speaker 1: kingdom wandering past. Right, You've seen mammoth before, but these

732
00:43:18,640 --> 00:43:20,680
Speaker 1: mammoths don't quite look like the ones that you've been

733
00:43:20,680 --> 00:43:25,360
Speaker 1: seeing in Alaska. They're slightly different. You've got large predators

734
00:43:25,400 --> 00:43:30,080
Speaker 1: on the landscape. Um, you've got a smile it on Faytalis,

735
00:43:31,080 --> 00:43:35,520
Speaker 1: which is the best scientific name ever devised. It's the

736
00:43:35,600 --> 00:43:40,400
Speaker 1: deadly claw, It's the saber tooth cat. You've got Arctotis Simus,

737
00:43:40,440 --> 00:43:45,319
Speaker 1: the giant short faced bear. And I had a TV

738
00:43:46,280 --> 00:43:50,160
Speaker 1: role once where I started with an animated Arctotis Simus.

739
00:43:50,880 --> 00:43:54,919
Speaker 1: My kids, I lost all credibility with them. Even with them.

740
00:43:55,120 --> 00:43:58,719
Speaker 1: Look that's on TV with a cartoon bear. Not my

741
00:43:58,760 --> 00:44:05,279
Speaker 1: best moment. Um and thirty eight genera altogether that are

742
00:44:05,320 --> 00:44:07,160
Speaker 1: on their way to extinction. Now, some of them were

743
00:44:07,719 --> 00:44:10,400
Speaker 1: keep keep going with the list, because like multiple species

744
00:44:10,400 --> 00:44:16,759
Speaker 1: of camel ITTs, camels, horses, tapers, peckery's um of hunter

745
00:44:16,840 --> 00:44:19,839
Speaker 1: pound beaver. Oh yeah, kind of kind of like a beaver,

746
00:44:20,200 --> 00:44:23,719
Speaker 1: kind of like a beaver. Yeah. Um. And then you

747
00:44:23,760 --> 00:44:27,400
Speaker 1: had my favorite was the um the glyptodont, which was

748
00:44:27,560 --> 00:44:33,440
Speaker 1: basically I think submersible um Volkswagen with an armored tail.

749
00:44:33,760 --> 00:44:35,800
Speaker 1: And you've got a cliptod on it's about that big

750
00:44:36,719 --> 00:44:42,279
Speaker 1: h You've got um giant ground slots, four genera of

751
00:44:42,360 --> 00:44:47,279
Speaker 1: them that way three four tons uh. And of course

752
00:44:47,320 --> 00:44:51,640
Speaker 1: you've got multiple species of elephant. Uh. It's a spectacular thing.

753
00:44:51,680 --> 00:44:57,200
Speaker 1: And the thing that had always struck people was it

754
00:44:57,320 --> 00:44:59,600
Speaker 1: looked as though they all went extinct at the same

755
00:44:59,680 --> 00:45:05,520
Speaker 1: moment in time. Now, if you're going to have thirty

756
00:45:05,520 --> 00:45:10,600
Speaker 1: eight different genera of animals going extinct, explain genera people. Ah.

757
00:45:10,640 --> 00:45:13,680
Speaker 1: So that goes back to the Lenaean hierarchy that you

758
00:45:13,719 --> 00:45:20,160
Speaker 1: may have remembered from high school biology. Um, species, genus,

759
00:45:20,440 --> 00:45:27,759
Speaker 1: family all that. Uh and genus uh yeah, um, it's

760
00:45:28,840 --> 00:45:30,839
Speaker 1: it's a word. There's a word that you use as

761
00:45:30,840 --> 00:45:38,880
Speaker 1: an there's a pnemonic. Yeah, but King Philip sits on yeah. Uh.

762
00:45:38,960 --> 00:45:43,480
Speaker 1: And so genera is simply the plural of genus. Okay,

763
00:45:43,520 --> 00:45:45,920
Speaker 1: So you've got thirty eight genera. They all appear to

764
00:45:45,960 --> 00:45:49,520
Speaker 1: have gone extinct simultaneously. And you think as many people

765
00:45:49,560 --> 00:45:54,799
Speaker 1: did define simultaneously, I mean on Tuesday, right, I mean, well, no,

766
00:45:54,960 --> 00:45:57,720
Speaker 1: that's the issue is that people thought that they all

767
00:45:57,920 --> 00:46:01,439
Speaker 1: just died at the same geological moment. Now, a geological moment,

768
00:46:01,480 --> 00:46:03,080
Speaker 1: you know, plus or minus a hundred years. Okay, but

769
00:46:03,120 --> 00:46:04,960
Speaker 1: that's really fast. Oh they thought it was plus or

770
00:46:04,960 --> 00:46:09,080
Speaker 1: minus a hundred years. Um, well, actually three hundred years.

771
00:46:09,120 --> 00:46:12,839
Speaker 1: I was exaggerating. But still that's still oh no question, No, yeah,

772
00:46:12,880 --> 00:46:15,879
Speaker 1: that's that's that's a that's a lot of narrow, mighty

773
00:46:15,960 --> 00:46:17,960
Speaker 1: narrow chunk of time. Well, and especially if you're talking

774
00:46:17,960 --> 00:46:21,880
Speaker 1: anywhere from a hundred to two hundred million animals. Yeah, okay,

775
00:46:22,400 --> 00:46:26,279
Speaker 1: So can climate do that? Can climate wipe out an

776
00:46:26,440 --> 00:46:29,040
Speaker 1: entire well literally a hemisphere? Because you had thirty eight

777
00:46:29,080 --> 00:46:31,800
Speaker 1: genera in North America and fifty two in South America

778
00:46:32,280 --> 00:46:36,120
Speaker 1: so extinct. Could climate have done all that simultaneously, given

779
00:46:36,239 --> 00:46:40,280
Speaker 1: that you were dealing with animals that live in arid

780
00:46:40,280 --> 00:46:43,000
Speaker 1: and semi art environments, animals that live in the forest,

781
00:46:43,320 --> 00:46:47,200
Speaker 1: animals that live as hurt animals, animals that have basically

782
00:46:47,239 --> 00:46:53,160
Speaker 1: live isolated lives in the woods. Umfer absolutely very different physiology,

783
00:46:53,160 --> 00:46:57,600
Speaker 1: adaptation habitats. Can climate a single climate change wipe them

784
00:46:57,600 --> 00:46:59,600
Speaker 1: all out? And the answer is, well, it's kind of

785
00:46:59,600 --> 00:47:01,960
Speaker 1: hard to aim. But here's the thing. This is like

786
00:47:01,960 --> 00:47:04,319
Speaker 1: a this is a where the logic a little bit

787
00:47:04,360 --> 00:47:08,560
Speaker 1: falls apartners It didn't wipe them all out. Chipmunks were here.

788
00:47:08,880 --> 00:47:11,200
Speaker 1: There's chipmunks. You know, it's like an annoyance of me

789
00:47:11,280 --> 00:47:14,319
Speaker 1: when people say an ice age relic, So like we're

790
00:47:14,360 --> 00:47:17,680
Speaker 1: ice age relics, raccoons or ice age relics, mice or

791
00:47:17,719 --> 00:47:20,320
Speaker 1: ice age relics. And and actually a number of those

792
00:47:20,600 --> 00:47:23,960
Speaker 1: small rodents are still responding to recent climate changes from

793
00:47:23,960 --> 00:47:27,279
Speaker 1: the last ice age. No, but see, this is this

794
00:47:27,360 --> 00:47:29,560
Speaker 1: is where this needs to go. Everything died down to

795
00:47:29,600 --> 00:47:32,799
Speaker 1: the size of a bison. Yeah, no, except for the

796
00:47:32,800 --> 00:47:35,200
Speaker 1: spruce tree that also went extinct, and the snakes that

797
00:47:35,200 --> 00:47:38,399
Speaker 1: went extinct, and Oh yeah, No, I shouldn't say down

798
00:47:38,440 --> 00:47:39,920
Speaker 1: to like and then then the end of there. But

799
00:47:39,960 --> 00:47:43,719
Speaker 1: I mean there were many animals that were bigger than that.

800
00:47:43,880 --> 00:47:46,360
Speaker 1: We'll see this is this is where we're going. Because

801
00:47:47,080 --> 00:47:50,120
Speaker 1: all of these animals thought to have gone extinct simultaneously,

802
00:47:50,719 --> 00:47:53,160
Speaker 1: it couldn't have been climate. Therefore it had to be people.

803
00:47:53,400 --> 00:47:56,040
Speaker 1: It had to be fast moving hunters blasting out across

804
00:47:56,080 --> 00:47:59,920
Speaker 1: the contin Blitz Creek, the overkill hypothesis, all that nutting

805
00:48:00,040 --> 00:48:02,160
Speaker 1: this right, you've got a bunch of people are gonna

806
00:48:02,160 --> 00:48:05,680
Speaker 1: call that? Not now, a bunch of people with sharp

807
00:48:05,719 --> 00:48:08,360
Speaker 1: sticks and pointy rocks at the end are going to

808
00:48:08,600 --> 00:48:11,680
Speaker 1: wipe out a hundred million animals in the space of

809
00:48:11,719 --> 00:48:18,640
Speaker 1: several hundred years. Um well, what we've what we've the

810
00:48:18,719 --> 00:48:24,920
Speaker 1: end of a Rambo movie. Yeah, Adrian, sorry, wrong movie.

811
00:48:25,320 --> 00:48:28,759
Speaker 1: Um At, what we've now realized is that those thirty

812
00:48:28,800 --> 00:48:31,640
Speaker 1: eight genera didn't all go extinct simultaneously. So immediately that

813
00:48:31,680 --> 00:48:36,799
Speaker 1: takes the pressure off of finding a single cause. Okay,

814
00:48:36,880 --> 00:48:38,920
Speaker 1: so now we can say, well, what's happening at the

815
00:48:39,000 --> 00:48:40,600
Speaker 1: end of the Ice Age? See, there's always been this

816
00:48:40,640 --> 00:48:44,800
Speaker 1: confluence of potential causes. The end of the Ice Age

817
00:48:45,000 --> 00:48:48,680
Speaker 1: brings people into the Americas and animals go extinct, and

818
00:48:48,719 --> 00:48:52,359
Speaker 1: so the assumption always was, well, Okay, people come in,

819
00:48:52,560 --> 00:48:54,600
Speaker 1: animals go extinct. They had to be related. Well, no,

820
00:48:54,760 --> 00:48:59,120
Speaker 1: maybe they're both related to that larger trigger, which is

821
00:48:59,239 --> 00:49:02,080
Speaker 1: the end of the ice age. That's an interesting point.

822
00:49:02,840 --> 00:49:05,040
Speaker 1: Rather than one being a symptom of the other, there

823
00:49:05,040 --> 00:49:08,279
Speaker 1: are symptoms of the same thing. And what we now

824
00:49:08,360 --> 00:49:10,600
Speaker 1: know is that some of these animals were probably gone

825
00:49:10,840 --> 00:49:14,719
Speaker 1: twenty thousand years ago, long before people show up, and

826
00:49:14,760 --> 00:49:18,920
Speaker 1: in fact, the majority of those thirty eight genera we

827
00:49:18,960 --> 00:49:21,160
Speaker 1: don't have any evidence that they were around when people

828
00:49:21,200 --> 00:49:24,360
Speaker 1: got here, so they've all disappeared, so there's no association.

829
00:49:25,719 --> 00:49:28,880
Speaker 1: So we do have evidence that people hunted some of

830
00:49:28,920 --> 00:49:33,920
Speaker 1: these animals. There are a grand total of fifteen fifteen

831
00:49:34,440 --> 00:49:38,800
Speaker 1: sites in which we have reasonably secure evidence that people

832
00:49:38,880 --> 00:49:43,240
Speaker 1: prayed on mammoth. There's about a dozen of those sites.

833
00:49:43,960 --> 00:49:47,400
Speaker 1: Masted on. It's someone that's pretty iron clad, like projectile

834
00:49:47,440 --> 00:49:52,120
Speaker 1: points stuck in its skull. Still no question mammoth mastered

835
00:49:52,160 --> 00:49:56,279
Speaker 1: on horse and camel. Mammoth masthed on horse, camel and

836
00:49:56,520 --> 00:50:00,239
Speaker 1: gampath here, so we've got it's it's another l pant

837
00:50:00,440 --> 00:50:04,719
Speaker 1: it's a it's a sort of um more southern um

838
00:50:04,760 --> 00:50:08,960
Speaker 1: elephant that is related to mammoth mastodon. They're all in

839
00:50:09,000 --> 00:50:12,360
Speaker 1: the Proposidian family. Okay, so so tell me the ones again.

840
00:50:12,760 --> 00:50:18,480
Speaker 1: Mammoth mastodon, gampathyre, horse, camel five Now, no kill site

841
00:50:18,480 --> 00:50:22,279
Speaker 1: of a saber tooth. No, no hemia, kenya kills, No

842
00:50:22,400 --> 00:50:27,000
Speaker 1: camel kills, no horse kills, ground cloth no, yeah, no

843
00:50:27,080 --> 00:50:31,160
Speaker 1: ecliptodont kills. Yeah. But that's the thing, is that stuff none.

844
00:50:31,280 --> 00:50:33,160
Speaker 1: I I never read about him. I never thought about it.

845
00:50:33,239 --> 00:50:35,480
Speaker 1: I never thought about the omissions. If you're gonna yeah that.

846
00:50:35,600 --> 00:50:38,000
Speaker 1: And that's the key thing is that people always point

847
00:50:38,040 --> 00:50:40,480
Speaker 1: to mammoth kills. Well, yeah, okay, so somebody killed an elephant,

848
00:50:40,920 --> 00:50:42,959
Speaker 1: but you've still got another hundred million animals you gotta

849
00:50:42,960 --> 00:50:45,920
Speaker 1: get rid of, and you've got another thirty seven genera

850
00:50:45,920 --> 00:50:48,520
Speaker 1: that you've got to kill off. But here's the other thing.

851
00:50:48,800 --> 00:50:52,200
Speaker 1: When you look at the extinctions process in isolation, you've

852
00:50:52,200 --> 00:50:55,640
Speaker 1: got thirty eight large animals that go extinct. Well, there's

853
00:50:55,800 --> 00:51:00,560
Speaker 1: nine large animals that are still around today, moose, cariboo,

854
00:51:00,680 --> 00:51:03,120
Speaker 1: must cox. You know, things that you guys have probably

855
00:51:03,160 --> 00:51:06,359
Speaker 1: hunted over the years, those are megafauna in that definition.

856
00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:09,160
Speaker 1: But more importantly, not only do we have these nine

857
00:51:09,760 --> 00:51:13,520
Speaker 1: genera that survive, we've also got other genera that go

858
00:51:13,600 --> 00:51:16,759
Speaker 1: extinct that are not megafauna. And in fact, even one

859
00:51:16,760 --> 00:51:20,320
Speaker 1: of the megafauna is the astaland rabbit. The astland rabbit

860
00:51:20,360 --> 00:51:22,239
Speaker 1: was the size of a bunny. There's no way that's

861
00:51:22,239 --> 00:51:24,279
Speaker 1: a megafauna. But it went extinct, right, So how do

862
00:51:24,280 --> 00:51:27,759
Speaker 1: you explain that they absolutely how do you explain why

863
00:51:27,760 --> 00:51:33,439
Speaker 1: bison didn't go extinct? So here we have thirty eight genera, Oh,

864
00:51:33,600 --> 00:51:36,080
Speaker 1: no question, right, And we've got thirty eight genera for

865
00:51:36,120 --> 00:51:38,880
Speaker 1: which we have virtually no evidence of human hunting and predations.

866
00:51:41,320 --> 00:51:44,680
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, And and bison get hunted for eleven twelve

867
00:51:44,840 --> 00:51:48,759
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand years and in mass kills, right, I mean

868
00:51:48,800 --> 00:51:52,840
Speaker 1: there are single kills of two hundred animals and bison.

869
00:51:53,000 --> 00:51:56,759
Speaker 1: I mean you can still order it ted Turner's Montana Restaurant,

870
00:51:57,080 --> 00:52:01,440
Speaker 1: Montana Grill, Montana Grill, and it's it's really good stuff. Right. Uh.

871
00:52:01,560 --> 00:52:04,040
Speaker 1: So here we have intensive hunting of an animal for

872
00:52:04,320 --> 00:52:07,240
Speaker 1: eleven twelve thousand years, and they don't go extinct, virtually

873
00:52:07,239 --> 00:52:09,319
Speaker 1: no evidence of any hunting of any of these thirty

874
00:52:09,320 --> 00:52:10,920
Speaker 1: eight genera and they do go extinct. Why do we

875
00:52:10,960 --> 00:52:13,360
Speaker 1: think humans were responsible for that? Okay, but when you

876
00:52:13,400 --> 00:52:15,359
Speaker 1: were a younger man, not that your old man. Now,

877
00:52:15,440 --> 00:52:21,080
Speaker 1: when you were a younger man, were you and uh,

878
00:52:21,239 --> 00:52:23,200
Speaker 1: what's what I'm trying to look for an apostle. Were

879
00:52:23,200 --> 00:52:27,080
Speaker 1: you a believer in were you a blitz Creek hypothesis? Man,

880
00:52:28,760 --> 00:52:31,840
Speaker 1: your history isn't tarnished by blitz Creak hupp I liked

881
00:52:31,840 --> 00:52:34,839
Speaker 1: it because of how tidy it was. Oh well, that's

882
00:52:34,840 --> 00:52:36,720
Speaker 1: why a lot of people liked it. And in fact,

883
00:52:36,920 --> 00:52:39,279
Speaker 1: we're like, okay, cool, Now let's move on to the

884
00:52:39,280 --> 00:52:43,480
Speaker 1: next question. Because no, I mean, I do archaeology, and

885
00:52:43,520 --> 00:52:46,200
Speaker 1: I know how many sites killed sites there are. I

886
00:52:47,080 --> 00:52:49,879
Speaker 1: just I never bought it because the evidence wasn't there.

887
00:52:50,080 --> 00:52:52,640
Speaker 1: And people love people love the idea, and nothing they

888
00:52:52,640 --> 00:52:54,640
Speaker 1: liked about the idea, and this is gonna take us

889
00:52:54,640 --> 00:52:56,760
Speaker 1: way astray, and don't you don't need even pursue this thought.

890
00:52:56,800 --> 00:52:59,360
Speaker 1: I think one of the reasons people liked about it

891
00:52:59,440 --> 00:53:02,600
Speaker 1: is because when you look at other when you look

892
00:53:02,640 --> 00:53:07,520
Speaker 1: at examples of human cause environmental destruction, it's nice to

893
00:53:07,600 --> 00:53:10,480
Speaker 1: get It's nice you look at all these horrible things

894
00:53:10,520 --> 00:53:13,200
Speaker 1: are going on. Now, it's nice to be like, this

895
00:53:13,280 --> 00:53:17,880
Speaker 1: is nothing. Those those people, but the ancestors of the the

896
00:53:18,000 --> 00:53:21,120
Speaker 1: Native Americans, they were horrible. They killed everything off. Therefore,

897
00:53:21,200 --> 00:53:23,200
Speaker 1: we should really give ourselves a pat on the back

898
00:53:23,280 --> 00:53:25,560
Speaker 1: for not being so destructive. Um, I think there's a

899
00:53:25,560 --> 00:53:27,000
Speaker 1: little bit of that at play. There's a lot of that.

900
00:53:27,080 --> 00:53:29,840
Speaker 1: And know that this is probably way outside of your no, no, no.

901
00:53:29,960 --> 00:53:31,880
Speaker 1: In two thousand three, Don Grayson and I wrote a

902
00:53:31,880 --> 00:53:33,680
Speaker 1: paper in which we said one of the things that

903
00:53:33,719 --> 00:53:36,840
Speaker 1: made the overkill hypothesis attractive was in the nineteen sixties.

904
00:53:36,840 --> 00:53:38,239
Speaker 1: It came out really in a big way in the

905
00:53:38,280 --> 00:53:41,279
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties when everybody was all about Earth Day and

906
00:53:41,440 --> 00:53:43,920
Speaker 1: important things like that, and they used it as a

907
00:53:44,120 --> 00:53:46,440
Speaker 1: as a homily, as a lesson of look at all

908
00:53:46,480 --> 00:53:48,680
Speaker 1: the horrible things humans have done. Well, wait a minute,

909
00:53:48,760 --> 00:53:51,200
Speaker 1: this is one thing humans didn't do. Right. They are

910
00:53:51,239 --> 00:53:54,520
Speaker 1: not guilty of murdering the place to see, right, So

911
00:53:54,680 --> 00:53:57,080
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right. I mean, this is something that people

912
00:53:57,120 --> 00:54:01,879
Speaker 1: were using for and that the evidence didn't warrant being

913
00:54:01,960 --> 00:54:06,439
Speaker 1: used in that way. In the tidiness, and because it's

914
00:54:06,480 --> 00:54:09,600
Speaker 1: so baffling, it's nice, like, you know, when you're trying

915
00:54:09,640 --> 00:54:14,600
Speaker 1: to comprehend infinity, like in space. It's comforting if someone

916
00:54:14,719 --> 00:54:18,040
Speaker 1: was say like, oh, no, it does end, that ends

917
00:54:18,120 --> 00:54:20,480
Speaker 1: there's a wall. Yeah yeah, and then you'd be like, well,

918
00:54:20,520 --> 00:54:22,279
Speaker 1: what's past the wall? It would be nice to just

919
00:54:22,280 --> 00:54:24,239
Speaker 1: have to be able to stop thinking about it. Yeah. No,

920
00:54:24,320 --> 00:54:25,880
Speaker 1: I've seen men in black I know, you know at

921
00:54:25,880 --> 00:54:31,640
Speaker 1: the end where they and everything there's a wall in there. Yeah. No, absolutely.

922
00:54:31,760 --> 00:54:34,560
Speaker 1: It was a tidy explanation, but a wrong one, and

923
00:54:34,800 --> 00:54:41,320
Speaker 1: a badly wrong one. So how broad was for how many? Okay,

924
00:54:42,040 --> 00:54:44,880
Speaker 1: is there is there sort of I know that species

925
00:54:45,600 --> 00:54:48,000
Speaker 1: beginning to end all the time, Like, there's things right,

926
00:54:48,239 --> 00:54:51,799
Speaker 1: we're creating them, not we. Evolution is happening, yeah, the

927
00:54:51,840 --> 00:54:54,600
Speaker 1: earth is whatever. You're producing things and things are dying.

928
00:54:55,360 --> 00:54:57,640
Speaker 1: If you were going to sort of put some brackets

929
00:54:57,680 --> 00:55:02,719
Speaker 1: around this mass extinction, where do the brackets set? Well,

930
00:55:02,760 --> 00:55:05,040
Speaker 1: it does, knowing that there's that it's not hard edged,

931
00:55:05,120 --> 00:55:07,319
Speaker 1: right the edges are yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I

932
00:55:07,320 --> 00:55:12,000
Speaker 1: mean the process was probably starting um as the last

933
00:55:12,000 --> 00:55:15,799
Speaker 1: glacial maximum was beginning. Okay, so some of them are

934
00:55:16,000 --> 00:55:18,600
Speaker 1: disappearing really early on, and some of them are in

935
00:55:18,680 --> 00:55:22,520
Speaker 1: fact making it up until twelve thousand years ago, eleven

936
00:55:22,520 --> 00:55:25,920
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago. It's smeared over time.

937
00:55:26,239 --> 00:55:29,120
Speaker 1: It's smeared over time. Why wasn't it happening during the

938
00:55:29,200 --> 00:55:32,319
Speaker 1: other cycles. Well, now that's that's the gotcha question that

939
00:55:32,400 --> 00:55:34,439
Speaker 1: I always get. So I give a talk was trying

940
00:55:34,440 --> 00:55:37,640
Speaker 1: to do, but I'm I'm glad you did. In fact,

941
00:55:37,640 --> 00:55:40,279
Speaker 1: you can phrase it as I got your question. I

942
00:55:40,320 --> 00:55:43,279
Speaker 1: give a talk about plisuscene extinctions, and I give all

943
00:55:43,280 --> 00:55:47,120
Speaker 1: the evidence as to why humans weren't blamed. In Inevitably,

944
00:55:47,160 --> 00:55:49,439
Speaker 1: somebody raises her hand at the end says, what about

945
00:55:50,160 --> 00:55:54,080
Speaker 1: what about previous? Right? So I make the point that

946
00:55:54,120 --> 00:55:56,680
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of climate changes that are happening at

947
00:55:56,680 --> 00:56:01,319
Speaker 1: different levels that would have impacted different different animals in

948
00:56:01,360 --> 00:56:03,600
Speaker 1: different ways at different times, and so on and so forth.

949
00:56:03,640 --> 00:56:06,000
Speaker 1: So we really need to get a better understanding of

950
00:56:06,160 --> 00:56:10,000
Speaker 1: how climate change affected individual species rather than treat everything

951
00:56:10,120 --> 00:56:13,359
Speaker 1: is a block. It was alive when extinct. Let's try

952
00:56:13,400 --> 00:56:16,279
Speaker 1: and figure out what was it about glyptodonts that they

953
00:56:16,320 --> 00:56:18,279
Speaker 1: couldn't handle at the end of the Palistocene. So I

954
00:56:18,320 --> 00:56:21,000
Speaker 1: do all this well, and then here's the gotcha. Come around.

955
00:56:21,040 --> 00:56:24,200
Speaker 1: I know you, Yeah, what was it about those? Or

956
00:56:24,239 --> 00:56:27,320
Speaker 1: take something else like a mammoth. I don't know. I

957
00:56:27,400 --> 00:56:31,200
Speaker 1: don't know. They're extinct animals, and because we don't know

958
00:56:31,440 --> 00:56:34,960
Speaker 1: their physiology, their adaptation, we know something about their habitats.

959
00:56:35,000 --> 00:56:37,480
Speaker 1: But here's where we're going to get past the impast

960
00:56:37,800 --> 00:56:40,560
Speaker 1: We're gonna get past the impast with ancient DNA because

961
00:56:40,600 --> 00:56:46,120
Speaker 1: now we're sequencing their their genomes and we know now well,

962
00:56:46,320 --> 00:56:50,759
Speaker 1: for some species, we know now that their genetic diversity

963
00:56:50,800 --> 00:56:54,279
Speaker 1: was collapsing towards the end of the Palistocene. We know

964
00:56:54,400 --> 00:56:57,520
Speaker 1: now that their populations were collapsing towards the end of

965
00:56:57,520 --> 00:57:00,960
Speaker 1: the Palistocene. We're still not entirely sure why this is happening,

966
00:57:01,000 --> 00:57:03,239
Speaker 1: but it has nothing to do with people, because it's

967
00:57:03,239 --> 00:57:07,200
Speaker 1: happening pre people. Okay, so we are going to start

968
00:57:07,200 --> 00:57:09,480
Speaker 1: to get those answers. This is a hundred and fifty

969
00:57:09,560 --> 00:57:12,520
Speaker 1: year old question that people have been struggling with. I mean,

970
00:57:12,600 --> 00:57:15,080
Speaker 1: Charles Lyell, the British geologist who was here in the

971
00:57:15,080 --> 00:57:18,360
Speaker 1: eighteen forties, wrote about this saying, you know, why do

972
00:57:18,400 --> 00:57:21,080
Speaker 1: all these big animals go extinct? We're going to have

973
00:57:21,120 --> 00:57:25,560
Speaker 1: an answer in the next couple of decades, I would predict, man,

974
00:57:25,800 --> 00:57:28,160
Speaker 1: I don't want to do this. It's not a gotcha.

975
00:57:28,960 --> 00:57:31,520
Speaker 1: You ask me the gotcha question, but it's not. It's

976
00:57:31,520 --> 00:57:34,680
Speaker 1: not meant to be like a bad gotcha? What about?

977
00:57:34,840 --> 00:57:37,160
Speaker 1: What about? What about? Right? What about? This is? What

978
00:57:37,200 --> 00:57:40,800
Speaker 1: about is m what about? I don't want to get

979
00:57:40,800 --> 00:57:43,280
Speaker 1: two sidetracked here. But when when they were laying who

980
00:57:43,320 --> 00:57:45,400
Speaker 1: was the guy that laid out the famous he published

981
00:57:45,400 --> 00:57:49,480
Speaker 1: blitz Creek hypothesis. Wonderful guy, the terrific guy. When it

982
00:57:49,560 --> 00:57:52,240
Speaker 1: was so you don't have animosity? Oh no, no, I

983
00:57:52,320 --> 00:57:55,800
Speaker 1: liked Paul when it was laid out. There were examples

984
00:57:56,160 --> 00:58:00,880
Speaker 1: like Rangle Island in this Okay, Rangle Island, the Bearing

985
00:58:00,920 --> 00:58:05,640
Speaker 1: Sea held on to him until four thousand years ago.

986
00:58:05,960 --> 00:58:09,360
Speaker 1: And it just so happens that mugs hadn't showed up.

987
00:58:09,960 --> 00:58:13,680
Speaker 1: They still went extinct. They weren't extinct before people ever

988
00:58:13,720 --> 00:58:16,800
Speaker 1: made it there. I thought it was like contemporary people

989
00:58:16,800 --> 00:58:19,960
Speaker 1: eventually did. In fact, there's some really interesting research that

990
00:58:20,200 --> 00:58:22,760
Speaker 1: um Well Best Shapiro and Russ Graham were just involved

991
00:58:22,760 --> 00:58:28,040
Speaker 1: in on St. Paul's Island, um where basically they showed that, uh,

992
00:58:28,040 --> 00:58:30,800
Speaker 1: these these mammoths were surviving past the end of the

993
00:58:30,800 --> 00:58:35,200
Speaker 1: ice age. Um, they were shrinking because basically they had

994
00:58:36,040 --> 00:58:39,439
Speaker 1: the shrinking, shrinking body size. Yeah, there simply wasn't enough

995
00:58:39,520 --> 00:58:42,800
Speaker 1: to support them. Sea levels were coming up, the island

996
00:58:42,840 --> 00:58:46,640
Speaker 1: was getting smaller, um, they were running out of fresh water.

997
00:58:46,720 --> 00:58:49,560
Speaker 1: There were all sorts of things, and basically they ultimately vanished.

998
00:58:49,560 --> 00:58:53,280
Speaker 1: And I think it's around well ahead of here's part

999
00:58:53,320 --> 00:58:55,920
Speaker 1: two of the got you okay? Good? And then then

1000
00:58:55,960 --> 00:59:00,400
Speaker 1: leave it's rest. Then they point out that humans have

1001
00:59:00,760 --> 00:59:06,600
Speaker 1: always been in Africa and humans co evolved with what

1002
00:59:06,720 --> 00:59:09,680
Speaker 1: makes you think animals didn't go extinct in Africa as well?

1003
00:59:09,680 --> 00:59:12,680
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm talking. We're talking about we're talking about elephants. Okay,

1004
00:59:12,920 --> 00:59:15,760
Speaker 1: I am sure. That's a great point. That's a great point.

1005
00:59:16,960 --> 00:59:19,120
Speaker 1: That's but that's the thing people say, I'm about arguing

1006
00:59:19,120 --> 00:59:20,960
Speaker 1: this to you. Tell me, I'm relating to you like

1007
00:59:20,960 --> 00:59:23,720
Speaker 1: an argument you're very familiar with. It's always like, okay,

1008
00:59:23,720 --> 00:59:29,280
Speaker 1: so elephants vanished virtually everywhere, um that they exist except

1009
00:59:29,320 --> 00:59:32,520
Speaker 1: these elephant species in Alaska or I'm sorry, in Africa.

1010
00:59:32,920 --> 00:59:35,360
Speaker 1: Hang on, it must be because they were used to

1011
00:59:35,440 --> 00:59:37,840
Speaker 1: people and that people couldn't kill them all because they

1012
00:59:37,960 --> 00:59:42,400
Speaker 1: co evolved. That's the thing folks say. Yeah, Okay, I'm

1013
00:59:42,400 --> 00:59:45,440
Speaker 1: not quite sure that it really has much meaning. But

1014
00:59:45,560 --> 00:59:48,440
Speaker 1: in any case, you don't even like the Well, can

1015
00:59:48,480 --> 00:59:49,919
Speaker 1: you do a better job of saying what I'm trying

1016
00:59:49,960 --> 00:59:52,200
Speaker 1: to say? Um? Well, let me put it this way.

1017
00:59:53,240 --> 00:59:57,800
Speaker 1: My my colleague Jim O'Connell, who worked with the Hazza

1018
00:59:59,040 --> 01:00:04,160
Speaker 1: in Africa, the Hadza don't describe elephants as animals. They

1019
01:00:04,160 --> 01:00:08,480
Speaker 1: describe them as enemies. They don't mess with elephants. Go

1020
01:00:08,560 --> 01:00:11,880
Speaker 1: back and read Teddy Roosevelt's encounter with a bull elephant.

1021
01:00:12,040 --> 01:00:13,640
Speaker 1: When he got out of the White House, he went

1022
01:00:13,680 --> 01:00:17,800
Speaker 1: on a murderous spree in Africa collecting. That's a big

1023
01:00:17,840 --> 01:00:24,640
Speaker 1: word for sure. Go ahead. He didn't my favorite food.

1024
01:00:24,720 --> 01:00:26,480
Speaker 1: He was stuffing it and sending it to New York.

1025
01:00:26,560 --> 01:00:30,080
Speaker 1: But on display, Um and read his encounter with a

1026
01:00:30,080 --> 01:00:36,640
Speaker 1: bull elephant and he darn near died uh in the encounter. Okay, Uh,

1027
01:00:36,680 --> 01:00:40,400
Speaker 1: these are nasty animals, and whether people were hunting them

1028
01:00:40,520 --> 01:00:45,160
Speaker 1: or not, uh, it's pretty doubtful. Okay, But let's get

1029
01:00:45,160 --> 01:00:48,080
Speaker 1: to the sort of larger question about the climate. If

1030
01:00:48,120 --> 01:00:52,360
Speaker 1: you put the extinctions in context, what you see is

1031
01:00:52,400 --> 01:00:54,280
Speaker 1: that all sorts of things are happening at the end

1032
01:00:54,280 --> 01:00:57,120
Speaker 1: of the place to see in North America. But you

1033
01:00:57,120 --> 01:00:58,840
Speaker 1: almost started saying something he did. Did a bunch of

1034
01:00:58,840 --> 01:01:02,840
Speaker 1: stuff go extinct in Africa? Some did? Yeah? Yeah, not

1035
01:01:03,120 --> 01:01:08,800
Speaker 1: as not as massive and as constrained geologically in geological

1036
01:01:08,840 --> 01:01:12,800
Speaker 1: time as in the Americas. Okay, Um, what happened in

1037
01:01:12,840 --> 01:01:17,000
Speaker 1: Europe in parts of Europe and parts of Eurasia. Absolutely no,

1038
01:01:17,080 --> 01:01:22,760
Speaker 1: we lose mammoths in Eurasia. Yeah, Um, you have massive

1039
01:01:22,880 --> 01:01:27,560
Speaker 1: range changes. Caribou don't live in the southeast US anymore,

1040
01:01:27,760 --> 01:01:33,000
Speaker 1: Muskoks don't live in Tennessee anymore, and so you've got

1041
01:01:33,040 --> 01:01:37,760
Speaker 1: these ecological changes that are taking place. Um, Biota are dissolving,

1042
01:01:38,080 --> 01:01:40,680
Speaker 1: plants and animals are moving all. That's a really interesting

1043
01:01:40,720 --> 01:01:44,680
Speaker 1: point about muskox I've never thought about then. I mean,

1044
01:01:44,680 --> 01:01:48,160
Speaker 1: if you okay, if they found muskoks remains in Tennessee,

1045
01:01:48,160 --> 01:01:52,680
Speaker 1: you're saying, and you look at the fringe that they

1046
01:01:52,680 --> 01:01:56,680
Speaker 1: inhabited at the time of European contact, you were it's

1047
01:01:56,720 --> 01:01:59,840
Speaker 1: like you had ten fingers, they were down to a pinky,

1048
01:02:00,320 --> 01:02:01,840
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. It's interesting thing like they

1049
01:02:01,840 --> 01:02:04,440
Speaker 1: were probably close. Yeah, it could have been close to

1050
01:02:04,480 --> 01:02:06,560
Speaker 1: being gone or something, you know, uh well, or they

1051
01:02:06,600 --> 01:02:09,640
Speaker 1: just found their niche. Uh and it's a very good niche.

1052
01:02:09,800 --> 01:02:12,959
Speaker 1: And in fact, they would have been highly vulnerable human hunting.

1053
01:02:12,960 --> 01:02:14,880
Speaker 1: And they're still around. I mean, what's there. What's their

1054
01:02:14,880 --> 01:02:19,360
Speaker 1: defensive strategies? They all get heads out, heads out, butts in. Right,

1055
01:02:19,360 --> 01:02:23,080
Speaker 1: it's like a faculty. And and it works with wolves.

1056
01:02:23,240 --> 01:02:25,480
Speaker 1: But if a bunch of hunters show up and they

1057
01:02:25,480 --> 01:02:28,000
Speaker 1: want to kill off all the muscocks, they're they're just

1058
01:02:28,160 --> 01:02:31,080
Speaker 1: standing targets, right. Okay, But let's get back to the

1059
01:02:31,160 --> 01:02:37,600
Speaker 1: larger picture. Massive range changes, massive ecological changes, um, lots

1060
01:02:37,640 --> 01:02:41,080
Speaker 1: of extinctions. Birds go extinct, You've got snakes going extinct.

1061
01:02:41,120 --> 01:02:44,760
Speaker 1: You've got reptiles going extinct. You've got turtles going extinct.

1062
01:02:44,800 --> 01:02:48,720
Speaker 1: You've got a spruce tree going extinct. There's and Paul

1063
01:02:48,760 --> 01:02:51,120
Speaker 1: Martin actually tried to come up with an explanation as

1064
01:02:51,160 --> 01:02:55,320
Speaker 1: to why humans would have overkilled a spruce tree. No, Um,

1065
01:02:55,360 --> 01:02:57,560
Speaker 1: it has something to do with forest burning or something.

1066
01:02:57,880 --> 01:03:02,160
Speaker 1: It didn't work this tree, oh yeah, uh oh yeah,

1067
01:03:02,240 --> 01:03:05,400
Speaker 1: And and so all of these things are happening. So extinctions,

1068
01:03:05,520 --> 01:03:07,640
Speaker 1: if you rip it out of its context, it looks.

1069
01:03:07,640 --> 01:03:10,120
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this is horrible. Humans showed up. They

1070
01:03:10,160 --> 01:03:12,800
Speaker 1: must be the cause. Well, did humans also cause all

1071
01:03:12,800 --> 01:03:14,600
Speaker 1: these other kinds of things going on? No, it was

1072
01:03:14,640 --> 01:03:17,040
Speaker 1: the end of the Pleistocene. Now let's get to the

1073
01:03:17,040 --> 01:03:19,920
Speaker 1: gotcha question that I wanted you to ask me. Just

1074
01:03:19,960 --> 01:03:23,520
Speaker 1: going to ask, So, why is it that they didn't

1075
01:03:23,520 --> 01:03:29,760
Speaker 1: go extinct during the previous interglacial? Okay, we've been cycling

1076
01:03:29,760 --> 01:03:34,000
Speaker 1: through ice ages for the last two plus million years. Okay,

1077
01:03:34,040 --> 01:03:36,040
Speaker 1: So why is it that all these animals didn't go

1078
01:03:36,120 --> 01:03:39,600
Speaker 1: extinct and twenty five thousand years ago the last time

1079
01:03:39,640 --> 01:03:42,160
Speaker 1: we had a warming event. Why did they only wait

1080
01:03:42,240 --> 01:03:47,000
Speaker 1: until ten thou plus years ago to go extinct? And

1081
01:03:47,040 --> 01:03:50,520
Speaker 1: the answer is is that, well, some of them did disappear.

1082
01:03:52,440 --> 01:03:56,240
Speaker 1: A lot of those species weren't around during the previous interglacial.

1083
01:03:56,840 --> 01:04:00,360
Speaker 1: We actually don't know that much about the previous intergl acial.

1084
01:04:00,520 --> 01:04:03,960
Speaker 1: In terms of what we know about the last previous

1085
01:04:04,400 --> 01:04:07,479
Speaker 1: interglacial is from deep sea cores. We have no idea

1086
01:04:07,480 --> 01:04:09,520
Speaker 1: what's going on in the landscape. We don't have good

1087
01:04:09,520 --> 01:04:13,680
Speaker 1: records of changes in the vegetation, changes in the ecosystem,

1088
01:04:13,800 --> 01:04:15,920
Speaker 1: changes in the environment. It was all demolished by the

1089
01:04:15,920 --> 01:04:20,040
Speaker 1: ice sheets. Well, because we just don't have good we

1090
01:04:20,080 --> 01:04:21,760
Speaker 1: don't have good samples of it. I mean, this is

1091
01:04:21,800 --> 01:04:24,000
Speaker 1: stuff that's a hundred and twenty five years old. You

1092
01:04:24,040 --> 01:04:27,600
Speaker 1: can probably count on one hand the number of pollen

1093
01:04:27,640 --> 01:04:30,320
Speaker 1: cores vegetation records that we have from a hundred and

1094
01:04:31,240 --> 01:04:34,960
Speaker 1: years ago. There's just no data, right, So you can't say, well,

1095
01:04:35,120 --> 01:04:37,360
Speaker 1: they should have all gone extinct in the previous interglacial

1096
01:04:37,360 --> 01:04:41,160
Speaker 1: if it was climate. We don't know what that looked like, right,

1097
01:04:41,360 --> 01:04:44,880
Speaker 1: We still don't know what this interglacial, this transition from

1098
01:04:44,960 --> 01:04:47,640
Speaker 1: the ice Age to the not ice Age. We're still

1099
01:04:47,680 --> 01:04:49,600
Speaker 1: not fully aware of this, and we won't be aware

1100
01:04:49,640 --> 01:04:52,360
Speaker 1: of its effects on these animals until we do each

1101
01:04:52,400 --> 01:04:56,080
Speaker 1: of these animals individually, because we've got to figure out

1102
01:04:56,160 --> 01:04:58,880
Speaker 1: what is it about a glyptodont that it couldn't handle?

1103
01:04:58,880 --> 01:05:01,120
Speaker 1: What is it about the giant ever that it couldn't handle?

1104
01:05:01,400 --> 01:05:04,920
Speaker 1: What might be an example, like any example, okay, and

1105
01:05:04,920 --> 01:05:06,800
Speaker 1: then then we'll move on to our checklist. But what

1106
01:05:06,880 --> 01:05:09,640
Speaker 1: may be any example when you say that it couldn't

1107
01:05:09,680 --> 01:05:11,880
Speaker 1: handle it? So one of the things that happens at

1108
01:05:11,920 --> 01:05:14,880
Speaker 1: the end of the ice age is that obviously it

1109
01:05:14,920 --> 01:05:19,040
Speaker 1: gets warmer, and there's a change in the composition of

1110
01:05:19,120 --> 01:05:23,760
Speaker 1: the plains grassland, grasses grass right when you look at it,

1111
01:05:23,800 --> 01:05:27,080
Speaker 1: when it's on your lawn or whatever. But in fact,

1112
01:05:27,120 --> 01:05:32,280
Speaker 1: there's very distinctive kinds of grass species that occupy that

1113
01:05:32,280 --> 01:05:35,880
Speaker 1: that create that landscape of the Great Plains um and

1114
01:05:36,000 --> 01:05:39,640
Speaker 1: they're designated by particular carbon pathways. Their CE three grasses,

1115
01:05:39,640 --> 01:05:42,840
Speaker 1: Sea four grasses. These are grasses that grow predominantly in

1116
01:05:42,840 --> 01:05:46,320
Speaker 1: the summer, and then there's winter grasses. Well at the

1117
01:05:46,400 --> 01:05:49,560
Speaker 1: end of the plaista scene Sea four grasses. And this

1118
01:05:49,600 --> 01:05:52,439
Speaker 1: is a hypothesis that I've sort of kicked around for

1119
01:05:52,480 --> 01:05:55,680
Speaker 1: a few years and and I'm still not convinced it's

1120
01:05:55,760 --> 01:06:00,440
Speaker 1: correct and definitely needs testing. But you wanted a for instance,

1121
01:06:02,520 --> 01:06:04,600
Speaker 1: at the end of the place to see the plains

1122
01:06:04,720 --> 01:06:10,280
Speaker 1: grassland becomes dominantly C four Now Sea four grasses um

1123
01:06:10,480 --> 01:06:16,600
Speaker 1: have anti herbivory toxins. It taste terrible and um they

1124
01:06:16,720 --> 01:06:21,360
Speaker 1: are not easily digested unless well, one of the principal

1125
01:06:21,440 --> 01:06:27,280
Speaker 1: Sea four grasses is buffalo grass. Buffalo love the stuff mammoth.

1126
01:06:27,360 --> 01:06:30,439
Speaker 1: They don't have the same kind of gut systems that

1127
01:06:30,560 --> 01:06:36,760
Speaker 1: bison do, and so they're on a landscape where the

1128
01:06:36,920 --> 01:06:41,720
Speaker 1: resources to them, the food forage to them is shrinking, right,

1129
01:06:42,400 --> 01:06:46,760
Speaker 1: and it's becoming more toxic to them. Well, the expanding

1130
01:06:46,800 --> 01:06:51,400
Speaker 1: grasses are becoming more toxic to them. H And suddenly

1131
01:06:51,480 --> 01:06:57,360
Speaker 1: they're getting out competed by bison. Bison populations are expanding, mammoth, horse, camel.

1132
01:06:57,600 --> 01:07:01,680
Speaker 1: They can't cope. One other assibility that people have suggested,

1133
01:07:01,760 --> 01:07:05,360
Speaker 1: which um Again, it's gonna be hard to tell and

1134
01:07:05,480 --> 01:07:09,000
Speaker 1: test until we get that really high resolution data. But

1135
01:07:09,160 --> 01:07:12,720
Speaker 1: imagine this. You're in the middle of an ice age,

1136
01:07:14,120 --> 01:07:19,280
Speaker 1: and for a variety of reasons ice age um climates

1137
01:07:19,320 --> 01:07:22,440
Speaker 1: were more equable. And by that what we mean is

1138
01:07:22,480 --> 01:07:26,320
Speaker 1: that you had cooler summers, warmer winters. Nowadays, out on

1139
01:07:26,360 --> 01:07:29,600
Speaker 1: the central part of North America we have really hot

1140
01:07:29,640 --> 01:07:34,920
Speaker 1: summers and really cold winters. Okay, during the Pleistocene actually

1141
01:07:34,960 --> 01:07:38,000
Speaker 1: wasn't so bad for a variety of reasons, not least

1142
01:07:38,000 --> 01:07:40,360
Speaker 1: that you had this massive ice sheet parked over Canada,

1143
01:07:40,680 --> 01:07:43,400
Speaker 1: blocking cold Arctic air from coming south. Yeah. When you

1144
01:07:43,400 --> 01:07:45,320
Speaker 1: say the extremes, I mean you could live in a

1145
01:07:45,360 --> 01:07:49,360
Speaker 1: northern tier state and you live in uh, you live

1146
01:07:49,400 --> 01:07:52,800
Speaker 1: in something that can very consistently swing hundred twenty degree

1147
01:07:52,800 --> 01:07:55,960
Speaker 1: temperature swings absolutely, like it's not unusual to get a

1148
01:07:56,000 --> 01:07:58,080
Speaker 1: negative twenty winter day, and it's not unusual to get

1149
01:07:58,160 --> 01:08:00,960
Speaker 1: over a hundred summer day. You've been in North Dakota.

1150
01:08:01,440 --> 01:08:03,840
Speaker 1: So now what that means is that if if you're

1151
01:08:03,840 --> 01:08:07,959
Speaker 1: an elephant and you've been producing calves and it takes

1152
01:08:07,960 --> 01:08:11,800
Speaker 1: you twenty two months to grow another elephant and and

1153
01:08:11,920 --> 01:08:16,559
Speaker 1: have that elephant child, Um, you've been used to having

1154
01:08:16,600 --> 01:08:21,240
Speaker 1: that elephant in, say March. Well, during the Pleistocene, March

1155
01:08:21,360 --> 01:08:25,759
Speaker 1: wasn't so bad. But what happens when that climate shifts

1156
01:08:25,760 --> 01:08:29,519
Speaker 1: from a more equable to a more continental, big swing

1157
01:08:29,600 --> 01:08:33,320
Speaker 1: and temperature suddenly March instead of being you know, it's

1158
01:08:33,360 --> 01:08:35,400
Speaker 1: kind of almost spread. Is the word you're saying when

1159
01:08:35,400 --> 01:08:39,040
Speaker 1: you say equable equable e q U a B equator

1160
01:08:39,120 --> 01:08:43,559
Speaker 1: Like exactly. I thought you were saying equitable meaning equal. Yeah,

1161
01:08:44,280 --> 01:08:48,560
Speaker 1: and then continental continental is really strong swings in temperature.

1162
01:08:48,600 --> 01:08:53,840
Speaker 1: So San Francisco versus North Dakota. Okay, so you've been

1163
01:08:54,080 --> 01:08:58,120
Speaker 1: you've been birthing baby mammoths all this time in March,

1164
01:08:58,640 --> 01:09:01,920
Speaker 1: and suddenly March damn cold freezing, there's nothing to eat

1165
01:09:02,360 --> 01:09:05,320
Speaker 1: and the baby dies, Well, it takes you another twenty

1166
01:09:05,320 --> 01:09:07,920
Speaker 1: two months to make another one. You can't respond that quickly.

1167
01:09:08,080 --> 01:09:09,920
Speaker 1: And then how many every years to bring it for

1168
01:09:10,080 --> 01:09:12,840
Speaker 1: to achieve sexual maturity? Right? Well, exactly right? And how

1169
01:09:12,840 --> 01:09:14,360
Speaker 1: many are you going to have over the course of

1170
01:09:14,360 --> 01:09:18,599
Speaker 1: a reproductive lifetime? Four five? You know you you sort

1171
01:09:18,600 --> 01:09:21,360
Speaker 1: of knocked them, knock the knees out from under them

1172
01:09:21,400 --> 01:09:24,479
Speaker 1: in terms of their reproductive cycle. And yeah, you can

1173
01:09:24,560 --> 01:09:27,519
Speaker 1: drive mixed in pretty quickly, but these are just you know,

1174
01:09:27,600 --> 01:09:29,720
Speaker 1: sort of arm wavy things. Well, no, I understand that.

1175
01:09:29,760 --> 01:09:32,599
Speaker 1: You're like, yeah, we don't know upon request, you're taking

1176
01:09:32,600 --> 01:09:35,800
Speaker 1: shots at what what sorts of things? Yeah? I know

1177
01:09:35,880 --> 01:09:37,639
Speaker 1: him the first to admit. You know, people say, well,

1178
01:09:37,920 --> 01:09:39,800
Speaker 1: you've got to have a climate alternative. If you're gonna

1179
01:09:39,800 --> 01:09:43,640
Speaker 1: say it's not overkill, well no, I don't because we

1180
01:09:43,680 --> 01:09:45,800
Speaker 1: don't have the evidence. We know the kinds of things

1181
01:09:45,840 --> 01:09:48,360
Speaker 1: that we need, but we don't have any of that

1182
01:09:48,439 --> 01:09:50,920
Speaker 1: evidences yet and we need to get it. So there's

1183
01:09:50,960 --> 01:09:55,320
Speaker 1: pressure to to cleanly replace the blitz creek or the

1184
01:09:55,360 --> 01:09:57,960
Speaker 1: overkill hypothesis. Someone would want to be like, okay, if

1185
01:09:58,000 --> 01:10:00,800
Speaker 1: not that, then prove oh no, I'd love to have

1186
01:10:00,800 --> 01:10:03,040
Speaker 1: an answer for him. But this is this is the

1187
01:10:03,040 --> 01:10:05,800
Speaker 1: thing I think in in ten years down the road,

1188
01:10:06,160 --> 01:10:07,840
Speaker 1: twenty years down the road, we are going to have

1189
01:10:07,920 --> 01:10:10,759
Speaker 1: those answers and it's going to come at the molecular level.

1190
01:10:10,840 --> 01:10:13,559
Speaker 1: It's going to come out of the DNA. Yeah, that's

1191
01:10:13,560 --> 01:10:17,800
Speaker 1: the cool thing, not hout narrowheads. No, No, we're still

1192
01:10:17,800 --> 01:10:21,280
Speaker 1: gonna be doing it. But that's not where the answer

1193
01:10:21,360 --> 01:10:24,839
Speaker 1: is gonna be. Can can we jump to projectile points? Okay?

1194
01:10:27,080 --> 01:10:33,080
Speaker 1: Lay it out the the obsession with them in the

1195
01:10:33,120 --> 01:10:35,880
Speaker 1: early years of your discipline, I was it was like

1196
01:10:36,000 --> 01:10:39,800
Speaker 1: this diagnostic tool, and talked about that a little bit

1197
01:10:41,680 --> 01:10:43,320
Speaker 1: to approach. You know, that's a really good way to

1198
01:10:43,360 --> 01:10:47,360
Speaker 1: describe it, to use the term diagnostic, because um, these

1199
01:10:47,400 --> 01:10:50,680
Speaker 1: are artifacts. I mean, these books had all sorts of tools, right,

1200
01:10:51,400 --> 01:10:55,720
Speaker 1: we have fixated on that class of projectile points their

1201
01:10:55,720 --> 01:11:00,840
Speaker 1: weaponry because they invested a lot of effort in it.

1202
01:11:01,439 --> 01:11:03,720
Speaker 1: They invested a lot of effort in the manufacturer, They

1203
01:11:03,720 --> 01:11:06,320
Speaker 1: invested a lot of effort in finding the right stone,

1204
01:11:07,680 --> 01:11:11,280
Speaker 1: uh in hafting it, attaching it to the end of

1205
01:11:11,280 --> 01:11:15,360
Speaker 1: a spear um and they were doing as as I

1206
01:11:15,400 --> 01:11:19,800
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, they spent more effort on it than was

1207
01:11:19,840 --> 01:11:24,040
Speaker 1: warranted by the task at hand. Okay, you feel that's

1208
01:11:24,880 --> 01:11:29,120
Speaker 1: you feel that's true. You know, Um, it was fancier

1209
01:11:29,160 --> 01:11:31,559
Speaker 1: than it needed to be. You can't help but look

1210
01:11:31,560 --> 01:11:34,200
Speaker 1: at some of the stonework and some of the ways

1211
01:11:34,200 --> 01:11:38,080
Speaker 1: in which they flaked their artifacts too match up with

1212
01:11:38,439 --> 01:11:40,880
Speaker 1: you know, lines in the stone or bands or anything

1213
01:11:40,920 --> 01:11:42,920
Speaker 1: like that, and you can't help but think that's a

1214
01:11:43,040 --> 01:11:45,599
Speaker 1: human on the other side of that. Somebody was looking

1215
01:11:45,640 --> 01:11:48,880
Speaker 1: at that and had I mean, look, when you guys

1216
01:11:48,920 --> 01:11:51,960
Speaker 1: go out hunting, you have particular weapons, you take care

1217
01:11:52,040 --> 01:11:54,080
Speaker 1: of them. You might I don't know what do you

1218
01:11:54,120 --> 01:11:57,880
Speaker 1: do to sort of dress up your your guns or

1219
01:11:57,920 --> 01:12:01,960
Speaker 1: your bows. I mean you accessor rise, but nothing that well,

1220
01:12:02,120 --> 01:12:04,160
Speaker 1: I'm probably not looking at it right. Someone else might

1221
01:12:04,200 --> 01:12:08,760
Speaker 1: look at it and think that there are esthetic modifications,

1222
01:12:08,800 --> 01:12:11,400
Speaker 1: but off top of my head, I don't think of Yeah. Okay,

1223
01:12:11,439 --> 01:12:14,240
Speaker 1: but if you're if you're living on a landscape where

1224
01:12:14,400 --> 01:12:19,120
Speaker 1: you have relatively little material culture around you, right, and

1225
01:12:19,120 --> 01:12:21,840
Speaker 1: one of the things that's emblematic of your group is

1226
01:12:21,880 --> 01:12:26,840
Speaker 1: to make these protect these projectile points in a particular way. Um,

1227
01:12:26,920 --> 01:12:29,559
Speaker 1: you're going to invest in those things because you want

1228
01:12:29,560 --> 01:12:33,519
Speaker 1: people to see you remember the group. You're a good

1229
01:12:33,520 --> 01:12:37,439
Speaker 1: flint napper, You've been places, You've collected this really cool stone.

1230
01:12:38,040 --> 01:12:41,280
Speaker 1: And because you're investing in that you as an ancient

1231
01:12:41,360 --> 01:12:47,360
Speaker 1: hunter gatherer, we as archaeologists can use that because the

1232
01:12:47,560 --> 01:12:51,200
Speaker 1: style and the stylistic attributes that they are adding to

1233
01:12:51,280 --> 01:12:55,120
Speaker 1: their weaponry, the stuff that goes beyond what's necessary to

1234
01:12:55,280 --> 01:12:59,719
Speaker 1: kill that animal is diagnostic of time and of group.

1235
01:13:00,040 --> 01:13:04,320
Speaker 1: Enough space. Yeah, because someone's listening and you grab your

1236
01:13:04,360 --> 01:13:09,240
Speaker 1: phone and look, you know, type up folesome point, go

1237
01:13:09,400 --> 01:13:14,120
Speaker 1: to images and it's it's distinctive, it's it's Yeah, the

1238
01:13:14,160 --> 01:13:16,000
Speaker 1: minute you look, you'd be like, oh, I get it. Yep,

1239
01:13:16,080 --> 01:13:19,120
Speaker 1: there's nothing that looks like that, nothing at all, and

1240
01:13:19,240 --> 01:13:22,280
Speaker 1: so um, it's helpful to us. So the reason we

1241
01:13:22,360 --> 01:13:25,760
Speaker 1: have this fixation, and it's it's not always a healthy fixation,

1242
01:13:26,040 --> 01:13:28,120
Speaker 1: but the reason we have this fixation on their projectile

1243
01:13:28,200 --> 01:13:31,000
Speaker 1: points is that they tell us so much. Okay, and

1244
01:13:31,120 --> 01:13:34,519
Speaker 1: especially in the absence of radiocarbon dating, you know you've

1245
01:13:34,520 --> 01:13:37,200
Speaker 1: got a falsome side if you've got these points, unless

1246
01:13:37,720 --> 01:13:40,240
Speaker 1: you know, you were just darn unlucky and somebody happened

1247
01:13:40,280 --> 01:13:41,800
Speaker 1: to have found a falsome point and brought it into

1248
01:13:41,840 --> 01:13:44,640
Speaker 1: a pueblo, in which case you're gonna have to say, well,

1249
01:13:44,840 --> 01:13:49,800
Speaker 1: that probably doesn't belong there. Um. The downside of that

1250
01:13:50,080 --> 01:13:54,679
Speaker 1: is that we've been neglectful of all the other tools

1251
01:13:54,680 --> 01:13:56,559
Speaker 1: in the tool kit which you're doing most of the work.

1252
01:13:56,760 --> 01:14:00,679
Speaker 1: You know, the scrapers, the knives, the gravers, the drills,

1253
01:14:00,800 --> 01:14:04,240
Speaker 1: the alls. How many tools might someone have had, like

1254
01:14:04,240 --> 01:14:06,519
Speaker 1: like like an ice age family, what they what might

1255
01:14:06,520 --> 01:14:12,800
Speaker 1: they have had? Um? You know, the answer is probably

1256
01:14:13,040 --> 01:14:18,040
Speaker 1: in some of the burial caches that we have where uh,

1257
01:14:18,080 --> 01:14:22,160
Speaker 1: individuals had died and somebody basically left their tool kit

1258
01:14:22,280 --> 01:14:26,439
Speaker 1: with them. Uh. And there's a well known site, uh

1259
01:14:26,600 --> 01:14:30,760
Speaker 1: Crowfield in Ontario, and off the top of my head,

1260
01:14:30,840 --> 01:14:34,960
Speaker 1: I'm thinking several dozen um, and I could be quite

1261
01:14:34,960 --> 01:14:39,000
Speaker 1: mistaken about the number uh by faces and scrapers and

1262
01:14:39,160 --> 01:14:43,559
Speaker 1: points were found with the no no actual physical human

1263
01:14:43,600 --> 01:14:45,439
Speaker 1: remains were found, but there was a kind of a

1264
01:14:45,479 --> 01:14:48,880
Speaker 1: burned area, so it looked as though it was a

1265
01:14:48,880 --> 01:14:51,439
Speaker 1: a cremation burial and the only thing that survives is

1266
01:14:51,479 --> 01:14:53,160
Speaker 1: the stone. And of course the stone got put in

1267
01:14:53,160 --> 01:14:58,440
Speaker 1: the cremation, so it it popped and crazed and and broke. UM.

1268
01:14:58,600 --> 01:15:02,360
Speaker 1: But yeah, you could probably. I mean, stone may actually

1269
01:15:02,360 --> 01:15:03,760
Speaker 1: have been the least of the things that you had

1270
01:15:03,840 --> 01:15:07,439
Speaker 1: to deal with this year. As you're slepping across the landscape. Uh,

1271
01:15:07,479 --> 01:15:10,559
Speaker 1: you know, are you bringing material for building structures, are

1272
01:15:10,600 --> 01:15:15,200
Speaker 1: you carrying children? All that stuff? Yeah, cordage clothing as

1273
01:15:15,240 --> 01:15:18,759
Speaker 1: you bone bone products. And I'm glad you mentioned cordage

1274
01:15:18,800 --> 01:15:22,280
Speaker 1: because in fact, um we may be missing the vast

1275
01:15:22,320 --> 01:15:27,360
Speaker 1: majority of their tools. There are sites that where preservation

1276
01:15:27,479 --> 01:15:31,679
Speaker 1: is really really good, and the number of non stone

1277
01:15:31,960 --> 01:15:39,639
Speaker 1: artifacts would artifacts in particular by a factor of six

1278
01:15:40,160 --> 01:15:42,600
Speaker 1: six times more of that stuff than there is of

1279
01:15:42,600 --> 01:15:46,360
Speaker 1: stone tools. We get fixated on stone tools because that's

1280
01:15:46,400 --> 01:15:49,599
Speaker 1: all we got. One of the things you you get at,

1281
01:15:50,240 --> 01:15:55,840
Speaker 1: uh in your book Folsome is you talk about the

1282
01:15:56,040 --> 01:15:59,599
Speaker 1: Folsome type site and what the people who first dug

1283
01:15:59,640 --> 01:16:03,599
Speaker 1: it will looking for. They wanted big bones and big

1284
01:16:03,600 --> 01:16:06,760
Speaker 1: stone tools. Well, first they just everything else went into

1285
01:16:06,840 --> 01:16:09,400
Speaker 1: a pile right because it wasn't of interest. And then

1286
01:16:09,600 --> 01:16:12,280
Speaker 1: then later became like really like all the stuff that

1287
01:16:12,320 --> 01:16:16,320
Speaker 1: they weren't paying attention to that was so instructive. They

1288
01:16:16,640 --> 01:16:19,639
Speaker 1: this was the nine twenties, and what they really wanted

1289
01:16:20,200 --> 01:16:24,640
Speaker 1: first off was just a a bison to put on display.

1290
01:16:24,760 --> 01:16:27,360
Speaker 1: So these were museum folks out of Denver and they

1291
01:16:27,400 --> 01:16:31,520
Speaker 1: just wanted to find a bison that they could rearticulate

1292
01:16:31,840 --> 01:16:34,080
Speaker 1: and put on display. And up until about ten it

1293
01:16:34,080 --> 01:16:36,040
Speaker 1: doesn't look like the ones we have now, much bigger,

1294
01:16:36,439 --> 01:16:38,920
Speaker 1: much bigger, And up until about ten years ago you

1295
01:16:38,960 --> 01:16:41,160
Speaker 1: could see it at at what was then the Colorado

1296
01:16:41,240 --> 01:16:43,479
Speaker 1: Museum in Natural History which is now the Denver Museum

1297
01:16:43,479 --> 01:16:47,919
Speaker 1: of Nature and Science. And then when they realized artifacts

1298
01:16:47,920 --> 01:16:51,640
Speaker 1: were there, uh, the site became especially important to a

1299
01:16:51,680 --> 01:16:56,120
Speaker 1: broader audience because those bison were extinct, and in those

1300
01:16:56,240 --> 01:16:58,360
Speaker 1: pre radio carpon days when you had no way of

1301
01:16:58,400 --> 01:17:01,479
Speaker 1: determining how old something was, if you found an artifact

1302
01:17:01,920 --> 01:17:05,400
Speaker 1: wedged between the ribs of a now extinct animal, you

1303
01:17:05,479 --> 01:17:08,120
Speaker 1: knew that somebody had been around at the time that

1304
01:17:08,160 --> 01:17:13,400
Speaker 1: animal was alive. And so fulsome became terribly important in

1305
01:17:13,520 --> 01:17:17,240
Speaker 1: n seven because it was the very first site where

1306
01:17:17,280 --> 01:17:21,720
Speaker 1: you could definitively say there was a hunter, there was

1307
01:17:21,800 --> 01:17:24,920
Speaker 1: an ice age animal, and that hunter killed that ice

1308
01:17:24,960 --> 01:17:28,800
Speaker 1: age animal, and then they just you know, that's it,

1309
01:17:28,840 --> 01:17:32,800
Speaker 1: We're done. Uh. And seventy years later when we went

1310
01:17:32,840 --> 01:17:35,759
Speaker 1: back to the site, there were so many fundamental questions

1311
01:17:35,800 --> 01:17:38,639
Speaker 1: that hadn't been answered in the nineteen twenties because well,

1312
01:17:38,640 --> 01:17:40,120
Speaker 1: they just wanted to find out how old it was.

1313
01:17:40,600 --> 01:17:43,720
Speaker 1: I wanted to find out what was the environment like,

1314
01:17:43,920 --> 01:17:46,280
Speaker 1: what was the site like, what were the activities that

1315
01:17:46,320 --> 01:17:50,080
Speaker 1: took place there? How many animals were killed? What was

1316
01:17:50,120 --> 01:17:52,920
Speaker 1: the season of the year. Uh, did they camp there?

1317
01:17:53,200 --> 01:17:58,800
Speaker 1: Did they spend a winter there? Uh? And ultimately uh,

1318
01:17:58,960 --> 01:18:02,080
Speaker 1: when we spent three years excavating there and got a

1319
01:18:02,120 --> 01:18:04,559
Speaker 1: lot out of the site. The site's very famous, not

1320
01:18:04,640 --> 01:18:06,880
Speaker 1: because of what we did there, but because of its

1321
01:18:07,200 --> 01:18:10,360
Speaker 1: role in the history of archaeology. But we were really

1322
01:18:10,479 --> 01:18:12,519
Speaker 1: pleased to be able to go back there and learn

1323
01:18:12,560 --> 01:18:15,040
Speaker 1: a lot more about it. We're off, we're way off

1324
01:18:15,040 --> 01:18:17,719
Speaker 1: rejectile points. But you tell the story. But in your book,

1325
01:18:17,720 --> 01:18:20,479
Speaker 1: you tell the story of George mcjunkin. Yes, the guy

1326
01:18:20,560 --> 01:18:23,280
Speaker 1: that that that found it. He was a am I

1327
01:18:23,400 --> 01:18:25,080
Speaker 1: right that he was. He was a freed slave or

1328
01:18:25,080 --> 01:18:27,240
Speaker 1: the son of a freed's. George mcjunkin was born a

1329
01:18:27,360 --> 01:18:30,479
Speaker 1: slave in pre Civil War Texas, and he took the

1330
01:18:30,560 --> 01:18:35,160
Speaker 1: name mcjunkin from his owner. And after the Civil War

1331
01:18:36,120 --> 01:18:40,439
Speaker 1: he made his way into northeastern New Mexico and George.

1332
01:18:40,840 --> 01:18:45,759
Speaker 1: George must have been a remarkable man because after the

1333
01:18:45,920 --> 01:18:51,320
Speaker 1: great flood of Fulsome which cut this arroyo in, sized

1334
01:18:51,320 --> 01:18:54,479
Speaker 1: it deeply and exposed the bones, George was doing what

1335
01:18:54,560 --> 01:18:58,519
Speaker 1: every good cowboy does after a storm. He went out

1336
01:18:58,520 --> 01:19:01,719
Speaker 1: and he was checking his fence lines, and he looked

1337
01:19:01,760 --> 01:19:05,000
Speaker 1: down in what was probably about a twelve ft deep

1338
01:19:05,520 --> 01:19:11,200
Speaker 1: cut and saw bones. Now, um, I think a lot

1339
01:19:11,240 --> 01:19:14,799
Speaker 1: of cowboys looking down seeing bones would have just said, oh,

1340
01:19:15,040 --> 01:19:19,559
Speaker 1: bones and kept going. George got off his horse and

1341
01:19:19,600 --> 01:19:21,360
Speaker 1: he went down into the arroyo and he looked at

1342
01:19:21,400 --> 01:19:24,920
Speaker 1: the bones and he said to himself, we assume these

1343
01:19:25,000 --> 01:19:29,040
Speaker 1: are not cowbones. These are buffalo bones, and they're really big.

1344
01:19:29,080 --> 01:19:31,000
Speaker 1: And we know he thought something about him because he

1345
01:19:31,120 --> 01:19:35,120
Speaker 1: told people about him. George was an amateur naturalist. When

1346
01:19:35,120 --> 01:19:37,200
Speaker 1: you see pictures of George, there's very few of them,

1347
01:19:37,200 --> 01:19:39,640
Speaker 1: but in one of them he's on his horse and

1348
01:19:39,680 --> 01:19:43,720
Speaker 1: in the um scabbard where you keep your rifle. He

1349
01:19:43,760 --> 01:19:47,000
Speaker 1: had a telescope. He wasn't interested in shooting coyotes. He

1350
01:19:47,080 --> 01:19:49,720
Speaker 1: was interested in seeing what he could see with his telescope.

1351
01:19:50,600 --> 01:19:54,639
Speaker 1: So he made frequent trips over to Ratone and there

1352
01:19:54,720 --> 01:19:57,040
Speaker 1: was a sort of a kindred spirit there. Fellow by

1353
01:19:57,120 --> 01:19:59,559
Speaker 1: name of Karl Schwaheim who was the blacksmith in the

1354
01:19:59,640 --> 01:20:03,160
Speaker 1: village of her Tone, and Carl had a wonderful fountain

1355
01:20:03,320 --> 01:20:08,120
Speaker 1: outside his house where two male bull elks had gotten

1356
01:20:08,160 --> 01:20:12,439
Speaker 1: into Mortal Kombat. Their antlers had locked and they died,

1357
01:20:13,760 --> 01:20:15,880
Speaker 1: and Carl thought that was pretty cool, so he made

1358
01:20:15,920 --> 01:20:18,439
Speaker 1: a fountain out of it out of the racks. And

1359
01:20:18,520 --> 01:20:20,760
Speaker 1: George would stop by and and talk to Carl, and

1360
01:20:21,160 --> 01:20:23,519
Speaker 1: he told Carl, he said, you know, on this ranch,

1361
01:20:23,600 --> 01:20:26,280
Speaker 1: on the crow Foot ranch where I've been working, where

1362
01:20:26,320 --> 01:20:29,320
Speaker 1: on the ranch, foreman, I've I found these old bones.

1363
01:20:29,760 --> 01:20:33,479
Speaker 1: And it took years, but Carl finally got up there.

1364
01:20:33,880 --> 01:20:38,479
Speaker 1: Uh sadly after um mcjunkin died. Yeah, I I uh

1365
01:20:38,760 --> 01:20:41,720
Speaker 1: went to this site and wrote a piece about mcjunkin

1366
01:20:41,840 --> 01:20:44,840
Speaker 1: And this kind of thing that happens is that he

1367
01:20:45,080 --> 01:20:47,519
Speaker 1: so desperately wanted someone to come look, and then he

1368
01:20:47,600 --> 01:20:50,400
Speaker 1: dies and they finally go look, and then like, holy ship,

1369
01:20:50,479 --> 01:20:53,439
Speaker 1: this guy found something really others well, so they took

1370
01:20:53,439 --> 01:20:56,000
Speaker 1: the bones up to Denver and they said, you know, hey,

1371
01:20:56,040 --> 01:20:58,360
Speaker 1: there's there's a bunch of bison bones. And so that's

1372
01:20:58,360 --> 01:21:01,880
Speaker 1: when Denver got interested them museum to say, oh, sure

1373
01:21:01,920 --> 01:21:04,559
Speaker 1: we could use one for display. Uh. And so that's

1374
01:21:04,720 --> 01:21:07,639
Speaker 1: they subsequently went down there but again a few years

1375
01:21:07,760 --> 01:21:12,920
Speaker 1: later uh and started excavating and then realized, oh, this

1376
01:21:12,960 --> 01:21:15,960
Speaker 1: isn't just a bunch of bones, there's actually stone tools

1377
01:21:16,000 --> 01:21:18,759
Speaker 1: down here. What's going on? That's when they started. In fact,

1378
01:21:19,240 --> 01:21:23,560
Speaker 1: Karl Schwaheim, our village blacksmith, was hired to do the excavations.

1379
01:21:24,160 --> 01:21:28,160
Speaker 1: So he was He spent the summer of working largely

1380
01:21:28,240 --> 01:21:31,519
Speaker 1: by himself. And I can tell you from having dug

1381
01:21:31,760 --> 01:21:34,800
Speaker 1: that site that it was hard work. He had to

1382
01:21:34,800 --> 01:21:38,400
Speaker 1: dig through about nine or ten ft of lake clay's

1383
01:21:39,240 --> 01:21:42,280
Speaker 1: which if you've ever tried to shovel that stuff, it's hard,

1384
01:21:42,520 --> 01:21:46,080
Speaker 1: hard work. But he got down to the bone bed. Uh.

1385
01:21:46,080 --> 01:21:50,400
Speaker 1: He exposed it. Unfortunately that first summer, Uh, the artifact

1386
01:21:50,439 --> 01:21:52,120
Speaker 1: that he found popped out of the ground before he

1387
01:21:52,120 --> 01:21:54,080
Speaker 1: had a chance to see where it came from. But

1388
01:21:54,320 --> 01:21:57,479
Speaker 1: everybody got all excited and they said next year go

1389
01:21:57,520 --> 01:22:01,599
Speaker 1: back excavate again, but be more careful. And and that

1390
01:22:01,720 --> 01:22:05,439
Speaker 1: was the year that he exposed something, realized it was

1391
01:22:05,479 --> 01:22:09,880
Speaker 1: in place, realized it was literally between two ribs and

1392
01:22:10,240 --> 01:22:13,719
Speaker 1: stopped the presses or stop all activity, alert the press,

1393
01:22:13,760 --> 01:22:16,559
Speaker 1: get everybody out here, and folks came and witnessed it

1394
01:22:16,560 --> 01:22:18,400
Speaker 1: in place. It was literally one of those things where

1395
01:22:18,439 --> 01:22:21,000
Speaker 1: you sort of you lay your hands on it and say, okay,

1396
01:22:21,040 --> 01:22:24,000
Speaker 1: this is real. Uh. And one of the people that

1397
01:22:24,080 --> 01:22:27,639
Speaker 1: came to see it was a fellow miham A vy Kidder,

1398
01:22:27,680 --> 01:22:30,720
Speaker 1: who was at the time a god in the discipline.

1399
01:22:30,760 --> 01:22:33,280
Speaker 1: He was one of the most famous archaeologists in North America.

1400
01:22:33,800 --> 01:22:37,559
Speaker 1: He came, he saw, he blessed it. And and it's

1401
01:22:37,560 --> 01:22:40,240
Speaker 1: a comment about the way science works when somebody of

1402
01:22:40,280 --> 01:22:44,240
Speaker 1: that status looks at that site and says, I'm a believer.

1403
01:22:45,439 --> 01:22:47,680
Speaker 1: What are you going to say? What you say is

1404
01:22:47,840 --> 01:22:51,760
Speaker 1: I'm with him. I agree. Uh. And so from that

1405
01:22:51,800 --> 01:22:55,599
Speaker 1: moment on, Fulsome became sort of the anchor point of

1406
01:22:55,680 --> 01:22:58,639
Speaker 1: the first people into the Americas with their very distinctive

1407
01:22:58,640 --> 01:23:00,439
Speaker 1: Falsome point. You know what, you still old it because

1408
01:23:00,439 --> 01:23:02,440
Speaker 1: I was gonna do I was gonna do a remarkable

1409
01:23:02,439 --> 01:23:07,960
Speaker 1: bit of hosting where I brought us back to projectile points,

1410
01:23:08,840 --> 01:23:14,320
Speaker 1: but point by by pointing out that that name, the

1411
01:23:14,439 --> 01:23:18,400
Speaker 1: town of Falsom, New Mexico, was then bestowed upon the

1412
01:23:18,479 --> 01:23:22,519
Speaker 1: projectile point that was found there, the very diagnostic falsome

1413
01:23:22,560 --> 01:23:24,960
Speaker 1: point exactly right well down on it as a host. Yeah,

1414
01:23:25,000 --> 01:23:26,280
Speaker 1: well I was gonna do that, and then you did it.

1415
01:23:26,479 --> 01:23:32,400
Speaker 1: Yeah sorry, um, so fulsome point in the projectile point

1416
01:23:32,400 --> 01:23:35,639
Speaker 1: conversation people used to there there was falsome point. Everyone

1417
01:23:35,640 --> 01:23:39,960
Speaker 1: agreed that fulsome came after Clovis. They didn't know that yet.

1418
01:23:39,960 --> 01:23:43,240
Speaker 1: They didn't know that, okay. So Clovis gets discovered about

1419
01:23:43,240 --> 01:23:47,599
Speaker 1: half a dozen years later, and at first they weren't

1420
01:23:47,600 --> 01:23:49,160
Speaker 1: sure what to do with it because they looked at

1421
01:23:49,200 --> 01:23:52,080
Speaker 1: Clovis points. Now, Falsome points are really nice and thin,

1422
01:23:52,479 --> 01:23:55,040
Speaker 1: they're very sharp, they're very well made. You look at

1423
01:23:55,040 --> 01:23:58,000
Speaker 1: Clovis points and they're kind of larger and clunkier and thicker,

1424
01:23:58,040 --> 01:24:02,040
Speaker 1: and you think to yourself, it's fe horse exactly. So

1425
01:24:02,200 --> 01:24:04,920
Speaker 1: you think, okay, well, the clunkier ones they must have

1426
01:24:05,320 --> 01:24:07,519
Speaker 1: maybe they came later. Everybody sort of forgot what they

1427
01:24:07,520 --> 01:24:11,240
Speaker 1: were doing. No, um, they didn't. They didn't know the

1428
01:24:11,280 --> 01:24:14,479
Speaker 1: relative age of these things. And it wasn't until about

1429
01:24:14,520 --> 01:24:18,040
Speaker 1: five years into the excavations at the Clovis site, which

1430
01:24:18,080 --> 01:24:20,760
Speaker 1: took place between nineteen thirty three and about nineteen thirty

1431
01:24:20,840 --> 01:24:25,479
Speaker 1: eight that they finally realized that Clovis points were being

1432
01:24:25,520 --> 01:24:29,960
Speaker 1: found below the levels in which Falsome points were being found,

1433
01:24:29,960 --> 01:24:34,760
Speaker 1: and so therefore where are they both found at the

1434
01:24:34,800 --> 01:24:40,000
Speaker 1: Clovis gravel pit? What were people doing there? Hanging out?

1435
01:24:41,120 --> 01:24:45,200
Speaker 1: Someone dropped a fulsome point and then thousands of years

1436
01:24:45,280 --> 01:24:48,559
Speaker 1: later a guy drops the Clovis point. Now, first they

1437
01:24:48,600 --> 01:24:53,679
Speaker 1: dropped the Clovis point, then several thousand years later, Yeah, yeah, um, okay,

1438
01:24:53,680 --> 01:24:56,160
Speaker 1: So you're out on the high plains. You've been out

1439
01:24:56,160 --> 01:24:58,320
Speaker 1: on the high plains, right. It's not a lot of water.

1440
01:24:59,400 --> 01:25:03,360
Speaker 1: The Clovis site is one of those wonderful spring fed

1441
01:25:03,600 --> 01:25:07,000
Speaker 1: o a c's in the middle of a vast, semi

1442
01:25:07,080 --> 01:25:12,960
Speaker 1: arid environment. Every animal, you know, within a certain radius

1443
01:25:13,000 --> 01:25:15,800
Speaker 1: is going to come out there for a drink. Hunters

1444
01:25:16,240 --> 01:25:20,160
Speaker 1: were using that spot for thousands and thousands of years,

1445
01:25:21,000 --> 01:25:24,040
Speaker 1: and so they were drawn to it, and the first

1446
01:25:24,080 --> 01:25:26,960
Speaker 1: folks that were drawn to it we're Clovis people. And

1447
01:25:27,000 --> 01:25:31,160
Speaker 1: then they killed some mammoths in there. Uh, they scavenged

1448
01:25:31,280 --> 01:25:34,519
Speaker 1: some mammoths and some of them they killed. One of

1449
01:25:34,560 --> 01:25:36,760
Speaker 1: the things that's really interesting. People make a big deal

1450
01:25:36,760 --> 01:25:38,960
Speaker 1: about folks hunting elephants, and you know, you get this

1451
01:25:39,120 --> 01:25:42,479
Speaker 1: romantic image in your head of a bunch of brave

1452
01:25:42,560 --> 01:25:47,280
Speaker 1: guys with sharp pointy sticks killing this trumpeting animal. Oh

1453
01:25:47,360 --> 01:25:51,320
Speaker 1: there you go. Burn Well, several of the mammoths at

1454
01:25:51,479 --> 01:25:55,760
Speaker 1: um at the Clovis site had already died. And we

1455
01:25:55,880 --> 01:25:59,759
Speaker 1: know this because they were literally prying apart their feet

1456
01:26:00,439 --> 01:26:03,200
Speaker 1: after the rigor mortis had set in. They were scavenging

1457
01:26:03,200 --> 01:26:06,160
Speaker 1: the carcasses. They weren't killing these things. Now, some of

1458
01:26:06,160 --> 01:26:09,800
Speaker 1: them were genuinely killed, right, we have we have absolutely

1459
01:26:09,880 --> 01:26:12,920
Speaker 1: unequivocal evidence that people did kill these l because there

1460
01:26:12,960 --> 01:26:17,120
Speaker 1: was there was a skull well the projectile point. But

1461
01:26:17,160 --> 01:26:21,439
Speaker 1: then that was questioned, right, like project like a thing

1462
01:26:21,720 --> 01:26:24,000
Speaker 1: stuck in its eye socket. But then later people thought

1463
01:26:24,040 --> 01:26:27,160
Speaker 1: that it was just someone just did it after the

1464
01:26:27,160 --> 01:26:29,800
Speaker 1: fact they came out of the black Water draw site.

1465
01:26:29,840 --> 01:26:31,760
Speaker 1: That doesn't I mean, you know better me? Yeah, I know,

1466
01:26:31,800 --> 01:26:33,439
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to home a few more bars before

1467
01:26:33,439 --> 01:26:37,880
Speaker 1: I get that one. I'm not sure. I okay. What

1468
01:26:37,960 --> 01:26:41,639
Speaker 1: I had heard there was like that there was somehow

1469
01:26:41,680 --> 01:26:45,960
Speaker 1: in the history of this site someone had produced skull

1470
01:26:46,120 --> 01:26:48,920
Speaker 1: that has a Clovis point stuck in the eye socket

1471
01:26:48,920 --> 01:26:51,880
Speaker 1: and then someone later felt, I think that that projectile

1472
01:26:51,920 --> 01:26:56,479
Speaker 1: point was added to that skull nowadays, Yeah, that would

1473
01:26:56,479 --> 01:26:58,400
Speaker 1: be a pretty stupid place. If you can get to

1474
01:26:58,439 --> 01:27:01,880
Speaker 1: reach the offense, I you're probably in bigger trouble than

1475
01:27:03,800 --> 01:27:06,080
Speaker 1: it was. Whatever the story I heard was, it was

1476
01:27:06,160 --> 01:27:09,360
Speaker 1: it was questionable. Yeah, there was no questionable in C. Two.

1477
01:27:09,360 --> 01:27:13,800
Speaker 1: Is that the word you guys use institution associated? Um? No,

1478
01:27:13,960 --> 01:27:19,439
Speaker 1: these guys were literally prying apart already did elephants, and

1479
01:27:19,439 --> 01:27:22,519
Speaker 1: and they're only partially butchered because they're in a pond. Right,

1480
01:27:22,600 --> 01:27:24,519
Speaker 1: if you're gonna drop a big animal, are you going

1481
01:27:24,560 --> 01:27:26,680
Speaker 1: to drop a big animal in the mud? And if

1482
01:27:26,720 --> 01:27:28,519
Speaker 1: you do, how are you getting it out of the mud?

1483
01:27:29,560 --> 01:27:31,320
Speaker 1: That's a problem. Oh, this kind of thing happens. But

1484
01:27:31,400 --> 01:27:34,839
Speaker 1: sure it's not ideal. It's definitely not ideal, and especially

1485
01:27:34,840 --> 01:27:38,479
Speaker 1: if the animal weighs four tons and you know, so,

1486
01:27:38,520 --> 01:27:40,640
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do? Well, parts of it are

1487
01:27:40,720 --> 01:27:43,360
Speaker 1: kind of sticking out above the mud. You slice off

1488
01:27:43,400 --> 01:27:46,519
Speaker 1: some steaks and you're done. Or you come onto a

1489
01:27:46,560 --> 01:27:49,320
Speaker 1: recently dead animal and you think, yeah, it doesn't smell

1490
01:27:49,360 --> 01:27:52,960
Speaker 1: that bad and you kind of get some meat out

1491
01:27:53,000 --> 01:27:56,040
Speaker 1: of it. Now again, I emphasize that there are a

1492
01:27:56,080 --> 01:27:59,479
Speaker 1: few sites where it's absolutely clear that that people were

1493
01:28:00,520 --> 01:28:03,439
Speaker 1: that we're praying on live animals. But then there's also

1494
01:28:03,560 --> 01:28:07,240
Speaker 1: sites where some of these animals got away, they got shot.

1495
01:28:09,040 --> 01:28:12,280
Speaker 1: There's a very famous mammoth site in southern Arizona, the

1496
01:28:12,320 --> 01:28:15,080
Speaker 1: Nacho site. It's got eight Clovis points stuck in it.

1497
01:28:15,080 --> 01:28:19,120
Speaker 1: It's like a pincushion. But it wasn't butchered. It must

1498
01:28:19,160 --> 01:28:22,400
Speaker 1: have escaped some carnage somewhere and went off to die

1499
01:28:22,560 --> 01:28:26,360
Speaker 1: at eight points in it. Who's got those points? Uh?

1500
01:28:26,400 --> 01:28:32,960
Speaker 1: The Arizona State Museum man pay it late night visits. Really,

1501
01:28:32,960 --> 01:28:37,519
Speaker 1: I never heard that story. But they never got it butcher,

1502
01:28:37,560 --> 01:28:39,840
Speaker 1: they never butchered it. Yeah, there's there's several others that

1503
01:28:39,880 --> 01:28:43,040
Speaker 1: are like that. So people were losing stuff too. Yeah, well,

1504
01:28:43,080 --> 01:28:45,719
Speaker 1: you know the animal I mean, these are highly mobile.

1505
01:28:45,800 --> 01:28:48,559
Speaker 1: These these animals can travel. These animals can book it

1506
01:28:48,760 --> 01:28:52,960
Speaker 1: and you know, if you're not. Uh well. One of

1507
01:28:52,960 --> 01:28:54,960
Speaker 1: the things that we think about the Nachos site is

1508
01:28:55,040 --> 01:28:57,920
Speaker 1: that it was an escape ee from another kill, so

1509
01:28:58,040 --> 01:29:00,840
Speaker 1: that they were busy chowing down on the animals that

1510
01:29:00,880 --> 01:29:07,000
Speaker 1: they had killed and saying, yeah, I forget him, got

1511
01:29:07,040 --> 01:29:11,040
Speaker 1: him eight times. Yeah, I realized now we're gonna have

1512
01:29:11,040 --> 01:29:13,639
Speaker 1: to have a part two. But I wanna, um, because

1513
01:29:13,920 --> 01:29:15,320
Speaker 1: one of the things I want to talk about was,

1514
01:29:16,160 --> 01:29:19,840
Speaker 1: and it's nothing you talk about your books, is the

1515
01:29:21,680 --> 01:29:23,680
Speaker 1: don't even answer because this is part two. Sometimes we

1516
01:29:23,680 --> 01:29:25,280
Speaker 1: can will bother you, wait a year, and then bother

1517
01:29:25,360 --> 01:29:30,040
Speaker 1: you again. Um. That the love affair with these guys

1518
01:29:30,080 --> 01:29:33,479
Speaker 1: being these like big hunters and missing and I was

1519
01:29:33,520 --> 01:29:35,360
Speaker 1: kind of alluding to it when I got to what

1520
01:29:35,360 --> 01:29:38,160
Speaker 1: what they were interested in at the fulsome site and

1521
01:29:38,640 --> 01:29:42,760
Speaker 1: your argument of that they probably had like an enormously

1522
01:29:42,960 --> 01:29:49,360
Speaker 1: very diet shellfish, plant matter, small mammals that just isn't

1523
01:29:50,960 --> 01:29:53,880
Speaker 1: we don't see it. And then when people would find sites,

1524
01:29:54,200 --> 01:29:57,519
Speaker 1: they weren't looking for it. Yeah, I mean they didn't

1525
01:29:57,560 --> 01:29:59,080
Speaker 1: know what to say, like, oh, yeah, they're like eating

1526
01:29:59,080 --> 01:30:03,960
Speaker 1: little turtles, they're cracking clams open, you know whatever. Um,

1527
01:30:04,000 --> 01:30:06,000
Speaker 1: I'll answer you now, but we'll save it for part two.

1528
01:30:06,960 --> 01:30:08,720
Speaker 1: That's fine, because I do have one more question I'm

1529
01:30:08,720 --> 01:30:11,280
Speaker 1: gonna ask about for part one for part one. It

1530
01:30:11,280 --> 01:30:13,800
Speaker 1: has to do with the projectile points. Fair enough, So

1531
01:30:13,920 --> 01:30:16,840
Speaker 1: the anticipation of the question in part two is that

1532
01:30:16,880 --> 01:30:19,519
Speaker 1: you know we've got so many of these mammoth kills. Well,

1533
01:30:19,560 --> 01:30:23,439
Speaker 1: those are really easy to find archaeologically. Um. I I

1534
01:30:23,520 --> 01:30:26,320
Speaker 1: spent quite a number of years working on the high

1535
01:30:26,400 --> 01:30:29,559
Speaker 1: plains of West Texas, and I can tell you how

1536
01:30:29,560 --> 01:30:32,879
Speaker 1: many times I climbed a windmill to look out across

1537
01:30:32,960 --> 01:30:36,599
Speaker 1: the landscape and I could see an old pluvial lake

1538
01:30:36,640 --> 01:30:39,559
Speaker 1: basin a quarter of a mile away, and I could

1539
01:30:39,560 --> 01:30:42,240
Speaker 1: see an elephant tusk eroding out on the surface. It

1540
01:30:42,360 --> 01:30:46,160
Speaker 1: just gleamed white. Does happened to you? Oh yeah, And

1541
01:30:46,200 --> 01:30:48,680
Speaker 1: so I would just get down off the windmill and

1542
01:30:48,680 --> 01:30:50,800
Speaker 1: I'd go hike over there through the dunes to look

1543
01:30:50,800 --> 01:30:53,680
Speaker 1: at the lake basin and sure enough, oh, there's an

1544
01:30:53,680 --> 01:30:56,680
Speaker 1: elephant here, and then I look around for artifacts. Well

1545
01:30:56,720 --> 01:30:59,160
Speaker 1: that's how most of these sites were found. There's a

1546
01:30:59,200 --> 01:31:02,640
Speaker 1: reason these guys were big game hunters. It's because archaeologists

1547
01:31:02,960 --> 01:31:06,240
Speaker 1: we're only looking for the big bones. But it's it's

1548
01:31:06,280 --> 01:31:08,080
Speaker 1: excusable because what the hell is here supposed to go?

1549
01:31:08,080 --> 01:31:10,519
Speaker 1: By George mcjunkin, You know, I mean, you're just explaining

1550
01:31:10,520 --> 01:31:12,720
Speaker 1: George mac junkin saw a bunch of big bones. Yeah. No,

1551
01:31:13,040 --> 01:31:15,160
Speaker 1: I'm not going to climb up that that windmill tower

1552
01:31:15,200 --> 01:31:17,240
Speaker 1: and see, Oh look there were a bunch of mice

1553
01:31:17,280 --> 01:31:20,800
Speaker 1: that were killed over there. Yeah, it's not gonna be

1554
01:31:20,880 --> 01:31:23,400
Speaker 1: visible to you. So it creates this little bit of it.

1555
01:31:27,800 --> 01:31:30,559
Speaker 1: When I was looking into this um and in writing

1556
01:31:30,560 --> 01:31:32,960
Speaker 1: about some of the stuff I encountered, I can't remember

1557
01:31:32,960 --> 01:31:34,840
Speaker 1: who it was. I do remember who it was, but

1558
01:31:34,840 --> 01:31:36,240
Speaker 1: I don't want to. I don't want to say who

1559
01:31:36,280 --> 01:31:37,960
Speaker 1: it was because she didn't say it in the nicest

1560
01:31:37,960 --> 01:31:42,360
Speaker 1: possible way. It was It was a It was a

1561
01:31:42,360 --> 01:31:49,280
Speaker 1: woman um who spoke somewhat negatively of the Bison boys,

1562
01:31:52,160 --> 01:31:55,120
Speaker 1: and she had it in her head as she explained

1563
01:31:55,160 --> 01:31:58,679
Speaker 1: to me, that it was like this these big, macho

1564
01:31:59,120 --> 01:32:03,400
Speaker 1: western guy cowboys who love the story of the big

1565
01:32:04,040 --> 01:32:08,519
Speaker 1: bison hunters, the mammoth hunters, and it that's and they

1566
01:32:08,560 --> 01:32:12,280
Speaker 1: all like to hunt and oh yeah. And then it

1567
01:32:12,439 --> 01:32:14,559
Speaker 1: was like they're there's sort of like their dream of

1568
01:32:14,600 --> 01:32:18,880
Speaker 1: these like hunters. And it caused just in this mindset,

1569
01:32:19,120 --> 01:32:21,679
Speaker 1: caused to miss all these other things that maybe weren't

1570
01:32:22,400 --> 01:32:24,880
Speaker 1: is romantic to think about, which people like traveling down

1571
01:32:24,880 --> 01:32:28,200
Speaker 1: the coast eating clams. Right. No, she's not wrong, she's

1572
01:32:28,200 --> 01:32:30,800
Speaker 1: not wrong at all. Um. There's a I mean we

1573
01:32:30,880 --> 01:32:34,920
Speaker 1: all bring our own particular baggage to our science, and

1574
01:32:35,040 --> 01:32:38,559
Speaker 1: you know, we try and subvert the subjectiveness in in

1575
01:32:38,640 --> 01:32:41,519
Speaker 1: our inquiries, right we want to go where the evidence

1576
01:32:41,560 --> 01:32:45,880
Speaker 1: will take us, um. In my case, so I started

1577
01:32:45,920 --> 01:32:48,719
Speaker 1: doing archaeology when I was fifteen, and I was working

1578
01:32:48,760 --> 01:32:52,960
Speaker 1: on a Clovis site in Virginia, and I remember how

1579
01:32:53,240 --> 01:32:56,519
Speaker 1: desperate we were to find mammoth bones, because well, if

1580
01:32:56,520 --> 01:32:58,320
Speaker 1: it's a legitimate Clovis site, there's gotta be a dead

1581
01:32:58,320 --> 01:32:59,920
Speaker 1: elephant here or something, because they are never more intent

1582
01:33:00,040 --> 01:33:04,280
Speaker 1: from elephants, right um. And it was a spectacular site

1583
01:33:04,320 --> 01:33:06,839
Speaker 1: because it was sitting literally right on a church source,

1584
01:33:07,280 --> 01:33:10,120
Speaker 1: and they were making all these fabulous stone tools, and

1585
01:33:10,160 --> 01:33:14,240
Speaker 1: we had detailed records of literally individuals sitting there cross legged,

1586
01:33:14,439 --> 01:33:16,880
Speaker 1: napping a stone tool, standing up and walking away, and

1587
01:33:16,880 --> 01:33:19,400
Speaker 1: you could still see the artifacts that had rained down

1588
01:33:19,479 --> 01:33:22,479
Speaker 1: on either side of their crossed legs, and they got

1589
01:33:22,479 --> 01:33:24,960
Speaker 1: covered up almost immediately, and it still preserved ten thousand

1590
01:33:24,960 --> 01:33:26,880
Speaker 1: plus years later, and I thought, well, this is really cool,

1591
01:33:27,360 --> 01:33:32,920
Speaker 1: but no elephants. And I remember this was nineteen so

1592
01:33:32,960 --> 01:33:35,040
Speaker 1: this was the second season of their nineteen seventy two

1593
01:33:35,160 --> 01:33:38,320
Speaker 1: Hurricane agnes Is bearing down on the East coast and

1594
01:33:38,360 --> 01:33:41,080
Speaker 1: we are down in a pit ten twelve feet below

1595
01:33:41,120 --> 01:33:43,880
Speaker 1: the surface and we found what that's how deep this

1596
01:33:43,880 --> 01:33:47,479
Speaker 1: stuff is? Oh yeah, well in that particular site, Yeah,

1597
01:33:47,680 --> 01:33:49,720
Speaker 1: we found what we thought was a mammoth vertebrae. And

1598
01:33:49,760 --> 01:33:52,719
Speaker 1: I remember how excited everybody was and how how anxious

1599
01:33:52,760 --> 01:33:55,479
Speaker 1: everybody was because you know the hurricanes coming. We're literally

1600
01:33:55,560 --> 01:34:00,479
Speaker 1: right on the edge of the Shanandoah River, rivers rising fast, um,

1601
01:34:00,479 --> 01:34:02,559
Speaker 1: and everybody works late into the night to get this

1602
01:34:02,600 --> 01:34:03,960
Speaker 1: thing out of the ground. We get it back to

1603
01:34:04,000 --> 01:34:06,439
Speaker 1: the lab and in the sort of smoky glow of

1604
01:34:06,479 --> 01:34:10,240
Speaker 1: these lanterns, it gets cleaned up and we discover it's

1605
01:34:10,240 --> 01:34:12,920
Speaker 1: a piece of court site doing a really good imitation

1606
01:34:13,200 --> 01:34:16,760
Speaker 1: of a mammoth vertebrae. And I remember how how just

1607
01:34:16,840 --> 01:34:20,840
Speaker 1: busted everybody was. Yeah, and all the older kids got

1608
01:34:20,880 --> 01:34:22,840
Speaker 1: to go off and get stoned and drink and you know,

1609
01:34:23,040 --> 01:34:26,240
Speaker 1: I'm just sixteen. What am I doing? Um? And it

1610
01:34:26,400 --> 01:34:29,880
Speaker 1: really it It was a memory for me that I

1611
01:34:30,160 --> 01:34:34,320
Speaker 1: thought to myself, why were we so disappointed? What was

1612
01:34:34,360 --> 01:34:36,439
Speaker 1: it about it? And what what was it that made

1613
01:34:36,439 --> 01:34:39,360
Speaker 1: this site somehow inadequate? That we didn't have a dead

1614
01:34:39,400 --> 01:34:43,120
Speaker 1: elephant in it. And so I mean you asked earlier,

1615
01:34:43,240 --> 01:34:45,400
Speaker 1: was I ever an over killer? Well, no, I mean

1616
01:34:45,400 --> 01:34:47,840
Speaker 1: that was part of my my growing up experience as

1617
01:34:47,840 --> 01:34:51,280
Speaker 1: an archaeologists was I thought to myself, you know, maybe

1618
01:34:51,479 --> 01:34:55,479
Speaker 1: we've been letting our expectations drive the way we do

1619
01:34:55,560 --> 01:34:58,960
Speaker 1: our field work, or the kinds of anticipations that we

1620
01:34:59,040 --> 01:35:01,439
Speaker 1: have for what we're going to mind at an archaeological site.

1621
01:35:02,240 --> 01:35:04,400
Speaker 1: Maybe we need to sort of clear all that clutter

1622
01:35:04,439 --> 01:35:07,080
Speaker 1: out of our heads and try and think, you know,

1623
01:35:07,200 --> 01:35:10,280
Speaker 1: what does the record actually tell us? And to what

1624
01:35:10,400 --> 01:35:13,200
Speaker 1: degree is that record biased by what we're looking for

1625
01:35:13,280 --> 01:35:16,639
Speaker 1: as opposed to seeing what's in front of us. Before

1626
01:35:16,680 --> 01:35:20,000
Speaker 1: I get to my last question, uh, the thing I'd

1627
01:35:20,040 --> 01:35:23,920
Speaker 1: like to think about is that our thinking is still

1628
01:35:24,000 --> 01:35:28,679
Speaker 1: riddled with them. And you know, in in in in

1629
01:35:29,040 --> 01:35:34,640
Speaker 1: your fifty years from now, people will be laughing. I

1630
01:35:34,640 --> 01:35:35,960
Speaker 1: don't mean this isn't any I don't mean it's as

1631
01:35:36,000 --> 01:35:38,160
Speaker 1: an insult. Five years now, if you will be laughing

1632
01:35:38,200 --> 01:35:40,840
Speaker 1: at some of your assumptions, I I will be disappointed.

1633
01:35:40,880 --> 01:35:45,599
Speaker 1: If they don't, I will be disappointed they got lazy. Yeah,

1634
01:35:45,640 --> 01:35:47,759
Speaker 1: It's like, come on, people work hard, There's there's mistakes

1635
01:35:47,760 --> 01:35:50,760
Speaker 1: in here. You just gotta find them. Yeah. No, I

1636
01:35:50,800 --> 01:35:55,480
Speaker 1: mean you want science to improve, you want our understanding

1637
01:35:55,520 --> 01:35:57,800
Speaker 1: of the past to get better, and the only way

1638
01:35:57,840 --> 01:36:01,160
Speaker 1: to do that is to question your assumptions. Historical inertia

1639
01:36:01,240 --> 01:36:04,719
Speaker 1: is a very powerful force. You think what your teachers

1640
01:36:04,760 --> 01:36:08,160
Speaker 1: told you to think. Um, you you go with what

1641
01:36:08,200 --> 01:36:13,360
Speaker 1: the conventional wisdom is, and you don't cross examine it enough.

1642
01:36:13,600 --> 01:36:15,960
Speaker 1: You've got to cross examine that conventional wisdom. The thing

1643
01:36:15,960 --> 01:36:19,679
Speaker 1: I found with the people who are remarkable in this space,

1644
01:36:19,880 --> 01:36:22,400
Speaker 1: and I'll put you and I feel Bath Shapiro. I mean,

1645
01:36:22,439 --> 01:36:24,639
Speaker 1: you guys probably don't think of yourself in the same space,

1646
01:36:24,680 --> 01:36:29,000
Speaker 1: but you know, interesting old stuff. That's a good space. Um,

1647
01:36:29,160 --> 01:36:34,479
Speaker 1: they're not, You're not. She's not that in love with

1648
01:36:34,560 --> 01:36:38,840
Speaker 1: their ideas. It can be the ideas of Like it's

1649
01:36:38,840 --> 01:36:40,880
Speaker 1: like a thing I'm holding, I'm checking it out, I'm

1650
01:36:40,880 --> 01:36:44,200
Speaker 1: curious about it, but I'm not cradling it close to

1651
01:36:44,240 --> 01:36:49,400
Speaker 1: my you know, chest, so no one can come near it. Well,

1652
01:36:49,600 --> 01:36:52,200
Speaker 1: that's that's probably a hard position to hold. Well. That

1653
01:36:52,320 --> 01:36:54,679
Speaker 1: was the thing that was so wonderful and frustrating about

1654
01:36:54,680 --> 01:36:58,400
Speaker 1: Paul Martin, who again wonderful character. He was so good

1655
01:36:58,439 --> 01:37:00,920
Speaker 1: at ropa dope that when you'd pin him down on

1656
01:37:01,000 --> 01:37:04,880
Speaker 1: pleistocene overkill, he very quickly move away and he'd give

1657
01:37:04,920 --> 01:37:07,920
Speaker 1: you another counter argument. Oh damn it. Okay, so wait

1658
01:37:07,920 --> 01:37:10,639
Speaker 1: a minute, can counter your counter And he was so

1659
01:37:10,680 --> 01:37:16,080
Speaker 1: great at defending his argument um that in some ways

1660
01:37:16,120 --> 01:37:20,400
Speaker 1: it was kind of a caricature because it wasn't dead.

1661
01:37:20,800 --> 01:37:25,960
Speaker 1: Yeah he passed away gosh a while ago, no um,

1662
01:37:26,000 --> 01:37:29,360
Speaker 1: but again a lovely man and and very clever, And

1663
01:37:29,760 --> 01:37:34,760
Speaker 1: he was so fixated on defending his theory that he

1664
01:37:34,840 --> 01:37:38,320
Speaker 1: didn't say, Okay, well what is the alternative. I'm right,

1665
01:37:38,360 --> 01:37:40,360
Speaker 1: you should never be in the position of defending your theory.

1666
01:37:40,360 --> 01:37:42,560
Speaker 1: You should always be in the position of trying to

1667
01:37:42,640 --> 01:37:47,160
Speaker 1: kill it. Yeah, that's good advice. See it kind of

1668
01:37:47,160 --> 01:37:49,280
Speaker 1: messes up the flow. But I can't resist asking the

1669
01:37:49,360 --> 01:37:52,600
Speaker 1: last question. You want? That be a great place to end,

1670
01:37:52,800 --> 01:37:55,080
Speaker 1: you know, I was talking about remarkable hosting a remarkable

1671
01:37:55,120 --> 01:37:58,200
Speaker 1: holes would just be like we just end. I'm not uh,

1672
01:37:59,240 --> 01:38:01,200
Speaker 1: because one lasting I want to I want you want

1673
01:38:01,200 --> 01:38:02,800
Speaker 1: to go back. I want to get a better understanding,

1674
01:38:02,800 --> 01:38:08,800
Speaker 1: and I want you to explain to people that, uh,

1675
01:38:09,120 --> 01:38:12,240
Speaker 1: we just we make some different things. We we have

1676
01:38:12,240 --> 01:38:14,599
Speaker 1: a shirt, we just came out with UM, and it's

1677
01:38:14,720 --> 01:38:17,840
Speaker 1: it's like a very rough it's it's a very rough,

1678
01:38:17,920 --> 01:38:21,880
Speaker 1: like history of North American projectile points all way have

1679
01:38:21,960 --> 01:38:25,120
Speaker 1: to like a modern mechanical modern LK crunting point is

1680
01:38:25,160 --> 01:38:27,400
Speaker 1: it's really rough, right, And I knew that when we

1681
01:38:27,439 --> 01:38:30,720
Speaker 1: put the shirt out, um that all the know it

1682
01:38:30,760 --> 01:38:32,920
Speaker 1: alls to be like, oh you you forgot this, and

1683
01:38:32,960 --> 01:38:36,600
Speaker 1: you're so stupid you forgot that. And so I in

1684
01:38:37,520 --> 01:38:41,280
Speaker 1: unveiling the design, um, which it did on on a

1685
01:38:41,320 --> 01:38:43,599
Speaker 1: platform I'm guessing you don't spend a ton of time

1686
01:38:43,640 --> 01:38:49,080
Speaker 1: on called Instagram, and unveiling the design, four followers, Oh

1687
01:38:49,439 --> 01:38:51,160
Speaker 1: I'm gonna blow you up. We're gonna blow you up.

1688
01:38:51,479 --> 01:38:57,000
Speaker 1: So in unveiling the design, uh, I headed the naysayers

1689
01:38:57,080 --> 01:39:04,000
Speaker 1: off by saying, um, this is an approximation. There were

1690
01:39:04,000 --> 01:39:08,280
Speaker 1: many there were many false starts. Oh go ahead, can

1691
01:39:08,280 --> 01:39:10,200
Speaker 1: you pull it up? Oh you want to see it? Yeah,

1692
01:39:10,320 --> 01:39:12,960
Speaker 1: you're easy to find. We're gonna find the wrestling writer.

1693
01:39:14,680 --> 01:39:18,200
Speaker 1: So I say, like the shirts an approximation. These some

1694
01:39:18,280 --> 01:39:23,599
Speaker 1: of these technologies, um, some of these technologies, uh even

1695
01:39:23,640 --> 01:39:25,639
Speaker 1: like modern ones, like they kind of started and didn't

1696
01:39:25,680 --> 01:39:27,280
Speaker 1: catch on. And so this shirt just kind of shows

1697
01:39:27,320 --> 01:39:29,479
Speaker 1: like a rough outline of how these things came about.

1698
01:39:29,600 --> 01:39:32,519
Speaker 1: And I said, for instance, you could make a week's

1699
01:39:32,520 --> 01:39:37,280
Speaker 1: worth of T shirts showing what happened from pre Clovis

1700
01:39:37,320 --> 01:39:39,880
Speaker 1: to like the Woodland or whatever point I made, And

1701
01:39:39,920 --> 01:39:42,439
Speaker 1: a lot of guys on they were like, so glad

1702
01:39:42,479 --> 01:39:46,920
Speaker 1: you are not acknowledged pre Clovis, which is funny because

1703
01:39:46,920 --> 01:39:48,920
Speaker 1: I'm sure you guys are way beyond that. But there

1704
01:39:48,960 --> 01:39:51,200
Speaker 1: was a debate when I was like, when I was

1705
01:39:51,200 --> 01:39:53,280
Speaker 1: getting curious about this, and I met a mutual a

1706
01:39:53,280 --> 01:39:54,880
Speaker 1: guy that you were friends with, and I became friends

1707
01:39:54,920 --> 01:39:59,840
Speaker 1: with him, Tony Baker. Um. When we met, I like it,

1708
01:40:00,280 --> 01:40:03,040
Speaker 1: he are you reviewing the shirt? Like, yeah, but it's

1709
01:40:03,040 --> 01:40:06,080
Speaker 1: it's not in stratigraphic order. You have to have the

1710
01:40:06,080 --> 01:40:09,880
Speaker 1: oldest at the bottom, youngest at the top. Yeah, when

1711
01:40:09,920 --> 01:40:11,800
Speaker 1: you dig into a site, you don't get the oldest

1712
01:40:11,800 --> 01:40:14,120
Speaker 1: stuff at the top. So you got your clothes point

1713
01:40:14,200 --> 01:40:17,800
Speaker 1: right there. I'm not going to complain about anything else

1714
01:40:17,800 --> 01:40:19,360
Speaker 1: about that shirt. It's your shirt. You do whatever you

1715
01:40:19,360 --> 01:40:24,880
Speaker 1: want anyone. So when when I was dabbling in this stuff,

1716
01:40:26,080 --> 01:40:28,200
Speaker 1: there was this sort of debate where there was like

1717
01:40:28,240 --> 01:40:32,559
Speaker 1: people who argued right Clovis. First that this idea that

1718
01:40:32,560 --> 01:40:37,280
Speaker 1: that Clovis hunters were the ones that found the closed arms,

1719
01:40:37,280 --> 01:40:40,040
Speaker 1: were the ones that the first were the first Americans.

1720
01:40:40,080 --> 01:40:43,479
Speaker 1: And then the counter argument, which I think one which

1721
01:40:43,520 --> 01:40:50,439
Speaker 1: one right, is that Clovis emerged as this distinctly American culture.

1722
01:40:53,360 --> 01:40:56,960
Speaker 1: That's absolutely true, from some other group or some some

1723
01:40:56,960 --> 01:40:59,840
Speaker 1: people who had we don't know, from some other technology.

1724
01:41:00,000 --> 01:41:03,400
Speaker 1: It's the part we don't know. So you're absolutely right.

1725
01:41:03,880 --> 01:41:07,680
Speaker 1: The Clovis point is the very first American invention. Right.

1726
01:41:07,800 --> 01:41:10,679
Speaker 1: There's nothing in Siberia like this. There's nothing in Asia

1727
01:41:10,920 --> 01:41:14,840
Speaker 1: like this. Okay, so that was made here, made in America.

1728
01:41:15,600 --> 01:41:17,280
Speaker 1: Who made it? Do you think they stamped it made

1729
01:41:17,280 --> 01:41:23,160
Speaker 1: in America? Well, um, we're not going to go political,

1730
01:41:23,200 --> 01:41:28,320
Speaker 1: but it was made by immigrants, dam it. Um. So

1731
01:41:28,439 --> 01:41:32,000
Speaker 1: you've got this, uh, this Clovis point. But you've also

1732
01:41:32,000 --> 01:41:35,800
Speaker 1: got pre Clovis people here making stuff. And the real

1733
01:41:35,880 --> 01:41:40,000
Speaker 1: question is in terms of populations, what's the relationship between

1734
01:41:40,040 --> 01:41:42,759
Speaker 1: the Clovis folks and the people who were here before Clovis.

1735
01:41:42,840 --> 01:41:47,559
Speaker 1: Are they ancestor descendant? Are they two different groups? Um?

1736
01:41:47,640 --> 01:41:52,639
Speaker 1: And here's where once again that's interesting, man, that there

1737
01:41:52,720 --> 01:41:56,599
Speaker 1: was that there were groups that coexisted, but we actually

1738
01:41:56,600 --> 01:42:00,559
Speaker 1: don't know that, um to be sure, because is you know,

1739
01:42:00,640 --> 01:42:03,799
Speaker 1: pre Clovis stuff. We've got back now to fourteen seven,

1740
01:42:04,080 --> 01:42:06,519
Speaker 1: let's just say, fifteen thousand, rounded on, and they didn't

1741
01:42:06,520 --> 01:42:09,679
Speaker 1: make that point, and Clovis folks are making this point.

1742
01:42:09,720 --> 01:42:13,680
Speaker 1: Was your point cooler or less cool? Um? It just

1743
01:42:13,840 --> 01:42:16,840
Speaker 1: vary depending on where you were it was. It was

1744
01:42:16,840 --> 01:42:20,200
Speaker 1: it as crafty? Um, well, the ones at Montaverti are

1745
01:42:20,200 --> 01:42:24,120
Speaker 1: pretty crafty. Yeah, you look at me like, wow, oh absolutely, no,

1746
01:42:24,240 --> 01:42:30,080
Speaker 1: that's serious stonework. Um. So yeah. So the question is

1747
01:42:31,120 --> 01:42:33,200
Speaker 1: we as archaeologists can look at the points at a

1748
01:42:33,240 --> 01:42:36,360
Speaker 1: place like monta Verde and say, okay, well that doesn't

1749
01:42:36,360 --> 01:42:38,840
Speaker 1: look at all like Clovis, but could they be historically related?

1750
01:42:38,880 --> 01:42:40,639
Speaker 1: We have no way of telling, right, just a couple

1751
01:42:40,640 --> 01:42:42,559
Speaker 1: of different kinds of rocks and they're separated by two

1752
01:42:42,600 --> 01:42:46,639
Speaker 1: thousand years and several thousand miles. If we could get

1753
01:42:46,680 --> 01:42:51,479
Speaker 1: a genome of a pre Clovis person, we would know

1754
01:42:51,560 --> 01:42:55,120
Speaker 1: for sure what the relationship was between pre Clovis and Clovis,

1755
01:42:55,120 --> 01:42:58,400
Speaker 1: because at the moment we have a Clovis genome, and

1756
01:42:58,439 --> 01:43:00,400
Speaker 1: we know we've got lots of genoe him out of

1757
01:43:00,400 --> 01:43:03,559
Speaker 1: Montana exactly right. And we've got lots of genomes that

1758
01:43:03,560 --> 01:43:08,000
Speaker 1: are younger than Clovis. And we know basically everybody in

1759
01:43:08,000 --> 01:43:12,519
Speaker 1: the America's at the genomic level is related. Now they

1760
01:43:12,520 --> 01:43:15,559
Speaker 1: can be more or less distantly related, but they're all related.

1761
01:43:16,040 --> 01:43:18,920
Speaker 1: So the real, you know, the sixty dollar question that's

1762
01:43:18,960 --> 01:43:23,479
Speaker 1: still lnkering out there is what about earlier than Clovis? Um?

1763
01:43:23,479 --> 01:43:27,640
Speaker 1: We actually tried Eskis group tried to get um d

1764
01:43:27,800 --> 01:43:30,479
Speaker 1: NA out of some of the material from Monte Verde

1765
01:43:31,080 --> 01:43:38,400
Speaker 1: and was unsuccessful. Ah, so we're still looking. Uh, I'm

1766
01:43:38,400 --> 01:43:42,160
Speaker 1: gonna ask you what the odds are that we'll find someone,

1767
01:43:42,520 --> 01:43:44,840
Speaker 1: and if we do, what are the odds that it's

1768
01:43:44,840 --> 01:43:50,000
Speaker 1: gonna melt out of the perma frost in Alaska? And

1769
01:43:50,040 --> 01:43:53,000
Speaker 1: I'll point out by another person we both know, Mike

1770
01:43:53,080 --> 01:43:56,360
Speaker 1: cons Sure. I was describing him like, what would be

1771
01:43:56,400 --> 01:43:59,800
Speaker 1: the coolest thing that you could find? And he says,

1772
01:44:00,000 --> 01:44:02,280
Speaker 1: I remember him painting a picture of I'm flying along,

1773
01:44:02,920 --> 01:44:06,960
Speaker 1: you know, and his helicopter absolutely, and they're sticking out

1774
01:44:06,960 --> 01:44:12,760
Speaker 1: of a glacier. Is a damn hand you know? That

1775
01:44:12,880 --> 01:44:18,200
Speaker 1: actually sounded like my um, yeah, that would actually be

1776
01:44:18,240 --> 01:44:21,920
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Um, do you think we'll find something? You know,

1777
01:44:21,960 --> 01:44:25,200
Speaker 1: you never say never in archaeology, but it's but we've

1778
01:44:25,200 --> 01:44:28,600
Speaker 1: got I guess the problem is right, there's one, you

1779
01:44:28,680 --> 01:44:33,320
Speaker 1: got one good Clovis one. Yeah. But here's the thing

1780
01:44:33,400 --> 01:44:36,719
Speaker 1: about d n A. When you're looking at a genome,

1781
01:44:37,600 --> 01:44:43,080
Speaker 1: you're actually looking at thousands of ancestors because each of

1782
01:44:43,120 --> 01:44:46,920
Speaker 1: those letters in that DNA alphabet, the gees, the seas,

1783
01:44:47,000 --> 01:44:51,559
Speaker 1: the tse, the as um, are getting inherited from an

1784
01:44:51,600 --> 01:44:57,400
Speaker 1: expanding network of ancestors. So with a single genome, you're

1785
01:44:57,439 --> 01:45:01,240
Speaker 1: actually seeing lots of different populations that have contributed to

1786
01:45:01,360 --> 01:45:05,439
Speaker 1: the DNA of that individual. So we actually now we

1787
01:45:05,560 --> 01:45:11,080
Speaker 1: just published last fall um a paper which had some

1788
01:45:11,160 --> 01:45:15,160
Speaker 1: genomes from South America which have a signal which we

1789
01:45:15,160 --> 01:45:20,240
Speaker 1: think is real of UM, a distant austral Asian ancestor.

1790
01:45:21,200 --> 01:45:23,800
Speaker 1: So we know that there are other folks that are

1791
01:45:23,840 --> 01:45:25,920
Speaker 1: out there that are contributing to the d n A

1792
01:45:26,400 --> 01:45:31,679
Speaker 1: of Native Americans. What we don't have at the moment

1793
01:45:31,920 --> 01:45:35,200
Speaker 1: is a full genome of somebody who is not on

1794
01:45:35,280 --> 01:45:39,559
Speaker 1: that direct um that is pre Clovis in age right,

1795
01:45:40,240 --> 01:45:43,800
Speaker 1: and that may or may not be on that same

1796
01:45:44,200 --> 01:45:49,559
Speaker 1: Native American chain of ancestry back to Asia. My my

1797
01:45:49,640 --> 01:45:54,960
Speaker 1: gut feeling, uh is my gut is I don't know. Actually,

1798
01:45:55,240 --> 01:45:57,680
Speaker 1: I'm not going to make any predictions. You know, the

1799
01:45:57,800 --> 01:46:00,600
Speaker 1: archaeology of pre Clovis versus Clovis is so different. Do

1800
01:46:00,640 --> 01:46:02,360
Speaker 1: you think to yourself, Oh, there's gotta be different people.

1801
01:46:02,640 --> 01:46:04,320
Speaker 1: But one of the things that we found out is

1802
01:46:04,360 --> 01:46:08,040
Speaker 1: that you can have very distinctive archaeological records and yet

1803
01:46:08,200 --> 01:46:12,439
Speaker 1: genomically these populations are closely related. So yeah, people do

1804
01:46:12,520 --> 01:46:15,519
Speaker 1: different things. Some people drive one car, some people drive

1805
01:46:15,560 --> 01:46:18,559
Speaker 1: another style of car, same thing. How much time has

1806
01:46:18,600 --> 01:46:22,599
Speaker 1: to go by before I email you come back on

1807
01:46:22,800 --> 01:46:28,400
Speaker 1: and you'd be like really receptive to do it? A year? Um,

1808
01:46:28,400 --> 01:46:29,920
Speaker 1: sure we can talk in a year. I can call

1809
01:46:29,960 --> 01:46:32,439
Speaker 1: you a year, to email a year in a year,

1810
01:46:32,600 --> 01:46:34,360
Speaker 1: when I in a year and whatever in a year,

1811
01:46:34,400 --> 01:46:38,720
Speaker 1: in three months, when I get young June and when

1812
01:46:38,760 --> 01:46:41,080
Speaker 1: you come out here. Something I'm gonna ask about. I

1813
01:46:41,120 --> 01:46:45,920
Speaker 1: want to ask you about, uh, some of the discredited

1814
01:46:46,040 --> 01:46:49,400
Speaker 1: theories that have come up about who the first Americans were.

1815
01:46:50,120 --> 01:46:54,040
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about the idea of successional waves,

1816
01:46:54,640 --> 01:46:56,680
Speaker 1: that it wasn't like one group that showed up and

1817
01:46:56,680 --> 01:46:59,400
Speaker 1: then all Native Americans. But there could have been groups

1818
01:46:59,400 --> 01:47:02,000
Speaker 1: have showed up in, they petered out, they got killed off,

1819
01:47:02,040 --> 01:47:04,240
Speaker 1: they starved to death, and then other groups came in

1820
01:47:04,280 --> 01:47:09,720
Speaker 1: and replaced them. The thing about that ancient people were

1821
01:47:09,760 --> 01:47:12,920
Speaker 1: interested in what they regarded as ancient people and moved

1822
01:47:12,960 --> 01:47:15,639
Speaker 1: their stuff around a little bit, meaning they're like, oh,

1823
01:47:15,640 --> 01:47:17,880
Speaker 1: that's a cool looking projectile point, and they bring it

1824
01:47:17,960 --> 01:47:20,840
Speaker 1: home and to their TV and lay it with their

1825
01:47:20,880 --> 01:47:23,679
Speaker 1: special ship that they like. Um, this is a handful

1826
01:47:23,680 --> 01:47:25,080
Speaker 1: things I want to talk about next time we have you.

1827
01:47:25,200 --> 01:47:29,400
Speaker 1: All right, here's here's the deal that we can cut. Um.

1828
01:47:29,439 --> 01:47:33,599
Speaker 1: I'm just now finished the new edition of First Peoples

1829
01:47:33,600 --> 01:47:36,960
Speaker 1: in the New World. So you told me mine's obsolete. Now,

1830
01:47:37,240 --> 01:47:40,240
Speaker 1: Oh it's horribly obsolete. Yeah, no, it's don't even read it.

1831
01:47:41,439 --> 01:47:45,000
Speaker 1: It's too late. Now sit out on my coffee table. Well,

1832
01:47:45,320 --> 01:47:48,240
Speaker 1: forget everything you knew about it. Block it out of

1833
01:47:48,240 --> 01:47:51,760
Speaker 1: your mind. Um, when it comes out, let's have a conversation.

1834
01:47:51,880 --> 01:47:54,919
Speaker 1: How's that. That's a good time. And I'll be prompted

1835
01:47:54,960 --> 01:47:57,240
Speaker 1: to because I'll see it and I'll be like, that's right,

1836
01:47:57,280 --> 01:47:59,599
Speaker 1: that guy, that's right, that's right. I got a coffee

1837
01:47:59,600 --> 01:48:03,120
Speaker 1: table that needs a book. Thank you seriously this uh

1838
01:48:03,800 --> 01:48:05,800
Speaker 1: and I'm still gonna stand by my earlier statement. My

1839
01:48:05,840 --> 01:48:10,559
Speaker 1: favorite guest we've ever had on Dr David J. Meltzer

1840
01:48:11,439 --> 01:48:38,479
Speaker 1: s M. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, everyone,

1841
01:48:38,520 --> 01:48:40,800
Speaker 1: thanks for listening. Again. And if I said it once,

1842
01:48:40,800 --> 01:48:43,479
Speaker 1: I staid a thousand times. Please go check out our

1843
01:48:43,600 --> 01:48:48,960
Speaker 1: feature length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars

1844
01:48:48,960 --> 01:48:51,439
Speaker 1: in the Sky. You can find it at Stars in

1845
01:48:51,520 --> 01:48:55,200
Speaker 1: the Sky film dot com. It is available for streaming

1846
01:48:55,680 --> 01:48:58,920
Speaker 1: and download. Again, do us yourself a good turn, do

1847
01:48:59,160 --> 01:49:02,360
Speaker 1: us a good turn Stars in the Sky. Find it

1848
01:49:02,479 --> 01:49:05,920
Speaker 1: at Stars in the Sky film dot com. You can

1849
01:49:05,960 --> 01:49:08,719
Speaker 1: stream it, you can download it, and you can watch

1850
01:49:08,760 --> 01:49:10,600
Speaker 1: it again and again. Thank you.