Speaker 1: This is me eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear listening un podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor
Speaker 1: where you stand with on X David J. Meltzer. You
Speaker 1: know it's the writer named David Meltzer. That's gonna be disappointing.
Speaker 1: There's a poem named David Meltzer. There's a medical doctor
Speaker 1: named David Meltzers. If someone goes to if you go
Speaker 1: into Google and you write David Meltzer a auto phills
Speaker 1: David Meltzer anthropologist. Okay, so not David Meltzer, the wrestling writer. No,
Speaker 1: a victory from me. Uh, this is gonna this is
Speaker 1: gonna break some people's some dear friends of mine's hearts.
Speaker 1: But you're the favorite. Yeah, we haven't even started yet.
Speaker 1: You're the favorite guests that I've ever had on this show.
Speaker 1: We can stop right now. I'm good you haven't started.
Speaker 1: I uh um, I'm gonna flatter you a little bit.
Speaker 1: You know how people will have in a in a home.
Speaker 1: You'll have a coffee table right in your sign up
Speaker 1: your living room, and people will position books there which
Speaker 1: are a combination of what the person likes and how
Speaker 1: the person likes to be perceived. I keep I rotate. Well,
Speaker 1: there's there's a couple that aren't yours. I'm a little
Speaker 1: sorry to hear that. We go ahead. Well it's the
Speaker 1: photographer Um Hoffman. So I rotate Hoffman's book of photography
Speaker 1: with I sage people in a New World with your
Speaker 1: fulsome book. I rotate them and I and I put
Speaker 1: them there, and it's meant to be like this is
Speaker 1: my my this is like mikes. You know. My expression
Speaker 1: of myself is that that I value David J. Melzer's books.
Speaker 1: All I can say is, you've just earned yourself the
Speaker 1: next two books. Really, sure you get them on the
Speaker 1: house now, if they're gonna be, if they're gonna be
Speaker 1: on the table, you got them. I almost brought them
Speaker 1: to have you sign them. But they're but they're big
Speaker 1: sons of bitching books. Yeah, I do tend to, right,
Speaker 1: don't I know? Just they're they're they're they're full of
Speaker 1: maps and color, imagery, everything you could want from everything.
Speaker 1: I know when I finished with a book, I know nothing.
Speaker 1: It's all just poured out onto the page, nothing left. No,
Speaker 1: they're yeah, they're amazing, and you do. Um, we'll get
Speaker 1: into what you're working. We haven't. We're telling people all this,
Speaker 1: all them knowing what you do. But UM, a wonderful
Speaker 1: job of of explaining really complicated things in a way
Speaker 1: that don't They don't feel remotely dumbed down, but they're
Speaker 1: still accessible and you still feel like you have like
Speaker 1: you're getting a very scholarly understanding of something that would
Speaker 1: be easy to trivialize. All of us in the business
Speaker 1: have an obligation to speak to the public that both
Speaker 1: pays for people like me and is interested in the
Speaker 1: kinds of things that I'm lucky enough to do, and
Speaker 1: so I really feel that obligation strongly. Uh to write
Speaker 1: in good American that people can understand, which actually is
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot harder than writing for my colleagues.
Speaker 1: It's a whole lot easier just to use jargon because
Speaker 1: I know everybody knows what that is. And then when
Speaker 1: I have to explain something, especially in regard to some
Speaker 1: of the high tech stuff that we're involved in now,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of fun. I hope you keep at it.
Speaker 1: Um not. I want to tell people. Let's say you're
Speaker 1: at You're at a one of your faculty parties. We're
Speaker 1: here at Southern Methodist Universe. You're at a faculty party.
Speaker 1: You meet like an English professor, and you you meet
Speaker 1: an English professor's husband, and he says, so, what do
Speaker 1: you do? You say, so, I work on ice age
Speaker 1: hunter gatherers. That's the sort of boring tagline. Dude, that's
Speaker 1: that's titillating to me. Okay, So what follows is I
Speaker 1: work on the people who are the first to come
Speaker 1: into the America's Imagine what it must have been like
Speaker 1: to look around one day and see no smoke on
Speaker 1: the horizon, no freshly killed animals, no sign of any
Speaker 1: other human being, and realize, oh, we're all alone here,
Speaker 1: and this place is kind of looking different than where
Speaker 1: we came from. And what's over the next hill, and
Speaker 1: what's over the hill next to that. Imagine what it
Speaker 1: must have been like to be that person, to be
Speaker 1: in that group, to see a landscape teeming with animals
Speaker 1: that some of which you've never seen before. And you
Speaker 1: don't know which ones are going to feed you, which
Speaker 1: ones are going to cure you. The plants I think
Speaker 1: you raised in one of your books which ones are
Speaker 1: going to hurt you? When which ones are going to
Speaker 1: try and kill you? Exactly. You have a hypothetical scenario
Speaker 1: and one of your books where you point out something
Speaker 1: that's interesting is that people are coming from the north
Speaker 1: and had been were thousands of years, perhaps separated from
Speaker 1: tropical climates. And you're coming from the north and there
Speaker 1: there's a guy, we don't know, a woman, a man,
Speaker 1: whoever it was, that was like the first one to
Speaker 1: encounter a rattlesnake. No awareness, no even ancestral awareness of
Speaker 1: what that was. You kind of wonder though, Um, I mean,
Speaker 1: you guys surely have encountered rattlesnakes in your travels. And
Speaker 1: there is something that that that hits your reptilian brain
Speaker 1: that says, oh, it's kind of an interesting noise, but
Speaker 1: oh dear, that looks like that could be that could
Speaker 1: be trouble. Um. But yeah, imagine that and imagine all
Speaker 1: these these trees, these plants that you know you kind
Speaker 1: of recognize them. I mean, you know what a tree
Speaker 1: looks like for grind out loud, But what can that
Speaker 1: do for you? And that's one of the really amazing
Speaker 1: things about the peopling processes that after getting onto the
Speaker 1: continent and being here for ten thousand years, there's virtually
Speaker 1: not a single plant that Native Americans hadn't figured out.
Speaker 1: It's medicinal properties, it's food properties, its use as tools.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's really quite remarkable how folks learned about
Speaker 1: this new land. And I suspect they had to learn
Speaker 1: on the go, and they had to learn fairly quickly
Speaker 1: because they were moving with remarkable speed, archaeologically breathtaking speed
Speaker 1: across the continent. Uh, and they were able to figure
Speaker 1: things out. Can you can you explain that? Well? You know,
Speaker 1: let me ask you this, what's the best way if
Speaker 1: we're gonna get in, if we want to do a
Speaker 1: good fly over of the peopling of the New World,
Speaker 1: where's the best way to begin? Because I have in
Speaker 1: thinking about talking to you, there's all these things I
Speaker 1: wanted you to explain. I wanted he was playing like
Speaker 1: Clovis pre Clovis, sort of the moving like our best
Speaker 1: guests of Well, here's nothing I want to explain. How
Speaker 1: for a while the oldest accepted site in the New World,
Speaker 1: correct me if I'm wrong. For a while, the oldest
Speaker 1: one we knew about rock solid was down monta Verde
Speaker 1: right in Chili. Still is, so what happened between that?
Speaker 1: If they're coming from Siberia, what happened between Bryngia in Chili?
Speaker 1: Where's all their stuff? Fair question? Absolutely, these are all
Speaker 1: questions I want to ask you, So you tell me, like,
Speaker 1: what's the best place to begin what we used to
Speaker 1: think was the beginning or what we now think is
Speaker 1: the beginning. Well, so it used to be tough because
Speaker 1: with archaeological material, you're getting what's preserved, and it's a
Speaker 1: crapshoot because we are talking about a relatively small population
Speaker 1: on a vast continent. They're going to be flying below
Speaker 1: archaeological radar for centuries, if not millennia. There's simply not
Speaker 1: enough of them producing enough sites that the odds are
Speaker 1: that you'll find them. Right, So we always knew that
Speaker 1: the archaeological record, the oldest site you find is never
Speaker 1: going to be the oldest site in America. I mean,
Speaker 1: the odds are simply infinitestainally small. But now we've got
Speaker 1: genetics and genomics, And what genetics and genomics can tell
Speaker 1: us is the point at which ancestral Native Americans separated
Speaker 1: from Northeast Asian populations and started to make their way here. Now,
Speaker 1: the moment they split from their Asian cousins is not
Speaker 1: necessarily the moment they headed to the Americas, but it
Speaker 1: gives us a maximum age. And we now know based
Speaker 1: on ancient danna and genomics. And this is work that's
Speaker 1: been done by quite a number of but most especially
Speaker 1: my colleague Eski Willerslev at the GeoGenetics Center in Copenhagen,
Speaker 1: and our work has shown that around twenty three thousand
Speaker 1: years ago twenty three you know, plus or minus a
Speaker 1: thousand were archaeologists, right, Plus and minus a thousand years
Speaker 1: is nothing does around twenty three thousand years ago, we
Speaker 1: have that initial split. So we know that at some
Speaker 1: point after that they're coming this way and there was
Speaker 1: no longer exchange. Correct. We also know that, as you
Speaker 1: just said, we've got Monte verd A and the dates
Speaker 1: they're around fourteen thousand, seven hundred calibrated years. So we
Speaker 1: now have a window within which we can real quick
Speaker 1: explain for people what that means. Ah, okay, So radiocarbon
Speaker 1: years radiocarbon dating. Basically, you're looking at the amount of
Speaker 1: C four team that still resides in a sample after
Speaker 1: a certain period of time. And we know the half life,
Speaker 1: we know how long it takes to disintegrate in a sample. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna annoy you here. Okay, go even deeper the sun.
Speaker 1: Like notice, tell peop real quick, because people get this
Speaker 1: is stuff you here their whole lives. They never know
Speaker 1: like what it means. So the sun comes down, it
Speaker 1: hits our atmosphere. Yeah right, okay. So basically, nitrogen gets blasted,
Speaker 1: turns into a stabile isotope of carbon, normal garden variety
Speaker 1: carbon is carbon twelve, right, and then you've got this
Speaker 1: isotope carbon four team. Carbon four team behaves just like
Speaker 1: carbon twelve in that it joins up with oxygen forms.
Speaker 1: CEO two gets absorbed into living matter. When it's no
Speaker 1: longer being absorbed, when that organism dies, the amount of
Speaker 1: CEO two begins to decay back to basically it's zeros out, okay,
Speaker 1: and it decays at a known rate. It's called a
Speaker 1: half life, and a half life of radio carbon is
Speaker 1: about five thousand seven hundred and thirty years. So if
Speaker 1: you've got half of the amount, not even looking at notes, No,
Speaker 1: I'm just making it up. Um. If you've got half, um,
Speaker 1: half the radio carbon is gone. Five thousand, seven thirty
Speaker 1: years has elapsed, right, okay, So and it just halves halves, halves,
Speaker 1: halves halves. Okay. Here's the problem. The very mechanism that
Speaker 1: creates the C fourteen in the atmosphere in the first place,
Speaker 1: which is the sun bombarding the upper atmosphere and and
Speaker 1: creating all the C fourteen, It's varying. So at certain
Speaker 1: points in the past more C fourteen is being produced.
Speaker 1: At other points in the past, less C fourteen is
Speaker 1: being produced. What that means is that when you get
Speaker 1: a radio carbon date, you've got to say to yourself, Okay,
Speaker 1: if this was a period when excess carbon was being
Speaker 1: produced in the atmosphere, it's going to give me a
Speaker 1: funky date. I've got to calibrate it. And how do
Speaker 1: you calibrate it? Tree rings? Tree rings. When a tree
Speaker 1: grows and you guys cut down trees, right, Um, you
Speaker 1: see all the growth rings. Those growth rings come on
Speaker 1: one year at a time. Okay. If you date an
Speaker 1: individual growth ring on a tree that you've counted back,
Speaker 1: and we now have a tree ring sequence that goes
Speaker 1: back thirteen thousand years in change. I don't know the
Speaker 1: exact number. If I were to look it up, I
Speaker 1: could tell you. Uh, you date those individual rings, you
Speaker 1: know that that ring should be eleven thousand, three and
Speaker 1: forty eight years old, But your radio carbon date tells
Speaker 1: you something else. That's how you know how much it's off, right,
Speaker 1: And so we have these really elaborate calibration curves. There's
Speaker 1: a there's a difference. So a radio carbon date of
Speaker 1: ten thousand years is actually equivalent to a real year
Speaker 1: date about eleven thousand seven d okay. And when you
Speaker 1: and today we're speaking in count well let's speaking and
Speaker 1: basically like we're you're arranging it into years as we
Speaker 1: understand that exactly right, I'm gonna give you real years.
Speaker 1: And the reason I'm doing that is a bit because
Speaker 1: the estimates that we get from genetics and genomics are
Speaker 1: in essentially real years, right, Okay, So we've got the
Speaker 1: genetic estimates at twenty three, Monte Verde has a date
Speaker 1: of four teen seven, fourteen thou seven hundred real years.
Speaker 1: It's radio carbon years. Just to kind of finish up
Speaker 1: with the example is twelve five, Okay, so you can
Speaker 1: see what the discrepancy is between a radio carbon in
Speaker 1: a real year. Okay. So in that window between twenty
Speaker 1: three and fourteen seven, we know people showed up. Now
Speaker 1: there's an issue there because that window is downtown. Last
Speaker 1: glacial maximum, right, the coldest period of the last hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years was between about twenty three thousand and nineteen
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. That's when we had these massive ice
Speaker 1: sheets covering basically Canada. Okay, two big ice sheets. One
Speaker 1: that goes from Newfoundland and lapse up against the eastern
Speaker 1: flank of the Rocky Mountains Lauren Tied ice sheet. It
Speaker 1: goes as far south as Ohio, Central Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: It goes as far north as well. It actually connects
Speaker 1: up with an ice eat that makes it over to Greenland.
Speaker 1: Is there a point when a glacier turns into an
Speaker 1: ice sheet or absolutely um. It all starts with snow,
Speaker 1: and it all starts with summer temperatures. And this was
Speaker 1: figured out actually by a guy sitting in a prisoner
Speaker 1: of war camp in World War One. He was a
Speaker 1: he was a mathematician, and he understood that if you
Speaker 1: play around with the amount of sunlight and heat hitting
Speaker 1: the Earth, you can either grow a glacier or make
Speaker 1: one go away. And the reason this happens is that UM,
Speaker 1: and it has to do with a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: sort of astronomical physics UM, where basically all the planets
Speaker 1: are constantly getting jostled. We like to sort of think
Speaker 1: of our Earth is is orbiting in a particular way,
Speaker 1: and it's always been that way and it's never going
Speaker 1: to change. And that's just not right right because we've
Speaker 1: got all these other planets out there, so we've got
Speaker 1: the gravitational effects of the Sun. But then there's Jupiter
Speaker 1: parked a few orbits out there, and it's also affecting us.
Speaker 1: So at times in the past, the northern hemisphere has
Speaker 1: been closer or further away from the Sun, which meant
Speaker 1: there's been more or less solar radiation hitting the surface.
Speaker 1: When you reduce the amount of solar radiation hitting the
Speaker 1: surface in um the summer, last year's winter snow doesn't melt,
Speaker 1: The next year snow piles up, and if it doesn't
Speaker 1: melt again, well you pile that up to a certain
Speaker 1: depths or so, it compresses, it packs, it turns to ice,
Speaker 1: and it starts to flow. Okay, it used to be
Speaker 1: that there was about a three week window in the
Speaker 1: far North between the last of the spring um freezing
Speaker 1: temperatures and the first of the fall freeze. If you
Speaker 1: close that two to three week window, you could start
Speaker 1: another ice age. I mean you have to close it
Speaker 1: sort of consistently for many, many years, right, um. But
Speaker 1: that's how it works. And so we had this period
Speaker 1: between twenty three thousand, nineteen thousand years ago where you
Speaker 1: had these massive ice sheets that had built up starting
Speaker 1: probably around twenty nine thirty thousand years ago and reached
Speaker 1: their maximum extent between that twenty three and nineteen thousand,
Speaker 1: covering up ground upon which now lives millions and millions
Speaker 1: of Americans. There's a reason Minnesota's the land of ten
Speaker 1: thousand lakes. Those are all glacial puddles, right. Uh. Seattle
Speaker 1: had um an ice sheet basically in downtown Seattle. That's
Speaker 1: why it's a great port. Right. The ice basically created
Speaker 1: these fiords Chesapeake Bay wise, Chesapeake Bay a bay. Well,
Speaker 1: the Susquehanna River had to because and you grow that
Speaker 1: much ice on land, and we are talking about an
Speaker 1: ice sheet that again east coast to the Rocky Mountains,
Speaker 1: and then from the Rocky Mountains to the coast range
Speaker 1: there was a second major ice sheet, the Quardier and
Speaker 1: Ice sheet. You put that much ice on land, where's
Speaker 1: all the water coming from the ocean, right, So all
Speaker 1: of that precipitation, like oceans evaporate, precipitation clouds move over land,
Speaker 1: falls its snow, and then it freezes. It doesn't get
Speaker 1: back to the ocean. So when that happens, you're basically
Speaker 1: locking up about five percent of the world's water. When
Speaker 1: that happens, sea levels drop, and we know that sea
Speaker 1: levels dropped, and this becomes part of the people in
Speaker 1: America story. Right, sea levels drop about a hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty meters, so you know, put it in defeat, uh
Speaker 1: several hundred feet in depth. So you could walk from
Speaker 1: Asia to America and you would have no idea that
Speaker 1: you were walking from one hemisphere to another. And the
Speaker 1: reason you would have no idea is that don't think
Speaker 1: of the bearing Land bridge. Is this sort of skinny
Speaker 1: rope bridge over the Amazon River somewhere. No, it's a
Speaker 1: thousand miles and you know, you look around and it's
Speaker 1: just a continent to you. That's that was one of
Speaker 1: the things that really started to interest me in this
Speaker 1: world a little bit, was when I started to get
Speaker 1: that because in every every like American school child's imagination,
Speaker 1: the Bearing Land Bridge is this thing where you like,
Speaker 1: it's like Moses going through right the part of red seat,
Speaker 1: Like you pack your ship up and it's this narrow
Speaker 1: little thing. Everybody's like, okay, ready, and then you run
Speaker 1: across it. You know, it's like you're you're sort of
Speaker 1: impression of it. And then to go up at what's
Speaker 1: now the would be the foot of it now and
Speaker 1: just you're your Northwest Alaska and you stand there and
Speaker 1: be like, you don't have any you don't understand where
Speaker 1: the oceans sit. You're just out on this massive thing.
Speaker 1: And that's what life on the Bearing the Bearing Land
Speaker 1: Bridge wasn't any more than when you're in Michigan. You're
Speaker 1: very aware of that you're on a peninsula. You're just
Speaker 1: somewhere exactly look at the map, and you also put
Speaker 1: it together. Right. No, that's a great analogy because it's
Speaker 1: a scale issue. You know, humans are small and the
Speaker 1: bearing land Bridge was really large, and you would have
Speaker 1: had no idea. And in fact, you know, there's no
Speaker 1: reason to think that people were only coming in one
Speaker 1: direction either. You know, they could go east, they could
Speaker 1: go west, And we're starting to see some of that
Speaker 1: evidence genetically that these populations are moving back and forth
Speaker 1: across the land Bridge. It was trafficking in humans, plants,
Speaker 1: animals for thousands of years. Yeah, but you're right. But
Speaker 1: there's a point you bring up in one of your
Speaker 1: I think it's I say, people in the New World.
Speaker 1: You bring up a thing and I mentioned I quote
Speaker 1: you on this a lot, and I hope but I'm
Speaker 1: not over emphasizing it. But you bring up a thing
Speaker 1: where you said the movement of people. As people are
Speaker 1: moving around, they're moving quickly. And I can't remember if
Speaker 1: you say this that I added it to it. But
Speaker 1: they're not like running from warfare necessarily, like they're they're
Speaker 1: they're leaving there, They're leaving places they're sparsely populated, four
Speaker 1: places that are sparsely or not populated at all. And
Speaker 1: and you I do know this part. You to the
Speaker 1: point where like you can't rule out some amount of curiosity, absolutely,
Speaker 1: like someone like they're Maybe they weren't like saying, hey
Speaker 1: we're headed America. We're headed of what will become America.
Speaker 1: But they are saying they're thinking something or else. You
Speaker 1: can't account for that they would have gone as far
Speaker 1: as they went. Well, let's put it this way, when
Speaker 1: when Europeans started sailing around the globe, did they find
Speaker 1: a single habitable landmask that wasn't already inhabited. No, everywhere
Speaker 1: they got to there was already somebody living there. Humans
Speaker 1: have been moving for millions of years, but humans, modern humans,
Speaker 1: anatomically modern humans, they've been moving all over the globe
Speaker 1: for the last fifty thousand years. Um. Do we know
Speaker 1: the exact motives? Not really, But I think curiosity had
Speaker 1: to have something to do with it, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: in any group, somebody's gonna say, hey, let's go over there. Uh,
Speaker 1: but let's go over there also has a good um My,
Speaker 1: My now deceased colleague lue Binford always used to say,
Speaker 1: for hunter gatherers, insurance is not knowing what you have
Speaker 1: right in front of you, it's knowing where you go next.
Speaker 1: When things go bad right in front of you, there's
Speaker 1: an incentive to look over that next hill, because especially
Speaker 1: when things are okay, because that's when you have the
Speaker 1: time and the resources and the teenage sons who are
Speaker 1: just driving you insane, and you say, why don't you
Speaker 1: go do a walk about and come back in a
Speaker 1: month and tell us what you've found. I mean, one
Speaker 1: of the really interesting things about where we do have
Speaker 1: oral history records, like in the colonization of the Pacific
Speaker 1: on these remote islands, and the civic inevitably it's younger brother.
Speaker 1: It's like, get him out of the house. He's not
Speaker 1: going to inherit anything anyway. Let's let him get into
Speaker 1: boat and go someplace and and find new things. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so you know there's an advantage to that. Humans
Speaker 1: are also very good at surviving, and that was part
Speaker 1: of that buying that insurance policy. Did you bring up
Speaker 1: like do you address this or here to somewhere else
Speaker 1: that there's that there's yet the idea of expansion and
Speaker 1: you could say that you know, every hill I come over,
Speaker 1: there's more game and right, and the wood sources are
Speaker 1: down by the rivers and no one's burned it yet,
Speaker 1: and it's just good living. But when you look at
Speaker 1: the landscape in the ice sheets, you're talking about there
Speaker 1: had people had to have come up with up against
Speaker 1: what would be perceived as like a hostile environment perhaps
Speaker 1: and then jumped it without question. And in fact, one
Speaker 1: of the things that's really striking about the earliest archaeological
Speaker 1: record that we have is that we've got stuff all
Speaker 1: over the place in a very short period of time.
Speaker 1: So we know people are moving in their tracking great distances,
Speaker 1: but their distribution was broad, it was not deep. We
Speaker 1: are not seeing every single spot being filled in. What
Speaker 1: we're seeing is that these people were probably leap frogging
Speaker 1: right because they are paying attention to what's over the
Speaker 1: next hill. Um, and if it looks bad that way,
Speaker 1: we'll go someplace else, go in another direction. So in fact,
Speaker 1: they are moving, um, not necessarily in a nice wave,
Speaker 1: expanding out, washing out across the continent. Um. They're looking
Speaker 1: for sweet spots. They're looking for the places that the
Speaker 1: hunting is good, the gathering is good. Um, it's a
Speaker 1: decent place to spend the winter, those kinds of places.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're all like us. They want to have comfort,
Speaker 1: they want to have food, they want to have security.
Speaker 1: If you're knowing what you now know, um, I don't
Speaker 1: know why I would ask you two any other way,
Speaker 1: but no, you now, now, if you imagine a colonizing
Speaker 1: group wherever, whether it's in northwest Alaska, whether it's you know,
Speaker 1: here in Texas, fur the South, a colonizing group, a
Speaker 1: group that's not likely to be bumping up against people
Speaker 1: who are already inhabiting lands ahead of them. How big
Speaker 1: are the groups? So um, This is one of the
Speaker 1: things that we've actually been spending a lot of time
Speaker 1: trying to get a better handle on. We actually now
Speaker 1: have again because of the genetics record, we're getting a
Speaker 1: sense of how large these populations are. And uh, well,
Speaker 1: let me answer it in a couple of ways. First off,
Speaker 1: the direct answer to your question, you're probably going to disperse.
Speaker 1: If a hundred of you come into the New World,
Speaker 1: you're not going to stay together as a group of
Speaker 1: a hundred and move all around. Why Why Why do
Speaker 1: you assume that? Because it's well, a couple of things. One,
Speaker 1: if disaster strikes, that's it, end of story. But to
Speaker 1: one of them, it's important things for hunter gatherers is
Speaker 1: information by dispersing your group, by sending out I don't
Speaker 1: want to say pods, right, but by sending out smaller
Speaker 1: units of say, kind of an extended family group. Why
Speaker 1: don't you folks go that way, You go that way,
Speaker 1: We'll go this way and never see each other again. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's one of the really important things. It's not just
Speaker 1: um when you're coming into a new world. Is one
Speaker 1: of my colleagues that says, it's not just what to eat,
Speaker 1: it's who to meet. At a certain point, your kids
Speaker 1: are going to be a marriageable age and you're gonna
Speaker 1: need to find mates for them. Okay. So one of
Speaker 1: the things that we've been looking for for a very
Speaker 1: long time, which um must be out there, but we
Speaker 1: really haven't found a lot of them, are rendezvous sites
Speaker 1: where folks, you know, half a dozen years down the road,
Speaker 1: ten years down the road, they get together to exchange information,
Speaker 1: to exchange mates, to talk to one another. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're fundamentally social beings, right are you? Are you going
Speaker 1: to weave into talking about the lynden Meyer site, Well,
Speaker 1: we could get there. Lyndenmeyer is one of the very
Speaker 1: don't need to I just know the idea of that
Speaker 1: that when you say goodbye, you're not always just saying
Speaker 1: goodbye for forever. Oh never, never, never never. But then
Speaker 1: again this gets back to you're on a landscape that
Speaker 1: nobody else's is around. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: UM and again I keep harping on the genomics because
Speaker 1: it's been so amazing in terms of telling us about
Speaker 1: population history. At the end of their string, Neanderthals were
Speaker 1: becoming fairly incestuous and in breeding a lot, and they
Speaker 1: were doing that because their populations were shrinking and they
Speaker 1: were scattered over a wide area. We now have this
Speaker 1: latest genome that Eski's group published, that we published UM
Speaker 1: just a few weeks back. One of the sites is
Speaker 1: in remote northern Siberia, literally right on the Arctic Ocean. Uh.
Speaker 1: These guys are out in literally it's the end of
Speaker 1: the world. These are early modern humans. These are not
Speaker 1: neander Tolls, and yet we see absolutely no sign of
Speaker 1: inbreeding or anything like that. They are going long distance
Speaker 1: to find mates. They are ensuring that they're keeping a
Speaker 1: healthy gene pool. So yeah, that's very important for humans
Speaker 1: on on an empty landscape, is that you maintain these connections.
Speaker 1: So there's no understanding of a gene pool. Absolutely not.
Speaker 1: But but humans but humans have but humans have a
Speaker 1: tendency to they get that, they get that, um and
Speaker 1: you know, the tendency to not unless cultures tend to
Speaker 1: not want to be incestuous, unless they're the Royal family
Speaker 1: of England. We'll strike that from the record keeping it in.
Speaker 1: So the group size or the rendezvous site where you
Speaker 1: want to get to. Okay, so you want a rendezvous site,
Speaker 1: um that these are These are mobile hunter gatherers. They
Speaker 1: can only carry so much, right, so this is not
Speaker 1: like a potluck dinner where everybody brings a roast or something.
Speaker 1: So you want to have a site that is easily located.
Speaker 1: You want to have a site that's on an ecotone
Speaker 1: where you've got several different ecological units that are sort
Speaker 1: of coming together eco tone, and it's basically where ecological
Speaker 1: um bioms ecotone ecological zones overlap. And when you have
Speaker 1: overlapping zones, you've got greater richness because you've got all
Speaker 1: the animals and plants from this area and all the
Speaker 1: animals and plants from that area, and they're all in
Speaker 1: the same spot in our in our vernack. There we
Speaker 1: would say like we're a bunch of good ship comes
Speaker 1: together something like that. You said so um, because that
Speaker 1: way you've got because everybody's gonna be showing up and
Speaker 1: they're gonna hang out there for what three weeks a month?
Speaker 1: Who knows, right, Um, but that way there's a food source.
Speaker 1: You want to have springs nearby, you want to have
Speaker 1: water stone handy thing to have nearby as well, because
Speaker 1: when you get together, you know, you're sitting around your
Speaker 1: man stone tools. You're teaching the young. Oh hey, you know,
Speaker 1: we've learned this new technique of manufacturing these particular tools.
Speaker 1: Here's how you do it. And you brought up the
Speaker 1: Lindenmeyer site. It's a really important site because it might
Speaker 1: be one of the few instances that we have of
Speaker 1: a genuine bona fide um rendezvous site. Aggregation site is
Speaker 1: the fancy jargon term that we use rendezvous a lot better,
Speaker 1: and with linden Meyer, it's fantastic because it's sitting in
Speaker 1: a spot, a geological spot where you've got this very
Speaker 1: nice exposure of a wall that has um white rock,
Speaker 1: it's got red rock. It looks like a barber pole
Speaker 1: and you can see it from twenty miles away. We
Speaker 1: should point out that this site sits between Denver and
Speaker 1: Fort Collins actually just north of for Collins, nor Collin,
Speaker 1: about sixteen miles north of four Collins. And it's now
Speaker 1: a what's the Colorado Program of Parks umlife, Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: or it's not. It's not a private ranch anymore. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you can visit it. I visited it. I visited as
Speaker 1: a private ranch. No you can. You can now visit it.
Speaker 1: There's a little guest area there that you're kind of
Speaker 1: stand and look out over the site. It's very cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you can see this thing if you just you know,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're there ten thousand years ago, you
Speaker 1: just tell your buddies, we'll meet you at that giant
Speaker 1: rock barber pole. They didn't know what a barber pole was,
Speaker 1: but we'll go with it, um, and we'll be there
Speaker 1: in two years. Right. And it's at that katone where
Speaker 1: there's a whole bunch of springs, there's a lot of animals,
Speaker 1: there's good stone sources and the archaeology there. This is
Speaker 1: fulsome age. So we're not going to go back to
Speaker 1: our radio carbon dates. The radio carbon dates are about
Speaker 1: ten thousand four. The calibrated ages are about twelve four
Speaker 1: twelve three twelve four h twelve three thousand, twelve thousand,
Speaker 1: three hundred. Um. We've got projectile points made out of
Speaker 1: raw material that are coming from different points on the map.
Speaker 1: So clearly it looks like the way is the Texas Panhandle, right.
Speaker 1: It looks as though people are converging on that spot
Speaker 1: from great distances, absolutely carrying with them toolstone. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: one of the things that you're gonna do when you
Speaker 1: meet up with people that you haven't seen in six years. UM.
Speaker 1: One of the currencies, and I don't want to use
Speaker 1: that term in any literal sense, but you say, hey,
Speaker 1: you know I made I made these really lovely points
Speaker 1: out of this really nice material that I have access
Speaker 1: to down in you know, a hundred miles away. I'd
Speaker 1: like you to have it, right, Um, it's it's a bond,
Speaker 1: it's a gift. Now. Obviously, all sorts of other things
Speaker 1: are being exchanged that we're never going to pick up archaeologically, um,
Speaker 1: but certainly stone because the amount of effort that these
Speaker 1: folks put in to making their stone was well beyond
Speaker 1: the necessities of the weapon reef for the hunt we're
Speaker 1: So here's another problem. I'm still stacked u with things
Speaker 1: I wanted to tell people about we haven't got to
Speaker 1: I want to get to that. You can write it now.
Speaker 1: We haven't got to what the world looked like then
Speaker 1: the critters running around? What was happening to those critters? Extinction?
Speaker 1: Yeah okay? Um, and the diagnostic qualities of their spear
Speaker 1: points projectile points. All right, got it? Got it? Okay.
Speaker 1: Quick question about the Lindenmeyer site. Does it does it
Speaker 1: fit the bill of the perfect like katone? Oh? Absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1: You go there and you're like, man year round this
Speaker 1: place to be bitch and I could give them see
Speaker 1: your back planes to your front Oh yeah, no, you
Speaker 1: you just it's a great place, with the exception of
Speaker 1: the rattlesnakes, and they were they were they used they
Speaker 1: eight turtles and rattlesnakes and stuff at the site. Then
Speaker 1: the camel does there are camel bones? There's camel bones there,
Speaker 1: but they're they're archaeological association is questionable. It was there
Speaker 1: was a bison kill there, that were at least bison
Speaker 1: that were killed there. Um, and turtles. I would I
Speaker 1: would be surprised if they didn't remember. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that this is what I'm that you have whatever is
Speaker 1: happening in the years that they're not camping there. I
Speaker 1: mean that a rabbit dies whatever. You turn up with
Speaker 1: bones and it's probably hard to unless you see knife marks,
Speaker 1: it's hard to know that. That's. Actually one of the
Speaker 1: challenges when you're excavating a site is that um all
Speaker 1: sorts of extraneous things end up in a site, and
Speaker 1: sometimes those extraneous things are rodents um. And you've got
Speaker 1: to decide, Okay, I've got a bunch of dead bison here.
Speaker 1: So when we excavated the Fulsome site, we had a
Speaker 1: bunch of dead bison, but we also had small mammal remains.
Speaker 1: And the question is where they also eating the small mammals. Well,
Speaker 1: you look to see is there evidence that they've been butchered?
Speaker 1: You know, can you see cut marks on the bone? Uh?
Speaker 1: Is there evidence that they were burned? Well, if the
Speaker 1: bones were burned, where they burned because the rodent got
Speaker 1: too close to the fire um? Or or was it
Speaker 1: actually cooked um. So sometimes it's difficult to decide whether
Speaker 1: species in an archaeological site were prey or just background noise. UM.
Speaker 1: And in the case of Falsome, it was pretty obvious
Speaker 1: that those bison were prey because well, we've got the
Speaker 1: cut marks on the inside of the jaws where the
Speaker 1: tongues were cut out, probably right at the moment to
Speaker 1: kill tongue being a delicacy, not to me. What are
Speaker 1: the what are the cut mark What are the cut marks? Oh?
Speaker 1: From the stone tools that sliced the attachment of the
Speaker 1: tongue and you can actually see on the inside of
Speaker 1: the mandible. Uh, slices. We can go off to my
Speaker 1: lab after this and I'll show them to you. I've
Speaker 1: got them in the lab. Really, I've seen the photos
Speaker 1: of them. Oh. Yeah, no, I got the real thing. Um,
Speaker 1: did they do it the same way every time? Like
Speaker 1: they were good at it? Oh? I assume. So, I
Speaker 1: mean people when you look at um, planes, bison hunters. Uh.
Speaker 1: Certainly in the in the more recent groups, tongue is
Speaker 1: a delicacy and that was one of the first things
Speaker 1: that went at a at a bison kill eat it tongue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like I say, not for me, I understand. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't like lungs, I don't like brains. Tongues. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what did it look like? Alright, imagine this, You've
Speaker 1: you've made your way over from Siberia into Alaska. You
Speaker 1: don't actually know that, but you're there and you're looking,
Speaker 1: and what you notice is there's all these birds and
Speaker 1: they're flying off in a different They're flying off in
Speaker 1: a direction, and you're thinking to yourself, well, all I
Speaker 1: see is ice, and maybe there's a little bit of
Speaker 1: margin along that Pacific coast. Those birds are heading in
Speaker 1: that direction. That tells me that there must be something
Speaker 1: down there. And this gets to the question you were
Speaker 1: asking about earlier. Are there places that people don't want
Speaker 1: to go? Well, getting from Alaska down to the lower
Speaker 1: forty eight in those days would have been a challenge, right,
Speaker 1: because you've got two options. One is that you come
Speaker 1: down the Pacific coast and there you're dealing with ice
Speaker 1: that is calving off into the sea. Um, it's going
Speaker 1: to have outlet channels coming off of these ice fields
Speaker 1: that are gonna be choked with sediment. You've got to
Speaker 1: cross these things. You've got to work your way around
Speaker 1: these ice sheets. Um. And there may not be a
Speaker 1: whole lot of food resources. But that that route south
Speaker 1: actually opens pretty early. That route south is opened by
Speaker 1: around sixteen thousand years ago. So you remember now let's
Speaker 1: go back to we've got that window between twenty three
Speaker 1: thousand and fourteen seven. If that route south from Alaska
Speaker 1: opens at sixteen that's pretty good timing free relatively ice free.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to wait another probably several thousand years
Speaker 1: before that interior. So there's another route south in that
Speaker 1: route south opens when the ice sheets that basically met
Speaker 1: at the crest of the Rockies start to melt back,
Speaker 1: they start to retreat, So the one that sort of
Speaker 1: spread out from around Hudson Bay heads back east. The
Speaker 1: other one starts to work its way down the west
Speaker 1: slope of the Rockies. And now you've got what's called
Speaker 1: the ice free corridor opening between them. We now know, however,
Speaker 1: that that ice free corridor and this was environmental ancient DNA.
Speaker 1: This is DNA pulled out of sediment in a lake,
Speaker 1: in a lake that was at a pinch point right
Speaker 1: in the dead center of this ice free corridor. And
Speaker 1: let me see if I can create a mental picture
Speaker 1: for everybody. You've got a you've got two massive ice
Speaker 1: sheets butting one another. As they start to pull back,
Speaker 1: they open at the northern end and at the southern
Speaker 1: end like a coat that has a zipper that goes
Speaker 1: both ways, okay, and so if you you you raise
Speaker 1: your lower zipper and you lower your upper zipper, they're
Speaker 1: going to meet in the middle. And that's gonna be
Speaker 1: the last place that opens up where approximately like was
Speaker 1: that that pinch point on the continent. So we're in
Speaker 1: um at about fifty six degrees north in Alberta. It's
Speaker 1: in the Peace River drainage for those of the folks
Speaker 1: that have Google Maps want to kind of check it out,
Speaker 1: and those lakes. We cord the sediment at the base
Speaker 1: of the lake and you can recover DNA from all
Speaker 1: the animals and plants that were around that area and
Speaker 1: right it about twelve in a in a dust like
Speaker 1: sediment form. It's mud. Yeah, you're not finding you're not
Speaker 1: tapping into bones and stuff. No, no, no, it's amazing
Speaker 1: you can find out um. And actually this is really
Speaker 1: going to revolutionize our our understanding of these extinct fauna,
Speaker 1: which I'm gonna get to in a moment, because you
Speaker 1: can see them even if their bones aren't there. It's
Speaker 1: just wild. And what we found in this particular core
Speaker 1: was right around twelve thousand, six hundred boom. You've got mammoth,
Speaker 1: you've got bison, you've got moose, you've got some species
Speaker 1: of fish. There's a seahawk that ends up it's DNA
Speaker 1: ends up in this lake. Now, well that's happening right
Speaker 1: at about twelve six. So what that tells you if
Speaker 1: you prior to that, not not much is going on exactly,
Speaker 1: so that that corridor actually physically opens probably several thousand
Speaker 1: years earlier. But because you've still got two ice sheets
Speaker 1: parked nearby, nothing's growing there and it takes a while
Speaker 1: for it to get you know, you've got to get
Speaker 1: the grass there, you've got to get the plants growing,
Speaker 1: and the animals are going to follow. And that was
Speaker 1: a study that we did. But a study that Beth
Speaker 1: Shapiro's group did, she's fantastic and and her studies showed
Speaker 1: that bison that were separated by these ice sheets during
Speaker 1: the ice Age, so you had a northern herd in
Speaker 1: a southern herd, they get together around thirteen thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: So her dates are thirteen thousand, ours are about twelve six.
Speaker 1: So that's pretty consistent. That's pretty consistently telling you that
Speaker 1: that passageway opens around thousand plus or minus I mean,
Speaker 1: while you already have people down in South America exactly exactly,
Speaker 1: so that tells you people might have been using that corridor,
Speaker 1: but they weren't the first ones there. And in fact,
Speaker 1: the really interesting story is is that that corridor was used,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't by groups going southbound. It was by
Speaker 1: groups going northbound. They were heading back up to Alaska.
Speaker 1: We have archaeological evidence that and it's based on these
Speaker 1: kind of distinctive kinds of projectile points that that we
Speaker 1: see and that's it's indeed on that list. Uh that
Speaker 1: is telling us that, you know, the movement in that
Speaker 1: corridor is principally on the north bound lane, perhaps not
Speaker 1: perhaps not intent like not like, man, let's go back
Speaker 1: up north, because there are probably people who have been
Speaker 1: that had been for hundreds of years to the south exactly.
Speaker 1: But this gets back to those bison. Right at the
Speaker 1: end of the ice age, you've got a H. Dale Guthrie,
Speaker 1: well known, remarkable University of Alaska scientist paleocologist. Dale called
Speaker 1: it the Great Bison Belt. At the end of the
Speaker 1: ice Age, you could walk from Texas to well Mike,
Speaker 1: Kansas site on the north slope of Alaska, and you'd
Speaker 1: be on grass the entire time. If you're living in
Speaker 1: Montana eleven thousand years ago. I'm sorry, I'm in radio
Speaker 1: carbon um old school. Do you think in radio carbon?
Speaker 1: I think in radio carbon, I always have to pause
Speaker 1: and get it into calibrated. You're like someone like you're
Speaker 1: like someone from Europe who's talking to Americans, and they're
Speaker 1: like they do They're like, let me think, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: x feet ten ft. Well, and here's the issue for
Speaker 1: me on that, and that is that calibrations have changed
Speaker 1: over the years. So the first calibration, okay, it gave
Speaker 1: us one answer, and then when the next calibration set
Speaker 1: came out five years later, thou wasn't eleven seven anymore.
Speaker 1: It was eleven five. And so I'm thinking, Okay, when
Speaker 1: you guys get that settled, I'll start using calibrated all
Speaker 1: the time. But until then, radio carbon doesn't change over
Speaker 1: the years, these dates, don't. Do you talk to your
Speaker 1: colleagues and radio carbon. It depends what I'm talking to.
Speaker 1: If I'm talking to a geneticist, I've got to go calibrated.
Speaker 1: If I'm talking to a geologist, depends what kind of geologist.
Speaker 1: I'll go calibrated if I have. Do you guys identify
Speaker 1: each other? Oh, it's a signal? Yeah, No, you tuck
Speaker 1: on your ear so you don't ask. Yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: You don't want to embarrass somebody by asking on that.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, I see fourteen radar goes off. Um
Speaker 1: what were we talking about? Oh? Right, So what does
Speaker 1: the world look like? Okay, so you get into northern
Speaker 1: North America and um, it looks a whole lot different
Speaker 1: than it does today. You've got this vast landscape opening
Speaker 1: up before you. You've got aircraft carriers of the animal
Speaker 1: kingdom wandering past. Right, You've seen mammoth before, but these
Speaker 1: mammoths don't quite look like the ones that you've been
Speaker 1: seeing in Alaska. They're slightly different. You've got large predators
Speaker 1: on the landscape. Um, you've got a smile it on Faytalis,
Speaker 1: which is the best scientific name ever devised. It's the
Speaker 1: deadly claw, It's the saber tooth cat. You've got Arctotis Simus,
Speaker 1: the giant short faced bear. And I had a TV
Speaker 1: role once where I started with an animated Arctotis Simus.
Speaker 1: My kids, I lost all credibility with them. Even with them.
Speaker 1: Look that's on TV with a cartoon bear. Not my
Speaker 1: best moment. Um and thirty eight genera altogether that are
Speaker 1: on their way to extinction. Now, some of them were
Speaker 1: keep keep going with the list, because like multiple species
Speaker 1: of camel ITTs, camels, horses, tapers, peckery's um of hunter
Speaker 1: pound beaver. Oh yeah, kind of kind of like a beaver,
Speaker 1: kind of like a beaver. Yeah. Um. And then you
Speaker 1: had my favorite was the um the glyptodont, which was
Speaker 1: basically I think submersible um Volkswagen with an armored tail.
Speaker 1: And you've got a cliptod on it's about that big
Speaker 1: h You've got um giant ground slots, four genera of
Speaker 1: them that way three four tons uh. And of course
Speaker 1: you've got multiple species of elephant. Uh. It's a spectacular thing.
Speaker 1: And the thing that had always struck people was it
Speaker 1: looked as though they all went extinct at the same
Speaker 1: moment in time. Now, if you're going to have thirty
Speaker 1: eight different genera of animals going extinct, explain genera people. Ah.
Speaker 1: So that goes back to the Lenaean hierarchy that you
Speaker 1: may have remembered from high school biology. Um, species, genus,
Speaker 1: family all that. Uh and genus uh yeah, um, it's
Speaker 1: it's a word. There's a word that you use as
Speaker 1: an there's a pnemonic. Yeah, but King Philip sits on yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so genera is simply the plural of genus. Okay,
Speaker 1: So you've got thirty eight genera. They all appear to
Speaker 1: have gone extinct simultaneously. And you think as many people
Speaker 1: did define simultaneously, I mean on Tuesday, right, I mean, well, no,
Speaker 1: that's the issue is that people thought that they all
Speaker 1: just died at the same geological moment. Now, a geological moment,
Speaker 1: you know, plus or minus a hundred years. Okay, but
Speaker 1: that's really fast. Oh they thought it was plus or
Speaker 1: minus a hundred years. Um, well, actually three hundred years.
Speaker 1: I was exaggerating. But still that's still oh no question, No, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's a that's a lot of narrow, mighty
Speaker 1: narrow chunk of time. Well, and especially if you're talking
Speaker 1: anywhere from a hundred to two hundred million animals. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So can climate do that? Can climate wipe out an
Speaker 1: entire well literally a hemisphere? Because you had thirty eight
Speaker 1: genera in North America and fifty two in South America
Speaker 1: so extinct. Could climate have done all that simultaneously, given
Speaker 1: that you were dealing with animals that live in arid
Speaker 1: and semi art environments, animals that live in the forest,
Speaker 1: animals that live as hurt animals, animals that have basically
Speaker 1: live isolated lives in the woods. Umfer absolutely very different physiology,
Speaker 1: adaptation habitats. Can climate a single climate change wipe them
Speaker 1: all out? And the answer is, well, it's kind of
Speaker 1: hard to aim. But here's the thing. This is like
Speaker 1: a this is a where the logic a little bit
Speaker 1: falls apartners It didn't wipe them all out. Chipmunks were here.
Speaker 1: There's chipmunks. You know, it's like an annoyance of me
Speaker 1: when people say an ice age relic, So like we're
Speaker 1: ice age relics, raccoons or ice age relics, mice or
Speaker 1: ice age relics. And and actually a number of those
Speaker 1: small rodents are still responding to recent climate changes from
Speaker 1: the last ice age. No, but see, this is this
Speaker 1: is where this needs to go. Everything died down to
Speaker 1: the size of a bison. Yeah, no, except for the
Speaker 1: spruce tree that also went extinct, and the snakes that
Speaker 1: went extinct, and Oh yeah, No, I shouldn't say down
Speaker 1: to like and then then the end of there. But
Speaker 1: I mean there were many animals that were bigger than that.
Speaker 1: We'll see this is this is where we're going. Because
Speaker 1: all of these animals thought to have gone extinct simultaneously,
Speaker 1: it couldn't have been climate. Therefore it had to be people.
Speaker 1: It had to be fast moving hunters blasting out across
Speaker 1: the contin Blitz Creek, the overkill hypothesis, all that nutting
Speaker 1: this right, you've got a bunch of people are gonna
Speaker 1: call that? Not now, a bunch of people with sharp
Speaker 1: sticks and pointy rocks at the end are going to
Speaker 1: wipe out a hundred million animals in the space of
Speaker 1: several hundred years. Um well, what we've what we've the
Speaker 1: end of a Rambo movie. Yeah, Adrian, sorry, wrong movie.
Speaker 1: Um At, what we've now realized is that those thirty
Speaker 1: eight genera didn't all go extinct simultaneously. So immediately that
Speaker 1: takes the pressure off of finding a single cause. Okay,
Speaker 1: so now we can say, well, what's happening at the
Speaker 1: end of the Ice Age? See, there's always been this
Speaker 1: confluence of potential causes. The end of the Ice Age
Speaker 1: brings people into the Americas and animals go extinct, and
Speaker 1: so the assumption always was, well, Okay, people come in,
Speaker 1: animals go extinct. They had to be related. Well, no,
Speaker 1: maybe they're both related to that larger trigger, which is
Speaker 1: the end of the ice age. That's an interesting point.
Speaker 1: Rather than one being a symptom of the other, there
Speaker 1: are symptoms of the same thing. And what we now
Speaker 1: know is that some of these animals were probably gone
Speaker 1: twenty thousand years ago, long before people show up, and
Speaker 1: in fact, the majority of those thirty eight genera we
Speaker 1: don't have any evidence that they were around when people
Speaker 1: got here, so they've all disappeared, so there's no association.
Speaker 1: So we do have evidence that people hunted some of
Speaker 1: these animals. There are a grand total of fifteen fifteen
Speaker 1: sites in which we have reasonably secure evidence that people
Speaker 1: prayed on mammoth. There's about a dozen of those sites.
Speaker 1: Masted on. It's someone that's pretty iron clad, like projectile
Speaker 1: points stuck in its skull. Still no question mammoth mastered
Speaker 1: on horse and camel. Mammoth masthed on horse, camel and
Speaker 1: gampath here, so we've got it's it's another l pant
Speaker 1: it's a it's a sort of um more southern um
Speaker 1: elephant that is related to mammoth mastodon. They're all in
Speaker 1: the Proposidian family. Okay, so so tell me the ones again.
Speaker 1: Mammoth mastodon, gampathyre, horse, camel five Now, no kill site
Speaker 1: of a saber tooth. No, no hemia, kenya kills, No
Speaker 1: camel kills, no horse kills, ground cloth no, yeah, no
Speaker 1: ecliptodont kills. Yeah. But that's the thing, is that stuff none.
Speaker 1: I I never read about him. I never thought about it.
Speaker 1: I never thought about the omissions. If you're gonna yeah that.
Speaker 1: And that's the key thing is that people always point
Speaker 1: to mammoth kills. Well, yeah, okay, so somebody killed an elephant,
Speaker 1: but you've still got another hundred million animals you gotta
Speaker 1: get rid of, and you've got another thirty seven genera
Speaker 1: that you've got to kill off. But here's the other thing.
Speaker 1: When you look at the extinctions process in isolation, you've
Speaker 1: got thirty eight large animals that go extinct. Well, there's
Speaker 1: nine large animals that are still around today, moose, cariboo,
Speaker 1: must cox. You know, things that you guys have probably
Speaker 1: hunted over the years, those are megafauna in that definition.
Speaker 1: But more importantly, not only do we have these nine
Speaker 1: genera that survive, we've also got other genera that go
Speaker 1: extinct that are not megafauna. And in fact, even one
Speaker 1: of the megafauna is the astaland rabbit. The astland rabbit
Speaker 1: was the size of a bunny. There's no way that's
Speaker 1: a megafauna. But it went extinct, right, So how do
Speaker 1: you explain that they absolutely how do you explain why
Speaker 1: bison didn't go extinct? So here we have thirty eight genera, Oh,
Speaker 1: no question, right, And we've got thirty eight genera for
Speaker 1: which we have virtually no evidence of human hunting and predations.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, And and bison get hunted for eleven twelve
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand years and in mass kills, right, I mean
Speaker 1: there are single kills of two hundred animals and bison.
Speaker 1: I mean you can still order it ted Turner's Montana Restaurant,
Speaker 1: Montana Grill, Montana Grill, and it's it's really good stuff. Right. Uh.
Speaker 1: So here we have intensive hunting of an animal for
Speaker 1: eleven twelve thousand years, and they don't go extinct, virtually
Speaker 1: no evidence of any hunting of any of these thirty
Speaker 1: eight genera and they do go extinct. Why do we
Speaker 1: think humans were responsible for that? Okay, but when you
Speaker 1: were a younger man, not that your old man. Now,
Speaker 1: when you were a younger man, were you and uh,
Speaker 1: what's what I'm trying to look for an apostle. Were
Speaker 1: you a believer in were you a blitz Creek hypothesis? Man,
Speaker 1: your history isn't tarnished by blitz Creak hupp I liked
Speaker 1: it because of how tidy it was. Oh well, that's
Speaker 1: why a lot of people liked it. And in fact,
Speaker 1: we're like, okay, cool, Now let's move on to the
Speaker 1: next question. Because no, I mean, I do archaeology, and
Speaker 1: I know how many sites killed sites there are. I
Speaker 1: just I never bought it because the evidence wasn't there.
Speaker 1: And people love people love the idea, and nothing they
Speaker 1: liked about the idea, and this is gonna take us
Speaker 1: way astray, and don't you don't need even pursue this thought.
Speaker 1: I think one of the reasons people liked about it
Speaker 1: is because when you look at other when you look
Speaker 1: at examples of human cause environmental destruction, it's nice to
Speaker 1: get It's nice you look at all these horrible things
Speaker 1: are going on. Now, it's nice to be like, this
Speaker 1: is nothing. Those those people, but the ancestors of the the
Speaker 1: Native Americans, they were horrible. They killed everything off. Therefore,
Speaker 1: we should really give ourselves a pat on the back
Speaker 1: for not being so destructive. Um, I think there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of that at play. There's a lot of that.
Speaker 1: And know that this is probably way outside of your no, no, no.
Speaker 1: In two thousand three, Don Grayson and I wrote a
Speaker 1: paper in which we said one of the things that
Speaker 1: made the overkill hypothesis attractive was in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: It came out really in a big way in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties when everybody was all about Earth Day and
Speaker 1: important things like that, and they used it as a
Speaker 1: as a homily, as a lesson of look at all
Speaker 1: the horrible things humans have done. Well, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: this is one thing humans didn't do. Right. They are
Speaker 1: not guilty of murdering the place to see, right, So
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right. I mean, this is something that people
Speaker 1: were using for and that the evidence didn't warrant being
Speaker 1: used in that way. In the tidiness, and because it's
Speaker 1: so baffling, it's nice, like, you know, when you're trying
Speaker 1: to comprehend infinity, like in space. It's comforting if someone
Speaker 1: was say like, oh, no, it does end, that ends
Speaker 1: there's a wall. Yeah yeah, and then you'd be like, well,
Speaker 1: what's past the wall? It would be nice to just
Speaker 1: have to be able to stop thinking about it. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I've seen men in black I know, you know at
Speaker 1: the end where they and everything there's a wall in there. Yeah. No, absolutely.
Speaker 1: It was a tidy explanation, but a wrong one, and
Speaker 1: a badly wrong one. So how broad was for how many? Okay,
Speaker 1: is there is there sort of I know that species
Speaker 1: beginning to end all the time, Like, there's things right,
Speaker 1: we're creating them, not we. Evolution is happening, yeah, the
Speaker 1: earth is whatever. You're producing things and things are dying.
Speaker 1: If you were going to sort of put some brackets
Speaker 1: around this mass extinction, where do the brackets set? Well,
Speaker 1: it does, knowing that there's that it's not hard edged,
Speaker 1: right the edges are yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I
Speaker 1: mean the process was probably starting um as the last
Speaker 1: glacial maximum was beginning. Okay, so some of them are
Speaker 1: disappearing really early on, and some of them are in
Speaker 1: fact making it up until twelve thousand years ago, eleven
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago. It's smeared over time.
Speaker 1: It's smeared over time. Why wasn't it happening during the
Speaker 1: other cycles. Well, now that's that's the gotcha question that
Speaker 1: I always get. So I give a talk was trying
Speaker 1: to do, but I'm I'm glad you did. In fact,
Speaker 1: you can phrase it as I got your question. I
Speaker 1: give a talk about plisuscene extinctions, and I give all
Speaker 1: the evidence as to why humans weren't blamed. In Inevitably,
Speaker 1: somebody raises her hand at the end says, what about
Speaker 1: what about previous? Right? So I make the point that
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of climate changes that are happening at
Speaker 1: different levels that would have impacted different different animals in
Speaker 1: different ways at different times, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: So we really need to get a better understanding of
Speaker 1: how climate change affected individual species rather than treat everything
Speaker 1: is a block. It was alive when extinct. Let's try
Speaker 1: and figure out what was it about glyptodonts that they
Speaker 1: couldn't handle at the end of the Palistocene. So I
Speaker 1: do all this well, and then here's the gotcha. Come around.
Speaker 1: I know you, Yeah, what was it about those? Or
Speaker 1: take something else like a mammoth. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't know. They're extinct animals, and because we don't know
Speaker 1: their physiology, their adaptation, we know something about their habitats.
Speaker 1: But here's where we're going to get past the impast
Speaker 1: We're gonna get past the impast with ancient DNA because
Speaker 1: now we're sequencing their their genomes and we know now well,
Speaker 1: for some species, we know now that their genetic diversity
Speaker 1: was collapsing towards the end of the Palistocene. We know
Speaker 1: now that their populations were collapsing towards the end of
Speaker 1: the Palistocene. We're still not entirely sure why this is happening,
Speaker 1: but it has nothing to do with people, because it's
Speaker 1: happening pre people. Okay, so we are going to start
Speaker 1: to get those answers. This is a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: year old question that people have been struggling with. I mean,
Speaker 1: Charles Lyell, the British geologist who was here in the
Speaker 1: eighteen forties, wrote about this saying, you know, why do
Speaker 1: all these big animals go extinct? We're going to have
Speaker 1: an answer in the next couple of decades, I would predict, man,
Speaker 1: I don't want to do this. It's not a gotcha.
Speaker 1: You ask me the gotcha question, but it's not. It's
Speaker 1: not meant to be like a bad gotcha? What about?
Speaker 1: What about? What about? Right? What about? This is? What
Speaker 1: about is m what about? I don't want to get
Speaker 1: two sidetracked here. But when when they were laying who
Speaker 1: was the guy that laid out the famous he published
Speaker 1: blitz Creek hypothesis. Wonderful guy, the terrific guy. When it
Speaker 1: was so you don't have animosity? Oh no, no, I
Speaker 1: liked Paul when it was laid out. There were examples
Speaker 1: like Rangle Island in this Okay, Rangle Island, the Bearing
Speaker 1: Sea held on to him until four thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: And it just so happens that mugs hadn't showed up.
Speaker 1: They still went extinct. They weren't extinct before people ever
Speaker 1: made it there. I thought it was like contemporary people
Speaker 1: eventually did. In fact, there's some really interesting research that
Speaker 1: um Well Best Shapiro and Russ Graham were just involved
Speaker 1: in on St. Paul's Island, um where basically they showed that, uh,
Speaker 1: these these mammoths were surviving past the end of the
Speaker 1: ice age. Um, they were shrinking because basically they had
Speaker 1: the shrinking, shrinking body size. Yeah, there simply wasn't enough
Speaker 1: to support them. Sea levels were coming up, the island
Speaker 1: was getting smaller, um, they were running out of fresh water.
Speaker 1: There were all sorts of things, and basically they ultimately vanished.
Speaker 1: And I think it's around well ahead of here's part
Speaker 1: two of the got you okay? Good? And then then
Speaker 1: leave it's rest. Then they point out that humans have
Speaker 1: always been in Africa and humans co evolved with what
Speaker 1: makes you think animals didn't go extinct in Africa as well?
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm talking. We're talking about we're talking about elephants. Okay,
Speaker 1: I am sure. That's a great point. That's a great point.
Speaker 1: That's but that's the thing people say, I'm about arguing
Speaker 1: this to you. Tell me, I'm relating to you like
Speaker 1: an argument you're very familiar with. It's always like, okay,
Speaker 1: so elephants vanished virtually everywhere, um that they exist except
Speaker 1: these elephant species in Alaska or I'm sorry, in Africa.
Speaker 1: Hang on, it must be because they were used to
Speaker 1: people and that people couldn't kill them all because they
Speaker 1: co evolved. That's the thing folks say. Yeah, Okay, I'm
Speaker 1: not quite sure that it really has much meaning. But
Speaker 1: in any case, you don't even like the Well, can
Speaker 1: you do a better job of saying what I'm trying
Speaker 1: to say? Um? Well, let me put it this way.
Speaker 1: My my colleague Jim O'Connell, who worked with the Hazza
Speaker 1: in Africa, the Hadza don't describe elephants as animals. They
Speaker 1: describe them as enemies. They don't mess with elephants. Go
Speaker 1: back and read Teddy Roosevelt's encounter with a bull elephant.
Speaker 1: When he got out of the White House, he went
Speaker 1: on a murderous spree in Africa collecting. That's a big
Speaker 1: word for sure. Go ahead. He didn't my favorite food.
Speaker 1: He was stuffing it and sending it to New York.
Speaker 1: But on display, Um and read his encounter with a
Speaker 1: bull elephant and he darn near died uh in the encounter. Okay, Uh,
Speaker 1: these are nasty animals, and whether people were hunting them
Speaker 1: or not, uh, it's pretty doubtful. Okay, But let's get
Speaker 1: to the sort of larger question about the climate. If
Speaker 1: you put the extinctions in context, what you see is
Speaker 1: that all sorts of things are happening at the end
Speaker 1: of the place to see in North America. But you
Speaker 1: almost started saying something he did. Did a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff go extinct in Africa? Some did? Yeah? Yeah, not
Speaker 1: as not as massive and as constrained geologically in geological
Speaker 1: time as in the Americas. Okay, Um, what happened in
Speaker 1: Europe in parts of Europe and parts of Eurasia. Absolutely no,
Speaker 1: we lose mammoths in Eurasia. Yeah, Um, you have massive
Speaker 1: range changes. Caribou don't live in the southeast US anymore,
Speaker 1: Muskoks don't live in Tennessee anymore, and so you've got
Speaker 1: these ecological changes that are taking place. Um, Biota are dissolving,
Speaker 1: plants and animals are moving all. That's a really interesting
Speaker 1: point about muskox I've never thought about then. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you okay, if they found muskoks remains in Tennessee,
Speaker 1: you're saying, and you look at the fringe that they
Speaker 1: inhabited at the time of European contact, you were it's
Speaker 1: like you had ten fingers, they were down to a pinky,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. It's interesting thing like they
Speaker 1: were probably close. Yeah, it could have been close to
Speaker 1: being gone or something, you know, uh well, or they
Speaker 1: just found their niche. Uh and it's a very good niche.
Speaker 1: And in fact, they would have been highly vulnerable human hunting.
Speaker 1: And they're still around. I mean, what's there. What's their
Speaker 1: defensive strategies? They all get heads out, heads out, butts in. Right,
Speaker 1: it's like a faculty. And and it works with wolves.
Speaker 1: But if a bunch of hunters show up and they
Speaker 1: want to kill off all the muscocks, they're they're just
Speaker 1: standing targets, right. Okay, But let's get back to the
Speaker 1: larger picture. Massive range changes, massive ecological changes, um, lots
Speaker 1: of extinctions. Birds go extinct, You've got snakes going extinct.
Speaker 1: You've got reptiles going extinct. You've got turtles going extinct.
Speaker 1: You've got a spruce tree going extinct. There's and Paul
Speaker 1: Martin actually tried to come up with an explanation as
Speaker 1: to why humans would have overkilled a spruce tree. No, Um,
Speaker 1: it has something to do with forest burning or something.
Speaker 1: It didn't work this tree, oh yeah, uh oh yeah,
Speaker 1: And and so all of these things are happening. So extinctions,
Speaker 1: if you rip it out of its context, it looks.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this is horrible. Humans showed up. They
Speaker 1: must be the cause. Well, did humans also cause all
Speaker 1: these other kinds of things going on? No, it was
Speaker 1: the end of the Pleistocene. Now let's get to the
Speaker 1: gotcha question that I wanted you to ask me. Just
Speaker 1: going to ask, So, why is it that they didn't
Speaker 1: go extinct during the previous interglacial? Okay, we've been cycling
Speaker 1: through ice ages for the last two plus million years. Okay,
Speaker 1: So why is it that all these animals didn't go
Speaker 1: extinct and twenty five thousand years ago the last time
Speaker 1: we had a warming event. Why did they only wait
Speaker 1: until ten thou plus years ago to go extinct? And
Speaker 1: the answer is is that, well, some of them did disappear.
Speaker 1: A lot of those species weren't around during the previous interglacial.
Speaker 1: We actually don't know that much about the previous intergl acial.
Speaker 1: In terms of what we know about the last previous
Speaker 1: interglacial is from deep sea cores. We have no idea
Speaker 1: what's going on in the landscape. We don't have good
Speaker 1: records of changes in the vegetation, changes in the ecosystem,
Speaker 1: changes in the environment. It was all demolished by the
Speaker 1: ice sheets. Well, because we just don't have good we
Speaker 1: don't have good samples of it. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: stuff that's a hundred and twenty five years old. You
Speaker 1: can probably count on one hand the number of pollen
Speaker 1: cores vegetation records that we have from a hundred and
Speaker 1: years ago. There's just no data, right, So you can't say, well,
Speaker 1: they should have all gone extinct in the previous interglacial
Speaker 1: if it was climate. We don't know what that looked like, right,
Speaker 1: We still don't know what this interglacial, this transition from
Speaker 1: the ice Age to the not ice Age. We're still
Speaker 1: not fully aware of this, and we won't be aware
Speaker 1: of its effects on these animals until we do each
Speaker 1: of these animals individually, because we've got to figure out
Speaker 1: what is it about a glyptodont that it couldn't handle?
Speaker 1: What is it about the giant ever that it couldn't handle?
Speaker 1: What might be an example, like any example, okay, and
Speaker 1: then then we'll move on to our checklist. But what
Speaker 1: may be any example when you say that it couldn't
Speaker 1: handle it? So one of the things that happens at
Speaker 1: the end of the ice age is that obviously it
Speaker 1: gets warmer, and there's a change in the composition of
Speaker 1: the plains grassland, grasses grass right when you look at it,
Speaker 1: when it's on your lawn or whatever. But in fact,
Speaker 1: there's very distinctive kinds of grass species that occupy that
Speaker 1: that create that landscape of the Great Plains um and
Speaker 1: they're designated by particular carbon pathways. Their CE three grasses,
Speaker 1: Sea four grasses. These are grasses that grow predominantly in
Speaker 1: the summer, and then there's winter grasses. Well at the
Speaker 1: end of the plaista scene Sea four grasses. And this
Speaker 1: is a hypothesis that I've sort of kicked around for
Speaker 1: a few years and and I'm still not convinced it's
Speaker 1: correct and definitely needs testing. But you wanted a for instance,
Speaker 1: at the end of the place to see the plains
Speaker 1: grassland becomes dominantly C four Now Sea four grasses um
Speaker 1: have anti herbivory toxins. It taste terrible and um they
Speaker 1: are not easily digested unless well, one of the principal
Speaker 1: Sea four grasses is buffalo grass. Buffalo love the stuff mammoth.
Speaker 1: They don't have the same kind of gut systems that
Speaker 1: bison do, and so they're on a landscape where the
Speaker 1: resources to them, the food forage to them is shrinking, right,
Speaker 1: and it's becoming more toxic to them. Well, the expanding
Speaker 1: grasses are becoming more toxic to them. H And suddenly
Speaker 1: they're getting out competed by bison. Bison populations are expanding, mammoth, horse, camel.
Speaker 1: They can't cope. One other assibility that people have suggested,
Speaker 1: which um Again, it's gonna be hard to tell and
Speaker 1: test until we get that really high resolution data. But
Speaker 1: imagine this. You're in the middle of an ice age,
Speaker 1: and for a variety of reasons ice age um climates
Speaker 1: were more equable. And by that what we mean is
Speaker 1: that you had cooler summers, warmer winters. Nowadays, out on
Speaker 1: the central part of North America we have really hot
Speaker 1: summers and really cold winters. Okay, during the Pleistocene actually
Speaker 1: wasn't so bad for a variety of reasons, not least
Speaker 1: that you had this massive ice sheet parked over Canada,
Speaker 1: blocking cold Arctic air from coming south. Yeah. When you
Speaker 1: say the extremes, I mean you could live in a
Speaker 1: northern tier state and you live in uh, you live
Speaker 1: in something that can very consistently swing hundred twenty degree
Speaker 1: temperature swings absolutely, like it's not unusual to get a
Speaker 1: negative twenty winter day, and it's not unusual to get
Speaker 1: over a hundred summer day. You've been in North Dakota.
Speaker 1: So now what that means is that if if you're
Speaker 1: an elephant and you've been producing calves and it takes
Speaker 1: you twenty two months to grow another elephant and and
Speaker 1: have that elephant child, Um, you've been used to having
Speaker 1: that elephant in, say March. Well, during the Pleistocene, March
Speaker 1: wasn't so bad. But what happens when that climate shifts
Speaker 1: from a more equable to a more continental, big swing
Speaker 1: and temperature suddenly March instead of being you know, it's
Speaker 1: kind of almost spread. Is the word you're saying when
Speaker 1: you say equable equable e q U a B equator
Speaker 1: Like exactly. I thought you were saying equitable meaning equal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then continental continental is really strong swings in temperature.
Speaker 1: So San Francisco versus North Dakota. Okay, so you've been
Speaker 1: you've been birthing baby mammoths all this time in March,
Speaker 1: and suddenly March damn cold freezing, there's nothing to eat
Speaker 1: and the baby dies, Well, it takes you another twenty
Speaker 1: two months to make another one. You can't respond that quickly.
Speaker 1: And then how many every years to bring it for
Speaker 1: to achieve sexual maturity? Right? Well, exactly right? And how
Speaker 1: many are you going to have over the course of
Speaker 1: a reproductive lifetime? Four five? You know you you sort
Speaker 1: of knocked them, knock the knees out from under them
Speaker 1: in terms of their reproductive cycle. And yeah, you can
Speaker 1: drive mixed in pretty quickly, but these are just you know,
Speaker 1: sort of arm wavy things. Well, no, I understand that.
Speaker 1: You're like, yeah, we don't know upon request, you're taking
Speaker 1: shots at what what sorts of things? Yeah? I know
Speaker 1: him the first to admit. You know, people say, well,
Speaker 1: you've got to have a climate alternative. If you're gonna
Speaker 1: say it's not overkill, well no, I don't because we
Speaker 1: don't have the evidence. We know the kinds of things
Speaker 1: that we need, but we don't have any of that
Speaker 1: evidences yet and we need to get it. So there's
Speaker 1: pressure to to cleanly replace the blitz creek or the
Speaker 1: overkill hypothesis. Someone would want to be like, okay, if
Speaker 1: not that, then prove oh no, I'd love to have
Speaker 1: an answer for him. But this is this is the
Speaker 1: thing I think in in ten years down the road,
Speaker 1: twenty years down the road, we are going to have
Speaker 1: those answers and it's going to come at the molecular level.
Speaker 1: It's going to come out of the DNA. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the cool thing, not hout narrowheads. No, No, we're still
Speaker 1: gonna be doing it. But that's not where the answer
Speaker 1: is gonna be. Can can we jump to projectile points? Okay?
Speaker 1: Lay it out the the obsession with them in the
Speaker 1: early years of your discipline, I was it was like
Speaker 1: this diagnostic tool, and talked about that a little bit
Speaker 1: to approach. You know, that's a really good way to
Speaker 1: describe it, to use the term diagnostic, because um, these
Speaker 1: are artifacts. I mean, these books had all sorts of tools, right,
Speaker 1: we have fixated on that class of projectile points their
Speaker 1: weaponry because they invested a lot of effort in it.
Speaker 1: They invested a lot of effort in the manufacturer, They
Speaker 1: invested a lot of effort in finding the right stone,
Speaker 1: uh in hafting it, attaching it to the end of
Speaker 1: a spear um and they were doing as as I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, they spent more effort on it than was
Speaker 1: warranted by the task at hand. Okay, you feel that's
Speaker 1: you feel that's true. You know, Um, it was fancier
Speaker 1: than it needed to be. You can't help but look
Speaker 1: at some of the stonework and some of the ways
Speaker 1: in which they flaked their artifacts too match up with
Speaker 1: you know, lines in the stone or bands or anything
Speaker 1: like that, and you can't help but think that's a
Speaker 1: human on the other side of that. Somebody was looking
Speaker 1: at that and had I mean, look, when you guys
Speaker 1: go out hunting, you have particular weapons, you take care
Speaker 1: of them. You might I don't know what do you
Speaker 1: do to sort of dress up your your guns or
Speaker 1: your bows. I mean you accessor rise, but nothing that well,
Speaker 1: I'm probably not looking at it right. Someone else might
Speaker 1: look at it and think that there are esthetic modifications,
Speaker 1: but off top of my head, I don't think of Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: but if you're if you're living on a landscape where
Speaker 1: you have relatively little material culture around you, right, and
Speaker 1: one of the things that's emblematic of your group is
Speaker 1: to make these protect these projectile points in a particular way. Um,
Speaker 1: you're going to invest in those things because you want
Speaker 1: people to see you remember the group. You're a good
Speaker 1: flint napper, You've been places, You've collected this really cool stone.
Speaker 1: And because you're investing in that you as an ancient
Speaker 1: hunter gatherer, we as archaeologists can use that because the
Speaker 1: style and the stylistic attributes that they are adding to
Speaker 1: their weaponry, the stuff that goes beyond what's necessary to
Speaker 1: kill that animal is diagnostic of time and of group.
Speaker 1: Enough space. Yeah, because someone's listening and you grab your
Speaker 1: phone and look, you know, type up folesome point, go
Speaker 1: to images and it's it's distinctive, it's it's Yeah, the
Speaker 1: minute you look, you'd be like, oh, I get it. Yep,
Speaker 1: there's nothing that looks like that, nothing at all, and
Speaker 1: so um, it's helpful to us. So the reason we
Speaker 1: have this fixation, and it's it's not always a healthy fixation,
Speaker 1: but the reason we have this fixation on their projectile
Speaker 1: points is that they tell us so much. Okay, and
Speaker 1: especially in the absence of radiocarbon dating, you know you've
Speaker 1: got a falsome side if you've got these points, unless
Speaker 1: you know, you were just darn unlucky and somebody happened
Speaker 1: to have found a falsome point and brought it into
Speaker 1: a pueblo, in which case you're gonna have to say, well,
Speaker 1: that probably doesn't belong there. Um. The downside of that
Speaker 1: is that we've been neglectful of all the other tools
Speaker 1: in the tool kit which you're doing most of the work.
Speaker 1: You know, the scrapers, the knives, the gravers, the drills,
Speaker 1: the alls. How many tools might someone have had, like
Speaker 1: like like an ice age family, what they what might
Speaker 1: they have had? Um? You know, the answer is probably
Speaker 1: in some of the burial caches that we have where uh,
Speaker 1: individuals had died and somebody basically left their tool kit
Speaker 1: with them. Uh. And there's a well known site, uh
Speaker 1: Crowfield in Ontario, and off the top of my head,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking several dozen um, and I could be quite
Speaker 1: mistaken about the number uh by faces and scrapers and
Speaker 1: points were found with the no no actual physical human
Speaker 1: remains were found, but there was a kind of a
Speaker 1: burned area, so it looked as though it was a
Speaker 1: a cremation burial and the only thing that survives is
Speaker 1: the stone. And of course the stone got put in
Speaker 1: the cremation, so it it popped and crazed and and broke. UM.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you could probably. I mean, stone may actually
Speaker 1: have been the least of the things that you had
Speaker 1: to deal with this year. As you're slepping across the landscape. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, are you bringing material for building structures, are
Speaker 1: you carrying children? All that stuff? Yeah, cordage clothing as
Speaker 1: you bone bone products. And I'm glad you mentioned cordage
Speaker 1: because in fact, um we may be missing the vast
Speaker 1: majority of their tools. There are sites that where preservation
Speaker 1: is really really good, and the number of non stone
Speaker 1: artifacts would artifacts in particular by a factor of six
Speaker 1: six times more of that stuff than there is of
Speaker 1: stone tools. We get fixated on stone tools because that's
Speaker 1: all we got. One of the things you you get at,
Speaker 1: uh in your book Folsome is you talk about the
Speaker 1: Folsome type site and what the people who first dug
Speaker 1: it will looking for. They wanted big bones and big
Speaker 1: stone tools. Well, first they just everything else went into
Speaker 1: a pile right because it wasn't of interest. And then
Speaker 1: then later became like really like all the stuff that
Speaker 1: they weren't paying attention to that was so instructive. They
Speaker 1: this was the nine twenties, and what they really wanted
Speaker 1: first off was just a a bison to put on display.
Speaker 1: So these were museum folks out of Denver and they
Speaker 1: just wanted to find a bison that they could rearticulate
Speaker 1: and put on display. And up until about ten it
Speaker 1: doesn't look like the ones we have now, much bigger,
Speaker 1: much bigger, And up until about ten years ago you
Speaker 1: could see it at at what was then the Colorado
Speaker 1: Museum in Natural History which is now the Denver Museum
Speaker 1: of Nature and Science. And then when they realized artifacts
Speaker 1: were there, uh, the site became especially important to a
Speaker 1: broader audience because those bison were extinct, and in those
Speaker 1: pre radio carpon days when you had no way of
Speaker 1: determining how old something was, if you found an artifact
Speaker 1: wedged between the ribs of a now extinct animal, you
Speaker 1: knew that somebody had been around at the time that
Speaker 1: animal was alive. And so fulsome became terribly important in
Speaker 1: n seven because it was the very first site where
Speaker 1: you could definitively say there was a hunter, there was
Speaker 1: an ice age animal, and that hunter killed that ice
Speaker 1: age animal, and then they just you know, that's it,
Speaker 1: We're done. Uh. And seventy years later when we went
Speaker 1: back to the site, there were so many fundamental questions
Speaker 1: that hadn't been answered in the nineteen twenties because well,
Speaker 1: they just wanted to find out how old it was.
Speaker 1: I wanted to find out what was the environment like,
Speaker 1: what was the site like, what were the activities that
Speaker 1: took place there? How many animals were killed? What was
Speaker 1: the season of the year. Uh, did they camp there?
Speaker 1: Did they spend a winter there? Uh? And ultimately uh,
Speaker 1: when we spent three years excavating there and got a
Speaker 1: lot out of the site. The site's very famous, not
Speaker 1: because of what we did there, but because of its
Speaker 1: role in the history of archaeology. But we were really
Speaker 1: pleased to be able to go back there and learn
Speaker 1: a lot more about it. We're off, we're way off
Speaker 1: rejectile points. But you tell the story. But in your book,
Speaker 1: you tell the story of George mcjunkin. Yes, the guy
Speaker 1: that that that found it. He was a am I
Speaker 1: right that he was. He was a freed slave or
Speaker 1: the son of a freed's. George mcjunkin was born a
Speaker 1: slave in pre Civil War Texas, and he took the
Speaker 1: name mcjunkin from his owner. And after the Civil War
Speaker 1: he made his way into northeastern New Mexico and George.
Speaker 1: George must have been a remarkable man because after the
Speaker 1: great flood of Fulsome which cut this arroyo in, sized
Speaker 1: it deeply and exposed the bones, George was doing what
Speaker 1: every good cowboy does after a storm. He went out
Speaker 1: and he was checking his fence lines, and he looked
Speaker 1: down in what was probably about a twelve ft deep
Speaker 1: cut and saw bones. Now, um, I think a lot
Speaker 1: of cowboys looking down seeing bones would have just said, oh,
Speaker 1: bones and kept going. George got off his horse and
Speaker 1: he went down into the arroyo and he looked at
Speaker 1: the bones and he said to himself, we assume these
Speaker 1: are not cowbones. These are buffalo bones, and they're really big.
Speaker 1: And we know he thought something about him because he
Speaker 1: told people about him. George was an amateur naturalist. When
Speaker 1: you see pictures of George, there's very few of them,
Speaker 1: but in one of them he's on his horse and
Speaker 1: in the um scabbard where you keep your rifle. He
Speaker 1: had a telescope. He wasn't interested in shooting coyotes. He
Speaker 1: was interested in seeing what he could see with his telescope.
Speaker 1: So he made frequent trips over to Ratone and there
Speaker 1: was a sort of a kindred spirit there. Fellow by
Speaker 1: name of Karl Schwaheim who was the blacksmith in the
Speaker 1: village of her Tone, and Carl had a wonderful fountain
Speaker 1: outside his house where two male bull elks had gotten
Speaker 1: into Mortal Kombat. Their antlers had locked and they died,
Speaker 1: and Carl thought that was pretty cool, so he made
Speaker 1: a fountain out of it out of the racks. And
Speaker 1: George would stop by and and talk to Carl, and
Speaker 1: he told Carl, he said, you know, on this ranch,
Speaker 1: on the crow Foot ranch where I've been working, where
Speaker 1: on the ranch, foreman, I've I found these old bones.
Speaker 1: And it took years, but Carl finally got up there.
Speaker 1: Uh sadly after um mcjunkin died. Yeah, I I uh
Speaker 1: went to this site and wrote a piece about mcjunkin
Speaker 1: And this kind of thing that happens is that he
Speaker 1: so desperately wanted someone to come look, and then he
Speaker 1: dies and they finally go look, and then like, holy ship,
Speaker 1: this guy found something really others well, so they took
Speaker 1: the bones up to Denver and they said, you know, hey,
Speaker 1: there's there's a bunch of bison bones. And so that's
Speaker 1: when Denver got interested them museum to say, oh, sure
Speaker 1: we could use one for display. Uh. And so that's
Speaker 1: they subsequently went down there but again a few years
Speaker 1: later uh and started excavating and then realized, oh, this
Speaker 1: isn't just a bunch of bones, there's actually stone tools
Speaker 1: down here. What's going on? That's when they started. In fact,
Speaker 1: Karl Schwaheim, our village blacksmith, was hired to do the excavations.
Speaker 1: So he was He spent the summer of working largely
Speaker 1: by himself. And I can tell you from having dug
Speaker 1: that site that it was hard work. He had to
Speaker 1: dig through about nine or ten ft of lake clay's
Speaker 1: which if you've ever tried to shovel that stuff, it's hard,
Speaker 1: hard work. But he got down to the bone bed. Uh.
Speaker 1: He exposed it. Unfortunately that first summer, Uh, the artifact
Speaker 1: that he found popped out of the ground before he
Speaker 1: had a chance to see where it came from. But
Speaker 1: everybody got all excited and they said next year go
Speaker 1: back excavate again, but be more careful. And and that
Speaker 1: was the year that he exposed something, realized it was
Speaker 1: in place, realized it was literally between two ribs and
Speaker 1: stopped the presses or stop all activity, alert the press,
Speaker 1: get everybody out here, and folks came and witnessed it
Speaker 1: in place. It was literally one of those things where
Speaker 1: you sort of you lay your hands on it and say, okay,
Speaker 1: this is real. Uh. And one of the people that
Speaker 1: came to see it was a fellow miham A vy Kidder,
Speaker 1: who was at the time a god in the discipline.
Speaker 1: He was one of the most famous archaeologists in North America.
Speaker 1: He came, he saw, he blessed it. And and it's
Speaker 1: a comment about the way science works when somebody of
Speaker 1: that status looks at that site and says, I'm a believer.
Speaker 1: What are you going to say? What you say is
Speaker 1: I'm with him. I agree. Uh. And so from that
Speaker 1: moment on, Fulsome became sort of the anchor point of
Speaker 1: the first people into the Americas with their very distinctive
Speaker 1: Falsome point. You know what, you still old it because
Speaker 1: I was gonna do I was gonna do a remarkable
Speaker 1: bit of hosting where I brought us back to projectile points,
Speaker 1: but point by by pointing out that that name, the
Speaker 1: town of Falsom, New Mexico, was then bestowed upon the
Speaker 1: projectile point that was found there, the very diagnostic falsome
Speaker 1: point exactly right well down on it as a host. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I was gonna do that, and then you did it.
Speaker 1: Yeah sorry, um, so fulsome point in the projectile point
Speaker 1: conversation people used to there there was falsome point. Everyone
Speaker 1: agreed that fulsome came after Clovis. They didn't know that yet.
Speaker 1: They didn't know that, okay. So Clovis gets discovered about
Speaker 1: half a dozen years later, and at first they weren't
Speaker 1: sure what to do with it because they looked at
Speaker 1: Clovis points. Now, Falsome points are really nice and thin,
Speaker 1: they're very sharp, they're very well made. You look at
Speaker 1: Clovis points and they're kind of larger and clunkier and thicker,
Speaker 1: and you think to yourself, it's fe horse exactly. So
Speaker 1: you think, okay, well, the clunkier ones they must have
Speaker 1: maybe they came later. Everybody sort of forgot what they
Speaker 1: were doing. No, um, they didn't. They didn't know the
Speaker 1: relative age of these things. And it wasn't until about
Speaker 1: five years into the excavations at the Clovis site, which
Speaker 1: took place between nineteen thirty three and about nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: eight that they finally realized that Clovis points were being
Speaker 1: found below the levels in which Falsome points were being found,
Speaker 1: and so therefore where are they both found at the
Speaker 1: Clovis gravel pit? What were people doing there? Hanging out?
Speaker 1: Someone dropped a fulsome point and then thousands of years
Speaker 1: later a guy drops the Clovis point. Now, first they
Speaker 1: dropped the Clovis point, then several thousand years later, Yeah, yeah, um, okay,
Speaker 1: So you're out on the high plains. You've been out
Speaker 1: on the high plains, right. It's not a lot of water.
Speaker 1: The Clovis site is one of those wonderful spring fed
Speaker 1: o a c's in the middle of a vast, semi
Speaker 1: arid environment. Every animal, you know, within a certain radius
Speaker 1: is going to come out there for a drink. Hunters
Speaker 1: were using that spot for thousands and thousands of years,
Speaker 1: and so they were drawn to it, and the first
Speaker 1: folks that were drawn to it we're Clovis people. And
Speaker 1: then they killed some mammoths in there. Uh, they scavenged
Speaker 1: some mammoths and some of them they killed. One of
Speaker 1: the things that's really interesting. People make a big deal
Speaker 1: about folks hunting elephants, and you know, you get this
Speaker 1: romantic image in your head of a bunch of brave
Speaker 1: guys with sharp pointy sticks killing this trumpeting animal. Oh
Speaker 1: there you go. Burn Well, several of the mammoths at
Speaker 1: um at the Clovis site had already died. And we
Speaker 1: know this because they were literally prying apart their feet
Speaker 1: after the rigor mortis had set in. They were scavenging
Speaker 1: the carcasses. They weren't killing these things. Now, some of
Speaker 1: them were genuinely killed, right, we have we have absolutely
Speaker 1: unequivocal evidence that people did kill these l because there
Speaker 1: was there was a skull well the projectile point. But
Speaker 1: then that was questioned, right, like project like a thing
Speaker 1: stuck in its eye socket. But then later people thought
Speaker 1: that it was just someone just did it after the
Speaker 1: fact they came out of the black Water draw site.
Speaker 1: That doesn't I mean, you know better me? Yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: You're gonna have to home a few more bars before
Speaker 1: I get that one. I'm not sure. I okay. What
Speaker 1: I had heard there was like that there was somehow
Speaker 1: in the history of this site someone had produced skull
Speaker 1: that has a Clovis point stuck in the eye socket
Speaker 1: and then someone later felt, I think that that projectile
Speaker 1: point was added to that skull nowadays, Yeah, that would
Speaker 1: be a pretty stupid place. If you can get to
Speaker 1: reach the offense, I you're probably in bigger trouble than
Speaker 1: it was. Whatever the story I heard was, it was
Speaker 1: it was questionable. Yeah, there was no questionable in C. Two.
Speaker 1: Is that the word you guys use institution associated? Um? No,
Speaker 1: these guys were literally prying apart already did elephants, and
Speaker 1: and they're only partially butchered because they're in a pond. Right,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna drop a big animal, are you going
Speaker 1: to drop a big animal in the mud? And if
Speaker 1: you do, how are you getting it out of the mud?
Speaker 1: That's a problem. Oh, this kind of thing happens. But
Speaker 1: sure it's not ideal. It's definitely not ideal, and especially
Speaker 1: if the animal weighs four tons and you know, so,
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do? Well, parts of it are
Speaker 1: kind of sticking out above the mud. You slice off
Speaker 1: some steaks and you're done. Or you come onto a
Speaker 1: recently dead animal and you think, yeah, it doesn't smell
Speaker 1: that bad and you kind of get some meat out
Speaker 1: of it. Now again, I emphasize that there are a
Speaker 1: few sites where it's absolutely clear that that people were
Speaker 1: that we're praying on live animals. But then there's also
Speaker 1: sites where some of these animals got away, they got shot.
Speaker 1: There's a very famous mammoth site in southern Arizona, the
Speaker 1: Nacho site. It's got eight Clovis points stuck in it.
Speaker 1: It's like a pincushion. But it wasn't butchered. It must
Speaker 1: have escaped some carnage somewhere and went off to die
Speaker 1: at eight points in it. Who's got those points? Uh?
Speaker 1: The Arizona State Museum man pay it late night visits. Really,
Speaker 1: I never heard that story. But they never got it butcher,
Speaker 1: they never butchered it. Yeah, there's there's several others that
Speaker 1: are like that. So people were losing stuff too. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know the animal I mean, these are highly mobile.
Speaker 1: These these animals can travel. These animals can book it
Speaker 1: and you know, if you're not. Uh well. One of
Speaker 1: the things that we think about the Nachos site is
Speaker 1: that it was an escape ee from another kill, so
Speaker 1: that they were busy chowing down on the animals that
Speaker 1: they had killed and saying, yeah, I forget him, got
Speaker 1: him eight times. Yeah, I realized now we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to have a part two. But I wanna, um, because
Speaker 1: one of the things I want to talk about was,
Speaker 1: and it's nothing you talk about your books, is the
Speaker 1: don't even answer because this is part two. Sometimes we
Speaker 1: can will bother you, wait a year, and then bother
Speaker 1: you again. Um. That the love affair with these guys
Speaker 1: being these like big hunters and missing and I was
Speaker 1: kind of alluding to it when I got to what
Speaker 1: what they were interested in at the fulsome site and
Speaker 1: your argument of that they probably had like an enormously
Speaker 1: very diet shellfish, plant matter, small mammals that just isn't
Speaker 1: we don't see it. And then when people would find sites,
Speaker 1: they weren't looking for it. Yeah, I mean they didn't
Speaker 1: know what to say, like, oh, yeah, they're like eating
Speaker 1: little turtles, they're cracking clams open, you know whatever. Um,
Speaker 1: I'll answer you now, but we'll save it for part two.
Speaker 1: That's fine, because I do have one more question I'm
Speaker 1: gonna ask about for part one for part one. It
Speaker 1: has to do with the projectile points. Fair enough, So
Speaker 1: the anticipation of the question in part two is that
Speaker 1: you know we've got so many of these mammoth kills. Well,
Speaker 1: those are really easy to find archaeologically. Um. I I
Speaker 1: spent quite a number of years working on the high
Speaker 1: plains of West Texas, and I can tell you how
Speaker 1: many times I climbed a windmill to look out across
Speaker 1: the landscape and I could see an old pluvial lake
Speaker 1: basin a quarter of a mile away, and I could
Speaker 1: see an elephant tusk eroding out on the surface. It
Speaker 1: just gleamed white. Does happened to you? Oh yeah, And
Speaker 1: so I would just get down off the windmill and
Speaker 1: I'd go hike over there through the dunes to look
Speaker 1: at the lake basin and sure enough, oh, there's an
Speaker 1: elephant here, and then I look around for artifacts. Well
Speaker 1: that's how most of these sites were found. There's a
Speaker 1: reason these guys were big game hunters. It's because archaeologists
Speaker 1: we're only looking for the big bones. But it's it's
Speaker 1: excusable because what the hell is here supposed to go?
Speaker 1: By George mcjunkin, You know, I mean, you're just explaining
Speaker 1: George mac junkin saw a bunch of big bones. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to climb up that that windmill tower
Speaker 1: and see, Oh look there were a bunch of mice
Speaker 1: that were killed over there. Yeah, it's not gonna be
Speaker 1: visible to you. So it creates this little bit of it.
Speaker 1: When I was looking into this um and in writing
Speaker 1: about some of the stuff I encountered, I can't remember
Speaker 1: who it was. I do remember who it was, but
Speaker 1: I don't want to. I don't want to say who
Speaker 1: it was because she didn't say it in the nicest
Speaker 1: possible way. It was It was a It was a
Speaker 1: woman um who spoke somewhat negatively of the Bison boys,
Speaker 1: and she had it in her head as she explained
Speaker 1: to me, that it was like this these big, macho
Speaker 1: western guy cowboys who love the story of the big
Speaker 1: bison hunters, the mammoth hunters, and it that's and they
Speaker 1: all like to hunt and oh yeah. And then it
Speaker 1: was like they're there's sort of like their dream of
Speaker 1: these like hunters. And it caused just in this mindset,
Speaker 1: caused to miss all these other things that maybe weren't
Speaker 1: is romantic to think about, which people like traveling down
Speaker 1: the coast eating clams. Right. No, she's not wrong, she's
Speaker 1: not wrong at all. Um. There's a I mean we
Speaker 1: all bring our own particular baggage to our science, and
Speaker 1: you know, we try and subvert the subjectiveness in in
Speaker 1: our inquiries, right we want to go where the evidence
Speaker 1: will take us, um. In my case, so I started
Speaker 1: doing archaeology when I was fifteen, and I was working
Speaker 1: on a Clovis site in Virginia, and I remember how
Speaker 1: desperate we were to find mammoth bones, because well, if
Speaker 1: it's a legitimate Clovis site, there's gotta be a dead
Speaker 1: elephant here or something, because they are never more intent
Speaker 1: from elephants, right um. And it was a spectacular site
Speaker 1: because it was sitting literally right on a church source,
Speaker 1: and they were making all these fabulous stone tools, and
Speaker 1: we had detailed records of literally individuals sitting there cross legged,
Speaker 1: napping a stone tool, standing up and walking away, and
Speaker 1: you could still see the artifacts that had rained down
Speaker 1: on either side of their crossed legs, and they got
Speaker 1: covered up almost immediately, and it still preserved ten thousand
Speaker 1: plus years later, and I thought, well, this is really cool,
Speaker 1: but no elephants. And I remember this was nineteen so
Speaker 1: this was the second season of their nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: Hurricane agnes Is bearing down on the East coast and
Speaker 1: we are down in a pit ten twelve feet below
Speaker 1: the surface and we found what that's how deep this
Speaker 1: stuff is? Oh yeah, well in that particular site, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we found what we thought was a mammoth vertebrae. And
Speaker 1: I remember how excited everybody was and how how anxious
Speaker 1: everybody was because you know the hurricanes coming. We're literally
Speaker 1: right on the edge of the Shanandoah River, rivers rising fast, um,
Speaker 1: and everybody works late into the night to get this
Speaker 1: thing out of the ground. We get it back to
Speaker 1: the lab and in the sort of smoky glow of
Speaker 1: these lanterns, it gets cleaned up and we discover it's
Speaker 1: a piece of court site doing a really good imitation
Speaker 1: of a mammoth vertebrae. And I remember how how just
Speaker 1: busted everybody was. Yeah, and all the older kids got
Speaker 1: to go off and get stoned and drink and you know,
Speaker 1: I'm just sixteen. What am I doing? Um? And it
Speaker 1: really it It was a memory for me that I
Speaker 1: thought to myself, why were we so disappointed? What was
Speaker 1: it about it? And what what was it that made
Speaker 1: this site somehow inadequate? That we didn't have a dead
Speaker 1: elephant in it. And so I mean you asked earlier,
Speaker 1: was I ever an over killer? Well, no, I mean
Speaker 1: that was part of my my growing up experience as
Speaker 1: an archaeologists was I thought to myself, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: we've been letting our expectations drive the way we do
Speaker 1: our field work, or the kinds of anticipations that we
Speaker 1: have for what we're going to mind at an archaeological site.
Speaker 1: Maybe we need to sort of clear all that clutter
Speaker 1: out of our heads and try and think, you know,
Speaker 1: what does the record actually tell us? And to what
Speaker 1: degree is that record biased by what we're looking for
Speaker 1: as opposed to seeing what's in front of us. Before
Speaker 1: I get to my last question, uh, the thing I'd
Speaker 1: like to think about is that our thinking is still
Speaker 1: riddled with them. And you know, in in in in
Speaker 1: your fifty years from now, people will be laughing. I
Speaker 1: don't mean this isn't any I don't mean it's as
Speaker 1: an insult. Five years now, if you will be laughing
Speaker 1: at some of your assumptions, I I will be disappointed.
Speaker 1: If they don't, I will be disappointed they got lazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's like, come on, people work hard, There's there's mistakes
Speaker 1: in here. You just gotta find them. Yeah. No, I
Speaker 1: mean you want science to improve, you want our understanding
Speaker 1: of the past to get better, and the only way
Speaker 1: to do that is to question your assumptions. Historical inertia
Speaker 1: is a very powerful force. You think what your teachers
Speaker 1: told you to think. Um, you you go with what
Speaker 1: the conventional wisdom is, and you don't cross examine it enough.
Speaker 1: You've got to cross examine that conventional wisdom. The thing
Speaker 1: I found with the people who are remarkable in this space,
Speaker 1: and I'll put you and I feel Bath Shapiro. I mean,
Speaker 1: you guys probably don't think of yourself in the same space,
Speaker 1: but you know, interesting old stuff. That's a good space. Um,
Speaker 1: they're not, You're not. She's not that in love with
Speaker 1: their ideas. It can be the ideas of Like it's
Speaker 1: like a thing I'm holding, I'm checking it out, I'm
Speaker 1: curious about it, but I'm not cradling it close to
Speaker 1: my you know, chest, so no one can come near it. Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's probably a hard position to hold. Well. That
Speaker 1: was the thing that was so wonderful and frustrating about
Speaker 1: Paul Martin, who again wonderful character. He was so good
Speaker 1: at ropa dope that when you'd pin him down on
Speaker 1: pleistocene overkill, he very quickly move away and he'd give
Speaker 1: you another counter argument. Oh damn it. Okay, so wait
Speaker 1: a minute, can counter your counter And he was so
Speaker 1: great at defending his argument um that in some ways
Speaker 1: it was kind of a caricature because it wasn't dead.
Speaker 1: Yeah he passed away gosh a while ago, no um,
Speaker 1: but again a lovely man and and very clever, And
Speaker 1: he was so fixated on defending his theory that he
Speaker 1: didn't say, Okay, well what is the alternative. I'm right,
Speaker 1: you should never be in the position of defending your theory.
Speaker 1: You should always be in the position of trying to
Speaker 1: kill it. Yeah, that's good advice. See it kind of
Speaker 1: messes up the flow. But I can't resist asking the
Speaker 1: last question. You want? That be a great place to end,
Speaker 1: you know, I was talking about remarkable hosting a remarkable
Speaker 1: holes would just be like we just end. I'm not uh,
Speaker 1: because one lasting I want to I want you want
Speaker 1: to go back. I want to get a better understanding,
Speaker 1: and I want you to explain to people that, uh,
Speaker 1: we just we make some different things. We we have
Speaker 1: a shirt, we just came out with UM, and it's
Speaker 1: it's like a very rough it's it's a very rough,
Speaker 1: like history of North American projectile points all way have
Speaker 1: to like a modern mechanical modern LK crunting point is
Speaker 1: it's really rough, right, And I knew that when we
Speaker 1: put the shirt out, um that all the know it
Speaker 1: alls to be like, oh you you forgot this, and
Speaker 1: you're so stupid you forgot that. And so I in
Speaker 1: unveiling the design, um, which it did on on a
Speaker 1: platform I'm guessing you don't spend a ton of time
Speaker 1: on called Instagram, and unveiling the design, four followers, Oh
Speaker 1: I'm gonna blow you up. We're gonna blow you up.
Speaker 1: So in unveiling the design, uh, I headed the naysayers
Speaker 1: off by saying, um, this is an approximation. There were
Speaker 1: many there were many false starts. Oh go ahead, can
Speaker 1: you pull it up? Oh you want to see it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're easy to find. We're gonna find the wrestling writer.
Speaker 1: So I say, like the shirts an approximation. These some
Speaker 1: of these technologies, um, some of these technologies, uh even
Speaker 1: like modern ones, like they kind of started and didn't
Speaker 1: catch on. And so this shirt just kind of shows
Speaker 1: like a rough outline of how these things came about.
Speaker 1: And I said, for instance, you could make a week's
Speaker 1: worth of T shirts showing what happened from pre Clovis
Speaker 1: to like the Woodland or whatever point I made, And
Speaker 1: a lot of guys on they were like, so glad
Speaker 1: you are not acknowledged pre Clovis, which is funny because
Speaker 1: I'm sure you guys are way beyond that. But there
Speaker 1: was a debate when I was like, when I was
Speaker 1: getting curious about this, and I met a mutual a
Speaker 1: guy that you were friends with, and I became friends
Speaker 1: with him, Tony Baker. Um. When we met, I like it,
Speaker 1: he are you reviewing the shirt? Like, yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: it's not in stratigraphic order. You have to have the
Speaker 1: oldest at the bottom, youngest at the top. Yeah, when
Speaker 1: you dig into a site, you don't get the oldest
Speaker 1: stuff at the top. So you got your clothes point
Speaker 1: right there. I'm not going to complain about anything else
Speaker 1: about that shirt. It's your shirt. You do whatever you
Speaker 1: want anyone. So when when I was dabbling in this stuff,
Speaker 1: there was this sort of debate where there was like
Speaker 1: people who argued right Clovis. First that this idea that
Speaker 1: that Clovis hunters were the ones that found the closed arms,
Speaker 1: were the ones that the first were the first Americans.
Speaker 1: And then the counter argument, which I think one which
Speaker 1: one right, is that Clovis emerged as this distinctly American culture.
Speaker 1: That's absolutely true, from some other group or some some
Speaker 1: people who had we don't know, from some other technology.
Speaker 1: It's the part we don't know. So you're absolutely right.
Speaker 1: The Clovis point is the very first American invention. Right.
Speaker 1: There's nothing in Siberia like this. There's nothing in Asia
Speaker 1: like this. Okay, so that was made here, made in America.
Speaker 1: Who made it? Do you think they stamped it made
Speaker 1: in America? Well, um, we're not going to go political,
Speaker 1: but it was made by immigrants, dam it. Um. So
Speaker 1: you've got this, uh, this Clovis point. But you've also
Speaker 1: got pre Clovis people here making stuff. And the real
Speaker 1: question is in terms of populations, what's the relationship between
Speaker 1: the Clovis folks and the people who were here before Clovis.
Speaker 1: Are they ancestor descendant? Are they two different groups? Um?
Speaker 1: And here's where once again that's interesting, man, that there
Speaker 1: was that there were groups that coexisted, but we actually
Speaker 1: don't know that, um to be sure, because is you know,
Speaker 1: pre Clovis stuff. We've got back now to fourteen seven,
Speaker 1: let's just say, fifteen thousand, rounded on, and they didn't
Speaker 1: make that point, and Clovis folks are making this point.
Speaker 1: Was your point cooler or less cool? Um? It just
Speaker 1: vary depending on where you were it was. It was
Speaker 1: it as crafty? Um, well, the ones at Montaverti are
Speaker 1: pretty crafty. Yeah, you look at me like, wow, oh absolutely, no,
Speaker 1: that's serious stonework. Um. So yeah. So the question is
Speaker 1: we as archaeologists can look at the points at a
Speaker 1: place like monta Verde and say, okay, well that doesn't
Speaker 1: look at all like Clovis, but could they be historically related?
Speaker 1: We have no way of telling, right, just a couple
Speaker 1: of different kinds of rocks and they're separated by two
Speaker 1: thousand years and several thousand miles. If we could get
Speaker 1: a genome of a pre Clovis person, we would know
Speaker 1: for sure what the relationship was between pre Clovis and Clovis,
Speaker 1: because at the moment we have a Clovis genome, and
Speaker 1: we know we've got lots of genoe him out of
Speaker 1: Montana exactly right. And we've got lots of genomes that
Speaker 1: are younger than Clovis. And we know basically everybody in
Speaker 1: the America's at the genomic level is related. Now they
Speaker 1: can be more or less distantly related, but they're all related.
Speaker 1: So the real, you know, the sixty dollar question that's
Speaker 1: still lnkering out there is what about earlier than Clovis? Um?
Speaker 1: We actually tried Eskis group tried to get um d
Speaker 1: NA out of some of the material from Monte Verde
Speaker 1: and was unsuccessful. Ah, so we're still looking. Uh, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna ask you what the odds are that we'll find someone,
Speaker 1: and if we do, what are the odds that it's
Speaker 1: gonna melt out of the perma frost in Alaska? And
Speaker 1: I'll point out by another person we both know, Mike
Speaker 1: cons Sure. I was describing him like, what would be
Speaker 1: the coolest thing that you could find? And he says,
Speaker 1: I remember him painting a picture of I'm flying along,
Speaker 1: you know, and his helicopter absolutely, and they're sticking out
Speaker 1: of a glacier. Is a damn hand you know? That
Speaker 1: actually sounded like my um, yeah, that would actually be
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Um, do you think we'll find something? You know,
Speaker 1: you never say never in archaeology, but it's but we've
Speaker 1: got I guess the problem is right, there's one, you
Speaker 1: got one good Clovis one. Yeah. But here's the thing
Speaker 1: about d n A. When you're looking at a genome,
Speaker 1: you're actually looking at thousands of ancestors because each of
Speaker 1: those letters in that DNA alphabet, the gees, the seas,
Speaker 1: the tse, the as um, are getting inherited from an
Speaker 1: expanding network of ancestors. So with a single genome, you're
Speaker 1: actually seeing lots of different populations that have contributed to
Speaker 1: the DNA of that individual. So we actually now we
Speaker 1: just published last fall um a paper which had some
Speaker 1: genomes from South America which have a signal which we
Speaker 1: think is real of UM, a distant austral Asian ancestor.
Speaker 1: So we know that there are other folks that are
Speaker 1: out there that are contributing to the d n A
Speaker 1: of Native Americans. What we don't have at the moment
Speaker 1: is a full genome of somebody who is not on
Speaker 1: that direct um that is pre Clovis in age right,
Speaker 1: and that may or may not be on that same
Speaker 1: Native American chain of ancestry back to Asia. My my
Speaker 1: gut feeling, uh is my gut is I don't know. Actually,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to make any predictions. You know, the
Speaker 1: archaeology of pre Clovis versus Clovis is so different. Do
Speaker 1: you think to yourself, Oh, there's gotta be different people.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that we found out is
Speaker 1: that you can have very distinctive archaeological records and yet
Speaker 1: genomically these populations are closely related. So yeah, people do
Speaker 1: different things. Some people drive one car, some people drive
Speaker 1: another style of car, same thing. How much time has
Speaker 1: to go by before I email you come back on
Speaker 1: and you'd be like really receptive to do it? A year? Um,
Speaker 1: sure we can talk in a year. I can call
Speaker 1: you a year, to email a year in a year,
Speaker 1: when I in a year and whatever in a year,
Speaker 1: in three months, when I get young June and when
Speaker 1: you come out here. Something I'm gonna ask about. I
Speaker 1: want to ask you about, uh, some of the discredited
Speaker 1: theories that have come up about who the first Americans were.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about the idea of successional waves,
Speaker 1: that it wasn't like one group that showed up and
Speaker 1: then all Native Americans. But there could have been groups
Speaker 1: have showed up in, they petered out, they got killed off,
Speaker 1: they starved to death, and then other groups came in
Speaker 1: and replaced them. The thing about that ancient people were
Speaker 1: interested in what they regarded as ancient people and moved
Speaker 1: their stuff around a little bit, meaning they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's a cool looking projectile point, and they bring it
Speaker 1: home and to their TV and lay it with their
Speaker 1: special ship that they like. Um, this is a handful
Speaker 1: things I want to talk about next time we have you.
Speaker 1: All right, here's here's the deal that we can cut. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm just now finished the new edition of First Peoples
Speaker 1: in the New World. So you told me mine's obsolete. Now,
Speaker 1: Oh it's horribly obsolete. Yeah, no, it's don't even read it.
Speaker 1: It's too late. Now sit out on my coffee table. Well,
Speaker 1: forget everything you knew about it. Block it out of
Speaker 1: your mind. Um, when it comes out, let's have a conversation.
Speaker 1: How's that. That's a good time. And I'll be prompted
Speaker 1: to because I'll see it and I'll be like, that's right,
Speaker 1: that guy, that's right, that's right. I got a coffee
Speaker 1: table that needs a book. Thank you seriously this uh
Speaker 1: and I'm still gonna stand by my earlier statement. My
Speaker 1: favorite guest we've ever had on Dr David J. Meltzer
Speaker 1: s M. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, everyone,
Speaker 1: thanks for listening. Again. And if I said it once,
Speaker 1: I staid a thousand times. Please go check out our
Speaker 1: feature length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars
Speaker 1: in the Sky. You can find it at Stars in
Speaker 1: the Sky film dot com. It is available for streaming
Speaker 1: and download. Again, do us yourself a good turn, do
Speaker 1: us a good turn Stars in the Sky. Find it
Speaker 1: at Stars in the Sky film dot com. You can
Speaker 1: stream it, you can download it, and you can watch
Speaker 1: it again and again. Thank you.