Speaker 1: It's just it's just such mystery and that's the that's
Speaker 1: why these are so cool. Yeah, and the fact that
Speaker 1: we could find these Clovis points, this technology that is
Speaker 1: indicative of this time period can be found from Alaska
Speaker 1: to Florida, from Maine to New Mexico.
Speaker 2: Oh, even Central America.
Speaker 1: I mean they these people covered the continent. Yes, so
Speaker 1: you could you could find one of these in your regard.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, definitely, one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: If you consider yourself a connoisseur of wild places, wild history,
Speaker 1: and the wild human story on this continent, this episode
Speaker 1: is for you. We're diving into the mysteries of the
Speaker 1: Clovist people, and if you don't know who they are,
Speaker 1: Brent Reeves, no problem, because the experts don't really know either.
Speaker 1: But modern archaeology is uncovering some incredible new stuff. We're
Speaker 1: gonna learn about the Clovis type site in New Mexico,
Speaker 1: what a Clovis point is, We're gonna dismantle the Clovis
Speaker 1: first theory, and we'll get into how archaeology can be
Speaker 1: used as the political weapon. The ride will be rocky,
Speaker 1: but I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss
Speaker 1: this one. One quick thing before we get started. Brent Reeves,
Speaker 1: Bear Newcomb and I will be at BHA's Black Bear
Speaker 1: Bonanza in Bentonville, Arkansas, on March first. We'll be there
Speaker 1: all day. This is an event all about black bear hunting.
Speaker 1: Ton of Fun and Bear nukelem and E's Bear Hunt
Speaker 1: Spring Bear Hunt in Montana. The film for that will
Speaker 1: be up on the Meat Eater YouTube channel on February twentieth.
Speaker 1: Don't miss it. My name is Clay nukemb And. This
Speaker 1: is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten
Speaker 1: but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where
Speaker 1: we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives
Speaker 1: close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made,
Speaker 1: purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be
Speaker 1: as rugged as the place as we explore. I'm in Ohio.
Speaker 1: I'm at Kent State University. I'm here to meet doctor Metton.
Speaker 1: Aaron Meton's going to take me into his lab. He
Speaker 1: is the expert of the country on Clovi style stone
Speaker 1: points and really just the stone age there. He is.
Speaker 1: Hey man, I'm good. Good to see you, bro, you too,
Speaker 1: Come on in heck yeah, thanks for meeting me on
Speaker 1: a Saturday.
Speaker 2: Oh God, this is Henry bad Way.
Speaker 1: He looks like a cross between a beagle and a
Speaker 1: basket of hound.
Speaker 2: He is a cross between a beagle and a Cavalier Spaniel.
Speaker 1: Oh really, Henry com what are you daring? Doctor Aaron
Speaker 1: is more personable than you might envision a stuffy archaeologist.
Speaker 1: He leads me to the fourth floor and we enter
Speaker 1: through a metal framed door with one of those tall
Speaker 1: rectangular windows with wire in the glass. Meton's given off
Speaker 1: the energy of a second grader taking his parents into
Speaker 1: his homeroom class for the first time. I've traveled from
Speaker 1: the Ozarks to Ohio to see his experimental Archaeology lab.
Speaker 1: It's the only one like it in the world. Here
Speaker 1: they test ancient weaponry and tools.
Speaker 2: Yeah, welcome to the Kent State Experimental Archaeology Lab.
Speaker 1: It's the whole wing.
Speaker 2: We're pretty lucky because this used to be storage before
Speaker 2: I got here. But then they gave me the whole
Speaker 2: wing and said to build the love of your dreams,
Speaker 2: and so everything you see, everything's a replica from either
Speaker 2: I've made, or my students have made, or doctor Michelle
Speaker 2: Beber's made.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so it's like part library, part stone age
Speaker 1: hunting storage shed. I think I'm looking at maybe fifty
Speaker 1: adelaid darts over there. This place is a real nerd hut,
Speaker 1: walled wall, bookshelves, filing cabinets, five gallon buckets, with flint flakes, maps,
Speaker 1: and random stone points lying around everywhere. It's just the
Speaker 1: kind of place to begin to tell the big story
Speaker 1: of ancient America. But when you're here, it's kind of
Speaker 1: weird calling this place America because the Paleolithic world knew
Speaker 1: nothing of such a place. Calling this place America is
Speaker 1: like someone getting a new name after they've become an
Speaker 1: old old man, because human history here is deep, and
Speaker 1: this lab is dedicated to the scant but telling details
Speaker 1: we have about this old man we now call America.
Speaker 1: The main thing I noticed that makes this different than
Speaker 1: just like a standard library is the dirt on the floor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a workshop slash library. There's like boot tracks
Speaker 1: and flint chips and stuff laying around.
Speaker 2: That's the whole lab, right, I mean, this is this
Speaker 2: is very much like a working archaeology and engineering laboratories.
Speaker 2: People are always making stuff and breaking stuff, and you know,
Speaker 2: we usually do like a big clean once or twice
Speaker 2: a year, usually once a year.
Speaker 1: But it looks awesome. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2: So it's yeah, we're real lucky.
Speaker 1: Where there are no oxen, the stables are clean, and
Speaker 1: it's clear there's some real science going on here. He's
Speaker 1: got machines for smashing stuff. He's got chronographs, life size
Speaker 1: animal archery targets, and enormous collections of ancient stone points.
Speaker 1: And there's a pottery shop in here. So you guys
Speaker 1: are are trying to understand even like a lot of
Speaker 1: the physics of how people use stone tools to survive,
Speaker 1: to kill stuff, to butcher animals.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Like so we want to understand, like what
Speaker 2: makes an optimal spear point. You have to understand that, Like,
Speaker 2: you know, we're dealing with time periods in the Stone
Speaker 2: Age that are hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
Speaker 2: So people had the opportunity to have natural experiments over
Speaker 2: generations to figure out how stuff works.
Speaker 1: And we're just playing around. This is like life and death,
Speaker 1: life and death. So they figured out what works.
Speaker 2: And what's amazing is it takes in a lot of
Speaker 2: cases twenty first century cutting edge engineering technology to figure
Speaker 2: out what these folks learned just throughout paying attention and
Speaker 2: really just being observant to what's around them.
Speaker 1: Stone age technology is astonishing. You may remember a meat
Speaker 1: eater video we did with doctor Aaron and doctor David
Speaker 1: Meltzer where myself along with the crew, butchered an entire
Speaker 1: bison using stone tools. It's on YouTube. We thought it
Speaker 1: was going to take all day, but we finished in
Speaker 1: a couple of hours. It was almost as fast as
Speaker 1: using modern knives. Doctor Aaron published a paper on it.
Speaker 1: We're about to dig into this deep history, but I
Speaker 1: first need a little refresher on what archaeology actually is.
Speaker 2: Archaeology is the study of ancient technology, and then we
Speaker 2: can use what we learned from ancient technology to make
Speaker 2: inferences about ancient people's behavior, how they lived, sometimes in
Speaker 2: rare cases, maybe what they believed, stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So this is a hard hitting question. What was Indian Jones?
Speaker 1: He was an archaeologist, Now, how was he studying ancient technology?
Speaker 2: Hee?
Speaker 3: With that word is a whole part for me to understand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all of archaeology would be considered studying ancient technology.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because a pot, a table, a building, the holy Grail,
Speaker 2: the holy grail, that is technology.
Speaker 1: The holy Grail. Technology was amazing, But archaeology studies human
Speaker 1: made stuff that's left behind called artifacts. Future archaeologists will
Speaker 1: be studying iPhones, but the iPhone of the Ice Age
Speaker 1: was a tricked out style of point that we're going
Speaker 1: to learn about called the Clovis point. Archaeology fits under
Speaker 1: the bigger umbrella of anthropology, which is the study of humans.
Speaker 1: Forgive my ignorance, but I need some more clarification on
Speaker 1: something else. So, okay, where does paleontology fit into go?
Speaker 2: So, paleontology is the study of ancient animals, but palantell.
Speaker 1: The intelligence is the study of essentially bone, essentially bone
Speaker 1: in the fossil record.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right. You know, people always you know ASKO,
Speaker 2: do you study dinosaurs? Right? And what I will say
Speaker 2: is I wish I did because that'd be sweet. But
Speaker 2: the last dinosaur went extinct around sixty five million years ago, right.
Speaker 2: The first creature that really kind of is a human
Speaker 2: human like is six to seven million years ago. So
Speaker 2: sixty million years separates the last dinosaur and the first
Speaker 2: human like creature.
Speaker 1: If we were biting into a chicken leg, we've just
Speaker 1: been nibbling on the crispy skin, but we're about to
Speaker 1: get into the meat. I want to understand the chronology
Speaker 1: of our understanding of the peopling of America, where they
Speaker 1: came from, and win. This involves a term we're going
Speaker 1: to come to understand intimately.
Speaker 2: There was a huge debate in the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: early nineteen hundreds as to whether or not there was
Speaker 2: a Stone Age period in the New World, right, because
Speaker 2: the Stone Age is generally defined as the Pleistocene period,
Speaker 2: which is ten thousand years and earlier. At this point
Speaker 2: in Europe, they were pretty confident, right, they had start
Speaker 2: to uncover Neanderthal remains. A Dutch pale anthropologist named Eugene
Speaker 2: Dubois had uncovered Homorectus in Southeast Asia. You know, America
Speaker 2: wanted to have as old in antiquity as Europe. There's
Speaker 2: kind of some competition there, and so there's this huge
Speaker 2: debate and Dave Meltzer's book The Great Paleothic War, it's
Speaker 2: several hundred pages going into that debate, and it's pretty entertaining.
Speaker 2: It's just like just gossip and pretty good.
Speaker 1: I want to stop you right there. Why were people
Speaker 1: so worked up about that, Like, why would we want
Speaker 1: to have as deep a history as Europe? I mean,
Speaker 1: is it literally just like we just want to think
Speaker 1: we're as old as them? Or is there some something
Speaker 1: I don't understand, some economic benefit or some cultural benefit.
Speaker 2: No, no benefit other than ego. I mean, we're American,
Speaker 2: so we got to be first, and we got to
Speaker 2: have the oldest.
Speaker 1: Like I've been holding out on you, I didn't just
Speaker 1: go to Ohio to Meton's lab, but I also went
Speaker 1: to Dallas, Texas to the campus of SMU. Doctor David
Speaker 1: Meltzer is an og archaeologist and author, and he's going
Speaker 1: to give us a granular walkthrough of the deep story
Speaker 1: of America. But first we've got to talk about Foalsome,
Speaker 1: New Mexico.
Speaker 4: So when we were last talking, Clay, you remember we
Speaker 4: were in Fulsom New Mexico. And Fulsom New Mexico was
Speaker 4: a turning point in the story of the peopling of
Speaker 4: the Americas, because up to that moment in time, nobody
Speaker 4: was really confident that we had any evidence whatsoever that
Speaker 4: people had been and arrived in the Americas in Ice
Speaker 4: age times. Fulsom broke that barrier after literally fifty years
Speaker 4: of controversy, Fulsom came along and we had clear cut
Speaker 4: evidence for the first time of human artifacts, genuine human artifacts.
Speaker 4: There was no question about these in direct association with
Speaker 4: what we're known to be now extinct Ice age bison.
Speaker 1: I have no doubt that you remember Bargrea's Hall of
Speaker 1: Famer George mcjunkin, who discovered the Falsome site in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh eight. It's here where they found the first falsome points,
Speaker 1: which were beautifully crafted, lanceolate shaped, thin sharp stone points
Speaker 1: that are fluted on both sides. Fluting means that with
Speaker 1: a single strike they flaked off the entire side of
Speaker 1: a point. They do this on both sides to create
Speaker 1: a mysteriously thin point. Might be best to like google
Speaker 1: it if you want to envision what it looks like.
Speaker 1: We did a whole series on Fulsome starting with episode
Speaker 1: twenty eight to Bear Grease, and we have a meat
Speaker 1: eater film on YouTube where I killed a bear with
Speaker 1: a falsome point. But after the Fulsome discovery, a new, unidentified,
Speaker 1: slightly different type of fluted points started showing up all
Speaker 1: over the country. These newly found points had smaller flutes
Speaker 1: than falsome, but they were using the same napping technology.
Speaker 1: It was kind of like a grandson making a variation
Speaker 1: of his grandfather's design.
Speaker 4: Well, in the wake of fulsome and those very distinctive
Speaker 4: fluted points that we've talked about before, suddenly everybody realized
Speaker 4: these things are all over the continent, and you know,
Speaker 4: you can go to Ohio, you can go to Florida,
Speaker 4: you can go to the state of Washington, and they've
Speaker 4: all got these very distinctive fluid points. Except they didn't
Speaker 4: actually quite look like fulsome, and so there was a
Speaker 4: little bit of confusion. You know, they used terms like
Speaker 4: generalized fulsome because they didn't quite it didn't quite fit
Speaker 4: the type right. Well, what happens after that is, you know,
Speaker 4: suddenly everybody's looking for these sites. Everybody wants to dig
Speaker 4: up these sites. About half a dozen years later, fella
Speaker 4: by name of Edgar B. Howard, who was at the
Speaker 4: Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, have been working on
Speaker 4: these old sites and he'd gotten wind about a locality
Speaker 4: outside of Clovis, New Mexico, and he'd been told he'd
Speaker 4: gotten word that in these dunes along the term is
Speaker 4: blackwater draw that these dunes along Blackwater Draw were producing
Speaker 4: large animal bones.
Speaker 1: TD. B. Howard was a real deal Indiana Jones type,
Speaker 1: and he was headed to check out these bones near
Speaker 1: Clovis and Blackwater Draw. And this guy was a he
Speaker 1: hadn't been an archaeologist's whole career. He was like an
Speaker 1: adult onset archaeologist. Yeah, he was like, there's.
Speaker 2: Forties or oh yeah. So he had heard that megafonnel
Speaker 2: remains had been kind of uncovered in this gravel quarry
Speaker 2: that was being excavated. So it's thought that the Clovis
Speaker 2: site is a spring and there would have been lots
Speaker 2: of water resources around kind of been like a watering hole.
Speaker 2: So all sorts of animals would have been coming to
Speaker 2: that spot. And you know, sometimes that would make a
Speaker 2: really good hunting locale, right, do you take advantage of
Speaker 2: these animals because they need water? But sometimes they would
Speaker 2: also die just naturally through natural causes at that spot.
Speaker 2: And when he went and started to explore and he
Speaker 2: got teams looking around, they start to find these points
Speaker 2: that were larger than Falsom points. At the time, they
Speaker 2: thought they were cruder. And the flutes, you know, those
Speaker 2: grooves that extend from the base upwards rather than Falseom,
Speaker 2: where they go the whole way. These flutes would only
Speaker 2: go a third of the way up the spearhead right,
Speaker 2: sometimes half, sometimes a little bit less. And what's amazing
Speaker 2: about Blackwater draw this site is they were finding Clovis
Speaker 2: points underneath Falsome points. And so this was the first
Speaker 2: time where they actually had really concrete evidence based on
Speaker 2: the law of superposition that, wow, Falsom isn't the oldest.
Speaker 2: There are older cultures and Falsome because when we dig deeper,
Speaker 2: we're finding different artifacts. And that's what the law of
Speaker 2: superposition is. It's just basically generally the deeper you go,
Speaker 2: the older things get.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just these unusual points that made the Clovis
Speaker 1: site different. There were other types of bones here that
Speaker 1: really put Clovis on the map. This place would become
Speaker 1: known as the Clovis type site, which is a term
Speaker 1: used to describe the original place that something important is found.
Speaker 1: Did you hear him say that this famous place, this
Speaker 1: Clovis site as it would be come known, was a
Speaker 1: commercial gravel pit. Talk about two different types of folks
Speaker 1: interested in digging gravel miners and archaeologists. These guys are
Speaker 1: on like completely different spectrums. Oh, no question, I mean
Speaker 1: like as far apart as you could possibly be.
Speaker 4: And you know what, the situation, it's actually kind of
Speaker 4: sad because it gets worse in the nineteen fifties. They
Speaker 4: bring in these giant road graders and trackos and everything,
Speaker 4: and there's photos that you can see of bulldozers in
Speaker 4: the background and a bunch of folks in the foreground
Speaker 4: frantically excavating bones.
Speaker 2: Wow, I'm just looking now at one of the books
Speaker 2: on clothes and it says the New Mexico Highway Department,
Speaker 2: prospecting for gravel to use in local road improvements, struck
Speaker 2: a deposit on the Anderson Carter ranch, not far from
Speaker 2: where Whitman and Anderson had made their discoveries. To other archaeologists,
Speaker 2: mammoth bones were dislodged and pulled up by heavy construction machinery.
Speaker 2: Soon thereafter, some of the fossils were placed on display
Speaker 2: in nearby portales. Other bones were carted away by workers
Speaker 2: and curious onlookers. Some people were taking stuff away only
Speaker 2: to show up later on porches, in cupboards, and in garages.
Speaker 2: One local farmer who made off with a hefty chunk
Speaker 2: of mammoth bone eventually used it as a doorstop. Luckily,
Speaker 2: eb Howard caught word of these happenings and rushed back
Speaker 2: to Clovis.
Speaker 4: But what they discovered, and this is what eb Howard
Speaker 4: realized in November of nineteen thirty two, was we've got
Speaker 4: another instance kind of like full except it's not just bison.
Speaker 4: There's also mammoth at this site. And so he excavates
Speaker 4: there in the early nineteen thirties over a series of
Speaker 4: about half a dozen years, and they recover in association
Speaker 4: Fulsome points with bison and what will come to be
Speaker 4: called Clovis Points with mammoth.
Speaker 1: And that's really important because the Fulsome site was with
Speaker 1: these bison antiquis, correct, which were an extinct species of bison.
Speaker 1: But still there was some question amongst the people that
Speaker 1: but like, well, maybe they weren't really bison antiquis, maybe
Speaker 1: it was something different. But mammoth we knew for sure.
Speaker 4: That's an excellent point, because you know, bison, we're still
Speaker 4: wandering around, right And it was really a question of
Speaker 4: are these truly ancient bison or not? And people were
Speaker 4: reasonably confident in that. But when you've got projectile point
Speaker 4: associated with a mammoth, there's no ambiguity. Yeah, mammoths are
Speaker 4: not wandering around the American high planes.
Speaker 3: And they're still trying to answer this question of were
Speaker 3: their humans here during the Pleistocene. Do you remember where
Speaker 3: you were in November nineteen thirty two when they discovered
Speaker 3: mammoth bones in association with Clovis points. Well, most of
Speaker 3: us weren't alive, but you get the point. Pun intended
Speaker 3: that this was monumental and to bring us all up
Speaker 3: to speed. The Fulsome site dates back between ten thousand,
Speaker 3: two hundred years and ten thousand, seven hundred years ago,
Speaker 3: but that site was found first, so it's a little confusing.
Speaker 3: But it was younger than the Clovis site, which was
Speaker 3: found in nineteen thirty two. And the Clovis period is
Speaker 3: basically the prior one thousand years, dating it back to
Speaker 3: just under twelve thousand years old. But we need to
Speaker 3: know it exactly what it means when we say Clovist technology.
Speaker 2: So Clovist technology is comprised of stone and bone artifacts. Now,
Speaker 2: the iconic Clovist artifact is what we call the Clovis
Speaker 2: fluted point right, and so this is a spear point
Speaker 2: that could have been used as a projectile for like
Speaker 2: the Atlatl dart. It could have been used as a
Speaker 2: spearhead for thrusting spears. It could have been used as
Speaker 2: a knife in knife handles.
Speaker 1: Right, it would not have been used in archery because
Speaker 1: it was way older than archery. Really, maybe you tell.
Speaker 2: Me, Well, so this is the thing. People assume that
Speaker 2: the bow and arrow occurs very late in North America,
Speaker 2: but I don't know. I mean, we get evidence of
Speaker 2: the bow and arrow in South Africa. I want to say,
Speaker 2: something like seventy thousand years ago. Wow, So it's very
Speaker 2: possible that, you know, because technologies are like biological species,
Speaker 2: they can emerge, they can also go extinct. So it's
Speaker 2: possible that at some point, as people are moving across
Speaker 2: Asia and Siberia, they lose bow and arrow technology and
Speaker 2: then when they come to the New World they have
Speaker 2: to reinvent it.
Speaker 1: So a close point, it's within the realm of possibility
Speaker 1: that could have been.
Speaker 2: Could have been used with a bone.
Speaker 3: I can't wait for Steve Ornelle to hear this.
Speaker 2: Is it's now. I'm not saying they did. So it
Speaker 2: is possible. We don't know, I mean, and to be honest,
Speaker 2: we also don't know that they use the at laddle.
Speaker 2: We don't. We've never found a Clovis at laddle. We've
Speaker 2: never found a Clovis spear.
Speaker 1: That's preservation bias potentially, that's yeah, So like an at
Speaker 1: laddle thrower would have been made of organic matter, would bone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that Clovis folks use the bone arrow,
Speaker 1: But what I'm saying is we can't say that they
Speaker 1: didn't use the more. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But so this gets to that really pesky answer. I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 1: Oh, strings and aerow shafts are also organic matter. And
Speaker 1: a man whose name rhyme's with Cleves Stinella, once chotted
Speaker 1: me for shooting a Paleo point out of my bow,
Speaker 1: saying it wasn't historically accurate. But that's water under the bridge.
Speaker 1: Let's get back to these presumed emphasis on presumed Clovis
Speaker 1: mammoth hunters.
Speaker 2: Now, the other thing to keep in mind is, do
Speaker 2: you know how many sites on the entire continent of
Speaker 2: North America we have with Clovis points in association.
Speaker 1: With mammoth thirteen?
Speaker 2: Fifteen, fifteen, you're close, yeah, fifteen. So let's say hypothetically.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a lot to me, but it's probably
Speaker 1: really not.
Speaker 2: Well, fifteen on the entire continent of North America, right,
Speaker 2: fifteen is not a large nub.
Speaker 1: Do we not have Clovis points lodged in mammoth.
Speaker 2: Well, that it's funny. That was exactly what's going to
Speaker 2: bring up next. We've never found Clovis tips, Clovis point
Speaker 2: stone lodged in mammoth bones. Now that's really interesting to
Speaker 2: think about because in Europe we find stone points, bone
Speaker 2: points lodged in animals going back hundreds of thousands of years, right,
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of years. So the question is why,
Speaker 2: why in Europe during the Stone Age? I'm jealous, are
Speaker 2: we getting direct evidence of shooting? We get that over
Speaker 2: and over and over again in Europe, not once in
Speaker 2: North America with a mammoth, with a mammoth. Why, I
Speaker 2: don't know we have something like that.
Speaker 1: We don't know.
Speaker 2: We have over ninety Clovis points in association with mammoth.
Speaker 2: Not one stone point is lodged in any of the bones.
Speaker 1: Could it not just be simple statistics that there were
Speaker 1: less people here for a shorter period of time, So
Speaker 1: statistically us.
Speaker 2: Find in that it could be another.
Speaker 1: I mean humans have been there longer, Yeah, most likely.
Speaker 2: But I think the question though, is even at the
Speaker 2: equivalent period, which would be the Magdalenian period in Europe,
Speaker 2: which is a Stone Age culture right before the end
Speaker 2: of the Ice Age, right, you'll get stone points and
Speaker 2: stuff embedded in bone. Then, so why not at the
Speaker 2: equivalent period in northern America. So I think when we
Speaker 2: do find Clovis points in association with mammoth remains, it
Speaker 2: is very possible that that animal is hunting. But you
Speaker 2: also have to remember that these animals, mammoths, they were
Speaker 2: going extinct, right, and ten thousand years ago we were
Speaker 2: facing a climate change that is kind of hard to comprehend.
Speaker 2: We were going from the Ice Age to the Holocene,
Speaker 2: so these animals environments were kind of collapsing around them.
Speaker 2: So there may have been more frequent dead mammoths then
Speaker 2: for people to scavenge the right.
Speaker 1: Because it was a population in the klon, it was
Speaker 1: a population in decline. They were dying, they were dying.
Speaker 2: So again, I think a lot of folks have seen
Speaker 2: research that my cell and my colleagues have done and
Speaker 2: they immediately like, oh, you thinkvist didn't hunt mammoths. No,
Speaker 2: not at all hunting mammoths. What I don't believe is
Speaker 2: Clovis did not hunt mammoths to extinction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny. It's funny. You called it a stereotype
Speaker 1: that closed people hunted mammoths. You could you could almost
Speaker 1: see that being used as like a like a stereotypical
Speaker 1: slur back in the day those mammoths and the mammoth
Speaker 1: and the Clovist people are like, man, we we're just
Speaker 1: finding them dead.
Speaker 3: We're not even killed.
Speaker 1: Them at offen.
Speaker 2: We didn't do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, those dirty mammoth hunters. Yeah, I love a good mystery.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that we don't find points lodged
Speaker 1: in mammoth bones in America? And this is relevant to
Speaker 1: the story because in modern times Clovis culture became synonymous
Speaker 1: with MegaFon of hunters and even known to only hunt
Speaker 1: mammoth and that just isn't true. They were hunting all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff. It's just intriguing to think about these
Speaker 1: people killing giant, ancient wooly elephants with these Clovis spear points.
Speaker 1: But we really don't have any hard evidence of that.
Speaker 1: But that brings up a theory that's becoming less and
Speaker 1: less relevant, and it has to do with humans causing
Speaker 1: the extinctions of the Pleistocene megafauna.
Speaker 4: And in fact, there's a whole body of claims out
Speaker 4: there that humans were actually fairly voracious hunters to the
Speaker 4: degree that they were the cause of the extinction of
Speaker 4: these animals, because of course these animals are no longer here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Do they call it plastiscene overkill?
Speaker 4: They do, indeed, blitz grieg model, Yeah, and that all
Speaker 4: ties back to that sort of traditional notion. You come
Speaker 4: down through the ice free corridor, you look out out
Speaker 4: in front of you, and it's just the landscape teeming
Speaker 4: with these large animals that have never peered down the
Speaker 4: shaft of a spear, have no idea how to respond
Speaker 4: to a human, and just stand around while they get
Speaker 4: well shafted.
Speaker 1: Okay, archaeology, dad joke, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: So I don't buy it, and I don't buy it
Speaker 4: for a number of reasons.
Speaker 1: Here's the reasons why it's unlikely human hunters caused what's
Speaker 1: called the Quaternary megafaunal extinction or the ice Age extinction,
Speaker 1: that took place between fifty thousand to nine thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Number one, human hunters lived high on the hog killing
Speaker 1: naive animals and killing the final animals in the population
Speaker 1: could be difficult. They'd probably just move on when the
Speaker 1: hunting got hard, leaving some stragglers for seed. Number two,
Speaker 1: Hunting these huge animals was risky. They're hard to kill.
Speaker 1: It was a low success rate type hunt, and you
Speaker 1: might get killed doing it, so it was just risky.
Speaker 1: The last reason is the most compelling to me, and
Speaker 1: we only have hard evidence that these Clovis people killed
Speaker 1: five types of big megafauna.
Speaker 4: Here's doctor meltzer, mammoth, mastod on, gompethier, horse, and camel. Yeah,
Speaker 4: so five genera. We have reasonably good evidence that people
Speaker 4: killed the animals at those sixteen sites. Thirty eight different
Speaker 4: genera went extinct. So what about the other thirty three genera?
Speaker 4: We don't have any evidence that people were hunting giant peckery's,
Speaker 4: giant tapers, giant beavers, giant ground sloths. Right, there's all
Speaker 4: these other animals that went extinct. So why is it
Speaker 4: that we don't have any evidence If people were responsible
Speaker 4: for coming into this continent and blasting their way through
Speaker 4: and hunting in the sort of bloodthirsty rage all the
Speaker 4: way through the hemisphere. Where's the evidence. It's just not there. Now,
Speaker 4: take that and contrast it with bison. Bison started getting
Speaker 4: were hunted as early as Clovis times. We have Clovis
Speaker 4: age bison kills at the Clovis type site. Bison will
Speaker 4: then be hunted for literally the next twelve thousand years,
Speaker 4: but they don't go extinct.
Speaker 1: They're still here today. Absolutely, it seems clear that humans
Speaker 1: didn't cause the court extinction. I want to ask doctor
Speaker 1: Aaron more about this overkill hypothesis once again, you're gonna
Speaker 1: need to know something going in. The Anzac child that
Speaker 1: he's about to talk about was a two year old
Speaker 1: from the Pleistocene found buried on a Montana ranch in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight. Is that idea still pretty well received?
Speaker 2: Oh it's yeah. I mean, in fact, there was a
Speaker 2: paper published recently in Science Advances where they did an
Speaker 2: isotopic analysis of the Anzik baby skeleton and they found
Speaker 2: that the diet was consistent with a plysisne big cat right, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you might have seen that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well so where they analyzed the DNA, Yeah, this
Speaker 1: two year old child and decided that the mother was
Speaker 1: basically eating a diet.
Speaker 2: Of mammoth and yeah, of meat, right, mammoth and stuff,
Speaker 2: and great, that's fine. But the paper then says because
Speaker 2: of that one, fine, humans cause the extinction of mammoths
Speaker 2: the North America.
Speaker 1: Is that I mean, do you think some of that
Speaker 1: is informed by just the modern bias of like human
Speaker 1: intrusion on the landscape. So it's like an environmental statement
Speaker 1: of like we're wrecking the planet.
Speaker 2: They're trying to use that as a signal to point
Speaker 2: to a very good cause. Preserving the environment and species
Speaker 2: is so important. And showing that the Anzac baby and
Speaker 2: its mother ate meat, that's a huge leap then to say, well,
Speaker 2: because they ate meat, well, we cause the extinction of
Speaker 2: the mammoths in North America.
Speaker 1: It's kind of bewildering to hear about archaeology being used
Speaker 1: as a political tool. But we're about to hear a
Speaker 1: lot more about this, But let's get back into Clovis.
Speaker 1: This site would become the prominent American discovery of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, and for the next forty years there would
Speaker 1: be an idea called Clovis First, meaning these people that
Speaker 1: make these Clovis style points were the first Americans Clovis First.
Speaker 1: So this Clovis First thing answered the big question we'd
Speaker 1: been asking for a long time about how long people
Speaker 1: had been here, and this ceiling that the Clovis First
Speaker 1: theory put on, this thing was about that thirteen thousand
Speaker 1: year mark.
Speaker 4: But there was trouble, and so the argument that sort
Speaker 4: of emerged in the nineteen sixties was that Clovis groups
Speaker 4: were first.
Speaker 1: And they came from Asia, and they came.
Speaker 4: From absolutely yeah, they came from Northeast Asia, come into
Speaker 4: the Americas and basically start eating their way from one
Speaker 4: end of the continent to the other. But what also
Speaker 4: was happening simultaneously in the nineteen sixties was that people
Speaker 4: were saying, are we absolutely certain that Clovis's oldest? Could
Speaker 4: there be stuff evidence of people here prior to Clovis,
Speaker 4: And that triggered a huge kerfuffle in debate. A lot
Speaker 4: of it was because people would make claims about sites
Speaker 4: of great antiquity and the claims simply did not pass
Speaker 4: critical muster, and so archaeologists, I mean, we have long memories.
Speaker 4: It's an occupational hazard, right, And so we got really
Speaker 4: kind of skeptical and even maybe cynical about the idea
Speaker 4: of pre Clovis.
Speaker 1: My friend Taylor Keene is a Cherokee in Omaha. He's
Speaker 1: a graduate of Harvard and a professor of business at
Speaker 1: Crichton University. He's also an Indigenous historian and author. He
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Rediscovering Turtle Island, which is about
Speaker 1: the peopling of the Americas. He and many others believe
Speaker 1: that the original persistence of the archaeological community in denying
Speaker 1: the deep antiquity of human here was rooted in bias
Speaker 1: that helped build the justification narrative for America's westward expansion.
Speaker 5: So, if there's anything I learned from writing a book
Speaker 5: on this topic, to me, it started with some very
Speaker 5: basic human questions of how long have my indigenous ancestors
Speaker 5: been here? And pretty quickly, especially in the academic narratives,
Speaker 5: what you're going to find is some fairly fixed biases
Speaker 5: around different theories. Primary one of those is around the
Speaker 5: baron straight theory and then the Clovis first theory, and
Speaker 5: that was embedded in anthropology as a barrier to anything
Speaker 5: being before those time frames. For sure, I think that anthropology,
Speaker 5: especially the Bureau of American ethnology was created at a
Speaker 5: time when we were experiencing the vanishing race of indigenous peoples,
Speaker 5: and I think it was a hopeful prophecy for the
Speaker 5: European settlers who had colonized this, because that would have
Speaker 5: been much easier than having to deal with the people
Speaker 5: for a long time. So whatever we could do reasonably
Speaker 5: within science to limit how far indigenous peoples have been
Speaker 5: here seemed to be the cultural norm.
Speaker 1: Taylor believes the dogma and persistence of the Clovis First theory,
Speaker 1: which remember helped break this ice age barrier, was politically motivated.
Speaker 1: It's complicated though, because Meltzer is saying the theory was
Speaker 1: simply based on the evidence that we had at the time.
Speaker 1: I have a feeling that both of these things could
Speaker 1: be true at the same time. But I'm still trying
Speaker 1: to understand why this is political.
Speaker 5: So much of manifests destiny. There's a famous painting, and
Speaker 5: I always forget the name of it, but it shows
Speaker 5: basically Lady Liberty floating as a ghost across the plains,
Speaker 5: and you see the advancing railroad. You see a handful
Speaker 5: of indigenous peoples. But it's a god given right for
Speaker 5: European colonization to happen here. And I think the mindset
Speaker 5: is that, you know, this was the new Jerusalem for
Speaker 5: some of the Rosicrucian thinkers coming out of the Enlightenment
Speaker 5: and all this New Atlantis type of theory, and all
Speaker 5: of a sudden, it was a view that America could
Speaker 5: become that and it was the God given right of
Speaker 5: the colonizers to take it and to do with it
Speaker 5: what they were. But to get there you need a narrative.
Speaker 5: The land needs to be a wilderness. The people that
Speaker 5: were there before need to be savages, and it was
Speaker 5: our manifest destiny to take over the West. That's the backdrop,
Speaker 5: that's the psychology within the academy. Anything that was before
Speaker 5: theory was rejected.
Speaker 1: It's possible that America wanted a narrative that people hadn't
Speaker 1: been here that long, and on the other side, many
Speaker 1: indigenous people wanted to give their ancestors full credit for
Speaker 1: how long they'd actually been here. Taylor believes it's possible
Speaker 1: that humans have been here in the Americas for as
Speaker 1: long as one hundred thousand years, but that's like the
Speaker 1: furthest extent. But he thinks for sure forty or fifty,
Speaker 1: but at this time there really isn't hard evidence to
Speaker 1: support that yet and none may exist, but that thing
Speaker 1: could still be true. It's possible for something to be
Speaker 1: true but there be no evidence. And my analysis and
Speaker 1: personal opinion is that at one time these biases to
Speaker 1: build this pro American narrative were probably real, but modern
Speaker 1: archaeologists like Meltzer and air and are humble, realistic, and
Speaker 1: seem to be open to whatever the real evidence shows.
Speaker 1: At some point, I'd like to talk about modern journalists
Speaker 1: and popular TV host Graham Hand, who believes the archaeological
Speaker 1: community is still not wanting the human arrival dates to
Speaker 1: be too deep In time. We'll get to that, But
Speaker 1: to get back to the mission of this podcast, here's
Speaker 1: doctor Meltzer talking about when the Clovis first theory began
Speaker 1: to crumble.
Speaker 4: But then starting in the late seventies and early eighties,
Speaker 4: there were some sites that came online that were actually
Speaker 4: pretty impressive and that provided pretty compelling evidence that indeed
Speaker 4: people were here a whole lot earlier. Fast forward to today,
Speaker 4: we've got a number of sites now that give us
Speaker 4: reasonably confident evidence and data that make it clear that
Speaker 4: folks have been here a lot earlier than Clovis. What's
Speaker 4: a lot earlier minimally, we think that folks are here
Speaker 4: around fifteen sixteen thousand years ago. Now that actually had
Speaker 4: implications for how they got.
Speaker 1: Here, Now that that would predate Clovis by like two
Speaker 1: three thousand years exactly right. Clothes first began to crumble
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies, but it takes decades for theories
Speaker 1: and sights to gain credibility. And that's exactly why Meltzer
Speaker 1: didn't mention White Sands, New Mexico, that has footprints dating
Speaker 1: back over twenty three thousand years. Many people just don't
Speaker 1: believe all the questions about those prints have been answered.
Speaker 1: And if this podcast is a fried chicken leg and
Speaker 1: we've already had one meaty bite, we're now at the
Speaker 1: meat close to the bone. And if you're opposed to
Speaker 1: learning some stuff, I'd suggest you just turned this podcast
Speaker 1: off right now. We're about to talk about the ideas
Speaker 1: around the ice Free Corridor, which for decades people believed
Speaker 1: the Clovis people traveled through this ice free Corridor to
Speaker 1: get from Alaska's burying land bridge into the interior of America.
Speaker 1: The corridor was created by two abutting glaciers, my beloved
Speaker 1: Laurentidde and the Coridialian ice Sheet. Here's some hard hitting knowledge, boys.
Speaker 1: So what site is the most definitive site today that
Speaker 1: bumps it back to that fifteen.
Speaker 4: Well, there's several. You've got some here in Texas, the
Speaker 4: Gault site, which is just outside of Austin. We've got
Speaker 4: sits in the Pacific Northwest, like Cooper's Ferry. We've got
Speaker 4: sits in southern South America like Monteverde, and so in
Speaker 4: monta Verde dates you know, fourteen six, fourteen seven, And
Speaker 4: if you think about it, if they're down there by
Speaker 4: fourteen six or fourteen seven, they came across the land
Speaker 4: bridge a hell out earlier.
Speaker 1: And we and oh man, we're like moving so fast.
Speaker 1: We know that the people, the peopling of South America
Speaker 1: came through the North American continent through genetics exactly.
Speaker 4: But let me actually throw a wrinkle into this first. Okay,
Speaker 4: remember we were talking about the ice Free Corridor, and
Speaker 4: I'm gonna bring genetics into it. By the way, So
Speaker 4: the Ice Free Corridor, it was traditionally thought, you know,
Speaker 4: it opened just about the time of Clovis well doing
Speaker 4: some work. We obtained several cores from the center of
Speaker 4: the ice free Corridor region. The ice free corridor runs
Speaker 4: from slightly northwest to slightly southeast, and it opened like
Speaker 4: your winter coats where the zipper comes down from the
Speaker 4: top and up from the bottom.
Speaker 1: And it's gone from Alaska to Montana basically exactly.
Speaker 4: So if you can imagine, then you're unzipping your winter
Speaker 4: coat from the top and the bottom. The central portion
Speaker 4: of that coat is going to stay closed latest. Okay,
Speaker 4: So we obtained cores from lakes in that central portion,
Speaker 4: and we looked at the vironmental ancient DNA. There's been
Speaker 4: a revolution in our ability to understand past environments. We
Speaker 4: can take a sediment core, So think about drilling a
Speaker 4: core down into the sediment at the bottom of a lake.
Speaker 1: You then extrude.
Speaker 4: That tube of sediment and then you find slice it
Speaker 4: and you look at the DNA fragments that are preserved
Speaker 4: in that mud. Because a square centimeter of dirt will
Speaker 4: contain billions of fragments of DNA. Billions with a.
Speaker 1: Beak of animals that urinated, defecated, did.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, absolutely anything that was hanging around that lake. Okay,
Speaker 4: and what we discovered that organic life does not come
Speaker 4: to this lake until around twelve thousand, six hundred years ago. Okay,
Speaker 4: So wait a minute. We just said people were in
Speaker 4: the America sixteen thousand years ago. If there's nothing growing
Speaker 4: in the ice Freak Corridor until twelve six how the
Speaker 4: heck did people get through that corridor? They didn't, right,
Speaker 4: That corridor stayed closed relatively late, and when it did
Speaker 4: finally open, it was not biologically viable. If you're coming
Speaker 4: from Alaska down to Montana, you're not packing a lunch
Speaker 4: and doing it in a day, Okay, You've got to
Speaker 4: have resources. Those resources weren't available. So what does that
Speaker 4: tell us they didn't come down the ice free corld.
Speaker 3: It would have been like a ice hallway.
Speaker 1: I mean, there wouldn't have been a bunch of animals
Speaker 1: there and nope, nope, and even vegetation maybe. I mean
Speaker 1: it would have been much flat through an ice.
Speaker 4: Box exactly, and through mud and lakes and just glacial debris.
Speaker 4: It would not have been a pleasant So.
Speaker 1: The ice free Corridor was That's the way that we
Speaker 1: believed people got into the interior of the continent. Traditionally,
Speaker 1: until like ten years ago, pretty much with basically with
Speaker 1: these mud, these dirt cores and them saying, hey, there
Speaker 1: was nothing here right until twelve thousand years ago.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what does that mean?
Speaker 4: Well, that means they got here some other way. Wow.
Speaker 4: And the other way is down the Pacific coast.
Speaker 1: So the first Americans undoubtedly came by water period. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: decades ago, the head honcho leaders said this wasn't a possibility.
Speaker 5: Here's Taylor John Wesley Powell, who was the original inaugural
Speaker 5: director for both the Smithsonian but more importantly the Bureau
Speaker 5: of American Ethnology. The very first paper that was written
Speaker 5: on the academy. So think like legal case law. If
Speaker 5: you write the first piece of case law, everyone else
Speaker 5: has to follow you. And I'm going to paraphrase the
Speaker 5: title of it. On the Limitations of certain Anthropological data
Speaker 5: is what it was called. Since he laid out the
Speaker 5: burying straight theory and a very calculated line. He said
Speaker 5: something along of the lines of we will entertain no
Speaker 5: extra limital diffusion, meaning people didn't come from across water
Speaker 5: or from somewhere else. Now, this is to the people
Speaker 5: that invented the canoe and seafaring canoes up in the Arctic. Obviously,
Speaker 5: we've navigated waterways for a very long time.
Speaker 1: Many in the indigenous communities believe these statements to be
Speaker 1: politically motivated, But I think modern archaeologists would just say
Speaker 1: that we didn't have the data, we didn't have the
Speaker 1: hard evidence. And I can sympathize with both sides. The
Speaker 1: field of archaeology is limited to hard evidence, and it
Speaker 1: just didn't have it. But we've seen even in modern
Speaker 1: times how people are politicizing science, and the ancient stories
Speaker 1: of indigenous people just seem to get truer and truer
Speaker 1: as time goes by. As we wind down, I've got
Speaker 1: a Clovis point in my hand, and I'm mesmerized by it.
Speaker 1: It's just it's just such mystery, and that's the that's
Speaker 1: why these are so cool.
Speaker 6: Yeah, such a mystery, and the fact that we could
Speaker 6: find these Clovis points, this technology that is indicative of
Speaker 6: this time period can be found from Alaska to Florida,
Speaker 6: from Maine to New Mexico.
Speaker 2: Oh even a Central America.
Speaker 1: I mean they these people covered the cont Yes, so
Speaker 1: you could you could find one of these in your yard?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, definitely, one hundred percent. The cool thing about
Speaker 2: the stone Age is the stone Age is everyone's history, right,
Speaker 2: That is the story of our species and how the
Speaker 2: modern world looks the way it does today.
Speaker 1: We've learned so much on this episode. I hope our
Speaker 1: brains don't overheat from all this new knowledge. But I
Speaker 1: think this will give us a good foundation for understanding
Speaker 1: some of this continent's earliest history. And I find this
Speaker 1: stuff valuable when I'm in a wild place alone, and
Speaker 1: the thoughts of humans in the Ice Age chasing mammoths
Speaker 1: and the great mystery around their lives is just almost overwhelming.
Speaker 1: I really love this stuff big thanks to my distinguished guests,
Speaker 1: Doctor Aaron, Doctor Meltzer, and Taylor Kean. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: I can't thank everybody enough for listening to Bear Grease
Speaker 1: and Brent's This Country Life podcast Keep the Wild Places Wild,
Speaker 1: because that's where the bears live.
Speaker 2: You know, we've been talking about extinctions and hunting and stuff.
Speaker 2: What I want someone out there to do, if you're
Speaker 2: into like movie are TV shows. I want someone out
Speaker 2: there to combine the stone Age genre with the zombie
Speaker 2: apocalypse genre. And what I want is I want a
Speaker 2: TV show where the megafaunam have been zombified and that
Speaker 2: is the reason why they went extinct. And like Clovist
Speaker 2: folks have to defend themselves against a zombie mammoth or
Speaker 2: a zombie short faced bear. But I'm just like, why
Speaker 2: hasn't anyone combined zombies with stone age.
Speaker 1: If Hollywood, somehow ever gets into this lab, they're going
Speaker 1: to get there.
Speaker 2: Can we do like an audio trademark, so if someone
Speaker 2: wants to pick up this idea, we get the royalties.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll give it all to you man, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is your brain chilt.