WEBVTT - Ep. 033 0:00:08.960 --> 0:00:12.760 This is me Eat Your Podcast coming in you shirtless, 0:00:12.800 --> 0:00:17.680 severely folk bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. 0:00:18.239 --> 0:00:29.600 You can't predict anything. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Me 0:00:29.640 --> 0:00:32.320 Eat Your Podcast. This is as high as we've ever 0:00:32.360 --> 0:00:36.199 been in that we're in the nineteenth four of a 0:00:36.200 --> 0:00:41.479 hotel right now, Seattle, Washington, the Western Um. Yeah, this 0:00:41.560 --> 0:00:43.600 is the Yeah, as high as we've ever been, looking 0:00:43.600 --> 0:00:47.280 out on Puget Sound. And I'm here with couple folks. 0:00:47.320 --> 0:00:51.199 But the most important one right now is are you 0:00:51.360 --> 0:00:54.480 still go by professor? You can't be a professor anymore. 0:00:54.640 --> 0:00:58.480 I'm not a professor anymore. Now, So what are you now? Uh? 0:00:58.720 --> 0:01:01.800 Just a citizen, right, I guess? Oh yeah, I can 0:01:01.840 --> 0:01:05.560 say that. We're here with the writer Dan. Now. We 0:01:05.640 --> 0:01:07.840 had this debate earlier because I had always thought I 0:01:07.880 --> 0:01:12.000 had always like floorries. That's correct, Okay, I thought this 0:01:12.000 --> 0:01:16.680 this guy, your former student, doesn't know that. What were 0:01:16.680 --> 0:01:19.839 you trying to tell me? It was? I've always heard flores, yeah, 0:01:19.920 --> 0:01:25.160 within Flores, yeah, Flores. Yeah, it's uh, it's because it's 0:01:25.400 --> 0:01:34.280 pronounced uh with a Louisiana French accent, like it's floor. Yeah. 0:01:34.319 --> 0:01:37.440 So writer and citizen Dan Flores who I met when 0:01:37.480 --> 0:01:40.160 he was Professor Dan Flores years ago. I was in 0:01:40.160 --> 0:01:41.600 graduate school and I had to. I think it was 0:01:41.640 --> 0:01:44.199 part of the recordment. You take a seminar or something 0:01:45.200 --> 0:01:49.080 outside of your discipline. I was a writing, a writing student, 0:01:49.040 --> 0:01:54.800 and I took a class. Um, I took your class. 0:01:54.840 --> 0:01:56.920 What was your that class called? You remember the when 0:01:56.920 --> 0:02:00.200 I was in it was it was an environment all 0:02:00.720 --> 0:02:03.840 writing seminar, I think is what you took. Yeah, And 0:02:03.880 --> 0:02:06.800 I was just humiliated in it. Um, way out of 0:02:06.840 --> 0:02:09.560 my league. All these guys I knew all about writing 0:02:09.600 --> 0:02:12.799 about things that they were sure happened instead of things 0:02:12.840 --> 0:02:15.800 you thought might have happened. Um. Which is part of 0:02:15.800 --> 0:02:17.760 the being a historian. I think that they try to 0:02:17.800 --> 0:02:21.160 train you and that I recall you might have that class. Yeah, 0:02:21.200 --> 0:02:23.000 but I was like I was out gone. There was 0:02:23.040 --> 0:02:26.960 some good students in there. Man. But I met Dana 0:02:27.000 --> 0:02:29.760 took that class, and it was just had a profound 0:02:29.800 --> 0:02:34.560 impact on me. Um. The body of literature that you know, 0:02:34.600 --> 0:02:36.760 we looked at and just like a way of thinking 0:02:36.800 --> 0:02:41.919 about things. Um. We had your student on who Who's here? 0:02:42.400 --> 0:02:45.519 Randa Williams on talking about his dissertation he did, and 0:02:45.919 --> 0:02:50.120 you were involved in that as an advisor. Yea, um, 0:02:51.200 --> 0:02:56.040 but just just again, can you hit what um in 0:02:56.120 --> 0:02:59.160 your own words, like what an environmental historian is and 0:02:59.240 --> 0:03:03.280 does and looks at. It's not it's that terms not 0:03:03.400 --> 0:03:07.200 a term people are familiar with outside of academics and scenes. Yeah, 0:03:07.240 --> 0:03:09.320 it's a it's a kind of term that you end 0:03:09.360 --> 0:03:13.440 up explaining to people in bars quite a bit, uh 0:03:13.440 --> 0:03:15.480 when they ask you, you know what you do or 0:03:15.480 --> 0:03:19.560 what you write about? I mean, basically, it's a it's 0:03:19.600 --> 0:03:23.600 a way of thinking about their relationship between people in 0:03:23.639 --> 0:03:27.000 the natural world. And so it's and and doing it 0:03:27.440 --> 0:03:32.720 using history, which of course causes you to to examine 0:03:34.240 --> 0:03:38.520 changes over time. And so it's a environmental history and 0:03:38.560 --> 0:03:41.200 it's only been around for about thirty five or forty 0:03:41.280 --> 0:03:46.280 years now as a as a field of study. In fact, 0:03:46.360 --> 0:03:49.880 we're in Seattle right now because the American Society for 0:03:50.000 --> 0:03:53.880 Environmental History is meeting here. This is its annual conference, 0:03:53.880 --> 0:03:56.840 and it held its first one in nineteen seventy six, 0:03:56.880 --> 0:03:59.240 So they'll give you an idea of how recent this 0:03:59.400 --> 0:04:02.560 feel has been around. But it's basically a way to 0:04:03.360 --> 0:04:06.960 uh to look at the history of how people have 0:04:07.080 --> 0:04:12.560 interacted with nature and that's a broad enough, uh spectrum 0:04:12.640 --> 0:04:16.599 of study that you just get the right and think 0:04:16.640 --> 0:04:19.640 about all kinds of things, you know, not just the 0:04:19.760 --> 0:04:25.160 environmental movement itself or the history of conservation Teddy Roosevelt. 0:04:25.760 --> 0:04:30.080 But uh, I mean in Randall's case, for example, he 0:04:30.080 --> 0:04:37.279 he got to think and write about how hunters have 0:04:37.880 --> 0:04:42.120 played a role in American culture in the twentieth century. 0:04:42.480 --> 0:04:45.400 And the thing I've been interested in most in the 0:04:45.480 --> 0:04:49.560 last few years has been, uh, animals and the relationship 0:04:49.560 --> 0:04:54.279 between people and animals. Yeah, and you have two books 0:04:54.320 --> 0:04:56.159 coming out right now? How many books? How many like 0:04:56.400 --> 0:05:00.920 book length manuscripts have you published? Uh? These two will 0:05:00.960 --> 0:05:06.039 be the ninth and tenth. Uh so, and that dates 0:05:06.080 --> 0:05:08.320 back to about four My first book came out in 0:05:10.080 --> 0:05:15.039 hundreds of academic papers, well hundreds. But I've written an 0:05:15.080 --> 0:05:18.440 academic popular and academic articles. Yeah, a lot of a 0:05:18.440 --> 0:05:21.320 lot of popular things. I probably have published more popular 0:05:21.360 --> 0:05:24.760 things than academic pieces, but I've done I don't know, 0:05:26.760 --> 0:05:30.159 actually I'm just having a hazard guess, but maybe two 0:05:30.240 --> 0:05:35.120 or three dozen academic papers and peer reviewed kind of journals, 0:05:35.560 --> 0:05:40.239 and then I often spun off, you know, popular article 0:05:40.400 --> 0:05:42.599 or two from those kinds of things. Oh that is 0:05:42.600 --> 0:05:45.039 that how you work generally, Like you'll find stuff through 0:05:45.080 --> 0:05:47.880 your research that would be like, you know, would be 0:05:47.920 --> 0:05:50.880 suitable to a popular audience. Yeah, so you know, I mean, 0:05:50.960 --> 0:05:53.919 writing for academic journals is a wonderful things. How you 0:05:53.960 --> 0:05:57.240 make your reputation in a field and get a professorship 0:05:57.360 --> 0:06:00.440 and and all that sort of stuff. But uh, they 0:06:00.440 --> 0:06:02.520 don't pay you any money for those kinds of things. 0:06:02.520 --> 0:06:04.720 And I always I mean, I started out as a 0:06:04.760 --> 0:06:08.240 magazine writer before I ever became an academic, so I 0:06:08.240 --> 0:06:10.760 always had in my mind when I would do an 0:06:10.800 --> 0:06:14.960 academic piece, so how can I spend this off somehow 0:06:15.000 --> 0:06:18.560 as a you know, as a popular article and uh 0:06:19.760 --> 0:06:22.400 reach a bigger audience with it for one thing. Uh, 0:06:22.839 --> 0:06:25.120 make a little bit of change from it as well, 0:06:26.120 --> 0:06:30.560 but primarily kind of reach more people. And so yeah, 0:06:30.600 --> 0:06:33.039 a lot of the things I've done is as academic 0:06:33.120 --> 0:06:36.279 and scholarly things have ended up, as you know, either 0:06:36.320 --> 0:06:39.520 getting absorbed into a book or or published as a 0:06:39.520 --> 0:06:41.880 as a popular article. So what are what are the 0:06:41.880 --> 0:06:44.960 two books you have now? And why in the world 0:06:44.960 --> 0:06:48.360 are you published in two books at the same time. Yeah, 0:06:48.400 --> 0:06:54.600 that's an unusual thing. Um, So the books are American Serengetti, 0:06:55.680 --> 0:07:00.200 which is UM just a day or two away from 0:07:00.360 --> 0:07:04.039 officially being out UH. And the subtitle of that book 0:07:04.120 --> 0:07:09.400 is UM the Last Big Animals of the Great Plains. 0:07:10.360 --> 0:07:14.040 And the other book is called Coyote America Unnatural and 0:07:14.160 --> 0:07:19.080 Supernatural History. And that book comes out about the middle 0:07:19.080 --> 0:07:22.840 of May. And you're writing them both at the same time. Well, 0:07:23.760 --> 0:07:26.600 I wasn't really And you know, the truth is, the 0:07:27.120 --> 0:07:32.880 books are connected to one another because UM the Coyote 0:07:33.000 --> 0:07:39.840 Book or a Coyote Book was originally contracted to the 0:07:39.920 --> 0:07:44.040 publisher of the American Serengetti book, and which was a 0:07:44.160 --> 0:07:49.520 university press publisher. And I've retired from the University of 0:07:49.560 --> 0:07:52.600 Montana two years ago, and as I got close to retirement, 0:07:52.600 --> 0:07:55.600 I realized that, so there's not really much point in 0:07:55.720 --> 0:07:59.520 writing books for university presses anymore. I mean, that's really 0:08:00.080 --> 0:08:03.360 great when you're a professor and you get rewarded by 0:08:03.360 --> 0:08:05.800 your university for doing that and in the field for 0:08:05.880 --> 0:08:08.760 doing that. But I knew I was about to retire, 0:08:09.360 --> 0:08:12.760 and so to reach bigger audiences, I wanted to do 0:08:12.840 --> 0:08:18.920 a book. UM start writing books basically for UH commercial presses, 0:08:19.600 --> 0:08:24.160 And so I had acquired an agent who asked me 0:08:24.200 --> 0:08:26.040 about three or four years ago, so what are you 0:08:26.040 --> 0:08:28.559 working on now? Said, well, I've got a coyote book 0:08:28.600 --> 0:08:33.600 that's contracted to the University of Kansas Press, and uh. 0:08:34.080 --> 0:08:37.640 He said, well, why don't you write a proposal out 0:08:37.640 --> 0:08:39.120 of that and let me take it to New York 0:08:39.160 --> 0:08:42.080 and see if I can sell it? And I did 0:08:42.559 --> 0:08:47.600 and he did. Uh. The problem was, so that was 0:08:47.640 --> 0:08:51.560 all great, but the problem was University of Kansas Press 0:08:52.200 --> 0:08:55.280 didn't take all that kindly to us sort of taking 0:08:55.920 --> 0:08:58.840 their book away from them. And so the only way 0:08:58.920 --> 0:09:03.400 to kind of resolve things with with Kansas was to 0:09:03.640 --> 0:09:07.680 promise them another book, which, yeah, which they agreed to, 0:09:08.080 --> 0:09:10.280 but they also said, okay, that's fine, we want to 0:09:10.360 --> 0:09:14.160 keep the same deadline you had with us, however, And 0:09:14.240 --> 0:09:17.959 so basically this time last year, I had a deadline 0:09:18.000 --> 0:09:22.160 for the Coyote Book in New York of January, and 0:09:22.200 --> 0:09:26.240 I had a deadline for the American Sarrangetty Book in Lawrence, 0:09:26.320 --> 0:09:32.199 Kansas of May the first. So I finished up the 0:09:32.360 --> 0:09:36.640 Coyote book and uh, in hailed a couple of times, 0:09:36.640 --> 0:09:40.000 took a couple of deep breaths, and uh, since I 0:09:40.040 --> 0:09:42.120 was already used to getting up every day and writing 0:09:42.160 --> 0:09:44.960 four or five or six hours. I just kept ongoing 0:09:45.160 --> 0:09:48.320 and in another four months or so, managed to finish 0:09:48.320 --> 0:09:51.840 off that. Yeah, that American sarrang Getty book. But in 0:09:51.840 --> 0:09:55.920 a way, you've been researching that book for your entire career. Indeed, 0:09:55.960 --> 0:09:58.080 I had, and I you know, and I had, I 0:09:58.080 --> 0:10:02.000 had written some of it actually, um already, I mean 0:10:02.040 --> 0:10:06.880 I ended up I ended up revising pretty considerably the 0:10:06.880 --> 0:10:10.640 things that I've already written. But yeah, I had worked 0:10:10.679 --> 0:10:14.559 on Buffalo. Uh years ago. I had written a kind 0:10:14.600 --> 0:10:20.360 of a major scholarly peace about Buffalo that sort of reimagined, 0:10:20.800 --> 0:10:24.840 reconceptualized what happened to him in the nineteenth century. That 0:10:24.960 --> 0:10:30.400 became a pretty successful academic article. Yeah, I've I've had 0:10:31.200 --> 0:10:34.439 a lot of great luck just telling that story for you, 0:10:36.760 --> 0:10:39.960 being like you know what I was reading. Yeah. I 0:10:40.000 --> 0:10:43.480 always credit you, though, man, Yeah, well, I mean yeah, 0:10:43.559 --> 0:10:46.199 and you uh you did credit me, and I appreciated 0:10:46.240 --> 0:10:50.120 that in your in your Buffalo book. But I so 0:10:50.240 --> 0:10:53.120 that story I kind of uh you know, I knew 0:10:53.160 --> 0:10:56.400 pretty well, and that provided me with a starting point 0:10:56.440 --> 0:10:59.959 for the chapter that's on Buffalo in this American Staring 0:11:00.000 --> 0:11:03.360 Getty book. But Leo the premise of the American when 0:11:03.360 --> 0:11:04.959 you say the last big ones, you mean the last 0:11:04.960 --> 0:11:06.559 big ones that are here now? Are the last big 0:11:06.600 --> 0:11:08.000 ones like the ones we lost at the end of 0:11:08.000 --> 0:11:10.760 the Places scene. Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean, 0:11:10.760 --> 0:11:13.840 I actually talk about both versions of the American Serengetti. 0:11:14.000 --> 0:11:18.920 The Pleistocene version um doesn't get as much coverage as 0:11:18.960 --> 0:11:22.000 the historic version of the American Serengetti, but I spend 0:11:22.000 --> 0:11:25.160 a good bit of time talking about it because down 0:11:25.200 --> 0:11:27.200 to ten thousand years ago, I mean, we really we 0:11:27.320 --> 0:11:32.360 had an African analog on the American Great Plains. Uh, 0:11:32.600 --> 0:11:36.679 with all the the charismatic megafauna that we're here. I mean, 0:11:36.679 --> 0:11:42.439 we had elephants in the form of mammoths. We had uh, 0:11:42.640 --> 0:11:46.920 we had camels. We had of course, huge herds of 0:11:47.080 --> 0:11:51.040 giant bison that were sort of the counterpart to wildebeest 0:11:51.440 --> 0:11:55.480 herds in Africa. We had a lion, the step Line, 0:11:55.480 --> 0:11:59.320 which was actually a larger lion than the African lion. 0:12:00.080 --> 0:12:05.560 We had giant and very grass isisle short faced bear 0:12:05.720 --> 0:12:09.679 that was down to about twelve years ago was probably 0:12:09.720 --> 0:12:12.400 one of the most formidable predators anywhere in the world. 0:12:13.040 --> 0:12:17.640 Some people think that humans weren't able to to migrate 0:12:17.640 --> 0:12:21.800 to North America until about fifteen thousand years ago because 0:12:22.720 --> 0:12:27.080 these short faced bears were there at the bearing straight 0:12:27.440 --> 0:12:32.240 and they presented such a formidable barrier uh to humans 0:12:32.280 --> 0:12:35.960 that we basically they had to become extinct before humans 0:12:36.000 --> 0:12:38.040 were able to get to North America. So there was 0:12:38.080 --> 0:12:42.440 this large beast she area of animals down to ten 0:12:42.480 --> 0:12:49.400 thousand years ago. A giant hunting, very fast hunting hyena. Uh. 0:12:49.440 --> 0:12:54.160 There were cheetah like cats that were related to cougars 0:12:55.040 --> 0:13:00.000 um cougars are kind of their descendants, but they were uh, 0:13:00.559 --> 0:13:06.599 curved fang cats, one called a scimitar cat. And of course, uh, 0:13:06.640 --> 0:13:10.880 you know, the the these cats that we imagine from 0:13:10.920 --> 0:13:15.959 the plies to saying running down the calves of of mammoths. 0:13:15.960 --> 0:13:18.720 But most of that beast sherry, with the exception of 0:13:19.240 --> 0:13:23.440 five or six animals, when extinct about ten thousand years 0:13:23.440 --> 0:13:28.120 ago in an extinction scenario frankly that we still don't 0:13:28.200 --> 0:13:31.800 quite understand. I mean like we don't understand it temporarily. 0:13:32.960 --> 0:13:36.760 We don't understand it temporarily or in terms of costs. 0:13:38.480 --> 0:13:44.720 For example, one of the most common creatures of the Pleistocene, 0:13:44.840 --> 0:13:50.400 American Serenghetti were bands of wild horses. Some biologists believe 0:13:50.520 --> 0:13:56.319 that they comprised as much as twenty of the biomass 0:13:56.400 --> 0:14:00.200 of grazing animals on the Great Plains down to about 0:14:00.280 --> 0:14:03.360 eight or nine thousand years ago. And they the thing 0:14:03.360 --> 0:14:06.320 about horses is they migrated across the Bearing Strait and 0:14:06.320 --> 0:14:08.920 they ended up in Asia and in Africa, where they 0:14:08.920 --> 0:14:13.480 became zebras and quaggas and and related animals, uh and 0:14:13.520 --> 0:14:17.920 European horses. And they survived in all those places. But 0:14:18.000 --> 0:14:21.160 for some reason that we don't grasp, about eight or 0:14:21.200 --> 0:14:24.760 nine thousand years ago, all those horses became extinct in 0:14:24.840 --> 0:14:30.360 North America. And so we lost this giant biomass of 0:14:30.520 --> 0:14:34.200 grazing animals in the form of wild horses that completely 0:14:34.280 --> 0:14:39.320 disappeared from the Pleistocene serengetti. And we don't know exactly why. 0:14:39.400 --> 0:14:45.360 I mean, some of the speculation is that they contracted diseases. Um. 0:14:45.520 --> 0:14:48.840 Some of some of these is the blitz Creek hypothesis 0:14:48.880 --> 0:14:53.280 totally out of fashion, though it is not out of fashion. Yeah, 0:14:53.360 --> 0:14:59.520 and so there's a paleog Yeah. The so the ideas 0:14:59.680 --> 0:15:04.960 range from the Blitzkrieg that you mentioned, which was popularized 0:15:05.000 --> 0:15:08.440 by a paleo biology saying Paul Martin now Paul Martin 0:15:08.480 --> 0:15:13.000 at the University of Arizona, who wrote a bunch of 0:15:13.040 --> 0:15:16.480 really compelling books. The most the last one he wrote 0:15:16.480 --> 0:15:20.880 was called Twilight of the Mammoths, and his argument was 0:15:20.960 --> 0:15:25.640 that about fifteen thousand years or so ago, humans began 0:15:25.720 --> 0:15:28.880 migrating out of Asia into North America, confronting a bit 0:15:29.680 --> 0:15:32.920 of animals that had never seen human predators before. And 0:15:32.960 --> 0:15:38.000 these these people were very accomplished predators with a very 0:15:38.040 --> 0:15:44.640 sophisticated tool kit, and the Blitzkrieg model speculates that in 0:15:44.880 --> 0:15:49.720 a period of less than three hundred years, these people 0:15:50.440 --> 0:15:55.600 expanded from Siberia into the America's all the way down 0:15:55.640 --> 0:15:59.240 to the tip of South America and wiped out most 0:15:59.240 --> 0:16:02.600 of these speed She's that we're confronting human predators for 0:16:02.600 --> 0:16:05.720 the first time and just sort of collapsed in the 0:16:05.720 --> 0:16:11.400 wake of this assault. It's out on one hand, it's outlandish. 0:16:11.400 --> 0:16:14.840 On the other hand, when you look at the if, 0:16:14.840 --> 0:16:19.920 when you look at how where things went extinct win 0:16:20.680 --> 0:16:23.240 and when people showed up there, and then you have 0:16:23.400 --> 0:16:27.200 things like Mammoth's on Wrangle Island, up until four thousand 0:16:27.240 --> 0:16:29.880 years ago, and no one had ever stepped foot on wrangle. 0:16:30.720 --> 0:16:33.920 It just gets weird, man, it does get weird, and 0:16:34.000 --> 0:16:37.480 it's Martin argued, and other people have argued that as 0:16:37.560 --> 0:16:40.080 humans spread out of Africa, we actually kind of did 0:16:40.160 --> 0:16:42.840 this all over the world. Uh. You know, some of 0:16:42.840 --> 0:16:45.040 the really good examples of it are, for example, in 0:16:45.080 --> 0:16:49.640 the islands of Polynesia, where as soon as humans arrive, 0:16:50.760 --> 0:16:56.920 um for instance in a y uh thirty, some species 0:16:56.920 --> 0:16:59.960 of flightless birds become extinct within a couple of hundred 0:17:00.120 --> 0:17:04.679 years because they're such easy targets for human hunters. And 0:17:04.760 --> 0:17:10.040 humans usually arrived with dogs and sometimes with hawks, and 0:17:11.000 --> 0:17:14.040 this suite of animals that we bring along with us 0:17:14.080 --> 0:17:17.560 as domestic that's sort of play a role. And and 0:17:17.600 --> 0:17:20.920 the simplification of the ecologies of all these far flung 0:17:21.000 --> 0:17:23.800 places that we get into. Yeah, in Europe. And I'm 0:17:23.800 --> 0:17:25.800 not arguing, like I don't know enough to argue for 0:17:25.880 --> 0:17:27.360 it against it, but I'm just talking about the parts 0:17:27.359 --> 0:17:30.719 that are compelling is that Europe had versions of all 0:17:30.760 --> 0:17:32.600 these things we're talking about in the American when what 0:17:32.640 --> 0:17:35.160 you describe as the American serengetti, but they went through 0:17:35.160 --> 0:17:38.640 it thirty years ago, and we know that humans were 0:17:38.720 --> 0:17:42.320 like that. You know that the human hunters like basically us, 0:17:42.359 --> 0:17:45.600 like people that were they alive today, could fly an airplane. 0:17:45.960 --> 0:17:50.480 You know that they arrived there around those times and 0:17:50.480 --> 0:17:52.000 you saw the same thing happened again. But on the 0:17:52.040 --> 0:17:54.240 other hand, it's just like, how in the world could 0:17:54.240 --> 0:17:58.119 you kill them all? Yeah, it's uh, it's it's with 0:17:58.200 --> 0:18:01.440 atladdles and that's the primary su primary weapon they had 0:18:01.840 --> 0:18:07.359 at laddles and sometimes just stabbing spears, but lay the 0:18:07.440 --> 0:18:09.320 other ones out. I kind of hijacked it with the 0:18:10.080 --> 0:18:13.160 blitz screen thing is so fascinating. It's not as fun 0:18:13.200 --> 0:18:15.480 as it's more fun than the things like the disease. 0:18:15.760 --> 0:18:21.040 Yeah it is. And so uh, the best evidence, by 0:18:21.080 --> 0:18:24.800 the way, for the blitzkrieg is in North America is 0:18:24.880 --> 0:18:29.960 with mammoths. I mean we we've only recently, for instance, 0:18:30.440 --> 0:18:35.080 actually discovered kill sites of horses in North America from 0:18:38.359 --> 0:18:41.040 there have been some discovered in the last seven or 0:18:41.080 --> 0:18:44.960 eight ten years. Yeah, and those are the first one. 0:18:45.040 --> 0:18:48.359 So part of the problem with the blitzkrieg model is that, Okay, 0:18:48.400 --> 0:18:51.240 so if that's your model, then you expect to go 0:18:51.280 --> 0:18:55.000 out there and archaeology paleoarchaeology is going to yield up 0:18:55.200 --> 0:18:57.760 all these sites with slaughtered animals, sort of the way 0:18:57.800 --> 0:19:03.040 it does in Europe. At with horses in France. I mean, 0:19:03.080 --> 0:19:06.359 there's a spot in France where something like thirty or 0:19:06.400 --> 0:19:10.520 forty thousand horse carcasses were killed and butchered by human 0:19:10.600 --> 0:19:13.639 hunters driving off cliffs. Well, I mean, that was the 0:19:13.640 --> 0:19:15.520 speculation for a long time. It looks like what they 0:19:15.560 --> 0:19:18.520 were actually doing was driving them into corrals. They were 0:19:18.600 --> 0:19:22.800 driving them into corral. Such a horrific vision driven off 0:19:22.800 --> 0:19:26.399 a cliff's yeah, it's a horrific vision. And there's a 0:19:26.480 --> 0:19:29.880 there's a wonderful nineteenth century illustration of horses pouring off 0:19:29.880 --> 0:19:33.600 a cliff in France. But it looks as if what 0:19:33.680 --> 0:19:36.320 they actually were doing were billing corrals and crawling them 0:19:36.320 --> 0:19:39.080 and then then kill them. Some people argue, in fact 0:19:39.080 --> 0:19:42.199 that the reason we have modern horses, which most of 0:19:42.240 --> 0:19:46.040 which spring from European and African sources, is because about 0:19:46.080 --> 0:19:48.920 six thousand years ago we domesticated them before we could 0:19:49.000 --> 0:19:52.680 kill them all off. We finally domesticated them, and that's 0:19:52.680 --> 0:19:57.520 what enabled them to serve in the mythology of plains 0:19:57.600 --> 0:20:01.840 tribes horses sometimes play a role, or am I wrong? 0:20:01.920 --> 0:20:05.199 I remember someone pointing out that, like the like this 0:20:05.280 --> 0:20:10.280 idea of of the mounted planes hunter was a two 0:20:10.680 --> 0:20:15.119 was like a brief phenomenon's it started to years ago. 0:20:15.440 --> 0:20:17.479 But they're like, how could it be so ingrained? How 0:20:17.520 --> 0:20:20.520 could the horse become so quickly so ingrained in the mythology. 0:20:21.520 --> 0:20:23.600 It just had such a profound impact on them. Well, 0:20:23.640 --> 0:20:27.160 I mean, some some tribes. I saw an exhibit in 0:20:27.160 --> 0:20:30.639 in Calgary several years ago that was curated by the 0:20:30.720 --> 0:20:35.399 Blackfoot Confederacy and at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and 0:20:35.400 --> 0:20:41.560 and these Blackfoot elders said in the text of this 0:20:41.640 --> 0:20:50.320 exhibit that there mythological stories remembered horses from thousands of 0:20:50.400 --> 0:20:54.480 years ago, and so they argued that they had preserved 0:20:54.520 --> 0:20:57.520 a memory of horses from back in the Plies to Saine, 0:20:57.920 --> 0:21:04.120 and when in the seventeen hundreds they encountered European horses, 0:21:04.400 --> 0:21:08.880 they were able to draw on some mythology about these animals. Um, 0:21:09.119 --> 0:21:12.440 you hear the term collective memory, Yeah, and a collective 0:21:12.480 --> 0:21:14.840 tribal memory is I mean, you know, I don't denigrate 0:21:14.920 --> 0:21:17.960 that at all. It's it's entirely possible that that was 0:21:17.960 --> 0:21:24.000 the case. But I would say that Martin's argument about 0:21:24.040 --> 0:21:28.159 a blitzkrieg is most evident with mammoths, where we do 0:21:28.280 --> 0:21:34.920 have kill sites with projectile points like Clovis points embedded 0:21:35.359 --> 0:21:38.800 in the skeletal material of the recovered animals, and they're 0:21:39.119 --> 0:21:43.000 there are a lot of of Clovis sites with mammoths. 0:21:43.400 --> 0:21:45.320 Do you remember that you and I visited one of 0:21:45.320 --> 0:21:47.680 those slights together, Well, I wrote about that. That's sort 0:21:47.720 --> 0:21:52.240 of like that's how the American Serengetti book opens, In fact, 0:21:52.320 --> 0:21:54.680 is when that with that visit that you and I 0:21:54.760 --> 0:21:58.600 made over to Blackwater Draw, uh and sort of giving 0:21:58.640 --> 0:22:02.000 ourselves our own personal tour because I were called. We 0:22:02.080 --> 0:22:03.760 drove all the way over there from Santa Fe and 0:22:03.800 --> 0:22:06.159 the place was close, so we just hopped over the 0:22:06.200 --> 0:22:10.560 fence and and gave ourselves a tour. But uh, yeah, 0:22:10.600 --> 0:22:13.399 so the Blackwater Draw, I mean, that's that's the the 0:22:13.400 --> 0:22:20.400 the original Clovis site in North America where butchered mammoths 0:22:20.680 --> 0:22:25.240 were first found with with evidence of human hunting. But 0:22:25.320 --> 0:22:27.439 there's not much evidence for the other animals. I mean, 0:22:27.480 --> 0:22:29.760 you'd think that there would be all these camel sites 0:22:29.800 --> 0:22:35.360 out there with butchered remains and points and horse sits 0:22:35.440 --> 0:22:38.280 and and so that's been one of the problems more 0:22:38.320 --> 0:22:41.600 recently last ten or fifteen years with the Blitz Creeg 0:22:41.640 --> 0:22:44.160 model is that there's not there aren't the sites out there. 0:22:44.200 --> 0:22:47.159 Maybe we just haven't found them, but except for the 0:22:47.200 --> 0:22:50.119 mammoth site, there's not much out there. There's a I 0:22:50.160 --> 0:22:55.000 believe at Lyndenmeyer, the Lindenmeyer site near Fort Collins, Colorado, 0:22:55.240 --> 0:22:58.800 there was a foreshaft made from a camel bone. Yeah. Yeah, 0:22:58.880 --> 0:23:02.480 So there's evidence obviously that they were using yeah, picking 0:23:02.520 --> 0:23:05.479 it up. They were at least exploiting the remains of camus, 0:23:05.520 --> 0:23:07.439 whether they were camels where they were killing or not. 0:23:07.520 --> 0:23:10.040 So what is the horse sight that turned up? It's one. 0:23:10.080 --> 0:23:14.000 It's one near Boulder, Uh, Colorado. Uh. And I've not 0:23:14.359 --> 0:23:17.320 read much about it or visited it, but it's one 0:23:17.400 --> 0:23:22.080 that uh was unearthed I don't know, maybe seven eight 0:23:22.160 --> 0:23:26.360 years ago. So there is a horse sight near Boulder 0:23:26.800 --> 0:23:33.400 that shows evidence of human butchering and evidently human kills 0:23:33.440 --> 0:23:36.879 of horses. The problem with that, of course, is that 0:23:37.000 --> 0:23:41.040 you'd think if the horse comprised thirty of the biomass 0:23:41.080 --> 0:23:45.000 of all these grazing animals. There would be scores of 0:23:45.080 --> 0:23:48.840 sights like that, and we've struggled to try to find 0:23:48.920 --> 0:23:52.360 any at all. So that's led some people to say, Okay, 0:23:52.400 --> 0:23:55.840 what actually happened to these animals was a changing climate. 0:23:56.560 --> 0:23:59.600 We know that about the time, so two things happened. 0:23:59.600 --> 0:24:01.840 A copy said about the time all these animals disappeared, 0:24:01.920 --> 0:24:06.840 humans arrived from Asia and the climate started changing, and 0:24:06.960 --> 0:24:12.800 the climate was cycling into a much warmer and drier regime. 0:24:13.640 --> 0:24:16.840 And so one of the arguments about what happened to 0:24:16.880 --> 0:24:21.560 all these original American Serengeti animals is that they basically 0:24:22.400 --> 0:24:26.200 succumbed to a changing climate. They were evolved to kind 0:24:26.200 --> 0:24:30.200 of an ice age climate, and when the climate turned 0:24:30.240 --> 0:24:34.480 warm and dry, uh, it basically dried up their habitat, 0:24:35.200 --> 0:24:37.320 and so they disappeared as a result of that. And 0:24:37.359 --> 0:24:41.760 then one of the more most recent explanations is a 0:24:41.880 --> 0:24:48.119 disease explanation, which is so far mostly speculative because we 0:24:48.200 --> 0:24:52.200 don't other than people saying, Okay, we can't figure this out. 0:24:52.280 --> 0:24:55.560 There's got to be some other reason, and maybe it's disease. 0:24:56.080 --> 0:25:00.880 The problem is that right, carnivore exactly and I think 0:25:00.880 --> 0:25:03.200 people focus on all these large animals, but we lost 0:25:03.200 --> 0:25:06.160 many many small animals, lost a lot of small animals, 0:25:06.160 --> 0:25:10.320 although at least in In Martin's argument, it's mostly the 0:25:10.400 --> 0:25:13.040 large animals and a lot of the small animals are intact. 0:25:13.600 --> 0:25:17.200 But Martin even argues that I mean, so, for instance, 0:25:17.840 --> 0:25:21.240 some of the I mean horses specialized in stiper grasses 0:25:21.240 --> 0:25:24.400 and needle and thread grasses, and those grasses are still 0:25:24.440 --> 0:25:27.320 all over the West. So it's like the fodder that 0:25:27.400 --> 0:25:32.080 they were grazing is still there, but the animals disappeared. 0:25:33.080 --> 0:25:36.320 So the truth is right now. This is one of 0:25:36.320 --> 0:25:42.160 the great mysteries of North American environment. I would too, 0:25:42.520 --> 0:25:45.240 I'd love to know anybody had to keep the secret, 0:25:45.400 --> 0:25:48.199 but we have not figured it out yet. All we 0:25:48.280 --> 0:25:54.080 know is that that version, that much uh African like 0:25:54.440 --> 0:25:59.119 version of the Serengetti disappeared between eight and twelve thousand 0:25:59.240 --> 0:26:01.800 years ago. So what do you call in the Serengetti like? 0:26:02.119 --> 0:26:06.960 Lay it off me. In terms of geography, it's the 0:26:07.520 --> 0:26:10.520 It's basically the American Great Plains, so the Hunter Meridian 0:26:10.560 --> 0:26:14.120 to the Rockies. Yeah, it's the hundredth meridian. Uh. In 0:26:14.160 --> 0:26:18.800 some instances for some species slightly further east. Uh, but 0:26:19.040 --> 0:26:22.680 basically about the hundredth meridian to the Rockies and from 0:26:22.920 --> 0:26:28.920 Texas uh into Alberta and Saskatchewan. So just for people 0:26:28.960 --> 0:26:31.560