Speaker 1: There were so many questions about the site that were unanswered.
Speaker 1: That's why I went back seventy years later. On this
Speaker 1: episode of the Bargaris podcast, we're going to the site
Speaker 1: of an ancient bison kill, the one found by George
Speaker 1: mcjuncan on Part one of the series. After George's death,
Speaker 1: it would become known as the Fulsome Site. It was
Speaker 1: here that stone tools made by humans were found with
Speaker 1: a relic form of Pleistocene bison and forever planted an
Speaker 1: indisputable data point into the debate of human antiquity in
Speaker 1: North America. We're gonna talk with Old Steve ronnella of
Speaker 1: Meat Eater and the nation's leading expert on the Fulsome site,
Speaker 1: Dr David Meltzer. He literally wrote the book on Fulsome
Speaker 1: after he went back there seventy years after its initial
Speaker 1: excavation and excavator in it again to find more answers.
Speaker 1: So on this podcast, we're going back to Fulsome. I
Speaker 1: really doubt you're gonna want to miss this one. But first,
Speaker 1: I have an overarching question I'd like to present to you,
Speaker 1: and it's this, What is the relevance of this knowledge
Speaker 1: about these ancient people in their lives? Why do we care?
Speaker 1: Is it merely entertainment to try to understand them or
Speaker 1: is there more? I'm in search of the answer. These
Speaker 1: things were herded, driven into a box canyon and then
Speaker 1: just raindown spears. I don't even kill them. You can't
Speaker 1: make them go anywhere they don't want to go. We
Speaker 1: don't have to drive them in there. Oh we gotta
Speaker 1: do is wait until they go up in their own
Speaker 1: their own So I think it was an accident. My
Speaker 1: name is Clay Nukelem, and this is the Air Grease podcast,
Speaker 1: where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight
Speaker 1: and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of
Speaker 1: Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented
Speaker 1: by f HF gear, American made purpose built hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the
Speaker 1: places we explore. Yeah, that's see, that's the only way
Speaker 1: that I need to get in here. I'm walking through
Speaker 1: a grassy meadow headed towards a small drainage. The clicking
Speaker 1: you're hearing is Kyle Bell's Spurs the wild Worth Royo.
Speaker 1: That's it. We're eleven miles west of Folsom, New Mexico,
Speaker 1: on the Crowfoot Ranch. The place we're headed to is
Speaker 1: where a Pleistocene hunters killed a cow calf herd of
Speaker 1: thirty two bison some ten thousand, three hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: Here they found the bison bone piles buried beneath ten
Speaker 1: feet of earth and astonishingly roughly twenty stone points of
Speaker 1: a design that had never been documented before. They called
Speaker 1: this place the fulsome sight. You'd walk right past it
Speaker 1: if you didn't know what you were looking for. It
Speaker 1: looks like every other place on this ranch, but something
Speaker 1: special happened here. This is the voice of the current
Speaker 1: manager of the Crowfoot Ranch, Seth. They had all those
Speaker 1: archaeologists come out, you know, from this different schools, and
Speaker 1: they did a dig twenty years ago, twenty plus, so
Speaker 1: all this disturbed dirt they they dug right in here.
Speaker 1: What I thought was ironic that they found was they
Speaker 1: said that they were being selective of meat. Have you
Speaker 1: heard that? Because they didn't have any of their lower
Speaker 1: jaw bones to them, so they thought they were eating
Speaker 1: the tongues out of him. Yeah, really, and they were.
Speaker 1: They thought that was a delicacy. Here you're at the site.
Speaker 1: So when George found it, would it have been like
Speaker 1: it had been like a fresh cut bank after a
Speaker 1: big floor. Yeah, I mean you look, you can come
Speaker 1: up here and look at the erosion from it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I assumed that this this has probably eroded more since.
Speaker 1: But you see how steep it was in in that flood.
Speaker 1: You know, it probably took another two or three foot
Speaker 1: off the sides. And that's when he set found the bone.
Speaker 1: In part one of this series, we learned that the
Speaker 1: site was discovered a nineteen o eight by freed slave
Speaker 1: named George mcjunkin. He was a self educated, self made
Speaker 1: man who became a renowned cowboy and the manager of
Speaker 1: the Crowfoot Ranch. The site wasn't excavated by professional archaeologists
Speaker 1: until after George's death, so he never knew the significance
Speaker 1: of his discovery. In this podcast series, we're en route
Speaker 1: to get a layman's pa h D on the fulsome site.
Speaker 1: You've heard Steve Ronella on Fair Greece before. He's a
Speaker 1: George Junkin junkie and has been forever fascinated by ice
Speaker 1: age hunters. In fact, he loved the bison hunters of
Speaker 1: the American planes so much he wrote a book called
Speaker 1: American Buffalo and he's been to the Fulsome site. Here's
Speaker 1: Steve of all the different really cool archaeological sites in America.
Speaker 1: I think one of the best things about the Fulsome
Speaker 1: site is that the finding of it, like the circumstances
Speaker 1: of who found it and how with the flash flood
Speaker 1: and you know, everybody dying in this freed slave trying
Speaker 1: to convince people to come. Look, right, the finding of
Speaker 1: it's as cool as what happened. So it's like a
Speaker 1: double whammy. Finding it is way cooler than just some
Speaker 1: I mean no disrespect, but if some anthropologists had just
Speaker 1: found it whatever doing aerial mapping right, it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: half as cool as it is. The way that it
Speaker 1: was the sky, yeah, and the fact you go down
Speaker 1: there and the guy's buried not too far from the site,
Speaker 1: like McJunkins, it just drips of history. You know. Mcjonkans
Speaker 1: got a nice tombstone now, but he used to just
Speaker 1: have this crudi old tombstones and people pitched together and
Speaker 1: made him a nice tombstone. I was standing there in
Speaker 1: the at Mcjonkins's grave with an archaeologist. Let's see these
Speaker 1: little bones laying on the ground, said what are all
Speaker 1: these bones. I picked one up. He said, that's a
Speaker 1: human finger bone because it had been ground squirrels and
Speaker 1: pray dogs whatever it Badgers over your cemetery, Yeah, every
Speaker 1: every you know, presidents make monuments all the time. If
Speaker 1: I was president, I would I would make it the
Speaker 1: George mcjunkin, not the Foalsome, the George mcjunkin National Monument,
Speaker 1: which would include the Falsome Site. Now, that would be
Speaker 1: something if Steve Ronella was president. To understand the significance
Speaker 1: of the Falsome Site. We've got to understand the quandary
Speaker 1: about human antiquity in North America that had been brewing
Speaker 1: for decades. Up to this point. Most people believe humans
Speaker 1: have only been here for about three thousand years. I
Speaker 1: had mentioned how the Folsome site is doubly cool. It's
Speaker 1: cool because how was found and who founded the McJunkins story.
Speaker 1: It was cool because of what happened there, meaning some
Speaker 1: dudes during the Ice Age killed thirty some bison and
Speaker 1: a big pile with stone tools and hand thrown weaponry.
Speaker 1: That's cool. It's tripally cool because of what it did
Speaker 1: to up end conventional thinking about what had gone on
Speaker 1: in the Western hemisphere. There's been a handful of occasions
Speaker 1: where human tools, like indisputably human creations in the form
Speaker 1: of projectile points were found mixed up with near in
Speaker 1: loose association with animals that we knew to be, like
Speaker 1: extinct Ice age animals. But the Ice Age was a
Speaker 1: long time ago. Here with the Folsome site, you got
Speaker 1: it stuck together. You got a projectile point in the rib,
Speaker 1: laying what they call in C. Two, laying in the
Speaker 1: rib of the thing. No rational reasonable person could come
Speaker 1: and make any argument that here's an Ice age relic,
Speaker 1: an animal that's not here now, that was killed and
Speaker 1: butchered by human beings, And that proved once and for
Speaker 1: all that human antiquity in the New World went back
Speaker 1: a long way. I want to clarify that by quote
Speaker 1: in the rib, Steve means the point was laying in
Speaker 1: between two ribs. It wasn't stuck in a rib, but
Speaker 1: it was just as conclusive. We heard briefly from Dr
Speaker 1: David Meltzer on Part one. He's the national authority on
Speaker 1: the Falsome site. And how would one know that, Well,
Speaker 1: he literally wrote a giant book called Falsome. It's basically
Speaker 1: a textbook on everything known about the place. Dr Meltzer
Speaker 1: isn't just a falsome expert, though. He's dedicated his academic
Speaker 1: career to the people of the Pleistocene era, which is
Speaker 1: a block of time that began a couple million years
Speaker 1: ago and ended ten thousand years ago. The time period
Speaker 1: from then until now it is called the Holocene. We
Speaker 1: live in the Holocene. If you know these two words,
Speaker 1: Pleistocene and Holocene, you'll pretty much be in the loop
Speaker 1: for talking about the recent history of planet Earth. Dr
Speaker 1: Meltzer is the author of multiple books on the Pleistocene,
Speaker 1: including First People's in a New World, The Great Paleolithic War,
Speaker 1: and Search for the First Americans. I went to the
Speaker 1: campus of s m U in Dallas, Texas, where he works.
Speaker 1: We'd hardly greeted each other when he asked me to
Speaker 1: follow him into his lab. It was full of bones
Speaker 1: and stone tools, ancient stuff. Skull that's been turned upside
Speaker 1: down because when we got it in the ground, it
Speaker 1: was top of the head facing up right. So we
Speaker 1: plastered it and then we cut underneath it, lifted it out,
Speaker 1: and so now what you see is the plaster. It's
Speaker 1: resting on its plaster cast and you can see the
Speaker 1: teeth in here. Wow. Right, And there's the back of
Speaker 1: the skull. So that is a bison antiquist skull from
Speaker 1: the full side, Yes, and it's a big It's pretty
Speaker 1: wild being in the same room with the skull of
Speaker 1: a bison antiquous. If you want to see a cell
Speaker 1: phone video the skull, you can check out my instagram
Speaker 1: at clay Underscore Newcomb. Dr Meltzer is a unique guy
Speaker 1: when it comes to fulsome The site was originally excavated
Speaker 1: between nineteen and nineteen, but seventy years later there were
Speaker 1: unanswered questions that he knew our modern techniques and technology
Speaker 1: could now answer, primarily carbon dating, which we'll talk about
Speaker 1: more in Part three of this series. Like a dramatic
Speaker 1: movie sequel and night Team, Dr Meltzer and his team
Speaker 1: went back to Falsome. They dug up the place again
Speaker 1: with new questions about the site's geology, it's antiquity which
Speaker 1: is the site's age, the paleo topography which is its
Speaker 1: former geography, and its depositional history, which basically means the
Speaker 1: layers that covered the site. Here's Dr Meltzer talking about
Speaker 1: the uniqueness of the Falsome site for fifty years there
Speaker 1: had been this very heated debate over how long people
Speaker 1: had been in the Americas, and all manner of contenders
Speaker 1: were put forward. This is evidence that people have been
Speaker 1: here since the place to see. This is evidence that
Speaker 1: people have been here for three hundred thousand years. Here's
Speaker 1: evidence that people have been here for three d fifty
Speaker 1: thousand years. But in each and every instance, those sites
Speaker 1: failed to prove what they were claimed to prove, and
Speaker 1: they failed because of various reasons. Uh, the artifacts weren't
Speaker 1: actually artif tacks, the artifacts were not in the geological
Speaker 1: deposits that were said to be that old. Uh, the
Speaker 1: artifacts had rolled downhill and ended up next to ancient
Speaker 1: animal remains, but they were not necessarily in what we
Speaker 1: call primary context. That is to say, they didn't enter
Speaker 1: the deposit at the same time as those ancient animals
Speaker 1: that are the deposit. And so you had, you know,
Speaker 1: literally decades of people arguing back and forth over how
Speaker 1: long people have been in the America's. When Folsom came along,
Speaker 1: it was just as advertised. What you had was a
Speaker 1: spot on the landscape where hunters had confronted and killed
Speaker 1: a herd of bison, we now know there were about
Speaker 1: thirty two animals that were dispatched that day and in
Speaker 1: the process left behind their artifacts in ways that made
Speaker 1: it absolutely clear that those animals and those people had
Speaker 1: been on that very landscape at the same moment in time.
Speaker 1: Because we had spear points what we know as falsome
Speaker 1: fluted points in direct association with the bones. And what
Speaker 1: I mean by that is we had a projectile point
Speaker 1: in between ribs. Right, it had sat there since that
Speaker 1: animal was killed. Right, There was no question that that
Speaker 1: that that was some sort of adventitious association, that somehow
Speaker 1: a projectile point had worked its way down into the dirt,
Speaker 1: into the earth ten feet below the surface and ended
Speaker 1: up in between two bison ribs. No. No, that animal
Speaker 1: was stabbed by a human. And because that animal was
Speaker 1: a now extinct form of bison, which when extinct at
Speaker 1: the end of the Palistocene, that was the first absolutely
Speaker 1: definitive proof that people had been in the Americas at
Speaker 1: the end of the Palistocene. The only question remaining after
Speaker 1: that was how much earlier might they have been? Right,
Speaker 1: But that's that's what made fulsome different. It was just
Speaker 1: as advertised. When you look back at the history of
Speaker 1: archaeology itself as a study. There was an incredible amount
Speaker 1: of drama and ego involved in the discussion of human antiquity.
Speaker 1: It was highly competitive regarding who discovered what and where.
Speaker 1: So it's hard to overstate how important to find was
Speaker 1: because it was so indisputable. Here's another component of understanding
Speaker 1: Falsome and archaeology that will help us. This is Steve
Speaker 1: describing to us what is called a type site. A
Speaker 1: lot of bygone cultures will have a thing called the
Speaker 1: type site, and the type site is where they were identified.
Speaker 1: When we talk about Fulsome hunters, the Fulsome culture was
Speaker 1: identified at wild Horse or Royal. You're Fulsome, New Mexico
Speaker 1: was when it was first identified the identifying feature of
Speaker 1: the Foalsome culture. I was calling Folsome homes and they
Speaker 1: took the name Falsome simply because that was the English
Speaker 1: name of the town. Sure, that was probably a brand
Speaker 1: new town. Has nothing to do as a descriptor of
Speaker 1: these people, not at all, and just to to keeping
Speaker 1: in the same state, just at the same point, in
Speaker 1: the same state. When we talk about a Clovis hunter,
Speaker 1: it just so happens that the projectile points which stand
Speaker 1: for the hunters that made them were first identified near Clovis,
Speaker 1: New Mexico. They were there over ten thousand years before
Speaker 1: anyone even thought to name to make it, we happen
Speaker 1: to right now be doing our conversation about Fulsome near Shadrin, Nebraska.
Speaker 1: Were you and I to walk out and find Holy
Speaker 1: Cow look at this insane projectile point, diagnostic unfound point,
Speaker 1: and then we realized it was this whole culture of people.
Speaker 1: And they made this point, they might wind up and
Speaker 1: call them the shattern Hunters. I think they'd call it
Speaker 1: Ronella newcom Okay, But if they were consistent with the
Speaker 1: days of yore, that's what they would wind up naming them.
Speaker 1: Fulsome Hunters were identified near Fulsom, New Mexico, and so
Speaker 1: they just the name, the nearby town name was applied
Speaker 1: to the culture. We talk about a culture. We're talking
Speaker 1: about like what you imagine a culture of people. We
Speaker 1: know them when we see them based on the point
Speaker 1: with our understanding right now, it's the point. The point
Speaker 1: has to be present, The projectile point that they like
Speaker 1: to make has to be present, meaning if we know
Speaker 1: that the Fulsome culture was active eleven thousand, seven hundred
Speaker 1: years ago. If you went down to South Florida and
Speaker 1: found a human camp site from eleven thousand, seven hundred
Speaker 1: years ago that had a different projectile point, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: call it a fulsome site. Okay, So it's not to when, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not when it's who and when it describes a culture,
Speaker 1: just like the culture of us to drive Chevrolet pickups
Speaker 1: and there's another culture in France that drives some other
Speaker 1: kind of pickup. The fulsome culture is identified by the
Speaker 1: type of technology they used when making stone points. But
Speaker 1: this culture was also associated with something else, much bigger.
Speaker 1: They were highly associated with a relics form of bison
Speaker 1: called bison antiquis, not something that went extinct, probably a
Speaker 1: relic form of the animal that lives here now. It
Speaker 1: was bigger, different sort of horn configuration was a bigger
Speaker 1: they call it like bison antiquis. They had a lot
Speaker 1: of fidelity to a certain style of points. They had
Speaker 1: a lot seems to have a lot of fidelity to bison.
Speaker 1: And they lived on what is now the American Great Plains.
Speaker 1: That's where they're found. So you can find them in
Speaker 1: the Panhandle of Texas, you can find them in New Mexico.
Speaker 1: You can find them in Montana, you can find fulsome
Speaker 1: points in southern Saskatchewan, you can find them all the
Speaker 1: way in western Nebraska. But they stayed to the Great
Speaker 1: Plains where the most of the plains Buffalo were. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and at the time it was probably cooler and wetter,
Speaker 1: but it was an open grassland, and it was just
Speaker 1: going by how few fulsome sites there are and how
Speaker 1: widely dispersed they are, and kind of the sort of
Speaker 1: the imprint of those people, it was probably insanely low
Speaker 1: population densities. I can't tell no one, no one can
Speaker 1: say this for real, but I've run this by professional anthropologists.
Speaker 1: It's not unreasonable to think that a band of these hunters,
Speaker 1: which would be an extended family group, that these bands
Speaker 1: of people, it makes sense that they were maybe you know,
Speaker 1: they maybe didn't exceed ten or twenty individuals. It's not
Speaker 1: unreasonable to imagine that they could go a generation without
Speaker 1: encountering individuals that you're not immediately related to. It seems
Speaker 1: very few people occupying that landscape at that time. Take
Speaker 1: a minute and imagine the North American continent ten thousand,
Speaker 1: three hundred years ago with human populations that scarce. By
Speaker 1: the time Europeans arrived here roughly ten thousand years after
Speaker 1: the Falsome Bison kill, which would be about six hundred
Speaker 1: plus years from the present. Backwards from the present, the
Speaker 1: place was basically like an urban center crawling with people.
Speaker 1: The civilization of the American Indians was in full swing
Speaker 1: and highly developed compared to when the Falsome Hunters were here.
Speaker 1: Some American Indians are undoubtedly the descendants of the Folsome
Speaker 1: Hunters wildly, though, of all the things these fulsome hunters
Speaker 1: used in life, there is one thing that has outlasted
Speaker 1: the rigor of time that we infer an incredible amount
Speaker 1: of data from. One of the things I like about
Speaker 1: the projectile point sin It's made of stone and it
Speaker 1: lasts long time, so it winds up being Some people
Speaker 1: that aren't into what we'd call Indian arrowheads sometimes don't
Speaker 1: get the fascination with it. But wait to think about it.
Speaker 1: It's not so much that it's the arrowhead. It's just
Speaker 1: a It's it's a a piece of something that survived,
Speaker 1: sometimes in a perfect state, from the time they handled it.
Speaker 1: Their bones are gone to large measure, their homes and structures,
Speaker 1: the things they wore the wood that they employed. I'd
Speaker 1: be as excited to find a spear shaft, but they're
Speaker 1: not laying around. It's like, but here's this thing that
Speaker 1: like that. A guy can drop that thing and it's
Speaker 1: gonna sit there for twelve years. What other thing can
Speaker 1: you drop on the ground. We talked about how long
Speaker 1: our stuff lasts, right, like how long plastic last? You said,
Speaker 1: a plastic bottle on the ground for twelve thousand years.
Speaker 1: To come back and look at there might be something,
Speaker 1: but they look like a volsible. Imagine archaeologists ten thousand
Speaker 1: years from now, Well, I doubt this place will be around.
Speaker 1: But them taking just one of your material possessions and
Speaker 1: making vast inferences about your entire life from it, I
Speaker 1: wonder what they'd say. I had some questions about how
Speaker 1: an archaeological site is verified, so it's legitimacy is known.
Speaker 1: I think it's important for us to understand the bigger
Speaker 1: picture of what's happening here beyond some dudes digging up
Speaker 1: bones and finding stone points que the Randy Travis song.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty complex world, and there were many missteps
Speaker 1: in early archaeology and in the original excavation of the
Speaker 1: fulsome site that almost disqualified it. So from an archaeological process,
Speaker 1: there's a prescribed way that a site should be excavated
Speaker 1: and understood. As I understand that there were other sites
Speaker 1: in Texas and Nebraska and maybe even in Kansas that
Speaker 1: potentially had similar type evidence of humans and these older
Speaker 1: animals that are now extinct, but they were mishandled and
Speaker 1: so they have to be It's it's like evidence coming
Speaker 1: into a courtroom that was acquired the wrong way and
Speaker 1: the judge goes, I can't use this. That's exactly how
Speaker 1: it played out. But we also need to put a
Speaker 1: little bit of historical context here. This is the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, the teens. There weren't clear cut methods
Speaker 1: for field excavation. A lot of these excavations were not
Speaker 1: conducted by you know, what we would now recognize as
Speaker 1: sort of professional scientists, professional archaeologist, professional geologists, and they
Speaker 1: didn't know what they were doing is really what it
Speaker 1: came down to. So, you know, we had this site
Speaker 1: out in Frederick, Oklahoma, where it was a growl quarry,
Speaker 1: and you know, the folks who were working the gravel
Speaker 1: quarry said, oh yeah, we've got artifacts associated with mammoth bones. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it requires a certain amount of expertise to
Speaker 1: sort of really be able to in an excavation. No, okay,
Speaker 1: these are deposits of a certain age. These are things
Speaker 1: that are associated with those deposits. We know that they
Speaker 1: belong in those deposits. And so because there were not
Speaker 1: agreed upon field techniques and clear cut field techniques at
Speaker 1: the time, and because some of these discoveries were made
Speaker 1: by folks who really didn't understand what they were seeing
Speaker 1: an exactly, well, yeah, they weren't even archaeologists, you know.
Speaker 1: They're the guys that work at the quarry. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: and they're just you know, their job is just to
Speaker 1: shovel that stuff out of the way. Okay. So you
Speaker 1: find an artifact in the in the spoil pile over here,
Speaker 1: and you find some bones in the spoiled pile over there,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that you know, that artifact and that
Speaker 1: bone were associated back you know, twenty thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand years ago. In retrospect, a couple of those sites,
Speaker 1: not the one in Frederick, but one out in Colorado City, Texas.
Speaker 1: Um in retrospect, we looked at the artifacts and we said, well,
Speaker 1: you know what, there is a possibility those artifacts could
Speaker 1: have been associated with that bison. But the problem was
Speaker 1: in and this is a few years before folsome the
Speaker 1: bison was being excavated by a fella who was just
Speaker 1: a local guy. Uh. He had discovered this bison in
Speaker 1: this creek bed and he wrote to the museum and said,
Speaker 1: you guys wanted so the folks folks in Denver said yeah,
Speaker 1: we'd really like to have that bison skeleton. And they
Speaker 1: gave him instructions on how to get it out of
Speaker 1: the ground, plaster it and put it into crates and
Speaker 1: ship it up to Denver. He excavates the bison, he
Speaker 1: plasters it up, he puts it into a crate. And
Speaker 1: the crate had been you know the folks in Denver
Speaker 1: and said, make a crate. You know this big by
Speaker 1: this big, by this big. And so he had this
Speaker 1: giant plastered bison, couldn't fit it into a crate. Instead
Speaker 1: of building a bigger crate, he simply knocked off chunks
Speaker 1: of the bone shoved it in there. So this was
Speaker 1: not done well right, And even though they found artifacts
Speaker 1: with the bison, they didn't realize that that was of
Speaker 1: interest or significance, and so they just ignored them. And
Speaker 1: it was only after the fact somebody was visiting Denver
Speaker 1: and said, hey, you know, I'd watched your guys excavate
Speaker 1: this thing down in Texas, and did you know they had,
Speaker 1: you know, points that came out with the bison. And
Speaker 1: the folks in Denver said, we had no clue. So,
Speaker 1: you know, you can't base a case for people having
Speaker 1: been here a very long time ago or hunting bison
Speaker 1: a very long time ago when you had that kind
Speaker 1: of excavation, And so that very well could have been
Speaker 1: a totally legitimate site, and I think it is actually
Speaker 1: the Fulsome site was originally excavated by an amateur archaeologist
Speaker 1: named Carl Schwaheim. He was a friend of George's. He
Speaker 1: was hired by the Denver Museum of Natural History to
Speaker 1: get them a bison and tick with skeleton. But while
Speaker 1: he was digging, he found a stone point. He made
Speaker 1: some sketches and notified the museum and this really perked
Speaker 1: their ears up, and they told him if you find
Speaker 1: another one, Carl, don't dig it up, leave it in place. Luckily,
Speaker 1: he did find another one, and they were able to
Speaker 1: send down a bona fide archaeologists to verify it in
Speaker 1: C two or in place. This then attracted the attention
Speaker 1: of the world. But I've got more questions, you know,
Speaker 1: and that brings me to kind of my biggest overarching
Speaker 1: question inside of archaeology, that is just it's so it's
Speaker 1: intriguing to think about this, is that how much of
Speaker 1: planet Earth have we excavated to understand what is here?
Speaker 1: I mean, it feels like we're just going off these
Speaker 1: very like if you took the volume of the Earth
Speaker 1: and said how much how much of that volume had
Speaker 1: as a professional archaeologist and modern times actually excavated, it
Speaker 1: would be a number so small it would be unbelievable.
Speaker 1: And so we're basing so much what we know off
Speaker 1: these little bit spots. But who's to say there's not
Speaker 1: another incredible spot fifty feet from the Falsome site that's
Speaker 1: gonna redirect history again, you know. But you're absolutely right.
Speaker 1: A lot of these sites are deeply buried. A lot
Speaker 1: of these sites will never see the surface again. A
Speaker 1: lot of these sites disappeared over time. You've got erosion.
Speaker 1: If you were around on the high Plains in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties during the dust Bowl. It would have been
Speaker 1: the worst time to live there, but it would have
Speaker 1: been the best time to do archaeology there because what
Speaker 1: was happening was that basically the surface is blowing away,
Speaker 1: and what it did was is exposed a lot of
Speaker 1: these old Ice Age Pleistocene Age lake beds, and they're
Speaker 1: all manner of bones and artifacts that came out of
Speaker 1: these sites. But of course, once all that stopped blowing,
Speaker 1: a lot of the archaeological discovery is necessarily based on
Speaker 1: chance encounters where you've got ranchers that are putting in
Speaker 1: a stock tank, you've got farmers that are plowing, you've
Speaker 1: got a road that's getting cut, and you just get
Speaker 1: lucky or a guh George mcjunkin exactly Occult of wild
Speaker 1: Horse Rodeo. You know, that's George mcjunkan is such an
Speaker 1: interesting character to me. You know, this is a guy
Speaker 1: who is clearly really intrigued and interested and fascinated wants
Speaker 1: to learn about what's around him. So he was the
Speaker 1: right guy at the right moment, in the right spot,
Speaker 1: and it changed American archaeology. We just can't get away
Speaker 1: from old George now Canley, I kind of get obsessed
Speaker 1: with these characters that I learned about them, and I'm
Speaker 1: considering them a junking tattoo. Bad That's not true. I
Speaker 1: don't do tats, but I do need some more info
Speaker 1: on the actual site. From this, I think will begin
Speaker 1: to understand how archaeologists think. Let's talk in specifics about
Speaker 1: the Falsome site and what was found there. So this
Speaker 1: flood in nineteen o eight unearthed these bones that George
Speaker 1: mcjunkin found, so we know how they were found in
Speaker 1: kind of the series, but what did they find there?
Speaker 1: So the initial excavations at Fulsome took place in ninety
Speaker 1: seven in night as well. Unfortunately, the site was excavated
Speaker 1: by paleontologists. The site was excavated by folks that were
Speaker 1: interested in bones, and while they did a decent job,
Speaker 1: they well, the term is telling. They referred to the
Speaker 1: Fulsome site as the Fulsome bone quarry. Right, they're coreying
Speaker 1: bone out of this thing, So they're not they're not
Speaker 1: viewing it as an archaeological site. Where an archaeological site
Speaker 1: meaning it has huge evidence of humans. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: they saw it as a bone quarry that had evidence
Speaker 1: of humans. But what they weren't doing was paying really
Speaker 1: close attention to things that we as archaeologists pay attention to.
Speaker 1: Where exactly were those artifacts found, how were the bones distributed.
Speaker 1: This is one of the things that really challenged us
Speaker 1: when we started excavating there, was that there's basically where
Speaker 1: no maps of their excavations. Now, we're archaeologists, were fairly
Speaker 1: compulsive about things. We're fairly compulsive about a lot of
Speaker 1: things because when you're excavating an archaeological site, you're destroying it.
Speaker 1: So you've got to make very very careful records all
Speaker 1: the way through the process. Maps, photographs, detailed measurements, all
Speaker 1: this stuff. And the folks who were basically coreying this
Speaker 1: for bone, we're doing none of that. And so when
Speaker 1: we started they had identified on their maps, you know,
Speaker 1: here's a skeleton here, here's a skeleton here, here's a
Speaker 1: skeleton over here. They weren't nice, discrete skeletons of animals.
Speaker 1: These were bone piles, and they hadn't quite recognized that
Speaker 1: these were discard piles. They were not you know, here's
Speaker 1: an animals stretched out on the ground. And of course,
Speaker 1: you know, they weren't paying attention to a lot of
Speaker 1: the things that we only subsequently started paying attention to,
Speaker 1: like what's the surface condition of the bone, because that
Speaker 1: tells you something about how long it was sitting out
Speaker 1: posed before it got covered by the sediment. They weren't
Speaker 1: really paying much attention to the sediment itself. What's the
Speaker 1: nature of the sediment, how did it originate? Why is
Speaker 1: the site in this particular spot, Where did the kill
Speaker 1: take place? There were so many unanswered questions. The thing
Speaker 1: that they that they did in the nineteen twenties was
Speaker 1: they clearly showed people have been here since the Pleistocene.
Speaker 1: They did that just fine, But there were so many
Speaker 1: questions about the site that were unanswered. That's why I
Speaker 1: went back seventy years later because I said, you know,
Speaker 1: it's the most famous site in North America, one of
Speaker 1: the most famous sites in North America, and we know
Speaker 1: almost nothing about it in terms of what we what
Speaker 1: we hope and expect to know nowadays about an archaeological site.
Speaker 1: It's funny in when they finished up the excavations, barn
Speaker 1: and Brown, who had been in charge, said, there's nothing left.
Speaker 1: Don't bother to come here. We've excavated the whole thing
Speaker 1: what I realized. And this was actually before we went
Speaker 1: out there. I was talking to a verder of paleontologists
Speaker 1: here at the university and he said, oh, Barne Brown
Speaker 1: said that about all his sites. And the reason he
Speaker 1: said that about all his sites is he didn't want
Speaker 1: anybody coming in after him to go to dig the sites.
Speaker 1: So he said, you can probably ignore that, And wow,
Speaker 1: I bet that was encouraging. How many more bison did
Speaker 1: you discover when you did excavations in the late nineties, Well,
Speaker 1: because we know there were thirty there was a bison
Speaker 1: kill of thirty two animals. We know that now, and
Speaker 1: so how many did they find and how many did
Speaker 1: you find? Well, so this gets back to the issue
Speaker 1: of you know, they were just counting a pile of
Speaker 1: bones as as an animal, right, they didn't really have
Speaker 1: a clear sense of how many animals they were. They
Speaker 1: had a clear sense of how many animal piles, how
Speaker 1: many bones piles that there were, but they did estimate
Speaker 1: that they were probably at least a couple of dozen. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: what we did, and this is sort of the the
Speaker 1: typical way in which you estimate the number of animals
Speaker 1: that were once present in a kill, is that you
Speaker 1: take bones that well, in this case, we were taking
Speaker 1: basically bison ankles. So bison have two ankles left and right.
Speaker 1: And so what you do if you count up how
Speaker 1: many right ankles you have or how many left ankles
Speaker 1: you have, and you say, okay, I got thirty two
Speaker 1: right ankles, or I got thirty right ankles and thirty
Speaker 1: two left ankles. Well, there wasn't an animal walking around
Speaker 1: on three legs. You probably had thirty two animals. Where
Speaker 1: did they teach you this kind of reasoning? This is brilliant. No,
Speaker 1: well it's not me um no. But see, this is
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that you didn't do in the
Speaker 1: nine twenties. This is why we had to go back
Speaker 1: and in fact by literally counting up all of the
Speaker 1: elements that gave us insight into what the hunters were
Speaker 1: eating and what they took off site. Because you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so there's two hundred plus or minus change of bones
Speaker 1: and a bison skeleton, there is you know, X number
Speaker 1: of ribs, there's X number of thoracic vertebrae, and so
Speaker 1: you've got thirty two animals. So if you've got thirty
Speaker 1: two animals, and you know X number of ribs thirty
Speaker 1: two times X gives you the total number of ribs,
Speaker 1: and then you double it because you got a left
Speaker 1: side and the right side. So then when you go
Speaker 1: to the site and you say, well, I've only got
Speaker 1: three ribs here, you know what you're missing. They took
Speaker 1: those ribs with them. And we have pretty clear evidence
Speaker 1: that these folks were literally taking rib racks off of
Speaker 1: these animals because we have an under account of what
Speaker 1: we ought to have in terms of ribs, in terms
Speaker 1: of thoracic vertebrae. Those are the big sort of structural
Speaker 1: high spinus process ribs on a buffalo hump. That's what
Speaker 1: makes the hump right really good meat there. So we're
Speaker 1: missing a bunch of upper leg bones and that's where
Speaker 1: the bulk of the meat would be in the hams
Speaker 1: of those big bison. Think of them as bison drumsticks.
Speaker 1: So when we go to the site, we do all
Speaker 1: these detailed counts of all the bones. How many should
Speaker 1: there be? How many are we missing? And are we
Speaker 1: missing them because of erosion or the bones you know,
Speaker 1: fell apart, or are we missing them because the hunters
Speaker 1: when they did all of them took them with them
Speaker 1: exactly right. So Dr Meltzer never fully got to the
Speaker 1: answer my question about how many more bison he found
Speaker 1: when he redug fulsome we need some answers. How many
Speaker 1: bison did your team find that we're not found in
Speaker 1: the original excavations, because just an estimate, I mean, did
Speaker 1: did you find five more? Or well, whole skeletons are
Speaker 1: numbers of bones. Well, let me how many? How many
Speaker 1: bison skulls did you find that they had not found? Oh,
Speaker 1: let me think about that. You know, usually the people
Speaker 1: that I deal with, Dr Meltzer kind of can say
Speaker 1: offhand how many bison and tick with skulls they've found
Speaker 1: in their life. You're the only one I've talked to
Speaker 1: you that it's like, well, I don't know. You know.
Speaker 1: I talked to a guy on one of my previous
Speaker 1: Burgaris podcasts and I asked him how many times he
Speaker 1: been bit by venomous snakes and he said, uh, he said,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I've lost count, and he had been
Speaker 1: bit by twenty venomous snakes in his twenty plus You're
Speaker 1: kind of like that guy. Well, you know, I'm talking
Speaker 1: about Mr Fred episode twelve. Um. Actually I have the
Speaker 1: total numbers. So the Colorado Museum collected sixteen hundred elements,
Speaker 1: the American Museum two thousand, we collected about seven hundred.
Speaker 1: Uh So there's a total of about forty three hundred
Speaker 1: bison elements. So you probably found more. Yeah, mind you,
Speaker 1: we're not finding you know, whole bison and complete parts.
Speaker 1: Uh So, we found about seventeen cranial parts. We found
Speaker 1: at least three. Yeah, we have at least three intact
Speaker 1: crania and many more. That's exciting to dig up a
Speaker 1: bison skull. Were you there when they I mean, were
Speaker 1: you the one digging when this happened? Um? Actually no,
Speaker 1: I got out of the way. So did your team
Speaker 1: find any points? No, it was that surprising to you know.
Speaker 1: And the reason is is that they literally ad excavated
Speaker 1: back in the nies most of the site. So if
Speaker 1: you if you imagine to kill site with that many animals,
Speaker 1: I guess there would be kind of a central area
Speaker 1: and then kind of fringe animals out to the side
Speaker 1: of it, and you guys kind of we're finding well leftovers,
Speaker 1: we were finding the leftovers of the excavation rather than
Speaker 1: the leftovers of the kill because I think we were
Speaker 1: in an area of the kill where a lot of
Speaker 1: the processing and butchering was taking place. But because we
Speaker 1: were where the area of processing and butchering was taking place,
Speaker 1: there weren't necessarily points there. Okay, so let's think about
Speaker 1: this is in terms of a bison kill. Okay, So
Speaker 1: we've got a conundrum. We have no way of knowing
Speaker 1: really what happened that day in the fall some ten
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. I wanted to get some clarity from
Speaker 1: Dr Meltzer about what we one hundred no. So we're
Speaker 1: trying to make sense of how the heck that these
Speaker 1: ancient humans could have killed that many big animals in
Speaker 1: one spot. How how certain are you your hypothesis? I mean,
Speaker 1: when you really think about the amount of evidence that
Speaker 1: we have and the kind of conclusions that we're coming to,
Speaker 1: it's kind of mind boggling to me. Because we have bones,
Speaker 1: and we have points, we have the topography, and now
Speaker 1: you have in depth researched what the land would have
Speaker 1: looked like at that time from the from the excavations
Speaker 1: that you've done. How certain are you? I mean, you
Speaker 1: being the chief authority on this, are you just guessing question. Well, no,
Speaker 1: you asked two questions there, Clay, Okay, how it went down,
Speaker 1: that's inference, right, How they made the kill, um, the
Speaker 1: time of the year they made the kill. Uh. Did
Speaker 1: they maneuver the animals and kill them in the in
Speaker 1: the arroyo or did they kill them in the tributary?
Speaker 1: I have to infer that right, Okay, So that part
Speaker 1: you're making absolutely and in fact, you know, when we
Speaker 1: wrote all this up in the Folsome book, you know
Speaker 1: I made it clear. Here's one alternative explanation, here's another. Now,
Speaker 1: the first part of your question was, am I sure
Speaker 1: this is a kill of thirty two animals? Yes? Absolutely, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: because there's no other way to account for it. Right.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that we do is archaeologists,
Speaker 1: um is Okay, You've always got to make sure that
Speaker 1: things are not there naturally before you can conclude that
Speaker 1: they're there culturally, that is to say, before you can
Speaker 1: conclude that they're there is a consequence of human action.
Speaker 1: You've got to illuminate the possibility that nature could have
Speaker 1: done it. Precisely, how they did it and how the
Speaker 1: thing played out that that day in the fall ten
Speaker 1: thousand four, ninety plus or minus twenty years ago. Those
Speaker 1: are educated inferences based on all of the evidence that
Speaker 1: we've accumulated in terms of what the landscape look like,
Speaker 1: where we find bones, where we find bone parts, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. It's time to get into the meat
Speaker 1: of this story. Let's talk about the day of the kill.
Speaker 1: Here's Steve and I talking about it. Talk to me
Speaker 1: about what you think happened on that day. We have
Speaker 1: one isolated bison kill site, thirty two animals, roughly twenty
Speaker 1: points that were found in this kill site. We have
Speaker 1: radio carbon dates that take us back to that time.
Speaker 1: We know how far it was below the surface. It's
Speaker 1: like you only have so many data points to begin
Speaker 1: to make conclusions. What do you think happened that day?
Speaker 1: These animals wait over a thousand pounds. You didn't drag
Speaker 1: them around and pile them up, but they're in a
Speaker 1: big pile. The understanding based on every way you look
Speaker 1: at it, including like the proximity of the animals where
Speaker 1: they were killed, the fact that they were in a
Speaker 1: high box canyon, is that someone didn't come up and
Speaker 1: surprise them. Thirty some animals in a tight little bundle
Speaker 1: at the head of a box canyon. They weren't in
Speaker 1: there sleeping. It just goes against everything we understand about
Speaker 1: how bison act. These are an open country animal. They're
Speaker 1: not in there like, oh, they're all in there asleep,
Speaker 1: We're gonna sneak in. It's just not what they were doing.
Speaker 1: They got driven up in there. That's like the understanding
Speaker 1: of everyone looks at the landscape is these things were herded,
Speaker 1: driven into a box canyon where there was no escape.
Speaker 1: They got him up to the head of the box canyon,
Speaker 1: big high walls. I'll tell you I've I've managed to
Speaker 1: do that on two occasions, almost accidentally, and caught dear
Speaker 1: at the head of box canyons where they had to
Speaker 1: come back out through me to get out, heard him
Speaker 1: into a box canyon, and then this rain down spears
Speaker 1: on him and killed him. Very interesting, Steve Ronnella. But
Speaker 1: our old buddy Kyle Bell disagrees with you. Kyle was
Speaker 1: the cowboy on part one that I said was the
Speaker 1: guardian of George McJunkins character and legacy. We're standing in
Speaker 1: the wild horse arroyo at the sight of the kill
Speaker 1: as he's telling me what he thinks happened, and This
Speaker 1: is strictly my theory on this, and everybody does. When
Speaker 1: the first time I ever came down here and looked around,
Speaker 1: I saw some things that didn't fit some of the
Speaker 1: stories that I had heard. But I have been a
Speaker 1: guide for the last thirty years and probably been in
Speaker 1: on at least two hundred buffalo kills, and my theories
Speaker 1: are based on if bison antiquous acted like the bison
Speaker 1: that we deal with today, and that's what I'm basing
Speaker 1: my theories on. There was a reason that the bison
Speaker 1: almost got wiped out in North America. They're not hard
Speaker 1: to kill and you can't make them go anywhere they
Speaker 1: don't want to go. If there was a migration path
Speaker 1: through and bison came through here in the fall, then
Speaker 1: the people that followed the bison that lived off of
Speaker 1: them would know that they're gonna be in this valley
Speaker 1: this time of year. In this particular drag cameras probably
Speaker 1: had a couple of drones, you know. And I believe
Speaker 1: in this drainage that there's a mineral in here that
Speaker 1: the buffalo knew about and that we're after. And selenium
Speaker 1: is a mineral. It doesn't get in the grass no
Speaker 1: matter how much grass they eat, they don't get the
Speaker 1: selenium that they need. So they need to know where
Speaker 1: there's a lick, a salt lick of some sword. Then
Speaker 1: the people would know it too, and they said, we
Speaker 1: don't have to drive them in there. Oh we gotta
Speaker 1: do is wait until they go up in there on
Speaker 1: their own, and then we'll put hunters in a circle
Speaker 1: around them. The men back then were proficient with an
Speaker 1: addle addle. That's what was used here to kill the
Speaker 1: buffalo with very interesting kyle, the old salt lick, bush whack,
Speaker 1: the oldest trick, and the paleolithic hunter's bag of tricks.
Speaker 1: They were probably hanging in tree saddles and using commercial
Speaker 1: scent control products too. But let's see what the doctor
Speaker 1: Meltzer has to say about it. So I think it
Speaker 1: was an accident. I think these folks were hid in
Speaker 1: someplace else. I think they were heading for a pass
Speaker 1: that's about eight eight or so kilometers north of there.
Speaker 1: I think they spotted a herd. And you know, with bison,
Speaker 1: the image that you have is lots of noise, lots
Speaker 1: of stampedes, animals flying over a cliff. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of of these hunts in These kills were based
Speaker 1: on very careful maneuvering of the herd Bison. You know,
Speaker 1: their eyesight is not so good. They smell good in
Speaker 1: the sense that they smell well, not that they bathe regularly,
Speaker 1: and so you can kind of get behind them and
Speaker 1: make them a little bit nervous. I mean, you don't
Speaker 1: want to make them too nervous, because you know, those
Speaker 1: animals can go at upwards of almost forty miles an hour.
Speaker 1: They can turn on a dime. They're dangerous. But if
Speaker 1: you can get them maneuvered, and if you can get moving,
Speaker 1: and if you can move them up in arroyo that
Speaker 1: has a nickpoint, a point beyond which they can't go,
Speaker 1: you got them trapped. The thing about fulsome it's a
Speaker 1: very interesting land form because you've got this arroyo what
Speaker 1: we now call a wild horse arroyo, and it had
Speaker 1: a tributary coming in. You think that the animals were
Speaker 1: moved up that arroyo, they hit that bottleneck, they hit
Speaker 1: that nick point, and they couldn't go anywhere, and I
Speaker 1: think the hunters had kind of gone around. So you
Speaker 1: had hunters maybe behind them, moving the herd small herd,
Speaker 1: and then you had your hunters who had flanked them
Speaker 1: gone around, and we're on the uplands above that bottleneck,
Speaker 1: above that nick point. Some of the bones that we found,
Speaker 1: or the bulk of the site was actually in the
Speaker 1: tributary that's leading down into what was then wild Horse
Speaker 1: Arroyo ten thousand plus years ago. Most of the bones
Speaker 1: that were found were found up in that tributary. Some
Speaker 1: of the bones were found down in the arroyo. So
Speaker 1: either the kill took place in the arroyo and some
Speaker 1: of the animals were trying to escape up that ramp
Speaker 1: of the tributary, or the kill took place in the
Speaker 1: tributary and they were fleeing down the tributary and trying
Speaker 1: to escape out the channel. Either way, it appears as
Speaker 1: though a number of the animals were sort of piled
Speaker 1: up against the walls of the arroyo, and the royal
Speaker 1: walls were, you know, four meters high plus or minus.
Speaker 1: A bison is not gonna be able to jump out
Speaker 1: of that thing, right, So they were trapped and and
Speaker 1: the bottleneck point is literally about a foot and a
Speaker 1: half wide, so they wouldn't been able to squeeze up
Speaker 1: and get past um that bottleneck, having dedicated much of
Speaker 1: his life to this kill. Dr Meltzer's opinion carries a
Speaker 1: lot of weight with me. Both he and Steve think
Speaker 1: the bison were herded into the Box Canyon. Dr Meltzer
Speaker 1: continues on with its story. So the kill takes place,
Speaker 1: and it's a it's a god awful, bloody, messy affair.
Speaker 1: You've got thirty two animals. It's it's the fall. You've
Speaker 1: got calves there, you've got cows. They're they're making a ruckus.
Speaker 1: You make the kill, you start to butcher the animals
Speaker 1: your field. You know, you're doing your field processing. Points
Speaker 1: will have broken off inside the carcass points will have
Speaker 1: broken off when you've shoved the spear into them and
Speaker 1: it's snapped and you pull out the spear and all
Speaker 1: you've got is a little butt end of the point
Speaker 1: that's still attached to the spear. You're doing the butchering.
Speaker 1: You know there's blood, there's gore, there's everything all over
Speaker 1: the place, and you're kind of in a hurry because
Speaker 1: we know they didn't stay there for very long, so
Speaker 1: you're just getting everything ready to transport. And so the
Speaker 1: main area where the kill took place is where you're
Speaker 1: going to find the busted up points that they couldn't retrieve,
Speaker 1: or that they found that they said, you know what,
Speaker 1: this thing is so busted up, there's no point trying.
Speaker 1: Those points would have been found at the point of
Speaker 1: the kill where the action took place, right, and then
Speaker 1: where they may have drugs. Some of them to butcher
Speaker 1: would have been right and so but when you're butchering,
Speaker 1: you got your hand on the stone knife, you've got
Speaker 1: your hand on the scrapers, so you're not gonna lose that,
Speaker 1: right understood. So um, but that's the stuff that you're
Speaker 1: going to very carefully curate and take with you onto
Speaker 1: the next place, right, because that's part of your tool kits.
Speaker 1: So that explains why your team wouldn't have found any
Speaker 1: points because you guys were I think where the main
Speaker 1: excavations that had taken place in the nineteen twenties pretty
Speaker 1: much removed the principal kill area we were excavating. And
Speaker 1: we know this partly by looking at the bones. What
Speaker 1: we were finding were discard piles where carcass parts that
Speaker 1: were not nobody's gonna transport a bison skull, It had
Speaker 1: no no use for it. It's too heavy, there's no
Speaker 1: use for it. And once you chop the tongue out,
Speaker 1: and we know they did that at the spot, you
Speaker 1: don't need the jaws either, So they're just throw that
Speaker 1: off to the side. So we were excavating where they
Speaker 1: were just pushing off the stuff to the side that
Speaker 1: they were not going to transport. I had some more
Speaker 1: questions about the kill. Here's Steve. How many people do
Speaker 1: you think would have been there to have done that.
Speaker 1: I think it's uh, No, one knows. No, I think
Speaker 1: it was. It was probably a major kill man. It's
Speaker 1: interesting that they were able to do that because one
Speaker 1: of the things think about return when we were talking
Speaker 1: about um, just the very low population density of people
Speaker 1: and the isolation of it, and the fact that they
Speaker 1: seemed to wander a lot. These guys and false in
Speaker 1: New Mexico are carrying toolstone from the Texas Panhandle. You
Speaker 1: can say like, oh, they had this trade route and
Speaker 1: traded it. They went there and got it, and they
Speaker 1: wandered around, and they kept on the move, and they
Speaker 1: hunted animals that experienced no hunting pressure that they were
Speaker 1: dispersed and moved, and they'd find animals where in that
Speaker 1: group of animals there's no experience with humans because that
Speaker 1: we know that means a lot in terms of the
Speaker 1: ability for a human to kill an animal. For them
Speaker 1: to not have figured out what was going on, it
Speaker 1: might have been just that these are just animals with
Speaker 1: very little exposure to humans and perhaps very easily manipulated
Speaker 1: by humans. You can get real close to them, you
Speaker 1: can kind of make a half surround and you know,
Speaker 1: nudge them along. They're not immediate like you see one
Speaker 1: of those things on two legs. I don't care what
Speaker 1: you're doing. You get there. Perhaps they're responding to the
Speaker 1: human predators no differently than they respond than how we
Speaker 1: see the same species respond to wolves, which is your
Speaker 1: bunch up. Maybe when approached by a bunch of bipedal predators,
Speaker 1: these bipedal predators could just mimic the activity of wolves,
Speaker 1: kind of get roughly around them, they sort of bunch up,
Speaker 1: and then you kind of like gently nudge them along
Speaker 1: and nudge them into this thing, and then nudge them
Speaker 1: up this canyon, and when they can't get away, you
Speaker 1: start killing them. May be like a walk in the park,
Speaker 1: but here's your thing. Maybe that day, because we don't
Speaker 1: there's not tons of these sites. It's like it's hard
Speaker 1: to nothing last that long, or it's all it's twenty
Speaker 1: under sand and gravel, whatever. There's not a lot of
Speaker 1: these sights to compare it to. Or as far as
Speaker 1: we know, those people talked about that day for the
Speaker 1: rest of their lives, that's the weirdest day that ever happened.
Speaker 1: They're like, no, man, I'm telling you, dude, do you
Speaker 1: remember that one time they just were up in there.
Speaker 1: I don't know what they were doing. I never see
Speaker 1: anything like it. My dad never saw anything like it.
Speaker 1: Or it was just another day. You know, when you
Speaker 1: get this any kind of like some sort of like
Speaker 1: statistical thing, if you only find one thing, you have
Speaker 1: to assume that you were looking at like something happened. Well, no, no,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say the other point that let's say
Speaker 1: that at some point in time, someone was gonna like
Speaker 1: freeze an American household. Here's an American household frozen in place.
Speaker 1: What are the odds that of all the American households
Speaker 1: at at eleven PM that you would have frozen place
Speaker 1: a murder in progress, or would have more likely have
Speaker 1: been some people in their living room watching TV. It's like,
Speaker 1: it's just more likely that you would have catch just
Speaker 1: this randomized American household at eleven PM. You catch some
Speaker 1: sort of thing that seemed normal multiple rather than like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, this one spectacular always murdering each other
Speaker 1: at eleven at night, because you capture the spectacular event
Speaker 1: and isolation. So you look at like this one thing,
Speaker 1: we don't have many of them, This one thing, like
Speaker 1: you have to go like, I don't know, man, there's
Speaker 1: these people out there. They are killings of all time.
Speaker 1: Here's this pretty well preserved scenario where they killed stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna have to go on the assumption that
Speaker 1: this is like indicative of what these people did and
Speaker 1: not that it was a weird day. We've talked about
Speaker 1: these stone points, but we haven't talked about how they
Speaker 1: were used to kill the bison. At the time in
Speaker 1: North America, there were two options for throwing sticks with
Speaker 1: sharp rocks on the end, bows and addle addles. Here's
Speaker 1: what Dr Meltzer had to say, were these hand projected spears?
Speaker 1: Were these ad laddles? Well, now, so that's something I
Speaker 1: cannot answer, right. You need a lot of force. Think
Speaker 1: about a bison. The side of a bison is basically
Speaker 1: a picket fence of ribs, and they're fairly wide. You've
Speaker 1: got hair, you've got hied, you've got bone, you've got fat.
Speaker 1: All that stuff has to get penetrated. The thinking is,
Speaker 1: the suspicion is and this, you know, this gets to
Speaker 1: another one of those things that we just have to
Speaker 1: infer this because we don't really know that these were
Speaker 1: either thrust or thrown at high velocity. And we know
Speaker 1: that in fact, there was some velocity involved because we
Speaker 1: have what are known as impact fractures. Basically, when bone
Speaker 1: meat stone at high velocity the front end, you get
Speaker 1: some serious front end damage. So the points that they found,
Speaker 1: though were not diagnostic in terms of at lett or
Speaker 1: hand thrusted spear, No, because you know, whether it was
Speaker 1: thrust or throne, it's the same size point. You know,
Speaker 1: regardless of how it happened, it would have had to
Speaker 1: bend some pretty bad to the bone people to have
Speaker 1: killed thirty two bison. It was a cow calf herd
Speaker 1: and the kill took place in the fall. How do
Speaker 1: we know the dental eruption patterns? So bison tend to
Speaker 1: have between about mid April and mid May, and their teeth,
Speaker 1: their molars grow at a fairly regular rate. And these
Speaker 1: these molars or these pre molars have already you know,
Speaker 1: busted over and are on the surface. Now you can say, okay,
Speaker 1: well it's probably been about four months. So if you go,
Speaker 1: you know, mid April age of the calves, that then
Speaker 1: understand that they we been born in the spring. And
Speaker 1: and you've got a bunch of four month old calves,
Speaker 1: that tells you you've got a kill that took place,
Speaker 1: you know, September plus or minus. We're going to halt
Speaker 1: the conversation right here. It's so interesting to ponder our
Speaker 1: ancient history as humans. You have to wait for part
Speaker 1: three to hear the rest of the story. We live
Speaker 1: in such a weird concoction called time that binds us
Speaker 1: so tightly to the present, it's hard to imagine any
Speaker 1: other form of life beyond what we experience with their
Speaker 1: own life, that is, unless we strain our brains to
Speaker 1: think back. But maybe it's not a cognitive exercise as
Speaker 1: much as it is a spiritual one to try to
Speaker 1: understand ancient man. But a bigger question is why do
Speaker 1: we care or even want to understand them? And I
Speaker 1: cannot fully answer that, but I am convinced that the
Speaker 1: lives of these people that left these stone points are
Speaker 1: still relevant in regardless of the barrier of time that
Speaker 1: separates us. We're in the process as a culture of
Speaker 1: redefining modern humanity. Who we are, why we're here, Why
Speaker 1: are we so clearly different than the other beasts of
Speaker 1: this planet? And now the heck did we go from
Speaker 1: slinging stone tip spears advising to driving testlas? Why is
Speaker 1: there such turboil in the earth. These are just some
Speaker 1: of the questions that we have. The fulsome sight gives
Speaker 1: us an indisputable data point, a moment frozen time that
Speaker 1: shows us what men were doing during a couple of
Speaker 1: days stretch over ten thousand years ago. As rudimentary as
Speaker 1: this info may seem, this data point anchors part of
Speaker 1: our identity as humans. It reminds us of a more
Speaker 1: simple definition of humanity. This was a group of people
Speaker 1: connected together by a common cause. These hunters were undoubtedly
Speaker 1: a family group trying to make a living and survive
Speaker 1: in a hostile place. The complexity of modern life can
Speaker 1: be bewildering, but I don't think it has to be.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of mysterious questions about these people
Speaker 1: that I'm very interested in, like where the heck did
Speaker 1: they come from? And what was the construct of their
Speaker 1: spiritual belief system which they undoubtedly had. Atheism seems to
Speaker 1: be a pretty new phenomena in our species. These are
Speaker 1: questions that stone points and bones can't answer, but it's
Speaker 1: all we have to go off of. But isn't this
Speaker 1: the cool thing about being human? This rare cognition and
Speaker 1: this awareness that we possessed is a gift, and our
Speaker 1: curiosity about past humans on this planet is also a gift.
Speaker 1: I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Greece.
Speaker 1: On Part three of this podcast, will continue in our
Speaker 1: conversation with Steve Rinella and Dr Meltzer. We've got several
Speaker 1: interesting topics yet to explore, one of them being how
Speaker 1: the Fulsome Sight upended many people's understanding of the Bible's
Speaker 1: teaching on the Age of men and the Earth. I've
Speaker 1: got a few thoughts on that. Leave us a review
Speaker 1: on iTunes and tell some of your friends about this
Speaker 1: podcast and tune in next week when myself, along with
Speaker 1: a whole New Render crew discuss the Fulsome Sight Sorry
Speaker 1: Old Render regulars have a great week,