Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty eight in central Montana, construction workers digging
Speaker 1: with a backo discovered human bones. It was a child
Speaker 1: buried twelve thousand, nine hundred years ago in the Pleistocene
Speaker 1: the Ice Age, which is a time period that has
Speaker 1: remained a mystery for archaeologists until now, because in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: forty six years after the discovery, a new technology emerged
Speaker 1: that told us who this child was, as it became
Speaker 1: the first and only Clovis era human DNA to be
Speaker 1: fully sequenced, giving us insight into the first Americans. In
Speaker 1: this episode, doctor David Meltzer will tell us what we
Speaker 1: learned from America's oldest bones. I doubt that you're gonna
Speaker 1: want to miss this one.
Speaker 2: We've got enzac in Montana, We've got these individuals in
Speaker 2: southeastern Brazil. It's a site called Lego Asanta, and we
Speaker 2: can see a tight connection between the two in a
Speaker 2: genetic sense. But there's also something lurking in those genomes
Speaker 2: at Lego Asanta. Geneticists refer to it as a ghost population.
Speaker 2: Does this possibly represent a pre Clovis population that has
Speaker 2: simply disappeared and the only record we have of it
Speaker 2: was that there was some sort of gene flow or
Speaker 2: interaction and why is it only in South America?
Speaker 3: And hey, don't forget that.
Speaker 1: On June ninth, there will be a new drop on
Speaker 1: the bear Grease feed to go along with bear Grease.
Speaker 1: What you're listening to now the Bear Grease Render Brent's
Speaker 1: this country life podcast. But now you'll be able to
Speaker 1: listen to Lake Pickles Backwoods Universe. This is our wildlife
Speaker 1: biology podcast and it's really good. We're going to learn
Speaker 1: a lot. But now we're on to the peopling of America.
Speaker 1: Roll the intro Reba. My name is Klay Nukem, and
Speaker 1: this is the bear Grease Podcast where we'll explore things
Speaker 1: forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and
Speaker 1: where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their
Speaker 1: lives close to the land. Presented by FHF gear, American
Speaker 1: made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to
Speaker 1: be as rugged as the place.
Speaker 4: As we explore, there's a whole sort of new synthesis emerging,
Speaker 4: a new view emerging about the peopling of the Americas,
Speaker 4: which is making it clear that the traditional interpretations that
Speaker 4: we had people get to Alaska, they come through the
Speaker 4: ice free corridor.
Speaker 2: Boom, it's all done. It's Clovis. It just doesn't work anymore.
Speaker 2: And it really hasn't worked for quite some time, right,
Speaker 2: because we've had these pre Clovis age sites now for
Speaker 2: the better part of fifteen twenty years. But what's happening
Speaker 2: now is that we're getting a much better picture, a
Speaker 2: more nuanced picture of the process itself and the routes
Speaker 2: that they may have taken, and getting back to the
Speaker 2: DNA who they were.
Speaker 1: I want to learn about the peopling of America, about
Speaker 1: who were the first people that came here. This is
Speaker 1: a conversation that's been heated since the late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: The technology in the last ten years has changed the conversation.
Speaker 1: This is doctor David Meltzer, an archaeologist, author and from
Speaker 1: SMU in Dallas, Texas. He's a great communicator.
Speaker 2: It used to be that I had lots of questions
Speaker 2: as an archaeologist, who are these folks, where did they
Speaker 2: come from? Who are they related to? These are not
Speaker 2: questions I could answer with archaeological remains. Right, I can
Speaker 2: look at a projectile point over here, and I can
Speaker 2: look at a projectile point over there, and I can
Speaker 2: infer that they're made in a similar fashion, they have
Speaker 2: a similar style. Maybe they're related, but I'd never know
Speaker 2: that for sure. Right, But with ancient DNA, if I
Speaker 2: have skeletal material that we can extract the DNA from
Speaker 2: an ancient individual, which we do very carefully and with
Speaker 2: considerable respect. There's a lot of ethical issues tied with
Speaker 2: ancient DNA, As you might imagine, I can identify ad mixture, ancestry,
Speaker 2: who these people are, where they came from, who their
Speaker 2: ancestors were in Northeast Asia and the like. And it's
Speaker 2: been it's been an absolute sea change in terms of
Speaker 2: our understanding of the peopling process. So we know from
Speaker 2: the ancient genetic record, ancient genomic record, that we had
Speaker 2: groups that were living in Eastern Asia China today, forty
Speaker 2: thousand years ago, very distinctive genomically. They've been isolated for
Speaker 2: some time. When we say distinctive genomically, we're not talking
Speaker 2: about them being you know, superior or inferior or anything
Speaker 2: like that. What we're actually measuring are genetic traits that
Speaker 2: have absolutely no bearing on their fitness. These are parts
Speaker 2: of your genome that actually don't do anything. So you
Speaker 2: can look at two different populations and there will be
Speaker 2: a certain amount of genetic distance between them. So we
Speaker 2: can use we can use DNA as a clock. This
Speaker 2: is just wild stuff. Is this would not have been imaginable,
Speaker 2: you know, forty years ago.
Speaker 1: How long have we had this technology?
Speaker 2: Well, so the first ancient North American genome was twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: just a shade over ten years ago, ten years ago,
Speaker 2: ten years ago. Yeah, no, Clay, if we had had
Speaker 2: this conversation in twenty ten, it'd be over in about
Speaker 2: five minutes because I'd have nothing else to say.
Speaker 1: Really. Yeah, it's exciting to live in the times of
Speaker 1: new technology being developed that's solving ancient mysteries. But it
Speaker 1: can also be a little unnerving as it up ends
Speaker 1: long held philosophies, and I sometimes wonder if our certainty
Speaker 1: at some point won't be disrupted again in the future
Speaker 1: by even more cryptic technology. But we need to understand
Speaker 1: what we are certain about. We need to talk about bones.
Speaker 1: So what discovery of human remains was found that opened
Speaker 1: the key to these place to see people?
Speaker 2: Well so, in terms of North America, right, the first
Speaker 2: ancient genome was the Anzik child. So The Antik child
Speaker 2: was discovered in the nineteen sixties, and the story, as
Speaker 2: I understand it, was a rancher was sort of doing
Speaker 2: some dirt work on his property with some heavy equipment,
Speaker 2: Montana and just outside of Wilson, Montana. In fact, it
Speaker 2: was quite close to where we did the bison butchering experiment,
Speaker 2: and I kept looking off in that distance thinking I'm close.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And the Anzik child was interred with grave goods some
Speaker 2: really distinctive Clovis points, so we know that the Anzick
Speaker 2: child was a member of that Clovis cultural group.
Speaker 1: How this came about was that a backo operator was
Speaker 1: digging gravel off a ranch owned by a family named Anzik.
Speaker 1: He hit an unusual layer of dirt and recognized his
Speaker 1: stone point. He got off, and he discovered human bones
Speaker 1: there too. What he'd later learn is that he found
Speaker 1: a formal burial of a one to two year old
Speaker 1: male child, buried with one hundred and twenty stone own
Speaker 1: tools in six non human bone adladal four shafts, and
Speaker 1: some elk antlers dusted with red ochre, and the human
Speaker 1: bones appeared to have red ochre on them as well.
Speaker 1: It makes you wonder if they buried the child with
Speaker 1: the things they thought it would need for the afterlife,
Speaker 1: the things they relied on most stone tools.
Speaker 3: But here is what they learned.
Speaker 2: Subsequent radiocarbon dating demonstrated that Anazik was around twelve seven
Speaker 2: hundred years ago, so late Pleistocene, Late Ice Age, and
Speaker 2: when Eski's group did the sequencing, what they discovered, what
Speaker 2: we discovered and published in twenty fourteen was that that
Speaker 2: individual was part of a population movement into the Americas
Speaker 2: that we subsequently identified as Southern Native Americans. Now we
Speaker 2: all know that Montana's not in southern portion of the continent.
Speaker 2: But what Anzik signified was this was one member of
Speaker 2: a population that subsequently would spread throughout the hemisphere. Whereas
Speaker 2: the other sort of fork in the road, right, so
Speaker 2: one fork goes south, the other stays north. Those are
Speaker 2: Northern Native Americans.
Speaker 1: So Anzik all connected anzimatically to this Anzik child.
Speaker 2: It all sort of gets channeled back through Anzik or
Speaker 2: through others of that population, right, So Anzik is not
Speaker 2: sort of the founding population per se, It's a member
Speaker 2: of that early population.
Speaker 1: This discovery of this Anzik child was is the only
Speaker 1: pliest scene human remains that we were able to extract
Speaker 1: good enough DNA from to really do the type of
Speaker 1: genetic research and discovery that you're talking about.
Speaker 2: Fact, that's correct so far, So all.
Speaker 1: This is based upon one really good specimen.
Speaker 2: Well, there's actually more to it, okay. So anzik Is
Speaker 2: so far are the oldest genome that we have in
Speaker 2: the Americas. However, we have others that come along pretty
Speaker 2: soon thereafter, and that help fill in the picture of
Speaker 2: the dispersal of these populations throughout the hemisphere. We have
Speaker 2: some in southeastern Brazil that date to so anziic is
Speaker 2: twelve seven. We've got ones in South America, southeastern Brazil
Speaker 2: that are around ten and a half. We've got in
Speaker 2: Spirit Cave and Nevada that's about ten to seven. What's
Speaker 2: really striking about the genetic data, so again, you know
Speaker 2: we've got data from Montana, we've got Nevada, we've got Brazil,
Speaker 2: we've got various other places in South America. Is how
Speaker 2: closely linked they are and how similar they are at
Speaker 2: the genetic level. What that tells us is that this
Speaker 2: is a population that was actually moving pretty fast because
Speaker 2: there hasn't been that much change in the time from
Speaker 2: Anazik down to southeastern percent.
Speaker 1: Yes, so it wasn't like five thousand years no, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's literally people generations, maybe a little more than that,
Speaker 1: but yeah, that's that's the tendency, right, is that it
Speaker 1: happened really fast.
Speaker 2: We call them quick waivers. They you know, it's just
Speaker 2: a fast moving radiation throughout the hemisphere.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine moving on foot from Montana to Brazil?
Speaker 1: What was pushing these people? Why did they move? These
Speaker 1: are answers we will never know. But maybe one day
Speaker 1: they'll have a technology that can read the thoughts and
Speaker 1: understand the motivations of people by the DNA.
Speaker 3: Extracted from their bones.
Speaker 1: One of the most interesting things about the Anazac child
Speaker 1: was recorded in a peer review paper in the Science
Speaker 1: Advances journal, in which an isotope analysis was done on
Speaker 1: the bones and in that they can determine and the
Speaker 1: type of protein that the mother ate when she nursed
Speaker 1: the young child, and they found that her diet was
Speaker 1: more closely related to a scimitar cat, a carnivore, than
Speaker 1: anything else. They use this study to say that these
Speaker 1: people were eaten a lot of big mammal meat that
Speaker 1: is pretty durned crazy. But our next question is what
Speaker 1: did these bones tell us about where these people came from.
Speaker 2: So we've got these two populations, one in Eastern Asia
Speaker 2: and one sort of in the region around Lake Baikal,
Speaker 2: probably around twenty five twenty three thousand years ago. There's
Speaker 2: there's interaction. These groups or members of these groups kind
Speaker 2: of bump into one another and then split off as
Speaker 2: a sort of combined entity. A combined population. That's the
Speaker 2: group that will become ancestor to Native Americans. That's the
Speaker 2: group that will make their way across the land bridge.
Speaker 2: They'll do it in at least a couple of different pulses.
Speaker 2: They'll be the initial one, and those will be the
Speaker 2: folks that will make it all the way down into
Speaker 2: the lower forty eight, throughout South America and so on.
Speaker 2: Then there'll be a slightly later one which will come
Speaker 2: into Alaska and stay and not go any further south
Speaker 2: and ultimately disappear from the genetic and archaeological record. Okay, wow,
Speaker 2: we could never see disappearance in the archaeological record. Before
Speaker 2: we could see artifacts, but we had no idea who
Speaker 2: made them and whether the people who made them had
Speaker 2: descendants among modern groups. All modern people have ancestors, there's
Speaker 2: no question about that, right, But not all ancient people
Speaker 2: that we see in the ancient DNA record necessarily had descendants,
Speaker 2: because some populations disappeared others were replaced, either you know,
Speaker 2: locally or regionally or whatever. Humans move and humans been
Speaker 2: moving for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, so we can
Speaker 2: start to see that kind of thing. We can see
Speaker 2: people and populations disappearing.
Speaker 1: All from basically finding bits of DNA and.
Speaker 2: Well bones in bones exactly right. So when you're doing
Speaker 2: ancient DNA on skeletal remains, what you're doing is you're
Speaker 2: getting that individual's genome. But it's more than just that individual,
Speaker 2: because your genome, my genome. All of these things are
Speaker 2: a record of all of our ancestors and the big picture.
Speaker 1: This would be like sorcery to someone one hundred years ago.
Speaker 2: Oh, no question.
Speaker 1: Like if you said, I can tell you everything about
Speaker 1: where you're from, who your people were, I mean.
Speaker 2: Really, well, it's a scale thing though, right. I mean,
Speaker 2: by the way, don't buy any of those things that
Speaker 2: the genetic ancestry testing companies are telling you about. We
Speaker 2: can tell you exactly who your ancestors. No, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of arm weaving with a lot of that stuff. Really, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Now what we're looking at are population level trends, right, Okay,
Speaker 2: so we're not able to take your DNA and precisely show.
Speaker 1: Who your ancestors were.
Speaker 2: That makes sense, But we can look at it as
Speaker 2: a population and we do.
Speaker 1: What if you told a human living in the Pleistocene
Speaker 1: that inside their bones were the inscriptions of their ancestors.
Speaker 1: I think they tell you that they already knew that.
Speaker 1: I find this bizarre and oddly circular. Author Barry Lopez
Speaker 1: and his book Arctic Dreams, raises the question of how
Speaker 1: far modern man has actually come. He questions whether all
Speaker 1: we've accomplished is quote a more complicated manipulation of materials,
Speaker 1: more astounding display of his grasp.
Speaker 3: Of the physical principles of matter.
Speaker 1: We are dazzled by mere styles of expression end of quote.
Speaker 1: I think what he's saying is that modernity has produced
Speaker 1: a very technical quote style of expression like sequencing DNA,
Speaker 1: where previous humans might have been more spiritually acute and
Speaker 1: expressed life in different ways.
Speaker 3: I like thinking about this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: This is the perfect time to stop for just a
Speaker 1: second and review some basic stuff that will help all
Speaker 1: this make sense. The Clovis era is a term used
Speaker 1: to describe a group of people that we're here in
Speaker 1: what is now America roughly thirteen thousand years ago. They
Speaker 1: spanned the continent and made uniquely fluted stone points. That's
Speaker 1: basically the only way that we know who they are
Speaker 1: is because of their technology. For decades, people thought that
Speaker 1: these the Clovis people, crossed the burying land bridge out
Speaker 1: of Asia in the Pleistocene and came through an ice
Speaker 1: free corridor between the glaciers into the interior of North America.
Speaker 3: But through this.
Speaker 1: Ice core technology that we learned about on episode two
Speaker 1: ninety eight of Bear Grease, we're realizing that that ice
Speaker 1: free corridor travel path wouldn't be possible. All that information
Speaker 1: is going to be valuable in just a little bit.
Speaker 2: But I'm gonna throw a wrinkle in here, anazak is Clovis.
Speaker 2: We still don't have a pre Clovis genome, so we
Speaker 2: don't know whether the earlier population that comes into the Americas,
Speaker 2: who are they and how do they relate to Clovis,
Speaker 2: and were they part of that quick wave? Will presumably
Speaker 2: not because that quick wave is Clovis down to you know,
Speaker 2: South America. We're looking.
Speaker 1: So it's just so hard to find human remains that
Speaker 1: are over ten thousand years old. I mean, that's what
Speaker 1: we're dealing with. Like there were hundreds, clearly hundreds for sure,
Speaker 1: even thousands of people, oh yeah, across the landscape, across
Speaker 1: all spread out, all across North America, and we can't
Speaker 1: find any of their bones because it's organic matter, it deteriorates.
Speaker 1: What we find is what you specialize in, which is
Speaker 1: stone points and archaeological like physical evidence that humans were here.
Speaker 1: And so just these really unique situations where something happened,
Speaker 1: where bones were preserved. It's like literally searching for a
Speaker 1: needle in a thousand haystacks.
Speaker 2: It's a challenge. So throughout the hemisphere North and South America,
Speaker 2: there's maybe twenty five thirty human remains older than about
Speaker 2: eight thousand years. That's a hell of a small population
Speaker 2: on which to you know, create any sort of inferential
Speaker 2: basis for what the first people look like. Now, the
Speaker 2: thing that's really interesting is that at this time in
Speaker 2: Europe we've got all sorts of skeletal remains, right, So, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a preservation issue, but obviously, you know, Europe must
Speaker 2: have preservation issues there as well. But the difference is
Speaker 2: is that their base population of individuals that were living
Speaker 2: at that time is so much larger that if you
Speaker 2: take one percent of that population and then one percent
Speaker 2: of the population that's living in the America's which is
Speaker 2: a lot smaller, you know, what are the odds that
Speaker 2: you're going to get well preserved human vas Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean it is the case that throughout most of
Speaker 2: eastern North America, bone does not preserve in sediments.
Speaker 1: Eastern North America being the eastern deciduous forest where have
Speaker 1: a lot of rainfalls at a lot of biological a
Speaker 1: lot of soils and all that stuff. In the West,
Speaker 1: it would be better.
Speaker 2: Better chances, absolutely absolutely, But you know, preservation depends on
Speaker 2: just so many things. You know, was the individual interred,
Speaker 2: what was the context of the burial, you know, where
Speaker 2: scavenger is able to get to the you know, the
Speaker 2: remains or you know, these people were highly mobile. They
Speaker 2: did not have cemeteries, you know, at this period of time.
Speaker 2: Actually the first cemetery we see is probably around ten
Speaker 2: thousand years ago. But as I mentioned earlier, you know,
Speaker 2: this is something that is now being done much more
Speaker 2: in concert with Native American groups, because these are the
Speaker 2: ancestors of these individuals, right. The people today are descended
Speaker 2: from these first Americans, and so a lot of the
Speaker 2: you know, the first decade or so of ancient DNA work,
Speaker 2: and this is true globally, there was a bone rush, right.
Speaker 2: Every time you found a bone, somebody wanted to sequence
Speaker 2: it and say, you know, because you learn something new
Speaker 2: with each new specimen. We're starting to calm down a
Speaker 2: little bit because, you know, we're starting to get the
Speaker 2: picture together. We're filling in you know, it's much more
Speaker 2: filling in the details rather than creating the whole canvas.
Speaker 2: But we're also doing much more collaborative work with the
Speaker 2: native groups because you know, they're interested. They might not
Speaker 2: necessarily be interested in the same kinds of things we're
Speaker 2: interested in, but we find that out right, we do
Speaker 2: what we can to sort of respect the descendants, the
Speaker 2: descendant communities, and at the same time sort of look
Speaker 2: into and try and understand their history. And really, this
Speaker 2: is this is human history, right, This is the story
Speaker 2: of people essentially coming out of Africa and making their
Speaker 2: way around the globe. It's an amazing story, because one
Speaker 2: of the things that's always struck me is the vanity
Speaker 2: of Europeans when they started sailing around the globe. You know,
Speaker 2: they talked about exploring all these places and going where
Speaker 2: no man has gone before, throwing in a star trek
Speaker 2: reference here. But the reality is is every place they
Speaker 2: landed there was somebody there, right. Yeah, you know, so
Speaker 2: hunter gatherer groups, foraging groups leaving Africa managed to pretty
Speaker 2: much populate the entire globe, with the exception of Antarctica,
Speaker 2: and even then there's some question about whether indigenous groups
Speaker 2: got to Antarctica before James Cook approached it in the
Speaker 2: late seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Humans seem to be really good at dividing up based
Speaker 1: upon really the quite small cosmetic and cultural differences within
Speaker 1: our species. But doctor Meltzer makes a good point, this
Speaker 1: is the story of mankind. As I learned about archaeology,
Speaker 1: what is most astonishing to me is how random the
Speaker 1: data points seemed to be for because I mean, like
Speaker 1: we talk about Clovis this well, first of we talk
Speaker 1: about Folsome, this incredible archaeological discovery discovered by George mcjenkin,
Speaker 1: who you know, is just this cowboy get out on
Speaker 1: his ranch and he finds these bones and he gets
Speaker 1: old there. And then the Clovis site is basically a
Speaker 1: commercial gravel pit where they're digging up stuff and they
Speaker 1: and they find it. The Anzik child is discovered when
Speaker 1: they're doing excavation on just some rancher's random place. And
Speaker 1: I mean it feels like as a species, we would
Speaker 1: be like globally like, okay, everyone, we're gonna grid off
Speaker 1: the earth and we want every man, woman and child
Speaker 1: to go out and excavate the land that they own
Speaker 1: and look for evidence of deep human antiquity. Ready, go
Speaker 1: report back to us in a month, and we we
Speaker 1: grid off the whole earth and we find everything that
Speaker 1: is not even remotely I mean that's a fairy tale,
Speaker 1: like like you know, how much has been destroyed? How
Speaker 1: much is there? Is there an archaeological site under my
Speaker 1: house in Arkansas that would change the world and the
Speaker 1: whole story, But we're never gonna dig it up in
Speaker 1: my lifetime because my house is.
Speaker 2: There, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, funny fact. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2: Well, I think you should move your house and we
Speaker 2: can see what's on it.
Speaker 1: I do find stone points in my yard.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well there you go, then it really is good.
Speaker 1: Reason to move to your house find stone points in
Speaker 1: my yard.
Speaker 2: So there's there's a bunch of things. First off, you're
Speaker 2: absolutely right in that it's complicated. Sites are found randomly.
Speaker 2: Sites are found owing to construction erosion, dumb luck. The
Speaker 2: person happened to be walking along at the moment that
Speaker 2: something eroded out, and if they'd come twenty minutes later,
Speaker 2: it would have washed downstream and they'd never know. This
Speaker 2: is why we as archaeologists when we're out in the field,
Speaker 2: we're talking to ranchers, we're talking to farmers, we're talking
Speaker 2: to people who are following you orders and surveying that
Speaker 2: you know, one square mile around their house, and they're
Speaker 2: the ones his eyes are on the ground all the time. Okay,
Speaker 2: But at the same time, we're also thinking, and we're
Speaker 2: also using techniques like remote sensing, techniques like understanding the
Speaker 2: local geology, like understanding erosional and depositional processes. The best example,
Speaker 2: wonderful example of this is fellow by name of Reed
Speaker 2: Firing at the University of North Texas. Reid has two PhDs,
Speaker 2: one an anthropology, one in geology, and reads a pretty
Speaker 2: savvy guy, and he was looking at the geology in
Speaker 2: his neighborhood literally, and he got to thinking, you know,
Speaker 2: the ice age stuff is now buried under about eight
Speaker 2: to nine meters a sediment, and he got it into
Speaker 2: his head that well, they're digging a dam and they're
Speaker 2: cutting an overflow sluice way by that dam, and he
Speaker 2: just decided, well, that's a really good opportunity to go
Speaker 2: look eight meters below the surface. He starts walking down
Speaker 2: that contact between the end of the place to scene
Speaker 2: and the Cretaceous. Right, So you've got twelve thousand year
Speaker 2: old sediments sitting on top of sixty million year old rock,
Speaker 2: and what does he discover? The Clovis point, right, So
Speaker 2: just like walking around yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you
Speaker 2: take that sort of knowledge and apply it, it's not
Speaker 2: a completely random thing. But you know, the prepared mind
Speaker 2: will find things, and Reed certainly was. And that's it's
Speaker 2: so called. It's the Aubry site. So it's one of
Speaker 2: the oldest Clovi sites we have while and it was
Speaker 2: discovered because he was savvy enough to know where to look.
Speaker 1: I bet those damn builders wish he hadn't found.
Speaker 2: It did not have anything, it did not slow the
Speaker 2: dam It all worked out just fine for all concern.
Speaker 1: The bones have answered the question of where Clovis people
Speaker 1: came from. But now I want to try to understand
Speaker 1: how they got here. Meltzer is going to bring up
Speaker 1: something called the Kelp Highway, which is the theory that
Speaker 1: after crossing the Burying land bridge, humans moved down the coast,
Speaker 1: utilizing the rich ecosystems provided by Kelp.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, so we've now established that people came down
Speaker 2: the coast, and the question is, well, what resources were
Speaker 2: they using? There is an interesting theory about the so
Speaker 2: called Kelp Highway that would have provided a rich resource
Speaker 2: base for groups. Certainly there's a lot of help out
Speaker 2: there today. The obvious question is what did it look
Speaker 2: like at the Pleisto scene sixteen thousand years ago when
Speaker 2: people were coming down that coast. I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't know that any of us know, because you know,
Speaker 2: these are sea plants where we haven't got a really
Speaker 2: good geological record of the history of Kelp along the coat.
Speaker 1: You can't do the core.
Speaker 2: Well, you know what we have we again this.
Speaker 1: Is I thought maybe I gave him a new idea. Well,
Speaker 1: I was going to be like call it the clay
Speaker 1: Nucombe core because I told you to get a core
Speaker 1: of the Kelp.
Speaker 2: Well, the problem is, you know what the Pacific Northwest
Speaker 2: coast looks like, right, it's constantly getting pounded. Uh, the
Speaker 2: odds are against you. I would tell you, by the way,
Speaker 2: that the fellow who found the Titanic years ago, one
Speaker 2: of his people contacted me and they said, you know,
Speaker 2: he was thinking, now that he's found the Titanic, that
Speaker 2: maybe he would do some work on the Bearing Land
Speaker 2: Bridge and look for sites and would be interested. And
Speaker 2: I said, sure, nothing everything side, Yeah, nothing, nothing happened.
Speaker 2: I told him that, you know, the odds were actually
Speaker 2: not very.
Speaker 1: Good, just because the ocean would have just yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: well volatile down there.
Speaker 2: You can do bathometric studies, right, you can. You can
Speaker 2: map the seafloor and you can see valleys, you can
Speaker 2: see river drainages in the like. But are you going
Speaker 2: to find an archaeological site. I mean it's hard enough
Speaker 2: to find stuff on land and doing it in sixty
Speaker 2: meters of water icy water. Yeah. So yeah, that one
Speaker 2: never came to pass. It would have been kind of
Speaker 2: fun though. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So okay, so you're telling me about what we know
Speaker 1: about the water route.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, don't think of it as a water route,
Speaker 2: think of it as a coastal route. Okay. I suspect
Speaker 2: they were taking small animals and maybe even plant material
Speaker 2: out of tide pools. They were probably hunting animals that
Speaker 2: would have been in that same ribbon of dry land
Speaker 2: along the ice sheet. And before you get into the water,
Speaker 2: large mammal hunting, large sea mammal hunting is a much
Speaker 2: later thing and it usually requires boats, and we don't
Speaker 2: Now we don't have any evidence of boats. Does that
Speaker 2: mean they didn't have boats? No? I mean we just
Speaker 2: don't have any boats. Yeah, yeah, or exactly. I mean,
Speaker 2: what are the odds that you would actually find something
Speaker 2: like that?
Speaker 1: Now, so there are archaeological sites along that coast, no
Speaker 1: kind of.
Speaker 2: No, No, that's that's another challenge.
Speaker 1: So we just have So what are the data points,
Speaker 1: like like Cooper's Ferry is inland, yep, off of the
Speaker 1: it's off the Snake the Snake River, Like, we'll think
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: Think about it. You're coming down the coast, right, so
Speaker 2: you've got this ribbon of land. You can make your
Speaker 2: way down the coast and once you get south of
Speaker 2: that ice sheet. Now mind you that ice sheet comes
Speaker 2: into Seattle really late. You had ice in Seattle as
Speaker 2: recently as fourteen and a half fifteen thousand years ago
Speaker 2: before it starts to retreat. But once you get south
Speaker 2: of that ice sheet, you get to the Columbia, make
Speaker 2: a left turn that takes you into the interior. Right,
Speaker 2: and then right there you go, and you're gonna find
Speaker 2: your way to a place like Cooper Ferry. So you
Speaker 2: could either continue south, you could make a left turn,
Speaker 2: go into the interior, go a little further south, make
Speaker 2: another left turn. Yeah. So once once you get south
Speaker 2: of the ice it's open season, it's open plans.
Speaker 1: And so the data points then become like we have
Speaker 1: this Anzik child in Montana that we can genetically trace.
Speaker 2: To populations in Northeast Asia.
Speaker 1: And we know they didn't come down the ice free
Speaker 1: corridor because there was a it was closed up until it.
Speaker 2: Was not biologically viable until after they got here.
Speaker 1: And so I mean the only thing left is they
Speaker 1: either flew airplanes or they came down the.
Speaker 2: Coast exactly right.
Speaker 1: And so there's no paleolithic archaeological sites like on the
Speaker 1: coast of Alaska and British Columbia.
Speaker 2: It would be lovely if there were that we could
Speaker 2: sort of, you know, if they left behind like Hansel
Speaker 2: and Gretel, right, a trail of breadcrumbs, a trail of
Speaker 2: archaeological sites. There is one site that based around thirteen
Speaker 2: that's off the coast of British Columbia, where they actually
Speaker 2: have some ancient footprints literally footprints coming into this continent.
Speaker 2: But that's one of the only ones that's and that's
Speaker 2: still not old enough, right, because if people are at
Speaker 2: Cooper's Ferry at fifteen and a half, then a site
Speaker 2: this thirteen thousand is, yeah, that's that's long after.
Speaker 1: Wow. It's currently believed that the first people arriving in
Speaker 1: what is now the Lower forty eight got here using
Speaker 1: a coastal route, and sites like Cooper's Ferry, which is
Speaker 1: along the Salmon River near Cottonwood, Idaho, force us to
Speaker 1: believe in the water route. At Cooper's Ferry, they've found
Speaker 1: stone points and burned animal bones that radio carbon date
Speaker 1: back to fifteen thousand, five hundred years ago. This is
Speaker 1: two thousand years before Clovis, thousands of years before the
Speaker 1: ice free corridor was biologically viable for a thirteen hundred
Speaker 1: mile journey. Paleo's sites are just hard to come by,
Speaker 1: so it's difficult to piece it all together.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, think about this in terms of numbers.
Speaker 2: We are not talking about a lot of people. Not
Speaker 2: only is there not a lot of people in absolute terms,
Speaker 2: in terms of density, You've got relatively few people on
Speaker 2: a vast continent and they're not and they're highly mobile,
Speaker 2: they're moving all the time. Archaeological sites accumulate when people
Speaker 2: slow down and stop, and especially if you've got a
Speaker 2: large number of people slowing down and stopping.
Speaker 1: And these people weren't making impact. I mean, like today,
Speaker 1: like you think about the impact that a human would
Speaker 1: leave on the planet in a week's time period. I'm
Speaker 1: producing trash, controducing tire tracks and mud when I drive
Speaker 1: my truck to where I hunt. And these people didn't
Speaker 1: have plastics, they didn't have metal.
Speaker 2: Oh god, no, yeah.
Speaker 1: Every everything they had was organic matter that would rot
Speaker 1: in a period of years at most. So it just
Speaker 1: took these like really special circumstances for something to be preserved.
Speaker 1: It's just astonishing to me how how this like these
Speaker 1: little breadcrumbs that we have, But also how much we
Speaker 1: know off these small data points, right.
Speaker 2: No, we we specialize in getting large amounts of information
Speaker 2: from tiny amounts of data. Yeah, because we have to.
Speaker 1: It's astonishing to me to think about, like who these
Speaker 1: people would have really been. They were humans, just like
Speaker 1: a same mental capacity. They could have learned to fly
Speaker 1: an airplane, they could have learned complex math. We just
Speaker 1: have to assume that they wouldn't have had any sense
Speaker 1: of their uniqueness in the world. I mean in terms
Speaker 1: of like we now look back from this place in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, where we have this incredible technology and
Speaker 1: we have these like what we perceive as modern lives
Speaker 1: right on the cutting edge of time. Well, they were
Speaker 1: on the cutting edge of time fifteen thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: It was it's hard for me to think about a
Speaker 1: place to sene man waking up, getting the fire going,
Speaker 1: and just thinking, man, it's just another Tuesday, and I
Speaker 1: gotta figure out what we're gonna eat, and I gotta
Speaker 1: go out and you know, kill a deer, kill a mammoth,
Speaker 1: or I've got a We're gonna head south today and
Speaker 1: maybe we'll run into some other group of people. I mean,
Speaker 1: they didn't know they were They just thought this is
Speaker 1: what human life was.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And then now fifteen thousand years later, we have, because
Speaker 1: of technology, because of history, because of written languages, because
Speaker 1: of communication, at this high level that we have, we're
Speaker 1: able to see this huge slice of the pie and go,
Speaker 1: holy smokes, those guys were just so unique.
Speaker 2: And yes, I think you're absolutely right. The only point
Speaker 2: that I would add is that I suspect at some level,
Speaker 2: at some degree, they must have realized looking around that
Speaker 2: there's not a lot of people here, right, there's wouldn't.
Speaker 1: That have been normal to them?
Speaker 2: Exactly right, exactly right. But think about it in terms
Speaker 2: of the first people coming into the Americas, where you know,
Speaker 2: they'd seen people in Siberia, they'd interacted with folks along
Speaker 2: the way, and suddenly they realize, you know, it's been months,
Speaker 2: it's been a really long time since we've seen smoke
Speaker 2: on the horizon, or a freshly killed animal, or bumped
Speaker 2: into somebody else.
Speaker 1: The place is uninhabited. Exactly They would have recognized.
Speaker 2: It, right, They may have recognized it or just thought,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe I just need to keep moving and
Speaker 2: I'm going to find somebody else.
Speaker 1: Right, What if they thought that was a positive or negative.
Speaker 2: Well, now that's if you're looking at your kids and
Speaker 2: they're getting to be a marriageable la you're thinking, boy,
Speaker 2: I hope we run into somebody really quick. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: that's actually one of the other things that's come out
Speaker 2: of the genetic record is that there's no evidence whatsoever
Speaker 2: of incest or I don't know if you necessarily want
Speaker 2: to talk about that. Sure, but with Neanderthals toward the
Speaker 2: end of their their string by you know, fifty thousand
Speaker 2: years ago, there was a lot of inbreeding really with
Speaker 2: modern human population, and they basically were running out of
Speaker 2: mates for their kids. With modern humans, you do not
Speaker 2: see that. So these folks, again, this goes back to
Speaker 2: if you're on an empty landscape, it pays to recognize
Speaker 2: strangers as friends.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's fascinating. It's mind boggling to think of so
Speaker 1: few humans on such a huge continent, especially as planet
Speaker 1: Earth now has over eight billion people. It's tempting to
Speaker 1: think that it would be nice to go back, but
Speaker 1: I'm sure all those people from the Pleistocene would like
Speaker 1: to be in our shoes, with excess food, air conditioning,
Speaker 1: and hospitals. This next section reveals one of the biggest
Speaker 1: mysteries of the Americas. Here, doctor Meltzer is going to
Speaker 1: introduce us to what they refer to as the ghost population.
Speaker 2: So one of the really interesting things, as we've talked about,
Speaker 2: we've got Anzac in Montana, we've got these individuals in
Speaker 2: southeastern Brazil. It's a site called Lego Asanta, and we
Speaker 2: can see a tight connection between the two in a
Speaker 2: genetic sense, but there's also something lurking in those genomes
Speaker 2: at Lego Asanta a well. Geneticists refer to it as
Speaker 2: a ghost population, and by that what we mean is
Speaker 2: that we've got segments of DNA that are clearly unrelated
Speaker 2: to everything else that are part of the genome of
Speaker 2: those individuals, and it's a signal that bears a resemblance
Speaker 2: to austral Asian populations, so Australia, New Guinea, that region
Speaker 2: of the world. So we've got these chunks, these odd
Speaker 2: chunks of DNA in these populations in southeastern Brazil that
Speaker 2: are part of the genome. But what's really puzzling about
Speaker 2: this stuff is that we don't see that austral Asian
Speaker 2: signal in any of the North American individuals that we've sequenced.
Speaker 2: We don't see it in any of the Alaskan individuals
Speaker 2: that we've sequenced. We don't see them in the Northeast
Speaker 2: Asian ones. So clearly there's ancestral genetic components and segments
Speaker 2: that are coming into the Americas, and we don't know
Speaker 2: does this possibly represent a pre Clovis population that has
Speaker 2: simply disappeared? And the only record we have of it
Speaker 2: was that there was some sort of gene flow or interaction.
Speaker 2: And why is it only in South America? If it
Speaker 2: came across the land bridge and into North America, you
Speaker 2: would expect to see this signal all the way down
Speaker 2: into the continent. R So we haven't quite figured out that.
Speaker 1: Do they not think that it's it potentially came from
Speaker 1: the South into South America?
Speaker 2: Not really, And let me tell you why we don't
Speaker 2: think that. And again with the caveat that with archaeology,
Speaker 2: you know, we're never at one hundred percent sure, but
Speaker 2: I'm going to say ninety nine point ninety nine on
Speaker 2: this one. We know when people start moving out across
Speaker 2: the Pacific, and we do know in fact that groups
Speaker 2: that moved out across the Pacific ultimately will touch down
Speaker 2: in coastal South America. They won't really spend much time there, right,
Speaker 2: But that's only about three thousand years ago, and that's
Speaker 2: only after folks developed the ocean going technology this, you know,
Speaker 2: the big outrigger canoes and that sort of thing to
Speaker 2: do that in the place to scene, No, I think
Speaker 2: it's pretty much again.
Speaker 1: So just to clarify, there's there's a genetic signal in
Speaker 1: South America that's not in North America. That it's from Australia.
Speaker 2: In that region, and that and that, and that's in
Speaker 2: South America and no place else.
Speaker 1: So what what do you think? This complete mystery?
Speaker 2: It's absolutely I mean, these are the things that make
Speaker 2: this fun. Right said, there's still so many questions to answer,
Speaker 2: and that's a big one.
Speaker 1: The ghost population of South America is some wild stuff.
Speaker 1: But it's worth noting that not all of the scientific
Speaker 1: community is an agreement that it's real. But that's how
Speaker 1: all this stuff works. Usually takes a generation or two
Speaker 1: to sort it all out. Potentially one day we'll understand
Speaker 1: even more as new information and technology unfolds, and this
Speaker 1: exact thing uncertainty spurs My last question to doctor Meltzer,
Speaker 1: with your career how do you manage the uncertainty because
Speaker 1: you have to be starting like there's I'm sure you've
Speaker 1: done stuff in your career where you said like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is the best information we have and here's what
Speaker 1: we believe, and then later that was proven wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's the fun of it, right. I Mean,
Speaker 2: our hypotheses, our theories, our inferences are not like our children.
Speaker 2: We're more than happy to discover something new that shows
Speaker 2: us oh okay, now we have a much better idea.
Speaker 2: What I thought before was wrong. I mean, you don't
Speaker 2: want it to happen too often, sure, sure, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: but it's really it's refreshing in a way because you're
Speaker 2: constantly learning stuff and by virtue of the sort of
Speaker 2: dearth of data. I mean, we have a tremendous amount
Speaker 2: of data. Yeah, but in the grand scheme of things,
Speaker 2: do we want more? Do we wish we had more? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: But there there definitely are are things that you can
Speaker 1: say with certainty that will never be pretty much reversed.
Speaker 1: I mean, like I'm thinking, like if we'd had this
Speaker 1: conversation in the year nineteen hundred, we would this would
Speaker 1: be an entirely different conversation. If we had this conversation
Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties. Oh yeah, it would be entirely different.
Speaker 1: We'd say, oh man, we got Clovis and fulsome and
Speaker 1: people have been here for thirteen thousand years. We also,
Speaker 1: through the you know, the latter part of the nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: would have thought that people came across the Burying land
Speaker 1: Bridge through the Ice Free Corridor and that's how they
Speaker 1: got here. And then now we're saying, well, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a coastal route. Yeah, Like, how twenty years from
Speaker 1: now will we still be saying that.
Speaker 2: Okay, I see we are route Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 2: think there are anchor points that we can use. I
Speaker 2: don't think the ice Free Corridor is going to open
Speaker 2: any earlier than we thought.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's like pretty that's like I saw.
Speaker 2: I'm confident on that one. So let's have this conversation
Speaker 2: in twenty years and find out if I was right
Speaker 2: or not. Yeah, but I think that's good.
Speaker 1: We're going to book this as a calendar.
Speaker 2: Of let's anchor that one right there. That's good. Was
Speaker 2: Clovis dating to you know, around thirteen thousand plus minus. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's good. Have we found the earliest people in the Americas. No,
Speaker 2: I don't think. So is it going to go much
Speaker 2: before around fifty thousand years ago? I also don't think so.
Speaker 2: Here's what we're doing, This is this is really what
Speaker 2: science is all about. We are worrying away our ignorance.
Speaker 2: So I can say, just having this conversation here today,
Speaker 2: that I think the first people came into the Americas
Speaker 2: sometime between about sixteen and say twenty five thousand years ago. Okay,
Speaker 2: Do I think people could have come here one hundred
Speaker 2: thousand years ago? No? I don't, not at all, just
Speaker 2: because of the evidence that we have today suggests that's
Speaker 2: not the case. I don't even think they were or
Speaker 2: as early as fifty or forty or maybe even thirty.
Speaker 2: But that's just based on the evidence that we have today.
Speaker 2: Am I willing to accept the possibility that I could
Speaker 2: be wrong, Absolutely, because as you know, it's sort of
Speaker 2: alluded to the fact that I've been in this business
Speaker 2: for a while, and it's true, I've seen a lot
Speaker 2: of changes in the time that I've been in this business,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean, we all used to believe that
Speaker 2: it was Clovis first, and then it wasn't. We used
Speaker 2: to believe the ice free quarter was the way in
Speaker 2: and that it wasn't. So yeah, I've seen those changes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I've also you know, and it's it's humbling in
Speaker 2: the sense that it makes you realize, do not be
Speaker 2: too confident about what you know, because with archaeology there's
Speaker 2: always the potential for surprises.
Speaker 3: We're worrying away our ignorance.
Speaker 1: Attempting to answer these questions of the deep andiquity of
Speaker 1: man in North America is a grand intellectual feed and
Speaker 1: I think it's important and it adds weight to our
Speaker 1: modern human story of driving on paved roads and living
Speaker 1: in brick, air conditioned homes. I can't imagine living in
Speaker 1: modern times and having little curiosity about where people came from.
Speaker 1: To me, this curiosity is respect, and in this case,
Speaker 1: it's respect for these people that lived here, but also
Speaker 1: respect for the land itself.
Speaker 3: This is its story.
Speaker 1: I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease
Speaker 1: Brince this country life podcast, and I know that you're
Speaker 1: gonna enjoy Lake's Backwoods University. Please share our podcast feed
Speaker 1: with a friend this week and keep the wild places wild,
Speaker 1: because that's where the bears live.
Speaker 2: Fe