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Speaker 1: Humans belonging to Clovis and Folsome cultures entered in America,

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Speaker 1: teeming with a remarkable diversity of Africa like creatures, but

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Speaker 1: confronted an extinction crisis that was possibly precipitated by their

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Speaker 1: own arrival. I'm Dan Florries, and this is the American West,

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Speaker 1: brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in Barrel, Velvet

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Speaker 1: Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season

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Speaker 1: that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports

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Speaker 1: backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and

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Speaker 1: wildlife enjoy responsibly Clovisia the Beautiful. We hardly know our

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Speaker 1: actual beginnings America, even when the stories are set in

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Speaker 1: places we recognize. The characters of our deep time history

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Speaker 1: can be alien to the point of fantasy. But while

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Speaker 1: it may sound unlikely in the twenty twenties, there's no

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Speaker 1: place quite like downtown Los Angeles for acquiring some sense

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Speaker 1: of how the human story began on the continent. Rancho

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Speaker 1: Librea Tarpits, just off Wiltshire Boulevard in the heart of

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Speaker 1: a sprawling Pacific coast city, is today the most successible

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Speaker 1: place in the country for picturing in the minds eye

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Speaker 1: the wild new world migrating humans found when they first

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Speaker 1: saw America. True enough, there's a sense of time travel shock,

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Speaker 1: having your lift drop you in the middle of swirling,

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Speaker 1: honking la traffic, only to stand face to face minutes

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Speaker 1: later with Columbian mammos fatally mired in tar, trumpeting their despair.

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Speaker 1: Even if the mammoths are robots and their forlorn cries

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Speaker 1: don't drown out the traffic, they and Librea and the

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Speaker 1: Page Museum still work a kind of magic. Twenty thousand

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Speaker 1: years drops away if you let it, because Librea preserves

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Speaker 1: tangible remnants of a world at the far ends of

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Speaker 1: the earth for ancestors of ours whose migrations had begun

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Speaker 1: in Africa. The Page Museum is a working laboratory of paleontology,

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Speaker 1: where visitors can watch scientists labor over the site's latest discoveries.

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Speaker 1: Many of those are the remains of scavenger predators once

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Speaker 1: lured by the cries of snagged mammoths, or the scin

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Speaker 1: of decomposing horses, camels, or ground sloths trapped by surface

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Speaker 1: tar near what was once a water source and a

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Speaker 1: dry landscape. The skulls and tusks of the elephants extracted

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Speaker 1: from Librea are impressive, but anyone who tours the museum

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Speaker 1: has to admit the most stunning display is the wall,

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Speaker 1: backlit and yellow of hundreds of dire wolf skulls. The

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Speaker 1: strapping cane. It's indigenous to America, but memorably revived as

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Speaker 1: fictional wester ROAs fauna and Game of Thrones left the

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Speaker 1: most remains here of any species, eighteen hundred individuals. The

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Speaker 1: fossils of hundreds of coyotes, a brawnier version than our

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Speaker 1: modern animal, make up the third most common species here,

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Speaker 1: But in second place are those ultimate ambush predators of

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Speaker 1: the Pleistocene, the western subspecies of sabertooths, heavily built cats

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Speaker 1: with a fearsome snake like jaw, gape and enormous fangs.

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Speaker 1: The replica skull of a sabertooth from Librea sits a

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Speaker 1: few feet away as I write this. Its rapier sharp

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Speaker 1: canines capable of tearing open a sloth or mammoth calf,

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Speaker 1: gleaming in rich afternoon light, Each fang measures a full

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Speaker 1: eight inches from gumline to tip. The vast assemblages of

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Speaker 1: hyperconnivore bones at Las joined the skeletal remains of mega herbivores,

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Speaker 1: mammoths and macedons, giant bison, pronghorns, lamas, California turkeys, and

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Speaker 1: many more. The predator list is lengthier than just wolves, coyotes,

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Speaker 1: and sabretooths as well. The cats whose remains have come

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Speaker 1: out of the tar include American cheetahs, step lions, and

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Speaker 1: giant jaguars. Immense, hyperactive short faced bears twice the weight

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Speaker 1: of a grizzly died in the asphalt. So did the

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Speaker 1: enormous Miriam's terratorn applies to seeing bird of prey with

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Speaker 1: a ten and a half foot wingspan. The remains span

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Speaker 1: indigenous creatures spawned by continental evolution and migrants from Asia,

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Speaker 1: some ancient to America, some recent arrivals. The mammals and

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Speaker 1: birds may seem alien are vaguely African, but in fact

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Speaker 1: this bestiary was purely classically American, the America of the Pleistocene.

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Speaker 1: The Rancho Librea victims that left their bones and skulls

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Speaker 1: in Casinar were once representatives of one of the grand

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Speaker 1: ecologies of planet Earth. This was a different America than

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Speaker 1: most of us conjured. When we imagine the continent Europeans

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Speaker 1: found five hundred years ago. But this libreal world wasn't

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Speaker 1: like the pre chick Salube age of the dinosaurs absent

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Speaker 1: of humans either. Late in the Pleistocene, our human forebears

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Speaker 1: joined American ecologies as the newest predator.

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Speaker 2: Here.

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Speaker 1: These first Americans lived their lives among Librea creatures and

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Speaker 1: created the first coast to coast human societies in American history.

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Speaker 1: Their presence began to leave the continent, and this rich

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Speaker 1: aggregate of impressive animals forever changed. The first time we

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Speaker 1: became aware that humans were actually in America during the

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Speaker 1: Pleistocene was barely one hundred years ago, and the place

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Speaker 1: that happened was along the New Mexico Colorado border. In

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Speaker 1: the days following a flood in the dry Cimarron River,

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Speaker 1: an African American cowboy named George mcjunkin was riding through

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Speaker 1: grassy parkland a few hundred yards below the rim rock

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Speaker 1: of a miles long mesa that extended eastward from the

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Speaker 1: rocky mountains, checking for ranch fence lines damaged by the flood.

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Speaker 1: Suddenly mcjenkin's horse braced its hoofs, furrowing into foot deep

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Speaker 1: mud at the edge of a ragged scar. Floodwaters had

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Speaker 1: cut into the slope below the Mesa. Mcjenkin leaned out

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Speaker 1: of his saddle to peer into a fresh chasm sliced

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Speaker 1: into the brown shale. What he saw changed the story

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Speaker 1: of America forever. On a similar rainy August day in

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Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, some thirty five of us are stepping through

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Speaker 1: the lush grass of that same slope as it angles

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Speaker 1: up towards the rim rock of Johnson Mesa. We're following

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Speaker 1: David Eck, a New Mexico State Lands archaeologist with a

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Speaker 1: long ponytail halfway down his back, who is leading us

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Speaker 1: towards the very spot where George mcjenkin's horse had pulled

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Speaker 1: up one hundred and ten years before. The topography is

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Speaker 1: now a grassy, shallow drain called wild Horse Arroyo, and

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Speaker 1: as we crowd around its edges, it seems somehow too

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Speaker 1: commonplace to be the scene of one of the continent's

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Speaker 1: most significant historical finds. Nonetheless, this in the flesh is

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Speaker 1: the legendary fulsome archaeological site. What mcjunkin had done about

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Speaker 1: where we now stood talking was to spot in the

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Speaker 1: flood gashed arroyo bones of an immense size. They turned

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Speaker 1: out to be from a herd of bison antiquis, an

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Speaker 1: extinct form of giant bison, but the bones themselves weren't

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Speaker 1: the pas de raisi sants. At the time, the sciences

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Speaker 1: of ethnology and archaeology in the United States were firmed

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Speaker 1: that American Indians had arrived in North America only a

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Speaker 1: couple thousand years prior to the coming of Europeans. In

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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty six, the Black Cowboys plea to have a

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Speaker 1: scientist look at his bone pit reached Jesse Figgins, director

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Speaker 1: of the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver. Something

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Speaker 1: of an amateur himself, Figgins was mostly interested in fossil

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Speaker 1: bison that might make exhibits in his museum. His team

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Speaker 1: began an excavation of the site in May of nineteen

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Speaker 1: twenty six and quickly began finding the skeletal remains of

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Speaker 1: bison of a monstrous size. That was exciting enough, but

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Speaker 1: in their second season of work, on August twenty ninth,

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Speaker 1: nineteen twenty seven, Figgins's crew traveled up Big History pay dirt.

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Speaker 1: As David Eck was gesturing to the dimensions of this

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Speaker 1: near century old dig in the pocket of my light

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Speaker 1: Patagonia jacket, my fingers closed over an object that I

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Speaker 1: could fit into my palm. In shape, it was oblate,

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Speaker 1: think a flattened football, but with an end bitten off.

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Speaker 1: Beneath my fingers, I could feel an irregular surface, made

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Speaker 1: so by labor intensive flaking to create a pointed blade

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Speaker 1: that dwindled to a remarkably thin base. The delicacy of

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Speaker 1: that base was a result of matching flutes skillfully popped

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Speaker 1: from the flint on both sides, and that first summer

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Speaker 1: of digging, Figginson's paleontologists had on earthed two of these

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Speaker 1: points in the loose dirt of the site. Eventually, the

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Speaker 1: Denver team would find eight of these stunning fluted points

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Speaker 1: scattered amongst the bones. But it wasn't just the bones

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Speaker 1: and not the points that made folsome what American Museum

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Speaker 1: of Natural History scientists Henry Fairfield Osborne labeled the greatest

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Speaker 1: event in American discoveries. When the second season crew at

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Speaker 1: Folsom flicked the dirt from the ribs of an extinct bison,

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Speaker 1: they were greeted by the sight of one of these

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Speaker 1: fluted points embedded to two thirds its length in the bone.

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Speaker 1: The bar for proof that humans were part of the

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Speaker 1: American places scene had always been an extinct animal, preserving

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Speaker 1: evidence that as a living creature, it had been killed

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Speaker 1: by human technology. Now outside the tiny berg of Folsom,

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Speaker 1: New Mexico, that bar was hurdled. America two had an antiquity.

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Speaker 1: How much of an antiquity was still in question because

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Speaker 1: radiocarbon dating was yet three decades in the future. Figgins

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Speaker 1: claimed the site was four hundred thousand years old. Eventually,

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Speaker 1: archaeology and paleontology would agree that on an October day,

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Speaker 1: a band of three dozen humans had driven into a

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Speaker 1: Box canyon, killed and butchered thirty two giant bison of

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Speaker 1: the species Bison antiquis in the spot where I was

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Speaker 1: now standing, and they had done this twelve thousand, four

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Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years ago. No one knows now what

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Speaker 1: these ancient bison hunters call themselves or their weapons. Their

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Speaker 1: beautiful fluted points were likely attached to darts thrown by

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Speaker 1: at adults or spear throwers. But not knowing much about

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Speaker 1: these early Americans didn't prevent the scientists from naming both

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Speaker 1: the points and the people Fulsome after the nearby town.

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Speaker 1: Yet Fulsome wasn't the book of genesis for America's human history.

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Speaker 1: Six years after the Fulsome discovery, there was another dramatic revelation.

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Speaker 1: How on the featureless sweeps of the southern Great Plains,

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Speaker 1: an ordinary gravel excavation near a tiny farming town named

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Speaker 1: Clovis exposed the bones of long extinct American elephants, a

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Speaker 1: remarkable twenty eight of them. Science in the reading public

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Speaker 1: knew that America had harbored various kinds of giant elephants

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Speaker 1: in the deep past, But unlike nineteenth century mastodon finds

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Speaker 1: in the East, this time the skeletons were intermixed with

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Speaker 1: large five to six inch long projectile points and tools

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Speaker 1: of an unknown and apparently even more ancient population than

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Speaker 1: the Fulsome people. We now know that even these elephant

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Speaker 1: hunters were not the first. What has very recently produced

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Speaker 1: certain evidence for even more ancient arrivals in America, likely

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Speaker 1: in boats following shoreline out of Asia. Are human footprints

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Speaker 1: to be precise sixty one footprints left primarily by children

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Speaker 1: or adolescents, in the soft mud of a lake shore

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Speaker 1: some twenty three thousand years before the area became New

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Speaker 1: Mexico's White Sands National Park. That blockbuster find by a

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Speaker 1: park employee in twenty nineteen ultimately drew a team of

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Speaker 1: researchers from the US Geological Survey to date the seeds

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Speaker 1: of a species of grass crushed by the footprints. Their

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Speaker 1: dating indicates a time frame at the height of the

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Speaker 1: glacial maximum, when it would have been impossible to come

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Speaker 1: overland to America. The human footprints aren't the only tracks

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Speaker 1: researchers are finding. There are also mammoth tracks and prints

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Speaker 1: of dire wolves and giant ground sloths. In one fascinating interaction,

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Speaker 1: the tracks appear to show that a young woman carrying

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Speaker 1: a child on her hip, who she occasionally put down,

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Speaker 1: walked a stretch of lake shore and returned by the

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Speaker 1: same path, which in the interval both a mammoth and

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Speaker 1: a ground sloth crossed. The mammoth paid no obvious attention,

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Speaker 1: but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs and

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Speaker 1: what may have been alarm. So far as we now know,

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Speaker 1: only a scant few intrepid souls came to America this early.

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Speaker 1: They remind me of Viking visitors to America. A thousand

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Speaker 1: years ago, their numbers must have been small, with much

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Speaker 1: of America still empty of humans. So ten thousand years later,

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Speaker 1: the elephant hunters we now call Clovis made up the

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Speaker 1: first human culture to spread across all the Americas, an

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Speaker 1: overlan arrival that became a rapidly advancing wave thirteen thousand

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Speaker 1: years ago. The rapidity of their spreads suggesting that they

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Speaker 1: uncomp hundred few, if any, other human cultures along the way.

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Speaker 1: Clovis people occupied every American state from Alaska to Florida

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Speaker 1: for more than three centuries until a mature United States

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Speaker 1: spread coast to coast. In fact, Clovis stood as the

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Speaker 1: sole human culture that once draped across our entire country.

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Speaker 1: So for three centuries, a very long time ago, America

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Speaker 1: was Clovisia the Beautiful. We are still struggling to understand them.

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Speaker 1: They left no oral or written histories of their monarchs

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Speaker 1: or any defining events. We have no sense of their

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Speaker 1: gods or the philosophies they believed in, or what language

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Speaker 1: or family of languages they spoke. We know a great

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Speaker 1: deal about their tools, and we're developing a sense of

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Speaker 1: them from their bones and more recently, from their genetics,

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Speaker 1: but starting thirteen thousand and fifty years ago and lasting

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Speaker 1: until twelve thousand, seven hundred and fifty years ago, the

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Speaker 1: Clovisians placed their stamp on the country and its animals

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Speaker 1: and changed the continent. Their name comes from the place

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Speaker 1: where we first became aware of their existence, an ancient

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Speaker 1: arroyo on the outskirts of the small town of Clovis,

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Speaker 1: New Mexico, on the windswept southern high Plains. Getting in

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Speaker 1: close to wild creatures holds a fascination that resonates because

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Speaker 1: it taps ancient imperatives still within us. The relationship between

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Speaker 1: prey and their predators involves learning curves, and each side

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Speaker 1: is very good at the algorithm, but prey do have

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Speaker 1: to learn. Numerous examples from around the world testify that

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Speaker 1: upon initially encountering humans, many wild creatures did not associate

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Speaker 1: us with a threat. There is a term of art

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Speaker 1: for this biological first contact. Wild animals had to learn

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Speaker 1: to be afraid of us. Many died standing and looking,

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Speaker 1: never absorbing the lesson. Finding naive animals that were easy

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Speaker 1: for human hunters was a powerful motive for our species

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Speaker 1: migrations around the world. But just who were these Clovis

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Speaker 1: people who left so many sites across America, more than

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Speaker 1: twenty excavated ones so far, including some seventy butchered elephants.

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Speaker 1: One recent theory that briefly achieved traction in places like

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Speaker 1: National Geographic came from the Smithsonian's Dennis Stanford, who believed

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Speaker 1: that the direct ancestors of the Clovist people reached America

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Speaker 1: eighteen thousand years ago from Europe. To say that the

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Speaker 1: scientific community scoffed at Stanford's across Atlantic ice claims barely

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Speaker 1: does justice to the profound skepticism that followed it. While

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Speaker 1: Paleolithic hunters in Europe and America did pursue similar megafauna

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Speaker 1: and flint points crafted by Western Europe's soul Utrean culture

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Speaker 1: superficially resembled Clovis points, other researchers dismissed Stanford's claims that

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Speaker 1: the two groups were the same people. Linguistic and genetic

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Speaker 1: conclusions have since refuted Stanford's argument. Once scientists were able

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Speaker 1: to analyze genomic evidence from archaeological sites, they quickly confirmed

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Speaker 1: a trail of genetic kinship stretching from Siberia rather than

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Speaker 1: Europe into the Americas. We now suspect that the people

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Speaker 1: who ultimately swept into America first spent several thousand years

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Speaker 1: on the bearing Land Bridge itself, the so called Baringian standstill,

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Speaker 1: apparently awaiting more favorable conditions to move southward. That long

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Speaker 1: pause in Beringia may have produced humanity's first domestic cication

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Speaker 1: of another animal engaged in their own return to America

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Speaker 1: twenty five thousand years ago, gray wolves were abundant in Beringia.

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Speaker 1: Since human hunters only ate the fattest parts of the

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Speaker 1: animals they killed, they had left over lean portions they

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Speaker 1: were willing to share. Some of the wolves had a

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Speaker 1: mutation that made them hyper social, and puppies with that

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Speaker 1: gene may have been able to bond with humans. There

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Speaker 1: probably also were wolf puppies, known today as gifted word

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Speaker 1: learning animals capable of picking up human language. By the

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Speaker 1: time the two species got to America, humans and their

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Speaker 1: tamed wolves had formed a partnership for the rest of history,

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Speaker 1: or so goes one theory about dog domestication. Clovis genetics

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Speaker 1: are best represented by a male toddler from a twelve thousand,

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Speaker 1: eight hundred year old burial in Montana. He's known as

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Speaker 1: the Anzac Child, and he's from a site not far

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Speaker 1: from today's Bozeman. The Clovis Child was buried with a

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Speaker 1: large cache of artifacts that included eight Clovis points painted

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Speaker 1: in red ochre after he played an epic role in

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Speaker 1: reconstructing a history of two continents. In twenty fourteen, the

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Speaker 1: Onzac Boy was reburied by local tribes in Montana's Shields River,

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Speaker 1: near where he had lain for nearly thirteen thousand years.

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Speaker 1: While we have no surviving mammoth or mastodon populations to study,

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Speaker 1: we do know a good deal about Asian elephant natural history,

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Speaker 1: and if this closest living relative of mammos offers clues,

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Speaker 1: America's ancient elephants would have been highly intelligent creatures, especially

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Speaker 1: acute in what biologists called situational intelligence. Their trunks were

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Speaker 1: elephant analogus, who are opposable thumbs with as many as

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Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty thousand muscle subunits, as ecological keystone

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Speaker 1: creatures whose activities shaped landscapes. Mammos and masdons foraged in

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Speaker 1: ways that likely transformed American vegetation the way modern elephants

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Speaker 1: do in Africa. They traveled their huge ranges with an

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Speaker 1: unusually powerful geographic memory, as a recent study of a

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Speaker 1: wooly mammos lifetime movements through Alaska seventeen thousand years ago,

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Speaker 1: reconstructed by analyzing strontium isotope ratios that reference geography in

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Speaker 1: its tusks, now indicate all elephants are what biologists refer

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Speaker 1: to as case species, meaning they do not come into

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Speaker 1: sexual maturity until they're fifteen years old or older, a

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Speaker 1: state brought on by periodic must The pacoderm version of

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Speaker 1: sexual heat from insemination to giving birth probably took two years,

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Speaker 1: a generational turnover slow enough to make population recovery difficult

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Speaker 1: in the face of a new threat, and by the

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Speaker 1: time humans were entering America, mammoths, mastodons, and other archaic

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Speaker 1: elephant species were already suffering from a background rate of

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Speaker 1: extinctions that had been going on for seventy five thousand years.

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Speaker 1: But as the Rancho, Librea, Folsome and Clovis sites show,

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Speaker 1: elephants and big cats and many other remarkable creatures still

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Speaker 1: occupied the ground where we now commute and go to

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Speaker 1: sleep in our suburbs. Only they all disappeared quite suddenly

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00:22:41,920 --> 00:22:48,200
Speaker 1: and mysteriously long long ago. That disappearance is one of

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Speaker 1: the most profound ecological and aesthetic events of continental history.

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Speaker 1: As Darwin's ally. In The Breakthrough to Understanding Natural Selection

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Speaker 1: and Evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, in fact, we present

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Speaker 1: day Americans live in a zoological impoverished world from which

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Speaker 1: all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared.

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Speaker 1: Wallace was using recently in a big history sense. All

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Speaker 1: those hugest, fiercest, and strangest animals vanished from America between

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Speaker 1: about thirteen thousand and nine thousand years ago. In fact,

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Speaker 1: we lost thirty genera and forty species. All of them

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Speaker 1: are very largest creatures right down to our present moment.

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Speaker 1: These ancient losses make up the most dramatic extinction event

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Speaker 1: since humans have been in North America. But science has

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Speaker 1: never grouped the so called Pleistocene extinctions with the five

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Speaker 1: great planetary extinctions of Earth history. It's different from all

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Speaker 1: of those, which were global extinguished life on both land

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Speaker 1: and in the oceans, and showed no size bias in

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Speaker 1: the creatures they marked for disappearance. The Pleistocene losses didn't

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Speaker 1: happen in oceans in Africa or in Southern Asia. They

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Speaker 1: devastated life on Earth only in Eurasia, North America, South

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Speaker 1: America and Australia. Something very odd seemed to be unfolding

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Speaker 1: in specific parts of the planet during the late Pleistocene,

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Speaker 1: but there is a common thread. Those were all places

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Speaker 1: where human predators out of Africa seeking out large animals

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Speaker 1: to hunt, were arriving for the first time. The Pleistocene extinctions,

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Speaker 1: in other words, looked very much like the first act

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Speaker 1: of the anthroposcene, the beginnings of what we now called

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Speaker 1: the sixth Extinction. This has been a prelude to introducing

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Speaker 1: you to a scientist who was able to imagine how

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Speaker 1: this might have happened. Paul Martin, who passed away in

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Speaker 1: twenty ten, was one of the country's late twentieth century

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Speaker 1: intellectual giants. He was also lucky enough to have a

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Speaker 1: brand new tool to play with, radiocarbon dating, invented in

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Speaker 1: nineteen forty six by Willard Libby, who won the Nobel

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Speaker 1: Prize for it. That new tool, almost overnight allowed an

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Speaker 1: understanding of something very crucial about the Pleistocene extinctions. When

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Speaker 1: did the various animals disappear? Exactly, and how did the

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Speaker 1: arrival of humans in America line up with those dates.

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Speaker 1: I got to meet Martin at a point in his

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Speaker 1: career when he seemed to bear a resemblance to a

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Speaker 1: target at a shooting range. At a time when politics

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Speaker 1: and many university departments embraced the idea of ancient peoples

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Speaker 1: as ecological examples for the modern world, there were those

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Speaker 1: who saw Martin's argument that early humans were responsible for

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Speaker 1: extinctions as politically incorrect. The popular Native American writer Vine

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Speaker 1: Deloria Junior was vitriolic in his condemnation of Martin, which

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Speaker 1: I could tell mortified and baffled the paleobiologists. Between eighteen

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Speaker 1: thousand and twelve thousand years ago, the Solutrean culture had

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Speaker 1: similarly wiped out Europe's remaining Plecesne creatures. Clovis and Folsom

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Speaker 1: were not Indian stories, Martin insisted, they were big history

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Speaker 1: human stories. Martin and I arranged to get together on

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Speaker 1: his visit to the University of Montana, where I taught.

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Speaker 1: After two days of wide ranging conversations, I began to

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Speaker 1: think about Martin in the manner of a Stephen Hawking.

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Speaker 1: When his body had slowed from Polio. His vast energy

359
00:26:56,240 --> 00:27:01,359
Speaker 1: had lit a turbocharger that accelerated his mind. The crux

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00:27:01,400 --> 00:27:04,760
Speaker 1: of the Pleistocene story Martin told me was that North

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Speaker 1: America was a continental island remote from the evolution of humans,

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Speaker 1: and when we finally arrived in numbers in the form

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Speaker 1: of the Clovisians, the well known slaughter humans had made

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Speaker 1: on island biologies all over the world came to America.

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Speaker 1: We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs

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Speaker 1: and fire and baggage like rats. The predation we engaged

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00:27:30,480 --> 00:27:35,080
Speaker 1: in changed local ecologies so substantially that animals evolved in

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00:27:35,160 --> 00:27:39,800
Speaker 1: our absence couldn't survive once we arrived. I realized Martin

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00:27:39,920 --> 00:27:42,879
Speaker 1: was giving me a command performance of his Planet of

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00:27:43,000 --> 00:27:47,320
Speaker 1: Doom theory, a modern version now buttressed with science, history

371
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Speaker 1: and details. As Martin put it in his two thousand

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Speaker 1: and six Twilight of the Mammos, I argue that virtually

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Speaker 1: all extinctions of wild animals in the last fifty thousand

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Speaker 1: years are anthropose. By the time the destruction was over,

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00:28:03,520 --> 00:28:07,520
Speaker 1: only a handful of America's biggest animals remained, and those

376
00:28:07,600 --> 00:28:12,320
Speaker 1: were either European or Asian like caribou or bison that

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00:28:12,480 --> 00:28:16,320
Speaker 1: had prior experience with humans, or they were native ones

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00:28:16,480 --> 00:28:20,520
Speaker 1: like pronghorns that carried so little fat they offered little

379
00:28:20,560 --> 00:28:26,960
Speaker 1: inducement for hunters. Otherwise, the Clovisians erased millions of years

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Speaker 1: of evolution. In two thousand and one, independently of Martin,

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Speaker 1: an Australian paleobiologist at the Smithsonian, John Alroy developed a

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Speaker 1: computer model to test this American extinction story. Alroy's computer's

383
00:28:44,600 --> 00:28:50,240
Speaker 1: modeled an absolutely classic ecological release by fifteen hundred years

384
00:28:50,280 --> 00:28:54,400
Speaker 1: after the human arrival, accepting a few scattered remnants hunters

385
00:28:54,440 --> 00:28:57,720
Speaker 1: had overlooked, but were now too separated to exchange their

386
00:28:57,800 --> 00:29:02,280
Speaker 1: genes and dying out from lack of genetic diversity. Seventy

387
00:29:02,320 --> 00:29:07,760
Speaker 1: five percent of America's Pleistocene bestiari had been gutted. Alroy's

388
00:29:07,760 --> 00:29:11,880
Speaker 1: computer model predicted the extinction or survival of thirty two

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00:29:12,120 --> 00:29:17,880
Speaker 1: of forty one Clovis prey species. He concluded, long before

390
00:29:17,920 --> 00:29:22,160
Speaker 1: the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for

391
00:29:22,280 --> 00:29:29,160
Speaker 1: a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe. Southeast

392
00:29:29,240 --> 00:29:32,920
Speaker 1: of present day Tucson along the Santa Cruz River, there

393
00:29:32,960 --> 00:29:37,160
Speaker 1: are three famous Clovis sites, you suspect and long ago

394
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Speaker 1: Clovis Lord. This may have been a legendary event, or

395
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Speaker 1: given that many similar stories follow it in the historical

396
00:29:43,840 --> 00:29:47,960
Speaker 1: record of America, maybe what transpired here wasn't legendary at all,

397
00:29:48,400 --> 00:29:51,320
Speaker 1: just the way things were done. What seems to have

398
00:29:51,360 --> 00:29:55,040
Speaker 1: happened is that at the most westerly location now call

399
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Speaker 1: the Leaner site, a Clovis band surrounded a family group

400
00:29:59,320 --> 00:30:03,760
Speaker 1: of fifteen mammoths. The herd apparently huddled together for defense

401
00:30:03,880 --> 00:30:08,920
Speaker 1: against the assault, but thirteen of them, all adolescents and calves,

402
00:30:09,240 --> 00:30:15,000
Speaker 1: died in the spot. Archaeologists found exactly thirteen Clovis points

403
00:30:15,080 --> 00:30:18,160
Speaker 1: in their remains, but it must not have been an

404
00:30:18,160 --> 00:30:22,520
Speaker 1: easy thing. In different locations a few miles away, the

405
00:30:22,720 --> 00:30:28,480
Speaker 1: Escapool and Naco sites, archaeologists found two adult mammoths who

406
00:30:28,480 --> 00:30:32,640
Speaker 1: had apparently fled the slaughter. The large male had died

407
00:30:32,680 --> 00:30:36,040
Speaker 1: with two Clovis points in his body, but the female

408
00:30:36,120 --> 00:30:38,719
Speaker 1: must have put up a tremendous fight to protect her

409
00:30:38,800 --> 00:30:43,600
Speaker 1: young before mortally wounded. She had fled, and her remains

410
00:30:43,720 --> 00:30:48,200
Speaker 1: there were no fewer than eight embedded Clovis points. The

411
00:30:48,280 --> 00:30:56,760
Speaker 1: hunters who killed those mammoths appeared to have been absolute professionals.

412
00:30:56,800 --> 00:31:01,080
Speaker 1: Our best strategy for understanding America's pleistocenic distinctions may be

413
00:31:01,200 --> 00:31:06,120
Speaker 1: on an animal by animal basis. Clovis hunters almost certainly

414
00:31:06,160 --> 00:31:09,760
Speaker 1: wiped out the elephants and folsome people the giant bison,

415
00:31:10,240 --> 00:31:14,120
Speaker 1: but animals like dire wolves, giant beavers, and big cats

416
00:31:14,200 --> 00:31:17,720
Speaker 1: may have simply been out competed by gray wolves and

417
00:31:17,920 --> 00:31:23,560
Speaker 1: modern beavers and cougars. Smaller size and earlier sexual maturity

418
00:31:23,760 --> 00:31:28,040
Speaker 1: fitted the replacements better for an America now inhabited by

419
00:31:28,120 --> 00:31:31,959
Speaker 1: human predators. The first examples on the continent for what

420
00:31:32,080 --> 00:31:39,320
Speaker 1: biologists called anthropogenic evolution. Horses and camels do remain enigmas.

421
00:31:39,960 --> 00:31:44,280
Speaker 1: Sites of Clovis age in southern Alberta and Colorado show

422
00:31:44,520 --> 00:31:48,440
Speaker 1: horse and camel kills, but nothing like the vast number

423
00:31:48,480 --> 00:31:53,280
Speaker 1: of horses from Solutrean sites in Europe. And why did

424
00:31:53,400 --> 00:31:58,360
Speaker 1: various camelids survive in South America, providing later native people

425
00:31:58,520 --> 00:32:10,480
Speaker 1: domestic possibilities, but not farther north. As for the Clovisians themselves,

426
00:32:10,600 --> 00:32:15,560
Speaker 1: they remained maddenly elusive. They are us, of course, but

427
00:32:15,640 --> 00:32:19,080
Speaker 1: it's difficult even to know your recent relatives at all.

428
00:32:19,160 --> 00:32:22,360
Speaker 1: You have to go on are their tools and diet preferences.

429
00:32:23,280 --> 00:32:26,240
Speaker 1: We know that with the fluted point, a purely American

430
00:32:26,280 --> 00:32:30,160
Speaker 1: invention not found in Siberia, their thinkers had solved the

431
00:32:30,320 --> 00:32:35,280
Speaker 1: ancient technology hurdle of affixing points solidly to wooden spears

432
00:32:35,360 --> 00:32:40,120
Speaker 1: or darts. We also know that they were consumer connoisseurs

433
00:32:40,120 --> 00:32:43,880
Speaker 1: of the best the world had to offer. Clovis artisans

434
00:32:43,920 --> 00:32:48,600
Speaker 1: fashion their toolkit from the hardest, sharpest, most vividly colored

435
00:32:48,640 --> 00:32:52,760
Speaker 1: flints and church in North America whose outprops existed as

436
00:32:52,800 --> 00:32:57,200
Speaker 1: a geographic atlas in their heads. They journeyed hundreds of

437
00:32:57,240 --> 00:33:01,120
Speaker 1: miles to those sources, as if on quests special magic.

438
00:33:01,960 --> 00:33:06,720
Speaker 1: Some of their tool caches featured multiple gorgeous, unused points

439
00:33:06,760 --> 00:33:10,160
Speaker 1: of eight to nine inches in leaked with sacred red

440
00:33:10,240 --> 00:33:14,800
Speaker 1: ochre still adhering to them. One Clovis mystery has always

441
00:33:14,800 --> 00:33:18,880
Speaker 1: been why no art? Why nothing? Like the grand paintings

442
00:33:18,920 --> 00:33:22,920
Speaker 1: of animals on the cave walls of Chauvet, Lasco and

443
00:33:23,040 --> 00:33:27,920
Speaker 1: Alzamira in Europe, there are pebbles in size with crosshatching.

444
00:33:28,320 --> 00:33:31,880
Speaker 1: There's an elephant carved into a piece of ivory. Otherwise

445
00:33:32,080 --> 00:33:34,880
Speaker 1: we had no hints what they thought of the animals

446
00:33:34,920 --> 00:33:39,160
Speaker 1: they hunted, of America, of their lives in general. That

447
00:33:39,280 --> 00:33:42,480
Speaker 1: may be changing with a new twenty nineteen to twenty

448
00:33:42,560 --> 00:33:45,960
Speaker 1: twenty investigation of the rock art of a region in

449
00:33:46,040 --> 00:33:51,360
Speaker 1: the Colombian Amazon known as Sarania La Lindosa. But we'll

450
00:33:51,440 --> 00:33:54,479
Speaker 1: have to wait to see if the images there really

451
00:33:54,520 --> 00:33:59,080
Speaker 1: are Clovis or fulsome ones. One recent theory is that

452
00:33:59,120 --> 00:34:03,760
Speaker 1: the Clovisians may have been a Northern Hemisphere wild type,

453
00:34:04,200 --> 00:34:10,080
Speaker 1: a group of hyper aggressive Siberian vikings. According to modern science,

454
00:34:10,200 --> 00:34:14,920
Speaker 1: a high fat diet is a strong trigger for enhanced testosterone.

455
00:34:15,320 --> 00:34:19,719
Speaker 1: But who they were really is us. My twenty three

456
00:34:19,800 --> 00:34:22,960
Speaker 1: ande meters profile shows three percent of my genes are

457
00:34:23,080 --> 00:34:26,480
Speaker 1: Native Americans, a common figure for those of us whose

458
00:34:26,520 --> 00:34:31,000
Speaker 1: European ancestors arrived in America three hundred or more years ago.

459
00:34:31,880 --> 00:34:37,000
Speaker 1: Clovis heredity is within us. The Clovis story resonates because

460
00:34:37,040 --> 00:34:41,799
Speaker 1: we imagine them as ancient versions of ourselves, explorers of

461
00:34:41,920 --> 00:34:47,239
Speaker 1: hidden continents, the last of the masterful hunters of enormous animals,

462
00:34:47,600 --> 00:34:53,280
Speaker 1: the culmination of forty thousand generations of hunters. They must

463
00:34:53,320 --> 00:34:57,360
Speaker 1: have had a sense of that timeless tradition But to me,

464
00:34:57,440 --> 00:35:01,440
Speaker 1: the biggest question is this, what did they think? What

465
00:35:01,600 --> 00:35:04,640
Speaker 1: did they do when so many of the animals they

466
00:35:04,719 --> 00:35:09,160
Speaker 1: lived among began to disappear, to dwindle to a last

467
00:35:09,239 --> 00:35:14,160
Speaker 1: few scattered survivors until there were none. What they faced

468
00:35:14,239 --> 00:35:19,120
Speaker 1: is mirrored by our own twenty first century circumstances. Like

469
00:35:19,280 --> 00:35:23,320
Speaker 1: us then lived as their ancestors did, and no doubt

470
00:35:23,520 --> 00:35:27,080
Speaker 1: had every expectation that the world would continue as it

471
00:35:27,120 --> 00:35:30,640
Speaker 1: always had, and so long as there was a Siberia

472
00:35:30,920 --> 00:35:34,440
Speaker 1: or a Baringia or an America out there, it did.

473
00:35:35,440 --> 00:35:40,200
Speaker 1: But Earth proved finite, and so did its animals, much

474
00:35:40,239 --> 00:35:44,279
Speaker 1: as we are doing today. The Clovisians ran into a

475
00:35:44,400 --> 00:36:00,360
Speaker 1: wall of limits.

476
00:36:02,120 --> 00:36:08,200
Speaker 3: When I think about certain areas of inquiry, I think

477
00:36:08,200 --> 00:36:13,040
Speaker 3: that in a lot of spaces there's room for huge discoveries,

478
00:36:15,280 --> 00:36:20,520
Speaker 3: meaning we can find life on another planet. Right, Yeah,

479
00:36:20,840 --> 00:36:23,600
Speaker 3: there could be huge medical you know, you can picture

480
00:36:24,160 --> 00:36:28,000
Speaker 3: where we have some medical breakthrough and like increased life

481
00:36:28,040 --> 00:36:30,440
Speaker 3: expectancy by twenty five percent or fifty percent, Like I

482
00:36:30,440 --> 00:36:35,080
Speaker 3: wouldn't be shocked. But do you feel that our our

483
00:36:35,239 --> 00:36:43,239
Speaker 3: understanding of pre human and early human North America is

484
00:36:43,280 --> 00:36:47,040
Speaker 3: like down to the details now, like it's kind of

485
00:36:47,120 --> 00:36:49,759
Speaker 3: all there, it's just details.

486
00:36:52,000 --> 00:36:56,000
Speaker 1: Well, I tend to think that there are some big

487
00:36:56,320 --> 00:36:58,120
Speaker 1: discoveries yet to be made.

488
00:36:58,200 --> 00:36:58,439
Speaker 3: Yeah.

489
00:36:58,600 --> 00:37:04,080
Speaker 1: Now, I will say that the advent of genomic research,

490
00:37:05,120 --> 00:37:08,560
Speaker 1: you know, on human remains all over the world is

491
00:37:08,640 --> 00:37:11,640
Speaker 1: telling us a lot of stuff that we've never known before.

492
00:37:12,000 --> 00:37:16,799
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the modern version of you know,

493
00:37:17,040 --> 00:37:21,239
Speaker 1: radiocarbon dating in the nineteen fifties and stuff. We've now

494
00:37:21,360 --> 00:37:27,120
Speaker 1: got a way to analyze human remains that is giving

495
00:37:27,200 --> 00:37:30,200
Speaker 1: us a sense of how people spread around the world

496
00:37:30,239 --> 00:37:33,840
Speaker 1: and what connections they had with one another. So my

497
00:37:33,920 --> 00:37:37,160
Speaker 1: guess is, and you know, it's probably a pretty easy

498
00:37:37,160 --> 00:37:39,240
Speaker 1: thing to guess, is that there's got to be something

499
00:37:39,640 --> 00:37:44,920
Speaker 1: big out there, and it's likely to involve something technological

500
00:37:45,160 --> 00:37:48,640
Speaker 1: like those two where you have a sudden breakthrough and

501
00:37:48,680 --> 00:37:51,120
Speaker 1: it's possible to do something you've not been able to

502
00:37:51,160 --> 00:37:51,720
Speaker 1: do before.

503
00:37:51,800 --> 00:37:55,839
Speaker 3: I mean, you find somewhere in South America, you find

504
00:37:55,840 --> 00:37:59,719
Speaker 3: a genetic marker from twelve thousand years ago, and it

505
00:38:00,080 --> 00:38:00,880
Speaker 3: doesn't make sense.

506
00:38:01,320 --> 00:38:03,480
Speaker 1: It doesn't make sense, and you have to and people

507
00:38:03,560 --> 00:38:05,560
Speaker 1: have to explain it, you know, and it may take

508
00:38:05,560 --> 00:38:08,120
Speaker 1: a while. It takes science often a lot of time

509
00:38:08,239 --> 00:38:10,960
Speaker 1: to explain things, and there are a lot of kind

510
00:38:11,000 --> 00:38:13,439
Speaker 1: of false leads and ideas that are put out there

511
00:38:13,480 --> 00:38:17,839
Speaker 1: that don't last. I mean that's just the way you know,

512
00:38:17,960 --> 00:38:21,120
Speaker 1: human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, works. But yeah, I think

513
00:38:21,120 --> 00:38:22,759
Speaker 1: there's going to be you know, we're going to know

514
00:38:23,360 --> 00:38:25,680
Speaker 1: in the case of the pleciscene extinctions, I think in

515
00:38:25,719 --> 00:38:28,440
Speaker 1: another thirty or forty years, there's going to be something,

516
00:38:29,080 --> 00:38:32,440
Speaker 1: some kind of technological breakthrough that enables us to suddenly

517
00:38:32,480 --> 00:38:35,680
Speaker 1: know a lot more about this than we've known. I mean,

518
00:38:35,760 --> 00:38:38,919
Speaker 1: one to me is the is, you know, the our

519
00:38:39,160 --> 00:38:43,560
Speaker 1: sudden realization that a lack of genetic diversity can be

520
00:38:43,640 --> 00:38:47,040
Speaker 1: pretty murderous on a on a species, because if you

521
00:38:47,160 --> 00:38:51,160
Speaker 1: start separating a population out so it's not possible for

522
00:38:51,200 --> 00:38:56,239
Speaker 1: them to breed anymore and exchange genes, they become they

523
00:38:56,320 --> 00:38:59,200
Speaker 1: become weak. I mean, there are instances where you know,

524
00:38:59,480 --> 00:39:03,040
Speaker 1: it's impossible for them to reproduce, and so I think

525
00:39:03,160 --> 00:39:07,280
Speaker 1: all of that that's another variation obviously of the genetic revolution.

526
00:39:07,640 --> 00:39:10,959
Speaker 1: But I think all those things point to some new

527
00:39:11,960 --> 00:39:14,759
Speaker 1: breakthrough in the future that's you know, it's going to

528
00:39:14,840 --> 00:39:15,880
Speaker 1: be fun to see.

529
00:39:16,280 --> 00:39:19,200
Speaker 3: I mean, I of things like that, and I'm glad

530
00:39:19,200 --> 00:39:21,000
Speaker 3: to hear this, because I was starting to worry that

531
00:39:21,040 --> 00:39:24,080
Speaker 3: it was going to get boring. These questions were going

532
00:39:24,160 --> 00:39:26,960
Speaker 3: to get boring as things just got more like here's

533
00:39:27,000 --> 00:39:27,520
Speaker 3: the story.

534
00:39:27,800 --> 00:39:29,799
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I don't think they're going to get boring.

535
00:39:29,840 --> 00:39:31,640
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be it's going to be fun,

536
00:39:31,680 --> 00:39:34,759
Speaker 1: and we're going to still be interested. Uh, you know,

537
00:39:34,960 --> 00:39:37,920
Speaker 1: just like all of us are still interested in this.

538
00:39:38,320 --> 00:39:41,400
Speaker 1: I mean, none of us is really trained in the

539
00:39:41,440 --> 00:39:45,480
Speaker 1: fields of paleold biology or anything like that, but we

540
00:39:45,680 --> 00:39:50,240
Speaker 1: find it fascinating to want to understand how this happened,

541
00:39:50,400 --> 00:39:52,759
Speaker 1: and uh, we want to know more about ourselves, and

542
00:39:52,760 --> 00:39:54,000
Speaker 1: that's what a lot of this is about.

543
00:39:54,600 --> 00:40:00,399
Speaker 3: Do you remember the writer, Uh, he's very fun. Any guy,

544
00:40:00,400 --> 00:40:04,120
Speaker 3: the writer Jack hit Oh yeah, yeah. He once observed

545
00:40:04,160 --> 00:40:06,000
Speaker 3: he was taught about that he has a hard time

546
00:40:06,040 --> 00:40:11,680
Speaker 3: taking palaeontology seriously because it was a discipline that he

547
00:40:11,760 --> 00:40:15,720
Speaker 3: found the most knowledge about it was held by thirteen

548
00:40:15,800 --> 00:40:19,839
Speaker 3: year olds. He's talking about dinosaurs.

549
00:40:19,960 --> 00:40:23,239
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true. Yeah, that's true.

550
00:40:23,800 --> 00:40:26,520
Speaker 3: And this is a feel like this stuff like like

551
00:40:26,600 --> 00:40:29,759
Speaker 3: ice age. America is definitely a hobbyist RealD you know,

552
00:40:29,800 --> 00:40:33,319
Speaker 3: I mean, there's a lot of room for hobbyists right, like, like,

553
00:40:33,360 --> 00:40:35,280
Speaker 3: I'm a hobbyist. There's a lot of room for hobbyists.

554
00:40:35,320 --> 00:40:36,440
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that's right.

555
00:40:36,480 --> 00:40:37,960
Speaker 3: You can stay up breast, you know, you can stay

556
00:40:37,960 --> 00:40:39,480
Speaker 3: abreast of the subject.

557
00:40:39,880 --> 00:40:43,239
Speaker 2: I think what's what's there's sort of a tension in

558
00:40:43,280 --> 00:40:48,320
Speaker 2: this subject for me between like when you describe people

559
00:40:48,400 --> 00:40:52,360
Speaker 2: seeking out a new frontier or moving across the landscape

560
00:40:52,400 --> 00:40:57,280
Speaker 2: and being you know, drawn in by certain topographical features.

561
00:40:57,360 --> 00:41:01,480
Speaker 2: It's something that reson with me, and I find it

562
00:41:01,760 --> 00:41:05,480
Speaker 2: sort of part of the human condition. On the other hand,

563
00:41:05,520 --> 00:41:08,680
Speaker 2: there's certain things about these people that are totally unknowable,

564
00:41:09,719 --> 00:41:13,200
Speaker 2: Like you know, even with all of the technological advances

565
00:41:13,360 --> 00:41:16,520
Speaker 2: we have ahead of us, we don't have their voices,

566
00:41:17,800 --> 00:41:22,640
Speaker 2: and we don't even know what their voices sounded like,

567
00:41:22,960 --> 00:41:28,520
Speaker 2: you know. And so whenever I'm playing with this subject

568
00:41:28,560 --> 00:41:31,680
Speaker 2: in my mind, I always get stuck on that sort

569
00:41:31,680 --> 00:41:37,040
Speaker 2: of contradiction between what's very familiar and what is and

570
00:41:37,120 --> 00:41:39,360
Speaker 2: will probably always remain totally alien.

571
00:41:40,560 --> 00:41:44,960
Speaker 1: Well, that part probably will remain completely alien. I mean

572
00:41:45,000 --> 00:41:49,240
Speaker 1: we call you know, we have named these paleol cultures

573
00:41:49,239 --> 00:41:53,319
Speaker 1: in North America, things like Folsome and plain View and Clovis,

574
00:41:53,680 --> 00:41:59,440
Speaker 1: and those are all names of towns near which paleontological

575
00:41:59,440 --> 00:42:02,320
Speaker 1: and archael logical sites were found. I mean, we have

576
00:42:02,400 --> 00:42:04,760
Speaker 1: no idea what they called themselves. They for sure probably

577
00:42:04,760 --> 00:42:09,160
Speaker 1: didn't call themselves Clovisians, you know, or Fulsomites or whatever

578
00:42:09,160 --> 00:42:12,759
Speaker 1: the fulsome term for the people would be. I mean

579
00:42:12,800 --> 00:42:15,480
Speaker 1: they So we don't know that, and we're very likely

580
00:42:15,520 --> 00:42:19,000
Speaker 1: not ever to know that. What I am still a

581
00:42:19,040 --> 00:42:22,680
Speaker 1: little disappointed by, and I'm hoping that this side in

582
00:42:22,880 --> 00:42:27,719
Speaker 1: South America pans out as a as an actual rock

583
00:42:27,880 --> 00:42:34,239
Speaker 1: imagery site for clovis In fulsome is the lack of art,

584
00:42:34,800 --> 00:42:38,799
Speaker 1: especially in comparison to Western Europe, where there's there are

585
00:42:38,840 --> 00:42:43,600
Speaker 1: all these marvelous cave paintings that I mean tell you

586
00:42:43,680 --> 00:42:46,720
Speaker 1: so much about. I mean, they're One of the pieces

587
00:42:46,760 --> 00:42:48,840
Speaker 1: I read when I was researching Well in the World

588
00:42:49,239 --> 00:42:54,160
Speaker 1: was about how the artists at chove A Cave got

589
00:42:54,239 --> 00:42:59,920
Speaker 1: the rhythm of the foot footprints, the feet hitting the

590
00:43:00,239 --> 00:43:05,800
Speaker 1: ground of quadrupeds exactly right. And this particular article said

591
00:43:05,920 --> 00:43:10,560
Speaker 1: it wasn't until the eighteen nineties that modern painters were

592
00:43:10,640 --> 00:43:14,680
Speaker 1: able to get the rhythm of how horse hoofs hit

593
00:43:14,760 --> 00:43:17,960
Speaker 1: the ground when they were running at the same level

594
00:43:18,239 --> 00:43:22,160
Speaker 1: of expertise that these guys did fifteen sixteen thousand years ago,

595
00:43:22,719 --> 00:43:25,120
Speaker 1: and so that's very exciting and tells us a little

596
00:43:25,160 --> 00:43:29,239
Speaker 1: bit about those people. And it's just disappointing that, you know,

597
00:43:29,280 --> 00:43:31,200
Speaker 1: we have nothing like that in North America.

598
00:43:31,840 --> 00:43:34,200
Speaker 3: I'll correct my kids now and then where they'll talk

599
00:43:34,280 --> 00:43:38,520
Speaker 3: about they'll say when cave people were here, and I'll say,

600
00:43:39,000 --> 00:43:44,480
Speaker 3: be careful, because it seems like what you're imagining, like

601
00:43:44,680 --> 00:43:47,359
Speaker 3: it seems like the Ice age people that were here

602
00:43:47,520 --> 00:43:49,520
Speaker 3: didn't have a real affinity for caves.

603
00:43:51,040 --> 00:43:53,080
Speaker 1: Well they probably had, ye.

604
00:43:53,600 --> 00:43:58,160
Speaker 3: They weren't like, they weren't like they're not quite contemporaries.

605
00:43:58,160 --> 00:44:00,879
Speaker 3: But what was happening here twelve thirteen thousand years ago

606
00:44:01,440 --> 00:44:05,240
Speaker 3: was a very similar lifestyle in Western Europe thirty thousand

607
00:44:05,320 --> 00:44:08,279
Speaker 3: years ago. And there are parallels, but there also seems

608
00:44:08,280 --> 00:44:10,520
Speaker 3: to be differences. Like you're saying, like, where's all the

609
00:44:10,560 --> 00:44:10,960
Speaker 3: cave art?

610
00:44:11,600 --> 00:44:14,640
Speaker 1: Yeah, where's the art? And I mean, and it's interesting

611
00:44:14,680 --> 00:44:16,920
Speaker 1: to me since you brought that up that the first

612
00:44:17,040 --> 00:44:20,759
Speaker 1: archaeologists in North America who were looking for evidence of

613
00:44:21,040 --> 00:44:24,920
Speaker 1: human antiquity here looked in caves. They went to places

614
00:44:24,960 --> 00:44:28,439
Speaker 1: like Carlsbad and stuff and looked in caves because this

615
00:44:28,680 --> 00:44:31,080
Speaker 1: was the I mean, they were thinking by analogy, this

616
00:44:31,239 --> 00:44:33,440
Speaker 1: was the example they had in Western Europe, this is

617
00:44:33,480 --> 00:44:35,759
Speaker 1: where these people are, and so they were looking in

618
00:44:35,800 --> 00:44:41,520
Speaker 1: places like Carlsbad caverns for evidence that early humans in

619
00:44:41,560 --> 00:44:43,799
Speaker 1: North America would have done the same kind of thing.

620
00:44:44,200 --> 00:44:48,120
Speaker 1: And of course, accidentally, on the way back, a guy

621
00:44:48,160 --> 00:44:50,040
Speaker 1: by the name of Edgar Hewett, on the way back

622
00:44:50,080 --> 00:44:53,160
Speaker 1: from one of those expeditions happened to go past the

623
00:44:53,280 --> 00:44:57,239
Speaker 1: Clovis site and had some cowboys say, well, you know,

624
00:44:57,320 --> 00:44:59,920
Speaker 1: we've been finding these kind of strange looking a lot

625
00:45:00,160 --> 00:45:04,880
Speaker 1: urge two like objects here on the ground. No caves

626
00:45:04,880 --> 00:45:08,600
Speaker 1: anywhere around, but they're just kind of lying out here on.

627
00:45:08,520 --> 00:45:11,120
Speaker 3: The plains on what was a wetland.

628
00:45:11,280 --> 00:45:13,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, what was a wetland? And you know, no caves

629
00:45:14,000 --> 00:45:17,120
Speaker 1: around anywhere. So it's kind of one of those ways.

630
00:45:17,160 --> 00:45:22,360
Speaker 1: I think that the people of antiquity, the paleo hunters

631
00:45:22,400 --> 00:45:27,360
Speaker 1: in particular in North America, are pretty damn distinctive from

632
00:45:27,480 --> 00:45:31,680
Speaker 1: the people in Western Europe, And in this particular case,

633
00:45:31,719 --> 00:45:34,200
Speaker 1: I wish the distinction weren't so great, because I would

634
00:45:34,239 --> 00:45:36,279
Speaker 1: love to be able to find some art that they

635
00:45:36,320 --> 00:45:38,680
Speaker 1: did but so far not much.

636
00:45:42,280 --> 00:45:46,239
Speaker 2: Along the lines of like preconceived notions that people have

637
00:45:46,320 --> 00:45:49,879
Speaker 2: when they sort of look at this era of prehistory

638
00:45:49,880 --> 00:45:52,560
Speaker 2: as just sort of one block and then all of

639
00:45:52,560 --> 00:45:55,840
Speaker 2: a sudden, you know, the Stone Age goes to the

640
00:45:55,840 --> 00:45:59,640
Speaker 2: the Bronze Age, something like that. I think one of

641
00:45:59,640 --> 00:46:02,960
Speaker 2: the things that you've always opened my eyes to is

642
00:46:03,200 --> 00:46:07,920
Speaker 2: paying attention to these advancements in technology, which I think

643
00:46:07,960 --> 00:46:12,040
Speaker 2: most people wouldn't think of them as technology. But you know,

644
00:46:12,080 --> 00:46:16,759
Speaker 2: we were just looking at stone points at the Archaeological

645
00:46:16,760 --> 00:46:19,759
Speaker 2: Repository and Laramie, and you look at the level of

646
00:46:19,880 --> 00:46:24,200
Speaker 2: artistry and mastery in these in these objects, and it

647
00:46:24,360 --> 00:46:27,839
Speaker 2: very much is like a technology. It's not like these

648
00:46:27,840 --> 00:46:33,239
Speaker 2: people were trapped in some era, right, there's this there's

649
00:46:33,280 --> 00:46:36,000
Speaker 2: this long history that's played out in just the material

650
00:46:36,040 --> 00:46:37,280
Speaker 2: objects that they leave behind.

651
00:46:37,560 --> 00:46:39,879
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and you know, things that to us

652
00:46:40,080 --> 00:46:46,000
Speaker 1: do not look particularly significant, like the flute on the

653
00:46:46,040 --> 00:46:49,560
Speaker 1: sides of Clovis and fulsome points. I mean that you

654
00:46:49,600 --> 00:46:52,720
Speaker 1: can almost miss that when you look at those points,

655
00:46:52,800 --> 00:46:58,320
Speaker 1: but that very clearly was a major technological innovation because

656
00:46:58,400 --> 00:47:01,920
Speaker 1: it finally allowed the you're fastening of a point to

657
00:47:02,440 --> 00:47:05,520
Speaker 1: a dart an add addle dart or a spear, and

658
00:47:05,560 --> 00:47:09,120
Speaker 1: so it was. It was one of those human genius

659
00:47:09,480 --> 00:47:14,279
Speaker 1: breakthroughs where someone realized, if I just you know, make

660
00:47:14,320 --> 00:47:18,799
Speaker 1: a flute, make an indentation running down each side of

661
00:47:18,840 --> 00:47:23,600
Speaker 1: this point, I can now secure my adlett dart to

662
00:47:23,719 --> 00:47:27,840
Speaker 1: it and it won't pop off upon hitting an animal.

663
00:47:28,160 --> 00:47:32,239
Speaker 1: It will stay secure and penetrate through the skin. And

664
00:47:32,280 --> 00:47:34,400
Speaker 1: that's kind of you know, as I said, it's not

665
00:47:34,520 --> 00:47:36,480
Speaker 1: something that you look at and go wow, this is

666
00:47:36,840 --> 00:47:40,920
Speaker 1: like the invention of the model T. Nonetheless, Yeah, for

667
00:47:41,040 --> 00:47:45,799
Speaker 1: these people, it effectively was a huge leap forward. Yeah.

668
00:47:45,880 --> 00:47:47,720
Speaker 3: I want to return for a minute to a comment

669
00:47:47,760 --> 00:47:53,200
Speaker 3: you made about as the picture becomes clear or the

670
00:47:53,200 --> 00:47:56,399
Speaker 3: picture changes about this error we're discussing that you look

671
00:47:56,520 --> 00:48:03,680
Speaker 3: too technological enhancements, technological improvements which might upend some of

672
00:48:03,719 --> 00:48:05,520
Speaker 3: our notions.

673
00:48:05,920 --> 00:48:06,040
Speaker 1: Uh.

674
00:48:07,040 --> 00:48:08,279
Speaker 3: After you said that, it made me think about a

675
00:48:08,280 --> 00:48:11,799
Speaker 3: conversation I had with an anthropologist who focused on the

676
00:48:11,920 --> 00:48:17,319
Speaker 3: like the prices scene Holocene transition at Colorado State, and

677
00:48:18,000 --> 00:48:21,840
Speaker 3: I was kind of saying to him in a discussion,

678
00:48:21,880 --> 00:48:23,759
Speaker 3: I was kind of saying to him like, well, as

679
00:48:23,800 --> 00:48:29,000
Speaker 3: we find more sites, it'll get clearer. And he's really

680
00:48:29,000 --> 00:48:33,000
Speaker 3: pessimistic about about that about sites. I'm like, well, you know,

681
00:48:33,160 --> 00:48:35,200
Speaker 3: some guy building the road and he's like, how many

682
00:48:35,280 --> 00:48:38,799
Speaker 3: roads have we built? I mean, like, look at all

683
00:48:38,800 --> 00:48:40,440
Speaker 3: the roads we built, Look at all the farm fields

684
00:48:40,440 --> 00:48:43,919
Speaker 3: we cleared, and we have a handful. Like I don't

685
00:48:43,920 --> 00:48:47,040
Speaker 3: think increasing road building, you know, at the at the

686
00:48:47,080 --> 00:48:50,319
Speaker 3: decrease rate that we're building roads and clearing fields that

687
00:48:50,440 --> 00:48:53,000
Speaker 3: I don't think it's going to be that it's new sites.

688
00:48:53,520 --> 00:48:57,560
Speaker 3: You know, he really wasn't optimistic about finding crazy sites.

689
00:48:57,880 --> 00:48:59,920
Speaker 3: I think that what I think that we've kind of

690
00:49:00,200 --> 00:49:03,279
Speaker 3: found what is there to find, you know, barring some

691
00:49:03,440 --> 00:49:08,680
Speaker 3: unforeseen thing. But I think that I don't think you

692
00:49:08,719 --> 00:49:11,759
Speaker 3: can go and say the same thing about South America, right,

693
00:49:11,880 --> 00:49:14,759
Speaker 3: especially all that like like areas that are heavily forested

694
00:49:14,800 --> 00:49:17,520
Speaker 3: and jungle areas, like places that haven't been through like

695
00:49:17,640 --> 00:49:20,640
Speaker 3: our dust bowl when we had a good chance to

696
00:49:20,680 --> 00:49:25,160
Speaker 3: see the western landscape stripped clean of top soil and vegetation, Like,

697
00:49:25,200 --> 00:49:28,799
Speaker 3: there could be some amazing stuff laying there. Yeah, it

698
00:49:28,880 --> 00:49:30,279
Speaker 3: rots quicker, but it could be there.

699
00:49:30,440 --> 00:49:31,920
Speaker 1: Yeah, it could be. And I mean, you know, and

700
00:49:31,960 --> 00:49:35,040
Speaker 1: so Lidar, I suppose at this stage of the game,

701
00:49:35,080 --> 00:49:37,719
Speaker 1: I mean that's certainly a technological breakthrough. This enable to

702
00:49:37,760 --> 00:49:44,080
Speaker 1: discovery of all sorts of new particularly buildings mayan structures

703
00:49:44,160 --> 00:49:47,399
Speaker 1: that are suddenly now visible from above in a way

704
00:49:47,440 --> 00:49:51,719
Speaker 1: that they never are on the ground but lightar's, as

705
00:49:51,800 --> 00:49:54,560
Speaker 1: far as I am aware of it, it probably is

706
00:49:54,719 --> 00:49:57,960
Speaker 1: not fine grained enough to do something like the sort

707
00:49:58,000 --> 00:50:02,160
Speaker 1: of archaeological sites that that you're talking about, but I

708
00:50:02,239 --> 00:50:04,840
Speaker 1: kind of wouldn't think so now I tend to agree

709
00:50:04,880 --> 00:50:08,880
Speaker 1: with the anthropologists you were talking to. I think we've

710
00:50:08,920 --> 00:50:14,200
Speaker 1: got the sites. I think what we probably can improve

711
00:50:14,320 --> 00:50:18,120
Speaker 1: the interpretation of those sites with is going to be

712
00:50:18,960 --> 00:50:25,040
Speaker 1: something like these big leaps forward we had with radiocarbon dating,

713
00:50:25,360 --> 00:50:27,960
Speaker 1: which was you know, that was a huge game changer

714
00:50:28,280 --> 00:50:32,200
Speaker 1: seventy five years ago, and now the genomic revolution, the

715
00:50:32,239 --> 00:50:36,319
Speaker 1: genetic revolution, which is another enormous game changer for all

716
00:50:36,400 --> 00:50:40,120
Speaker 1: kinds of things, including these sort of extinctions from the

717
00:50:40,200 --> 00:50:43,920
Speaker 1: Pleistocene Holocene boundary. So I think it's going to be

718
00:50:43,920 --> 00:50:46,000
Speaker 1: something like that. I don't know exactly what it is,

719
00:50:46,719 --> 00:50:50,160
Speaker 1: but it's probably going to be something that subtenly enables

720
00:50:50,239 --> 00:50:52,239
Speaker 1: us to interpret what we have in a way we've

721
00:50:52,239 --> 00:50:52,840
Speaker 1: not been able to.

722
00:50:54,680 --> 00:50:59,160
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think what we're talking about here a lot

723
00:50:59,280 --> 00:51:03,000
Speaker 2: is how we can change your understanding of this subject

724
00:51:03,040 --> 00:51:07,000
Speaker 2: looking forward. But I also wonder if you can look

725
00:51:07,080 --> 00:51:12,239
Speaker 2: backward at your own career, just in your lifetime, how

726
00:51:12,320 --> 00:51:16,360
Speaker 2: much has changed in terms of knowledge about this subject,

727
00:51:16,400 --> 00:51:19,160
Speaker 2: and also how conversations have evolved over time.

728
00:51:21,480 --> 00:51:25,879
Speaker 1: Well, I would say, you know, I mean, I may

729
00:51:25,920 --> 00:51:28,200
Speaker 1: look as if I come from the early twentieth century,

730
00:51:28,239 --> 00:51:34,080
Speaker 1: but I'm actually more a mid twentieth century artifact. And

731
00:51:34,160 --> 00:51:37,760
Speaker 1: so I was born at about the time that radiocarbon

732
00:51:38,520 --> 00:51:45,480
Speaker 1: dating won the Nobel Prize for a guy, and I

733
00:51:45,520 --> 00:51:50,799
Speaker 1: have not I will say that during the sixties and

734
00:51:50,920 --> 00:51:53,640
Speaker 1: especially the seventies, the late seventies, when I was in

735
00:51:53,719 --> 00:52:00,879
Speaker 1: graduate school, there was a strong disinclination to believe that

736
00:52:01,080 --> 00:52:04,000
Speaker 1: humans had played much of a role at all. And

737
00:52:04,600 --> 00:52:08,080
Speaker 1: what it reminded is, i've looked back on it now,

738
00:52:08,480 --> 00:52:10,680
Speaker 1: it reminds me of the sort of reluctance that a

739
00:52:10,680 --> 00:52:14,960
Speaker 1: lot of people feel about climate change. It's that humans

740
00:52:14,960 --> 00:52:18,160
Speaker 1: couldn't have done that. We couldn't have done that. I mean,

741
00:52:18,200 --> 00:52:21,080
Speaker 1: a bunch of animals became extinct. That had to have

742
00:52:21,160 --> 00:52:24,760
Speaker 1: been climate That had to have been a comet strike

743
00:52:25,200 --> 00:52:29,800
Speaker 1: that had to have been something other than humans, because

744
00:52:30,600 --> 00:52:33,240
Speaker 1: I mean, there's just no way that's not possible. People

745
00:52:33,440 --> 00:52:36,400
Speaker 1: armed only with ad adomles and spears and so forth

746
00:52:36,640 --> 00:52:39,480
Speaker 1: could not do those sorts of things, And that of

747
00:52:39,520 --> 00:52:43,160
Speaker 1: course played into and went along with this sensibility back

748
00:52:43,200 --> 00:52:47,520
Speaker 1: in those same years where we were kind of in

749
00:52:47,560 --> 00:52:53,480
Speaker 1: a way first discovering native ecology and indigenous knowledge about

750
00:52:53,520 --> 00:52:57,919
Speaker 1: the world, and we were of course looking for some examples,

751
00:52:58,000 --> 00:53:01,600
Speaker 1: looking desperately for some examples of human beings to say,

752
00:53:02,320 --> 00:53:05,080
Speaker 1: these people did it right, here's the way you do it.

753
00:53:05,400 --> 00:53:08,319
Speaker 1: We're not on the right track, we're doing it wrong,

754
00:53:08,400 --> 00:53:13,000
Speaker 1: but they did it correctly. And of course, arguing that

755
00:53:13,520 --> 00:53:16,239
Speaker 1: you know, early arrivals in North America like Clovis and

756
00:53:16,280 --> 00:53:21,400
Speaker 1: fulsome people may have wiped out species that ran against

757
00:53:21,440 --> 00:53:24,600
Speaker 1: that sentiment that, well, we're trying to find in the

758
00:53:24,680 --> 00:53:29,040
Speaker 1: past some humans who really lived well on the environment,

759
00:53:29,200 --> 00:53:34,839
Speaker 1: and so that change I think sometime I don't know,

760
00:53:34,920 --> 00:53:40,840
Speaker 1: probably in the early two thousands, when after one kind

761
00:53:40,880 --> 00:53:45,440
Speaker 1: of alternative explanation after another was advanced and none of

762
00:53:45,480 --> 00:53:48,239
Speaker 1: them really seemed to work. They never did manage to

763
00:53:48,280 --> 00:53:51,880
Speaker 1: convince many people. I mean, you know, Ross McFee of

764
00:53:51,920 --> 00:53:55,200
Speaker 1: the American Museum and Natural History advanced. Well, maybe some

765
00:53:55,280 --> 00:54:00,080
Speaker 1: new disease swept through North America and killed everything. Well,

766
00:54:00,080 --> 00:54:03,160
Speaker 1: of course there was no candidate disease. And then the

767
00:54:03,160 --> 00:54:06,719
Speaker 1: other problem was, most diseases don't kill everything. I mean,

768
00:54:07,200 --> 00:54:10,680
Speaker 1: they usually leave some piece of a population that often

769
00:54:10,719 --> 00:54:13,400
Speaker 1: rebuilds with immunity. I mean, all of us are examples

770
00:54:13,760 --> 00:54:17,560
Speaker 1: of Old World diseases that killed many of those that

771
00:54:17,640 --> 00:54:21,840
Speaker 1: our ancestors survived and allowed us to be born today.

772
00:54:22,520 --> 00:54:27,319
Speaker 1: So alternative explanations have not so far really worked. And

773
00:54:27,360 --> 00:54:29,640
Speaker 1: what I've kind of been noticing in the last ten

774
00:54:29,719 --> 00:54:33,399
Speaker 1: or fifteen years has been a kind of a reluctant

775
00:54:33,960 --> 00:54:36,480
Speaker 1: I would say, reluctant, but still a sort of a

776
00:54:36,520 --> 00:54:43,200
Speaker 1: growing consensus that the human arrival in North America still

777
00:54:43,360 --> 00:54:47,080
Speaker 1: seems to be the best explanation we have for what

778
00:54:47,239 --> 00:54:50,400
Speaker 1: happened to all those animals. And what I ended up

779
00:54:50,560 --> 00:54:52,840
Speaker 1: arguing in Wild New World is that I think, you know,

780
00:54:52,920 --> 00:54:56,160
Speaker 1: we talk a lot about the sixth extinction today. I

781
00:54:56,160 --> 00:55:00,080
Speaker 1: think the six extinction started thirty five thousand years ago.

782
00:55:00,640 --> 00:55:03,520
Speaker 1: I mean when human started spreading around the world. Yeah,

783
00:55:03,560 --> 00:55:07,120
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just in contrast to an asteroid strike

784
00:55:07,160 --> 00:55:10,080
Speaker 1: which wipes out seventy five percent of Earth's life in

785
00:55:10,719 --> 00:55:13,120
Speaker 1: a matter of a few weeks. This has just been

786
00:55:13,160 --> 00:55:18,040
Speaker 1: a thirty five thousand sort of slow motion extinction that's

787
00:55:18,080 --> 00:55:21,600
Speaker 1: been going on for a very very long time, and

788
00:55:21,680 --> 00:55:24,080
Speaker 1: so it's good for us to be alarmed about a

789
00:55:24,120 --> 00:55:26,600
Speaker 1: six extinction. I just sometimes try to point out to

790
00:55:26,680 --> 00:55:29,160
Speaker 1: people I think this has actually been happening for a

791
00:55:29,200 --> 00:55:29,760
Speaker 1: long time.

792
00:55:31,080 --> 00:55:35,560
Speaker 3: I recently had a discussion with an attorney who's Native

793
00:55:35,560 --> 00:55:40,960
Speaker 3: American and he works in repatriation, and his particular focus

794
00:55:41,080 --> 00:55:49,040
Speaker 3: is on getting the remains of his ancestors back from museums. Yeah,

795
00:55:49,560 --> 00:55:53,360
Speaker 3: I said to him, I said, would you ever strike

796
00:55:53,400 --> 00:55:59,440
Speaker 3: a deal where they get a gram of each of

797
00:55:59,440 --> 00:56:03,799
Speaker 3: those bones and then you get the bones back? And

798
00:56:03,840 --> 00:56:08,120
Speaker 3: he said, we would never even consider something like that.

799
00:56:11,360 --> 00:56:14,880
Speaker 3: I don't expect you to answer this, but like, what

800
00:56:14,920 --> 00:56:20,279
Speaker 3: would be some things that you consider when you think

801
00:56:20,320 --> 00:56:25,680
Speaker 3: of the tension around a desire to study apply modern

802
00:56:26,000 --> 00:56:33,160
Speaker 3: analytics to human remains, and where that rubs against cultural

803
00:56:33,239 --> 00:56:40,240
Speaker 3: sensitivities about playing with remains of someone that you rightfully

804
00:56:40,320 --> 00:56:44,319
Speaker 3: or wrongfully consider to be your ancestor, even if you're

805
00:56:44,360 --> 00:56:48,560
Speaker 3: separated by nine thousand and ten thousand years from them.

806
00:56:48,920 --> 00:56:50,479
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really like what kind.

807
00:56:50,360 --> 00:56:52,600
Speaker 3: Of things bounce around in your head. I'm not asking

808
00:56:52,600 --> 00:56:54,000
Speaker 3: you to say what we ought to do, but like,

809
00:56:54,000 --> 00:56:55,160
Speaker 3: how do you even approach that?

810
00:56:55,280 --> 00:56:59,000
Speaker 1: Right? Well, what, here's what I kind of suspect. I

811
00:56:59,120 --> 00:57:04,839
Speaker 1: think we're living through a moment, and I think the

812
00:57:05,000 --> 00:57:13,040
Speaker 1: moment has been caused by the previous lack of respect

813
00:57:13,280 --> 00:57:18,760
Speaker 1: that so many bone merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth

814
00:57:18,760 --> 00:57:22,320
Speaker 1: and twentieth centuries brought to the game of archaeology, where

815
00:57:22,360 --> 00:57:28,560
Speaker 1: they paid not the slightest attention to the desires wants

816
00:57:29,040 --> 00:57:33,080
Speaker 1: of the local people, who very well could be connected

817
00:57:33,160 --> 00:57:39,680
Speaker 1: to the ruins or the excavations that they're doing on

818
00:57:39,800 --> 00:57:44,640
Speaker 1: human remains. And so what I think is that we're

819
00:57:44,680 --> 00:57:47,640
Speaker 1: experiencing a moment that's kind of a backlash against that.

820
00:57:48,760 --> 00:57:51,080
Speaker 1: And I tend to be one of these kind of

821
00:57:51,080 --> 00:57:54,200
Speaker 1: people who thinks that, you know, we're really kind of

822
00:57:54,240 --> 00:57:58,280
Speaker 1: all the same, actually, and what we're interested in is

823
00:57:58,360 --> 00:58:01,640
Speaker 1: the human story, the big story of all of us,

824
00:58:01,680 --> 00:58:05,040
Speaker 1: which is why I'm intrigued by humans coming out of Africa,

825
00:58:05,040 --> 00:58:08,880
Speaker 1: spreading through Asia, coming to North America, going to South America,

826
00:58:09,400 --> 00:58:11,480
Speaker 1: and I know that people get hung up on the

827
00:58:11,520 --> 00:58:14,640
Speaker 1: idea of Okay, this particular culture has this view of

828
00:58:14,640 --> 00:58:18,040
Speaker 1: how the world should be conducted and how scientific research

829
00:58:18,040 --> 00:58:21,880
Speaker 1: could be conducted. But I am very much interested in

830
00:58:21,960 --> 00:58:28,360
Speaker 1: the big story of humanity, and I think ultimately most

831
00:58:28,440 --> 00:58:31,800
Speaker 1: people are interested in that. And so I think when

832
00:58:31,880 --> 00:58:36,560
Speaker 1: we get past this moment where we're sort of boomeranging

833
00:58:36,720 --> 00:58:41,040
Speaker 1: from centuries where we had no respect for the remains

834
00:58:41,040 --> 00:58:44,680
Speaker 1: of these people, that in another who knows how long,

835
00:58:44,800 --> 00:58:46,960
Speaker 1: but in another century. In fact, I know need of

836
00:58:47,040 --> 00:58:50,680
Speaker 1: people who have already reached this position where they too

837
00:58:50,840 --> 00:58:53,840
Speaker 1: are intrigued and interested and they want to know. And

838
00:58:53,880 --> 00:58:56,120
Speaker 1: so I think that at some point in the future,

839
00:58:56,160 --> 00:58:58,160
Speaker 1: I don't know how far out it is, that there

840
00:58:58,160 --> 00:59:03,840
Speaker 1: will be some relaxing of that kind of reluctance to

841
00:59:03,880 --> 00:59:07,240
Speaker 1: allow science to try to answer some of these great questions.

842
00:59:07,280 --> 00:59:10,120
Speaker 1: I just think it's a you know, the pendulum has

843
00:59:10,200 --> 00:59:15,840
Speaker 1: swung at the moment at a to a degree that

844
00:59:17,680 --> 00:59:20,480
Speaker 1: Native people are they don't want this to happen. Yeah,

845
00:59:20,520 --> 00:59:24,280
Speaker 1: but I think it'll swing back. Yeah.

846
00:59:24,280 --> 00:59:30,400
Speaker 2: I think on Steve's on Steve's question, there there's implicit

847
00:59:30,440 --> 00:59:36,160
Speaker 2: in that, is this question about the scope of time

848
00:59:36,280 --> 00:59:40,600
Speaker 2: that we're talking about when we talk about people arriving

849
00:59:40,680 --> 00:59:46,440
Speaker 2: in North America and from the place to scene extinctions

850
00:59:46,560 --> 00:59:49,840
Speaker 2: up until just say fifteen hundred, and I wonder if

851
00:59:49,880 --> 00:59:53,840
Speaker 2: you can just sort of put that. I always have

852
00:59:53,880 --> 00:59:57,840
Speaker 2: a hard time wrapping my mind around big time, and

853
00:59:57,880 --> 00:59:59,920
Speaker 2: so I wonder if you can kind of contextualize that

854
01:00:00,080 --> 01:00:04,240
Speaker 2: at what we're talking about versus the broader story of

855
01:00:05,320 --> 01:00:07,760
Speaker 2: humans spreading around the world.

856
01:00:08,280 --> 01:00:11,960
Speaker 1: Well, when I mean, you guys all know this as

857
01:00:11,960 --> 01:00:15,960
Speaker 1: well as I do. But you know, when you're doing history,

858
01:00:16,520 --> 01:00:21,360
Speaker 1: history we always think of history, especially professionally and in

859
01:00:21,400 --> 01:00:24,600
Speaker 1: the academy, we think of that as being something you

860
01:00:24,680 --> 01:00:29,000
Speaker 1: do from written sources. And of course written sources only

861
01:00:29,040 --> 01:00:31,880
Speaker 1: exist for the human story back to about thirty five

862
01:00:31,960 --> 01:00:34,520
Speaker 1: hundred and four thousand years ago, and beyond that we

863
01:00:34,640 --> 01:00:38,880
Speaker 1: have no written stories, and so that sort of implies that. Okay,

864
01:00:38,880 --> 01:00:41,800
Speaker 1: so if you're interested in history, that's the end of it.

865
01:00:42,280 --> 01:00:45,600
Speaker 1: Four thousand years back, you don't have any history anymore.

866
01:00:45,640 --> 01:00:49,880
Speaker 1: There's no way. I'm not satisfied with that, obviously, because

867
01:00:50,480 --> 01:00:53,760
Speaker 1: that's a very small slice of the human story, and

868
01:00:53,800 --> 01:00:58,040
Speaker 1: the human story goes way way farther back in time,

869
01:00:58,720 --> 01:01:04,960
Speaker 1: and so I mean my whole take on something like

870
01:01:05,920 --> 01:01:10,720
Speaker 1: writing that chapter about what I call Native America. After

871
01:01:11,240 --> 01:01:16,040
Speaker 1: the Pleistocene extinctions and the Holycene period began in North America,

872
01:01:16,080 --> 01:01:18,080
Speaker 1: I tried to write a chapter about the next ten

873
01:01:18,160 --> 01:01:21,400
Speaker 1: thousand years, which takes you down to five hundred years ago,

874
01:01:21,640 --> 01:01:25,880
Speaker 1: when Europeans and Old Worlders began arriving in North America.

875
01:01:26,880 --> 01:01:30,560
Speaker 1: I was trying to sort of satisfy my own curiosity

876
01:01:30,600 --> 01:01:33,720
Speaker 1: about that, because I couldn't really find very many people

877
01:01:33,800 --> 01:01:37,320
Speaker 1: who had ventured a guess as to how that story

878
01:01:37,400 --> 01:01:40,000
Speaker 1: had unfolded. And in a book like that, where I

879
01:01:40,080 --> 01:01:44,000
Speaker 1: was interested primarily in the relationship between animals and people,

880
01:01:44,520 --> 01:01:49,040
Speaker 1: I was trying to figure out how did it happen

881
01:01:49,560 --> 01:01:53,080
Speaker 1: that when Europeans get here five hundred years ago, they

882
01:01:53,240 --> 01:01:57,000
Speaker 1: land on a continent that they're so impressed with. Now,

883
01:01:57,040 --> 01:01:59,080
Speaker 1: maybe it's just in comparison to what they had done

884
01:01:59,080 --> 01:02:02,760
Speaker 1: to Europe, but they're really impressed with the biological diversity

885
01:02:02,760 --> 01:02:05,680
Speaker 1: of North America. It's kind of an Eden for the animals.

886
01:02:05,680 --> 01:02:08,600
Speaker 1: And so the question was, how did we get from

887
01:02:08,680 --> 01:02:11,120
Speaker 1: ten thousand years ago down to five hundred years ago?

888
01:02:11,480 --> 01:02:15,400
Speaker 1: Where Native people managed to preserve all that, and that

889
01:02:15,600 --> 01:02:18,880
Speaker 1: presented obviously a lot of a lot of questions to

890
01:02:19,000 --> 01:02:21,520
Speaker 1: try to answer. And I'm sure there'll be people who

891
01:02:21,600 --> 01:02:25,520
Speaker 1: improve on that story that I told, But that was

892
01:02:25,680 --> 01:02:29,920
Speaker 1: kind of my own attempt to do something about the

893
01:02:30,040 --> 01:02:33,080
Speaker 1: Native American story that I didn't see anybody else really

894
01:02:33,120 --> 01:02:36,640
Speaker 1: making a stab at trying to interpret, probably because it's

895
01:02:36,720 --> 01:02:37,400
Speaker 1: too dawning.

896
01:02:38,120 --> 01:02:39,880
Speaker 3: But I think you did a phenomenal job because you

897
01:02:39,960 --> 01:02:45,439
Speaker 3: distilled it down into an observation that here's nine five

898
01:02:45,520 --> 01:02:48,720
Speaker 3: hundred years of history and there's maybe like one.

899
01:02:48,800 --> 01:02:52,400
Speaker 1: Yeah, one extinction, one extinction in that time we've done.

900
01:02:52,800 --> 01:02:56,640
Speaker 3: Yeah, the last five hundred years has been a real ripper.

901
01:02:56,440 --> 01:02:59,560
Speaker 1: Yes, and a real ripper, there's no question about it.

902
01:02:59,840 --> 01:03:05,000
Speaker 1: I mean, one piece I read in the National Academy

903
01:03:05,040 --> 01:03:09,600
Speaker 1: of Sciences from about twenty nineteen argued that we have

904
01:03:09,760 --> 01:03:13,920
Speaker 1: sacrificed in the last five hundred years about a half

905
01:03:13,960 --> 01:03:19,360
Speaker 1: a million years of evolved genetics on planet Earth as

906
01:03:19,360 --> 01:03:22,360
Speaker 1: a consequence of all the destruction that we've made to

907
01:03:23,000 --> 01:03:25,640
Speaker 1: creatures around the world. And most of the animals that

908
01:03:25,720 --> 01:03:30,720
Speaker 1: have disappeared have been really charismatic and very common, like

909
01:03:30,800 --> 01:03:35,520
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons survived in North America for fifteen

910
01:03:35,600 --> 01:03:39,640
Speaker 1: million years, and they couldn't last three hundred years after

911
01:03:39,680 --> 01:03:43,720
Speaker 1: we got here. So there's certainly been that. And then

912
01:03:43,800 --> 01:03:46,080
Speaker 1: there's that ten thousand year period we were just talking

913
01:03:46,080 --> 01:03:49,200
Speaker 1: about where I could find evidence for only one extinction,

914
01:03:49,320 --> 01:03:52,880
Speaker 1: and that was a flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast.

915
01:03:53,240 --> 01:03:57,080
Speaker 1: But then of course there's the period before that, the Pleistocene,

916
01:03:57,640 --> 01:04:02,640
Speaker 1: where if anything, truction was even on more massive a scale.

917
01:04:02,960 --> 01:04:05,960
Speaker 1: And in that instance, not only do we sacrifice an

918
01:04:06,120 --> 01:04:11,960
Speaker 1: enormous amount of biological diversity and genetics evolved genetics, but

919
01:04:12,040 --> 01:04:15,520
Speaker 1: it was the genetics of most of the really large

920
01:04:15,640 --> 01:04:22,160
Speaker 1: and impressive animals of the globe. And so that's a

921
01:04:22,200 --> 01:04:26,240
Speaker 1: story in other words, that doesn't have it doesn't travel

922
01:04:26,320 --> 01:04:32,800
Speaker 1: just in one direction. It's as if humans realizing, wow,

923
01:04:32,920 --> 01:04:36,120
Speaker 1: we may have really screwed things up, or things got

924
01:04:36,120 --> 01:04:39,200
Speaker 1: screwed up for some reason, because I'm not sure they

925
01:04:39,520 --> 01:04:43,200
Speaker 1: quite understood what had happened, but it seems to have

926
01:04:43,280 --> 01:04:47,680
Speaker 1: produced a kind of a reaction where for nearly ten

927
01:04:47,720 --> 01:04:53,040
Speaker 1: thousand years they are very careful about things. And you know,

928
01:04:53,080 --> 01:04:55,920
Speaker 1: as I said, that's a story that I really had

929
01:04:55,960 --> 01:05:01,640
Speaker 1: to put together because I couldn't find anyone that was

930
01:05:01,760 --> 01:05:05,520
Speaker 1: willing to make to venture a guess about how that

931
01:05:05,560 --> 01:05:07,840
Speaker 1: it all played out, and yet it's obviously a really

932
01:05:07,840 --> 01:05:09,080
Speaker 1: big part of American history.

933
01:05:09,920 --> 01:05:11,320
Speaker 3: Well, Dan, I want to thank you for sitting and

934
01:05:11,360 --> 01:05:13,080
Speaker 3: having this post chat with us.

935
01:05:13,720 --> 01:05:16,440
Speaker 1: You best see. Thanks thanks to both of you guys. Randall,

936
01:05:17,200 --> 01:05:22,360
Speaker 1: you guys were you know, many years ago, uh, terrific

937
01:05:22,560 --> 01:05:25,680
Speaker 1: students in the classes that I taught at the University

938
01:05:25,720 --> 01:05:27,840
Speaker 1: of Montown. It's fun to sit down and do this again.

939
01:05:28,760 --> 01:05:28,880
Speaker 1: What