Speaker 1: Humans belonging to Clovis and Folsome cultures entered in America,
Speaker 1: teeming with a remarkable diversity of Africa like creatures, but
Speaker 1: confronted an extinction crisis that was possibly precipitated by their
Speaker 1: own arrival. I'm Dan Florries, and this is the American West,
Speaker 1: brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in Barrel, Velvet
Speaker 1: Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season
Speaker 1: that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports
Speaker 1: backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and
Speaker 1: wildlife enjoy responsibly Clovisia the Beautiful. We hardly know our
Speaker 1: actual beginnings America, even when the stories are set in
Speaker 1: places we recognize. The characters of our deep time history
Speaker 1: can be alien to the point of fantasy. But while
Speaker 1: it may sound unlikely in the twenty twenties, there's no
Speaker 1: place quite like downtown Los Angeles for acquiring some sense
Speaker 1: of how the human story began on the continent. Rancho
Speaker 1: Librea Tarpits, just off Wiltshire Boulevard in the heart of
Speaker 1: a sprawling Pacific coast city, is today the most successible
Speaker 1: place in the country for picturing in the minds eye
Speaker 1: the wild new world migrating humans found when they first
Speaker 1: saw America. True enough, there's a sense of time travel shock,
Speaker 1: having your lift drop you in the middle of swirling,
Speaker 1: honking la traffic, only to stand face to face minutes
Speaker 1: later with Columbian mammos fatally mired in tar, trumpeting their despair.
Speaker 1: Even if the mammoths are robots and their forlorn cries
Speaker 1: don't drown out the traffic, they and Librea and the
Speaker 1: Page Museum still work a kind of magic. Twenty thousand
Speaker 1: years drops away if you let it, because Librea preserves
Speaker 1: tangible remnants of a world at the far ends of
Speaker 1: the earth for ancestors of ours whose migrations had begun
Speaker 1: in Africa. The Page Museum is a working laboratory of paleontology,
Speaker 1: where visitors can watch scientists labor over the site's latest discoveries.
Speaker 1: Many of those are the remains of scavenger predators once
Speaker 1: lured by the cries of snagged mammoths, or the scin
Speaker 1: of decomposing horses, camels, or ground sloths trapped by surface
Speaker 1: tar near what was once a water source and a
Speaker 1: dry landscape. The skulls and tusks of the elephants extracted
Speaker 1: from Librea are impressive, but anyone who tours the museum
Speaker 1: has to admit the most stunning display is the wall,
Speaker 1: backlit and yellow of hundreds of dire wolf skulls. The
Speaker 1: strapping cane. It's indigenous to America, but memorably revived as
Speaker 1: fictional wester ROAs fauna and Game of Thrones left the
Speaker 1: most remains here of any species, eighteen hundred individuals. The
Speaker 1: fossils of hundreds of coyotes, a brawnier version than our
Speaker 1: modern animal, make up the third most common species here,
Speaker 1: But in second place are those ultimate ambush predators of
Speaker 1: the Pleistocene, the western subspecies of sabertooths, heavily built cats
Speaker 1: with a fearsome snake like jaw, gape and enormous fangs.
Speaker 1: The replica skull of a sabertooth from Librea sits a
Speaker 1: few feet away as I write this. Its rapier sharp
Speaker 1: canines capable of tearing open a sloth or mammoth calf,
Speaker 1: gleaming in rich afternoon light, Each fang measures a full
Speaker 1: eight inches from gumline to tip. The vast assemblages of
Speaker 1: hyperconnivore bones at Las joined the skeletal remains of mega herbivores,
Speaker 1: mammoths and macedons, giant bison, pronghorns, lamas, California turkeys, and
Speaker 1: many more. The predator list is lengthier than just wolves, coyotes,
Speaker 1: and sabretooths as well. The cats whose remains have come
Speaker 1: out of the tar include American cheetahs, step lions, and
Speaker 1: giant jaguars. Immense, hyperactive short faced bears twice the weight
Speaker 1: of a grizzly died in the asphalt. So did the
Speaker 1: enormous Miriam's terratorn applies to seeing bird of prey with
Speaker 1: a ten and a half foot wingspan. The remains span
Speaker 1: indigenous creatures spawned by continental evolution and migrants from Asia,
Speaker 1: some ancient to America, some recent arrivals. The mammals and
Speaker 1: birds may seem alien are vaguely African, but in fact
Speaker 1: this bestiary was purely classically American, the America of the Pleistocene.
Speaker 1: The Rancho Librea victims that left their bones and skulls
Speaker 1: in Casinar were once representatives of one of the grand
Speaker 1: ecologies of planet Earth. This was a different America than
Speaker 1: most of us conjured. When we imagine the continent Europeans
Speaker 1: found five hundred years ago. But this libreal world wasn't
Speaker 1: like the pre chick Salube age of the dinosaurs absent
Speaker 1: of humans either. Late in the Pleistocene, our human forebears
Speaker 1: joined American ecologies as the newest predator.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: These first Americans lived their lives among Librea creatures and
Speaker 1: created the first coast to coast human societies in American history.
Speaker 1: Their presence began to leave the continent, and this rich
Speaker 1: aggregate of impressive animals forever changed. The first time we
Speaker 1: became aware that humans were actually in America during the
Speaker 1: Pleistocene was barely one hundred years ago, and the place
Speaker 1: that happened was along the New Mexico Colorado border. In
Speaker 1: the days following a flood in the dry Cimarron River,
Speaker 1: an African American cowboy named George mcjunkin was riding through
Speaker 1: grassy parkland a few hundred yards below the rim rock
Speaker 1: of a miles long mesa that extended eastward from the
Speaker 1: rocky mountains, checking for ranch fence lines damaged by the flood.
Speaker 1: Suddenly mcjenkin's horse braced its hoofs, furrowing into foot deep
Speaker 1: mud at the edge of a ragged scar. Floodwaters had
Speaker 1: cut into the slope below the Mesa. Mcjenkin leaned out
Speaker 1: of his saddle to peer into a fresh chasm sliced
Speaker 1: into the brown shale. What he saw changed the story
Speaker 1: of America forever. On a similar rainy August day in
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, some thirty five of us are stepping through
Speaker 1: the lush grass of that same slope as it angles
Speaker 1: up towards the rim rock of Johnson Mesa. We're following
Speaker 1: David Eck, a New Mexico State Lands archaeologist with a
Speaker 1: long ponytail halfway down his back, who is leading us
Speaker 1: towards the very spot where George mcjenkin's horse had pulled
Speaker 1: up one hundred and ten years before. The topography is
Speaker 1: now a grassy, shallow drain called wild Horse Arroyo, and
Speaker 1: as we crowd around its edges, it seems somehow too
Speaker 1: commonplace to be the scene of one of the continent's
Speaker 1: most significant historical finds. Nonetheless, this in the flesh is
Speaker 1: the legendary fulsome archaeological site. What mcjunkin had done about
Speaker 1: where we now stood talking was to spot in the
Speaker 1: flood gashed arroyo bones of an immense size. They turned
Speaker 1: out to be from a herd of bison antiquis, an
Speaker 1: extinct form of giant bison, but the bones themselves weren't
Speaker 1: the pas de raisi sants. At the time, the sciences
Speaker 1: of ethnology and archaeology in the United States were firmed
Speaker 1: that American Indians had arrived in North America only a
Speaker 1: couple thousand years prior to the coming of Europeans. In
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty six, the Black Cowboys plea to have a
Speaker 1: scientist look at his bone pit reached Jesse Figgins, director
Speaker 1: of the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver. Something
Speaker 1: of an amateur himself, Figgins was mostly interested in fossil
Speaker 1: bison that might make exhibits in his museum. His team
Speaker 1: began an excavation of the site in May of nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty six and quickly began finding the skeletal remains of
Speaker 1: bison of a monstrous size. That was exciting enough, but
Speaker 1: in their second season of work, on August twenty ninth,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty seven, Figgins's crew traveled up Big History pay dirt.
Speaker 1: As David Eck was gesturing to the dimensions of this
Speaker 1: near century old dig in the pocket of my light
Speaker 1: Patagonia jacket, my fingers closed over an object that I
Speaker 1: could fit into my palm. In shape, it was oblate,
Speaker 1: think a flattened football, but with an end bitten off.
Speaker 1: Beneath my fingers, I could feel an irregular surface, made
Speaker 1: so by labor intensive flaking to create a pointed blade
Speaker 1: that dwindled to a remarkably thin base. The delicacy of
Speaker 1: that base was a result of matching flutes skillfully popped
Speaker 1: from the flint on both sides, and that first summer
Speaker 1: of digging, Figginson's paleontologists had on earthed two of these
Speaker 1: points in the loose dirt of the site. Eventually, the
Speaker 1: Denver team would find eight of these stunning fluted points
Speaker 1: scattered amongst the bones. But it wasn't just the bones
Speaker 1: and not the points that made folsome what American Museum
Speaker 1: of Natural History scientists Henry Fairfield Osborne labeled the greatest
Speaker 1: event in American discoveries. When the second season crew at
Speaker 1: Folsom flicked the dirt from the ribs of an extinct bison,
Speaker 1: they were greeted by the sight of one of these
Speaker 1: fluted points embedded to two thirds its length in the bone.
Speaker 1: The bar for proof that humans were part of the
Speaker 1: American places scene had always been an extinct animal, preserving
Speaker 1: evidence that as a living creature, it had been killed
Speaker 1: by human technology. Now outside the tiny berg of Folsom,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, that bar was hurdled. America two had an antiquity.
Speaker 1: How much of an antiquity was still in question because
Speaker 1: radiocarbon dating was yet three decades in the future. Figgins
Speaker 1: claimed the site was four hundred thousand years old. Eventually,
Speaker 1: archaeology and paleontology would agree that on an October day,
Speaker 1: a band of three dozen humans had driven into a
Speaker 1: Box canyon, killed and butchered thirty two giant bison of
Speaker 1: the species Bison antiquis in the spot where I was
Speaker 1: now standing, and they had done this twelve thousand, four
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years ago. No one knows now what
Speaker 1: these ancient bison hunters call themselves or their weapons. Their
Speaker 1: beautiful fluted points were likely attached to darts thrown by
Speaker 1: at adults or spear throwers. But not knowing much about
Speaker 1: these early Americans didn't prevent the scientists from naming both
Speaker 1: the points and the people Fulsome after the nearby town.
Speaker 1: Yet Fulsome wasn't the book of genesis for America's human history.
Speaker 1: Six years after the Fulsome discovery, there was another dramatic revelation.
Speaker 1: How on the featureless sweeps of the southern Great Plains,
Speaker 1: an ordinary gravel excavation near a tiny farming town named
Speaker 1: Clovis exposed the bones of long extinct American elephants, a
Speaker 1: remarkable twenty eight of them. Science in the reading public
Speaker 1: knew that America had harbored various kinds of giant elephants
Speaker 1: in the deep past, But unlike nineteenth century mastodon finds
Speaker 1: in the East, this time the skeletons were intermixed with
Speaker 1: large five to six inch long projectile points and tools
Speaker 1: of an unknown and apparently even more ancient population than
Speaker 1: the Fulsome people. We now know that even these elephant
Speaker 1: hunters were not the first. What has very recently produced
Speaker 1: certain evidence for even more ancient arrivals in America, likely
Speaker 1: in boats following shoreline out of Asia. Are human footprints
Speaker 1: to be precise sixty one footprints left primarily by children
Speaker 1: or adolescents, in the soft mud of a lake shore
Speaker 1: some twenty three thousand years before the area became New
Speaker 1: Mexico's White Sands National Park. That blockbuster find by a
Speaker 1: park employee in twenty nineteen ultimately drew a team of
Speaker 1: researchers from the US Geological Survey to date the seeds
Speaker 1: of a species of grass crushed by the footprints. Their
Speaker 1: dating indicates a time frame at the height of the
Speaker 1: glacial maximum, when it would have been impossible to come
Speaker 1: overland to America. The human footprints aren't the only tracks
Speaker 1: researchers are finding. There are also mammoth tracks and prints
Speaker 1: of dire wolves and giant ground sloths. In one fascinating interaction,
Speaker 1: the tracks appear to show that a young woman carrying
Speaker 1: a child on her hip, who she occasionally put down,
Speaker 1: walked a stretch of lake shore and returned by the
Speaker 1: same path, which in the interval both a mammoth and
Speaker 1: a ground sloth crossed. The mammoth paid no obvious attention,
Speaker 1: but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs and
Speaker 1: what may have been alarm. So far as we now know,
Speaker 1: only a scant few intrepid souls came to America this early.
Speaker 1: They remind me of Viking visitors to America. A thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, their numbers must have been small, with much
Speaker 1: of America still empty of humans. So ten thousand years later,
Speaker 1: the elephant hunters we now call Clovis made up the
Speaker 1: first human culture to spread across all the Americas, an
Speaker 1: overlan arrival that became a rapidly advancing wave thirteen thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. The rapidity of their spreads suggesting that they
Speaker 1: uncomp hundred few, if any, other human cultures along the way.
Speaker 1: Clovis people occupied every American state from Alaska to Florida
Speaker 1: for more than three centuries until a mature United States
Speaker 1: spread coast to coast. In fact, Clovis stood as the
Speaker 1: sole human culture that once draped across our entire country.
Speaker 1: So for three centuries, a very long time ago, America
Speaker 1: was Clovisia the Beautiful. We are still struggling to understand them.
Speaker 1: They left no oral or written histories of their monarchs
Speaker 1: or any defining events. We have no sense of their
Speaker 1: gods or the philosophies they believed in, or what language
Speaker 1: or family of languages they spoke. We know a great
Speaker 1: deal about their tools, and we're developing a sense of
Speaker 1: them from their bones and more recently, from their genetics,
Speaker 1: but starting thirteen thousand and fifty years ago and lasting
Speaker 1: until twelve thousand, seven hundred and fifty years ago, the
Speaker 1: Clovisians placed their stamp on the country and its animals
Speaker 1: and changed the continent. Their name comes from the place
Speaker 1: where we first became aware of their existence, an ancient
Speaker 1: arroyo on the outskirts of the small town of Clovis,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, on the windswept southern high Plains. Getting in
Speaker 1: close to wild creatures holds a fascination that resonates because
Speaker 1: it taps ancient imperatives still within us. The relationship between
Speaker 1: prey and their predators involves learning curves, and each side
Speaker 1: is very good at the algorithm, but prey do have
Speaker 1: to learn. Numerous examples from around the world testify that
Speaker 1: upon initially encountering humans, many wild creatures did not associate
Speaker 1: us with a threat. There is a term of art
Speaker 1: for this biological first contact. Wild animals had to learn
Speaker 1: to be afraid of us. Many died standing and looking,
Speaker 1: never absorbing the lesson. Finding naive animals that were easy
Speaker 1: for human hunters was a powerful motive for our species
Speaker 1: migrations around the world. But just who were these Clovis
Speaker 1: people who left so many sites across America, more than
Speaker 1: twenty excavated ones so far, including some seventy butchered elephants.
Speaker 1: One recent theory that briefly achieved traction in places like
Speaker 1: National Geographic came from the Smithsonian's Dennis Stanford, who believed
Speaker 1: that the direct ancestors of the Clovist people reached America
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand years ago from Europe. To say that the
Speaker 1: scientific community scoffed at Stanford's across Atlantic ice claims barely
Speaker 1: does justice to the profound skepticism that followed it. While
Speaker 1: Paleolithic hunters in Europe and America did pursue similar megafauna
Speaker 1: and flint points crafted by Western Europe's soul Utrean culture
Speaker 1: superficially resembled Clovis points, other researchers dismissed Stanford's claims that
Speaker 1: the two groups were the same people. Linguistic and genetic
Speaker 1: conclusions have since refuted Stanford's argument. Once scientists were able
Speaker 1: to analyze genomic evidence from archaeological sites, they quickly confirmed
Speaker 1: a trail of genetic kinship stretching from Siberia rather than
Speaker 1: Europe into the Americas. We now suspect that the people
Speaker 1: who ultimately swept into America first spent several thousand years
Speaker 1: on the bearing Land Bridge itself, the so called Baringian standstill,
Speaker 1: apparently awaiting more favorable conditions to move southward. That long
Speaker 1: pause in Beringia may have produced humanity's first domestic cication
Speaker 1: of another animal engaged in their own return to America
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand years ago, gray wolves were abundant in Beringia.
Speaker 1: Since human hunters only ate the fattest parts of the
Speaker 1: animals they killed, they had left over lean portions they
Speaker 1: were willing to share. Some of the wolves had a
Speaker 1: mutation that made them hyper social, and puppies with that
Speaker 1: gene may have been able to bond with humans. There
Speaker 1: probably also were wolf puppies, known today as gifted word
Speaker 1: learning animals capable of picking up human language. By the
Speaker 1: time the two species got to America, humans and their
Speaker 1: tamed wolves had formed a partnership for the rest of history,
Speaker 1: or so goes one theory about dog domestication. Clovis genetics
Speaker 1: are best represented by a male toddler from a twelve thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred year old burial in Montana. He's known as
Speaker 1: the Anzac Child, and he's from a site not far
Speaker 1: from today's Bozeman. The Clovis Child was buried with a
Speaker 1: large cache of artifacts that included eight Clovis points painted
Speaker 1: in red ochre after he played an epic role in
Speaker 1: reconstructing a history of two continents. In twenty fourteen, the
Speaker 1: Onzac Boy was reburied by local tribes in Montana's Shields River,
Speaker 1: near where he had lain for nearly thirteen thousand years.
Speaker 1: While we have no surviving mammoth or mastodon populations to study,
Speaker 1: we do know a good deal about Asian elephant natural history,
Speaker 1: and if this closest living relative of mammos offers clues,
Speaker 1: America's ancient elephants would have been highly intelligent creatures, especially
Speaker 1: acute in what biologists called situational intelligence. Their trunks were
Speaker 1: elephant analogus, who are opposable thumbs with as many as
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty thousand muscle subunits, as ecological keystone
Speaker 1: creatures whose activities shaped landscapes. Mammos and masdons foraged in
Speaker 1: ways that likely transformed American vegetation the way modern elephants
Speaker 1: do in Africa. They traveled their huge ranges with an
Speaker 1: unusually powerful geographic memory, as a recent study of a
Speaker 1: wooly mammos lifetime movements through Alaska seventeen thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: reconstructed by analyzing strontium isotope ratios that reference geography in
Speaker 1: its tusks, now indicate all elephants are what biologists refer
Speaker 1: to as case species, meaning they do not come into
Speaker 1: sexual maturity until they're fifteen years old or older, a
Speaker 1: state brought on by periodic must The pacoderm version of
Speaker 1: sexual heat from insemination to giving birth probably took two years,
Speaker 1: a generational turnover slow enough to make population recovery difficult
Speaker 1: in the face of a new threat, and by the
Speaker 1: time humans were entering America, mammoths, mastodons, and other archaic
Speaker 1: elephant species were already suffering from a background rate of
Speaker 1: extinctions that had been going on for seventy five thousand years.
Speaker 1: But as the Rancho, Librea, Folsome and Clovis sites show,
Speaker 1: elephants and big cats and many other remarkable creatures still
Speaker 1: occupied the ground where we now commute and go to
Speaker 1: sleep in our suburbs. Only they all disappeared quite suddenly
Speaker 1: and mysteriously long long ago. That disappearance is one of
Speaker 1: the most profound ecological and aesthetic events of continental history.
Speaker 1: As Darwin's ally. In The Breakthrough to Understanding Natural Selection
Speaker 1: and Evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, in fact, we present
Speaker 1: day Americans live in a zoological impoverished world from which
Speaker 1: all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared.
Speaker 1: Wallace was using recently in a big history sense. All
Speaker 1: those hugest, fiercest, and strangest animals vanished from America between
Speaker 1: about thirteen thousand and nine thousand years ago. In fact,
Speaker 1: we lost thirty genera and forty species. All of them
Speaker 1: are very largest creatures right down to our present moment.
Speaker 1: These ancient losses make up the most dramatic extinction event
Speaker 1: since humans have been in North America. But science has
Speaker 1: never grouped the so called Pleistocene extinctions with the five
Speaker 1: great planetary extinctions of Earth history. It's different from all
Speaker 1: of those, which were global extinguished life on both land
Speaker 1: and in the oceans, and showed no size bias in
Speaker 1: the creatures they marked for disappearance. The Pleistocene losses didn't
Speaker 1: happen in oceans in Africa or in Southern Asia. They
Speaker 1: devastated life on Earth only in Eurasia, North America, South
Speaker 1: America and Australia. Something very odd seemed to be unfolding
Speaker 1: in specific parts of the planet during the late Pleistocene,
Speaker 1: but there is a common thread. Those were all places
Speaker 1: where human predators out of Africa seeking out large animals
Speaker 1: to hunt, were arriving for the first time. The Pleistocene extinctions,
Speaker 1: in other words, looked very much like the first act
Speaker 1: of the anthroposcene, the beginnings of what we now called
Speaker 1: the sixth Extinction. This has been a prelude to introducing
Speaker 1: you to a scientist who was able to imagine how
Speaker 1: this might have happened. Paul Martin, who passed away in
Speaker 1: twenty ten, was one of the country's late twentieth century
Speaker 1: intellectual giants. He was also lucky enough to have a
Speaker 1: brand new tool to play with, radiocarbon dating, invented in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty six by Willard Libby, who won the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize for it. That new tool, almost overnight allowed an
Speaker 1: understanding of something very crucial about the Pleistocene extinctions. When
Speaker 1: did the various animals disappear? Exactly, and how did the
Speaker 1: arrival of humans in America line up with those dates.
Speaker 1: I got to meet Martin at a point in his
Speaker 1: career when he seemed to bear a resemblance to a
Speaker 1: target at a shooting range. At a time when politics
Speaker 1: and many university departments embraced the idea of ancient peoples
Speaker 1: as ecological examples for the modern world, there were those
Speaker 1: who saw Martin's argument that early humans were responsible for
Speaker 1: extinctions as politically incorrect. The popular Native American writer Vine
Speaker 1: Deloria Junior was vitriolic in his condemnation of Martin, which
Speaker 1: I could tell mortified and baffled the paleobiologists. Between eighteen
Speaker 1: thousand and twelve thousand years ago, the Solutrean culture had
Speaker 1: similarly wiped out Europe's remaining Plecesne creatures. Clovis and Folsom
Speaker 1: were not Indian stories, Martin insisted, they were big history
Speaker 1: human stories. Martin and I arranged to get together on
Speaker 1: his visit to the University of Montana, where I taught.
Speaker 1: After two days of wide ranging conversations, I began to
Speaker 1: think about Martin in the manner of a Stephen Hawking.
Speaker 1: When his body had slowed from Polio. His vast energy
Speaker 1: had lit a turbocharger that accelerated his mind. The crux
Speaker 1: of the Pleistocene story Martin told me was that North
Speaker 1: America was a continental island remote from the evolution of humans,
Speaker 1: and when we finally arrived in numbers in the form
Speaker 1: of the Clovisians, the well known slaughter humans had made
Speaker 1: on island biologies all over the world came to America.
Speaker 1: We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs
Speaker 1: and fire and baggage like rats. The predation we engaged
Speaker 1: in changed local ecologies so substantially that animals evolved in
Speaker 1: our absence couldn't survive once we arrived. I realized Martin
Speaker 1: was giving me a command performance of his Planet of
Speaker 1: Doom theory, a modern version now buttressed with science, history
Speaker 1: and details. As Martin put it in his two thousand
Speaker 1: and six Twilight of the Mammos, I argue that virtually
Speaker 1: all extinctions of wild animals in the last fifty thousand
Speaker 1: years are anthropose. By the time the destruction was over,
Speaker 1: only a handful of America's biggest animals remained, and those
Speaker 1: were either European or Asian like caribou or bison that
Speaker 1: had prior experience with humans, or they were native ones
Speaker 1: like pronghorns that carried so little fat they offered little
Speaker 1: inducement for hunters. Otherwise, the Clovisians erased millions of years
Speaker 1: of evolution. In two thousand and one, independently of Martin,
Speaker 1: an Australian paleobiologist at the Smithsonian, John Alroy developed a
Speaker 1: computer model to test this American extinction story. Alroy's computer's
Speaker 1: modeled an absolutely classic ecological release by fifteen hundred years
Speaker 1: after the human arrival, accepting a few scattered remnants hunters
Speaker 1: had overlooked, but were now too separated to exchange their
Speaker 1: genes and dying out from lack of genetic diversity. Seventy
Speaker 1: five percent of America's Pleistocene bestiari had been gutted. Alroy's
Speaker 1: computer model predicted the extinction or survival of thirty two
Speaker 1: of forty one Clovis prey species. He concluded, long before
Speaker 1: the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for
Speaker 1: a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe. Southeast
Speaker 1: of present day Tucson along the Santa Cruz River, there
Speaker 1: are three famous Clovis sites, you suspect and long ago
Speaker 1: Clovis Lord. This may have been a legendary event, or
Speaker 1: given that many similar stories follow it in the historical
Speaker 1: record of America, maybe what transpired here wasn't legendary at all,
Speaker 1: just the way things were done. What seems to have
Speaker 1: happened is that at the most westerly location now call
Speaker 1: the Leaner site, a Clovis band surrounded a family group
Speaker 1: of fifteen mammoths. The herd apparently huddled together for defense
Speaker 1: against the assault, but thirteen of them, all adolescents and calves,
Speaker 1: died in the spot. Archaeologists found exactly thirteen Clovis points
Speaker 1: in their remains, but it must not have been an
Speaker 1: easy thing. In different locations a few miles away, the
Speaker 1: Escapool and Naco sites, archaeologists found two adult mammoths who
Speaker 1: had apparently fled the slaughter. The large male had died
Speaker 1: with two Clovis points in his body, but the female
Speaker 1: must have put up a tremendous fight to protect her
Speaker 1: young before mortally wounded. She had fled, and her remains
Speaker 1: there were no fewer than eight embedded Clovis points. The
Speaker 1: hunters who killed those mammoths appeared to have been absolute professionals.
Speaker 1: Our best strategy for understanding America's pleistocenic distinctions may be
Speaker 1: on an animal by animal basis. Clovis hunters almost certainly
Speaker 1: wiped out the elephants and folsome people the giant bison,
Speaker 1: but animals like dire wolves, giant beavers, and big cats
Speaker 1: may have simply been out competed by gray wolves and
Speaker 1: modern beavers and cougars. Smaller size and earlier sexual maturity
Speaker 1: fitted the replacements better for an America now inhabited by
Speaker 1: human predators. The first examples on the continent for what
Speaker 1: biologists called anthropogenic evolution. Horses and camels do remain enigmas.
Speaker 1: Sites of Clovis age in southern Alberta and Colorado show
Speaker 1: horse and camel kills, but nothing like the vast number
Speaker 1: of horses from Solutrean sites in Europe. And why did
Speaker 1: various camelids survive in South America, providing later native people
Speaker 1: domestic possibilities, but not farther north. As for the Clovisians themselves,
Speaker 1: they remained maddenly elusive. They are us, of course, but
Speaker 1: it's difficult even to know your recent relatives at all.
Speaker 1: You have to go on are their tools and diet preferences.
Speaker 1: We know that with the fluted point, a purely American
Speaker 1: invention not found in Siberia, their thinkers had solved the
Speaker 1: ancient technology hurdle of affixing points solidly to wooden spears
Speaker 1: or darts. We also know that they were consumer connoisseurs
Speaker 1: of the best the world had to offer. Clovis artisans
Speaker 1: fashion their toolkit from the hardest, sharpest, most vividly colored
Speaker 1: flints and church in North America whose outprops existed as
Speaker 1: a geographic atlas in their heads. They journeyed hundreds of
Speaker 1: miles to those sources, as if on quests special magic.
Speaker 1: Some of their tool caches featured multiple gorgeous, unused points
Speaker 1: of eight to nine inches in leaked with sacred red
Speaker 1: ochre still adhering to them. One Clovis mystery has always
Speaker 1: been why no art? Why nothing? Like the grand paintings
Speaker 1: of animals on the cave walls of Chauvet, Lasco and
Speaker 1: Alzamira in Europe, there are pebbles in size with crosshatching.
Speaker 1: There's an elephant carved into a piece of ivory. Otherwise
Speaker 1: we had no hints what they thought of the animals
Speaker 1: they hunted, of America, of their lives in general. That
Speaker 1: may be changing with a new twenty nineteen to twenty
Speaker 1: twenty investigation of the rock art of a region in
Speaker 1: the Colombian Amazon known as Sarania La Lindosa. But we'll
Speaker 1: have to wait to see if the images there really
Speaker 1: are Clovis or fulsome ones. One recent theory is that
Speaker 1: the Clovisians may have been a Northern Hemisphere wild type,
Speaker 1: a group of hyper aggressive Siberian vikings. According to modern science,
Speaker 1: a high fat diet is a strong trigger for enhanced testosterone.
Speaker 1: But who they were really is us. My twenty three
Speaker 1: ande meters profile shows three percent of my genes are
Speaker 1: Native Americans, a common figure for those of us whose
Speaker 1: European ancestors arrived in America three hundred or more years ago.
Speaker 1: Clovis heredity is within us. The Clovis story resonates because
Speaker 1: we imagine them as ancient versions of ourselves, explorers of
Speaker 1: hidden continents, the last of the masterful hunters of enormous animals,
Speaker 1: the culmination of forty thousand generations of hunters. They must
Speaker 1: have had a sense of that timeless tradition But to me,
Speaker 1: the biggest question is this, what did they think? What
Speaker 1: did they do when so many of the animals they
Speaker 1: lived among began to disappear, to dwindle to a last
Speaker 1: few scattered survivors until there were none. What they faced
Speaker 1: is mirrored by our own twenty first century circumstances. Like
Speaker 1: us then lived as their ancestors did, and no doubt
Speaker 1: had every expectation that the world would continue as it
Speaker 1: always had, and so long as there was a Siberia
Speaker 1: or a Baringia or an America out there, it did.
Speaker 1: But Earth proved finite, and so did its animals, much
Speaker 1: as we are doing today. The Clovisians ran into a
Speaker 1: wall of limits.
Speaker 3: When I think about certain areas of inquiry, I think
Speaker 3: that in a lot of spaces there's room for huge discoveries,
Speaker 3: meaning we can find life on another planet. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: there could be huge medical you know, you can picture
Speaker 3: where we have some medical breakthrough and like increased life
Speaker 3: expectancy by twenty five percent or fifty percent, Like I
Speaker 3: wouldn't be shocked. But do you feel that our our
Speaker 3: understanding of pre human and early human North America is
Speaker 3: like down to the details now, like it's kind of
Speaker 3: all there, it's just details.
Speaker 1: Well, I tend to think that there are some big
Speaker 1: discoveries yet to be made.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, I will say that the advent of genomic research,
Speaker 1: you know, on human remains all over the world is
Speaker 1: telling us a lot of stuff that we've never known before.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the modern version of you know,
Speaker 1: radiocarbon dating in the nineteen fifties and stuff. We've now
Speaker 1: got a way to analyze human remains that is giving
Speaker 1: us a sense of how people spread around the world
Speaker 1: and what connections they had with one another. So my
Speaker 1: guess is, and you know, it's probably a pretty easy
Speaker 1: thing to guess, is that there's got to be something
Speaker 1: big out there, and it's likely to involve something technological
Speaker 1: like those two where you have a sudden breakthrough and
Speaker 1: it's possible to do something you've not been able to
Speaker 1: do before.
Speaker 3: I mean, you find somewhere in South America, you find
Speaker 3: a genetic marker from twelve thousand years ago, and it
Speaker 3: doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: It doesn't make sense, and you have to and people
Speaker 1: have to explain it, you know, and it may take
Speaker 1: a while. It takes science often a lot of time
Speaker 1: to explain things, and there are a lot of kind
Speaker 1: of false leads and ideas that are put out there
Speaker 1: that don't last. I mean that's just the way you know,
Speaker 1: human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, works. But yeah, I think
Speaker 1: there's going to be you know, we're going to know
Speaker 1: in the case of the pleciscene extinctions, I think in
Speaker 1: another thirty or forty years, there's going to be something,
Speaker 1: some kind of technological breakthrough that enables us to suddenly
Speaker 1: know a lot more about this than we've known. I mean,
Speaker 1: one to me is the is, you know, the our
Speaker 1: sudden realization that a lack of genetic diversity can be
Speaker 1: pretty murderous on a on a species, because if you
Speaker 1: start separating a population out so it's not possible for
Speaker 1: them to breed anymore and exchange genes, they become they
Speaker 1: become weak. I mean, there are instances where you know,
Speaker 1: it's impossible for them to reproduce, and so I think
Speaker 1: all of that that's another variation obviously of the genetic revolution.
Speaker 1: But I think all those things point to some new
Speaker 1: breakthrough in the future that's you know, it's going to
Speaker 1: be fun to see.
Speaker 3: I mean, I of things like that, and I'm glad
Speaker 3: to hear this, because I was starting to worry that
Speaker 3: it was going to get boring. These questions were going
Speaker 3: to get boring as things just got more like here's
Speaker 3: the story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I don't think they're going to get boring.
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be it's going to be fun,
Speaker 1: and we're going to still be interested. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: just like all of us are still interested in this.
Speaker 1: I mean, none of us is really trained in the
Speaker 1: fields of paleold biology or anything like that, but we
Speaker 1: find it fascinating to want to understand how this happened,
Speaker 1: and uh, we want to know more about ourselves, and
Speaker 1: that's what a lot of this is about.
Speaker 3: Do you remember the writer, Uh, he's very fun. Any guy,
Speaker 3: the writer Jack hit Oh yeah, yeah. He once observed
Speaker 3: he was taught about that he has a hard time
Speaker 3: taking palaeontology seriously because it was a discipline that he
Speaker 3: found the most knowledge about it was held by thirteen
Speaker 3: year olds. He's talking about dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's true. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3: And this is a feel like this stuff like like
Speaker 3: ice age. America is definitely a hobbyist RealD you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, there's a lot of room for hobbyists right, like, like,
Speaker 3: I'm a hobbyist. There's a lot of room for hobbyists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that's right.
Speaker 3: You can stay up breast, you know, you can stay
Speaker 3: abreast of the subject.
Speaker 2: I think what's what's there's sort of a tension in
Speaker 2: this subject for me between like when you describe people
Speaker 2: seeking out a new frontier or moving across the landscape
Speaker 2: and being you know, drawn in by certain topographical features.
Speaker 2: It's something that reson with me, and I find it
Speaker 2: sort of part of the human condition. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: there's certain things about these people that are totally unknowable,
Speaker 2: Like you know, even with all of the technological advances
Speaker 2: we have ahead of us, we don't have their voices,
Speaker 2: and we don't even know what their voices sounded like,
Speaker 2: you know. And so whenever I'm playing with this subject
Speaker 2: in my mind, I always get stuck on that sort
Speaker 2: of contradiction between what's very familiar and what is and
Speaker 2: will probably always remain totally alien.
Speaker 1: Well, that part probably will remain completely alien. I mean
Speaker 1: we call you know, we have named these paleol cultures
Speaker 1: in North America, things like Folsome and plain View and Clovis,
Speaker 1: and those are all names of towns near which paleontological
Speaker 1: and archael logical sites were found. I mean, we have
Speaker 1: no idea what they called themselves. They for sure probably
Speaker 1: didn't call themselves Clovisians, you know, or Fulsomites or whatever
Speaker 1: the fulsome term for the people would be. I mean
Speaker 1: they So we don't know that, and we're very likely
Speaker 1: not ever to know that. What I am still a
Speaker 1: little disappointed by, and I'm hoping that this side in
Speaker 1: South America pans out as a as an actual rock
Speaker 1: imagery site for clovis In fulsome is the lack of art,
Speaker 1: especially in comparison to Western Europe, where there's there are
Speaker 1: all these marvelous cave paintings that I mean tell you
Speaker 1: so much about. I mean, they're One of the pieces
Speaker 1: I read when I was researching Well in the World
Speaker 1: was about how the artists at chove A Cave got
Speaker 1: the rhythm of the foot footprints, the feet hitting the
Speaker 1: ground of quadrupeds exactly right. And this particular article said
Speaker 1: it wasn't until the eighteen nineties that modern painters were
Speaker 1: able to get the rhythm of how horse hoofs hit
Speaker 1: the ground when they were running at the same level
Speaker 1: of expertise that these guys did fifteen sixteen thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: and so that's very exciting and tells us a little
Speaker 1: bit about those people. And it's just disappointing that, you know,
Speaker 1: we have nothing like that in North America.
Speaker 3: I'll correct my kids now and then where they'll talk
Speaker 3: about they'll say when cave people were here, and I'll say,
Speaker 3: be careful, because it seems like what you're imagining, like
Speaker 3: it seems like the Ice age people that were here
Speaker 3: didn't have a real affinity for caves.
Speaker 1: Well they probably had, ye.
Speaker 3: They weren't like, they weren't like they're not quite contemporaries.
Speaker 3: But what was happening here twelve thirteen thousand years ago
Speaker 3: was a very similar lifestyle in Western Europe thirty thousand
Speaker 3: years ago. And there are parallels, but there also seems
Speaker 3: to be differences. Like you're saying, like, where's all the
Speaker 3: cave art?
Speaker 1: Yeah, where's the art? And I mean, and it's interesting
Speaker 1: to me since you brought that up that the first
Speaker 1: archaeologists in North America who were looking for evidence of
Speaker 1: human antiquity here looked in caves. They went to places
Speaker 1: like Carlsbad and stuff and looked in caves because this
Speaker 1: was the I mean, they were thinking by analogy, this
Speaker 1: was the example they had in Western Europe, this is
Speaker 1: where these people are, and so they were looking in
Speaker 1: places like Carlsbad caverns for evidence that early humans in
Speaker 1: North America would have done the same kind of thing.
Speaker 1: And of course, accidentally, on the way back, a guy
Speaker 1: by the name of Edgar Hewett, on the way back
Speaker 1: from one of those expeditions happened to go past the
Speaker 1: Clovis site and had some cowboys say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: we've been finding these kind of strange looking a lot
Speaker 1: urge two like objects here on the ground. No caves
Speaker 1: anywhere around, but they're just kind of lying out here on.
Speaker 3: The plains on what was a wetland.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what was a wetland? And you know, no caves
Speaker 1: around anywhere. So it's kind of one of those ways.
Speaker 1: I think that the people of antiquity, the paleo hunters
Speaker 1: in particular in North America, are pretty damn distinctive from
Speaker 1: the people in Western Europe, And in this particular case,
Speaker 1: I wish the distinction weren't so great, because I would
Speaker 1: love to be able to find some art that they
Speaker 1: did but so far not much.
Speaker 2: Along the lines of like preconceived notions that people have
Speaker 2: when they sort of look at this era of prehistory
Speaker 2: as just sort of one block and then all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, you know, the Stone Age goes to the
Speaker 2: the Bronze Age, something like that. I think one of
Speaker 2: the things that you've always opened my eyes to is
Speaker 2: paying attention to these advancements in technology, which I think
Speaker 2: most people wouldn't think of them as technology. But you know,
Speaker 2: we were just looking at stone points at the Archaeological
Speaker 2: Repository and Laramie, and you look at the level of
Speaker 2: artistry and mastery in these in these objects, and it
Speaker 2: very much is like a technology. It's not like these
Speaker 2: people were trapped in some era, right, there's this there's
Speaker 2: this long history that's played out in just the material
Speaker 2: objects that they leave behind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and you know, things that to us
Speaker 1: do not look particularly significant, like the flute on the
Speaker 1: sides of Clovis and fulsome points. I mean that you
Speaker 1: can almost miss that when you look at those points,
Speaker 1: but that very clearly was a major technological innovation because
Speaker 1: it finally allowed the you're fastening of a point to
Speaker 1: a dart an add addle dart or a spear, and
Speaker 1: so it was. It was one of those human genius
Speaker 1: breakthroughs where someone realized, if I just you know, make
Speaker 1: a flute, make an indentation running down each side of
Speaker 1: this point, I can now secure my adlett dart to
Speaker 1: it and it won't pop off upon hitting an animal.
Speaker 1: It will stay secure and penetrate through the skin. And
Speaker 1: that's kind of you know, as I said, it's not
Speaker 1: something that you look at and go wow, this is
Speaker 1: like the invention of the model T. Nonetheless, Yeah, for
Speaker 1: these people, it effectively was a huge leap forward. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I want to return for a minute to a comment
Speaker 3: you made about as the picture becomes clear or the
Speaker 3: picture changes about this error we're discussing that you look
Speaker 3: too technological enhancements, technological improvements which might upend some of
Speaker 3: our notions.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: After you said that, it made me think about a
Speaker 3: conversation I had with an anthropologist who focused on the
Speaker 3: like the prices scene Holocene transition at Colorado State, and
Speaker 3: I was kind of saying to him in a discussion,
Speaker 3: I was kind of saying to him like, well, as
Speaker 3: we find more sites, it'll get clearer. And he's really
Speaker 3: pessimistic about about that about sites. I'm like, well, you know,
Speaker 3: some guy building the road and he's like, how many
Speaker 3: roads have we built? I mean, like, look at all
Speaker 3: the roads we built, Look at all the farm fields
Speaker 3: we cleared, and we have a handful. Like I don't
Speaker 3: think increasing road building, you know, at the at the
Speaker 3: decrease rate that we're building roads and clearing fields that
Speaker 3: I don't think it's going to be that it's new sites.
Speaker 3: You know, he really wasn't optimistic about finding crazy sites.
Speaker 3: I think that what I think that we've kind of
Speaker 3: found what is there to find, you know, barring some
Speaker 3: unforeseen thing. But I think that I don't think you
Speaker 3: can go and say the same thing about South America, right,
Speaker 3: especially all that like like areas that are heavily forested
Speaker 3: and jungle areas, like places that haven't been through like
Speaker 3: our dust bowl when we had a good chance to
Speaker 3: see the western landscape stripped clean of top soil and vegetation, Like,
Speaker 3: there could be some amazing stuff laying there. Yeah, it
Speaker 3: rots quicker, but it could be there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it could be. And I mean, you know, and
Speaker 1: so Lidar, I suppose at this stage of the game,
Speaker 1: I mean that's certainly a technological breakthrough. This enable to
Speaker 1: discovery of all sorts of new particularly buildings mayan structures
Speaker 1: that are suddenly now visible from above in a way
Speaker 1: that they never are on the ground but lightar's, as
Speaker 1: far as I am aware of it, it probably is
Speaker 1: not fine grained enough to do something like the sort
Speaker 1: of archaeological sites that that you're talking about, but I
Speaker 1: kind of wouldn't think so now I tend to agree
Speaker 1: with the anthropologists you were talking to. I think we've
Speaker 1: got the sites. I think what we probably can improve
Speaker 1: the interpretation of those sites with is going to be
Speaker 1: something like these big leaps forward we had with radiocarbon dating,
Speaker 1: which was you know, that was a huge game changer
Speaker 1: seventy five years ago, and now the genomic revolution, the
Speaker 1: genetic revolution, which is another enormous game changer for all
Speaker 1: kinds of things, including these sort of extinctions from the
Speaker 1: Pleistocene Holocene boundary. So I think it's going to be
Speaker 1: something like that. I don't know exactly what it is,
Speaker 1: but it's probably going to be something that subtenly enables
Speaker 1: us to interpret what we have in a way we've
Speaker 1: not been able to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think what we're talking about here a lot
Speaker 2: is how we can change your understanding of this subject
Speaker 2: looking forward. But I also wonder if you can look
Speaker 2: backward at your own career, just in your lifetime, how
Speaker 2: much has changed in terms of knowledge about this subject,
Speaker 2: and also how conversations have evolved over time.
Speaker 1: Well, I would say, you know, I mean, I may
Speaker 1: look as if I come from the early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: but I'm actually more a mid twentieth century artifact. And
Speaker 1: so I was born at about the time that radiocarbon
Speaker 1: dating won the Nobel Prize for a guy, and I
Speaker 1: have not I will say that during the sixties and
Speaker 1: especially the seventies, the late seventies, when I was in
Speaker 1: graduate school, there was a strong disinclination to believe that
Speaker 1: humans had played much of a role at all. And
Speaker 1: what it reminded is, i've looked back on it now,
Speaker 1: it reminds me of the sort of reluctance that a
Speaker 1: lot of people feel about climate change. It's that humans
Speaker 1: couldn't have done that. We couldn't have done that. I mean,
Speaker 1: a bunch of animals became extinct. That had to have
Speaker 1: been climate That had to have been a comet strike
Speaker 1: that had to have been something other than humans, because
Speaker 1: I mean, there's just no way that's not possible. People
Speaker 1: armed only with ad adomles and spears and so forth
Speaker 1: could not do those sorts of things, And that of
Speaker 1: course played into and went along with this sensibility back
Speaker 1: in those same years where we were kind of in
Speaker 1: a way first discovering native ecology and indigenous knowledge about
Speaker 1: the world, and we were of course looking for some examples,
Speaker 1: looking desperately for some examples of human beings to say,
Speaker 1: these people did it right, here's the way you do it.
Speaker 1: We're not on the right track, we're doing it wrong,
Speaker 1: but they did it correctly. And of course, arguing that
Speaker 1: you know, early arrivals in North America like Clovis and
Speaker 1: fulsome people may have wiped out species that ran against
Speaker 1: that sentiment that, well, we're trying to find in the
Speaker 1: past some humans who really lived well on the environment,
Speaker 1: and so that change I think sometime I don't know,
Speaker 1: probably in the early two thousands, when after one kind
Speaker 1: of alternative explanation after another was advanced and none of
Speaker 1: them really seemed to work. They never did manage to
Speaker 1: convince many people. I mean, you know, Ross McFee of
Speaker 1: the American Museum and Natural History advanced. Well, maybe some
Speaker 1: new disease swept through North America and killed everything. Well,
Speaker 1: of course there was no candidate disease. And then the
Speaker 1: other problem was, most diseases don't kill everything. I mean,
Speaker 1: they usually leave some piece of a population that often
Speaker 1: rebuilds with immunity. I mean, all of us are examples
Speaker 1: of Old World diseases that killed many of those that
Speaker 1: our ancestors survived and allowed us to be born today.
Speaker 1: So alternative explanations have not so far really worked. And
Speaker 1: what I've kind of been noticing in the last ten
Speaker 1: or fifteen years has been a kind of a reluctant
Speaker 1: I would say, reluctant, but still a sort of a
Speaker 1: growing consensus that the human arrival in North America still
Speaker 1: seems to be the best explanation we have for what
Speaker 1: happened to all those animals. And what I ended up
Speaker 1: arguing in Wild New World is that I think, you know,
Speaker 1: we talk a lot about the sixth extinction today. I
Speaker 1: think the six extinction started thirty five thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: I mean when human started spreading around the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just in contrast to an asteroid strike
Speaker 1: which wipes out seventy five percent of Earth's life in
Speaker 1: a matter of a few weeks. This has just been
Speaker 1: a thirty five thousand sort of slow motion extinction that's
Speaker 1: been going on for a very very long time, and
Speaker 1: so it's good for us to be alarmed about a
Speaker 1: six extinction. I just sometimes try to point out to
Speaker 1: people I think this has actually been happening for a
Speaker 1: long time.
Speaker 3: I recently had a discussion with an attorney who's Native
Speaker 3: American and he works in repatriation, and his particular focus
Speaker 3: is on getting the remains of his ancestors back from museums. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I said to him, I said, would you ever strike
Speaker 3: a deal where they get a gram of each of
Speaker 3: those bones and then you get the bones back? And
Speaker 3: he said, we would never even consider something like that.
Speaker 3: I don't expect you to answer this, but like, what
Speaker 3: would be some things that you consider when you think
Speaker 3: of the tension around a desire to study apply modern
Speaker 3: analytics to human remains, and where that rubs against cultural
Speaker 3: sensitivities about playing with remains of someone that you rightfully
Speaker 3: or wrongfully consider to be your ancestor, even if you're
Speaker 3: separated by nine thousand and ten thousand years from them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really like what kind.
Speaker 3: Of things bounce around in your head. I'm not asking
Speaker 3: you to say what we ought to do, but like,
Speaker 3: how do you even approach that?
Speaker 1: Right? Well, what, here's what I kind of suspect. I
Speaker 1: think we're living through a moment, and I think the
Speaker 1: moment has been caused by the previous lack of respect
Speaker 1: that so many bone merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth
Speaker 1: and twentieth centuries brought to the game of archaeology, where
Speaker 1: they paid not the slightest attention to the desires wants
Speaker 1: of the local people, who very well could be connected
Speaker 1: to the ruins or the excavations that they're doing on
Speaker 1: human remains. And so what I think is that we're
Speaker 1: experiencing a moment that's kind of a backlash against that.
Speaker 1: And I tend to be one of these kind of
Speaker 1: people who thinks that, you know, we're really kind of
Speaker 1: all the same, actually, and what we're interested in is
Speaker 1: the human story, the big story of all of us,
Speaker 1: which is why I'm intrigued by humans coming out of Africa,
Speaker 1: spreading through Asia, coming to North America, going to South America,
Speaker 1: and I know that people get hung up on the
Speaker 1: idea of Okay, this particular culture has this view of
Speaker 1: how the world should be conducted and how scientific research
Speaker 1: could be conducted. But I am very much interested in
Speaker 1: the big story of humanity, and I think ultimately most
Speaker 1: people are interested in that. And so I think when
Speaker 1: we get past this moment where we're sort of boomeranging
Speaker 1: from centuries where we had no respect for the remains
Speaker 1: of these people, that in another who knows how long,
Speaker 1: but in another century. In fact, I know need of
Speaker 1: people who have already reached this position where they too
Speaker 1: are intrigued and interested and they want to know. And
Speaker 1: so I think that at some point in the future,
Speaker 1: I don't know how far out it is, that there
Speaker 1: will be some relaxing of that kind of reluctance to
Speaker 1: allow science to try to answer some of these great questions.
Speaker 1: I just think it's a you know, the pendulum has
Speaker 1: swung at the moment at a to a degree that
Speaker 1: Native people are they don't want this to happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think it'll swing back. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think on Steve's on Steve's question, there there's implicit
Speaker 2: in that, is this question about the scope of time
Speaker 2: that we're talking about when we talk about people arriving
Speaker 2: in North America and from the place to scene extinctions
Speaker 2: up until just say fifteen hundred, and I wonder if
Speaker 2: you can just sort of put that. I always have
Speaker 2: a hard time wrapping my mind around big time, and
Speaker 2: so I wonder if you can kind of contextualize that
Speaker 2: at what we're talking about versus the broader story of
Speaker 2: humans spreading around the world.
Speaker 1: Well, when I mean, you guys all know this as
Speaker 1: well as I do. But you know, when you're doing history,
Speaker 1: history we always think of history, especially professionally and in
Speaker 1: the academy, we think of that as being something you
Speaker 1: do from written sources. And of course written sources only
Speaker 1: exist for the human story back to about thirty five
Speaker 1: hundred and four thousand years ago, and beyond that we
Speaker 1: have no written stories, and so that sort of implies that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so if you're interested in history, that's the end of it.
Speaker 1: Four thousand years back, you don't have any history anymore.
Speaker 1: There's no way. I'm not satisfied with that, obviously, because
Speaker 1: that's a very small slice of the human story, and
Speaker 1: the human story goes way way farther back in time,
Speaker 1: and so I mean my whole take on something like
Speaker 1: writing that chapter about what I call Native America. After
Speaker 1: the Pleistocene extinctions and the Holycene period began in North America,
Speaker 1: I tried to write a chapter about the next ten
Speaker 1: thousand years, which takes you down to five hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: when Europeans and Old Worlders began arriving in North America.
Speaker 1: I was trying to sort of satisfy my own curiosity
Speaker 1: about that, because I couldn't really find very many people
Speaker 1: who had ventured a guess as to how that story
Speaker 1: had unfolded. And in a book like that, where I
Speaker 1: was interested primarily in the relationship between animals and people,
Speaker 1: I was trying to figure out how did it happen
Speaker 1: that when Europeans get here five hundred years ago, they
Speaker 1: land on a continent that they're so impressed with. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe it's just in comparison to what they had done
Speaker 1: to Europe, but they're really impressed with the biological diversity
Speaker 1: of North America. It's kind of an Eden for the animals.
Speaker 1: And so the question was, how did we get from
Speaker 1: ten thousand years ago down to five hundred years ago?
Speaker 1: Where Native people managed to preserve all that, and that
Speaker 1: presented obviously a lot of a lot of questions to
Speaker 1: try to answer. And I'm sure there'll be people who
Speaker 1: improve on that story that I told, But that was
Speaker 1: kind of my own attempt to do something about the
Speaker 1: Native American story that I didn't see anybody else really
Speaker 1: making a stab at trying to interpret, probably because it's
Speaker 1: too dawning.
Speaker 3: But I think you did a phenomenal job because you
Speaker 3: distilled it down into an observation that here's nine five
Speaker 3: hundred years of history and there's maybe like one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one extinction, one extinction in that time we've done.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the last five hundred years has been a real ripper.
Speaker 1: Yes, and a real ripper, there's no question about it.
Speaker 1: I mean, one piece I read in the National Academy
Speaker 1: of Sciences from about twenty nineteen argued that we have
Speaker 1: sacrificed in the last five hundred years about a half
Speaker 1: a million years of evolved genetics on planet Earth as
Speaker 1: a consequence of all the destruction that we've made to
Speaker 1: creatures around the world. And most of the animals that
Speaker 1: have disappeared have been really charismatic and very common, like
Speaker 1: passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons survived in North America for fifteen
Speaker 1: million years, and they couldn't last three hundred years after
Speaker 1: we got here. So there's certainly been that. And then
Speaker 1: there's that ten thousand year period we were just talking
Speaker 1: about where I could find evidence for only one extinction,
Speaker 1: and that was a flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast.
Speaker 1: But then of course there's the period before that, the Pleistocene,
Speaker 1: where if anything, truction was even on more massive a scale.
Speaker 1: And in that instance, not only do we sacrifice an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of biological diversity and genetics evolved genetics, but
Speaker 1: it was the genetics of most of the really large
Speaker 1: and impressive animals of the globe. And so that's a
Speaker 1: story in other words, that doesn't have it doesn't travel
Speaker 1: just in one direction. It's as if humans realizing, wow,
Speaker 1: we may have really screwed things up, or things got
Speaker 1: screwed up for some reason, because I'm not sure they
Speaker 1: quite understood what had happened, but it seems to have
Speaker 1: produced a kind of a reaction where for nearly ten
Speaker 1: thousand years they are very careful about things. And you know,
Speaker 1: as I said, that's a story that I really had
Speaker 1: to put together because I couldn't find anyone that was
Speaker 1: willing to make to venture a guess about how that
Speaker 1: it all played out, and yet it's obviously a really
Speaker 1: big part of American history.
Speaker 3: Well, Dan, I want to thank you for sitting and
Speaker 3: having this post chat with us.
Speaker 1: You best see. Thanks thanks to both of you guys. Randall,
Speaker 1: you guys were you know, many years ago, uh, terrific
Speaker 1: students in the classes that I taught at the University
Speaker 1: of Montown. It's fun to sit down and do this again.
Speaker 1: What