WEBVTT - Ep. 02: Clovisia the Beautiful 0:00:01.560 --> 0:00:05.760 Humans belonging to Clovis and Folsome cultures entered in America, 0:00:05.880 --> 0:00:10.320 teeming with a remarkable diversity of Africa like creatures, but 0:00:10.440 --> 0:00:15.040 confronted an extinction crisis that was possibly precipitated by their 0:00:15.080 --> 0:00:19.280 own arrival. I'm Dan Florries, and this is the American West, 0:00:21.480 --> 0:00:25.160 brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in Barrel, Velvet 0:00:25.160 --> 0:00:28.360 Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season 0:00:28.400 --> 0:00:31.960 that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports 0:00:32.159 --> 0:00:36.199 backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and 0:00:36.280 --> 0:00:58.840 wildlife enjoy responsibly Clovisia the Beautiful. We hardly know our 0:00:58.880 --> 0:01:02.720 actual beginnings America, even when the stories are set in 0:01:02.760 --> 0:01:06.080 places we recognize. The characters of our deep time history 0:01:06.120 --> 0:01:09.440 can be alien to the point of fantasy. But while 0:01:09.480 --> 0:01:12.360 it may sound unlikely in the twenty twenties, there's no 0:01:12.440 --> 0:01:16.520 place quite like downtown Los Angeles for acquiring some sense 0:01:16.600 --> 0:01:23.199 of how the human story began on the continent. Rancho 0:01:23.280 --> 0:01:27.000 Librea Tarpits, just off Wiltshire Boulevard in the heart of 0:01:27.000 --> 0:01:30.920 a sprawling Pacific coast city, is today the most successible 0:01:30.920 --> 0:01:34.080 place in the country for picturing in the minds eye 0:01:34.480 --> 0:01:37.880 the wild new world migrating humans found when they first 0:01:37.920 --> 0:01:42.080 saw America. True enough, there's a sense of time travel shock, 0:01:42.400 --> 0:01:45.000 having your lift drop you in the middle of swirling, 0:01:45.200 --> 0:01:48.800 honking la traffic, only to stand face to face minutes 0:01:48.880 --> 0:01:53.920 later with Columbian mammos fatally mired in tar, trumpeting their despair. 0:01:54.720 --> 0:01:58.040 Even if the mammoths are robots and their forlorn cries 0:01:58.120 --> 0:02:01.360 don't drown out the traffic, they and Librea and the 0:02:01.400 --> 0:02:05.680 Page Museum still work a kind of magic. Twenty thousand 0:02:05.760 --> 0:02:09.480 years drops away if you let it, because Librea preserves 0:02:09.600 --> 0:02:12.840 tangible remnants of a world at the far ends of 0:02:12.840 --> 0:02:16.919 the earth for ancestors of ours whose migrations had begun 0:02:17.000 --> 0:02:22.200 in Africa. The Page Museum is a working laboratory of paleontology, 0:02:22.320 --> 0:02:26.520 where visitors can watch scientists labor over the site's latest discoveries. 0:02:27.200 --> 0:02:30.560 Many of those are the remains of scavenger predators once 0:02:30.639 --> 0:02:33.920 lured by the cries of snagged mammoths, or the scin 0:02:33.960 --> 0:02:38.840 of decomposing horses, camels, or ground sloths trapped by surface 0:02:39.000 --> 0:02:42.040 tar near what was once a water source and a 0:02:42.160 --> 0:02:46.680 dry landscape. The skulls and tusks of the elephants extracted 0:02:46.680 --> 0:02:50.120 from Librea are impressive, but anyone who tours the museum 0:02:50.400 --> 0:02:53.600 has to admit the most stunning display is the wall, 0:02:54.080 --> 0:02:59.000 backlit and yellow of hundreds of dire wolf skulls. The 0:02:59.080 --> 0:03:03.799 strapping cane. It's indigenous to America, but memorably revived as 0:03:03.880 --> 0:03:07.800 fictional wester ROAs fauna and Game of Thrones left the 0:03:07.840 --> 0:03:13.639 most remains here of any species, eighteen hundred individuals. The 0:03:13.639 --> 0:03:17.240 fossils of hundreds of coyotes, a brawnier version than our 0:03:17.320 --> 0:03:20.680 modern animal, make up the third most common species here, 0:03:21.400 --> 0:03:25.440 But in second place are those ultimate ambush predators of 0:03:25.480 --> 0:03:31.200 the Pleistocene, the western subspecies of sabertooths, heavily built cats 0:03:31.240 --> 0:03:35.560 with a fearsome snake like jaw, gape and enormous fangs. 0:03:37.200 --> 0:03:40.360 The replica skull of a sabertooth from Librea sits a 0:03:40.440 --> 0:03:43.840 few feet away as I write this. Its rapier sharp 0:03:43.960 --> 0:03:47.760 canines capable of tearing open a sloth or mammoth calf, 0:03:48.160 --> 0:03:52.880 gleaming in rich afternoon light, Each fang measures a full 0:03:53.040 --> 0:03:58.080 eight inches from gumline to tip. The vast assemblages of 0:03:58.360 --> 0:04:04.040 hyperconnivore bones at Las joined the skeletal remains of mega herbivores, 0:04:04.400 --> 0:04:11.120 mammoths and macedons, giant bison, pronghorns, lamas, California turkeys, and 0:04:11.240 --> 0:04:16.200 many more. The predator list is lengthier than just wolves, coyotes, 0:04:16.240 --> 0:04:20.200 and sabretooths as well. The cats whose remains have come 0:04:20.200 --> 0:04:24.600 out of the tar include American cheetahs, step lions, and 0:04:24.800 --> 0:04:30.520 giant jaguars. Immense, hyperactive short faced bears twice the weight 0:04:30.600 --> 0:04:34.200 of a grizzly died in the asphalt. So did the 0:04:34.560 --> 0:04:39.159 enormous Miriam's terratorn applies to seeing bird of prey with 0:04:39.279 --> 0:04:44.159 a ten and a half foot wingspan. The remains span 0:04:44.400 --> 0:04:49.279 indigenous creatures spawned by continental evolution and migrants from Asia, 0:04:49.680 --> 0:04:54.839 some ancient to America, some recent arrivals. The mammals and 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:58.839 birds may seem alien are vaguely African, but in fact 0:04:58.960 --> 0:05:08.159 this bestiary was purely classically American, the America of the Pleistocene. 0:05:08.240 --> 0:05:11.640 The Rancho Librea victims that left their bones and skulls 0:05:11.680 --> 0:05:15.679 in Casinar were once representatives of one of the grand 0:05:15.800 --> 0:05:19.840 ecologies of planet Earth. This was a different America than 0:05:19.920 --> 0:05:23.280 most of us conjured. When we imagine the continent Europeans 0:05:23.440 --> 0:05:27.919 found five hundred years ago. But this libreal world wasn't 0:05:28.000 --> 0:05:31.719 like the pre chick Salube age of the dinosaurs absent 0:05:31.760 --> 0:05:36.240 of humans either. Late in the Pleistocene, our human forebears 0:05:36.440 --> 0:05:39.799 joined American ecologies as the newest predator. 0:05:39.880 --> 0:05:40.120 Here. 0:05:40.640 --> 0:05:44.720 These first Americans lived their lives among Librea creatures and 0:05:44.800 --> 0:05:49.120 created the first coast to coast human societies in American history. 0:05:49.800 --> 0:05:53.080 Their presence began to leave the continent, and this rich 0:05:53.240 --> 0:06:06.640 aggregate of impressive animals forever changed. The first time we 0:06:06.720 --> 0:06:09.719 became aware that humans were actually in America during the 0:06:09.760 --> 0:06:13.200 Pleistocene was barely one hundred years ago, and the place 0:06:13.279 --> 0:06:17.599 that happened was along the New Mexico Colorado border. In 0:06:17.640 --> 0:06:20.960 the days following a flood in the dry Cimarron River, 0:06:21.440 --> 0:06:25.640 an African American cowboy named George mcjunkin was riding through 0:06:25.680 --> 0:06:29.600 grassy parkland a few hundred yards below the rim rock 0:06:29.760 --> 0:06:33.680 of a miles long mesa that extended eastward from the 0:06:33.760 --> 0:06:38.240 rocky mountains, checking for ranch fence lines damaged by the flood. 0:06:39.200 --> 0:06:44.520 Suddenly mcjenkin's horse braced its hoofs, furrowing into foot deep 0:06:44.640 --> 0:06:48.040 mud at the edge of a ragged scar. Floodwaters had 0:06:48.120 --> 0:06:51.880 cut into the slope below the Mesa. Mcjenkin leaned out 0:06:51.880 --> 0:06:54.960 of his saddle to peer into a fresh chasm sliced 0:06:55.040 --> 0:06:59.279 into the brown shale. What he saw changed the story 0:06:59.320 --> 0:07:04.400 of America forever. On a similar rainy August day in 0:07:04.480 --> 0:07:08.080 twenty eighteen, some thirty five of us are stepping through 0:07:08.120 --> 0:07:11.480 the lush grass of that same slope as it angles 0:07:11.560 --> 0:07:15.880 up towards the rim rock of Johnson Mesa. We're following 0:07:15.960 --> 0:07:20.200 David Eck, a New Mexico State Lands archaeologist with a 0:07:20.240 --> 0:07:23.760 long ponytail halfway down his back, who is leading us 0:07:23.800 --> 0:07:27.600 towards the very spot where George mcjenkin's horse had pulled 0:07:27.680 --> 0:07:32.000 up one hundred and ten years before. The topography is 0:07:32.080 --> 0:07:37.520 now a grassy, shallow drain called wild Horse Arroyo, and 0:07:37.600 --> 0:07:41.200 as we crowd around its edges, it seems somehow too 0:07:41.280 --> 0:07:44.440 commonplace to be the scene of one of the continent's 0:07:44.480 --> 0:07:50.440 most significant historical finds. Nonetheless, this in the flesh is 0:07:50.520 --> 0:07:57.160 the legendary fulsome archaeological site. What mcjunkin had done about 0:07:57.200 --> 0:08:00.320 where we now stood talking was to spot in the 0:08:00.360 --> 0:08:04.960 flood gashed arroyo bones of an immense size. They turned 0:08:05.000 --> 0:08:08.640 out to be from a herd of bison antiquis, an 0:08:08.680 --> 0:08:13.640 extinct form of giant bison, but the bones themselves weren't 0:08:13.720 --> 0:08:17.840 the pas de raisi sants. At the time, the sciences 0:08:17.880 --> 0:08:21.480 of ethnology and archaeology in the United States were firmed 0:08:21.480 --> 0:08:25.360 that American Indians had arrived in North America only a 0:08:25.440 --> 0:08:30.840 couple thousand years prior to the coming of Europeans. In 0:08:30.920 --> 0:08:34.000 nineteen twenty six, the Black Cowboys plea to have a 0:08:34.080 --> 0:08:38.600 scientist look at his bone pit reached Jesse Figgins, director 0:08:38.679 --> 0:08:42.800 of the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver. Something 0:08:42.800 --> 0:08:46.720 of an amateur himself, Figgins was mostly interested in fossil 0:08:46.760 --> 0:08:50.480 bison that might make exhibits in his museum. His team 0:08:50.559 --> 0:08:53.480 began an excavation of the site in May of nineteen 0:08:53.559 --> 0:08:57.840 twenty six and quickly began finding the skeletal remains of 0:08:58.000 --> 0:09:02.600 bison of a monstrous size. That was exciting enough, but 0:09:02.720 --> 0:09:06.280 in their second season of work, on August twenty ninth, 0:09:06.440 --> 0:09:12.160 nineteen twenty seven, Figgins's crew traveled up Big History pay dirt. 0:09:14.040 --> 0:09:17.040 As David Eck was gesturing to the dimensions of this 0:09:17.240 --> 0:09:21.240 near century old dig in the pocket of my light 0:09:21.360 --> 0:09:25.080 Patagonia jacket, my fingers closed over an object that I 0:09:25.080 --> 0:09:28.679 could fit into my palm. In shape, it was oblate, 0:09:29.200 --> 0:09:33.160 think a flattened football, but with an end bitten off. 0:09:33.960 --> 0:09:37.520 Beneath my fingers, I could feel an irregular surface, made 0:09:37.600 --> 0:09:41.880 so by labor intensive flaking to create a pointed blade 0:09:41.920 --> 0:09:46.240 that dwindled to a remarkably thin base. The delicacy of 0:09:46.240 --> 0:09:51.520 that base was a result of matching flutes skillfully popped 0:09:51.520 --> 0:09:55.480 from the flint on both sides, and that first summer 0:09:55.520 --> 0:09:59.920 of digging, Figginson's paleontologists had on earthed two of these 0:10:00.080 --> 0:10:03.920 points in the loose dirt of the site. Eventually, the 0:10:03.920 --> 0:10:07.800 Denver team would find eight of these stunning fluted points 0:10:07.840 --> 0:10:11.560 scattered amongst the bones. But it wasn't just the bones 0:10:11.760 --> 0:10:15.160 and not the points that made folsome what American Museum 0:10:15.240 --> 0:10:20.760 of Natural History scientists Henry Fairfield Osborne labeled the greatest 0:10:20.880 --> 0:10:25.480 event in American discoveries. When the second season crew at 0:10:25.480 --> 0:10:28.800 Folsom flicked the dirt from the ribs of an extinct bison, 0:10:29.080 --> 0:10:31.360 they were greeted by the sight of one of these 0:10:31.440 --> 0:10:36.600 fluted points embedded to two thirds its length in the bone. 0:10:36.640 --> 0:10:38.680 The bar for proof that humans were part of the 0:10:38.679 --> 0:10:43.280 American places scene had always been an extinct animal, preserving 0:10:43.360 --> 0:10:46.720 evidence that as a living creature, it had been killed 0:10:46.960 --> 0:10:51.680 by human technology. Now outside the tiny berg of Folsom, 0:10:51.760 --> 0:10:57.640 New Mexico, that bar was hurdled. America two had an antiquity. 0:10:58.480 --> 0:11:01.400 How much of an antiquity was still in question because 0:11:01.559 --> 0:11:06.400 radiocarbon dating was yet three decades in the future. Figgins 0:11:06.400 --> 0:11:10.520 claimed the site was four hundred thousand years old. Eventually, 0:11:10.720 --> 0:11:15.520 archaeology and paleontology would agree that on an October day, 0:11:15.880 --> 0:11:19.120 a band of three dozen humans had driven into a 0:11:19.160 --> 0:11:24.240 Box canyon, killed and butchered thirty two giant bison of 0:11:24.280 --> 0:11:28.120 the species Bison antiquis in the spot where I was 0:11:28.200 --> 0:11:32.320 now standing, and they had done this twelve thousand, four 0:11:32.400 --> 0:11:36.439 hundred and fifty years ago. No one knows now what 0:11:36.480 --> 0:11:40.520 these ancient bison hunters call themselves or their weapons. Their 0:11:40.559 --> 0:11:44.640 beautiful fluted points were likely attached to darts thrown by 0:11:44.760 --> 0:11:48.319 at adults or spear throwers. But not knowing much about 0:11:48.320 --> 0:11:52.000 these early Americans didn't prevent the scientists from naming both 0:11:52.080 --> 0:11:56.280 the points and the people Fulsome after the nearby town. 0:12:00.760 --> 0:12:04.360 Yet Fulsome wasn't the book of genesis for America's human history. 0:12:05.280 --> 0:12:09.200 Six years after the Fulsome discovery, there was another dramatic revelation. 0:12:10.040 --> 0:12:12.960 How on the featureless sweeps of the southern Great Plains, 0:12:13.200 --> 0:12:17.400 an ordinary gravel excavation near a tiny farming town named 0:12:17.520 --> 0:12:22.840 Clovis exposed the bones of long extinct American elephants, a 0:12:22.920 --> 0:12:27.360 remarkable twenty eight of them. Science in the reading public 0:12:27.400 --> 0:12:30.920 knew that America had harbored various kinds of giant elephants 0:12:30.960 --> 0:12:34.880 in the deep past, But unlike nineteenth century mastodon finds 0:12:34.920 --> 0:12:38.000 in the East, this time the skeletons were intermixed with 0:12:38.200 --> 0:12:42.559 large five to six inch long projectile points and tools 0:12:42.600 --> 0:12:46.560 of an unknown and apparently even more ancient population than 0:12:46.600 --> 0:12:50.480 the Fulsome people. We now know that even these elephant 0:12:50.559 --> 0:12:54.000 hunters were not the first. What has very recently produced 0:12:54.040 --> 0:12:58.319 certain evidence for even more ancient arrivals in America, likely 0:12:58.360 --> 0:13:03.240 in boats following shoreline out of Asia. Are human footprints 0:13:03.920 --> 0:13:09.320 to be precise sixty one footprints left primarily by children 0:13:09.480 --> 0:13:12.880 or adolescents, in the soft mud of a lake shore 0:13:13.120 --> 0:13:17.520 some twenty three thousand years before the area became New 0:13:17.559 --> 0:13:23.160 Mexico's White Sands National Park. That blockbuster find by a 0:13:23.280 --> 0:13:27.120 park employee in twenty nineteen ultimately drew a team of 0:13:27.200 --> 0:13:31.120 researchers from the US Geological Survey to date the seeds 0:13:31.160 --> 0:13:35.080 of a species of grass crushed by the footprints. Their 0:13:35.160 --> 0:13:38.440 dating indicates a time frame at the height of the 0:13:38.440 --> 0:13:42.400 glacial maximum, when it would have been impossible to come 0:13:42.559 --> 0:13:46.880 overland to America. The human footprints aren't the only tracks 0:13:46.920 --> 0:13:50.800 researchers are finding. There are also mammoth tracks and prints 0:13:50.840 --> 0:13:55.800 of dire wolves and giant ground sloths. In one fascinating interaction, 0:13:56.160 --> 0:13:59.240 the tracks appear to show that a young woman carrying 0:13:59.240 --> 0:14:02.600 a child on her hip, who she occasionally put down, 0:14:03.080 --> 0:14:06.040 walked a stretch of lake shore and returned by the 0:14:06.080 --> 0:14:09.160 same path, which in the interval both a mammoth and 0:14:09.200 --> 0:14:13.480 a ground sloth crossed. The mammoth paid no obvious attention, 0:14:13.840 --> 0:14:17.400 but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs and 0:14:17.480 --> 0:14:21.680 what may have been alarm. So far as we now know, 0:14:22.200 --> 0:14:26.280 only a scant few intrepid souls came to America this early. 0:14:26.720 --> 0:14:30.080 They remind me of Viking visitors to America. A thousand 0:14:30.200 --> 0:14:33.720 years ago, their numbers must have been small, with much 0:14:33.760 --> 0:14:42.480 of America still empty of humans. So ten thousand years later, 0:14:42.680 --> 0:14:45.960 the elephant hunters we now call Clovis made up the 0:14:46.040 --> 0:14:50.840 first human culture to spread across all the Americas, an 0:14:50.920 --> 0:14:55.880 overlan arrival that became a rapidly advancing wave thirteen thousand 0:14:55.960 --> 0:14:59.600 years ago. The rapidity of their spreads suggesting that they 0:14:59.640 --> 0:15:03.320 uncomp hundred few, if any, other human cultures along the way. 0:15:04.360 --> 0:15:08.880 Clovis people occupied every American state from Alaska to Florida 0:15:09.080 --> 0:15:13.200 for more than three centuries until a mature United States 0:15:13.200 --> 0:15:16.560 spread coast to coast. In fact, Clovis stood as the 0:15:16.600 --> 0:15:21.000 sole human culture that once draped across our entire country. 0:15:22.160 --> 0:15:26.800 So for three centuries, a very long time ago, America 0:15:26.840 --> 0:15:31.600 was Clovisia the Beautiful. We are still struggling to understand them. 0:15:32.120 --> 0:15:35.320 They left no oral or written histories of their monarchs 0:15:35.400 --> 0:15:38.800 or any defining events. We have no sense of their 0:15:38.840 --> 0:15:42.680 gods or the philosophies they believed in, or what language 0:15:42.760 --> 0:15:45.960 or family of languages they spoke. We know a great 0:15:45.960 --> 0:15:48.960 deal about their tools, and we're developing a sense of 0:15:49.040 --> 0:15:52.280 them from their bones and more recently, from their genetics, 0:15:52.840 --> 0:15:56.840 but starting thirteen thousand and fifty years ago and lasting 0:15:56.960 --> 0:16:00.280 until twelve thousand, seven hundred and fifty years ago, the 0:16:00.360 --> 0:16:04.160 Clovisians placed their stamp on the country and its animals 0:16:04.440 --> 0:16:08.520 and changed the continent. Their name comes from the place 0:16:08.560 --> 0:16:12.160 where we first became aware of their existence, an ancient 0:16:12.280 --> 0:16:15.800 arroyo on the outskirts of the small town of Clovis, 0:16:15.800 --> 0:16:33.880 New Mexico, on the windswept southern high Plains. Getting in 0:16:33.960 --> 0:16:37.560 close to wild creatures holds a fascination that resonates because 0:16:37.600 --> 0:16:42.640 it taps ancient imperatives still within us. The relationship between 0:16:42.760 --> 0:16:47.520 prey and their predators involves learning curves, and each side 0:16:47.600 --> 0:16:51.000 is very good at the algorithm, but prey do have 0:16:51.080 --> 0:16:55.120 to learn. Numerous examples from around the world testify that 0:16:55.240 --> 0:17:00.320 upon initially encountering humans, many wild creatures did not associate 0:17:00.480 --> 0:17:03.640 us with a threat. There is a term of art 0:17:03.680 --> 0:17:09.040 for this biological first contact. Wild animals had to learn 0:17:09.200 --> 0:17:12.760 to be afraid of us. Many died standing and looking, 0:17:13.119 --> 0:17:18.000 never absorbing the lesson. Finding naive animals that were easy 0:17:18.000 --> 0:17:21.760 for human hunters was a powerful motive for our species 0:17:21.840 --> 0:17:26.040 migrations around the world. But just who were these Clovis 0:17:26.160 --> 0:17:30.240 people who left so many sites across America, more than 0:17:30.320 --> 0:17:35.560 twenty excavated ones so far, including some seventy butchered elephants. 0:17:36.480 --> 0:17:40.040 One recent theory that briefly achieved traction in places like 0:17:40.160 --> 0:17:44.960 National Geographic came from the Smithsonian's Dennis Stanford, who believed 0:17:44.960 --> 0:17:48.760 that the direct ancestors of the Clovist people reached America 0:17:48.800 --> 0:17:52.919 eighteen thousand years ago from Europe. To say that the 0:17:52.960 --> 0:17:58.439 scientific community scoffed at Stanford's across Atlantic ice claims barely 0:17:58.480 --> 0:18:02.480 does justice to the profound skepticism that followed it. While 0:18:02.560 --> 0:18:07.320 Paleolithic hunters in Europe and America did pursue similar megafauna 0:18:07.640 --> 0:18:11.840 and flint points crafted by Western Europe's soul Utrean culture 0:18:12.000 --> 0:18:17.520 superficially resembled Clovis points, other researchers dismissed Stanford's claims that 0:18:17.560 --> 0:18:21.600 the two groups were the same people. Linguistic and genetic 0:18:21.640 --> 0:18:27.720 conclusions have since refuted Stanford's argument. Once scientists were able 0:18:27.800 --> 0:18:32.680 to analyze genomic evidence from archaeological sites, they quickly confirmed 0:18:32.720 --> 0:18:37.320 a trail of genetic kinship stretching from Siberia rather than 0:18:37.359 --> 0:18:41.359 Europe into the Americas. We now suspect that the people 0:18:41.359 --> 0:18:46.240 who ultimately swept into America first spent several thousand years 0:18:46.240 --> 0:18:50.880 on the bearing Land Bridge itself, the so called Baringian standstill, 0:18:51.359 --> 0:18:56.480 apparently awaiting more favorable conditions to move southward. That long 0:18:56.560 --> 0:19:00.400 pause in Beringia may have produced humanity's first domestic cication 0:19:00.600 --> 0:19:04.800 of another animal engaged in their own return to America 0:19:05.160 --> 0:19:09.359 twenty five thousand years ago, gray wolves were abundant in Beringia. 0:19:10.000 --> 0:19:12.879 Since human hunters only ate the fattest parts of the 0:19:12.920 --> 0:19:16.960 animals they killed, they had left over lean portions they 0:19:17.000 --> 0:19:20.040 were willing to share. Some of the wolves had a 0:19:20.119 --> 0:19:24.440 mutation that made them hyper social, and puppies with that 0:19:24.560 --> 0:19:28.240 gene may have been able to bond with humans. There 0:19:28.280 --> 0:19:33.080 probably also were wolf puppies, known today as gifted word 0:19:33.240 --> 0:19:37.840 learning animals capable of picking up human language. By the 0:19:37.920 --> 0:19:41.480 time the two species got to America, humans and their 0:19:41.560 --> 0:19:45.440 tamed wolves had formed a partnership for the rest of history, 0:19:45.920 --> 0:19:54.320 or so goes one theory about dog domestication. Clovis genetics 0:19:54.320 --> 0:19:58.160 are best represented by a male toddler from a twelve thousand, 0:19:58.320 --> 0:20:02.640 eight hundred year old burial in Montana. He's known as 0:20:02.720 --> 0:20:06.040 the Anzac Child, and he's from a site not far 0:20:06.080 --> 0:20:10.159 from today's Bozeman. The Clovis Child was buried with a 0:20:10.320 --> 0:20:14.880 large cache of artifacts that included eight Clovis points painted 0:20:14.920 --> 0:20:18.439 in red ochre after he played an epic role in 0:20:18.600 --> 0:20:22.560 reconstructing a history of two continents. In twenty fourteen, the 0:20:22.600 --> 0:20:27.840 Onzac Boy was reburied by local tribes in Montana's Shields River, 0:20:28.400 --> 0:20:32.840 near where he had lain for nearly thirteen thousand years. 0:20:33.880 --> 0:20:37.639 While we have no surviving mammoth or mastodon populations to study, 0:20:37.680 --> 0:20:41.040 we do know a good deal about Asian elephant natural history, 0:20:41.520 --> 0:20:45.400 and if this closest living relative of mammos offers clues, 0:20:45.800 --> 0:20:50.800 America's ancient elephants would have been highly intelligent creatures, especially 0:20:50.840 --> 0:20:56.880 acute in what biologists called situational intelligence. Their trunks were 0:20:56.880 --> 0:21:00.719 elephant analogus, who are opposable thumbs with as many as 0:21:00.760 --> 0:21:06.320 one hundred and fifty thousand muscle subunits, as ecological keystone 0:21:06.359 --> 0:21:11.760 creatures whose activities shaped landscapes. Mammos and masdons foraged in 0:21:11.840 --> 0:21:16.920 ways that likely transformed American vegetation the way modern elephants 0:21:16.960 --> 0:21:21.159 do in Africa. They traveled their huge ranges with an 0:21:21.240 --> 0:21:25.679 unusually powerful geographic memory, as a recent study of a 0:21:25.720 --> 0:21:31.000 wooly mammos lifetime movements through Alaska seventeen thousand years ago, 0:21:31.040 --> 0:21:37.199 reconstructed by analyzing strontium isotope ratios that reference geography in 0:21:37.280 --> 0:21:42.520 its tusks, now indicate all elephants are what biologists refer 0:21:42.600 --> 0:21:46.080 to as case species, meaning they do not come into 0:21:46.119 --> 0:21:50.320 sexual maturity until they're fifteen years old or older, a 0:21:50.359 --> 0:21:54.520 state brought on by periodic must The pacoderm version of 0:21:54.640 --> 0:21:59.919 sexual heat from insemination to giving birth probably took two years, 0:22:00.320 --> 0:22:05.480 a generational turnover slow enough to make population recovery difficult 0:22:05.600 --> 0:22:08.439 in the face of a new threat, and by the 0:22:08.480 --> 0:22:13.080 time humans were entering America, mammoths, mastodons, and other archaic 0:22:13.119 --> 0:22:17.119 elephant species were already suffering from a background rate of 0:22:17.200 --> 0:22:20.800 extinctions that had been going on for seventy five thousand years. 0:22:23.640 --> 0:22:28.520 But as the Rancho, Librea, Folsome and Clovis sites show, 0:22:28.680 --> 0:22:32.920 elephants and big cats and many other remarkable creatures still 0:22:32.960 --> 0:22:36.520 occupied the ground where we now commute and go to 0:22:36.560 --> 0:22:41.840 sleep in our suburbs. Only they all disappeared quite suddenly 0:22:41.920 --> 0:22:48.200 and mysteriously long long ago. That disappearance is one of 0:22:48.240 --> 0:22:52.879 the most profound ecological and aesthetic events of continental history. 0:22:53.680 --> 0:22:57.720 As Darwin's ally. In The Breakthrough to Understanding Natural Selection 0:22:57.840 --> 0:23:02.760 and Evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, in fact, we present 0:23:02.840 --> 0:23:08.400 day Americans live in a zoological impoverished world from which 0:23:08.480 --> 0:23:13.720 all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared. 0:23:15.480 --> 0:23:19.600 Wallace was using recently in a big history sense. All 0:23:19.680 --> 0:23:24.240 those hugest, fiercest, and strangest animals vanished from America between 0:23:24.280 --> 0:23:28.600 about thirteen thousand and nine thousand years ago. In fact, 0:23:28.840 --> 0:23:33.120 we lost thirty genera and forty species. All of them 0:23:33.240 --> 0:23:37.800 are very largest creatures right down to our present moment. 0:23:38.280 --> 0:23:42.240 These ancient losses make up the most dramatic extinction event 0:23:42.440 --> 0:23:46.680 since humans have been in North America. But science has 0:23:46.760 --> 0:23:50.960 never grouped the so called Pleistocene extinctions with the five 0:23:51.119 --> 0:23:56.000 great planetary extinctions of Earth history. It's different from all 0:23:56.040 --> 0:23:59.800 of those, which were global extinguished life on both land 0:23:59.840 --> 0:24:03.359 and in the oceans, and showed no size bias in 0:24:03.400 --> 0:24:07.840 the creatures they marked for disappearance. The Pleistocene losses didn't 0:24:07.880 --> 0:24:11.880 happen in oceans in Africa or in Southern Asia. They 0:24:11.920 --> 0:24:16.600 devastated life on Earth only in Eurasia, North America, South 0:24:16.640 --> 0:24:22.280 America and Australia. Something very odd seemed to be unfolding 0:24:22.440 --> 0:24:26.200 in specific parts of the planet during the late Pleistocene, 0:24:26.880 --> 0:24:30.720 but there is a common thread. Those were all places 0:24:30.760 --> 0:24:34.960 where human predators out of Africa seeking out large animals 0:24:35.000 --> 0:24:40.120 to hunt, were arriving for the first time. The Pleistocene extinctions, 0:24:40.200 --> 0:24:43.560 in other words, looked very much like the first act 0:24:43.840 --> 0:24:48.199 of the anthroposcene, the beginnings of what we now called 0:24:48.520 --> 0:25:02.800 the sixth Extinction. This has been a prelude to introducing 0:25:02.840 --> 0:25:05.840 you to a scientist who was able to imagine how 0:25:05.840 --> 0:25:09.679 this might have happened. Paul Martin, who passed away in 0:25:09.720 --> 0:25:13.520 twenty ten, was one of the country's late twentieth century 0:25:13.560 --> 0:25:17.520 intellectual giants. He was also lucky enough to have a 0:25:17.560 --> 0:25:22.399 brand new tool to play with, radiocarbon dating, invented in 0:25:22.520 --> 0:25:26.240 nineteen forty six by Willard Libby, who won the Nobel 0:25:26.359 --> 0:25:30.680 Prize for it. That new tool, almost overnight allowed an 0:25:30.760 --> 0:25:35.960 understanding of something very crucial about the Pleistocene extinctions. When 0:25:36.040 --> 0:25:39.919 did the various animals disappear? Exactly, and how did the 0:25:40.080 --> 0:25:43.760 arrival of humans in America line up with those dates. 0:25:45.080 --> 0:25:46.879 I got to meet Martin at a point in his 0:25:47.000 --> 0:25:49.560 career when he seemed to bear a resemblance to a 0:25:49.680 --> 0:25:53.360 target at a shooting range. At a time when politics 0:25:53.400 --> 0:25:57.520 and many university departments embraced the idea of ancient peoples 0:25:57.600 --> 0:26:01.520 as ecological examples for the modern world, there were those 0:26:01.600 --> 0:26:05.480 who saw Martin's argument that early humans were responsible for 0:26:05.600 --> 0:26:11.720 extinctions as politically incorrect. The popular Native American writer Vine 0:26:11.760 --> 0:26:16.440 Deloria Junior was vitriolic in his condemnation of Martin, which 0:26:16.440 --> 0:26:22.000 I could tell mortified and baffled the paleobiologists. Between eighteen 0:26:22.080 --> 0:26:26.160 thousand and twelve thousand years ago, the Solutrean culture had 0:26:26.240 --> 0:26:31.320 similarly wiped out Europe's remaining Plecesne creatures. Clovis and Folsom 0:26:31.400 --> 0:26:35.760 were not Indian stories, Martin insisted, they were big history 0:26:35.960 --> 0:26:39.800 human stories. Martin and I arranged to get together on 0:26:39.880 --> 0:26:43.000 his visit to the University of Montana, where I taught. 0:26:43.800 --> 0:26:47.399 After two days of wide ranging conversations, I began to 0:26:47.440 --> 0:26:50.720 think about Martin in the manner of a Stephen Hawking. 0:26:51.480 --> 0:26:56.159 When his body had slowed from Polio. His vast energy 0:26:56.240 --> 0:27:01.359 had lit a turbocharger that accelerated his mind. The crux 0:27:01.400 --> 0:27:04.760 of the Pleistocene story Martin told me was that North 0:27:04.800 --> 0:27:08.920 America was a continental island remote from the evolution of humans, 0:27:09.240 --> 0:27:12.200 and when we finally arrived in numbers in the form 0:27:12.240 --> 0:27:16.119 of the Clovisians, the well known slaughter humans had made 0:27:16.240 --> 0:27:20.280 on island biologies all over the world came to America. 0:27:21.200 --> 0:27:25.560 We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs 0:27:25.760 --> 0:27:30.440 and fire and baggage like rats. The predation we engaged 0:27:30.480 --> 0:27:35.080 in changed local ecologies so substantially that animals evolved in 0:27:35.160 --> 0:27:39.800 our absence couldn't survive once we arrived. I realized Martin 0:27:39.920 --> 0:27:42.879 was giving me a command performance of his Planet of 0:27:43.000 --> 0:27:47.320 Doom theory, a modern version now buttressed with science, history 0:27:47.320 --> 0:27:50.800 and details. As Martin put it in his two thousand 0:27:50.800 --> 0:27:55.040 and six Twilight of the Mammos, I argue that virtually 0:27:55.119 --> 0:27:58.480 all extinctions of wild animals in the last fifty thousand 0:27:58.560 --> 0:28:03.200 years are anthropose. By the time the destruction was over, 0:28:03.520 --> 0:28:07.520 only a handful of America's biggest animals remained, and those 0:28:07.600 --> 0:28:12.320 were either European or Asian like caribou or bison that 0:28:12.480 --> 0:28:16.320 had prior experience with humans, or they were native ones 0:28:16.480 --> 0:28:20.520 like pronghorns that carried so little fat they offered little 0:28:20.560 --> 0:28:26.960 inducement for hunters. Otherwise, the Clovisians erased millions of years 0:28:27.000 --> 0:28:33.159 of evolution. In two thousand and one, independently of Martin, 0:28:33.520 --> 0:28:38.960 an Australian paleobiologist at the Smithsonian, John Alroy developed a 0:28:39.000 --> 0:28:44.480 computer model to test this American extinction story. Alroy's computer's 0:28:44.600 --> 0:28:50.240 modeled an absolutely classic ecological release by fifteen hundred years 0:28:50.280 --> 0:28:54.400 after the human arrival, accepting a few scattered remnants hunters 0:28:54.440 --> 0:28:57.720 had overlooked, but were now too separated to exchange their 0:28:57.800 --> 0:29:02.280 genes and dying out from lack of genetic diversity. Seventy 0:29:02.320 --> 0:29:07.760 five percent of America's Pleistocene bestiari had been gutted. Alroy's 0:29:07.760 --> 0:29:11.880 computer model predicted the extinction or survival of thirty two 0:29:12.120 --> 0:29:17.880 of forty one Clovis prey species. He concluded, long before 0:29:17.920 --> 0:29:22.160 the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for 0:29:22.280 --> 0:29:29.160 a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe. Southeast 0:29:29.240 --> 0:29:32.920 of present day Tucson along the Santa Cruz River, there 0:29:32.960 --> 0:29:37.160 are three famous Clovis sites, you suspect and long ago 0:29:37.240 --> 0:29:40.440 Clovis Lord. This may have been a legendary event, or 0:29:40.800 --> 0:29:43.760 given that many similar stories follow it in the historical 0:29:43.840 --> 0:29:47.960 record of America, maybe what transpired here wasn't legendary at all, 0:29:48.400 --> 0:29:51.320 just the way things were done. What seems to have 0:29:51.360 --> 0:29:55.040 happened is that at the most westerly location now call 0:29:55.160 --> 0:29:59.200 the Leaner site, a Clovis band surrounded a family group 0:29:59.320 --> 0:30:03.760 of fifteen mammoths. The herd apparently huddled together for defense 0:30:03.880 --> 0:30:08.920