WEBVTT - Ep. 069: Dr. Dan Flores 0:00:08.960 --> 0:00:13.320 This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, 0:00:13.480 --> 0:00:18.360 bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You 0:00:18.400 --> 0:00:27.000 can't predict anything, alright. First off, if you're listening to 0:00:27.040 --> 0:00:28.760 this before you go, do whatever you're gonna do while 0:00:28.800 --> 0:00:32.000 you listen, like drive your car or cooked dinner or something. Um, 0:00:32.120 --> 0:00:37.239 go to on iTunes or on Stitcher what have you, 0:00:37.560 --> 0:00:42.480 and give this here podcast a super good review, because 0:00:42.520 --> 0:00:46.839 that's helpful, real helpful, And it's like testimony to the 0:00:47.760 --> 0:00:52.239 stinginess and cruelty of society that less than one percent 0:00:52.440 --> 0:00:56.320 of the people who listen to this show have gone 0:00:56.400 --> 0:01:01.160 and given it a review on iTunes. In other news, 0:01:01.320 --> 0:01:03.000 we get a lot of people always ask about hats 0:01:03.000 --> 0:01:05.560 and shirts and stuff the merch stores like back up 0:01:05.560 --> 0:01:08.679 and running at the meat eater dot com. And another 0:01:08.720 --> 0:01:11.680 thing that comes up is people are always after they 0:01:11.720 --> 0:01:18.120 listen to shows, um, wondering about books, music ideas that 0:01:18.160 --> 0:01:20.440 were discussed on the show. So but but if you 0:01:20.480 --> 0:01:24.600 go to the metator dot com slash podcasts on the 0:01:24.640 --> 0:01:28.960 same place there that you can read descriptions of the shows. 0:01:29.160 --> 0:01:32.080 We have a thing where it's like show notes, right, 0:01:32.360 --> 0:01:37.679 so you can find links to books ideas articles that 0:01:37.959 --> 0:01:41.360 spring out of that selection is inspired by conversations we have. 0:01:41.400 --> 0:01:43.520 You're on the show because we're constantly getting things that 0:01:43.560 --> 0:01:45.600 people like, Yeah, you guys are talking about some book. 0:01:45.640 --> 0:01:47.160 I didn't really catch what book it was. I don't 0:01:47.160 --> 0:01:48.440 want to listen to the whole damn thing all the 0:01:48.440 --> 0:01:50.080 way over again to figure out what book it was. 0:01:50.280 --> 0:01:52.640 That's the place to go find out stuff like that. 0:01:52.680 --> 0:01:55.840 So the meat eater dot Com slash podcast to find 0:01:55.880 --> 0:01:58.160 that kind of stuff, the merch Store to find all 0:01:58.240 --> 0:02:00.560 kinds of cool stuff. And we got a new media podcast, 0:02:00.560 --> 0:02:04.440 t shirt out and go leave your review, which is 0:02:04.480 --> 0:02:08.200 real helpful. Now watch this segue, get ready, because when 0:02:08.200 --> 0:02:10.560 you go there, you'll find notes about books and whatnot. 0:02:10.600 --> 0:02:12.280 And some of those books are written by our guest, 0:02:12.360 --> 0:02:15.400 Dan Flores, whose house we're in right now. Can I 0:02:15.400 --> 0:02:18.240 see the road you live on? Uh? You almost see? Well, 0:02:18.280 --> 0:02:22.120 you can? I mean, so we're seventeen miles southwest of 0:02:22.240 --> 0:02:26.560 Santa Fe, New Mexico, not in Madrid. Now, we're not 0:02:26.680 --> 0:02:31.000 in uh Madrid, We're not in Syria's uh but kind 0:02:31.000 --> 0:02:35.239 of in the vicinity and within looking distance of what 0:02:35.400 --> 0:02:40.519 might be the oldest mine a turquoise mine, the oldest 0:02:40.560 --> 0:02:46.119 mine in North America. Yeah, very possibly the oldest mine 0:02:46.120 --> 0:02:48.240 and what is now the United States. I mean, we're 0:02:48.280 --> 0:02:50.880 sitting here on the couch looking out the screen door, 0:02:51.040 --> 0:02:55.880 and that mine is in view about four miles away. 0:02:56.320 --> 0:03:04.000 It's called Chalcey wheedle, which is an Aztec word. Um. 0:03:04.040 --> 0:03:09.280 Not that the the Aztec Indians lived here, this was 0:03:09.440 --> 0:03:15.040 Pueblo country, but the Pueblos traded turquoise all the way 0:03:15.040 --> 0:03:19.400 down into Central America, and uh, that turquoise made a 0:03:19.560 --> 0:03:23.320 really big splash among the Aztecs, who have a glyph 0:03:23.400 --> 0:03:26.120 for this little mountain where the mine is in the 0:03:26.160 --> 0:03:29.560 Temple of the Sun in Mexico City or or did 0:03:29.600 --> 0:03:33.240 have it. And so, yeah, this is a pretty major 0:03:33.680 --> 0:03:37.440 site for ancient North American archaeology. What did the what 0:03:37.560 --> 0:03:41.000 did the people here call it? Well, is that not known? Yeah, 0:03:41.000 --> 0:03:43.040 I don't think they don't. I'm not sure what the 0:03:43.080 --> 0:03:46.320 word was that the Pueblo Indians had for. But there 0:03:46.480 --> 0:03:50.520 was a pueblo here about five or six miles away 0:03:50.560 --> 0:03:55.560 that was basically a pueblo of miners responsible for mining 0:03:55.600 --> 0:03:59.520 the turquoise in the Surreos Hills. That pueblo was called 0:03:59.680 --> 0:04:03.600 sam Marcus Pueblo and it was part of the Chaco 0:04:03.840 --> 0:04:08.440 Canyon complex a thousand years ago, and this part of 0:04:08.440 --> 0:04:12.440 the world there was a major civilization that was basically 0:04:12.560 --> 0:04:16.159 orchestrated by a place we now called Choco, which is 0:04:16.200 --> 0:04:19.760 a National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. And it 0:04:19.839 --> 0:04:22.640 had far flung communities all over this part of the world, 0:04:22.640 --> 0:04:25.839 all the way over into Arizona present day Colorado, Utah, 0:04:26.279 --> 0:04:29.760 New Mexico. And this was a mining town that was 0:04:29.839 --> 0:04:33.360 part of that complex. Is it uh? Is it true 0:04:33.360 --> 0:04:35.360 to that Chocko ca. I think he told me this before, 0:04:35.560 --> 0:04:38.640 that it Chaco Canyon in present day. We didn't really 0:04:38.720 --> 0:04:42.480 understand it until you get up above it and aircraft 0:04:43.040 --> 0:04:47.080 and look down on it to understand how it's configured. Yeah, 0:04:47.160 --> 0:04:50.320 I think uh, I mean I might have said something 0:04:50.440 --> 0:04:53.719 like that and some of our conversations from years ago 0:04:53.839 --> 0:04:56.760 when we were in Missoula. And the reason that's the 0:04:56.880 --> 0:05:01.719 case is because what archaeologists have learned about Choco fairly 0:05:01.920 --> 0:05:04.520 recently in the last twenty five or so years, is 0:05:04.520 --> 0:05:08.120 that a lot of the buildings Pueblo Benito, for example, 0:05:08.160 --> 0:05:11.880 which was kind of the Indian version of the Vatican 0:05:12.120 --> 0:05:16.000 really uh in North America thousand years ago. It was 0:05:16.120 --> 0:05:21.760 laid out according to solstices and equinoxes. The sun rises 0:05:22.000 --> 0:05:25.800 over the Chaco Valley at solstice and equinox, and so 0:05:25.880 --> 0:05:29.760 the lines of the buildings were laid out in that way. 0:05:30.160 --> 0:05:33.200 And what archaeologists realized when I mean, I think they 0:05:33.279 --> 0:05:36.280 knew this for quite a while, but looking down on 0:05:36.320 --> 0:05:39.359 it from aerial views, they realized that this is a 0:05:39.400 --> 0:05:43.760 civilization that built an elaborate road network across the Southwest. 0:05:43.920 --> 0:05:46.000 And um, I mean, you can kind of see those 0:05:46.120 --> 0:05:48.440 roads when you're on the ground, when you're over there 0:05:48.520 --> 0:05:51.479 hiking around the cliffs, but you can really see them, 0:05:51.480 --> 0:05:54.840 I think, a lot better from the air. And what 0:05:54.880 --> 0:05:58.520 people realize looking down on the Chaco and Complex from 0:05:58.520 --> 0:06:02.320 the air was that these roads were built, probably for 0:06:02.360 --> 0:06:06.400 religious reasons, just straight as an arrow across the landscape. 0:06:06.600 --> 0:06:10.960 And so unlike modern road engineers who will take roads 0:06:11.000 --> 0:06:16.200 around mountains and follow streams up canyons and things, these 0:06:16.240 --> 0:06:19.920 guys just for whatever the reason, they shot these roads 0:06:20.360 --> 0:06:23.440 straight through the countryside, and if a butte got in 0:06:23.480 --> 0:06:25.760 the way, they just went right over the top of 0:06:25.800 --> 0:06:30.040 it and maintain that straight line. And these were roads 0:06:30.080 --> 0:06:33.600 that were used. I mean people were hauling the vegas, 0:06:33.720 --> 0:06:36.920 the beams that they used to build all these giant 0:06:36.920 --> 0:06:42.919 constructions in Chaco from the Chusca Mountains fifty miles away 0:06:42.960 --> 0:06:47.520 over these roads. And these guys who were basically pissing 0:06:47.680 --> 0:06:52.120 these logs from the mountains, great big Ponderosa pines, who 0:06:52.160 --> 0:06:55.920 are having to go up and down the topography because 0:06:56.000 --> 0:06:59.000 the roads just went straight, and there was probably a 0:06:59.040 --> 0:07:01.719 reason for it. I mean, it wasn't just done because 0:07:01.720 --> 0:07:03.800 that's like the practical way to build a road, because 0:07:03.839 --> 0:07:06.240 it's not practical. No, it's not really practical. I mean 0:07:06.240 --> 0:07:08.760 what you would you know, what animals do and what 0:07:08.800 --> 0:07:11.120 most road engineers to do is you see a beaute 0:07:11.120 --> 0:07:15.160 in front of you, you go around. But so that's 0:07:15.200 --> 0:07:17.400 what Steve, you might have a little of that blood 0:07:17.440 --> 0:07:19.440 in you, because that's kind of the way you hike. YEA. 0:07:19.760 --> 0:07:22.320 Most of us tend to go around and with the 0:07:22.360 --> 0:07:24.720 flow of the landscape, and when you see a beaut 0:07:24.880 --> 0:07:27.960 you're like, oh, just go right up and over it. Yeah, 0:07:27.960 --> 0:07:30.200 that's why they call me the inconsiderate mountain Go higher 0:07:30.720 --> 0:07:34.720 and considerate mountain go hiker. And and Dan, you were 0:07:34.720 --> 0:07:36.600 saying that some of that, so some of the turquoise 0:07:36.640 --> 0:07:39.520 taken out of here. You you're saying that, uh, there 0:07:39.600 --> 0:07:42.080 was awareness of this mind all the way down in 0:07:42.120 --> 0:07:45.760 the Aztec Empire, and that it seems as though, just 0:07:45.840 --> 0:07:51.560 based on faunnel remains, that these guys were getting maccaws 0:07:51.600 --> 0:07:56.880 and things from the jungles and they had those materials 0:07:56.960 --> 0:08:00.440 up here and in turn their rocks their turn turquoise 0:08:01.160 --> 0:08:05.920 was down there. Yeah, it was. It was a luxury 0:08:06.120 --> 0:08:09.200 good trade. I mean, we don't think, you know, of 0:08:09.960 --> 0:08:13.320 native people so much in the context of luxury goods, 0:08:13.400 --> 0:08:15.840 but I mean they were, you know, they were just 0:08:15.920 --> 0:08:19.880 like us. They were motivated by the same human nature 0:08:19.920 --> 0:08:25.720 impulses that we are to express status. And so turquoise, 0:08:25.840 --> 0:08:30.080 both turquoise and the things that the Pueblo people in 0:08:30.160 --> 0:08:35.120 the American Southwest traded farther south for turquoise were all 0:08:35.360 --> 0:08:39.720 luxury goods. And the mccause I mean, and this is 0:08:39.760 --> 0:08:42.480 a kind of a phenomenon of this part of the 0:08:42.480 --> 0:08:44.600 world because you can go into Santa Fe. I mean, 0:08:44.600 --> 0:08:47.320 I've got some scattered around here. There's a pot with 0:08:47.400 --> 0:08:50.480 McCaw feathers in it right there, and most of the 0:08:50.559 --> 0:08:53.760 shops in Santa fe still today you can go in 0:08:53.880 --> 0:08:57.520 and buy mccaugh feathers, because this is a bird we've 0:08:57.559 --> 0:09:00.920 known for the last thousand years around here, that was 0:09:00.960 --> 0:09:05.520 a sacred bird to the native people. They doesn't range here, obviously, 0:09:05.640 --> 0:09:09.600 this is a desert. They haul these things live up 0:09:09.640 --> 0:09:14.240 from the jungles of Central America, and the priests kept 0:09:14.280 --> 0:09:20.120 them in cages and treated them as kind of sacred beings. 0:09:20.200 --> 0:09:25.480 I think because of the brilliant plumage, the coloration of them. Yeah, 0:09:26.120 --> 0:09:29.280 and so yeah, it's a for their beautiful song. Oh 0:09:29.360 --> 0:09:32.720 my god, this is out the inconsistency between a macaw 0:09:33.559 --> 0:09:36.480 his appearance in his song where it sounds like like 0:09:36.480 --> 0:09:40.520 he's the most beautiful bird and he sounds like like 0:09:40.559 --> 0:09:45.120 a dying what I had imagined a disease dying tero 0:09:45.200 --> 0:09:48.280 dactyle to sound like. But we're just down in South 0:09:48.320 --> 0:09:54.880 America with some mkushi guys and they still hunt mccaus 0:09:54.920 --> 0:09:57.319 with the feathers. Yeah, I don't doubt it. And now 0:09:57.320 --> 0:09:58.920 you're like, we're in the world where's like we have 0:09:59.080 --> 0:10:01.200 dies and all these fabrics and you can buy like 0:10:01.360 --> 0:10:04.960 blaze pink ship on the internet, right, But they're like still, like, yeah, 0:10:05.040 --> 0:10:07.520 those feathers are amazing looking. And they were saying that 0:10:07.920 --> 0:10:10.040 macaus are difficult to hunt the hum of the bow. 0:10:10.960 --> 0:10:13.920 They're difficult to hunt. But there's a particular type of 0:10:13.920 --> 0:10:17.280 of date tree or I'm sorry, a particular type of 0:10:17.400 --> 0:10:20.319 palm that has like a date like fruit on it, 0:10:21.000 --> 0:10:24.240 and they said that the macaws like those so much 0:10:25.480 --> 0:10:27.840 that you need to watch for one of those trees 0:10:27.880 --> 0:10:30.800 the fruit, and that's the only time that a macaw 0:10:31.080 --> 0:10:34.360 will let down his guard. And if you wait under 0:10:34.360 --> 0:10:37.840 the tree, you might get a macaw with your bow. 0:10:38.559 --> 0:10:42.120 And the rig they use, it's just a little barbed 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:45.760 point that they try to hit the macaw with it 0:10:46.720 --> 0:10:49.920 and then the tip falls away from the arrow, but 0:10:50.000 --> 0:10:52.240 it's connected to the arrow shaft with a piece of string. 0:10:52.640 --> 0:10:54.880 And then McCaw get tangled up and they were able 0:10:54.920 --> 0:10:56.679 to climb up, able to climb up and get it 0:10:56.840 --> 0:10:59.560 and get their feathers. And they still produced. They still 0:10:59.559 --> 0:11:02.199 out of the cause and two cans and stuff. They 0:11:02.240 --> 0:11:08.240 produced ceremonial head dresses. Yeah, well that was you know, 0:11:08.400 --> 0:11:11.840 even a thousand years ago, and quite likely farther back 0:11:11.880 --> 0:11:15.559 than that, because there are macaus on the rock art 0:11:15.679 --> 0:11:17.840 all around us. I mean there's a rock art site 0:11:18.520 --> 0:11:23.960 UM about twelve miles away from here, uh that has 0:11:24.000 --> 0:11:28.480 a hole kind of base relief of Macau's painted on it, 0:11:28.520 --> 0:11:32.280 and it Petroglyph National Monument, which is out west of 0:11:32.320 --> 0:11:35.000 Albuquerque on the Mesa on the west side of the 0:11:35.040 --> 0:11:38.440 Real Grand River. UM. I mean, I've seen Macau's painted 0:11:38.480 --> 0:11:41.680 there too, And some of this rock art is older 0:11:41.679 --> 0:11:44.679 than the Chaco and civilization, so that indicates to me 0:11:44.760 --> 0:11:47.720 that there's been a fascination with Macau's and obviously a 0:11:47.840 --> 0:11:52.400 trade going down all the way into Central America from 0:11:52.440 --> 0:11:58.280 the southwest for longer than the Chaco and civilization existed 0:11:58.320 --> 0:12:01.760 in this part of the world. Another interesting connection between 0:12:02.679 --> 0:12:07.000 New Mexico and and maybe further south is that the 0:12:07.040 --> 0:12:14.000 first time a European described buffalo or bison, it was 0:12:14.280 --> 0:12:19.440 Cortez or one of his chroniclers ran into it in 0:12:19.600 --> 0:12:27.120 Montezuma's personal collection and his zoo, maybe five six hundred 0:12:27.160 --> 0:12:31.439 miles south of maybe more than that, south of the 0:12:31.559 --> 0:12:36.000 furthest southern point that the animal could have range. That's right, 0:12:36.040 --> 0:12:39.640 because they didn't. They clearly didn't cross the Chihuahuan Desert, 0:12:39.679 --> 0:12:43.599 which is hundreds of miles of pure desert now, and 0:12:43.840 --> 0:12:51.240 we think that bison did uh range sporadically down in 0:12:51.280 --> 0:12:55.040 the northern Chihuahua state into some of the grasslands there. 0:12:55.679 --> 0:13:00.280 So definitely in Sonora, Sonora, Chihuahua, but not as far 0:13:00.320 --> 0:13:03.240 south as so that would have had. That would have 0:13:03.280 --> 0:13:08.040 been an animal that courtez some that probably was taken 0:13:08.080 --> 0:13:12.120 as a calf down to the courts of the Estet 0:13:12.240 --> 0:13:15.400 capital and became part of the officials was gifted to 0:13:15.480 --> 0:13:18.600 him or traded to him some probably. Yeah, that's always 0:13:18.600 --> 0:13:21.199 been my thought about it. You know, there's nothing I 0:13:21.240 --> 0:13:22.839 want to I want to talk more about that stuff, 0:13:22.840 --> 0:13:24.480 but they want to ask you about you mention this 0:13:24.520 --> 0:13:26.920 one time and you haven't explained to me yet. You 0:13:26.920 --> 0:13:29.360 were saying that you're gonna tell me or could tell me. 0:13:30.040 --> 0:13:35.080 We're open to discussing why uh why people's houses are 0:13:35.120 --> 0:13:38.439 seventy two degrees. The thing I often tease my wife 0:13:38.440 --> 0:13:41.440 about is, I'm like, I've identified my wife's like general 0:13:41.480 --> 0:13:44.120 comfort range. I'm like, there's a four degree window on 0:13:44.200 --> 0:13:47.040 which you don't you that you don't take steps to 0:13:47.240 --> 0:13:50.560 like change your clothes to accommodate, And she like from 0:13:50.640 --> 0:13:54.800 sixty eight to seventy two. When it falls outside of 0:13:54.800 --> 0:13:57.199 that four degree thing, I always find she's doing something 0:13:57.320 --> 0:14:00.679 to like, she's like losing layers or gaining laryerous to 0:14:00.800 --> 0:14:05.840 keep up with it. Yeah, well, I used to pose 0:14:06.000 --> 0:14:09.640 this question to classes at the University of Montana, and 0:14:09.679 --> 0:14:12.240 I would often do it at the end of the 0:14:12.280 --> 0:14:17.160 first class meeting, sort of for further cogitation after they 0:14:17.280 --> 0:14:19.400 left the class. So I want you to think about 0:14:19.480 --> 0:14:23.320 this question. Why is it that, no matter whether you 0:14:23.400 --> 0:14:28.800 live in Tucson, Arizona, or in Fairbanks, Alaska, you set 0:14:28.840 --> 0:14:32.440 the thermostat of your house when it's when it can 0:14:32.480 --> 0:14:35.520 be controlled at seventy two degrees And we do this 0:14:35.840 --> 0:14:38.280 all around the world. So why do we do this? 0:14:38.560 --> 0:14:42.360 And I will say that I don't know that anybody 0:14:42.400 --> 0:14:44.760 ever came back on the second day of class and 0:14:44.800 --> 0:14:47.800 said I know the answer to that. But if you 0:14:47.880 --> 0:14:52.280 think about it, it's a fairly obvious one. We are 0:14:53.120 --> 0:14:57.680 native as a species to only one part of the world, 0:14:58.240 --> 0:15:02.680 and we've colonized every where else. And so in order 0:15:03.080 --> 0:15:07.400 for us, in fact, to colonize out of equatorial Africa, 0:15:07.720 --> 0:15:11.880 I mean, we had to invent sown clothing we basically 0:15:12.000 --> 0:15:16.000 had to harness fire in order to keep ourselves warm. 0:15:16.080 --> 0:15:20.240 We had to build structures to keep ourselves either warm 0:15:20.480 --> 0:15:24.200 or cool. And once we had those things, once, once 0:15:24.240 --> 0:15:28.360 we had clothing and structures, we were in fire. We 0:15:28.360 --> 0:15:31.200 were able then to spread around the world, to go 0:15:31.640 --> 0:15:35.960 into northern Europe, to go into Scandinavia, to spread into Polynesia, 0:15:36.080 --> 0:15:40.600 to end up crossing Siberia into North America. But everywhere 0:15:40.640 --> 0:15:45.040 we went, that migration hasn't been long enough. It's only 0:15:45.080 --> 0:15:47.840 taken place in the last forty five thousand years. We 0:15:47.960 --> 0:15:52.720 haven't gone anywhere long enough to actually change who we 0:15:52.760 --> 0:15:57.080 originally are as a species. And so what we've had 0:15:57.120 --> 0:16:00.800 to do is to take our original habit hat with 0:16:00.960 --> 0:16:04.880 us everywhere we've gone. And of course what it's meant 0:16:05.080 --> 0:16:07.680 is that if you live in Canada, are you live 0:16:07.720 --> 0:16:11.800 in Scandinavia, we have to consume an enormous amount of 0:16:12.000 --> 0:16:15.000 energy in order to keep ourselves warm to live in 0:16:15.040 --> 0:16:18.000 places like that, or if you live in Phoenix, Arizona, 0:16:18.280 --> 0:16:20.680 we have to consume an enormous amount of energy to 0:16:20.880 --> 0:16:25.840 cool ourselves. Because what we're doing everywhere we go, and 0:16:25.880 --> 0:16:27.680 we're gonna have to do this when we go to 0:16:27.760 --> 0:16:31.200 Mars too in another couple of decades. We've got to 0:16:31.240 --> 0:16:36.560 set the thermostat at seventies because that's the ambient temperature 0:16:36.760 --> 0:16:41.520 under which we evolved as a species, and that's why 0:16:41.920 --> 0:16:45.760 we are only comfortable in your wife's four degree range 0:16:45.800 --> 0:16:48.760 from six eight and seventy two. So we've got to 0:16:48.760 --> 0:16:54.440 recreate that everywhere we go. I read somewhere there's something 0:16:54.440 --> 0:16:57.320 about the human migrations around the world, and it was 0:16:57.360 --> 0:17:00.680 like to come at least the current on standing to 0:17:00.800 --> 0:17:03.360 come into what's now the Western Hemisphere, to come into 0:17:03.400 --> 0:17:07.720 the New World. The scholar the scholarly consensus is still 0:17:07.760 --> 0:17:10.960 that the first Americans passed across the Bearing Land Bridge, 0:17:11.440 --> 0:17:15.359 and to get to that point you needed to be 0:17:15.400 --> 0:17:18.240 able to live in the Arctic. Okay, so you're you're 0:17:18.280 --> 0:17:21.760 passing through the Arctic. People didn't get here until and 0:17:22.080 --> 0:17:24.720 the number could change through time, but it's sort of 0:17:24.800 --> 0:17:28.480 generally it's considered to be that people's first step foot 0:17:28.560 --> 0:17:32.800 here fourteen fifteen thousand years ago. That could change by 0:17:32.800 --> 0:17:37.199 a handful of years um as more sites emerge, but 0:17:37.800 --> 0:17:40.640 that the limiting factor what kept us out of here 0:17:40.960 --> 0:17:44.399 was that our our movement up into Siberia, which allowed 0:17:44.440 --> 0:17:47.600 us to come across into Alaska, was sort of stalled 0:17:47.640 --> 0:17:51.720 out until the invention of the eyed needle. Yeah, at 0:17:51.720 --> 0:17:56.800 which point, yeah, son clothing, Like once the archaeological record 0:17:56.920 --> 0:18:00.879 in Eurasia starts to turn up son close thing with 0:18:00.920 --> 0:18:03.200 the eye needle, and then people are ready to shoot 0:18:03.280 --> 0:18:07.800 up and crossover, and that that very likely was a 0:18:07.880 --> 0:18:11.439 female invention. I mean, you know, we pride ourselves as 0:18:11.840 --> 0:18:14.679 men on Okay, we invented at adols and things to 0:18:14.720 --> 0:18:18.320 be able to hunt more effectively, but the the eyde 0:18:18.480 --> 0:18:22.600 needle was probably an invention of women sitting there working 0:18:22.760 --> 0:18:28.000 hides and figuring out how to attach them one to 0:18:28.080 --> 0:18:32.320 the other and make an effect fitted clothing. Because what 0:18:32.359 --> 0:18:35.440 you need is clothing that's going to fit tightly enough 0:18:35.480 --> 0:18:38.800 around you that it maintains your body heat. And so 0:18:38.880 --> 0:18:44.040 we had to create sown clothing before we could ever 0:18:44.200 --> 0:18:49.359 basically not not even just live in these northern latitudes 0:18:49.440 --> 0:18:54.040 are extremely for southerly latitudes in the Southern hemisphere, but 0:18:54.240 --> 0:18:58.120 even to travel through them, because we suffered from frostbite 0:18:58.400 --> 0:19:02.800 so easily. I mean, we're basically semi equatorial apes and 0:19:02.880 --> 0:19:08.680 we have a hard time functioning in these really cold situations. 0:19:09.440 --> 0:19:13.840 I was just reading. I'm reading a book about d 0:19:14.040 --> 0:19:18.320 extinctions and it's written by a geneticist. It's about the 0:19:18.600 --> 0:19:23.159 possibility of like de extinction bringing back through people. Hear 0:19:23.200 --> 0:19:25.680 the word cloning is just like not at all like 0:19:26.040 --> 0:19:28.400 what they would do to to to recreate a passenger 0:19:28.440 --> 0:19:30.960 pigeon or recreate a mammoth is not at all has 0:19:31.000 --> 0:19:33.320 nothing to do with ship you saw on Jurassic Park. 0:19:33.440 --> 0:19:37.199 It's it's way more nuanced than complex. But Um, in it, 0:19:37.320 --> 0:19:40.760 she was explaining that the authors explaining that the wooly 0:19:40.880 --> 0:19:44.840 mammoth is about as far removed from the Asian elephant 0:19:45.320 --> 0:19:50.320 as we are from Chimp's meaning about we're about like 0:19:50.359 --> 0:19:54.920 genetically about nine eight percent the same, but there's still 0:19:57.000 --> 0:20:00.200 two percent pretty major man, Yeah, t percent at you 0:20:00.359 --> 0:20:04.720 Mozart and Einstein. Yeah, so you know an everything, And 0:20:04.880 --> 0:20:06.199 this is gonna lead to a question I want to 0:20:06.200 --> 0:20:09.960 ask you about. But Um, when I read about the 0:20:09.960 --> 0:20:12.200 people in the New World, like I've read the books 0:20:12.200 --> 0:20:16.159 that the anthropologist, the paleo anthropologist David Meltzer and and 0:20:16.320 --> 0:20:20.040 David Meltzer talks about that passageway that humans when humans 0:20:20.080 --> 0:20:23.560 went through the Arctic and passed through Siberian into Alaska first, 0:20:23.640 --> 0:20:26.000 Like important to realize that they weren't like thinking like, hey, 0:20:26.040 --> 0:20:28.879 let's go to America. There was no there was no 0:20:29.000 --> 0:20:31.600 like end the goal. They weren't like you, weren't like 0:20:31.640 --> 0:20:33.199 you were kind of you were going somewhere on a 0:20:33.400 --> 0:20:37.280 maybe a daily basis, but there was no like, hey, 0:20:37.359 --> 0:20:40.879 let's go colonize, like on the burying what's not the 0:20:40.880 --> 0:20:42.359 bearing what we think of when we look at like 0:20:42.400 --> 0:20:45.480 Burringia or what's not the burying land bridge, It's reasonable 0:20:45.480 --> 0:20:53.320 to think that generations might have been born and died 0:20:54.080 --> 0:20:58.399 on that land chunk with no concept of them being 0:20:58.520 --> 0:21:02.400 coming from somewhere and going somewhere. I mean, for one thing, 0:21:02.440 --> 0:21:05.359 it's six hundred miles wide. I mean we call it 0:21:05.400 --> 0:21:08.359 a bridge, and so that makes you think of it 0:21:08.400 --> 0:21:13.600 as this this narrow passageway from one continent to another. 0:21:13.720 --> 0:21:19.680 But at the time when h the the oceans were 0:21:19.720 --> 0:21:23.200 at their lowest, ebb Beringia was six d miles wide. 0:21:23.880 --> 0:21:26.840 So I mean it was you know, as wide as 0:21:26.880 --> 0:21:31.840 present day Texas. You wouldn't be crossing through Austin and 0:21:31.920 --> 0:21:37.240 San Antonio and think that Texarkana and El Paso were 0:21:37.240 --> 0:21:41.320 the edges of a bridge. I mean, I think probably 0:21:41.359 --> 0:21:44.359 you're exactly right. There would have been whole generations of 0:21:44.400 --> 0:21:47.000 people who would have just thought of that as a homeland. 0:21:47.400 --> 0:21:50.200 But I think what would have motivated them to go 0:21:50.880 --> 0:21:54.240 in the direction that carried them into North America is 0:21:54.280 --> 0:21:56.480 that I mean, I think this is one of the 0:21:56.480 --> 0:22:00.600 reasons we left Africa and began moving around the world, 0:22:00.800 --> 0:22:05.760 is that we were endlessly looking for places that other 0:22:05.920 --> 0:22:11.120 people hadn't been yet, because that meant the resources were rich, 0:22:11.520 --> 0:22:15.080 the animals were stupid, they hadn't been hunted yet, and 0:22:15.160 --> 0:22:18.639 so what you're looking for is a place where, wow, 0:22:19.160 --> 0:22:21.919 I haven't seen any other human camps for the last 0:22:22.240 --> 0:22:26.560 several days I have, I don't see smoke from campfires 0:22:26.680 --> 0:22:30.680 up ahead, And so you go in the direction where 0:22:30.800 --> 0:22:34.800 there appears to be an absence of prior human activity, 0:22:35.040 --> 0:22:39.880 and that's what naturally led them finally into North America. 0:22:40.280 --> 0:22:41.719 That that's kind of what I wanted to get out 0:22:41.760 --> 0:22:44.159 to ask you about is so of your feelings on that, 0:22:44.280 --> 0:22:48.240 because you just can't discount the idea that some point 0:22:50.000 --> 0:22:55.160 there was like some element of curiosity because population levels 0:22:55.200 --> 0:22:57.359 like like, for instance, there's this there's this idea that 0:22:57.480 --> 0:23:01.360 the reason that Native Americans were so susceptible to European 0:23:01.400 --> 0:23:05.720 diseases when when when Europeans arrived much later, it was 0:23:05.720 --> 0:23:08.200 because they had passed through this like big disease free 0:23:08.240 --> 0:23:11.680 corridor where you didn't have like in the Arctic, it 0:23:11.800 --> 0:23:18.000 was cold enough and it wasn't densely populated, so communicable diseases. 0:23:19.080 --> 0:23:22.600 Like people lost contact with communicable diseases and and lost 0:23:22.600 --> 0:23:25.320 their ability to tolerate them. So you can't be like, oh, 0:23:25.440 --> 0:23:28.879 like the Arctic was so filled up with people that 0:23:28.960 --> 0:23:33.280 there was warfare, right, It probably wasn't like that. It's 0:23:33.280 --> 0:23:37.520 probably just people moving. I think it was people moving. 0:23:37.520 --> 0:23:41.040 I mean, you know around like bacall And and uh, 0:23:41.200 --> 0:23:44.000 Russia there did seem to be where we think some 0:23:44.160 --> 0:23:47.920 of the Siberian populations that ended up in North America 0:23:47.920 --> 0:23:51.520 and became the ancestors of Native people. That I mean, 0:23:51.520 --> 0:23:56.560 there is some evidence of uh, you know, possible conflict 0:23:57.520 --> 0:24:00.199 that might have sent some groups on the move, but 0:24:00.760 --> 0:24:04.680 like like like over resources, probably over resources. I mean, 0:24:04.680 --> 0:24:10.480 I think that's probably the ultimate motivation for these migrations 0:24:10.520 --> 0:24:14.600 that carried us around the world, is that, as I said, 0:24:14.600 --> 0:24:18.400 a few minutes ago. I think human populations were sort 0:24:18.440 --> 0:24:24.880 of endlessly looking for places where the resources were going 0:24:24.920 --> 0:24:28.160 to be available solely to them and they weren't going 0:24:28.200 --> 0:24:30.639 to have to compete with other people for them, and 0:24:30.720 --> 0:24:33.800 so that would have that would have drawn people in 0:24:33.880 --> 0:24:39.960 these grand migrations northward, for example, out of Africa, through Turkey, 0:24:41.240 --> 0:24:45.320 around the Black Sea, all the way up into northern Europe. 0:24:46.200 --> 0:24:51.720 Originally because I mean anatomically modern humans us Holmo sapiens, 0:24:52.080 --> 0:24:54.600 we realized when we got there, the first people who 0:24:54.680 --> 0:24:59.359 arrived there found only Neanderthals. There, only these you know, 0:25:00.119 --> 0:25:05.560 I mean related hominins, but at least not us. And 0:25:05.600 --> 0:25:09.520 I think that's what fueled the migration into North America too. 0:25:09.760 --> 0:25:12.680 I will say, though, I mean, I'm I'm completely with 0:25:12.760 --> 0:25:19.400 you on this impulse that we have to see what's 0:25:19.440 --> 0:25:23.320 down the river and around the next mountain range. And 0:25:24.000 --> 0:25:26.639 I mean, I think that's why, you know, we're that 0:25:26.800 --> 0:25:30.040 kind of species. We've been doing this kind of spread 0:25:30.080 --> 0:25:33.680 out of our homeland and around the planet for so long. 0:25:34.320 --> 0:25:37.760 I mean, and not just our species, but prior hominant 0:25:37.760 --> 0:25:42.439 species like Neanderthals have done it, that it's part of 0:25:42.440 --> 0:25:46.480 our genetic legacy to to go and see what's there. 0:25:46.520 --> 0:25:48.920 I think that's why we we're gonna end up going 0:25:48.960 --> 0:25:52.679 to Mars uh and probably in other places in the 0:25:52.720 --> 0:25:55.600 Solar System as well. But I think that's why everybody 0:25:55.640 --> 0:25:58.640 is so excited about Mars at the moment. Is I mean, 0:25:58.680 --> 0:26:01.880 this is just one of those genetic pulls that we've 0:26:01.920 --> 0:26:04.720 had as a species, and I think it's been It's 0:26:04.720 --> 0:26:07.200 a tribute to us in a lot of ways. It's 0:26:07.240 --> 0:26:09.800 one of them, maybe the most noble things that we 0:26:10.200 --> 0:26:12.920 have about us. It's that we are curious enough that 0:26:13.000 --> 0:26:16.080 we want to go see what it's like somewhere else, 0:26:16.240 --> 0:26:18.960 even though we know, in the case of Mars, we're 0:26:19.000 --> 0:26:22.000 gonna have to wear helmets and suits and we've got 0:26:22.000 --> 0:26:26.000 to live inside polyurethane structures and you know, but I 0:26:26.040 --> 0:26:31.000 think people crossing uh Siberia and the the Baryngia and 0:26:31.040 --> 0:26:33.920 into North America said, Okay, we're gonna have to bundle 0:26:34.080 --> 0:26:38.160 up like you've never worn clothing before, and we've got 0:26:38.160 --> 0:26:44.920 to invent tight fitted clothing with you know, with eyed needles. Um. 0:26:44.960 --> 0:26:48.119 But if we need the technology to enable us to 0:26:48.280 --> 0:26:51.280 go there, damn it, we're gonna invent it because this 0:26:51.359 --> 0:26:53.600 is who we are. To me. It's one of our 0:26:53.960 --> 0:26:57.600 great tributes, our attributes as a species. The guy that 0:26:57.640 --> 0:27:01.800 I'm interested in his story get is the guy that's 0:27:02.680 --> 0:27:06.840 coming down the coastline. Like people used to be big 0:27:06.840 --> 0:27:09.400 on this idea that there was the ice free corridor 0:27:10.520 --> 0:27:13.399 that would have dumped the like the first the first 0:27:13.440 --> 0:27:17.120 Americans to hit what is now the Lower forty eight. 0:27:17.480 --> 0:27:19.119 There used to be this idea and made you can 0:27:19.119 --> 0:27:21.080 speak to other this idea is dead dead or kind 0:27:21.119 --> 0:27:23.919 of dead? Is uh? That they would have hit that 0:27:23.920 --> 0:27:27.920 they would have emerged on the Great Plains south of Edmonton, 0:27:28.400 --> 0:27:30.880 Alberta through what this idea that there's this ice free 0:27:30.920 --> 0:27:35.200 corridor where everything to the east was glaciated and the 0:27:35.480 --> 0:27:38.760 coastline was glaciated and the Rockies were glaciated, but you 0:27:38.840 --> 0:27:42.520 had this this dry chunk of land that would have 0:27:42.560 --> 0:27:45.919 just eventually funneled human traffic down with this little belt 0:27:46.160 --> 0:27:50.520 and spilled them out onto the primo hunting grounds of 0:27:50.560 --> 0:27:53.359 the Lower forty eight and from their reeked havoc on 0:27:53.880 --> 0:27:57.359 willie mammoths and mask dons. And now it seems that 0:27:57.400 --> 0:28:01.399 there's a lot more thinking or or that this a 0:28:01.440 --> 0:28:05.320 more fashionable idea. The people were coming down the coasts 0:28:05.760 --> 0:28:10.000 and probably had basic boat technology. But I'm interested in 0:28:10.040 --> 0:28:12.520 the feller and there was a first like like if 0:28:12.520 --> 0:28:15.160 you had a time machine you could go see if 0:28:15.160 --> 0:28:20.000 you're standing in any place, any place, and you're standing 0:28:20.000 --> 0:28:21.880 in California on the beach, there's a time you could 0:28:21.880 --> 0:28:26.280 have gone back in time and seeing the first dude 0:28:26.880 --> 0:28:30.680 or more likely a family group coming down the shore 0:28:31.440 --> 0:28:34.000 right and would have happened what happened. And I'm interesting 0:28:34.040 --> 0:28:35.919 the guy coming down the shore that hits like a 0:28:36.040 --> 0:28:39.840 calving glacier. So here he is never been here before. 0:28:40.440 --> 0:28:44.040 He's on this coastline and all he can see ahead 0:28:44.040 --> 0:28:47.760 of him is here's an ice field, alright, which still 0:28:47.800 --> 0:28:50.120 they still exist to day around you know, southeast Alaska, 0:28:50.440 --> 0:28:55.000 and there's a calving glacier. And he's like, kids, um, 0:28:55.120 --> 0:28:58.800 here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna trust that this ends, 0:28:59.400 --> 0:29:03.560 and we're gonna battle out and around and see what's 0:29:03.560 --> 0:29:07.560 on the other side. Because that was a leap and 0:29:07.600 --> 0:29:11.000 ship like that had to been happening. I think that's 0:29:11.120 --> 0:29:15.000 probably in a way, it's that's the you know, and 0:29:15.000 --> 0:29:20.560 and and Christian and Jewish theology. That's the Adam myth. 0:29:20.720 --> 0:29:25.560 I mean, that's it's the first man, the first woman 0:29:26.200 --> 0:29:29.680 to see the world. And you know, in that myth, 0:29:30.840 --> 0:29:34.000 Adam gets to name all the animals even and so 0:29:34.120 --> 0:29:39.880 you can extrapolate, you know, from the Bible and the 0:29:39.920 --> 0:29:44.760 Book of Genesis to your you know, captain of his 0:29:45.200 --> 0:29:49.440 boat with his family going around this calving glacier and 0:29:49.480 --> 0:29:53.400 hoping there's something on the other side, and landing on 0:29:53.440 --> 0:29:57.880 the other side and finding some land and seeing animals 0:29:57.960 --> 0:30:01.600 that they've never seen before, and getting to name the 0:30:01.640 --> 0:30:07.160 animals and so like be like hunting Yellowstone Park. That's right, 0:30:08.120 --> 0:30:12.120 that's with no park rangers, with no park rangers, and 0:30:12.120 --> 0:30:14.680 and all these new beasts. Because I mean that's one 0:30:14.720 --> 0:30:17.000 of the things that as we went went around the 0:30:17.040 --> 0:30:22.360 world we confronted not everything was the same. I mean, 0:30:22.400 --> 0:30:28.200 we were seeing this this grand diversity of life on 0:30:28.240 --> 0:30:32.360 a planet that was billions of years old, where life 0:30:32.360 --> 0:30:37.960 had evolved as a result of shifting uh and continents 0:30:38.000 --> 0:30:42.080 breaking apart, so that we ended up with everywhere you 0:30:42.120 --> 0:30:45.120 went there were there was there were different life forms. 0:30:45.640 --> 0:30:48.800 You saw birds that you had never seen before, you 0:30:48.840 --> 0:30:51.480 saw animals you had never seen before, And I think 0:30:51.480 --> 0:30:54.760 that's probably one of the things, Especially people who were 0:30:54.800 --> 0:30:58.040 as closely tuned to nature and observing nature as these 0:30:58.040 --> 0:31:01.920 folks would have been because they lived off the natural world, 0:31:02.400 --> 0:31:06.280 I think that would have been an ultimate fascination to 0:31:06.840 --> 0:31:09.640 land on the other side of a Calvin glacier and 0:31:09.840 --> 0:31:14.440 see a whole host of creatures you had never seen before. Yeah, 0:31:14.480 --> 0:31:19.200 like with the first guy idea, after people had after 0:31:19.240 --> 0:31:22.960 people had passed through the Arctic and started coming south, 0:31:23.640 --> 0:31:30.920 they were probably hundreds of generations removed from snakes. Alaska 0:31:30.960 --> 0:31:34.800 has no snakes, so you can imagine that there was there. Again, 0:31:34.840 --> 0:31:36.880 there was like a guy. That's the thing I always 0:31:36.880 --> 0:31:38.800 returned to, is you get like you get when you 0:31:38.840 --> 0:31:42.960 think about history, you always think of it becomes faceless, right, 0:31:43.120 --> 0:31:46.480 But there was like a person who had no idea 0:31:46.520 --> 0:31:49.560 that a rattlesnake, right was like bad ship. And he 0:31:49.560 --> 0:31:51.840 would have had to have have been like the guy who 0:31:51.960 --> 0:31:56.000 made it and to the point where there is one 0:31:56.160 --> 0:31:59.520 and saw that first one. Yeah, that's like what you're 0:32:00.040 --> 0:32:04.000 and and there was no thing. There's no cultural No, 0:32:04.280 --> 0:32:07.440 they did have cultural awareness, but their cultural awareness is 0:32:07.480 --> 0:32:11.600 probably more confined to like a stead of experiences by 0:32:11.640 --> 0:32:14.040 just a handful of past generations like you weren't like 0:32:14.080 --> 0:32:18.560 always reading about wildlife on other continents now in some 0:32:18.720 --> 0:32:22.960 like real time way. Yeah, and I think that would 0:32:23.000 --> 0:32:26.640 have been tremendously exciting. I mean, it excites me to 0:32:26.760 --> 0:32:30.600 think about it too. Step into a brand new world. 0:32:30.680 --> 0:32:33.360 I mean, and I I've read enough. For example, you know, 0:32:33.520 --> 0:32:37.280 just from in a sort of a minor key version 0:32:37.320 --> 0:32:42.720 of this, people passing in the nineteenth century from the 0:32:42.720 --> 0:32:48.240 woodlands of the east onto the Great Plains and encountering 0:32:48.360 --> 0:32:54.000 for the first time pronghorn antelope, for example, or coyotes, 0:32:54.400 --> 0:32:58.400 or huge herds of bison. They may have seen bison 0:32:58.640 --> 0:33:02.880 in small numbers in the woodlands in eighteen hundred, but 0:33:03.120 --> 0:33:06.920 getting two hundred miles farther west out of the grasslands 0:33:07.160 --> 0:33:10.840 and seeing herds that spread to the limits of the horizon. 0:33:11.160 --> 0:33:14.400 I mean. And and those people, of course left us 0:33:14.400 --> 0:33:17.880 a written account, and so you can read how exciting 0:33:18.040 --> 0:33:21.640 they found that. I mean, you know, John James Ottobon, 0:33:21.720 --> 0:33:27.360 who spent his entire life studying nature, hunting animals, shooting birds, 0:33:27.440 --> 0:33:32.520 painting birds, gets to a new setting on the Missouri 0:33:32.680 --> 0:33:35.720 River on the Great Plains in eighteen forty three, and 0:33:36.120 --> 0:33:38.400 I mean, I've always loved this passage. He wrote his 0:33:38.520 --> 0:33:42.160 wife that summer about all these animals he was seeing 0:33:42.160 --> 0:33:44.680 that he had never seen before, and finally close one 0:33:44.720 --> 0:33:47.400 of his letters with the line, I've got to stop right. 0:33:47.440 --> 0:33:50.560 I'm too excited to write anymore. I can't say anything else, 0:33:51.480 --> 0:33:55.640 I mean, And so there was that excitement is palpable 0:33:56.120 --> 0:33:59.840 through the written word of what people left us, you know, 0:34:00.000 --> 0:34:02.080 in the last hundred and fifty or two hundred years. 0:34:02.120 --> 0:34:06.840 So it must have been the same thing when someone 0:34:06.920 --> 0:34:13.799 emerged into North America and saw, you know, giant herds 0:34:13.840 --> 0:34:17.520 of camels for the first time, or I mean, they 0:34:17.520 --> 0:34:20.520 would have seen wild horses, no doubt plies the seen 0:34:20.600 --> 0:34:24.759 horses in Baryngia, and they would have seen mammoths and 0:34:24.880 --> 0:34:28.839 mastodons in in Baryngia, but they probably wouldn't have seen 0:34:28.880 --> 0:34:33.719 giant ground sloughs or hyenas or camels. And so they 0:34:33.760 --> 0:34:37.279 emerged into settings where they they saw creatures like that 0:34:37.480 --> 0:34:40.400 must have been exciting as hell. Some people have I 0:34:40.400 --> 0:34:43.000 think a hard time with the camel thing like that. 0:34:43.040 --> 0:34:46.839 We have like camelids on the great plants, but it's 0:34:46.840 --> 0:34:48.719 really like you kind of take for game like the 0:34:48.760 --> 0:34:54.279 in the Andies that you have llamas, alpacas, Yeah, and 0:34:54.320 --> 0:34:56.680 then something and then those are like domestic versions of 0:34:56.760 --> 0:34:59.279 some wild things. But yeah, so when you think about that, 0:34:59.280 --> 0:35:01.439 it's like not as surprising that we did have a 0:35:01.560 --> 0:35:06.080 number of camel species on the Great Plants and du 0:35:06.360 --> 0:35:08.400 hunting for him and dudes were hunting them. Yeah, we 0:35:08.440 --> 0:35:11.840 had one humped camels and not the double humped camels 0:35:11.840 --> 0:35:16.359 of of Africa. But the camels from South America had 0:35:16.440 --> 0:35:22.719 migrated u up the the Andes chain, crossed into North 0:35:22.760 --> 0:35:29.680 America and basically spread across the plains as far probably 0:35:29.719 --> 0:35:32.759 as the Canadian border, at least Montana. I mean, they 0:35:32.760 --> 0:35:36.360 were animals that could exist at fairly high latitudes in 0:35:36.400 --> 0:35:39.080 the Andes and so they could take fairly cold weather. 0:35:39.360 --> 0:35:44.320 So coming out of I mean, if these early UH inhabitants, 0:35:44.440 --> 0:35:48.680 these early arrivals in North America either came from the 0:35:48.719 --> 0:35:53.000 coast in land or emerged from an ice free corridor. 0:35:53.000 --> 0:35:55.200 And I don't think the ice free quarter is totally dead. 0:35:55.480 --> 0:35:58.600 I think they're dead now. I don't think it's dead. 0:35:58.640 --> 0:36:00.640 I think there are plenty of people who still believe 0:36:00.719 --> 0:36:06.200 that's the case, but I think they would have encountered 0:36:06.200 --> 0:36:09.720 as soon as they emerged from that quarter a suite 0:36:09.760 --> 0:36:12.279 of animals that they had never seen before. And I 0:36:12.440 --> 0:36:16.799 love the description I read fairly recently about um who 0:36:16.840 --> 0:36:20.520 these people might have been. I mean, we don't know, 0:36:20.719 --> 0:36:23.480 for example, if if the dates go back to fifteen 0:36:23.560 --> 0:36:27.160 sixteen thousand years, I mean we we haven't really assigned 0:36:27.160 --> 0:36:30.600 a name to maybe the first three or four thousand 0:36:31.000 --> 0:36:35.920 years of arrivals, because they didn't seem to leave a 0:36:36.080 --> 0:36:42.640 technology like the later Clovis people lad. But the Closed 0:36:42.719 --> 0:36:46.000 people left us thirteen thousand years ago and down to 0:36:46.160 --> 0:36:49.160 about eleven thousand years ago. I mean, they left us 0:36:49.560 --> 0:36:54.560 a technology that seems to make it apparent that uh. 0:36:54.640 --> 0:36:57.719 In the words of a recent scholar who described them, 0:36:57.760 --> 0:37:02.600 he described them as nor Are in hemisphere wild people, 0:37:02.920 --> 0:37:08.680 kind of like Vikings, but coming out of Siberia. And 0:37:09.080 --> 0:37:12.000 these were people who would who it was probably a 0:37:12.080 --> 0:37:17.320 very male dominated society, maybe dominated by warriors or hunters, 0:37:17.360 --> 0:37:21.200 and they were people who would have thrown themselves, uh 0:37:21.239 --> 0:37:25.960 into this new setting. And you know, if Paul Martin 0:37:26.120 --> 0:37:29.720 is right with his plies to scene the Bloods Creek hypothesis, 0:37:29.800 --> 0:37:32.600 Craig hypothesis. I mean, it would have only taken them 0:37:32.680 --> 0:37:35.160 three or four hundred years to go all the way 0:37:35.239 --> 0:37:38.160 from the vicinity of Edmonton down to the tip of 0:37:38.160 --> 0:37:42.359 South America to Tyral del Fuego and wipe out millions 0:37:42.400 --> 0:37:45.239 of animals along the way. That's the thing that's so 0:37:45.360 --> 0:37:48.840 puzzling about. There's two that you just brought up that 0:37:48.840 --> 0:37:50.560 that maybe you can speak to a little bit. Is 0:37:50.719 --> 0:37:56.600 uh One the way Clovis, the Clovis culture, they have 0:37:56.719 --> 0:38:01.520 this like diagnostic spear point. Okay, so when you when 0:38:01.520 --> 0:38:04.359 you excavate an old site and you find this spear point, 0:38:04.400 --> 0:38:07.719 the spear point is so peculiar. It's called a fluted 0:38:07.719 --> 0:38:10.400 spear point, where they would knock a channel out of 0:38:10.440 --> 0:38:14.359 each face of the projectile point. Um, it's it's so 0:38:14.440 --> 0:38:17.319 peculiar that it's regarded as diagnostic. And there are many 0:38:17.320 --> 0:38:22.719 projectile points there this way where people made it for 0:38:22.760 --> 0:38:25.479 a long time. They made it the same way every time, 0:38:25.840 --> 0:38:28.720 and then they moved on and started making different points 0:38:29.280 --> 0:38:33.000 that they're probably using in different ways and stopped making 0:38:33.040 --> 0:38:36.239 them that way. So when you find a clothe what 0:38:36.239 --> 0:38:38.719 what how you know a Clovis site, it's kind of 0:38:38.760 --> 0:38:42.960 like what did their spear point technology look like? Whoever 0:38:43.239 --> 0:38:47.880 arrived from There's nothing like trying to think out how 0:38:47.920 --> 0:38:53.360 to put this. There's nothing like the Clovis technology in Asia. 0:38:54.800 --> 0:38:59.600 So people think that it either is an American invention, 0:39:00.080 --> 0:39:03.440 that the people that first came down and colonized the 0:39:03.480 --> 0:39:05.160 New World, colonize what we now think of as a 0:39:05.200 --> 0:39:09.480 Lower forty eight and elsewhere, that they sort of coalesced 0:39:09.520 --> 0:39:13.520 into or developed into the Clovis culture and developed this 0:39:13.560 --> 0:39:17.120 projectile point suitable to the type of hunting they found here, 0:39:17.360 --> 0:39:26.640 or like an anthropological conspiracy theory is that the paleolithic 0:39:27.400 --> 0:39:35.120 people of Europe who quinn who Some whould argue it's coincidence, 0:39:35.120 --> 0:39:38.160 someone would argue it's not coincidence, who had a point 0:39:38.320 --> 0:39:42.400 kind of like the Clovis point much earlier, thirty forty 0:39:42.880 --> 0:39:45.319 years ago. They were making a point and hunting the 0:39:45.400 --> 0:39:48.080 same suite of mega fauna in Europe with a projectile 0:39:48.080 --> 0:39:51.319 point that's kind of similar. So there's this idea that 0:39:51.400 --> 0:39:58.560 these fellers uh hopped in some skin boats and came over. 0:40:00.239 --> 0:40:02.720 It's called I think it's called the salutary and hypothesis 0:40:02.800 --> 0:40:07.880 or the salute connection came over, showed the people here, 0:40:09.040 --> 0:40:13.160 what's up. The Europeans came, showed the people here, what's up? 0:40:14.040 --> 0:40:21.560 How to do this deal? They died out, and then 0:40:22.000 --> 0:40:28.520 what we regard as Native Americans came down afterward or 0:40:28.760 --> 0:40:32.360 had picked up their tricks of the trade from these 0:40:32.400 --> 0:40:37.920 European seafarers. What do you is that? What do you 0:40:37.920 --> 0:40:41.520 think of that? I mean, like, based on your career 0:40:41.560 --> 0:40:45.120 long exposure to this stuff, well, I mean it is 0:40:45.680 --> 0:40:47.680 in a way. I mean, it's a it's kind of 0:40:47.680 --> 0:40:50.120 a conspiracy theory, but it's a conspiracy theory that actually 0:40:50.120 --> 0:40:53.520 got a national geographic and so you've got to have 0:40:53.719 --> 0:40:57.920 some bona fides, some credentials to to make it into 0:40:57.960 --> 0:41:03.880 a magazine of that ilk um you know. I I 0:41:04.400 --> 0:41:08.680 some people call it racist. Well, I mean if you 0:41:09.280 --> 0:41:13.759 make the argument that, you know, it's the Europeans who 0:41:13.840 --> 0:41:17.640 kind of invent everything important and the Native people just 0:41:17.960 --> 0:41:23.080 glom onto the critical technological elements, then it does have 0:41:23.400 --> 0:41:27.080 sort of overtones of uh at least a kind of 0:41:27.080 --> 0:41:34.160 an ethnocentrism um word. Yeah, you know, so I I 0:41:34.239 --> 0:41:39.800 realized that we've not yet found a kind of a 0:41:39.840 --> 0:41:49.000 precursor to Clovish technology in Siberia, and frankly, I wonder 0:41:49.040 --> 0:41:52.760 if that's just because you know, there hasn't been great 0:41:52.960 --> 0:41:57.880 archaeology done yet in Siberia and that we're gonna find it. Um. 0:41:57.920 --> 0:42:01.840 I tend to think myself that this is somewhat coincidental 0:42:02.080 --> 0:42:05.759 in part because of the difference in time frames. The 0:42:05.800 --> 0:42:09.760 salutary In point, as you mentioned, is like a thirty 0:42:09.800 --> 0:42:13.000 thousand year old point. Uh. It's one of the points 0:42:13.040 --> 0:42:18.200 that you know, anatomically modern humans had in Europe within 0:42:18.360 --> 0:42:21.319 ten thousand years or fifteen thousand years of coming out 0:42:21.320 --> 0:42:26.240 of Africa. Uh. And the Clovis point, of course, occurs 0:42:26.280 --> 0:42:30.120 in time almost twenty thousand years later. So it's the 0:42:30.200 --> 0:42:35.080 kind of thing that that the time frame connections make 0:42:35.160 --> 0:42:37.799 me think it would be hard to to come up 0:42:37.840 --> 0:42:40.680 with the linkage, although you know you could. I suppose 0:42:40.960 --> 0:42:44.480 it's in the ram of possibility to argue that some Clovis, 0:42:44.520 --> 0:42:47.880 that maybe these Europeans got into North America left some sites, 0:42:48.000 --> 0:42:51.320 and people who became Clovis found those sites and attempted 0:42:51.360 --> 0:42:56.160 to emulate this kind of technology and did so very successfully. 0:42:56.760 --> 0:42:59.520 I don't know right now what the explanation for this 0:42:59.640 --> 0:43:02.040 particular gular mystery is. But one of the things I 0:43:02.080 --> 0:43:05.120 really love about science in all its forms is that 0:43:05.160 --> 0:43:10.279 we endlessly have mysteries. And you know the mysteries. I mean, 0:43:10.320 --> 0:43:14.000 in my career, Uh, quite a number of mysteries have 0:43:14.120 --> 0:43:16.520 been solved, but there are plenty of them out there 0:43:16.600 --> 0:43:18.560 that and all the time I've been doing this, we 0:43:18.640 --> 0:43:21.480 never have figured out what the answer is. And so 0:43:21.880 --> 0:43:24.520 that's kind of the great thing about all this is 0:43:24.560 --> 0:43:28.919 that there are things still to be resolved in the future. Uh, 0:43:28.960 --> 0:43:32.480 that other generations, uh maybe can come up with a 0:43:32.560 --> 0:43:35.840 really fine explanation for this is one that I have 0:43:35.960 --> 0:43:39.520 to say, you know, I can't come up with a 0:43:39.560 --> 0:43:44.600 plausible explanation for why the Salutary and culture and Point, 0:43:44.880 --> 0:43:49.759 which is a big game hunting culture, resembles the Clovis 0:43:49.880 --> 0:43:53.200 culture of twenty thousand years later in terms of some 0:43:54.239 --> 0:43:59.200 not just superficial but fairly close similarities of the technology. Uh. 0:43:59.360 --> 0:44:02.400 The one thing I will say about the two groups 0:44:02.520 --> 0:44:07.080 is that even though they're separated in time by almost 0:44:07.120 --> 0:44:10.000 twenty thousand years, they kind of seem to have the 0:44:10.080 --> 0:44:14.400 same effect on the fauna of the places they inhabit. 0:44:14.920 --> 0:44:17.640 I mean, it looks to me as if we finally 0:44:17.680 --> 0:44:24.279 invented agriculture in Europe because essentially people ultimately killed off 0:44:24.360 --> 0:44:29.920 all the major animals. And I think at a chronology 0:44:29.960 --> 0:44:34.640 that occurs at a later point in time in North America, 0:44:34.680 --> 0:44:39.400 because we entered we humans entered North America later in time. 0:44:39.840 --> 0:44:45.520 The same pattern follows. The big animals once our presence 0:44:45.600 --> 0:44:49.560 is fully established, uh in a location are going to 0:44:50.719 --> 0:44:56.080 go away. They disappear. And we began, in what's called 0:44:56.080 --> 0:45:01.520 the archaic phase, to sort of spread into too smaller 0:45:01.600 --> 0:45:05.600 micro habitats and hunt smaller animals like deer and elk 0:45:05.640 --> 0:45:10.120 and so forth. But eventually everywhere we go we're kind 0:45:10.160 --> 0:45:14.880 of forced in the direction ultimately of adopting agriculture. Because 0:45:14.960 --> 0:45:19.279 we tend to over hunt animals, we tend to ultimately 0:45:19.640 --> 0:45:23.560 take them out, so it's simply not as easy to 0:45:23.719 --> 0:45:27.680 live as a hunter anymore. And uh, we end up 0:45:27.680 --> 0:45:30.399 becoming farmers. You know. I want to get back that 0:45:31.120 --> 0:45:34.280 and and press you on a part of that, but uh, 0:45:34.400 --> 0:45:36.000 before I don't want to bring out like you're talking about, 0:45:36.000 --> 0:45:37.799 the mysteries is kind of the greatest mystery to me 0:45:37.920 --> 0:45:40.640 about the peopling of the New World, probably the greatest 0:45:40.680 --> 0:45:46.439 mystery to everyone is that we have we've most people 0:45:46.480 --> 0:45:49.280 have settled on this idea of the Bearing Land Bridge 0:45:49.280 --> 0:45:53.160 as the entry point. But the oldest rock solid site 0:45:53.160 --> 0:45:57.880 we have, Okay, the oldest site that like archaeologists and 0:45:57.960 --> 0:46:03.719 anthropologists just universe really agree on as being the oldest 0:46:04.600 --> 0:46:11.040 human settlement site in the New World is in Patagonia. Yeah, 0:46:11.120 --> 0:46:15.960 it is. And how much ship is missing between right, 0:46:16.520 --> 0:46:19.040 like it really, you know, And if you talk to 0:46:19.040 --> 0:46:22.759 anthro apologies about making more fines, they're not always like 0:46:22.840 --> 0:46:26.080 super optimistic about that we're gonna make more fines because 0:46:26.080 --> 0:46:29.080 there's been so much just like we've done so much 0:46:29.200 --> 0:46:31.719 road building and so much excavating and stuff that like 0:46:32.440 --> 0:46:35.120 that like the stuff that's gonna get found has maybe 0:46:35.200 --> 0:46:37.960 kind of been found, you know, you don't you don't 0:46:37.960 --> 0:46:40.319 feel like people are like in the Arctic, like in 0:46:40.400 --> 0:46:43.319 Siberia right now, there's a lot of enthusiasm about what's 0:46:43.400 --> 0:46:45.920 the next thing that's gonna thaw out of the perma frost, 0:46:46.520 --> 0:46:50.200 you know, like we don't even know, like mysteries are 0:46:50.200 --> 0:46:52.520 going to continue to like we're gonna be excited about 0:46:52.560 --> 0:46:54.799 what's to come, but most people are like not real 0:46:54.920 --> 0:46:59.720 excited about the prospect of finding really good intact iron 0:47:00.040 --> 0:47:05.400 ad paleo sites, but the oldest one we have is 0:47:05.840 --> 0:47:08.720 thousands and thousands of miles from the point of entry. 0:47:09.280 --> 0:47:16.319 So between Baryngia in Chili, it's like, where were those 0:47:16.360 --> 0:47:20.840 people hanging out? Well, I think that that site in Patagonia, 0:47:21.080 --> 0:47:25.200 which you know, the latest dates I've read for it, uh, 0:47:25.280 --> 0:47:27.840 you know, seemed to place it between fourteen and sixteen 0:47:27.840 --> 0:47:33.040 thousand years ago, that it very likely is good evidence 0:47:33.239 --> 0:47:37.279 that people were working their way down the coastlines. And 0:47:37.320 --> 0:47:41.200 I think the reason we don't have intervening sites along 0:47:41.239 --> 0:47:44.359 the coastlines is that as a result of the end 0:47:44.400 --> 0:47:47.360 of the Wisconsin ice Age and the rise of the oceans, 0:47:47.640 --> 0:47:50.760 many of those camp sites have ended up off shore 0:47:51.200 --> 0:47:55.279 and buried probably under two hundred feet of water. And 0:47:55.360 --> 0:47:59.800 so what we get then is an inland site in Chile. 0:48:00.640 --> 0:48:05.520 But they're probably were campsites, fairly regular campsites along the 0:48:05.560 --> 0:48:09.839 coast leading down to that that particular point, and we've 0:48:09.880 --> 0:48:11.839 just we've lost them as a result of the rise 0:48:11.880 --> 0:48:14.760 of the seas. A detail I like about that site, 0:48:14.840 --> 0:48:21.879 as they seem to have had tent steaks, tethering, some 0:48:21.960 --> 0:48:27.080 sort of tent structure with a strip of mastodon hyde, 0:48:28.360 --> 0:48:30.920 which is a nice detail. No, it's wonderful in it 0:48:31.520 --> 0:48:34.200 um but so so again what you jump in? What 0:48:34.320 --> 0:48:37.279 you gotta do? Why is it? Like you mentioned that 0:48:37.600 --> 0:48:41.400 we could have hunter gatherer cultures that went ten thousand 0:48:41.520 --> 0:48:45.120 years without over hunting, Like, what is it to happen? 0:48:45.200 --> 0:48:47.880 Like if we accept that some species were driven to 0:48:47.960 --> 0:48:51.359 extinction with the arrival of humans, right, and we like 0:48:51.600 --> 0:48:53.640 and as debatable, but let's just say that that was 0:48:53.680 --> 0:48:57.960 like it almost certainly was a contributing cause, right that 0:48:57.960 --> 0:49:01.839 that a lot of these big animals, mammoth masodonds, like 0:49:02.200 --> 0:49:07.920 their demise is contemporary at least contemporaneous with the arrival 0:49:07.960 --> 0:49:12.000 of people, suspiciously so suspiciously. So but then what why 0:49:12.040 --> 0:49:14.840 did how did we then go ten thousand years about 0:49:14.880 --> 0:49:21.279 losing a continuous stream of creatures? Well, I think you know, 0:49:21.680 --> 0:49:24.560 so again, this is kind of the plasto stine extinctions 0:49:24.600 --> 0:49:27.839 are are one of our big mysteries. And there are 0:49:28.000 --> 0:49:33.440 a big mystery in part because this is our most 0:49:33.560 --> 0:49:39.839 profound ecological disturbance since humans arrived in North America. I mean, 0:49:39.880 --> 0:49:42.800 we talk all the time these days about the effect 0:49:42.840 --> 0:49:47.360 that modern society has on wildlife on the habitat destruction. 0:49:47.600 --> 0:49:51.560 But I mean we lost thirty two genera of large 0:49:52.160 --> 0:49:57.839 animals in the plies to sine. I mean charismatic big species, 0:49:58.080 --> 0:50:04.239 Africa type analog animals, and hundreds of smaller ones. And 0:50:04.320 --> 0:50:06.880 so it was a kind of a sea change for 0:50:06.960 --> 0:50:12.920 North America. And suspiciously we arrived at just the time 0:50:13.000 --> 0:50:15.680 that this was happening, we humans did. But the other 0:50:15.760 --> 0:50:18.160 thing that happened, of course, is that this was the 0:50:18.280 --> 0:50:20.800 end of the Wisconsin ice Age, and so the climate 0:50:20.920 --> 0:50:24.880 was changing. And that's one of the great debates is 0:50:24.920 --> 0:50:28.400 whether or not climate was the primary cause, whether or 0:50:28.440 --> 0:50:31.799 not humans entering a landscape that had humans had not 0:50:31.960 --> 0:50:35.640 evolved in, had not been in before, where the animals 0:50:35.640 --> 0:50:40.000 had not evolved any kind of ability to resist us 0:50:40.520 --> 0:50:45.600 as hunters. I mean, that kind of thing is a 0:50:45.760 --> 0:50:48.879 debate that has been going on now for more than 0:50:48.920 --> 0:50:52.839 a century, and it's very likely that nobody is ever 0:50:52.920 --> 0:50:57.480 going to definitively resolve it. Some people argue that, okay, 0:50:57.480 --> 0:51:00.759 it's partly climate, and it's partly the human fluence. The 0:51:00.800 --> 0:51:03.920 best example we've got for the human influence is probably 0:51:04.000 --> 0:51:08.720 with the mammoths um Paul Martin and his his great 0:51:08.719 --> 0:51:11.440 book the you know, really the last book he wrote, 0:51:11.520 --> 0:51:13.879 and and the book that if people want to read 0:51:13.880 --> 0:51:16.239 about this, I think I would encourage them to read, 0:51:16.880 --> 0:51:19.880 is called The Twilight of the Mammoths. And Martin was 0:51:19.960 --> 0:51:23.880 the major advocate of Plistocene overkill, but he did concede 0:51:23.880 --> 0:51:26.800 that the best evidence we have is for this single species. 0:51:27.000 --> 0:51:29.120 For some species, we don't have very much evidence of 0:51:29.200 --> 0:51:31.719 human overkill at all because it doesn't turn up. It 0:51:31.719 --> 0:51:33.840 doesn't turn up in campsites, it doesn't turn up at 0:51:33.880 --> 0:51:37.600 camp sites. We don't find archaeological sites where people were 0:51:37.680 --> 0:51:43.000 processing horses, for example, and horses during the Plistocene seemed 0:51:43.000 --> 0:51:46.880 to have comprised in some places, like twenty of the 0:51:46.920 --> 0:51:51.320 biomass of large animals. They became extinct, and yet we've 0:51:51.400 --> 0:51:55.640 barely found any kind of archaeological sites at all that 0:51:55.760 --> 0:51:59.480 indicate that, in contrast to the Solutrean people in Europe 0:51:59.480 --> 0:52:01.480 who were run them over cliffs, we were running over 0:52:01.520 --> 0:52:04.560 cliffs and corralling them. Mostly what they were doing was 0:52:04.600 --> 0:52:07.720 corralling them and killing them, and they nearly wiped out 0:52:07.960 --> 0:52:11.000 Europe's horses. In fact, some people believed that it was 0:52:11.080 --> 0:52:14.960 only the domestication of the last few horses that enabled 0:52:15.000 --> 0:52:19.920 Europe's horses to survive extinction. But unlike those solutary and 0:52:20.000 --> 0:52:22.440 hunters in Europe, I mean, we, the North American hunters, 0:52:22.480 --> 0:52:26.240 don't seem to have produced the kind of archaeological sites 0:52:26.280 --> 0:52:30.279 that show, at least so far, a large scale destruction 0:52:30.400 --> 0:52:35.839 of horses. And yet horses became extinct here. So I mean, 0:52:36.160 --> 0:52:40.960 we're still puzzling this out as to exactly what happened. 0:52:41.160 --> 0:52:46.520 But we somehow lost all these animals. Probably humans were 0:52:47.000 --> 0:52:51.840 involved in some significant way for at least some of them, 0:52:51.880 --> 0:52:55.360 and once they were gone, what we essentially had to 0:52:55.440 --> 0:53:01.120 do was to reinvent ourselves. Two, to make the step 0:53:01.239 --> 0:53:06.160 from being Paleolithic big game hunters to the step of 0:53:06.280 --> 0:53:10.600 beginning to hunt smaller animals, beginning to rely more on 0:53:10.840 --> 0:53:16.919 gathering fruits and food stuffs from the plant world, and 0:53:17.400 --> 0:53:21.640 sort of instead of doing probably what the Clovis and 0:53:21.680 --> 0:53:26.280 fulsome people did was, which was to migrate widely across 0:53:26.320 --> 0:53:29.239 the landscape in search of animal herds, we had to 0:53:29.280 --> 0:53:33.000 start settling down into local habitats and I think and 0:53:33.080 --> 0:53:36.440 learning probably learning plant life too. That's exactly. The reason 0:53:36.560 --> 0:53:39.600 I think, to answer the question you pose to sort 0:53:39.600 --> 0:53:43.560 of launch this, why we don't just keep causing extinctions 0:53:44.000 --> 0:53:47.160 is because once we settle down and start living locally, 0:53:47.560 --> 0:53:53.000 we start learning landscapes at a more intimate level. And 0:53:53.080 --> 0:53:59.359 what we begin to learn is the the classic law 0:53:59.480 --> 0:54:04.000 of a bology, Lee Bigg's law, which argues that you 0:54:04.160 --> 0:54:10.239 have to to base your population for sheer survival on 0:54:10.400 --> 0:54:15.040 the worst years that you experience in your landscape rather 0:54:15.120 --> 0:54:18.800 than the best years. If you calibrate your population based 0:54:18.840 --> 0:54:21.360 on the best years, then when the worst years come along, 0:54:21.520 --> 0:54:25.720 you're going to be devastated. And so these archaic people 0:54:25.719 --> 0:54:29.560 who survive for seven or eight thousand years without wiping 0:54:29.600 --> 0:54:34.799 animals out and with with a very effective functioning kind 0:54:34.840 --> 0:54:39.920 of economy seem to do it because they become consciously 0:54:40.000 --> 0:54:44.440 aware of what a local habitat is capable of providing. 0:54:44.560 --> 0:54:47.520 Not that they don't trade with people from other settings, 0:54:47.520 --> 0:54:51.160 but they understand what it's like to live locally, and 0:54:51.200 --> 0:54:55.480 that gives them these kind of packets of cultural information 0:54:55.800 --> 0:54:59.440 about what the local habitat is capable of producing and 0:54:59.480 --> 0:55:02.640 what the limits are in both directions, the best years 0:55:02.640 --> 0:55:06.080 and the good years and what they seem to have done, frankly, 0:55:06.239 --> 0:55:11.279 was to have deliberately control their populations, mostly by engaging 0:55:11.280 --> 0:55:15.239 and infanticide, by killing excess babies when they were born, 0:55:15.280 --> 0:55:17.560 a kind of a form of abortion really kind of 0:55:17.560 --> 0:55:21.399 a draconian form of abortion that enabled them to keep 0:55:21.400 --> 0:55:25.960 their populations small enough that they weren't wiped out whenever 0:55:26.160 --> 0:55:28.800 bad years or a sequence of bad years came along. 0:55:29.160 --> 0:55:34.239 But starvation was still like certainly a factor in these societies. Oh, 0:55:34.280 --> 0:55:37.360 I think people certainly suffered from starvation. I mean, I 0:55:37.360 --> 0:55:42.480 think we've gotten genetic evidence today of people with you know, 0:55:43.000 --> 0:55:46.360 some of the groups in the Southwest. Native people in 0:55:46.360 --> 0:55:50.479 the Southwest have what's called starvation gene, where basically, uh, 0:55:50.520 --> 0:55:55.920 in contemporary times eating modern foods, they tend to become 0:55:56.040 --> 0:56:00.640 quite a beast because they had been in their past. 0:56:01.280 --> 0:56:05.560 Their populations selected for a type, a kind of a 0:56:05.560 --> 0:56:09.520 genetic type that was capable of storing food to enable 0:56:09.600 --> 0:56:14.400 them to get past these starving and lane times. And today, 0:56:14.440 --> 0:56:17.160 when they've got abundant food, they tend to if they're 0:56:17.160 --> 0:56:21.400 not careful, they become pretty OBEs. You know, this brings 0:56:21.440 --> 0:56:23.000 us something We touched on this a little bit before, 0:56:23.000 --> 0:56:25.319 But I'd like you to to to explain it more 0:56:25.440 --> 0:56:29.120 because that balance you arguing one of your and one 0:56:29.120 --> 0:56:31.359 of your papers, and the paper has been cited many, many, 0:56:31.360 --> 0:56:35.480 many times. You are like that that balance the people achieved, 0:56:35.680 --> 0:56:38.560 that that ten thousand year balance the people achieved between 0:56:39.360 --> 0:56:44.240 um humans and animals that they were hunting, was disturbed 0:56:44.920 --> 0:56:51.240 or interrupted by the introduction of the horse. Yeah, maybe unsustainably. 0:56:51.280 --> 0:56:55.560 So can you sketch that out for people? Yeah? I think, Uh, 0:56:55.640 --> 0:56:59.800 And this is what I argue in this long dure 0:57:00.000 --> 0:57:03.839 a story of of Native people in North America. I 0:57:03.880 --> 0:57:10.480 think the coming of Europeans bringing with them I mean, 0:57:10.520 --> 0:57:12.239 and I think it's a suite of things. I think 0:57:12.280 --> 0:57:16.840 it's it's not just the horse. I think it's the 0:57:17.000 --> 0:57:24.480 arrival of the market economy, which, as the Europeans introduce it, 0:57:24.480 --> 0:57:31.000 it essentially compels people who had been who had sort 0:57:31.040 --> 0:57:36.320 of lived off a diversity of resources in a landscape 0:57:36.880 --> 0:57:43.000 to specialize in the resources Let's say bison robes that 0:57:44.120 --> 0:57:47.560 the market economy wanted. The market economy might not have 0:57:47.600 --> 0:57:50.520 been interested in all the things they produced. It was 0:57:50.560 --> 0:57:54.520 interested in one or two things. And the market economy, 0:57:54.560 --> 0:57:58.160 as Europeans introduced it into North America five years ago, 0:57:58.280 --> 0:58:01.000 was very interested in the skins of animals, and so 0:58:01.080 --> 0:58:08.479 it tended to as European traders approached native people, they 0:58:08.600 --> 0:58:12.320 brought with them not only a desire to have these 0:58:12.400 --> 0:58:16.200 native people specialized in a particular product out of their 0:58:16.280 --> 0:58:21.800 resource base, but the Europeans also brought with them the 0:58:21.880 --> 0:58:27.120 goods of the industrial revolution, because Europe had gone through 0:58:27.160 --> 0:58:30.880 this progression of reaching a point where you couldn't live 0:58:30.920 --> 0:58:35.480 by hunting animals alone, and therefore having to become hunter 0:58:35.600 --> 0:58:43.640 gatherers and then eventually farmers. Europe, having been occupied by 0:58:43.920 --> 0:58:48.360 humans out of Africa forty five thousand years ago, had 0:58:48.440 --> 0:58:53.400 reached that sequence earlier in time than people in the 0:58:53.440 --> 0:58:57.880 America's had, having been occupied by a migration out of 0:58:57.880 --> 0:59:03.160 Africa only fifteen thousand year yars ago, And so the 0:59:03.240 --> 0:59:10.160 whole chronology of Europeans had carried their pattern through these 0:59:10.240 --> 0:59:13.840 various kinds of economies farther along to the point where 0:59:14.200 --> 0:59:18.920 they had begun to produce an industrial revolution metal goods. 0:59:19.000 --> 0:59:23.640 They produced iron, for example, and native people's all over 0:59:23.680 --> 0:59:27.040 the world who had not yet reached the iron age 0:59:27.600 --> 0:59:37.200 when they were first exposed to iron implements, knives, hatchets, axes, metal, 0:59:37.560 --> 0:59:43.920 arrow points, spear points. They were absolutely captivated by those goods. 0:59:44.320 --> 0:59:46.880 I mean. One of those stories I've often told is 0:59:46.920 --> 0:59:51.200 how when Captain Cook appeared off the coast of the 0:59:51.240 --> 0:59:55.960 island of Kawaii in the Hawaiian Islands in the seventeen eighties, 0:59:56.520 --> 1:00:03.080 the Natives who had been ex supposed to nails as 1:00:03.080 --> 1:00:07.080 a result of driftwood coming ashore. When they went out 1:00:07.120 --> 1:00:11.520 to meet cooked ships, they clamored aboard, and Cook's men 1:00:11.600 --> 1:00:15.760 reported that the Polynesians immediately started pulling the nails out 1:00:15.760 --> 1:00:18.320 of every plank on the ships, and they finally had 1:00:18.360 --> 1:00:21.200 to had to push them overboard and make them go 1:00:21.280 --> 1:00:24.160 back ashore because they were afraid they were gonna dismantle 1:00:24.200 --> 1:00:27.280 the damn vessels they were so eager to get metal. 1:00:28.040 --> 1:00:30.760 Another story I told I think I told this to 1:00:30.840 --> 1:00:33.640 Joe Rogan when I did the podcast with him, is 1:00:33.680 --> 1:00:37.000 about uh. I was once a an editor for a 1:00:37.080 --> 1:00:41.720 journal called ethno History, and we received a manuscript that 1:00:41.840 --> 1:00:45.400 was basically the editor journal of an early trader who 1:00:45.480 --> 1:00:50.040 was in the Amazonian basin. And this fellow had said 1:00:50.200 --> 1:00:53.680 he that he had replaced a trader who had been 1:00:53.720 --> 1:00:56.800 working among the native people for two or three decades, 1:00:57.240 --> 1:01:01.240 and when he asked the question of his predecessor, how 1:01:01.280 --> 1:01:03.680 do I get people who have never been exposed to 1:01:04.040 --> 1:01:07.560 the European trade to trade with us? This guy said, 1:01:07.640 --> 1:01:11.320 it's as simple as anything. You just go into an 1:01:11.360 --> 1:01:16.080 area where Europeans haven't been before and tie an axe 1:01:16.320 --> 1:01:21.560 to a tree, and a month later go back. And 1:01:21.600 --> 1:01:24.680 he wrote in his journal that he did this several times, 1:01:24.720 --> 1:01:28.200 and when he would go back, there would be throngs 1:01:28.280 --> 1:01:34.320 of people gathered around, hoping for another example of this 1:01:34.440 --> 1:01:38.120 kind of miraculous metal that they had found hanging from 1:01:38.160 --> 1:01:40.640 a tree. It's in some way, it's it's still happening 1:01:40.760 --> 1:01:44.120 right now though, because if you read about groups first 1:01:44.160 --> 1:01:49.240 contact groups coming out of the jungle in Peru, in Brazil, 1:01:50.120 --> 1:01:53.320 it's like oftentimes they're they're they're coming out to the 1:01:53.400 --> 1:02:01.760 rivers machetes and pots. Yes, that's it, it's metalware, it's metal. Well, 1:02:01.840 --> 1:02:05.960 I agree that stuff is nice. It's nice, and so 1:02:06.040 --> 1:02:09.640 I mean here in in the southwest, among these pueblo 1:02:09.680 --> 1:02:14.400 and people who made these gorgeous pots, I mean, and 1:02:14.440 --> 1:02:19.360 they made them hundreds of years before the Spaniards ever 1:02:19.480 --> 1:02:22.800 arrived here, and of course now sell them. I mean, 1:02:22.800 --> 1:02:25.440 I've got pots from the various pueblos all over the 1:02:25.440 --> 1:02:28.600 house here. They sell them in Santa fe Uh to 1:02:28.800 --> 1:02:33.120 people who want um to take home some beautiful object 1:02:33.240 --> 1:02:36.440 from the cultures of the Southwest. But when the Spaniards 1:02:36.520 --> 1:02:41.640 arrived with metal, these Pueblo people almost completely lost the art, 1:02:41.680 --> 1:02:45.520 and some of them at least of making pots, because hell, 1:02:45.720 --> 1:02:49.560 here's a metal pan. I don't really need a pot anymore. 1:02:49.960 --> 1:02:53.720 Here is an object made of metal that these Europeans 1:02:53.800 --> 1:02:57.960 will trade to me, and I don't have to engage 1:02:58.280 --> 1:03:02.720 in the painstaking work of making a ceramic pot. I mean, 1:03:04.000 --> 1:03:05.920 I was just telling the story to a group of 1:03:05.920 --> 1:03:09.680 people a few days ago about how uh Adolph Bandalier, 1:03:09.920 --> 1:03:12.560 the archaeologists who came out to what is now a 1:03:12.640 --> 1:03:17.280 Bandalia National Monument in the eighteen eighties, hired Indians to 1:03:17.360 --> 1:03:19.480 help him dig up some of the sites, and they 1:03:19.480 --> 1:03:24.440 were unearthing pot shards there, and those people took them 1:03:24.440 --> 1:03:28.080 back to pueblos like Sanduel Defonso Pueblo and showed these 1:03:28.120 --> 1:03:32.520 pot sharks to people like Maria Martinez, who became the 1:03:32.640 --> 1:03:37.520 first of the great modern celebrated pottery makers again in 1:03:37.600 --> 1:03:40.040 Pueblo and New Mexico. So it's like fixing up an 1:03:40.040 --> 1:03:42.040 old car. It's like fixing up an old car and 1:03:42.120 --> 1:03:46.360 learning how to do it again, basically reacquiring the skill 1:03:46.480 --> 1:03:49.680 to be able to do it, but having the availability 1:03:49.680 --> 1:03:53.360 of metal they had they had lost it. So when 1:03:53.440 --> 1:03:58.080 Native people confronted these kinds of things, this market impulse 1:03:58.160 --> 1:04:03.080 to specialize in particular resources, plus the availability of goods 1:04:03.120 --> 1:04:06.000 that were made of metal I mean, and those included things, 1:04:06.000 --> 1:04:10.919 of course, like the implements of war, like firearms. So 1:04:11.120 --> 1:04:14.960 if you trade someone a firearm, I mean, in the 1:04:15.000 --> 1:04:17.280 first few firearms that are traded a Native people are 1:04:17.360 --> 1:04:20.000 usually status goods, kind of like the turquoise we were 1:04:20.000 --> 1:04:22.960 talking about a minute ago. Only the head men end 1:04:23.040 --> 1:04:25.840 up with guns. But once you get them a gun, 1:04:26.560 --> 1:04:31.320 I mean, think of it. They can't produce powder, they 1:04:31.400 --> 1:04:36.560 can't produce flints or percussion caps. Later on, they don't 1:04:36.560 --> 1:04:39.320 have molds to make lead bullets, and they don't have 1:04:39.400 --> 1:04:42.040 gunsmiths to work on the gun if it breaks, And 1:04:42.120 --> 1:04:46.720 so suddenly they're snagged by the market economy. They've become 1:04:46.760 --> 1:04:50.520 dependent on it. From the point at which they start 1:04:50.600 --> 1:04:54.160 using guns they now have to have someone supply them 1:04:54.240 --> 1:05:00.160 with gunpowder, with cap percussion caps, with lead balls, and 1:05:00.240 --> 1:05:04.959 from that point on basically tell us what you want 1:05:05.080 --> 1:05:09.800 us to harvest for the market economy, and we'll do it. 1:05:10.360 --> 1:05:12.360 I mean in the way. Another factor had to have have been, 1:05:12.360 --> 1:05:14.960 like when you talk about that reliance to what it 1:05:14.960 --> 1:05:17.160 would have meant to neighboring groups that you were in 1:05:17.200 --> 1:05:20.240 warfare with, well, I mean, I was just gonna say 1:05:20.320 --> 1:05:22.520 that would add your that would like add to your 1:05:22.560 --> 1:05:25.680 incentive to acquire this stuff. It does, and it means 1:05:25.720 --> 1:05:29.560 that the people who don't acquire it who and there 1:05:29.560 --> 1:05:34.040 were some groups, for example, who who sort of saw, okay, 1:05:34.080 --> 1:05:36.720 this is a this is kind of a zero sum game, 1:05:36.760 --> 1:05:40.000 because if we get caught in this, we're never gonna 1:05:40.120 --> 1:05:42.640 get out of it. We're always gonna have to have 1:05:42.800 --> 1:05:45.400 these these goods, and we're just gonna go further and 1:05:45.440 --> 1:05:48.320 further and further into this kind of economy, and we're 1:05:48.320 --> 1:05:53.160 going to forever be pulled out of our ancient traditions. 1:05:53.560 --> 1:05:56.640 And so occasionally you would have a band or a 1:05:56.680 --> 1:05:59.480 tribe led by someone who would sort of see the 1:05:59.520 --> 1:06:02.120 consequence inst is and say, okay, I'm not gonna do it. 1:06:02.600 --> 1:06:06.520 But the people in the next valley, if they did it, 1:06:06.680 --> 1:06:10.160 and they armed themselves with with guns, and they had 1:06:10.760 --> 1:06:14.880 the resources that the European traders gave them as opposed 1:06:14.920 --> 1:06:18.440 to the group that was resisting entering the trade. I 1:06:18.480 --> 1:06:23.520 mean it became an unequal struggle and the group that 1:06:23.640 --> 1:06:28.280 resisted ended up being overpowered and overcome by those who 1:06:28.320 --> 1:06:32.320 cooperated with the market economy. You know, things you're saying 1:06:32.440 --> 1:06:35.000 keep resonating me with With this article, I've been bringing 1:06:35.040 --> 1:06:39.080 up a lot, lady by the journalist John Lee Anderson 1:06:39.080 --> 1:06:41.600 who who wrote this piece in The New Yorker about 1:06:41.640 --> 1:06:45.760 this group, this Amerindian group who's in the process right 1:06:45.800 --> 1:06:51.080 now of coming into contact with the wider world. And um, 1:06:51.120 --> 1:06:53.960 you know they're they're living the borderlands Team Prue and 1:06:53.960 --> 1:06:58.960 Brazil and the young ones will come out and are 1:06:59.000 --> 1:07:01.760 interacting and and the young ones that even explain because 1:07:01.920 --> 1:07:06.320 through some through various translators, they're able to communicate, and 1:07:06.440 --> 1:07:10.560 the young ones explain, Um, when we get close, you know, 1:07:11.600 --> 1:07:15.000 when we go back, the old people burned the clothes. 1:07:16.320 --> 1:07:19.400 Like there's that resistance built in where they're they're they're 1:07:19.400 --> 1:07:23.360 talking about people, Um, other generations being like, don't get 1:07:23.400 --> 1:07:28.200 tangled up with these people. But it's irresistible. It's irresistible. 1:07:28.360 --> 1:07:31.600 They're coming out of the jungle naked. Yeah, it's irresistible. 1:07:31.680 --> 1:07:36.640 And you know, so there, I think we can identify 1:07:36.920 --> 1:07:44.120 with it if we just understand that everybody is motivated 1:07:44.200 --> 1:07:49.560 by the same human nature, regardless of the cultural overlays 1:07:49.560 --> 1:07:54.960 that we have. These people that that you've just described 1:07:55.040 --> 1:07:58.240 from South America and that I was describing basically sort 1:07:58.280 --> 1:08:01.360 of using North American and examples from the eighteenth and 1:08:01.440 --> 1:08:06.160 nineteenth century, these they're just like us. And so we 1:08:06.280 --> 1:08:09.200 can if we think about it, we can find ourselves 1:08:09.240 --> 1:08:12.439 in exactly that kind of situation. I mean, I think 1:08:12.480 --> 1:08:16.040 we probably do, you know, in our modern lives on 1:08:16.200 --> 1:08:19.679 almost a daily basis, it's hard to resist a damn 1:08:19.720 --> 1:08:22.360 cell phone. I mean, I know a handful of people 1:08:22.760 --> 1:08:25.560 who say, Okay, I'm not gonna have one of those things. 1:08:25.600 --> 1:08:30.000 But I mean, you're kind of disadvantaging yourself in a 1:08:30.040 --> 1:08:34.519 way if you resist the march of modern technology. Yeah, Like, 1:08:34.640 --> 1:08:38.080 if all your buddies are out drinking nowadays, you can't 1:08:38.120 --> 1:08:41.320 find them without a phone. You can't on a bar, 1:08:41.400 --> 1:08:43.360 and everyone went there and stayed there. But now you'd 1:08:43.400 --> 1:08:45.280 never catch up with them, That's right, you gotta text 1:08:45.320 --> 1:08:47.800 them and find them. And so you know what I mean, 1:08:47.880 --> 1:08:52.720 it's the same principle at work, and I think it's 1:08:52.760 --> 1:08:58.519 been at work among us for two hundred thousand years 1:08:58.720 --> 1:09:01.679 and maybe in I mean that that that's as far 1:09:01.720 --> 1:09:04.480 back as we know right now that our own species 1:09:04.680 --> 1:09:07.920 has existed. You know, if we knew more about the Neanderthals, 1:09:07.960 --> 1:09:11.320 it probably was at work among them as well, these 1:09:11.360 --> 1:09:14.360 same principles. So do you feel that, like like, and 1:09:14.640 --> 1:09:18.120 I know you focus a lot of your scholarly attention, um, 1:09:18.120 --> 1:09:21.200 not exclusively, but a lot of it on bison. Do 1:09:21.240 --> 1:09:25.520 you feel that, let's say, just the market had been introduced, 1:09:26.040 --> 1:09:29.240 would they have wound up at in the same place 1:09:29.280 --> 1:09:37.200 that we did eventually, where we had effectively ecologically speaking, 1:09:37.240 --> 1:09:41.639 we had exterminated the animal. Well, I think it would 1:09:41.720 --> 1:09:45.160 have been possible. Yeah. So, I mean Native people obviously 1:09:45.360 --> 1:09:49.400 they have an economy. They haven't exchanged economy before Europeans 1:09:49.400 --> 1:09:53.400 ever arrived. I mean, we know that there were trading 1:09:53.479 --> 1:09:56.960 networks just like I was describing. For this Turko is 1:09:57.000 --> 1:09:59.800 going from the mountain out the door here all the 1:09:59.840 --> 1:10:04.240 way down into Central America and the Caribbean. There were 1:10:04.240 --> 1:10:08.960 trade networks that stretched all over the America's so that 1:10:09.439 --> 1:10:16.120 people that were producing goods, sometimes utilitarians, sometimes status goods, 1:10:16.520 --> 1:10:20.360 were able to trade for things they their local area 1:10:20.439 --> 1:10:24.360 didn't produce, uh, and that they wanted, that they desired. 1:10:24.800 --> 1:10:28.479 And so that had been going on for for thousands 1:10:28.520 --> 1:10:31.360 and thousands of years in the Americans. And that's probably 1:10:31.479 --> 1:10:34.439 I mean, I'm not an economist, but I don't doubt 1:10:34.479 --> 1:10:38.840 that that may not be the first step toward what 1:10:39.120 --> 1:10:42.920 ultimately becomes kind of a global market economy where everybody 1:10:43.000 --> 1:10:46.840 specializes in something and you have trade networks that spanned 1:10:46.880 --> 1:10:50.360 the world. I think in some ways what native people 1:10:50.400 --> 1:10:53.000 in the Americans were engaging in was kind of a 1:10:53.040 --> 1:10:58.479 prototypical version of that. But uh, and of course they 1:10:58.720 --> 1:11:02.360 they also had what the market, you know, is characterized 1:11:02.360 --> 1:11:06.439 by in our own time, where some people accumulate lots 1:11:06.439 --> 1:11:10.680 of things for purposes of status, and so again to 1:11:10.920 --> 1:11:14.680 make these native people who were here for thousands of 1:11:14.800 --> 1:11:19.080 years kind of more humanly understandable to us now, I mean, 1:11:19.120 --> 1:11:22.559 over in Chocko Canyon, when they were doing excavations over there, 1:11:23.120 --> 1:11:28.400 they discovered that the difference between the elites and the 1:11:28.479 --> 1:11:32.520 peasant population in Chocko Canyon, and the elites were probably 1:11:33.400 --> 1:11:39.040 priests and their families, was so dramatic that in some 1:11:39.200 --> 1:11:44.320 instances the elites had such better food, such better nutrition, 1:11:44.760 --> 1:11:48.599 that they were living twice as long as peasants who 1:11:48.600 --> 1:11:52.640 were working the fields only of a few hundred yards away. 1:11:52.880 --> 1:11:57.280 And there are instances where well, there was there was 1:11:57.400 --> 1:12:05.480 one uh vault where evidently the wife or the wives 1:12:05.520 --> 1:12:09.320 of one particular priest in Chaco at one stage of 1:12:09.400 --> 1:12:13.080 the high development of that civilization. Uh, this room was 1:12:13.120 --> 1:12:17.200 found with sixty thousand pieces of turquoise jewelry. I mean, 1:12:17.280 --> 1:12:20.120 so this is a woman who was the Choco and 1:12:20.320 --> 1:12:24.879 version of Amelda Marcos with all of her hundreds of shoes. 1:12:25.640 --> 1:12:29.880 I mean, no individual needs sixty thou pieces of turquoise jewelry. 1:12:29.880 --> 1:12:33.640 But that was kind of a status statement on the 1:12:33.680 --> 1:12:36.639 part of native people. So in other words, I'm saying 1:12:36.640 --> 1:12:39.720 that they also had that. It's not that they were 1:12:39.760 --> 1:12:45.840 trying to make everybody somehow democratically equal. There were status divisions, 1:12:46.800 --> 1:12:54.400 but they hadn't reached the point that the capitalists market had, 1:12:54.680 --> 1:13:00.680 where so much of the natural world has been converted 1:13:01.200 --> 1:13:07.720 into kind of soulless commodities when Native people confronted the 1:13:07.800 --> 1:13:15.719 capitalists market economy. For the Europeans, the animals whose hides 1:13:15.880 --> 1:13:23.000 they were trading for had no real relevance in Christian religion. 1:13:23.520 --> 1:13:29.200 Those animals lacked souls, they didn't have a plan uh 1:13:29.200 --> 1:13:34.679 in guard God's larger scheme of things. The Native people, though, 1:13:35.360 --> 1:13:40.680 still accorded kind of sacred rights to a lot of 1:13:40.680 --> 1:13:45.519 those uh animal species that Europeans saw is just kind 1:13:45.520 --> 1:13:48.559 of a congress of resources. So one of the places 1:13:48.600 --> 1:13:52.120 where you have a kind of a jarring difference is 1:13:52.200 --> 1:13:55.360 there where the European point of view is that you know, 1:13:55.400 --> 1:13:59.040 these are just resources. These things are kind of inert 1:13:59.160 --> 1:14:02.360 matter of These animals are alive, but they're just dumb 1:14:02.360 --> 1:14:05.920 brutes and their lives don't really matter. And Native people, 1:14:05.960 --> 1:14:10.200 on the other hand, they sometimes struggle with this trade 1:14:10.200 --> 1:14:15.440 exchange because they still did regard these animals as being sacred, 1:14:16.240 --> 1:14:23.240 soul filled uh ken really to them. So it was 1:14:23.360 --> 1:14:28.280 that's part of the psychic kind of disaster that I 1:14:28.320 --> 1:14:32.320 think Native people go through in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. 1:14:32.360 --> 1:14:35.280 And this happens all over the world and it'll be 1:14:35.360 --> 1:14:39.000 happening in among these groups that that New York or 1:14:39.080 --> 1:14:42.479 journalists would described was describing in South America too. It 1:14:42.680 --> 1:14:49.000 induces a kind of a a psychological crisis that undermines 1:14:49.120 --> 1:14:51.960 your worldview. And I think it's one of the reasons 1:14:52.000 --> 1:14:55.200 that Native people in the America's and I mean they 1:14:55.320 --> 1:14:59.720 had almost no choice but to participate in the market economy, 1:14:59.760 --> 1:15:05.920 but it really kind of rendered a catastrophic effect on 1:15:06.000 --> 1:15:09.639 them ultimately, from which I think some people have yet 1:15:09.680 --> 1:15:12.360 to recover. Are you through with the book Keepers of 1:15:12.400 --> 1:15:16.719 the Game? He he does a good job in there 1:15:16.920 --> 1:15:22.800 with the impacts of the beaver trade a native populations 1:15:22.880 --> 1:15:25.960 where here you have an ant like like like the 1:15:26.520 --> 1:15:29.960 bison or buffalo loose so large in the mythology of 1:15:29.960 --> 1:15:32.200 the tribes, I mean on the planes if you just 1:15:32.240 --> 1:15:35.920 look at like artwork and belief systems and oral traditions. 1:15:35.920 --> 1:15:39.960 But he talks about these groups in the Northeast that 1:15:40.080 --> 1:15:43.760 didn't really pay that much attention to the beaver. You know, 1:15:43.880 --> 1:15:46.040 it was it was like a reliable resource when you 1:15:46.080 --> 1:15:48.559 needed it, but it wasn't like this defining thing. And 1:15:48.560 --> 1:15:51.920 in Keepers of the Game he gets into some of 1:15:52.000 --> 1:15:55.760 their uh, some of the people's like just kind of 1:15:56.360 --> 1:15:59.800 puzzlement about why is it that they're so interested in 1:15:59.840 --> 1:16:04.479 the animal, and kind of the awakening to the idea 1:16:04.479 --> 1:16:06.880 that you could get a lot of money and get 1:16:06.880 --> 1:16:08.439 a lot of goods from this thing that we had 1:16:08.520 --> 1:16:12.439 really paid that much attention to before. Yeah, that's a 1:16:13.000 --> 1:16:15.200 like the guy who says, the guy who's like been 1:16:15.360 --> 1:16:17.920 stomping on Morrel's down in his cotton would grow up 1:16:17.960 --> 1:16:19.640 his whole life and never thought about them. One day 1:16:19.760 --> 1:16:22.400 some guy knocks on his door. He's like, you know, 1:16:22.880 --> 1:16:27.320 he's just like really ship man. Yeah, they're everywhere, They're everywhere, 1:16:27.360 --> 1:16:31.200 but people really want these things. Yeah, I think, uh 1:16:31.280 --> 1:16:33.719 you know, I mean, that's a very interesting book. Calvin 1:16:33.720 --> 1:16:36.880 Martin was the guy who wrote it, trying to that yeah, 1:16:37.000 --> 1:16:41.680 and uh you know, and his his argument was a 1:16:41.920 --> 1:16:47.760 really intriguing one because he kind of argued against some 1:16:47.800 --> 1:16:50.880 of the things. I was just explaining that the fur 1:16:50.960 --> 1:16:55.880 trade had an economic basis. He argued that it was 1:16:56.000 --> 1:17:00.200 based on it it was Indians participated in it for 1:17:00.400 --> 1:17:04.000 spiritual or religious reasons rather than economic reasons. And what 1:17:04.400 --> 1:17:08.080 he came up with was this very interesting idea that 1:17:08.439 --> 1:17:12.200 on the eve of the arrival of the Europeans, uh 1:17:12.240 --> 1:17:19.040 In the in the northeast, um Indians began contracting disease, 1:17:19.800 --> 1:17:22.559 and they were diseases they had never encountered before. And 1:17:22.640 --> 1:17:26.599 what Calvin Martin argued was that from uh itiner at 1:17:26.640 --> 1:17:30.160 European fishermen, they were being exposed, these native people being 1:17:30.160 --> 1:17:34.080 exposed for the first time to European diseases against which 1:17:34.120 --> 1:17:38.960 they had no immunity influenza, and they're dying of these 1:17:39.000 --> 1:17:42.360 diseases that their shamans can't cure, that they've never encountered before. 1:17:43.160 --> 1:17:48.000 And in their religious traditions they had uh Some of 1:17:48.040 --> 1:17:51.920 these Algonquin speaking people of that region had this tradition 1:17:52.520 --> 1:17:56.240 that they had a sacred pack with the animals, and 1:17:56.280 --> 1:18:01.000 the animals were supposed to keep humans healthy. And so 1:18:01.479 --> 1:18:07.320 Martin argued in that book that the circumstances of when 1:18:07.439 --> 1:18:11.160 these people were getting these diseases without ever having seen 1:18:11.240 --> 1:18:15.040 Europeans necessarily before, these are diseases that had worked inland 1:18:16.160 --> 1:18:20.760 with no explanation other than their own cultural beliefs, that 1:18:20.920 --> 1:18:27.160 they blamed the animals for those diseases and therefore engaged. 1:18:27.240 --> 1:18:31.160 And he found one Jesuit priest who said the Indians 1:18:31.200 --> 1:18:34.600 are engaging in a war against the animals and retaliation 1:18:34.720 --> 1:18:40.200 for making them sick, and they discover that these Europeans 1:18:40.280 --> 1:18:43.120 want the skins of those same animals. So it was 1:18:43.200 --> 1:18:45.800 kind of a blockbuster idea when it came out, which 1:18:45.840 --> 1:18:49.639 was in about nineteen eighty. But I have to say, 1:18:51.760 --> 1:18:55.000 was it was it Lampoon? Well, it wont a bunch 1:18:55.040 --> 1:18:58.280 of prizes when it came out as being this very 1:18:58.320 --> 1:19:03.160 imaginative and new inter rotation of why Indians participated in 1:19:03.200 --> 1:19:08.559 the fur trade. But what happened very interestingly is that 1:19:09.560 --> 1:19:15.280 another very famous anthropologist named Shepherd Craik came along three 1:19:15.360 --> 1:19:17.640 or four years later and called on a bunch of 1:19:17.680 --> 1:19:20.840 his anthropologist friends to see if they could find some 1:19:21.000 --> 1:19:24.919 evidence anywhere else in North America that something similar had happened. 1:19:25.520 --> 1:19:29.800 And they couldn't find any evidence anywhere that there had 1:19:29.880 --> 1:19:35.080 been another incident like this, And so Craik published a 1:19:35.240 --> 1:19:39.400 book consisting of all the studies of himself and his 1:19:39.439 --> 1:19:45.400 anthropos anthropologist friends trying to extrapolate Calvin Martin's argument elsewhere 1:19:45.439 --> 1:19:49.040 and finding no reason, uh that it seemed to work 1:19:49.080 --> 1:19:53.320 anywhere else. And he basically said, I think Calvin Martin 1:19:53.520 --> 1:19:59.439 took one document and he basically leveraged it into this 1:19:59.640 --> 1:20:04.720 argument hut without having additional supporting evidence for it. And 1:20:04.800 --> 1:20:10.000 it looks like he leveraged it too much. When you've 1:20:10.439 --> 1:20:15.720 put out your ideas, um and published them and previously 1:20:15.800 --> 1:20:19.720 in in journals and now in popular books, some of 1:20:19.760 --> 1:20:23.160 them are kind of controversial. Like what sort of negative 1:20:23.240 --> 1:20:28.040 feedback or or criticisms do you get when you call 1:20:28.120 --> 1:20:33.480 him to question something such as, you know, the relationship 1:20:33.560 --> 1:20:36.000 between Native Americans and buffalo when you call him the 1:20:36.120 --> 1:20:38.920 question that it was maybe a little more complex than 1:20:38.960 --> 1:20:46.120 we are taught in elementary school. Yeah, you must, you 1:20:46.200 --> 1:20:51.960 must get some you must get attacked. I will say 1:20:52.360 --> 1:20:55.400 it kind of worked like this, and yeah, I you know, 1:20:55.880 --> 1:21:00.320 not necessarily attacked. But I've had some interesting experien arians 1:21:00.479 --> 1:21:07.400 is um particularly I mean I first published, um, that 1:21:07.720 --> 1:21:11.800 bison ecology article in the journal American History, and so 1:21:12.720 --> 1:21:17.240 sort of in the aftermath that, uh, some big news outlets, 1:21:17.400 --> 1:21:21.519 uh you know, found out about it, and the New 1:21:21.560 --> 1:21:25.920 York Times did a story about my interpretation what had 1:21:25.920 --> 1:21:30.080 happened to the to the bison and so um. This 1:21:30.160 --> 1:21:32.160 was in the early nineties. I just got to the 1:21:32.240 --> 1:21:36.360 University of Montana UH to teach the history of the 1:21:36.400 --> 1:21:41.559 West there. And one day I was I was at 1:21:41.720 --> 1:21:43.800 home in my apartment. I hadn't moved out in the 1:21:43.800 --> 1:21:45.759 Bitter Root Valley and I was still living in Missooli 1:21:45.800 --> 1:21:49.280 in a little apartment. I was screwing around with something 1:21:49.320 --> 1:21:53.280 in the and the phone rang, just you know, And 1:21:53.320 --> 1:21:56.519 so I picked up the phone. And I mean, I 1:21:56.560 --> 1:21:59.760 would say it that way because the truth is, with 1:21:59.880 --> 1:22:01.800 a cell phone, I mean, I don't keep the ringer 1:22:01.880 --> 1:22:04.960 onto my phone, so a phone ringing is an unusual 1:22:05.080 --> 1:22:08.000 thing for me. This was back in the nineties before 1:22:08.400 --> 1:22:10.400 I had a cell phone, so I actually had a 1:22:10.520 --> 1:22:13.360 landline and still didn't ring very much. And I don't 1:22:13.400 --> 1:22:15.360 talk on the phone a whole lot. But the phone rang, 1:22:15.360 --> 1:22:19.000 and I picked up the phone, and this sonorous, deep 1:22:19.520 --> 1:22:24.719 voice says, is this Dan Flores? And I said, yes 1:22:24.760 --> 1:22:28.120 it is. And and the voice on the other hand said, well, 1:22:28.160 --> 1:22:33.240 this is Vine Deloria. I have just read your article 1:22:34.360 --> 1:22:38.920 on bison ecology. And what I thought he was going 1:22:38.960 --> 1:22:41.960 to say next is that, you know, you son of 1:22:41.960 --> 1:22:46.080 a bitch, How in the world could you ever argue, 1:22:46.880 --> 1:22:49.840 UH that Indians were involved in the destruction of the 1:22:49.840 --> 1:22:54.120 Bison because Vine Deloria, I mean for the members of 1:22:54.160 --> 1:22:57.000 your audience who don't know who Vine Gloria is. He was, 1:22:57.680 --> 1:22:59.720 I'm guilty this. I'm waiting to hear. Okay, so let 1:22:59.720 --> 1:23:03.400 me tell who he was. He's was one of the 1:23:03.439 --> 1:23:10.640 most outspoken Native writers in the period, from probably the 1:23:10.760 --> 1:23:15.439 nineteen seventies through vind Vine died about just a few 1:23:15.520 --> 1:23:18.160 years ago, so he was still alive into the twenty 1:23:18.160 --> 1:23:21.320 first century, but especially from about the nineteen seventies. He 1:23:21.360 --> 1:23:26.920 wrote books like God Has Read and Customer Died for 1:23:27.000 --> 1:23:31.639 Your Sins Yes. And he was teaching in the law 1:23:31.680 --> 1:23:36.080 school at the University of Colorado and Boulder when he 1:23:36.200 --> 1:23:41.439 called me, and what he said was, I would like 1:23:41.640 --> 1:23:45.919 for you to come to Boulder as my guest, because 1:23:45.960 --> 1:23:49.800 every year I have a gathering of people from the 1:23:49.840 --> 1:23:54.960 tribes and we discussed the relationship between Native people and animals, 1:23:55.520 --> 1:23:58.400 and I want you to come to the next one 1:23:58.720 --> 1:24:02.040 is my personal guest, the next one I'm having. It 1:24:02.120 --> 1:24:05.840 was just a couple of months away. But what I 1:24:05.880 --> 1:24:08.759 expected him to say was, I want you to speak 1:24:09.040 --> 1:24:13.599 to the assembled group. He said, I want to tell you, 1:24:14.000 --> 1:24:17.080 I don't want you to say a word when you come, 1:24:17.280 --> 1:24:20.120 I want you to come as my guest. You can 1:24:20.160 --> 1:24:23.599 sit right beside me. I'll introduce you to everybody there. 1:24:24.120 --> 1:24:25.559 But I don't want you to say a word. I 1:24:25.600 --> 1:24:30.439 want you to listen to what people say. And I said, 1:24:30.760 --> 1:24:32.960 I would be very happy to do that. And so 1:24:33.720 --> 1:24:39.280 I went to Boulder and UH set up beside Vindeloria. 1:24:40.120 --> 1:24:43.679 Out of the group of about thirty five people, there 1:24:43.800 --> 1:24:48.320 was one other white guy in the audience. Uh. And 1:24:49.120 --> 1:24:51.840 did you know his sorry interrupt his motive or what 1:24:51.920 --> 1:24:53.840 did you think his motive at that? Well? I I 1:24:53.920 --> 1:24:56.040 thought what his motive was and I and I was 1:24:56.160 --> 1:25:00.280 right about it. He he just wanted me to hear 1:25:00.400 --> 1:25:04.800 what Native people said about their relationship with animals. Um, 1:25:04.840 --> 1:25:08.200 but not in an adversarial way, not an anniversary show, 1:25:08.280 --> 1:25:11.280 you buddy, you know. And what he actually said to 1:25:11.360 --> 1:25:15.040 me when I was there is Uh. He said, that 1:25:15.360 --> 1:25:19.479 piece you did is the most interesting piece I've read 1:25:19.640 --> 1:25:24.320 that anybody has ever done on bison. He said interesting. 1:25:24.640 --> 1:25:30.360 He didn't say the most accurate, the best. He said 1:25:30.400 --> 1:25:36.519 he found it interesting. Now, Delia went on over the 1:25:36.560 --> 1:25:41.200 next few years as friends of mine in the profession 1:25:42.200 --> 1:25:46.479 began to adopt my argument about what happened to bison, 1:25:46.560 --> 1:25:48.400 And for the sake of your readers, I'll just say 1:25:48.439 --> 1:25:53.600 that the bison ecology article from was basically a recasting 1:25:53.600 --> 1:25:56.960 of what happened to bison in the West, and it 1:25:57.240 --> 1:26:01.320 argued that, in opposition to our simplistic view that we 1:26:01.360 --> 1:26:04.519 had had for a long time, that after the Civil War, 1:26:05.400 --> 1:26:09.240 white hide hunters had gone out and slaughtered these animals, 1:26:09.240 --> 1:26:12.320 slaughtered forty million of them are sixty million of them 1:26:12.320 --> 1:26:16.040 in the space of about twenty five years, and that 1:26:16.160 --> 1:26:19.920 was what had happened to them. I argued that in fact, 1:26:20.400 --> 1:26:24.360 the decline of bison had begun much earlier than that 1:26:24.360 --> 1:26:30.720 that it was caused by multiple reasons, in part a 1:26:30.880 --> 1:26:33.720 changing climate in the nineteenth century that produced the end 1:26:33.760 --> 1:26:37.840 of the Little Ice Age and therefore less conducive conditions 1:26:37.880 --> 1:26:40.720 to having large herds of bison on the grasslands of 1:26:40.720 --> 1:26:44.120 the Great Plains because the grasslands weren't as productive anymore. 1:26:44.560 --> 1:26:49.080 I argued that competition from horses for grass and water. 1:26:49.560 --> 1:26:53.160 As horse numbers had grown, wild horses and Indian horse 1:26:53.160 --> 1:26:55.960 herds had competed with bison, and that had drawn the 1:26:56.040 --> 1:27:02.560 numbers of bison down. That introduced European livestock diseases like anthrax, 1:27:02.680 --> 1:27:07.160 for example, and bovine tuberculosis had gotten among the herds 1:27:07.200 --> 1:27:11.439 as a result of UH, the overall on trails, taking 1:27:11.640 --> 1:27:15.280 oxen across the west and spreading these diseases, that that 1:27:15.439 --> 1:27:19.879 had reduced the numbers, and that there was in effect 1:27:19.960 --> 1:27:23.280 a whole host of reasons, but that one of the 1:27:23.320 --> 1:27:27.479 reasons was also that Native people had gotten involved in 1:27:27.520 --> 1:27:31.720 the market economy and had begun hunting bison not just 1:27:31.840 --> 1:27:36.120 for subsistence, but in order to produce bison robes for 1:27:36.160 --> 1:27:41.720 the market economy. And so among these various causes, the 1:27:41.920 --> 1:27:44.960 role of Indians in the hunt was one of them. 1:27:45.439 --> 1:27:52.000 And other scholars in the field of Western history, within 1:27:52.080 --> 1:27:56.200 the next five or six years, UH, people like Elliott 1:27:56.280 --> 1:28:00.960 West at the University of Arkansas and Drew Eisenberg, who 1:28:00.960 --> 1:28:03.920 at the time was at Princeton. Yeah, I read one 1:28:03.960 --> 1:28:09.520 of his books, Yeah, began writing books and articles basically 1:28:09.640 --> 1:28:14.519 using this same interpretation. And so during the nineteen nineties, 1:28:14.560 --> 1:28:18.000 I would say by probably two thousand and five, about 1:28:18.080 --> 1:28:23.400 fifteen years after I published that article, essentially just about 1:28:23.400 --> 1:28:28.080 everybody in the field had adopted that argument, and so 1:28:28.200 --> 1:28:31.839 it's become the standard argument for what happened to bison 1:28:32.120 --> 1:28:36.599 in the nineteenth century now has has replaced this earlier, 1:28:36.920 --> 1:28:39.599 more simplistic view that we had for a long time. 1:28:40.240 --> 1:28:43.719 And so as that's happened, one of the things I've 1:28:43.840 --> 1:28:48.200 noticed is that I haven't it's been a long time 1:28:48.240 --> 1:28:54.040 actually since anyone from the Native community has, you know, 1:28:54.880 --> 1:28:58.559 sort of stopped me in an elevator or at a 1:28:58.600 --> 1:29:03.479 conference or something and wanted to express some concern that 1:29:03.840 --> 1:29:08.639 I was dissing how Indians had interacted with bison. So 1:29:09.160 --> 1:29:12.080 I think the Native people, over time, and there have 1:29:12.120 --> 1:29:14.320 been some of them I've talked to who I mean, 1:29:14.320 --> 1:29:17.880 they were very perceptive about all this, and they understood 1:29:17.920 --> 1:29:24.080 that this very likely was absolutely what happened, because they 1:29:24.120 --> 1:29:28.240 had gotten enough evidence from their own traditions that people 1:29:28.280 --> 1:29:31.920 had hunted buffalo in fact for the market. Uh. So 1:29:31.960 --> 1:29:34.280 I think that even the Native people, I mean, there's 1:29:34.360 --> 1:29:37.120 no doubt if you you know, they're always as I've 1:29:37.200 --> 1:29:40.240 learned from writing Coyote America, I mean, there are people 1:29:40.280 --> 1:29:43.280 who are gonna troll you whenever they don't agree with 1:29:43.360 --> 1:29:47.720 your particular interpretation. So they're probably some trollers still out 1:29:47.760 --> 1:29:51.040 there on this this particular line of argument, but it's 1:29:51.080 --> 1:29:55.479 become the primary explanation for what happened to bison. But 1:29:55.640 --> 1:29:59.880 and it's not entirely isolated, because there's there's this idea 1:30:00.040 --> 1:30:08.120 it Europeans wiped out Muscos in Alaska without ever stepping 1:30:08.200 --> 1:30:14.120 foot on the land, just by saying, hey, if you 1:30:14.160 --> 1:30:19.439 get a minute, we'd like meat and hides. That's exactly Yeah, 1:30:19.960 --> 1:30:22.559 And that was all that it took. Yeah. Well, so, 1:30:22.640 --> 1:30:25.559 I mean, I'll give you another example that's directly related. 1:30:25.680 --> 1:30:28.479 I mean, it's a part of the bison story. I mean, 1:30:28.520 --> 1:30:32.160 we had argued that it was the hide hunt, wide 1:30:32.240 --> 1:30:34.840 hide hunters after the Civil War that had wiped out 1:30:34.840 --> 1:30:39.400 bison in the United States. There never was a white 1:30:39.600 --> 1:30:45.800 hide hunt in Canada. Canadian bison were hunted only by 1:30:45.920 --> 1:30:49.880 Native people and by the may Tee. And yet the 1:30:50.000 --> 1:30:54.840 same thing, explain explain. The Maytee are a group of 1:30:55.760 --> 1:31:03.200 Uh mixed blood Canadian people who were French from their 1:31:03.280 --> 1:31:09.680 European backgrounds Um and several different tribes of Sinnaboins and 1:31:10.680 --> 1:31:14.920 Uh Sue and speaking people's Uh from the Indian background. 1:31:15.000 --> 1:31:18.479 And they had become a kind of a third culture 1:31:18.920 --> 1:31:22.120 in Canada. And they had but they had an almost 1:31:22.360 --> 1:31:25.479 like industrial precision to their hunts they did, I mean, 1:31:25.600 --> 1:31:27.559 you know, and they had the same I mean, when 1:31:27.560 --> 1:31:32.439 you read their traditions from the Indian side of the mix, 1:31:32.760 --> 1:31:36.280 they had inherited many of the same explanations of the 1:31:36.360 --> 1:31:39.280 sacredness of the animal and the use of all the 1:31:39.320 --> 1:31:42.880 parts of it and everything that you find among the 1:31:42.880 --> 1:31:47.479 the Lakotas or the Cheyennes, or whichever group farther south 1:31:47.600 --> 1:31:50.640 you want to study. All of that was intact. But 1:31:50.800 --> 1:31:53.799 indeed they did have a kind of an industrial approach. 1:31:54.040 --> 1:31:58.760 They went out in carts, uh the famous Red River carts, 1:31:58.800 --> 1:32:02.640 out onto the plane and hunted bison and hauled the 1:32:02.680 --> 1:32:07.360 products back to places like Ottawa, for example, and sold them. 1:32:07.439 --> 1:32:11.919 But there was never a white hide hunt in Canada, 1:32:12.320 --> 1:32:15.160 and yet the exact same thing happened to bison there 1:32:15.200 --> 1:32:18.280 has happened in the States. Interesting about those guys that 1:32:18.320 --> 1:32:21.759 I read about was they would on the northern planes 1:32:22.360 --> 1:32:24.800 in the winter, when things started to freeze up, they 1:32:24.800 --> 1:32:29.680 would dig these giant pits and fill them full of 1:32:30.040 --> 1:32:34.960 quarters like bison quarters, wait till it all FROs good, 1:32:35.120 --> 1:32:38.599 and then bury that stuff. And they'd be eating frozen 1:32:38.640 --> 1:32:43.800 meat into July digging it out of those the ground. 1:32:43.840 --> 1:32:45.240 I mean if you think about it in the nineteenth 1:32:45.240 --> 1:32:47.439 century and earlier, I mean all the way back to 1:32:47.520 --> 1:32:51.080 the time of you know, head smashed in in Alberta, 1:32:51.240 --> 1:32:55.280 which where bison jumps go back ten thousand years. I mean. 1:32:55.280 --> 1:32:58.840 The great problem with killing large numbers of animals like 1:32:58.880 --> 1:33:03.360 bison is how do you preserve them? Because if you 1:33:03.920 --> 1:33:09.560 if you drive four hundred bison off a cliff and 1:33:09.760 --> 1:33:16.600 Alberta in August, I mean, you can only dry and 1:33:16.880 --> 1:33:20.759 salt a small percentage of the animals if you don't 1:33:21.040 --> 1:33:24.840 have a way to refrigerate those carcasses. And obviously ten 1:33:24.880 --> 1:33:28.280 thousand years ago or even two hundred years ago, they didn't, 1:33:28.760 --> 1:33:35.080 And so you had to be very circumspect about trying 1:33:35.120 --> 1:33:39.920 to drive enough and or small enough group of animals 1:33:39.960 --> 1:33:42.920 off a cliff that you didn't end up wasting an 1:33:43.080 --> 1:33:48.080 enormous quantity of that kill simply because you lack the 1:33:48.120 --> 1:33:50.559 ability to preserve enough of the meat. But there seems 1:33:50.600 --> 1:33:53.240 to be cases where it's spun out of control, like 1:33:53.320 --> 1:33:56.360 the Southernmost jump. I believe this is the Southernmost jump 1:33:56.600 --> 1:34:02.400 on fire Shelter used a couple of times, and one time, 1:34:02.720 --> 1:34:05.479 it worked real well, and it got its name because 1:34:05.520 --> 1:34:11.719 all those rotting carcasses combusted and a spontaneous combustion, hundreds 1:34:11.720 --> 1:34:15.320 of animals and some small number were as they say 1:34:15.360 --> 1:34:19.240 in the archaeological parlance, disarticulated, I think is the word 1:34:19.280 --> 1:34:23.960 they disarticulated for. But then, but even then it was 1:34:24.040 --> 1:34:29.400 like there was probably so few people and such strong 1:34:29.479 --> 1:34:31.439 resources that you did there was no need to even 1:34:31.479 --> 1:34:35.479 like consider finiteness now, and there were you know, they 1:34:35.479 --> 1:34:38.439 were even arguments some people who did Boston jumps set 1:34:39.240 --> 1:34:43.000 so you can't really let any of them get away 1:34:43.320 --> 1:34:46.600 because if one of them gets away, they're gonna go 1:34:46.800 --> 1:34:50.800 tell the other bison what your stratagem was. And so 1:34:51.200 --> 1:34:53.479 when you jump them, you've got to make sure that 1:34:53.520 --> 1:34:56.080 you kill every one of them that goes off the jump. 1:34:57.000 --> 1:35:01.320 Nobody sense because look at like the power of the 1:35:01.479 --> 1:35:07.480 lead cow and a herd of elk who carries institutional 1:35:07.560 --> 1:35:12.439 knowledge about where to go. And we know that there 1:35:12.479 --> 1:35:14.439 are damn sure a lot of cow elk running around 1:35:14.439 --> 1:35:18.360 that are twenty years old who have done big migrations 1:35:18.760 --> 1:35:24.160 that many times they put together where it's okay to 1:35:24.240 --> 1:35:27.400 be where it's not okay to be and how to 1:35:27.479 --> 1:35:35.360 respond to certain stimuli. And yeah, they are creatures that 1:35:35.520 --> 1:35:37.880 figure out what to do and what not to do. 1:35:38.240 --> 1:35:40.920 So I could totally see that you have a population 1:35:40.920 --> 1:35:43.800 in a valley that would get to be like, uh, yeah, 1:35:43.840 --> 1:35:45.960 we're not going on push this off that We're not 1:35:46.000 --> 1:35:48.040 We're not gonna do that, and you know, and I 1:35:48.080 --> 1:35:52.839 think that that harkens back to what is best called 1:35:53.120 --> 1:35:58.040 native science. I mean, it's an observation that native people 1:35:58.520 --> 1:36:04.320 made prop a blife from real life examples. We let 1:36:04.400 --> 1:36:09.679 that cow get away, and damn it, the next time 1:36:09.760 --> 1:36:14.559 we tried to drive, I heard off that cliff some 1:36:14.680 --> 1:36:18.040 cow looked like the same one, swerved him away and 1:36:18.080 --> 1:36:20.600 took him off in a different direction. And so I 1:36:20.600 --> 1:36:25.799 think it's it's kind of an observational uh kind of effect, 1:36:25.960 --> 1:36:29.640 which is a version of science where you observe and 1:36:29.720 --> 1:36:35.200 effect and you you related to a cause and you say, okay, 1:36:35.240 --> 1:36:41.000 that's why that happened. So kyote America. So that made 1:36:41.000 --> 1:36:44.639 the best seller that that was the New York Times bestseller. Yeah, 1:36:44.680 --> 1:36:47.280 the paperback is about to come out, and as one 1:36:47.320 --> 1:36:51.240 of my friends uh has put it, I cinema, the 1:36:51.320 --> 1:36:54.000 dust jacket of it and it's got New York Times 1:36:54.040 --> 1:36:56.160 best Seller across the top. And it also was a 1:36:56.200 --> 1:37:00.839 finalist for the E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Prize 1:37:00.880 --> 1:37:03.919 from Pan America. And so they put a big badge 1:37:03.920 --> 1:37:06.559 on the front and my my buddy wrote me back 1:37:06.600 --> 1:37:08.000 when I sent it to him. He said, Man, that 1:37:08.080 --> 1:37:11.320 coyote is wearing an awful lot of blaying this time around. 1:37:13.000 --> 1:37:15.000 Who told you on that? Like, who who didn't like 1:37:15.160 --> 1:37:18.560 the ideas in there? Like what sort of person was 1:37:18.680 --> 1:37:22.000 upset by the ideas of Well, it's been kind of 1:37:22.040 --> 1:37:27.320 and I'm basing this on the reviews on Amazon. Oh yeah, 1:37:27.360 --> 1:37:31.920 so right, but please yeah, but you've been reading those well, 1:37:32.000 --> 1:37:34.080 I mean I yeah, I do look at him because 1:37:34.560 --> 1:37:37.600 because I'm interested in that. Uh yeah, that just that 1:37:37.680 --> 1:37:40.400 could be just like okay, never mind, Yeah, it's right. 1:37:40.400 --> 1:37:42.320 It's somebody who's having a bad day. I mean, I 1:37:42.360 --> 1:37:44.559 had somebody write a review the other day that went 1:37:44.680 --> 1:37:48.400 something like, there was a review of American Serengetti and 1:37:48.439 --> 1:37:51.080 this guy says, or this person says, I think it 1:37:51.080 --> 1:37:54.720 was a guy says this is on Amazon says this 1:37:54.760 --> 1:38:00.160 book is flawlessly written. It's a quick read. It it's 1:38:00.200 --> 1:38:04.320 just It's marvelous from start to to end. Three stars 1:38:04.320 --> 1:38:07.519 out of five. Yeah. Yeah, well you know why. He 1:38:07.640 --> 1:38:10.840 was probably pissed because it took an extra day. Okay 1:38:10.840 --> 1:38:14.280 are you familiar are you for with Poco pads? Okay, 1:38:14.680 --> 1:38:17.839 so Poco pads. This guy with Jack's welding. Jack's plastic 1:38:17.840 --> 1:38:23.720 welding makes a like a sleeping pad. Okay, a very 1:38:23.760 --> 1:38:30.080 heavy duty sealed welding raft. Yeah, you can use it 1:38:30.120 --> 1:38:34.439 to as a bench cover. Um, the heaviest ship. Not 1:38:34.560 --> 1:38:37.800 a backpack raft, but indestructible sleeping pad that when you 1:38:37.840 --> 1:38:42.000 get away, you just dried off the top. So I 1:38:42.040 --> 1:38:43.599 was looking at it. I was not at the super 1:38:43.960 --> 1:38:46.160 there's the biggest one there, and I see it, like 1:38:46.800 --> 1:38:48.800 and you know, everybody knows these are great pads. But 1:38:48.840 --> 1:38:50.720 it's got a it's got like a two and a 1:38:50.760 --> 1:38:57.280 half star review. Okay, so, um, that's weird how it 1:38:57.280 --> 1:38:59.080 had because it's only been reviewed a couple of times. 1:38:59.120 --> 1:39:01.479 And I read him in like five stars, five stars. 1:39:01.479 --> 1:39:08.520 And some guy who's mad at Amazon about some delivery 1:39:08.600 --> 1:39:12.360 problem that he had had in the past and had 1:39:12.439 --> 1:39:19.680 given Amazon a one star review. Um, but gave it 1:39:19.720 --> 1:39:23.200 to Jack's plastic Welding, who hasn't sold many of these 1:39:23.240 --> 1:39:26.280 pads and therefore gave the illusion of this being a 1:39:26.280 --> 1:39:31.519 shitty pet. That's an example. But I don't think that 1:39:31.760 --> 1:39:35.520 when you read the reviews, I don't think you're capturing 1:39:36.720 --> 1:39:42.040 the general conversation around something. Well, yeah, I would agree 1:39:42.080 --> 1:39:46.400 with you absolutely on that. I mean, the reviews are 1:39:47.240 --> 1:39:49.960 you know, they're a slice, but they do give you, 1:39:50.000 --> 1:39:52.320 I mean one of the things that you know, Amazon 1:39:52.520 --> 1:39:55.920 reviews I think do give you as a as a author. 1:39:56.920 --> 1:39:59.559 It's a little bit of an impression of how something 1:39:59.680 --> 1:40:03.559 is getting received. And so to me, for something like 1:40:03.640 --> 1:40:08.080 Coyote America, Uh, what I kind of say is that 1:40:08.160 --> 1:40:14.559 there are camps of takes on a book like that, 1:40:14.960 --> 1:40:19.160 and I relate that to the fact that coyotes themselves 1:40:19.360 --> 1:40:26.080 are extremely political. Political is being gluten intolerant. Yeah, And 1:40:26.160 --> 1:40:30.759 so the fact that this is an astonishingly political animal 1:40:31.320 --> 1:40:34.800 means that there are people who have picked that book 1:40:34.920 --> 1:40:38.760 up or ordered it from Amazon and didn't really look 1:40:38.800 --> 1:40:41.559 too closely at what was going to be in it 1:40:42.000 --> 1:40:45.439 and opened it up and said, well, and this is 1:40:45.520 --> 1:40:49.679 what some people have said. I was expecting a bunch 1:40:49.760 --> 1:40:54.080 of animal stories like Ernest Thompson Seaton used to ride 1:40:54.120 --> 1:40:57.639 a hundred years ago, and instead I had to read 1:40:57.800 --> 1:41:01.120 about how I mean and I had just I had. 1:41:01.280 --> 1:41:03.800 I was forced into reading this. This author forced me 1:41:03.840 --> 1:41:09.600 to read how kyotes have been poisoned relentlessly for decades, 1:41:09.680 --> 1:41:11.840 and I just I didn't want to read that, but 1:41:11.880 --> 1:41:15.160 he forced me to read it. One star out of five. 1:41:17.200 --> 1:41:22.480 So if listeners want to go, we Uh interviewed Dan Uh. 1:41:22.720 --> 1:41:29.280 I believe episode thirty four or thirty six. Yeah, you 1:41:29.280 --> 1:41:31.639 haven't wait, can you? I was gonna say thirty three, 1:41:32.080 --> 1:41:35.440 but yeah, when he scrolled through it will say Seattle, Washington, 1:41:35.439 --> 1:41:37.799 and they'll say Dann Flores. But it was thirties somewhere 1:41:37.880 --> 1:41:40.280 right now. I might come back and tell you what 1:41:40.320 --> 1:41:43.040 it wasn't a second here. And we talked at length 1:41:43.120 --> 1:41:45.479 about both the Dan's books that were calling at the 1:41:45.479 --> 1:41:49.599 time Coyote America, I call him kyotes. We talked about that. 1:41:50.280 --> 1:41:53.599 Dan tells me um during that interview why I call 1:41:53.720 --> 1:41:56.800 him coyotes, Why he calls him coyotes? And he said 1:41:56.880 --> 1:41:59.640 something that I have I have referred to quite a 1:41:59.720 --> 1:42:04.040 number of times since, which was that anybody who shoots 1:42:04.080 --> 1:42:08.080 one never calls it a coyote. Yeah, yeah, anyone who's 1:42:08.120 --> 1:42:10.680 killed one calls the kayo, which I'm sure there's some deviations, 1:42:10.760 --> 1:42:14.360 just like there are political conservatives who are gluten and tolerant, 1:42:14.400 --> 1:42:17.240 but generally it's a left wing disease, so there's some 1:42:17.360 --> 1:42:22.519 variation there. But uh so go listen to that. If 1:42:22.520 --> 1:42:23.640 you want to hear about the two books, you have 1:42:23.640 --> 1:42:26.760 two boks go at the same time. American Serengetti and 1:42:26.760 --> 1:42:31.160 and you're in America Cowardy America and Coardy America is 1:42:31.200 --> 1:42:35.400 now coming out in paperback, and American Serengetti is already 1:42:35.400 --> 1:42:42.320 in paperback. And they're both also in audio CD form too, 1:42:43.439 --> 1:42:46.920 So check those out, and check out the interview that 1:42:46.960 --> 1:42:51.080 we did. Did you find the number? You've been off 1:42:51.080 --> 1:42:55.479 a quiet yet? Just listening? Just listening, Go back and 1:42:55.479 --> 1:42:57.760 listen to episode thirty three, which was really was one 1:42:57.760 --> 1:43:00.840 of It was a very pop of the episode for us. 1:43:00.840 --> 1:43:04.880 People loved it. That was demanded and demanded more. Yeah, 1:43:04.920 --> 1:43:10.639 that was really Uh the first interview I did for 1:43:10.680 --> 1:43:14.400 either one of those books, um, because they hadn't come 1:43:14.400 --> 1:43:16.720 out now, they hadn't come out yet. I mean I 1:43:16.720 --> 1:43:22.320 I ended up getting an interview on Morning America or 1:43:22.400 --> 1:43:26.879 a good Morning, uh morning edition I'm sorry on NPR 1:43:27.320 --> 1:43:32.480 with David Green uh for the Coyote book. Uh, and 1:43:32.560 --> 1:43:35.759 quite a number of other things on various regional NPR 1:43:35.880 --> 1:43:38.960 stations and so forth, and another podcast or two. But 1:43:39.000 --> 1:43:41.519 that was the one that you did, was the first one. 1:43:42.080 --> 1:43:46.800 Do you mind real quick? Um, just sketching out with 1:43:47.080 --> 1:43:50.759 each of those books, just so people understand. Yeah, Cayote 1:43:50.800 --> 1:43:56.160 America is, um, a biography of the animal in effect, 1:43:56.240 --> 1:43:58.400 is what it is. It's an attempt to write a 1:43:58.439 --> 1:44:03.320 biography of the coyote from its evolution in North America, 1:44:03.400 --> 1:44:06.719 which goes back to the the beginnings of the canad 1:44:06.760 --> 1:44:12.639 family five point three million years ago, through it's long 1:44:12.960 --> 1:44:20.000 roller coaster like history in America, including about ten thousand 1:44:20.080 --> 1:44:24.480 years of time when it was revered as a principal 1:44:24.720 --> 1:44:30.160 deity by the native people of the American West everywhere 1:44:30.160 --> 1:44:34.280 that coyotes were found. UM. And I do a chapter 1:44:34.400 --> 1:44:40.200 called Old Man America in the book which takes on 1:44:40.320 --> 1:44:44.080 that story and and relates uh in my own prose 1:44:44.280 --> 1:44:48.000 four different what I think are sort of representative old 1:44:48.040 --> 1:44:53.080 Man coyote stories, which are, if if one stops to 1:44:53.080 --> 1:44:56.360 think about it, this is the oldest literature in North America. 1:44:56.479 --> 1:45:00.840 This is our our oldest body of literally stories. They 1:45:00.840 --> 1:45:04.559 were handed down orally and then finally set down UH 1:45:04.600 --> 1:45:07.960 in print at the beginning of the twentieth century. So 1:45:08.000 --> 1:45:12.120 the story can the Coyotes biography continues from that through 1:45:12.200 --> 1:45:16.559 its UH first encounters with Europeans in the nineteenth century, 1:45:16.680 --> 1:45:21.679 people like Lewis and Clark Uh Mark Twain didn't quite 1:45:21.680 --> 1:45:23.519 know what to call it. Yeah, they don't. In fact, 1:45:23.600 --> 1:45:26.200 the coyote has called for most of the nineteenth century 1:45:26.760 --> 1:45:29.160 the prairie wolf. That's the name that Lewis and Clark 1:45:29.560 --> 1:45:32.720 gave it, and so for most Americans through about the 1:45:32.720 --> 1:45:36.639 eighteen seventies or eighteen eighties, that's what the coyote was called. 1:45:37.640 --> 1:45:41.560 But by the middle of the century, as as American 1:45:41.720 --> 1:45:44.439 settlement had begun to get out to the Southwest to 1:45:44.600 --> 1:45:48.599 places like here Santa Fe, New Mexico, they encountered people 1:45:48.680 --> 1:45:53.439 who were using the old Aztec word for the animal 1:45:53.840 --> 1:45:58.960 that had been hispanicized into coyote. And so by the 1:45:59.000 --> 1:46:02.519 time Mark Twain and rights Roughing in in eighteen seventy three, 1:46:03.240 --> 1:46:08.080 coyote has become at least among people who read his books. 1:46:08.880 --> 1:46:13.600 UH kind of the accepted form of pronunciation, although a 1:46:13.680 --> 1:46:17.759 two syllable form had survived in much of the rural 1:46:17.800 --> 1:46:21.120 parts of the country as a result of the mountain 1:46:21.160 --> 1:46:24.720 men who were in the Southwest and who encountered that 1:46:25.160 --> 1:46:29.160 that same sort of transition from prairie wolf to a 1:46:29.240 --> 1:46:31.439 new form, and they called it. I think they thought 1:46:31.520 --> 1:46:33.640 coyote was a little bit too fancy. They called it 1:46:33.880 --> 1:46:37.400 a coyote. If you're from Arkansas, maybe coyote sounds a 1:46:37.439 --> 1:46:40.760 little fancy. So uh, anyway, we ended up with two 1:46:40.800 --> 1:46:44.280 different pronunciations, one sort of in the rural middle part 1:46:44.320 --> 1:46:48.040 of the country and then around the coast, uh coyote. 1:46:48.080 --> 1:46:51.080 And of course when the Wily Coyote cartoons come along, 1:46:51.400 --> 1:46:55.280 they began to convert a lot of people who uh 1:46:55.760 --> 1:46:58.600 hadn't thought about how they were going to pronounce the 1:46:58.600 --> 1:47:02.600 animal's name and the kai yote pronouncers. But anyway, the 1:47:02.760 --> 1:47:06.719 story goes on through our attempts in the twentieth century. 1:47:06.760 --> 1:47:09.360 I mean, this is an animal that we actually in 1:47:09.400 --> 1:47:15.799 the United States attempted to exterminate through a federal agency 1:47:15.880 --> 1:47:18.920 known as the Bureau of Biological Survey. It's still around now. 1:47:18.960 --> 1:47:25.440 It's called wildlife services, and this agency poisoned and invented 1:47:25.520 --> 1:47:29.880 poisons for the purpose millions and millions of coyotes in 1:47:29.920 --> 1:47:34.000 the twentieth century, only to have us discover and this 1:47:34.080 --> 1:47:36.840 is the rare environmental story that goes in this kind 1:47:36.880 --> 1:47:40.760 of direction, that no matter what we did, we not 1:47:40.920 --> 1:47:43.679 only couldn't get rid of coyotes, we not only couldn't 1:47:43.720 --> 1:47:47.080 exterminate them, but in fact, our efforts to do so 1:47:47.560 --> 1:47:51.040 ended up spreading them out of the West across all 1:47:51.080 --> 1:47:53.400 of the rest of the United States. And so they 1:47:53.520 --> 1:47:55.800 now ended up in every single state except for a 1:47:55.840 --> 1:48:01.759 white uh, and are in every large and small city 1:48:02.040 --> 1:48:05.600 in the United States. They've even moved into urban areas. 1:48:05.640 --> 1:48:09.240 So um, it's the story of I argue in the 1:48:09.280 --> 1:48:13.920 book kind of really America's other than us, probably the 1:48:13.920 --> 1:48:18.240 most interesting mammal in North American history. No other creature 1:48:18.320 --> 1:48:23.320 has a biography that even approaches uh, something like the 1:48:23.360 --> 1:48:26.920 coyote has. And I kind of ended with talking about 1:48:28.160 --> 1:48:31.920 uh wily coyote and what effect Wily has had on 1:48:32.000 --> 1:48:36.800 American culture more than you would think. And even Walt Disney, 1:48:36.880 --> 1:48:39.800 who helped sort of change attitudes towards coyotes in the 1:48:39.840 --> 1:48:45.639 sixties seventies and uh those decades by doing six different 1:48:45.840 --> 1:48:50.439 pro coyote Disney films in those years. So that's what 1:48:50.560 --> 1:48:55.120 that book is about. American Serengetti is a book that's 1:48:55.200 --> 1:48:58.280 about the region of the United States, the American Great 1:48:58.320 --> 1:49:03.559 Plains that once was the analog of East Africa, the 1:49:03.640 --> 1:49:07.600 Massaia Mara and the Serengetti with I mean, it was 1:49:07.640 --> 1:49:10.559 one of the ecological wonders of the world up until 1:49:10.640 --> 1:49:15.600 about nineteen hundred or so, with this marvelous aggregate of 1:49:15.800 --> 1:49:19.040 large grazing animals, the bison that we've been talking about 1:49:19.439 --> 1:49:23.360 a lot tonight, Uh, that you, of course have written 1:49:23.360 --> 1:49:27.920 about in a very successful book, and I've written about 1:49:27.960 --> 1:49:33.639 some too. And along with bison, wild horses that were 1:49:33.720 --> 1:49:38.000 reintroduced having evolved on the Great Plains, reintroduced by Europeans 1:49:38.040 --> 1:49:41.759 back to America thousands of years after they had become extinct, 1:49:42.040 --> 1:49:47.559 and that just spread in uh an instant across this 1:49:47.680 --> 1:49:53.559 old ecological homeland of theirs uh prong horn antelope, gray wolves, 1:49:53.920 --> 1:49:57.439 grizzly bears, which we think of them as mountain animals now, 1:49:57.560 --> 1:50:01.080 but they were originally were a Great Lanes animals. Yeah, 1:50:01.160 --> 1:50:03.720 didn't Custer kill one in South Dakota, Custer Kill one 1:50:03.760 --> 1:50:05.960 in South Dakota. And one of the stories I tell 1:50:06.040 --> 1:50:09.200 people when I talk about this book is everybody has 1:50:09.280 --> 1:50:15.000 seen The Revenant with Leonardo Dicac that oh my god, 1:50:15.120 --> 1:50:18.880 you're ruined my night. Well, I mean the story that story, Yeah, 1:50:19.040 --> 1:50:23.120 opened the dank gass BC forest instead of where it 1:50:23.160 --> 1:50:26.280 belongs rightfully on the Willow line by Perian Zones. The 1:50:26.360 --> 1:50:30.240 American West was just like people should be hung for that. Yeah, 1:50:30.280 --> 1:50:32.639 on the great planes. This story was a real story. 1:50:32.680 --> 1:50:36.240 It happened to you glass, but it happened out on 1:50:36.280 --> 1:50:40.479 the planes rather than in the glass. Had no child, Yeah, 1:50:40.560 --> 1:50:45.799 he had not not exact revenge. He had no Indian 1:50:45.920 --> 1:50:50.120 child's and did not take revenge. Confronted the people that 1:50:50.200 --> 1:50:53.479 left him, and was satisfied knowing that they had to 1:50:53.479 --> 1:50:56.000 live the rest of their lives that he was still 1:50:56.040 --> 1:50:58.040 alive and they had left him. Yeah, with the guilt 1:50:58.080 --> 1:51:00.439 of having left him. But it happened down on the 1:51:00.479 --> 1:51:04.160 plains because that's where the grizzly bears were. So anyway, 1:51:04.200 --> 1:51:07.439 this is a book about all these these creatures of 1:51:07.479 --> 1:51:11.680 the Great Plains uh in the primarily the eighteenth and 1:51:11.760 --> 1:51:17.280 nineteen centuries, and uh, I sort of take them one 1:51:17.560 --> 1:51:21.479 at a time. I do prong horns in a chapter, 1:51:21.880 --> 1:51:25.760 wild horses in a chapter, gray wolves in a chapter, uh, 1:51:25.920 --> 1:51:28.479 grizzly bears and a chapter, bison in a chapter, and 1:51:28.520 --> 1:51:31.240 I do a chapter on coyotes, which were the jackals 1:51:31.280 --> 1:51:34.720 of the planes too. And then the book finally ends 1:51:34.800 --> 1:51:38.200 up going to our possibilities in the twenty first century, 1:51:38.360 --> 1:51:42.320 primarily through what's known as the American Pray Reserve Project 1:51:42.400 --> 1:51:47.560 in Montana of trying to recreate and rewild on Americans 1:51:47.680 --> 1:51:52.360 serengetti that will ultimately have all those animals in place 1:51:52.400 --> 1:51:56.639 again in a wildlife park that will be we hope, 1:51:56.760 --> 1:51:59.599 something like twice the size of Yelso it's a long 1:51:59.720 --> 1:52:03.040 term project, but it's spent under wife for about fifteen years, 1:52:03.040 --> 1:52:06.719 not not without speaking of controversy. Now without controversy itself, 1:52:06.800 --> 1:52:10.080 plenty of controversy surrounding it, to be sure, weirdly seems 1:52:10.120 --> 1:52:14.360 to be like the main story that is picked up 1:52:14.400 --> 1:52:18.240 in the media is the controversy, at which imagine a 1:52:18.320 --> 1:52:21.360 lot of ideas probably go through that phase. I would 1:52:21.439 --> 1:52:23.920 like to remind people when I'm talking, when I when 1:52:23.920 --> 1:52:26.080 I do when I give public lectures and I'm talking 1:52:26.080 --> 1:52:30.120 about the conservation history of this country, I always like 1:52:30.240 --> 1:52:37.880 to remind people how pissed everyone was at Theodore Roosevelt 1:52:38.800 --> 1:52:44.240 for laying out the national forest system. Pissed and then 1:52:44.400 --> 1:52:46.519 a couple of years go by and they carve his 1:52:46.720 --> 1:52:51.280 face in a big giant mountain. But at the time, 1:52:52.400 --> 1:52:54.639 live it. Yeah, I live it, I mean, and live 1:52:54.720 --> 1:52:57.599 it for I mean, when he set aside the Grand 1:52:57.800 --> 1:53:01.880 Canyon as a national mon month, I mean, you know, 1:53:02.000 --> 1:53:04.599 so we've got a review of the national monuments going 1:53:04.640 --> 1:53:09.719 on now, all the way back to the Escalante Grand 1:53:09.760 --> 1:53:15.920 Staircase in years and three, reviewing George W. Bush's Monuments 1:53:15.920 --> 1:53:19.800 review and Clinton's monuments as well on Obama's monuments. Yeah. Well, 1:53:19.880 --> 1:53:24.560 when Teddy Roosevelt decided that the Grand Kenyon he was 1:53:24.600 --> 1:53:27.599 going to set aside as a national monument, I mean, 1:53:27.640 --> 1:53:31.599 there were people who were absolutely furious at the idea. 1:53:31.920 --> 1:53:36.599 And of course it's basically a world class site. Became 1:53:36.640 --> 1:53:40.639 a National Park fourteen years later and is a world 1:53:40.720 --> 1:53:44.519 class site. So I mean, what I really would love 1:53:44.560 --> 1:53:48.240 to see, I think it's this American Prayers Air Project 1:53:48.320 --> 1:53:51.919 is the great conservation project of the twenty one century. 1:53:52.120 --> 1:53:54.599 It's gonna take decades, but I would love to see 1:53:54.640 --> 1:53:58.840 it as our version of Yellowstone National Park. I mean, 1:53:58.880 --> 1:54:02.280 we're the first country ever creates a national park system, 1:54:02.360 --> 1:54:05.759 the United States is, but we passed over the Great 1:54:05.800 --> 1:54:09.920 Plains in doing it, and I think now is our 1:54:10.040 --> 1:54:15.280 opportunity to circle back and take this area that once 1:54:15.439 --> 1:54:19.360 was one of the great spectacles of the world in 1:54:19.520 --> 1:54:24.320 terms of wild animals, and do like Africa has done 1:54:24.560 --> 1:54:31.439 and acquire for ourselves. Uh, this marvelous historic Great Plains 1:54:31.560 --> 1:54:34.520 animal park. Yeah, I should touch. Actually I brought up 1:54:34.560 --> 1:54:37.680 the idea of it, of its controversial nature, and I should. 1:54:38.320 --> 1:54:40.040 Rather than leaving that hangout, I just want to explain 1:54:40.080 --> 1:54:42.280 a couple of points about it. Where you already have 1:54:42.440 --> 1:54:46.120 some large federally managed landscapes up there. So you have 1:54:46.280 --> 1:54:51.160 the Charles M. Russell Refuge along the Missouri Breaks, and 1:54:51.400 --> 1:54:55.240 you have some some monument, some some national monument, national 1:54:55.240 --> 1:54:58.120 monument that was designated on the Clinton administration, the Missouri 1:54:58.160 --> 1:55:01.800 Breaks National Monument. And what what the Prayer Reserve is 1:55:01.800 --> 1:55:04.680 doing is taking money. And critics of it always like 1:55:04.720 --> 1:55:07.480 to point out that it's generally outside money. It's money 1:55:08.320 --> 1:55:11.840 that's very important for people to express for whatever reason, 1:55:11.880 --> 1:55:15.480 that they're taking money from people donated around the country 1:55:15.640 --> 1:55:19.520 to buy land that just comes up for sale. So 1:55:19.560 --> 1:55:24.440 we're talking about willing seller willing buyer. This is not 1:55:26.080 --> 1:55:28.800 it's not no one's like getting land for free. It's 1:55:28.800 --> 1:55:31.320 not the government giving anyone land. It's just they're starting 1:55:31.360 --> 1:55:36.320 out with existing parcels of public land. And when properties 1:55:36.360 --> 1:55:40.920 come up for sale in the vicinity, they go and 1:55:40.960 --> 1:55:45.640 say what you're asking for the place, The person names 1:55:45.720 --> 1:55:49.000 the price they're asking and it goes to auction or Hawevard. 1:55:49.040 --> 1:55:52.880 Also happens in the American Prayer Reserve buys the land, 1:55:52.960 --> 1:55:56.840 so the seller got exactly what they're after. They got 1:55:57.240 --> 1:56:02.800 market value for the land. Oftentimes the land you'll you'll 1:56:02.840 --> 1:56:09.800 also attain grazing rights on joining pieces of land, and 1:56:09.840 --> 1:56:13.320 so they will take over grazing rights and an opt 1:56:13.800 --> 1:56:17.400 to not opt to not always exercise them through the 1:56:17.400 --> 1:56:20.040 grazing of cattle. So they do have a program out 1:56:20.040 --> 1:56:24.800 there that deals with grazing cattle on land. The criticism 1:56:24.840 --> 1:56:27.400 comes from people who look and they say that and 1:56:27.760 --> 1:56:30.440 the and it's understandable, and yeah, and I think you 1:56:30.480 --> 1:56:32.800 need to be sympathetic to it, where someone's like, so 1:56:32.920 --> 1:56:39.360 my great grandfather, my grandfather, my father invested very heavily 1:56:39.400 --> 1:56:43.320 in this idea and sacrifice a tremendous amount um of 1:56:43.480 --> 1:56:49.120 work and effort to make the desert bloom right that 1:56:49.120 --> 1:56:53.640 that we came in and raise cattle and help feed 1:56:53.680 --> 1:56:57.120 the nation and establish an economy that would allow either 1:56:57.240 --> 1:57:01.760 to be schools and towns. And we built this out 1:57:01.800 --> 1:57:06.600 of nothing. And to now have someone say thanks, but 1:57:06.720 --> 1:57:11.400 no thanks, it's insulting to people. Um, the American praiser 1:57:11.680 --> 1:57:15.920 at one time used to it has this long line 1:57:15.960 --> 1:57:18.280 of ideas that are kind of strung out. At one time. 1:57:18.720 --> 1:57:21.280 There's this idea the Buffalo Commons, which is similar. Remember 1:57:21.360 --> 1:57:25.080 the writer Bill Kittridge in his book Hole in the Sky, 1:57:25.360 --> 1:57:29.600 Um pointed out that going to Jordan, Montana and mentioning 1:57:29.600 --> 1:57:32.080 the Buffalo Commons was a sure fire way to get 1:57:32.080 --> 1:57:35.520 your ask it. So that when I said, that's the 1:57:35.560 --> 1:57:41.800 controversial part is it's controversial and spirit only. It's not 1:57:41.880 --> 1:57:44.920 that someone's like stealing someone's lands, just someone's saying, like, 1:57:45.160 --> 1:57:49.120 how can you come and act like what we've done 1:57:49.160 --> 1:57:53.320 here isn't the best thing for the country. How can 1:57:53.360 --> 1:57:58.000 you say that you want to tear up our roads, 1:57:58.520 --> 1:58:04.200 raise our buildings, rip out our fences because what was 1:58:04.280 --> 1:58:06.960 here before us is more precious to you than what 1:58:07.480 --> 1:58:13.280 we created. Like, that's the idea. And I don't even 1:58:13.320 --> 1:58:15.440 really need to articulate the other side, because the other 1:58:15.480 --> 1:58:20.160 side has to do with, you know, more n like 1:58:20.240 --> 1:58:25.680 some fairly unassailable notions of of wildlife, habitat and and 1:58:25.720 --> 1:58:28.440 in this case, free market economies. But that kind of 1:58:28.440 --> 1:58:34.200 sketches out for you why it pisses people off, is yeah, 1:58:34.520 --> 1:58:37.840 um yeah, I think that's that's a good expression of it, 1:58:38.000 --> 1:58:41.000 you know, And like you, I think we can all 1:58:41.040 --> 1:58:45.120 be sympathetic to that. Um you know. I mean I 1:58:45.200 --> 1:58:50.800 come from Louisiana, where my grandfather and my father and 1:58:50.840 --> 1:58:55.400 my brother were all in the oil business. But that 1:58:55.560 --> 1:59:02.960 is a business in Louisiana that uh doesn't It doesn't 1:59:03.000 --> 1:59:08.000 have a continuing application into the future. It's not. I mean, 1:59:08.440 --> 1:59:13.720 primarily the oil resources are depleted, and so in my generation, 1:59:14.000 --> 1:59:17.520 there's no possibility to continue to do that. I mean, 1:59:17.560 --> 1:59:20.400 it might be possible, I suppose at some point to 1:59:20.440 --> 1:59:23.600 go in and frack or horizontal drill and manage to 1:59:23.640 --> 1:59:26.920 extract those resources. But what I'm saying is I'm from 1:59:26.920 --> 1:59:32.000 a generation that can't do what my father, my grandfather 1:59:32.560 --> 1:59:35.960 ended up doing for their livelihood. I think in Montana, 1:59:36.440 --> 1:59:39.720 on these ranches, there is a sense that they can 1:59:39.760 --> 1:59:44.120 continue to do this, and so that's I think, as 1:59:44.160 --> 1:59:48.520 as you said, Steven, that's kind of why there's a 1:59:48.520 --> 1:59:53.400 a sort of a spiritual resistance among some people to it. 1:59:54.480 --> 1:59:57.880 Um I would say, you know, on the other hand, 1:59:57.960 --> 2:00:02.240 that it's a good thing to remember that this is 2:00:02.280 --> 2:00:06.360 not a federal project. This is not the federal government 2:00:06.440 --> 2:00:10.520 coming in and creating a new national park or a 2:00:10.680 --> 2:00:16.640 national monument. This is private enterprise doing what it's always 2:00:16.800 --> 2:00:21.960 done in America, taking private land and then doing what 2:00:22.040 --> 2:00:24.680 they want to do with it. So it can be 2:00:24.880 --> 2:00:28.160 in a way, the American Prayer Reserve can be defended 2:00:28.600 --> 2:00:34.200 as part of this traditional kind of private enterprise, capitalist approach. 2:00:34.560 --> 2:00:37.160 It's just that what they want to do with it 2:00:37.200 --> 2:00:43.000 is not what private uh developers have often attempted to do. 2:00:43.240 --> 2:00:46.760 So it seems fishy. Two people, Yeah, it seems quietly 2:00:46.880 --> 2:00:50.560 bought a ranch and then over time people realize that 2:00:50.600 --> 2:00:53.560 you didn't run cattle on it, and that you tore 2:00:53.640 --> 2:00:58.640 up the fences. Um, it might go unnoticed. But articulating 2:00:58.680 --> 2:01:03.480 a grand vision, yeah, makes people uneasy. Um and you 2:01:03.560 --> 2:01:06.640 But anyways, you probably explain a lot of this, But 2:01:06.920 --> 2:01:09.080 I do. I mean I and I try to place 2:01:09.280 --> 2:01:13.680 this whole story in the context of how in the 2:01:13.760 --> 2:01:18.840 twentieth century we tried on numerous occasions, realizing that the 2:01:18.920 --> 2:01:22.160 great planes had been passed over for a kind of 2:01:22.200 --> 2:01:27.200 an African or Yellowstone like wildlife park. We tried on 2:01:27.240 --> 2:01:32.200 several occasions to make it happen, and uh, and every 2:01:32.280 --> 2:01:36.960 instance up and down the plains from West Texas to Montana, 2:01:37.560 --> 2:01:41.880 we've failed so far. And so this attempt by the 2:01:41.920 --> 2:01:47.680 American Prayer Reserve is probably the most promising attempt that 2:01:47.800 --> 2:01:51.840 we've had in a long time, and it's taking the 2:01:51.840 --> 2:01:55.880 the possibility on in a whole new way by doing 2:01:55.920 --> 2:02:00.880 this kind of private enterprise buying up ranches when they 2:02:00.920 --> 2:02:05.040 come up for sale, with the idea of ultimately cooperating 2:02:05.400 --> 2:02:07.560 with the managers of the federal lands that are in 2:02:07.600 --> 2:02:13.120 the vicinity along the Missouri River and somehow managing this 2:02:13.320 --> 2:02:17.800 as a whole in order to reintroduce all these classic 2:02:17.840 --> 2:02:22.560 animals that we sort of thoughtlessly, heedlessly a century Ago 2:02:23.280 --> 2:02:27.440 obliterated from the landscape. I mean, we did it almost 2:02:27.680 --> 2:02:31.360 without a second thought a hundred years ago, and now 2:02:31.440 --> 2:02:35.880 we're rethinking what we did and hoping that we can 2:02:36.280 --> 2:02:39.840 somehow restore this. And so, as I said to me 2:02:40.440 --> 2:02:44.640 and those of us who are conservation thinking kind of people, 2:02:44.760 --> 2:02:47.040 this is one of the most exciting things that's happening 2:02:47.040 --> 2:02:50.840 in the West these days. You know, uh, when you 2:02:50.920 --> 2:02:53.760 talk about doing without thinking about it. I recently had 2:02:53.800 --> 2:02:57.640 occasion to speak with the with the conservation leader Jim Pozits, 2:02:57.680 --> 2:03:01.360 and he spells out that time of us realizing what 2:03:01.400 --> 2:03:05.560 we were doing through the story of Theodore Roosevelt, the 2:03:05.640 --> 2:03:09.000 first buffalo he killed and the second buffalo he killed, 2:03:09.480 --> 2:03:14.840 and sort of how he how he interpreted those two actions, 2:03:14.920 --> 2:03:19.440 one being near is it Medina Madora, Madora, North Dakota, 2:03:19.480 --> 2:03:23.080 and one around Henry's Lake. Um. The second time and 2:03:23.200 --> 2:03:26.760 sort of the first one he does award dance around, 2:03:26.880 --> 2:03:30.400 dance surrounded right, and the second one um, and by 2:03:30.440 --> 2:03:33.839 this time there are like none left. And the second 2:03:33.840 --> 2:03:40.680 trip he has a conservation epiphany. UM. And that's one 2:03:40.720 --> 2:03:43.520 of the many things that makes that guy's life interesting 2:03:43.560 --> 2:03:46.240 that ties into things we're talking about is being this 2:03:46.440 --> 2:03:49.360 trans like one of these guys who was alive at 2:03:49.400 --> 2:03:53.960 this like very transitional moment where he was in some 2:03:54.080 --> 2:03:58.240 ways engaged with the end or kind of aware of 2:03:58.280 --> 2:04:02.880 the end, and then was one of the people who said, like, whoa, 2:04:03.360 --> 2:04:07.680 at just the right moment, I mean, just the right moment. Yeah, 2:04:07.680 --> 2:04:10.320 And it became the seed when he became president for 2:04:10.440 --> 2:04:14.760 those National Bison Refuges that he set up, and the 2:04:14.840 --> 2:04:18.160 first one in southwestern Oklahoma, the Witch of Toam Mountain Ones, 2:04:18.200 --> 2:04:21.240 and then the next one in when they did that one, 2:04:21.880 --> 2:04:27.320 they were trucking animals from the Bronx Zoo. That's how 2:04:27.400 --> 2:04:29.360 bad things got. When they were trying to set up 2:04:29.400 --> 2:04:33.640 some buffalo parks in the West, they were they were 2:04:33.720 --> 2:04:36.680 getting animals from the Bronx Zoo and shipping them by 2:04:36.800 --> 2:04:40.800 rail back out west. Well, William T. Hornaday, who was 2:04:40.880 --> 2:04:43.960 the director of the Bronx Zoo, had had the foresight, 2:04:44.000 --> 2:04:45.960 I mean, he had written the first great book about 2:04:46.000 --> 2:04:51.320 what had happened to bison extermination oftermination of the American bison. Yeah, 2:04:51.920 --> 2:04:56.200 and he had had the foresight to start through people 2:04:56.200 --> 2:04:59.920 like Buffalo Jones and Kansas Charles. Buffalo Jones who had 2:05:00.000 --> 2:05:04.040 and a former buffalo hunter, and then was stricken by 2:05:04.160 --> 2:05:08.040 guilt and said, as a result of my wickedness and 2:05:08.200 --> 2:05:10.600 killing so many, now I'm going to try to do 2:05:10.640 --> 2:05:13.400 everything I can to save the last few that are there. 2:05:13.680 --> 2:05:15.840 Not roped him and fed him on cow's milk. He 2:05:16.000 --> 2:05:19.840 did and provided Hornaday with some of these animals that 2:05:19.880 --> 2:05:22.160 went to the Bronx Zoo. So one of the reasons, 2:05:22.640 --> 2:05:24.960 as you know well and have written about, they were 2:05:24.960 --> 2:05:27.240 trading them around, of course, is they were trying to 2:05:27.280 --> 2:05:30.440 make sure, I mean, the the animal population of bison 2:05:30.480 --> 2:05:33.240 had had gotten so small that they were afraid of 2:05:33.280 --> 2:05:37.080 genetic bottlenecking, and so they were trying to spread the 2:05:37.200 --> 2:05:40.960 few animals that they had left widely to get as 2:05:41.600 --> 2:05:46.280 dispersed a number of genes from the original population. In 2:05:46.360 --> 2:05:49.600 these particular little groups of animals they were trying to 2:05:49.640 --> 2:05:52.160 build herds up from. There was a there was a 2:05:52.240 --> 2:05:55.400 hunter during the big slaughter in the southern plains. There 2:05:55.440 --> 2:05:57.800 was a hunter that was who grew sickened to buy 2:05:57.800 --> 2:06:00.880 it like what buffalo Jones later clan grew sickened by 2:06:00.880 --> 2:06:03.880 it and swore to call it off. But then in 2:06:03.920 --> 2:06:07.680 the morning he explained how he was hearing all the gunfire. 2:06:07.880 --> 2:06:09.760 It was like, funk, man, they're doing it. They're gonna 2:06:09.800 --> 2:06:13.960 do it whether I'm there or not, and jump back in. Yeh. 2:06:14.840 --> 2:06:18.040 Not too many of those buffalo hunters ever seemed to 2:06:18.080 --> 2:06:21.520 express much remorse, you know, and some of them actually 2:06:21.560 --> 2:06:25.360 became pretty combative about what they had done, you know. 2:06:25.480 --> 2:06:28.240 That's the interesting thing is like when Hornaday was out 2:06:28.520 --> 2:06:31.120 trying to get someone, he was trying to collect specimens. 2:06:31.120 --> 2:06:32.840 So at first he was trying to collect dead ones. 2:06:33.120 --> 2:06:36.200 And he he took the Northern Pacific I just recently 2:06:36.240 --> 2:06:39.520 made its way to Miles City, Montana, and Hornday took 2:06:39.520 --> 2:06:42.680 it out and then struck off with a wagon and 2:06:42.720 --> 2:06:45.320 cart and a guide he was traveling with, and they 2:06:45.360 --> 2:06:48.320 went up into the Pumpkin Creek area to see if 2:06:48.360 --> 2:06:52.120 he could shoot a handful as zoo specimens. And he's 2:06:52.360 --> 2:06:56.920 riding through the bone fields trying to find one. And 2:06:57.000 --> 2:07:00.280 in his book he points out that there was still eyes, 2:07:00.320 --> 2:07:04.520 there were still hide hunters in Miles City convinced, and 2:07:04.560 --> 2:07:06.320 that was like, that was I should put out. That 2:07:06.320 --> 2:07:10.520 was the last of them, That was the last big congregation, 2:07:10.600 --> 2:07:13.760 and I think it was killed. They started killing it 2:07:13.960 --> 2:07:19.200 in the Winner. The summer of eighty two, I think 2:07:19.200 --> 2:07:22.720 a bunch were killed on one of the reservations. Some 2:07:22.840 --> 2:07:25.680 of the Sioux got there where they gave them some 2:07:25.720 --> 2:07:28.280 of their guns back and let him leave the reservation 2:07:28.320 --> 2:07:30.080 to go on one last hunt, and they killed a 2:07:30.160 --> 2:07:33.400 thousand and then that was it to the point where 2:07:33.400 --> 2:07:36.520 Horny was out scrounging around hoping to find a couple. 2:07:37.320 --> 2:07:40.400 He points out that many of the people in Miles 2:07:40.400 --> 2:07:45.360 City were hide hunters who just were waiting for the 2:07:45.440 --> 2:07:50.080 next big push to come down out of Canada. Yeah, 2:07:50.160 --> 2:07:53.320 well some of them. And they had seen I heard 2:07:53.600 --> 2:07:58.160 cross the medicine line into Canada, and they were convinced 2:07:58.200 --> 2:08:02.480 that that herd was coming back soon. And I think, 2:08:02.800 --> 2:08:06.560 as harned, he says, he already knew when they were 2:08:06.560 --> 2:08:08.800 telling him that what had happened to that hurt because 2:08:08.880 --> 2:08:12.160 the mate had wiped out, that had gotten onto it. Yeah, 2:08:12.160 --> 2:08:14.960 they were that herd was already gone. But these hunters, 2:08:16.040 --> 2:08:18.880 I mean, and he he met one guy sitting around 2:08:18.880 --> 2:08:23.320 a campfire one night, Doc something or other who wandered 2:08:23.360 --> 2:08:25.480 into his campfire and sat down, And this guy was 2:08:25.560 --> 2:08:28.600 firmly convinced that all he had to do was sit 2:08:28.680 --> 2:08:31.160 around and wait for a few weeks or a few 2:08:31.160 --> 2:08:33.560 months or maybe the next year, and there was a 2:08:33.640 --> 2:08:35.920 gigantic herd or bison that was gonna come down from 2:08:35.920 --> 2:08:40.240 Canada and it would all resume. And instead, as he explains, 2:08:40.320 --> 2:08:46.040 these guys kind of fell into shopkeepers ranchers and they 2:08:46.040 --> 2:08:50.160 had to retrain. Eventually they never did come back. Well, 2:08:50.200 --> 2:08:52.280 when they did come back, they came from the east 2:08:52.320 --> 2:08:56.520 by rail. That's right. Yeah, Yeah, all those guys had 2:08:56.520 --> 2:08:59.680 to retrain. And so this is yet another one of 2:08:59.720 --> 2:09:04.560 those says in American history where the resources finally gone 2:09:04.880 --> 2:09:08.360 and you just have you have to face it. You 2:09:08.440 --> 2:09:11.240 gotta retrain and do something else. Yeah, there's another one 2:09:11.320 --> 2:09:14.880 you might know about. To another little remnant herd is 2:09:15.240 --> 2:09:18.000 the story from the story of the guys Sam walking Kyo. 2:09:18.920 --> 2:09:24.120 Sam walking coyote perhaps had gone, had gotten in a 2:09:24.160 --> 2:09:26.320 fight with his wife or divorced from his wife, and 2:09:26.360 --> 2:09:31.880 gone out to the Milk River and hunted and somehow 2:09:32.080 --> 2:09:35.720 came back home with a couple calves. Calves that followed him, 2:09:35.840 --> 2:09:39.040 and that became the source animals for what is still 2:09:39.120 --> 2:09:43.520 the National Bison Refuge for National Bises at the reserve refuge. 2:09:44.680 --> 2:09:47.720 It's uh, I think it's properly a refuge, just they're 2:09:47.800 --> 2:09:50.440 they're supposed to be administered by the Fishing Wildlife Service 2:09:50.480 --> 2:09:54.480 as a National wildlife refuge. And that so that became 2:09:54.920 --> 2:09:59.480 sam walking coyotes, animals from the milk became that source herd. 2:10:00.040 --> 2:10:05.000 Then later that heard in the Flathead Valley became the 2:10:05.080 --> 2:10:13.000 source herd for the original Alaska introductions, not reintroductions, but 2:10:13.160 --> 2:10:18.880 introductions as those animals spun off and the Canadian herds too, right, 2:10:18.960 --> 2:10:21.520 I mean, I think the Canadian government ended up buying 2:10:21.560 --> 2:10:26.200 that for that wild herd, and that and that was 2:10:26.240 --> 2:10:28.440 the I can't remember the name of that what that 2:10:28.600 --> 2:10:30.760 what that herd when that sprang off with that herd 2:10:30.800 --> 2:10:35.280 became all right, So check out dance books. You learn 2:10:35.280 --> 2:10:39.200 about all kinds of stuff. Um and uh and and 2:10:39.200 --> 2:10:43.920 and dan was hugely influential and and um fostering my 2:10:44.040 --> 2:10:48.760 interest in these subjects. Uh. Yeah, you haven't said ship 2:10:50.560 --> 2:10:52.280 are you building? Are you like built up with like 2:10:52.440 --> 2:10:55.120 bent up thoughts? Had those nice thoughts when we took 2:10:55.160 --> 2:10:59.040 our teat break there earlier, But um, which were that 2:10:59.680 --> 2:11:04.000 dan us talking about the the trade goods? You know 2:11:04.200 --> 2:11:08.600 that the market brought across the Atlantic and we're just 2:11:08.640 --> 2:11:12.360 down in Guyana, and how the parallels were so similar, 2:11:12.920 --> 2:11:17.440 Like they're still using their native bows, arrows. They like 2:11:17.960 --> 2:11:21.200 making a lot of that stuff, and they're they're big 2:11:21.240 --> 2:11:24.640 on um, like they know the importance I think now 2:11:24.880 --> 2:11:28.160 of sort of keeping that culture around because people like 2:11:28.280 --> 2:11:30.720 us are interested in that, you know, and there's value 2:11:30.720 --> 2:11:33.200 to that. But the one thing that has changed is 2:11:33.240 --> 2:11:37.600 like the metal, right, like they like files and machetes, 2:11:37.600 --> 2:11:39.800 and when the machete wears out, they turned that into 2:11:39.840 --> 2:11:44.160 ah an arrow point. I think you were saying right, 2:11:44.200 --> 2:11:47.480 you talked to Roving about how he made Did he 2:11:47.520 --> 2:11:49.240 ever learn how to make the points? I don't know. 2:11:49.360 --> 2:11:54.640 He remembers people using um where their bow and arrow 2:11:54.720 --> 2:11:59.360 gear was all native material. Now the only non native 2:11:59.360 --> 2:12:04.920 material is tip, which is steel. But he remembers the 2:12:04.960 --> 2:12:10.400 people using the basically a point made from cut from bamboo, 2:12:10.480 --> 2:12:13.280 and we saw those in Bolivia, those bamboo tips. So 2:12:13.320 --> 2:12:18.360 in one generation, that entire progression he's experienced. Yeah, we'll 2:12:18.400 --> 2:12:20.240 check this out. So I was there five or six 2:12:20.320 --> 2:12:23.440 years ago, and they do they hunt for fish with bows. 2:12:23.920 --> 2:12:26.040 It's one of the main ways they fish is bow fishing. 2:12:26.560 --> 2:12:28.400 I was down there five or six years ago, trying 2:12:28.400 --> 2:12:32.160 to sell them on polarized sunglasses. Okay, not ever already 2:12:32.200 --> 2:12:33.760 put them on, but check this ship out and put 2:12:33.800 --> 2:12:37.640 these you can see those fish well there didn't like 2:12:37.840 --> 2:12:44.640 the field, okay. And also shoes didn't want shoes five 2:12:44.760 --> 2:12:47.200 or six later, five or six years later. I'm not 2:12:47.360 --> 2:12:51.680 I'm not, I'm not even kind of joking. Everybody polarized 2:12:51.720 --> 2:12:54.520 sunglasses all day long, and and inn five or six 2:12:54.600 --> 2:13:00.880 years shoes, so you sing replicate me and many other 2:13:00.920 --> 2:13:04.080 people and many other people liking But it was just 2:13:04.200 --> 2:13:06.160 like it was. They were, you know what it is, 2:13:06.240 --> 2:13:08.440 and and the honest brought us up earlier it was 2:13:08.880 --> 2:13:15.680 ego tourism. We're just a constant, steady exposure to well 2:13:15.760 --> 2:13:21.360 healed outsiders who are coming down, and a lot of 2:13:21.400 --> 2:13:25.520 them like because it was still cutting edge location. A 2:13:25.560 --> 2:13:30.120 lot of them industry folks, okay, who come down with 2:13:30.200 --> 2:13:34.840 tons of ship and and just like, hey man, I 2:13:34.840 --> 2:13:37.240 brought a bunch of sunglasses done when I got back. 2:13:37.560 --> 2:13:39.600 When I went down the first time, the first thing 2:13:39.640 --> 2:13:41.280 I did when I got home was sent down. I'm 2:13:41.280 --> 2:13:45.400 not kidding. I sent down a shipload of files because 2:13:46.600 --> 2:13:48.320 they were talking about what a bitch it was to 2:13:48.360 --> 2:13:51.600 get a file, and that's how they made their fish 2:13:51.640 --> 2:13:54.880 points and ship and files were the dope, right, But 2:13:54.920 --> 2:13:59.360 it was very expensive to get a file and hard 2:13:59.400 --> 2:14:03.200 to find a file, and I sent down files. Now, 2:14:04.120 --> 2:14:07.840 I also point out that um, my main friend on there, 2:14:07.840 --> 2:14:11.400 he has an email address, so it's all very confused 2:14:12.040 --> 2:14:17.240 where he has an email address but makes his own 2:14:17.400 --> 2:14:20.640 bows and arrows from native jungle material. And if he 2:14:20.680 --> 2:14:24.080 wants to catch a fish, he goes to a to 2:14:24.240 --> 2:14:28.560 a palm and finds the fruit on the ground and 2:14:28.600 --> 2:14:32.480 cuts the fruit out open and pulls out a larva 2:14:33.400 --> 2:14:35.920 and takes the larva and puts it on a hook 2:14:36.360 --> 2:14:39.040 and catches the fish and uses that fish to catch 2:14:39.080 --> 2:14:43.400 another fish, and that fish catches the big fish that 2:14:43.520 --> 2:14:48.120 he eats, and he hunts and fishes. He hunts, fishes 2:14:48.160 --> 2:14:54.080 and farms year round except for on occasion when dudes 2:14:54.120 --> 2:14:57.000 like us go down and want to go out and 2:14:57.000 --> 2:15:01.320 see how they do ship, and them taking guys like 2:15:01.400 --> 2:15:05.080 me out to show how they do ship corrupts how 2:15:05.080 --> 2:15:09.280 they do ship absolutely or from their perspective, it doesn't 2:15:09.320 --> 2:15:11.360 krupt at all. It's just great stuff to know. It's 2:15:11.600 --> 2:15:13.800 the same way if someone came to me and they're like, hey, man, 2:15:14.320 --> 2:15:17.440 um uh, you know you guys wash your dishes by 2:15:17.440 --> 2:15:21.600 hand every night. Why not when you buy a new house, 2:15:21.640 --> 2:15:24.720 fit that sun bitch out with a dishwasher. And I'm like, hey, 2:15:24.760 --> 2:15:28.480 that's a great idea. These dishwashers are sweet. So from like, 2:15:29.400 --> 2:15:32.440 it's like a kind of colonialism, not colonialism, but it's 2:15:32.440 --> 2:15:34.760 like a colonial perspective to sort of be like, I 2:15:34.840 --> 2:15:38.960 hold the power to decide that you will or will 2:15:38.960 --> 2:15:44.720 not be exposed to these new materials. In fact, they're 2:15:44.720 --> 2:15:46.680 down there like, hey, you know, it turns out I 2:15:46.720 --> 2:15:49.160 got these polarized sunglasses in They're great because I can 2:15:49.200 --> 2:15:53.560 see fish and shoot them better the innocent It's it's 2:15:54.400 --> 2:15:57.400 what it is I think is I would just say 2:15:57.440 --> 2:16:01.840 two things. I think what you're just driving is a 2:16:02.040 --> 2:16:06.800 perfect description of probably what happened in the eighteenth and 2:16:06.880 --> 2:16:10.400 nineteenth centuries when Europeans went around the world and contacted 2:16:10.440 --> 2:16:13.600 indigenous peoples in the way we were talking about with 2:16:14.240 --> 2:16:17.800 how the market transformed the buffalo hunt, uh in the 2:16:17.840 --> 2:16:21.880 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I think this is just a 2:16:21.960 --> 2:16:25.640 kind of a microcosm description of it. And the other 2:16:25.680 --> 2:16:28.200 thing I think I would say is that you know, 2:16:29.000 --> 2:16:33.520 we're all in the same boat because technology is proceeding 2:16:34.120 --> 2:16:39.400 so rapidly all around us that we're all getting introduced, 2:16:39.920 --> 2:16:42.640 not on a daily basis, necessarily, but maybe on a 2:16:42.720 --> 2:16:48.720 monthly basis to new technologies that we can either accept 2:16:48.920 --> 2:16:52.200 or reject. But if we reject them, a lot of 2:16:52.200 --> 2:16:56.520 times we end up kind of disadvantaging ourselves because compared 2:16:56.600 --> 2:17:00.000 to everybody, Yeah, it shifts without you and it leaves 2:17:00.080 --> 2:17:03.359 you behind. And so I think the truth is we're 2:17:03.400 --> 2:17:10.039 all in this same boat. The world is going at 2:17:10.160 --> 2:17:16.520 hyper speed. Technology can easily leave somebody behind in their 2:17:16.600 --> 2:17:19.520 lifetime or either maybe in a decade or in a 2:17:19.560 --> 2:17:23.959 couple of years. And so we're finding ourselves sort of 2:17:24.120 --> 2:17:27.840 living that same experience that you've just been describing then 2:17:27.879 --> 2:17:32.640 and that I was describing earlier from centuries ago. Um, 2:17:32.879 --> 2:17:37.560 and it's happening all around us. Yeah, I think I 2:17:37.640 --> 2:17:42.120 hijacked your concluding thought. No, you never do that, what 2:17:42.120 --> 2:17:48.480 are you talking about? No? Uh, yeah, it is like 2:17:48.560 --> 2:17:51.440 it's a perfect paralleox. And now, instead of like other 2:17:52.200 --> 2:17:54.879 the other tribes saying no, I don't want the tools 2:17:56.000 --> 2:17:59.039 or the metal, you know the machetes. They're sort of 2:17:59.040 --> 2:18:03.440 like Romans groups like very much adopted the eco tourism 2:18:03.480 --> 2:18:07.680 and that's giving them wealth and like helping his village prosper. 2:18:08.160 --> 2:18:11.120 It's like the school there, I mean it took us 2:18:11.640 --> 2:18:13.680 actually didn't take that long to get there. We got 2:18:13.720 --> 2:18:16.120 there from New York in twenty four hours to the 2:18:16.200 --> 2:18:20.040 village itself, um, and that included a couple of hour 2:18:20.080 --> 2:18:22.720 boat ride, you know. But inside the village, when you 2:18:22.760 --> 2:18:25.440 go by the school, the school, it's like you look 2:18:25.440 --> 2:18:28.000 in the window and you're like, oh, well, it looks 2:18:28.000 --> 2:18:30.960 like every other school I've seen recently, you know, kids 2:18:31.040 --> 2:18:35.120 just well and they were in uniform and uh, you know, 2:18:35.240 --> 2:18:39.760 half high high teacher to pupil ratio. But he was 2:18:39.760 --> 2:18:42.080 telling us that the other you know, camps along the 2:18:42.200 --> 2:18:44.560 river hadn't really got gotten into that yet. And it's 2:18:44.600 --> 2:18:50.760 created some jealousy, you know, their village is actually growing. Yeah, 2:18:50.840 --> 2:18:57.119 well not just jealousy, but even inspired a a curse 2:18:57.200 --> 2:19:03.600 from a nearby shaman. Yeah. Well, I think, uh, you know, 2:19:03.879 --> 2:19:09.959 it's it's happening at differential rates for everybody, but I 2:19:10.000 --> 2:19:12.920 think we're all kind of caught in it. And maybe 2:19:12.920 --> 2:19:18.280 it's useful to see indigenous people's confronting it because that 2:19:18.440 --> 2:19:21.039 kind of is a mirror back on how all the 2:19:21.080 --> 2:19:24.959 rest office are having to grapple with the speed of 2:19:25.040 --> 2:19:32.320 technological change. My handful of experiences down there has um 2:19:32.640 --> 2:19:39.320 change in a remarkable way. How I view parts of 2:19:39.360 --> 2:19:43.640 our portions of our own nation's history that I'm interested in. 2:19:47.000 --> 2:19:49.800 All the parallels. Someone could very easily come in and 2:19:49.840 --> 2:19:54.959 point out that there that they're false comparisons, false analogies. 2:19:55.480 --> 2:20:01.560 But um uh, because it's not perfect, the timelines aren't perfect. 2:20:01.600 --> 2:20:09.640 But it's just fascinating, particularly the evolving relationships of people 2:20:09.760 --> 2:20:16.160 and animals and the market influence and to see people 2:20:17.000 --> 2:20:20.960 um going through a very speedy version of what we 2:20:21.000 --> 2:20:26.800 went through of within a single generation being engaged and 2:20:27.000 --> 2:20:32.439 being introduced to market hunting, engaging in market hunting, realizing 2:20:32.440 --> 2:20:35.640 where market hunting is going, and looking for a sustainable 2:20:35.680 --> 2:20:38.360 model to have that play out in a person's lifetime. 2:20:40.560 --> 2:20:45.240 You're seeing like like in some way, you're seeing a 2:20:45.360 --> 2:20:48.680 hundred years of American history can pressed down really tightly 2:20:49.040 --> 2:20:51.720 in part because of the technology you're talking about, where 2:20:51.800 --> 2:20:57.000 ideas can cycle in so quickly. Yeah, it's both ideas 2:20:57.280 --> 2:21:01.120 and uh, you know, the goods, the technical, logical, uh 2:21:01.360 --> 2:21:04.480 possibilities all at the same time. And I think you're 2:21:04.480 --> 2:21:07.320 exactly right. We're seeing it in a sort of a 2:21:07.400 --> 2:21:14.039 hyper drive microcosm, replicating the last five years of world 2:21:14.200 --> 2:21:19.080 history but happening in the space of a few years. Yeah. 2:21:21.080 --> 2:21:23.680 I don't know if that's good or bad. Any other 2:21:23.720 --> 2:21:30.280 final things. Yeah, that's intense. That's my final thought. Dan, 2:21:30.480 --> 2:21:33.800 anything you'd like to add, Thanks for having me on 2:21:33.879 --> 2:21:37.440 and say thanks for coming. Thanks to both you guys 2:21:37.600 --> 2:21:40.560 for being here. This makes it easy to do a 2:21:40.560 --> 2:21:44.879 podcast when we're sitting here on my couch. Yeah. Again, 2:21:44.879 --> 2:21:46.640 I want to thank you, and I really want to 2:21:46.680 --> 2:21:49.400 implore I really hope people do go check out your books, 2:21:49.840 --> 2:21:53.280 especially if if you've always you know, if you tend 2:21:53.280 --> 2:21:56.440 to only and I'm guilting this too, if you tend 2:21:56.480 --> 2:21:59.360 to only view a wild life from the perspective of 2:22:00.800 --> 2:22:03.560 hunting right and through that kind of media, I think 2:22:03.560 --> 2:22:08.360 it's helpful to to to step into um a historian 2:22:08.440 --> 2:22:12.080 like a trained historian shoes and look at wildlife a 2:22:12.080 --> 2:22:15.360 little bit because it, uh, it adds a layer to 2:22:15.480 --> 2:22:18.160 it that you don't get in the kind of normal 2:22:18.200 --> 2:22:23.320 conversations about wildlife and wildlife management that we engage in UM, 2:22:23.640 --> 2:22:26.039 where we're talking about like what we're doing now, what's 2:22:26.040 --> 2:22:30.840 going on now, threats at wildlife habitat now to step 2:22:30.840 --> 2:22:35.160 back and go like, oh, so that's the that's how 2:22:35.200 --> 2:22:38.080 we arrived at where we're at. Those are the things 2:22:38.120 --> 2:22:42.360 that shaped our understandings, the mistakes we've made, the successes 2:22:42.480 --> 2:22:45.640 we've had. UM. I think it's really enlightening. So yeah, 2:22:45.680 --> 2:22:49.680 hopefully you go check out Dan's uh not just his 2:22:50.280 --> 2:22:52.640 not just his books, but if you want to dig 2:22:52.720 --> 2:22:54.880 into the deep web, you'll find some of your academic 2:22:54.879 --> 2:22:59.000 pieces from your your past life as a peer reviewed journal, 2:22:59.240 --> 2:23:03.840 peer reviewed historian. So again that Dan, thank you very 2:23:03.920 --> 2:23:06.800 much for joining him. Thank you man and also Man, 2:23:06.879 --> 2:23:10.280 I just want to remind everyone please UM go and 2:23:10.320 --> 2:23:13.760 give go and give a big gas five star review. 2:23:14.120 --> 2:23:16.720 Me need your podcast. Thank you very much,