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Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,

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Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.

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Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven

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Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear

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Speaker 1: for every hunt. First like go farther, stay longer. All right, everybody,

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Speaker 1: Uh man, We're gonna get into something where this is

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Speaker 1: my favorite topic of all time. And these are two.

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Speaker 1: We have two guests today that I've been wanting to

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Speaker 1: get on. I'm gonna when I get into why uh

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Speaker 1: why you're here, You're gonna be extremely embarrassed. Okay, not no,

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Speaker 1: flattered and embarrassed. That's how much? How how jealous? I

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Speaker 1: am good of you? Too good? But first, your honest

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Speaker 1: is here, Brody? Like, how many times have you won

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Speaker 1: Media Tribune? Now, Brody? Two out of how many four?

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Speaker 1: Bretty got a perfect score. Brody got a perfect score.

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Speaker 1: But we realized. I realized something that there's a correlation

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Speaker 1: between age and winning. See, I thought it was just

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Speaker 1: reading articles, very small sample size. Steve, you can live

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Speaker 1: with the head with your head in the hole and

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Speaker 1: be old. No, it's over. I realized over the years

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Speaker 1: you accumulate answers to things, and it's just a race

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Speaker 1: to durking On and Dirk and smoked everybody. Then we

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Speaker 1: know what was being on. My wife thinks it has

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Speaker 1: to do with memory too, I mean bad, because it's

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Speaker 1: not always good to remember everything right. You want a quick,

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Speaker 1: funny Pat Dirkin story from last week? You know how

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Speaker 1: those Wisconsin boys that Doug Durhan, who's a huge man

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Speaker 1: rolls around with, are all large and individuals. Have you

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Speaker 1: noticed that? Yeah? And they keep getting bigger as the

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Speaker 1: night goes on, and by the time Keefer shows up,

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Speaker 1: you think like, there can't be a bigger man in Richland,

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Speaker 1: Like the largest man in Richland County is now here.

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Speaker 1: And then and then his labrador gets out of the

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Speaker 1: truck and it's the only lab on the planet where

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Speaker 1: the truck raises the dog gets up. You're like, what

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Speaker 1: is going on here? Can you imagine getting punched by Keefer?

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Speaker 1: Oh my god? Or punched by Doug No, no, I

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Speaker 1: think your bones would come out the other side of

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Speaker 1: your skin. They Doug punched you, And you realize why

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Speaker 1: they walk around like a little hunched over It's like

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Speaker 1: nothing is built for them anyway. Pat Dirkin walks out

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Speaker 1: into the middle of this group of gentlemen. And Pat, comparatively,

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Speaker 1: he's not from Richland County. He's not from Richland County. Comparatively,

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Speaker 1: he is quite small, one could say pint sized. And

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Speaker 1: you know, I said, I asked Pat. I was like, Pat,

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Speaker 1: what what have you not been eating? And he said,

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Speaker 1: I used to march in a company of eighty men.

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Speaker 1: And I'll tell you right now, I'm average sized. Uh

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Speaker 1: who else? Phil Karan? But then I want you guys

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Speaker 1: now to introduce yourselves and I'm Gonnay're not gonna embarrass you,

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Speaker 1: aren't you? Guests like talk about you, where you work,

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Speaker 1: whatever however you want to do it. It's a quick intro. Okay, Um,

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Speaker 1: my name is Dan Mann. I work in the University

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Speaker 1: of Alaska in Fairbanks, but the Arctic Biology deal, well

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Speaker 1: that's changed recently. I used to be in the geography department,

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Speaker 1: which was in GA Sciences, and then last year I

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Speaker 1: quit and I went to the Now I'm back in

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Speaker 1: the Institute of Artic Biology. Senior senior research scientists in

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Speaker 1: the Institute of Arctic Biology Pamela uh Ham Groves, and

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Speaker 1: I'm also at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and I've

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Speaker 1: been in the Institute of Archebiology since. Okay, now comes

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Speaker 1: the part where I'll tell you how uh I met you. Guys,

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Speaker 1: you probably remember this. Do you know what an individual

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Speaker 1: named Mike Cons? Very well? Okay, many years ago, many

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Speaker 1: years ago, I was in Mike cons field camp. I

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Speaker 1: think it wasn't like by the Iva Tuck Tuck. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: I was in his field camp doing uh, doing some

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Speaker 1: I was working on. I was working on my own

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Speaker 1: research project, which involved tagging along on his one of

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Speaker 1: his research projects. And we were up hunting arrowheads out

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Speaker 1: of helicopters on the north slope, which is prime pickings

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Speaker 1: for arrowhead hunting. You two happened to come through while

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Speaker 1: I was there. You happened to pass through, Okay, and Dan,

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Speaker 1: you said a sentence that I stole from you and

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Speaker 1: I have used a thousand times since then. You're the

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Speaker 1: one to introduced to me the term alder choked hell hole.

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Speaker 1: I think it was alder haunted hell because there was

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Speaker 1: also a bear haunted hell hole, and it can be

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Speaker 1: a moose haunted hell hole too. No, it might have been,

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Speaker 1: but I swear it was alder. You had described going

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Speaker 1: through an alder choked hell hole. And you guys were

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Speaker 1: coming from doing what I thought would be the greatest

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Speaker 1: job of any job on the planet. You were just

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Speaker 1: coming off of a river trip where you floated out

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Speaker 1: like umpteen dozen miles of Arctic river for the sole

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Speaker 1: purpose of finding old asked bones eroding out of the

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Speaker 1: river banks. And you had found a horse skull a

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Speaker 1: place the scene horse skull that you were feeling good about.

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Speaker 1: I just over. So how old were you? Well, I'm

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Speaker 1: forty seven now, so I must have been. This has

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Speaker 1: been in like two thousand four. So you you were

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Speaker 1: working for Outside magazine and did you do a story?

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Speaker 1: I'm Mike and his that was a Tony Baker, remember him?

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Speaker 1: He was he passed away, but he was an enthusiast. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: he was incredible that he was like the world's expert

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Speaker 1: on making certain tool types. Yeah, I think that was amazing. Um.

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Speaker 1: I'm curious to know how you how you two passed

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Speaker 1: through If you got there by a helicopter. Well, here's

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Speaker 1: the deal with like, you'll have to explain that. But

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Speaker 1: this place was so out there. Um. I think if

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Speaker 1: you like look math mathematically, like what's the remotest place

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Speaker 1: in North America. I think it's and you factor in

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Speaker 1: I don't know what the what the hell you factor in,

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Speaker 1: but like proximity to to any road populations and rolls,

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Speaker 1: it's kind of like there, it's the pole of inaccessibility.

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Speaker 1: And they had to take a I can't remember what

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Speaker 1: aircraft they used, but I was in it. They'd put

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Speaker 1: fuel drums in the back of an aircraft on parachutes,

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Speaker 1: the CASA from the BLM Fire Service, okay, and they

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Speaker 1: kicked the fuel drums out here and there so that

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Speaker 1: the helicause the helicopter couldn't get there on a tank

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Speaker 1: of gas. And so you'd be flying along in the

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Speaker 1: helicopter and you'd have to land on some little knob

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Speaker 1: and go down into an alder choked hellhole and roll

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Speaker 1: the barrel back up because it would have rolled off

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Speaker 1: a where off the landing zone. And they roll the

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Speaker 1: barrel back up, uncorked the barrel, hand pump gas into

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Speaker 1: a helicopter, and you passed through, I guess, because you

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Speaker 1: were just coming or going and it was kind of

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Speaker 1: a hub. It's like a well, there's a landing strip

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Speaker 1: at Iva Tuck. So you could fly small single engine

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Speaker 1: planes in there from Fairbanks and then from Iva Tuck

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Speaker 1: in the BLM days. Then there'd be helicopters that would

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Speaker 1: ferry us out to wherever we were going to work,

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Speaker 1: and then a week or two later, whatever the time

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Speaker 1: frame was, pick us up. We'd usually go back to

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Speaker 1: Iva Tuck, pick up more food, and go out again.

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Speaker 1: And you were you were hiking when you were doing

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Speaker 1: these excursions. Most of the time canoeing. We did some hiking,

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Speaker 1: but we have inflatable canoes that you could roll up

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Speaker 1: and stick in the helicopter. And then that was my

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Speaker 1: I was trying to envision a helicopter camp in which

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Speaker 1: you were passing through how like you're showing your horse

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Speaker 1: hat out the window or you come intro on a canoe.

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Speaker 1: I didn't get to see the horse said, so it

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Speaker 1: was a landing strip with a camp. And then we

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Speaker 1: see this is we do like an aviation version of

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Speaker 1: spike camping. So they got the way this this mike

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Speaker 1: cons worked. I'll just explain the whole damn thing. Now.

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Speaker 1: This is in the npr A, the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska,

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Speaker 1: which currently is like relative to everything else, like relative

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Speaker 1: to everything else on the continent is like like unexploited wilderness,

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Speaker 1: but it is the petroleum reserve, and so they have,

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Speaker 1: you know, the powers that be, UM have the right

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Speaker 1: to exploit the the oil resources, the mineral oil resources.

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Speaker 1: There should there be need for this, And there's how many,

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Speaker 1: like there's like four patrolling reserves in the country, a

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Speaker 1: couple of mere Ina, California. It's basically like oil in

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Speaker 1: the bank for an emergency, but they can tap it

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Speaker 1: for whatever reason. And I don't know what it takes

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Speaker 1: to be able to tap the oil, but it generally

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Speaker 1: just sits there and it's kind of like it's safe

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Speaker 1: in the ground. Um should we ever have you know,

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Speaker 1: world War three, we have this oil to exploit. They

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Speaker 1: were looking to do some leases that but they hadn't mapped, um,

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Speaker 1: they hadn't done a cultural survey of the landscape. So

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Speaker 1: that was sort of why this big giant arrowhead hunt

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Speaker 1: was going on, is they were out mapping cultural sites.

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Speaker 1: They didn't call it a giant arrowhead hunt. They were

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Speaker 1: out matching. They were out mapping cultural sites which might

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Speaker 1: in the future, UM make areas that would be hands

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Speaker 1: off two oil X to oil drilling stuff you'd have

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Speaker 1: to work around okay, because there's like significant cultural findings there.

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Speaker 1: It would basically come down to they'd get helicopters, or

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Speaker 1: in our case, we had to our like our group

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Speaker 1: had two helicopters that operated out of this big landing strip.

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Speaker 1: Or you could also land fixed wing aircraft. But then

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Speaker 1: we would spike camp using the helicopters to land in

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Speaker 1: places where you couldn't land fixed wing aircraft. So you'd

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Speaker 1: go into a new area, like you might go a

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Speaker 1: hundred miles over yonder and set up a camp and

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Speaker 1: then arrowhead hunt out of a helicopter from the spike camp.

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Speaker 1: Were you looking for known cultural sites? Are looking for?

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Speaker 1: You look for places where if you were camping, that's

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Speaker 1: where you'd camp and you'd land there. Like let's say

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Speaker 1: you got two rivers coming together and you got a

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Speaker 1: big like v of land and it benches out, so

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Speaker 1: like a finger wrinch coming down, it benches out. You're

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Speaker 1: twenty ft above the confluence of two streams. You can

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Speaker 1: see every direction you got water. There's a big flat spot.

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Speaker 1: You land uphill from it or whatever on whatever place

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Speaker 1: you could land. You walk down there and a lot

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Speaker 1: of times you go down and be like, oh, there's

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Speaker 1: a big tent ring. Oh mossed over, but you can

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Speaker 1: see the rocks, and you look an exposed ground, and

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Speaker 1: everywhere on the exposed ground flint chips, projectile points because

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Speaker 1: no one had ever picked it over, no one ever

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Speaker 1: picked it over. Everything here's you know, I mean, there's

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Speaker 1: still stuff laying around here, but it's been people been

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Speaker 1: picking it over since. I mean they knew as sooner

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Speaker 1: got done making stone points, they started picking them up.

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Speaker 1: And then in the dirty third, he's like in the

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Speaker 1: dust bowl it became like a real thing to hunt arrowheads.

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Speaker 1: But there it's like some dude dropped something ten years ago,

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Speaker 1: just still be laying there. And kind of what prompted

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Speaker 1: this area is cons had found this site called the

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Speaker 1: Masa site. We're gonna get back to you guys real

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Speaker 1: quick here. This maze site is this prominent mesa It

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Speaker 1: sits out you get you watch it. Can you guys

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Speaker 1: describe the maze site? Yeah, So what happened was, um,

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Speaker 1: back in the seventies they were doing some exploratory well drilling.

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Speaker 1: You gotta get Mike down here to tell you about

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Speaker 1: this dude. We've been trying Oh he'd love this. He

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Speaker 1: you gotta do it. Heating. He's waiting for well the

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Speaker 1: pandemic to and they have to take is gonna need

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Speaker 1: to call them and be like, Mike, the pandemic isn't ending.

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Speaker 1: You got to take your studio the Fairbanks. But anyway,

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Speaker 1: so they were doing this exploratory well dwelling drilling and

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Speaker 1: they had Mike along as the archaeologist, and they were like,

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Speaker 1: we need some shot rock, some fill to make road beds.

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Speaker 1: So they said, look, there's a mesa over there. When

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Speaker 1: you guys go check it out and tell us there's

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Speaker 1: no arrowheads, and then we'll go blow it up and

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Speaker 1: then we'll make a road and we'll use it all

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Speaker 1: for the fill to make highways or the make you know,

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Speaker 1: to the drill pad. So Mike went up there and

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Speaker 1: he went, holy cow, there's like projectile points everywhere. So

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Speaker 1: sad you can't blast this place. So he collected a

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Speaker 1: little bag that had some charcoal and it brought it

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Speaker 1: back to town and it sat on his shelf for

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Speaker 1: like a decade. And then another colleague of ours, Rick Ranier, said,

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Speaker 1: one day he goes, you know those stone projectile points

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Speaker 1: you found from that may say, they're really strange. Why

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Speaker 1: don't you let me radio carbon date that little bag

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Speaker 1: of charcoal you brought back. So, yeah, they sent it

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Speaker 1: in and it was like eleven thousand years old. It's

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Speaker 1: like super old. And the projectile points you've talked to

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Speaker 1: Meltzer already. Yeah, so they're they're very close and styled

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Speaker 1: to fulsome points which are like early Paleo Indian or

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Speaker 1: the kind of late Paleo Indian. Anyway, they're old from

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Speaker 1: down here this area. And so suddenly they had this

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Speaker 1: really significant site on the Mesa and so Rick and

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Speaker 1: Mike published his paper in Science magazine, and Ted Stevens

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Speaker 1: saw it in our old Senator and he said, he

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Speaker 1: called him up and he invited him to Washington, d C.

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Speaker 1: And he said, how much money do you guys need

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Speaker 1: to continue this research? And Mike was so, what was

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Speaker 1: his interest in it? It was Alaska, So he was

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Speaker 1: just a tireless promoter of Alaska, called him n He

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Speaker 1: didn't care fills oiler arrowheads. Well, he was interested in

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Speaker 1: the native people and stuff. And so Mike, you gotta

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Speaker 1: ask Mike this. But the way he's told people will

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Speaker 1: come on the show, well he will Eventually Mike said,

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Speaker 1: I was just so surprised that I should have said

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Speaker 1: five hundred thousand dollars a year, but I just said

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Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty thousand, and that's what he got.

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Speaker 1: And so the next ten years or something, Uncle Ted

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Speaker 1: made a line item in the federal budget that Mike

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Speaker 1: consit BLM and Alaska we get a hundred and twenty

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Speaker 1: thousand years to do whatever he wanted with. Dude, that's

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Speaker 1: classic pork barrel, right, And that's that he brought Pam

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Speaker 1: and I in then because it was like, oh, we

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Speaker 1: need somebody go collect bones. Oh so you guys are

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Speaker 1: rolled into the MASA site deal. Yeah, we worked It

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Speaker 1: wasn't good introduction. You just stumbled upon Steve so you

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Speaker 1: were did you? Uh? So you worked up like talk

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Speaker 1: about the Maza, like what it looks like and it's

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Speaker 1: not it's not miles long. You've been there, right, Yeah, Okay,

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Speaker 1: so it's it's a Mike again. You have talked to him.

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Speaker 1: But it's a place where the Native people came eleven thousand,

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Speaker 1: eight hundred to about ten thou years ago, and it

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Speaker 1: was a hunting lookout. So you went there to kind

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Speaker 1: of check out the caribou and probably the bison. And

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Speaker 1: to repair your stone points, okay, because they was always breaking.

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Speaker 1: Whenever you miss something or whatever, you hit a bone,

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Speaker 1: you break the point. So that you picture these guys

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Speaker 1: sitting up there like telling tall tales and repairing their

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Speaker 1: little projectile points. Right, and they left, they'd have little horrors.

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Speaker 1: So they're all these horrors. There's probably fifty different little horrors.

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Speaker 1: What's that just a pole of charcoal where they had

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Speaker 1: little campfires. Take a little fire and it's yeah, it's

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Speaker 1: a Tennessee pronunciation of hearth. Yeah, And so I was

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Speaker 1: just dragging it out. But they're all these like Steve

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Speaker 1: was saying, all this, uh, debotage, all this these flakes,

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Speaker 1: and then occasionally they have a broken point they couldn't

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Speaker 1: repair and they just toss it. So it's an amazing

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Speaker 1: but hundreds of them. Yeah, Now it turned out it

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Speaker 1: was a gold mine for these things. But it has

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Speaker 1: a very peculiar geology. And this is kind of interesting

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Speaker 1: if you're into the geology. A lot of those other

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Speaker 1: sites you visited out towards Utkok, they're on sedimentary rock

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Speaker 1: and as a result, the frost action breaks up the

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Speaker 1: rock and it all kind of um slushes downhill with

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Speaker 1: frost action. The Mazis site is peculiar because it's on

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Speaker 1: this dolar rite and its deeply fractured bedrock and so

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Speaker 1: the water it doesn't frost heave basically, so that anything

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Speaker 1: that was there ten thousand years ago is still there.

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Speaker 1: But if you go to another kind of outcrop, like

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Speaker 1: a lot of those you visited at by Uta Cook,

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Speaker 1: it's long gone. It's down in the drainage somewhere. So

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Speaker 1: it's just like amazing kind of coincidence of a place

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Speaker 1: where ancient people used a lot because it's amazing lookout

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Speaker 1: site and the geology was perfect for preservation, and this

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Speaker 1: was the oldest site that had been found in Alaska

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Speaker 1: at that point of well, in the northern part of

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Speaker 1: Alaska when because when humans first came into North America,

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Speaker 1: you know, they crossed the Baring Land Bridge and had

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Speaker 1: to move through northern Alaska before they could get anywhere

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Speaker 1: else on the continent. So these were the early people.

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Speaker 1: And the other thing that's kind of interesting is it's

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Speaker 1: of course the men that were sitting up on top

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Speaker 1: looking out, and nothing has been found of like a

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Speaker 1: village or an actual settlement where the women and the

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Speaker 1: kids would have been, because that's down in the lower

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Speaker 1: landscape that gets washed away as the river's meander and whatnot.

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Speaker 1: So that's what's the maids is so special because it's

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Speaker 1: such a stable spot geologically. How many yards long is that?

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Speaker 1: I mean it was a couple yards on top, it's

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Speaker 1: probably two yards, and it's three sides are steep cliffs

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Speaker 1: and so there's only one. Remember, there's kind of a

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Speaker 1: ramp that goes up outside, so it's kind of the

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Speaker 1: other thing. You gotta ask Mike about this, But my

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Speaker 1: theory always was that, you know, you you kill cariboo,

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Speaker 1: you drag them back there, and then you're probably gonna

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Speaker 1: dry the meat because I don't think they're living there

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Speaker 1: during the winter. So it would be a perfect place

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Speaker 1: to um prepare smoke meat and hides that are safe

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Speaker 1: from the predators and the scavengers because you're up on

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Speaker 1: this kind of fortress, right, so it'd be easy to

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Speaker 1: keep the you know, the bears and so forth away.

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Speaker 1: Did you guys find on the maze of did any

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Speaker 1: bones come off that? Yeah? There was. You look at

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Speaker 1: each other, now, well there was one bone fragment. They

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Speaker 1: discovered really late in the excavation, and nobody knew what

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Speaker 1: it was. It was just like this little piece of

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Speaker 1: burnt long bone. And I'm looking at him because Mike

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Speaker 1: was hoping she could figure out from the d NA

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Speaker 1: what the species was. But you couldn't get DNA out

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Speaker 1: of it. No. Once, maybe now somebody would have the

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Speaker 1: tech analogy. This was in uh, the nineties, when the

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Speaker 1: ancient DNA technology wasn't so good. And Uh, this DNA

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Speaker 1: sits in a dead piece of tissue like bone at

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Speaker 1: degrades over time, and especially if it's been burned, the

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Speaker 1: high temperatures cause further degradation. So it's really hard to

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Speaker 1: get DNA out of old samples like that. Where's that

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Speaker 1: bone sitting now? I don't know. But now that you

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Speaker 1: brought this up, I think we should send it to

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Speaker 1: Beth and see if she can get some DNA out

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Speaker 1: of it. Now she's been on the show, Best Shapiro.

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Speaker 1: She talked about bison. We talked mostly about mammoths. No,

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Speaker 1: we talked a bit about bison. I want to get

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Speaker 1: into bison with you guys too. How to clone a mammoth? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: we talked about that when we talked about that book

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Speaker 1: we're trying to get her back on and apparently her

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Speaker 1: husband's and Neanderthal researcher, Yeah, which I think has gone

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Speaker 1: back to Neanderthal. How's it that's okay? I think it's

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Speaker 1: bags being okay to see Neanderthal. I like, uh, so

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Speaker 1: many of these new discoveries are new technology discovering something

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Speaker 1: that's been on somebody's shelf or in somebody's drawer that

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Speaker 1: was actually taken from the ground and in the seventies

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Speaker 1: of the sixties, the fifties, um, and it's just like

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Speaker 1: it's the ultimate horders sport, right. It was like, oh,

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Speaker 1: don't throw that away. So here's the perfect example of Pam,

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Speaker 1: tell them about your polar bear skull from Lonely. But Pam,

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Speaker 1: before you do that, I just needed to put a

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Speaker 1: button on the bone. So you don't know what You

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00:21:37,280 --> 00:21:40,040
Speaker 1: don't have a theory about what the bonus. Uh my,

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Speaker 1: guess it's probably caribou, just because caribou were by far

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Speaker 1: the most common and easy to hunt, and because you

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Speaker 1: guys gave each other knowing glance. So I thought maybe

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Speaker 1: you felt that it was like a human bone, but

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Speaker 1: you didn't want to bring it up. No, And we've

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Speaker 1: look for human and bones and never found any. I

364
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Speaker 1: mean when we've collected bits and pieces of bones, we

365
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Speaker 1: could that be human. And I've had brought some back

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Speaker 1: and this could be and then it usually ends up

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Speaker 1: being a caribou something because it's the size. Okay, So

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Speaker 1: so do the polar bearing And I want to return

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Speaker 1: later to in your wanderings, um, what would be uh like?

370
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Speaker 1: I want to get back to the human the human

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Speaker 1: bone questions. So the polar bear story, of course, starts

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Speaker 1: with Mike Couns. So we were and Rick, we're near

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Speaker 1: the other guy from the Mesas. So the UM four

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Speaker 1: of us were up actually right on the north coast

375
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Speaker 1: of Alaska near an Old It was a do line

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Speaker 1: site lonely that distance early warning site or early radar

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Speaker 1: site from the Cold War? What was the word? Do

378
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Speaker 1: line line distance early warning to these old big radar

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Speaker 1: screens and to prevent red dawn. Right, So anyways, we'd

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Speaker 1: we'd land, the helicopter dropped it, the four of us

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Speaker 1: off and um Dan and Rick went one way with

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Speaker 1: their little handgun, and Mike and I went the other way.

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Speaker 1: And Mike had a shotgun and right before we left,

384
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Speaker 1: we said, s Mike, because normally we worked further inland

385
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Speaker 1: and the coast. And do you ever see polar bears

386
00:23:31,600 --> 00:23:36,080
Speaker 1: along this stretch? No, never this time of year. So

387
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Speaker 1: Dan and Rick are walking along with just their little handgun,

388
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Speaker 1: and they look on the beach and there these really

389
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Speaker 1: fresh polar bear tracks, which are really distinctive because in

390
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Speaker 1: polar bears you can see the hair. They have all

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Speaker 1: that hair on their feet and so well the hair

392
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Speaker 1: shows up in the track in the moll. They were

393
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Speaker 1: so fresh, and because the tide had just gone out,

394
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Speaker 1: so it was really obvious, and so it was kind

395
00:24:00,359 --> 00:24:04,880
Speaker 1: of foggy. So they're looking around and that the helicopter

396
00:24:05,080 --> 00:24:07,159
Speaker 1: disappeared in the fog, you know, so there was no

397
00:24:07,200 --> 00:24:09,480
Speaker 1: way you could have waved a warning. So they're going

398
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Speaker 1: one way and Mike and I are going the other way.

399
00:24:11,480 --> 00:24:13,360
Speaker 1: And then I said to Mike, so do you ever

400
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Speaker 1: find bones up here along the coast? And he goes nah.

401
00:24:17,760 --> 00:24:21,080
Speaker 1: And so we're just walking along and I looked down

402
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Speaker 1: and there's this bear skull and I pick it up

403
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Speaker 1: and it's a polar bear skull and it's like in

404
00:24:29,560 --> 00:24:32,040
Speaker 1: perfect condition, and so we go, oh, well, it must

405
00:24:32,080 --> 00:24:37,320
Speaker 1: have been a polar bear that just died, and so

406
00:24:37,640 --> 00:24:40,280
Speaker 1: we collected it and then we brought it back and

407
00:24:40,720 --> 00:24:44,040
Speaker 1: had it stored in our bone collection. And then it

408
00:24:44,160 --> 00:24:46,959
Speaker 1: was a couple of years later. We had some extra

409
00:24:47,560 --> 00:24:51,160
Speaker 1: or Mike had extra money for radio carbon dating, which

410
00:24:51,200 --> 00:24:53,800
Speaker 1: is how you can tell how old a bone is,

411
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Speaker 1: and we decided that we wanted to put everybody round

412
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Speaker 1: up the need this thing you can find. Well, when

413
00:25:00,320 --> 00:25:06,280
Speaker 1: we decided, we'd already dated and I'm sure we'll get

414
00:25:06,320 --> 00:25:12,119
Speaker 1: into this. We dated all these different herbivores caribout, mammoth, bison, horse, muscox,

415
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Speaker 1: and so let's do a bunch of carnivores. And you

416
00:25:15,119 --> 00:25:18,000
Speaker 1: don't find nearly as many carnivar bones as you do

417
00:25:18,080 --> 00:25:22,400
Speaker 1: herbivores because there's you go up the trophic levels, there's

418
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Speaker 1: fewer and fewer animals. So I said, oh, I got

419
00:25:25,400 --> 00:25:28,399
Speaker 1: this polar bear skull. You know it's modern, but maybe

420
00:25:28,800 --> 00:25:31,159
Speaker 1: maybe it's a hundred years old or something. So we

421
00:25:31,240 --> 00:25:33,880
Speaker 1: sent in a date and it came back and it

422
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Speaker 1: was greater than forty five hundred years, which is about

423
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Speaker 1: the limit of radio carbon dating. So you say it's infinite.

424
00:25:44,600 --> 00:25:48,320
Speaker 1: And we said, wow, that's amazing. I wonder if that's right.

425
00:25:48,600 --> 00:25:51,040
Speaker 1: So we sent off two more dates to a different lab,

426
00:25:51,119 --> 00:25:53,800
Speaker 1: two more samples to a different lab to get it

427
00:25:53,880 --> 00:25:57,360
Speaker 1: dated as well, and both of those came back at

428
00:25:57,400 --> 00:26:00,840
Speaker 1: greater than fifty thousand years. So it's like, wow, this

429
00:26:00,920 --> 00:26:03,359
Speaker 1: is the way on the beach. Polar bear was just

430
00:26:03,400 --> 00:26:07,080
Speaker 1: sitting just above the high tideline on the beach. And

431
00:26:07,480 --> 00:26:12,280
Speaker 1: so then I started looking and no ancient polar bear

432
00:26:12,320 --> 00:26:16,520
Speaker 1: skulls have ever been found. There's some there's one old

433
00:26:16,560 --> 00:26:20,439
Speaker 1: polar bear bone from Svalbard, part of a jawbone, and

434
00:26:21,200 --> 00:26:26,160
Speaker 1: a couple bone polar bone polar bear bone fragments from

435
00:26:26,240 --> 00:26:29,919
Speaker 1: Norway that are maybe around a hundred thousand years and

436
00:26:29,960 --> 00:26:33,160
Speaker 1: then there's our polar bear skull. Of course, it wasn't

437
00:26:33,200 --> 00:26:37,040
Speaker 1: in any kind of stratigraphic context, so all we could

438
00:26:37,080 --> 00:26:40,359
Speaker 1: say is it's older than radio carbon age. And do

439
00:26:40,359 --> 00:26:42,800
Speaker 1: you think it had been moved a lot over the time. No,

440
00:26:43,119 --> 00:26:48,040
Speaker 1: because it was in such good condition it couldn't have reworked.

441
00:26:48,160 --> 00:26:53,239
Speaker 1: And so we actually ended up, um, we've collaborated with

442
00:26:53,320 --> 00:26:56,919
Speaker 1: Beth Shapiro on a bunch of ancient DNA, And so

443
00:26:57,000 --> 00:26:59,359
Speaker 1: he said to Beth Hey, we got this old polar

444
00:26:59,359 --> 00:27:03,200
Speaker 1: bear skull. Are you interested? She said, of course, and

445
00:27:03,280 --> 00:27:08,520
Speaker 1: so we sent her a sample. And actually last night

446
00:27:08,560 --> 00:27:12,400
Speaker 1: we were just reviewing this manuscript that's um in review

447
00:27:13,080 --> 00:27:17,000
Speaker 1: to be published on the DNA of this polar bear.

448
00:27:17,640 --> 00:27:20,439
Speaker 1: And what all can you tell about it? Are we

449
00:27:20,480 --> 00:27:26,440
Speaker 1: allowed to say anything? Come on? First off, the it's

450
00:27:26,480 --> 00:27:32,000
Speaker 1: a female and um, it's named her Bruno. Yeah, it

451
00:27:32,040 --> 00:27:36,240
Speaker 1: should be Brunella. But but it's in incredibly good shape

452
00:27:36,280 --> 00:27:38,560
Speaker 1: so it hasn't been battered, so we think it was

453
00:27:38,760 --> 00:27:44,240
Speaker 1: probably safely stored in perma frost for ninety thousand plus years.

454
00:27:44,480 --> 00:27:47,960
Speaker 1: I got it. Yeah, but the basic polar bear story,

455
00:27:49,040 --> 00:27:52,000
Speaker 1: you gotta get to talk about this, but you'll be

456
00:27:52,040 --> 00:27:54,000
Speaker 1: really interested because it has a lot to do with

457
00:27:54,000 --> 00:27:57,840
Speaker 1: Southeast Alaska and the ABC bears. So Admiralty Bear enough

458
00:27:57,880 --> 00:28:01,399
Speaker 1: in Chichikov. So if you did you hear all this

459
00:28:01,440 --> 00:28:04,360
Speaker 1: stuff from her about the polar bear jeans, I've heard

460
00:28:04,359 --> 00:28:07,960
Speaker 1: it from other folks, but just remind us like, like, uh,

461
00:28:08,480 --> 00:28:11,600
Speaker 1: polar bears seem to be closely related to brown bears

462
00:28:11,640 --> 00:28:15,240
Speaker 1: from the A. B. C's and they're not. And polar

463
00:28:15,280 --> 00:28:20,480
Speaker 1: bears are you know a younger species than Yeah, then

464
00:28:20,520 --> 00:28:22,919
Speaker 1: brown bears, like the split went that way rather than

465
00:28:22,920 --> 00:28:25,520
Speaker 1: the other way. Yeah, though it's I might be screwing

466
00:28:25,560 --> 00:28:28,880
Speaker 1: us all up. Well, everybody else is confused about it too,

467
00:28:29,280 --> 00:28:32,040
Speaker 1: But what seems to have happened was, um, whenever there's

468
00:28:32,080 --> 00:28:34,800
Speaker 1: a warm time in the Arctic, we start losing sea ice.

469
00:28:34,840 --> 00:28:36,840
Speaker 1: Like what's going on right now. So the polar bears

470
00:28:36,880 --> 00:28:39,000
Speaker 1: are kind of shipped out of luck, so they tend

471
00:28:39,040 --> 00:28:42,040
Speaker 1: to come on shore, and when they come on shore,

472
00:28:42,080 --> 00:28:46,520
Speaker 1: they encounter brown bears, and for some reason, female brown bears,

473
00:28:46,720 --> 00:28:49,960
Speaker 1: female polar bears kind of like male brown bears. So

474
00:28:50,040 --> 00:28:53,720
Speaker 1: there seems to be uh, brown bear jeans go into

475
00:28:53,720 --> 00:28:57,120
Speaker 1: the polar bear population via male brown bears breeding with

476
00:28:57,200 --> 00:29:00,640
Speaker 1: female polar bears. So then during cold time, so picture

477
00:29:00,760 --> 00:29:03,680
Speaker 1: the height of a glaciation, it's super cold. The Arctic

478
00:29:03,880 --> 00:29:07,920
Speaker 1: is frozen. There's no leads, okay, So if you're hunt

479
00:29:08,000 --> 00:29:11,280
Speaker 1: if you're a hyper predator like a polar bear, and

480
00:29:11,320 --> 00:29:13,520
Speaker 1: you're hunting seals, you're kind of out of luck because

481
00:29:13,560 --> 00:29:16,360
Speaker 1: you need a place for the seals to come up, right,

482
00:29:16,720 --> 00:29:18,800
Speaker 1: So the polar bear population, you're saying the lead, you

483
00:29:18,840 --> 00:29:21,920
Speaker 1: mean like cracks in the ice opening, so the polar

484
00:29:21,920 --> 00:29:25,240
Speaker 1: bear populations tend to move south. So during the last

485
00:29:25,240 --> 00:29:28,120
Speaker 1: glacial maximum, like twenty years ago, they were polar bears

486
00:29:28,160 --> 00:29:30,560
Speaker 1: off the coast of Ireland and they were all the

487
00:29:30,600 --> 00:29:35,760
Speaker 1: way down to the southeast Alaska. Oh yeah, so what

488
00:29:35,800 --> 00:29:38,360
Speaker 1: we used to think happened then this was like last year.

489
00:29:38,440 --> 00:29:41,800
Speaker 1: This is what we thought happened, wasn't It's amazing how

490
00:29:42,360 --> 00:29:45,880
Speaker 1: how quickly ship about a long time ago changes. So

491
00:29:46,040 --> 00:29:50,080
Speaker 1: when the glaciers started the retreat about eighteen thousand years ago,

492
00:29:50,680 --> 00:29:54,200
Speaker 1: polar bears got stranded in southeast Alaska, Okay, So you

493
00:29:54,320 --> 00:29:57,000
Speaker 1: picture the sea ice is retreating back across the gulf

494
00:29:57,040 --> 00:29:59,360
Speaker 1: and then up the bearing straight. So you got these

495
00:29:59,360 --> 00:30:03,280
Speaker 1: poor polar and they're like stranded on these islands. And

496
00:30:03,320 --> 00:30:05,680
Speaker 1: then what we think happened that we thought last year,

497
00:30:05,680 --> 00:30:09,440
Speaker 1: what happened. Brown bears invaded from like Yellowstone and down

498
00:30:09,480 --> 00:30:12,000
Speaker 1: here southeat the ice sheet, and they came in and

499
00:30:12,040 --> 00:30:15,240
Speaker 1: they met these beautiful female polar bears and they made it.

500
00:30:15,520 --> 00:30:20,840
Speaker 1: And then we had polar bear mitochondrial DNA, because that's

501
00:30:20,840 --> 00:30:23,400
Speaker 1: inherited from the females, is now in the DNA of

502
00:30:23,480 --> 00:30:26,240
Speaker 1: these brown bears around you know on Prince of Wales

503
00:30:26,280 --> 00:30:32,000
Speaker 1: Island and so forth. Okay, so, um, there's this inner breeding,

504
00:30:32,480 --> 00:30:35,360
Speaker 1: but it turns out from the old fall Bard mandible

505
00:30:35,400 --> 00:30:38,560
Speaker 1: that pay mentioned in this from Bruno, this new bear

506
00:30:39,240 --> 00:30:44,360
Speaker 1: it's much more complicated, and there's been multiple hybridizations between

507
00:30:44,400 --> 00:30:49,000
Speaker 1: these two bear species and that's continuing today, right, yeah,

508
00:30:49,080 --> 00:30:52,120
Speaker 1: the today it's kind of confusing because the you know,

509
00:30:52,600 --> 00:30:56,960
Speaker 1: you read about like in Churchill where there's brown bears

510
00:30:57,000 --> 00:31:01,440
Speaker 1: and polar bears are mating, but apparently there's only one

511
00:31:01,640 --> 00:31:06,520
Speaker 1: female polar bear that's actually produced fertile offspring from those crosses.

512
00:31:06,600 --> 00:31:10,600
Speaker 1: She's had like eight cubs. She's had eight cross cubs

513
00:31:11,120 --> 00:31:15,320
Speaker 1: that they were all sexually viable. Well supposedly, yeah, but

514
00:31:15,360 --> 00:31:17,920
Speaker 1: I mean he really knows because they're all wondering around everywhere.

515
00:31:18,000 --> 00:31:21,400
Speaker 1: But so, yeah, which is where the name groller bear

516
00:31:21,480 --> 00:31:28,920
Speaker 1: comes from. It's only groller right because oh yeah right,

517
00:31:31,360 --> 00:31:33,720
Speaker 1: people screwing it up. But what's the larger thing is

518
00:31:33,760 --> 00:31:35,520
Speaker 1: interesting though, is that you know, we used to think

519
00:31:35,600 --> 00:31:39,320
Speaker 1: that species were just like unique, right and like to

520
00:31:39,400 --> 00:31:45,040
Speaker 1: be like a black bear and um, a polar bear

521
00:31:45,360 --> 00:31:47,880
Speaker 1: and a brown bear. But that's not true at all.

522
00:31:48,200 --> 00:31:51,400
Speaker 1: That we're finding more and more species, and bears are

523
00:31:51,440 --> 00:31:55,440
Speaker 1: not alone in this. Ravens are another group That's this

524
00:31:55,600 --> 00:31:58,920
Speaker 1: is becoming more more and more apparent. Is the species

525
00:31:58,920 --> 00:32:02,040
Speaker 1: aren't like ice later little islands. There's often a lot

526
00:32:02,080 --> 00:32:05,840
Speaker 1: of hybridization going on and this has been really important

527
00:32:05,880 --> 00:32:08,240
Speaker 1: in their evolution. And if you want to be hopeful

528
00:32:08,280 --> 00:32:10,959
Speaker 1: about something in a time like this, where the climate

529
00:32:11,040 --> 00:32:13,560
Speaker 1: is changing really rapidly and we have all these ecosystems

530
00:32:13,640 --> 00:32:16,920
Speaker 1: moving around, this is the perfect time for that. So

531
00:32:17,000 --> 00:32:18,880
Speaker 1: in some ways we see a lot of extinction, but

532
00:32:18,920 --> 00:32:24,000
Speaker 1: we also see a lot of new things happening evolutionarily. Yeah,

533
00:32:24,080 --> 00:32:29,200
Speaker 1: we were just talking about mule deer moving into Alaska. Yeah,

534
00:32:29,400 --> 00:32:35,280
Speaker 1: so maybe it will get mule deer and caribou Hybrid'll

535
00:32:35,280 --> 00:32:37,520
Speaker 1: think of a good name for a mule deer caribou

536
00:32:37,600 --> 00:32:41,959
Speaker 1: hybrid as you're sitting there, mulebo. Hey, before we move on,

537
00:32:42,040 --> 00:32:44,080
Speaker 1: I have a question. One more question about the mazis

538
00:32:44,160 --> 00:32:47,000
Speaker 1: that you were saying that they were often sitting up

539
00:32:47,000 --> 00:32:49,840
Speaker 1: there repairing their points. How do you know they were

540
00:32:49,880 --> 00:32:53,560
Speaker 1: repairing and not just making new ones? Um again, this

541
00:32:53,760 --> 00:32:56,160
Speaker 1: you gotta talk to the archaeologist, but he won't come

542
00:32:56,200 --> 00:33:00,200
Speaker 1: on the show. Well, you just gotta go to him

543
00:33:00,240 --> 00:33:06,840
Speaker 1: because around these little horrors, okay, they're all these broken points. Okay,

544
00:33:06,880 --> 00:33:09,239
Speaker 1: so we know that they were once mounted. They had

545
00:33:09,280 --> 00:33:12,240
Speaker 1: these little fore shafts. We're talking about not bows and arrows.

546
00:33:12,240 --> 00:33:14,880
Speaker 1: We're talking about spear throwers here. So you had a

547
00:33:14,920 --> 00:33:17,440
Speaker 1: little foreshaft that went on a longer thing and have

548
00:33:17,560 --> 00:33:19,360
Speaker 1: feathers on the end, and then you're throwing it with

549
00:33:19,400 --> 00:33:24,120
Speaker 1: an out laddle. So they often break, and so little horrors,

550
00:33:24,240 --> 00:33:27,640
Speaker 1: broken points, and then a lot of flakes from making

551
00:33:27,720 --> 00:33:30,720
Speaker 1: new points of repairing the old ones. And it's really funny.

552
00:33:30,760 --> 00:33:33,080
Speaker 1: If you look at some of the Mason points or

553
00:33:33,200 --> 00:33:37,400
Speaker 1: fulsome points, you'll see that they have a beautiful bass

554
00:33:37,960 --> 00:33:39,880
Speaker 1: and they go up and then they had the shoulder

555
00:33:40,440 --> 00:33:42,520
Speaker 1: and the shoulders where the point broke, and then the

556
00:33:42,520 --> 00:33:44,560
Speaker 1: guys were like, oh, hell, I could fix this, and

557
00:33:44,560 --> 00:33:48,720
Speaker 1: they just sharpen it up again. At the time that

558
00:33:48,840 --> 00:33:53,640
Speaker 1: I was up at the Mason site, I do want

559
00:33:53,640 --> 00:33:55,320
Speaker 1: to move away from archaeology and get into you guys,

560
00:33:55,400 --> 00:34:00,320
Speaker 1: especially which is paleontology, right, But the last arc alogy

561
00:34:00,360 --> 00:34:05,200
Speaker 1: point here when I was up there, the enthusiasm around

562
00:34:05,240 --> 00:34:09,400
Speaker 1: the site was that there was a lot of people

563
00:34:09,440 --> 00:34:13,239
Speaker 1: talking about in that community, people talking about like pre Clovis.

564
00:34:14,280 --> 00:34:18,800
Speaker 1: So at that time, for for for many decades, I

565
00:34:18,840 --> 00:34:21,240
Speaker 1: think it was held that like Clovis was this initial

566
00:34:21,360 --> 00:34:26,799
Speaker 1: human culture. And then uh, there was this theory that

567
00:34:26,840 --> 00:34:28,680
Speaker 1: there had to have been like Clovis had to have

568
00:34:28,800 --> 00:34:31,680
Speaker 1: arisen from something, right, there had been a culture that

569
00:34:31,719 --> 00:34:36,279
Speaker 1: created Clovis. So people were excited about that. And if

570
00:34:36,280 --> 00:34:39,920
Speaker 1: I remember right back then, a possible explanation for the

571
00:34:39,960 --> 00:34:44,879
Speaker 1: Masas site was that these people that that were occupying

572
00:34:44,920 --> 00:34:50,480
Speaker 1: that site and hunting there had possibly hadn't come like

573
00:34:50,520 --> 00:34:55,360
Speaker 1: their direct ancestors and in a few generations hadn't arrived

574
00:34:55,360 --> 00:35:00,640
Speaker 1: from Siberia, but had maybe back filled they had been.

575
00:35:01,040 --> 00:35:05,960
Speaker 1: They were coming from the south and sort of recolonizing

576
00:35:06,239 --> 00:35:09,520
Speaker 1: the north which their very distant ancestors might have passed through.

577
00:35:10,880 --> 00:35:14,920
Speaker 1: Is that still a fashionable notion or don't you track

578
00:35:15,040 --> 00:35:18,760
Speaker 1: the changing theories that much? You know what what melts

579
00:35:18,800 --> 00:35:22,080
Speaker 1: you say? I can't remember. I asked him about it too,

580
00:35:23,160 --> 00:35:25,440
Speaker 1: Do you remember what melts you said about that? Joan

581
00:35:25,480 --> 00:35:28,799
Speaker 1: and Yanni got to hold those fulsome schools when we

582
00:35:28,960 --> 00:35:33,480
Speaker 1: when we visited Meltzer, Dan and Meltzer were in grad

583
00:35:33,520 --> 00:35:36,320
Speaker 1: school together. So you guys still friends, are you like rivals?

584
00:35:37,200 --> 00:35:41,120
Speaker 1: I'm not an archaeologist. Yeah, I've worked with David the

585
00:35:41,239 --> 00:35:44,719
Speaker 1: Fulsome site. Oh you did the Fulsom site. Well, I

586
00:35:44,760 --> 00:35:49,240
Speaker 1: was doing the geomorph around the Wholesome site. Oh man, Yeah,

587
00:35:49,400 --> 00:35:54,840
Speaker 1: that's a great place. Steve, he's like, he's like Forrest

588
00:35:54,880 --> 00:35:59,480
Speaker 1: Gump archaeology. I've never been in the full Som site.

589
00:35:59,480 --> 00:36:02,120
Speaker 1: You gotta go there because it's an amazing, amazing place.

590
00:36:02,200 --> 00:36:06,200
Speaker 1: But um, yeah, so that's just the backwash hypothesis is

591
00:36:06,200 --> 00:36:10,759
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. It doesn't like this, so that's

592
00:36:10,760 --> 00:36:13,600
Speaker 1: why we're hesitating. Tony Baker was big into it, was he?

593
00:36:13,800 --> 00:36:17,279
Speaker 1: But he was he was an enthusiast. Yeah, a lot

594
00:36:17,360 --> 00:36:19,839
Speaker 1: of people are big into it because it's looking now.

595
00:36:20,200 --> 00:36:22,240
Speaker 1: And you guys know this from talking to day Meltzer.

596
00:36:22,320 --> 00:36:28,520
Speaker 1: Is it um first um dispersal the humans into the

597
00:36:28,520 --> 00:36:31,320
Speaker 1: New World was probably along the Northwest coast, so probably

598
00:36:31,320 --> 00:36:34,919
Speaker 1: down to southeast Alaska, and so then Clovis took off,

599
00:36:35,040 --> 00:36:39,239
Speaker 1: probably as people broken from the coast into the interior

600
00:36:39,360 --> 00:36:42,719
Speaker 1: kind of habitats and bison by that time would have

601
00:36:42,800 --> 00:36:45,520
Speaker 1: ranged all the way up through the ice free Corridor

602
00:36:45,600 --> 00:36:47,920
Speaker 1: up into the Yukon and onto the north slope, and

603
00:36:47,960 --> 00:36:50,440
Speaker 1: so it would have been you know, probably good hunting.

604
00:36:51,160 --> 00:36:53,440
Speaker 1: So they could well have spread back to the north.

605
00:36:53,560 --> 00:36:56,480
Speaker 1: And that's why Mason Points look so much like Falsome

606
00:36:56,520 --> 00:37:01,000
Speaker 1: Points is because they originated from the lower forty eight.

607
00:37:01,440 --> 00:37:05,360
Speaker 1: Those people. But you're you're like on the edge of

608
00:37:06,040 --> 00:37:09,560
Speaker 1: there's still a lot of archaeological controversy about this. Shouldn't

609
00:37:09,560 --> 00:37:13,239
Speaker 1: listen to us. Yeah, we're not archaeologists. Okay, I'm gonna

610
00:37:13,280 --> 00:37:16,120
Speaker 1: I'm gonna swing us into paleontology. But watch watch all

611
00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:20,720
Speaker 1: smoothly I do it. Okay, okay, Uh those fellers sitting

612
00:37:20,719 --> 00:37:25,879
Speaker 1: on top of the Maza site, what are they? What

613
00:37:25,920 --> 00:37:28,799
Speaker 1: were they seeing? You put in a good four day

614
00:37:28,840 --> 00:37:33,920
Speaker 1: hunt on the Maza site, like what walks past? And

615
00:37:33,960 --> 00:37:36,000
Speaker 1: had they been there a thousand years earlier, would it

616
00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:38,239
Speaker 1: have looked way different in terms of what would have

617
00:37:38,239 --> 00:37:43,279
Speaker 1: walked past? Um, it could have. The thing is you

618
00:37:43,360 --> 00:37:45,640
Speaker 1: probably could have sat there for a couple of days

619
00:37:45,640 --> 00:37:50,200
Speaker 1: and not seeing anything walk past. That's one thing that

620
00:37:51,480 --> 00:37:58,440
Speaker 1: people familiar with exchanged people think Alaska is you know,

621
00:37:58,480 --> 00:38:03,279
Speaker 1: this wilderness just crawling with animals and even back then

622
00:38:03,320 --> 00:38:06,759
Speaker 1: that there were all these mega fauna we call them

623
00:38:06,760 --> 00:38:11,440
Speaker 1: the large animals. Still they were dispersed over a huge

624
00:38:11,640 --> 00:38:17,360
Speaker 1: area and the caring capacity of the land probably wasn't

625
00:38:18,680 --> 00:38:21,920
Speaker 1: all that huge, so um, that's why it was important

626
00:38:21,920 --> 00:38:24,960
Speaker 1: to have a strategic lookout. And since there's no trees,

627
00:38:25,040 --> 00:38:27,640
Speaker 1: you could see a long way, so especially if it

628
00:38:27,719 --> 00:38:30,040
Speaker 1: happened to be a mammoth, you could probably spot it

629
00:38:30,719 --> 00:38:33,800
Speaker 1: way off in the distance. And so like, these animals

630
00:38:33,880 --> 00:38:37,240
Speaker 1: aren't like they're not living in a valley, like they're

631
00:38:37,280 --> 00:38:42,719
Speaker 1: constantly traveling as like for their food needs or reproduction

632
00:38:42,840 --> 00:38:48,560
Speaker 1: or migration or it's it's not clear how far they

633
00:38:48,600 --> 00:38:54,399
Speaker 1: would have traveled. Basically, an animal wants to travel as

634
00:38:54,440 --> 00:38:58,759
Speaker 1: little as possible because moving uses up energy and it

635
00:38:58,840 --> 00:39:03,600
Speaker 1: just depends on what food resources are available to you.

636
00:39:03,840 --> 00:39:09,840
Speaker 1: But they probably had some seasonal movements between winter and

637
00:39:09,960 --> 00:39:14,520
Speaker 1: summer feeding grounds. And just like caribos, most caribou populations

638
00:39:14,560 --> 00:39:17,520
Speaker 1: in the north are migratory and some of them travel

639
00:39:18,680 --> 00:39:23,719
Speaker 1: a thousand kilometers, some of them travel fifty kilometers, so

640
00:39:23,920 --> 00:39:28,600
Speaker 1: it really depends on their habitat. But that said that

641
00:39:29,920 --> 00:39:33,720
Speaker 1: the herbivores that could have been seen from the masa

642
00:39:33,840 --> 00:39:41,240
Speaker 1: site would have included caribou and musk oxen and which

643
00:39:41,320 --> 00:39:44,759
Speaker 1: still exists on the north slope today. And then there

644
00:39:44,800 --> 00:39:52,120
Speaker 1: also could have been mammoths, bison, and horses. And then

645
00:39:52,160 --> 00:39:55,440
Speaker 1: if they had really sharp eyes, they could have also

646
00:39:56,480 --> 00:40:02,279
Speaker 1: seen bears, wolves, And there were lions running around up there,

647
00:40:03,400 --> 00:40:06,600
Speaker 1: and not a lot of them, but they could have

648
00:40:06,680 --> 00:40:15,279
Speaker 1: seen those animals. What was the lion like big, a

649
00:40:15,320 --> 00:40:19,640
Speaker 1: little like a mountain, like an African lion, a little

650
00:40:19,680 --> 00:40:24,000
Speaker 1: bit bigger than any living lion um And their thought

651
00:40:24,120 --> 00:40:26,400
Speaker 1: because of the lack of a maine, and we know

652
00:40:26,480 --> 00:40:29,200
Speaker 1: the lack of a man from the cave paintings in Europe,

653
00:40:29,920 --> 00:40:33,040
Speaker 1: that they were probably not living in prides. They were

654
00:40:33,040 --> 00:40:35,680
Speaker 1: probably much smaller social groups, because that's what the main

655
00:40:35,880 --> 00:40:39,480
Speaker 1: is for as the boss around other big lions. So,

656
00:40:40,600 --> 00:40:43,000
Speaker 1: but one of the interesting things we found with our

657
00:40:43,040 --> 00:40:48,000
Speaker 1: bone collections on our slope is that the horses are

658
00:40:48,040 --> 00:40:55,440
Speaker 1: the main um large animal as the numerous really like

659
00:40:55,480 --> 00:41:01,000
Speaker 1: they would outnumber caribou back then. Probably yeah, how many

660
00:41:01,080 --> 00:41:04,799
Speaker 1: kinds of horses? Just one? Okay, in the late part

661
00:41:04,800 --> 00:41:08,120
Speaker 1: of the ice age they were more earlier. But what

662
00:41:08,160 --> 00:41:11,320
Speaker 1: did it look like? It looked kind of like, um,

663
00:41:11,760 --> 00:41:15,640
Speaker 1: you ever seen pictures of the little ponies from yakutsk,

664
00:41:16,520 --> 00:41:19,000
Speaker 1: Okay and they have this incredibly long hair I know

665
00:41:19,040 --> 00:41:21,760
Speaker 1: what only my daughter has, like a like an encyclopedia

666
00:41:21,760 --> 00:41:24,799
Speaker 1: of horses. Yeah, okay, so the picture a kind of

667
00:41:24,840 --> 00:41:29,160
Speaker 1: a large, fat Sutland pony with really really long, real sturdy,

668
00:41:29,400 --> 00:41:32,680
Speaker 1: very sturdy, and these little tiny holes like you know,

669
00:41:32,719 --> 00:41:36,560
Speaker 1: like this big which immediately tells you something about the landscape, right,

670
00:41:36,560 --> 00:41:41,960
Speaker 1: because they wouldn't have all that tussocks and pete up there. Yeah,

671
00:41:42,000 --> 00:41:45,440
Speaker 1: big feet, you would think you would associate larger feet

672
00:41:45,440 --> 00:41:49,200
Speaker 1: would always be the preferable foot for anything to do

673
00:41:49,239 --> 00:41:53,000
Speaker 1: with Alaska. Yeah, we can talk about that when we

674
00:41:53,040 --> 00:41:56,359
Speaker 1: talk about why they're not there anymore. But the thing

675
00:41:56,400 --> 00:41:59,520
Speaker 1: about um that Dan started to allude to is the

676
00:41:59,560 --> 00:42:04,600
Speaker 1: horses and lions. When we compiled this huge collection of

677
00:42:04,640 --> 00:42:09,800
Speaker 1: all these bones, the lion bones that we had dated

678
00:42:11,160 --> 00:42:16,239
Speaker 1: track and number the horse bones. So our theory is

679
00:42:16,400 --> 00:42:21,640
Speaker 1: is that lions specialized in hunting horses. Horses went down,

680
00:42:21,760 --> 00:42:26,879
Speaker 1: lion numbers went down. Yeah, And and that would make sense,

681
00:42:27,000 --> 00:42:30,840
Speaker 1: especially if they were solitary or small groups like a

682
00:42:30,920 --> 00:42:34,680
Speaker 1: horse would be much easier prey than say a mammoth

683
00:42:34,800 --> 00:42:39,400
Speaker 1: or even a bison with horns. And it appears that

684
00:42:39,480 --> 00:42:41,600
Speaker 1: there were lots of horses, so it would have been

685
00:42:41,640 --> 00:42:44,920
Speaker 1: easier to find a horse to munch on if you

686
00:42:44,960 --> 00:42:57,319
Speaker 1: were a lion. Can you, guys, explain a little bit

687
00:42:57,360 --> 00:43:01,840
Speaker 1: about you elude your bone collection? Explain a little bit

688
00:43:01,800 --> 00:43:07,280
Speaker 1: about how you built up a bone collection. The first

689
00:43:07,280 --> 00:43:11,680
Speaker 1: thing that we should say is, uh, collecting these bones.

690
00:43:11,719 --> 00:43:15,440
Speaker 1: It was all on federal property and we did it

691
00:43:15,560 --> 00:43:19,360
Speaker 1: either while we were working for the Bureau of Land

692
00:43:19,360 --> 00:43:22,440
Speaker 1: Management or when we had a permit from the Bureau

693
00:43:22,480 --> 00:43:26,359
Speaker 1: of Land Management to collect these bones. And all the

694
00:43:26,400 --> 00:43:31,600
Speaker 1: bones are in the University of Alaska Museum or Sciences. Yeah,

695
00:43:31,960 --> 00:43:38,640
Speaker 1: your chel we don't have our walls adorned with skulls

696
00:43:38,680 --> 00:43:44,000
Speaker 1: and tusks. It's all federal property and it's all Uh,

697
00:43:44,160 --> 00:43:47,920
Speaker 1: there's a database you can access online and all the

698
00:43:47,960 --> 00:43:53,280
Speaker 1: bones are listed in there. And you're probably and I'm guessing,

699
00:43:53,400 --> 00:43:59,239
Speaker 1: very meticulous about where it came from. What was the context? Yeah,

700
00:43:59,440 --> 00:44:03,480
Speaker 1: I have all that information on my computer. But um, yeah,

701
00:44:03,600 --> 00:44:08,680
Speaker 1: So so that's the first thing that we collected these bones,

702
00:44:08,840 --> 00:44:13,000
Speaker 1: and it's it's a federal crime to go onto federal

703
00:44:13,040 --> 00:44:20,160
Speaker 1: property and collect archaeological or paleontological specimens. You can end

704
00:44:20,239 --> 00:44:23,160
Speaker 1: up in jail or with a big fine. That's if

705
00:44:23,200 --> 00:44:29,440
Speaker 1: it's fossilized. Right. Well, no, it doesn't have to be

706
00:44:29,520 --> 00:44:33,479
Speaker 1: fossilized because many of these bones that we find they've

707
00:44:33,520 --> 00:44:36,760
Speaker 1: been stored in a deep freezer in the Arctic for

708
00:44:37,920 --> 00:44:42,000
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands. But you can pick up a shed

709
00:44:42,040 --> 00:44:46,600
Speaker 1: antler from a caribou, right, But if you found a

710
00:44:46,680 --> 00:44:52,040
Speaker 1: mammoth bone, that would be regarded as paleontological, even if

711
00:44:52,080 --> 00:44:57,440
Speaker 1: it was just came out of tundra and was looked

712
00:44:57,480 --> 00:45:00,600
Speaker 1: like a fresh bone, even if it had meat on it,

713
00:45:00,600 --> 00:45:04,600
Speaker 1: it's still so um. Yeah, the key thing is the

714
00:45:04,719 --> 00:45:10,280
Speaker 1: paleontological aspect, in other words, how old the thing is. Yeah,

715
00:45:10,360 --> 00:45:14,120
Speaker 1: and there's been a couple of incidents where professional like

716
00:45:14,280 --> 00:45:17,520
Speaker 1: river guides have the story. Yeah, okay, so we don't

717
00:45:17,560 --> 00:45:19,680
Speaker 1: need to go into that. So but if you could

718
00:45:19,719 --> 00:45:22,359
Speaker 1: tell the story, I would love. I never knew enough

719
00:45:22,440 --> 00:45:25,320
Speaker 1: detail to tell the story. Can I tell you a

720
00:45:25,440 --> 00:45:28,520
Speaker 1: version I've heard? Is that uncomfortable? Sure? You want to

721
00:45:28,520 --> 00:45:33,760
Speaker 1: put this on your podcast? Well know what kind of Okay? Yeah,

722
00:45:34,200 --> 00:45:37,719
Speaker 1: you know this lady? Huh no, no, But let me

723
00:45:37,760 --> 00:45:41,160
Speaker 1: tell you a version I heard. I heard that there

724
00:45:41,200 --> 00:45:46,080
Speaker 1: was a gentleman in the lower forty eight who had

725
00:45:46,120 --> 00:45:51,600
Speaker 1: a living room display. Am I right, had a living

726
00:45:51,680 --> 00:45:56,640
Speaker 1: room display of a nice man with tusk and someone

727
00:45:57,160 --> 00:45:58,920
Speaker 1: got to wonder and how the hell did he get

728
00:45:58,920 --> 00:46:07,840
Speaker 1: a man with tusk? And that led to a UM investigation. Yeah.

729
00:46:08,040 --> 00:46:13,239
Speaker 1: The story I heard was somehow a photograph got on

730
00:46:13,280 --> 00:46:16,040
Speaker 1: a website and it was like, come on my river

731
00:46:16,320 --> 00:46:18,720
Speaker 1: guided tour and you might be able to find things

732
00:46:18,760 --> 00:46:22,640
Speaker 1: like this. And then there was some photograph floating around

733
00:46:22,719 --> 00:46:25,200
Speaker 1: of the guy's living room. So that was how the

734
00:46:25,239 --> 00:46:27,799
Speaker 1: two were connected. But it's so ironic, like if you

735
00:46:28,040 --> 00:46:34,160
Speaker 1: still remember going to this uh uh pilot's house and

736
00:46:34,280 --> 00:46:36,759
Speaker 1: Kotsubue once and you know, I was like, hey, do

737
00:46:36,760 --> 00:46:39,160
Speaker 1: you ever spind any bones? And he goes, come on in,

738
00:46:39,280 --> 00:46:42,360
Speaker 1: I'll show you. And the guy had this incredible collection

739
00:46:43,000 --> 00:46:49,040
Speaker 1: of mainly bison but also um bear and mammoth, and

740
00:46:49,080 --> 00:46:50,400
Speaker 1: I was like, what are you gonna do with this?

741
00:46:50,480 --> 00:46:54,040
Speaker 1: And he goes, don't tell anybody I have it. Yeah,

742
00:46:54,080 --> 00:46:56,160
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of this stuff floating around. It

743
00:46:56,280 --> 00:46:58,960
Speaker 1: is legal if it is from your your mining claim

744
00:46:59,719 --> 00:47:02,560
Speaker 1: is it is it all? Isn't there also something where

745
00:47:02,640 --> 00:47:06,919
Speaker 1: Native Alaskans are allowed to take those things and keep

746
00:47:06,960 --> 00:47:08,640
Speaker 1: them or am I am I wrong? But I think

747
00:47:08,680 --> 00:47:11,640
Speaker 1: if it's on their private property, so it's like their

748
00:47:11,680 --> 00:47:16,120
Speaker 1: own allotment or their corporation tribal lands, Yeah, than it is.

749
00:47:16,320 --> 00:47:18,880
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's it's a sensitive thing, and you know,

750
00:47:19,719 --> 00:47:22,440
Speaker 1: you really got to be careful because there's what shocked

751
00:47:22,480 --> 00:47:25,520
Speaker 1: me about this river Guide incident. Was it Bureau of

752
00:47:25,600 --> 00:47:28,880
Speaker 1: Land Management, Department of Interior actually has a task force

753
00:47:29,280 --> 00:47:33,160
Speaker 1: whose job it is to investigate these things and go

754
00:47:33,280 --> 00:47:36,360
Speaker 1: after people. And it was like, holy, they have undercover

755
00:47:36,560 --> 00:47:40,400
Speaker 1: agents and yeah, it's it's like I think, scaring online

756
00:47:40,440 --> 00:47:43,600
Speaker 1: sales and stuff of Yeah, I think it'd be important

757
00:47:43,640 --> 00:47:48,160
Speaker 1: to talk about why we have these laws. Well, yeah,

758
00:47:48,400 --> 00:47:52,680
Speaker 1: the most, probably the strongest emotions about this come from

759
00:47:52,719 --> 00:47:56,160
Speaker 1: the archaeologist, because they go, do not pick up an arrowly.

760
00:47:56,600 --> 00:47:59,200
Speaker 1: I've gotten I've gotten a huge trouble just picking up something.

761
00:47:59,400 --> 00:48:00,960
Speaker 1: You look at this saying where do you get that?

762
00:48:01,000 --> 00:48:04,400
Speaker 1: Put that down because you're you're taking it out of context.

763
00:48:04,960 --> 00:48:06,759
Speaker 1: And so therefore they go out and they're trying to

764
00:48:06,760 --> 00:48:09,879
Speaker 1: figure out something about some archaeological site you've you've been

765
00:48:09,920 --> 00:48:11,920
Speaker 1: messing with the day and be like if someone messed

766
00:48:11,960 --> 00:48:14,960
Speaker 1: up a crime scene almost, yeah, exactly. That's a really

767
00:48:15,040 --> 00:48:18,000
Speaker 1: good analogy. So the same with these bones. You know,

768
00:48:18,080 --> 00:48:21,680
Speaker 1: you a bone that's out of context that you don't know,

769
00:48:21,840 --> 00:48:25,200
Speaker 1: somebody's uncle found it, you know, like who knows where,

770
00:48:25,360 --> 00:48:28,719
Speaker 1: and it's it's pretty much useless scientifically, and it's just

771
00:48:28,760 --> 00:48:33,080
Speaker 1: gonna sit in somebody's you know, coffee table and decay

772
00:48:33,239 --> 00:48:35,160
Speaker 1: and then they'll somebody will throw it away, so it's

773
00:48:35,200 --> 00:48:38,600
Speaker 1: it's like gone. So the best thing is if you

774
00:48:38,640 --> 00:48:40,520
Speaker 1: ever run across one of these things, even like an

775
00:48:40,560 --> 00:48:43,560
Speaker 1: arrowa just take a photograph of it and then I

776
00:48:43,680 --> 00:48:46,800
Speaker 1: call up your friendly archaeologists and say, hey, I found

777
00:48:46,800 --> 00:48:49,839
Speaker 1: this amazing point and it's going to change our ore

778
00:48:49,719 --> 00:48:52,840
Speaker 1: the history of the world. I think it's pretty interesting

779
00:48:52,840 --> 00:48:56,680
Speaker 1: that at some point in our recent past, we you know,

780
00:48:56,840 --> 00:48:59,800
Speaker 1: thought to think that far ahead, that hey, this stuff

781
00:48:59,880 --> 00:49:04,160
Speaker 1: is so important that we should make like federal rules

782
00:49:04,160 --> 00:49:07,640
Speaker 1: and laws, you know, to protect it. Like it seems

783
00:49:07,640 --> 00:49:10,680
Speaker 1: like a lot of foresight for I don't know, sometimes

784
00:49:10,680 --> 00:49:14,839
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem like we have that. Yeah, because you know,

785
00:49:14,880 --> 00:49:20,080
Speaker 1: there are all those museums that have human archaeological remains,

786
00:49:20,200 --> 00:49:25,319
Speaker 1: and now they're busy repatriating remains to the uh oh yeah,

787
00:49:25,920 --> 00:49:33,040
Speaker 1: digging people's graveyards. Hundred fifty years ago, people just ransacked

788
00:49:33,200 --> 00:49:36,480
Speaker 1: archaeological sites. And you know, I was reading a thing

789
00:49:36,600 --> 00:49:39,360
Speaker 1: recently about the there was a thing in the Atlantic

790
00:49:39,440 --> 00:49:43,719
Speaker 1: about um people working on the coastal passage of early

791
00:49:43,800 --> 00:49:46,719
Speaker 1: humans and they were talking about remember when we went

792
00:49:46,760 --> 00:49:51,719
Speaker 1: spear fishing with Greg and Alex the Channel Islands. They're

793
00:49:51,719 --> 00:49:56,640
Speaker 1: talking about in the Native people's on the Channel Islands,

794
00:49:58,320 --> 00:50:05,359
Speaker 1: them remembering people digging they're grave the graveyards of their ancestors.

795
00:50:05,400 --> 00:50:11,200
Speaker 1: They remember archaeologists digging those graveyards, complaining about the stench

796
00:50:11,360 --> 00:50:20,799
Speaker 1: of rotting carcasses. Wow, digging active. Yeah, And what it

797
00:50:20,840 --> 00:50:25,560
Speaker 1: got into was it got into a uh why there's

798
00:50:25,560 --> 00:50:28,359
Speaker 1: a great reluctance on the part of some Native people

799
00:50:28,480 --> 00:50:33,560
Speaker 1: to participate and the archaeological process like a star in

800
00:50:33,600 --> 00:50:37,040
Speaker 1: their mind is like like like literally the bones of

801
00:50:37,040 --> 00:50:40,320
Speaker 1: their grandfather's being hauled off. Yeah, like literally the bones

802
00:50:40,320 --> 00:50:43,239
Speaker 1: of their grandfather's being dug up by archaeologists and haul

803
00:50:43,280 --> 00:50:46,880
Speaker 1: the way to a museum. So back to how you

804
00:50:46,920 --> 00:50:50,440
Speaker 1: make a bone collection. So yeah, so you ca you

805
00:50:50,520 --> 00:50:53,680
Speaker 1: covered your ass. It's a legit bone collection and it's

806
00:50:53,680 --> 00:50:58,040
Speaker 1: not into your living room. So we fly into a

807
00:50:58,080 --> 00:51:00,920
Speaker 1: place like I've a tuck and then put all our

808
00:51:00,960 --> 00:51:06,719
Speaker 1: stuff on helicopter and get flown out and we say, oh,

809
00:51:06,760 --> 00:51:10,640
Speaker 1: that looks good and the helicopter what is all your stuff?

810
00:51:11,640 --> 00:51:14,040
Speaker 1: So if it's just the two of us, we have

811
00:51:14,160 --> 00:51:18,799
Speaker 1: one inflatable canoe. We have a sleeping tent and a

812
00:51:18,880 --> 00:51:22,600
Speaker 1: cook tent um some years we carry it an electric

813
00:51:22,640 --> 00:51:25,200
Speaker 1: fence for bears and then you know, just a little

814
00:51:25,239 --> 00:51:34,440
Speaker 1: camp stove and food freeze dry food. No, you're not

815
00:51:34,480 --> 00:51:37,720
Speaker 1: an actual food. You pack food, do a little fishing

816
00:51:37,800 --> 00:51:42,160
Speaker 1: on the way when you're floating. Occasionally we don't because

817
00:51:42,160 --> 00:51:46,239
Speaker 1: of the bears, just you know, just complicates things. But

818
00:51:46,640 --> 00:51:51,640
Speaker 1: we usually eat until Dan couldn't eat couscouse anymore, couscous

819
00:51:51,719 --> 00:51:58,080
Speaker 1: polenta rice. So we're usually happy for three weeks or so.

820
00:51:58,080 --> 00:52:00,680
Speaker 1: So three week river trips. Yeah, so that I mean

821
00:52:00,760 --> 00:52:04,160
Speaker 1: it's actually kind of boring. You you float along and

822
00:52:04,200 --> 00:52:07,120
Speaker 1: then she says, oh, there's a good gravel bar, So

823
00:52:07,160 --> 00:52:09,759
Speaker 1: she gets off and she walks the gravel bar and

824
00:52:09,800 --> 00:52:12,759
Speaker 1: I peddled the canoe up wind to the other end

825
00:52:12,760 --> 00:52:15,040
Speaker 1: of the gravel bar and pick her up. And then

826
00:52:15,080 --> 00:52:18,320
Speaker 1: she usually shows up with a bunch of bone fragments

827
00:52:18,360 --> 00:52:20,440
Speaker 1: and we lay them down the sand and we look

828
00:52:20,480 --> 00:52:23,640
Speaker 1: through them and go, well, that's interesting, that's not interesting.

829
00:52:23,680 --> 00:52:26,080
Speaker 1: That's well preserved, that's not well preserved. And if they're

830
00:52:26,120 --> 00:52:28,480
Speaker 1: not if they're not collectible, we just thrown back in

831
00:52:28,520 --> 00:52:32,960
Speaker 1: the river, so they never leave the place where they were. Yeah,

832
00:52:33,280 --> 00:52:36,279
Speaker 1: so we we rarely. I mean we probably collect like

833
00:52:36,840 --> 00:52:40,680
Speaker 1: one percent of the bones that we actually encounter on

834
00:52:40,760 --> 00:52:42,600
Speaker 1: a good day. How many bones do you find doing

835
00:52:42,640 --> 00:52:47,560
Speaker 1: a trip like that, Oh, on a really good day. Uh.

836
00:52:47,600 --> 00:52:51,040
Speaker 1: It's interesting because there's a sort of assorting process that

837
00:52:51,480 --> 00:52:54,800
Speaker 1: the river does with bones, and so there are certain

838
00:52:54,880 --> 00:52:59,759
Speaker 1: places and gravel bars that kind of accumulate bones. And

839
00:53:00,040 --> 00:53:06,760
Speaker 1: so you could on one gravel bar fine like maybe

840
00:53:06,760 --> 00:53:11,719
Speaker 1: five t b o s or humorous or femurs from

841
00:53:11,760 --> 00:53:16,520
Speaker 1: different species. Um. But on a really good day, I

842
00:53:16,520 --> 00:53:22,239
Speaker 1: would guess we might end up collecting fifty bones. And

843
00:53:23,080 --> 00:53:28,000
Speaker 1: most most commonly you'd find longbones like the leg and

844
00:53:28,280 --> 00:53:35,200
Speaker 1: armbones and footbones. And then of course a mammoth bone

845
00:53:36,760 --> 00:53:42,240
Speaker 1: is a lot more significant than a little caribou bone um.

846
00:53:42,400 --> 00:53:46,800
Speaker 1: And then skulls are pretty exciting when you find skulls.

847
00:53:49,239 --> 00:53:51,719
Speaker 1: You know, there's a lot of mammoths are big animals, right,

848
00:53:51,760 --> 00:53:54,719
Speaker 1: so they're bones just blow up sort of. So there's

849
00:53:54,719 --> 00:53:57,560
Speaker 1: a lot of mammoth material, and tusk are big and

850
00:53:57,600 --> 00:54:01,040
Speaker 1: they're well preserved. But we never collect husk anymore, you

851
00:54:01,080 --> 00:54:03,160
Speaker 1: don't know. So if you find a tusk, you kind

852
00:54:03,160 --> 00:54:06,040
Speaker 1: of go, that's cool, and you put it back in

853
00:54:06,080 --> 00:54:10,480
Speaker 1: the river, just leave it land. Do you throw it

854
00:54:10,480 --> 00:54:12,600
Speaker 1: out in a deep hole or do you just leave

855
00:54:12,600 --> 00:54:14,520
Speaker 1: it lane where you found it. Usually put it back

856
00:54:14,520 --> 00:54:16,680
Speaker 1: in the water because it's easier on him and they'll

857
00:54:16,680 --> 00:54:22,919
Speaker 1: get reburied that way. But the st just I've told

858
00:54:22,960 --> 00:54:24,520
Speaker 1: his story hunter times. But when I was doing that

859
00:54:24,560 --> 00:54:26,920
Speaker 1: stuff with cons and they'd find those sweet spear points

860
00:54:27,880 --> 00:54:30,520
Speaker 1: and then uh, photograph them drawn, they showed me how

861
00:54:30,520 --> 00:54:33,120
Speaker 1: they draw them. They sketch them, photograph and then just

862
00:54:33,239 --> 00:54:36,040
Speaker 1: stick them right back in the moss. Man. It was

863
00:54:36,080 --> 00:54:43,799
Speaker 1: like it took every like to walk away, like I'm

864
00:54:43,800 --> 00:54:46,160
Speaker 1: gonna sneak back here in the dark, but it never

865
00:54:46,200 --> 00:54:49,319
Speaker 1: got dark. We have collected some big tusks, and yeah,

866
00:54:49,360 --> 00:54:51,279
Speaker 1: one of the tuts we collected. I don't know if

867
00:54:51,280 --> 00:54:54,520
Speaker 1: you saw this article that Matt Willer was the first

868
00:54:54,560 --> 00:54:58,719
Speaker 1: author on that came out and just recently. Yeah, oh yeah, no,

869
00:54:58,800 --> 00:55:02,399
Speaker 1: we're hot on that wondering mammoth thing. Yeah, so this

870
00:55:02,480 --> 00:55:05,560
Speaker 1: was a tusk that we found. Have you guys found

871
00:55:05,560 --> 00:55:09,320
Speaker 1: that tusk? Yeah? So this is another Mike kun story.

872
00:55:09,400 --> 00:55:13,480
Speaker 1: So Mike said, he said, well, you guys go out

873
00:55:13,520 --> 00:55:17,680
Speaker 1: and to the eastern part of the dune field, which

874
00:55:17,719 --> 00:55:19,920
Speaker 1: is kind of the northern part of the n p

875
00:55:20,080 --> 00:55:21,759
Speaker 1: r A. So we were flying around and we saw

876
00:55:21,800 --> 00:55:26,759
Speaker 1: this gigantic mammoth tusk. Home at backup you're bone hunting

877
00:55:26,800 --> 00:55:28,920
Speaker 1: from the air, or you're flying to a river to

878
00:55:28,960 --> 00:55:31,040
Speaker 1: float it. Well, we were kind of doing both, but

879
00:55:31,160 --> 00:55:34,920
Speaker 1: it's a land it's so pactful of good stuff. You

880
00:55:34,920 --> 00:55:37,080
Speaker 1: can just fly over and pick it out with the

881
00:55:37,160 --> 00:55:39,680
Speaker 1: naked The tusk was so big that you could see

882
00:55:39,680 --> 00:55:41,840
Speaker 1: it from the helicopter at about five feet. So we

883
00:55:42,040 --> 00:55:44,840
Speaker 1: land and it's what is it doing. It's just sitting

884
00:55:44,880 --> 00:55:47,239
Speaker 1: on the side of the river. So we're like looking

885
00:55:47,239 --> 00:55:49,640
Speaker 1: at this thing that, No, this is not worth anything.

886
00:55:49,719 --> 00:55:52,839
Speaker 1: It's a bold tusk. So it's a huge diameter. It's

887
00:55:52,880 --> 00:55:56,719
Speaker 1: probably eight feet along the arc, but it's all just

888
00:55:56,840 --> 00:55:59,480
Speaker 1: laying out, just laying there. Would you say it's not

889
00:55:59,520 --> 00:56:01,279
Speaker 1: worth any thing? Already? It was like a beam of

890
00:56:01,320 --> 00:56:05,080
Speaker 1: sunlight shining through. Do you gather that it's worth a

891
00:56:05,080 --> 00:56:08,319
Speaker 1: lot to the folks in this room? There is a

892
00:56:08,360 --> 00:56:10,640
Speaker 1: lot of interest here. Yeah, So what we told Mike

893
00:56:10,680 --> 00:56:13,760
Speaker 1: can He goes, well, what was your question? I couldn't

894
00:56:13,920 --> 00:56:16,200
Speaker 1: you were being facetious? Are serious that you just you're

895
00:56:16,200 --> 00:56:18,319
Speaker 1: seeing like that something like this? And you go it

896
00:56:18,440 --> 00:56:22,520
Speaker 1: wasn't well enough preserved. But wait, we're gonna get to

897
00:56:22,600 --> 00:56:24,600
Speaker 1: what happens when you find it really well preserved one.

898
00:56:24,880 --> 00:56:26,399
Speaker 1: So we go back and Mike goes, well, I want

899
00:56:26,440 --> 00:56:28,440
Speaker 1: to see this thing. So it comes out with a shovel,

900
00:56:28,520 --> 00:56:32,040
Speaker 1: and sure enough he finds the pair because the other one,

901
00:56:32,760 --> 00:56:35,520
Speaker 1: So then we have this was the other one. It

902
00:56:35,600 --> 00:56:38,960
Speaker 1: was in the creek. It was like right there because

903
00:56:38,960 --> 00:56:40,520
Speaker 1: they're really big, so the creek is not able to

904
00:56:40,520 --> 00:56:42,800
Speaker 1: move it very far. So we have these these folks,

905
00:56:42,800 --> 00:56:47,120
Speaker 1: these ridiculous photographs of Mike posing with these two enormous

906
00:56:47,160 --> 00:56:50,320
Speaker 1: mammoth tests. I think he used it for his Christmas

907
00:56:50,320 --> 00:56:55,600
Speaker 1: card or something that way, Like I said that, we

908
00:56:55,640 --> 00:56:57,960
Speaker 1: brought this bathroom scale out there with us. The way

909
00:56:58,239 --> 00:57:02,600
Speaker 1: they were like a hundred and four he pounds. Can

910
00:57:02,640 --> 00:57:07,080
Speaker 1: you imagine this bull mammoth is carrying this weight. Okay,

911
00:57:07,080 --> 00:57:09,319
Speaker 1: So we're there and it's like, I'm like, this is

912
00:57:09,320 --> 00:57:12,000
Speaker 1: a total waste of time, you know. So we started

913
00:57:12,000 --> 00:57:15,400
Speaker 1: looking around and we find another tusk and it's sticking

914
00:57:15,400 --> 00:57:19,840
Speaker 1: out of the gravel. So um. We started digging around

915
00:57:19,960 --> 00:57:23,200
Speaker 1: and we would come up with the skull. Two beautiful

916
00:57:23,280 --> 00:57:27,840
Speaker 1: tusks there, exquisitely preserved. Also a bull, so the really

917
00:57:27,840 --> 00:57:30,320
Speaker 1: big diameter at the base but not so long. They

918
00:57:30,360 --> 00:57:32,400
Speaker 1: must have died in a fight. Well, this was a

919
00:57:32,440 --> 00:57:35,560
Speaker 1: little bit up stream. So we brought this back of

920
00:57:35,640 --> 00:57:38,760
Speaker 1: radio carbent dated it and it was very young, relatively young.

921
00:57:38,760 --> 00:57:41,439
Speaker 1: It was like eighteen nineteen thousand, and that's the one.

922
00:57:42,040 --> 00:57:45,320
Speaker 1: It was so well preserved that we decided to section

923
00:57:45,400 --> 00:57:49,640
Speaker 1: that one and do the um the annual growth ring. Yeah,

924
00:57:49,680 --> 00:57:51,480
Speaker 1: tell the whole damn story now. But they fit to

925
00:57:51,480 --> 00:57:54,919
Speaker 1: go to like ice cream cones and all that stuff. Yeah, well,

926
00:57:55,040 --> 00:57:58,919
Speaker 1: so hey, he said it so that the tust grow

927
00:57:59,160 --> 00:58:01,440
Speaker 1: kind of in a con cold it's like a stack

928
00:58:01,480 --> 00:58:05,480
Speaker 1: of ice cream cones, okay, And so by the hardest

929
00:58:05,480 --> 00:58:09,320
Speaker 1: thing about this whole analysis was we have this machinist friend,

930
00:58:09,760 --> 00:58:12,080
Speaker 1: and it was how are we going to cut this

931
00:58:12,200 --> 00:58:16,480
Speaker 1: thing down the axis? And it's it's cut this kind

932
00:58:16,520 --> 00:58:22,280
Speaker 1: of slow helical bend to it. So that that took

933
00:58:22,400 --> 00:58:25,520
Speaker 1: us eight took eight people eight hours with the band

934
00:58:25,560 --> 00:58:28,200
Speaker 1: saw to cut the thing, and it was it was

935
00:58:28,840 --> 00:58:32,240
Speaker 1: incredibly complicated, but we ended up section it in two

936
00:58:32,800 --> 00:58:34,600
Speaker 1: and hopefully one half is going to show up in

937
00:58:34,640 --> 00:58:36,960
Speaker 1: the museum at some point. And so then you could

938
00:58:37,000 --> 00:58:39,320
Speaker 1: see the little growth rings and you have to sand

939
00:58:39,360 --> 00:58:42,320
Speaker 1: it way down. Yeah, So then it's polished and then

940
00:58:42,360 --> 00:58:46,080
Speaker 1: it can be analyzed for these and once it's polished,

941
00:58:46,120 --> 00:58:48,680
Speaker 1: you can see the growth rings. Yeah. So then from

942
00:58:48,720 --> 00:58:51,320
Speaker 1: that it was apparent the thing was about what thirty

943
00:58:51,400 --> 00:58:55,400
Speaker 1: five years old or so he wasn't very old young

944
00:58:56,200 --> 00:59:05,200
Speaker 1: what was their lifespan, assuming they you know, hauled Ukraine? Yeah,

945
00:59:06,000 --> 00:59:13,320
Speaker 1: if they reached it's not it's like elephants, yeah, somewhere

946
00:59:13,360 --> 00:59:15,160
Speaker 1: like that. So he wasn't old at old, he was

947
00:59:15,240 --> 00:59:19,480
Speaker 1: kind of middle aged crime yeah, and he's a middle

948
00:59:19,480 --> 00:59:25,760
Speaker 1: age at thirty five. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, So when Matt

949
00:59:25,800 --> 00:59:29,440
Speaker 1: Wilder did the strontium isotopes and the nitrogen isotopes on

950
00:59:29,480 --> 00:59:33,040
Speaker 1: this thing. He put together the scheme where he could

951
00:59:33,080 --> 00:59:35,840
Speaker 1: track what you gotta explain that, but how he went

952
00:59:35,880 --> 00:59:39,880
Speaker 1: around gathering up all those rodent teeth and stuff. Yeah,

953
00:59:39,960 --> 00:59:43,600
Speaker 1: so it's there's actually more to it than that, because

954
00:59:43,640 --> 00:59:46,280
Speaker 1: there was a there was a grad student before who

955
00:59:46,520 --> 00:59:49,640
Speaker 1: started this thing working on salmon because you can trace

956
00:59:50,360 --> 00:59:53,280
Speaker 1: where the salmon are coming from from the strontium in

957
00:59:53,360 --> 01:00:00,680
Speaker 1: the the water from their streams stable is tope and

958
01:00:00,840 --> 01:00:05,600
Speaker 1: it um. It's the same as true of carbon, and

959
01:00:05,680 --> 01:00:08,840
Speaker 1: that's what radio carbon dating is based on, these stable

960
01:00:08,880 --> 01:00:13,080
Speaker 1: isotopes that can break down over time. And so yeah,

961
01:00:13,080 --> 01:00:15,920
Speaker 1: so Alaska has this really diverse geology and it it

962
01:00:16,120 --> 01:00:20,240
Speaker 1: varies in the amount of the strontium, this rare earth element.

963
01:00:20,840 --> 01:00:23,200
Speaker 1: So by looking at the amount of strontium in different

964
01:00:23,280 --> 01:00:27,000
Speaker 1: years of the mammoth tust he was able to figure out, well,

965
01:00:27,040 --> 01:00:29,400
Speaker 1: where did that mammoth probably lived during that year of

966
01:00:29,400 --> 01:00:32,640
Speaker 1: his life? And and if you looked at like a

967
01:00:32,680 --> 01:00:35,800
Speaker 1: mouse that has a very small home range, it would

968
01:00:35,800 --> 01:00:39,000
Speaker 1: just an all consistent strong teum value because he wasn't

969
01:00:39,120 --> 01:00:43,960
Speaker 1: ranging across different zones with different strong levels exactly. So

970
01:00:44,120 --> 01:00:47,000
Speaker 1: from that um they were able to put together where

971
01:00:47,040 --> 01:00:51,040
Speaker 1: this animal probably ranged. And we think it probably was

972
01:00:51,120 --> 01:00:55,320
Speaker 1: born somewhere down kind of on the lower Yukon and

973
01:00:55,360 --> 01:00:58,880
Speaker 1: then wandered around up past Fairbanks and then later in

974
01:00:58,960 --> 01:01:02,360
Speaker 1: life came back across up the Coya Cock when across

975
01:01:02,400 --> 01:01:04,760
Speaker 1: the bricks range, ended up on the north slope where

976
01:01:04,760 --> 01:01:09,880
Speaker 1: we found it. And the interesting thing from the nitrogen isotopes, um,

977
01:01:09,960 --> 01:01:12,400
Speaker 1: it looks like the thing probably starved the death, because

978
01:01:12,440 --> 01:01:15,480
Speaker 1: when you begin to starve to death, you begin to

979
01:01:15,520 --> 01:01:19,480
Speaker 1: break down your muscles and they have a characteristic um

980
01:01:19,720 --> 01:01:24,280
Speaker 1: nitrogen isotope ratio, so you're like eating yourself. And so

981
01:01:24,320 --> 01:01:27,400
Speaker 1: we think the things starved the death. And your question is, well,

982
01:01:27,480 --> 01:01:31,200
Speaker 1: why would a thirty five year old middle age bull

983
01:01:31,240 --> 01:01:36,680
Speaker 1: mammoth starved the death? I don't know why the animals die.

984
01:01:38,280 --> 01:01:41,240
Speaker 1: But we never found any of his leg bones. We

985
01:01:41,440 --> 01:01:44,360
Speaker 1: dug and doug we never found any, so we don't know.

986
01:01:44,960 --> 01:01:48,240
Speaker 1: So we didn't find the rest of his skeleton to

987
01:01:48,400 --> 01:01:51,320
Speaker 1: know if see if he had any injuries that were

988
01:01:51,360 --> 01:01:54,840
Speaker 1: obvious or anything. Yeah, you can see why a leglass

989
01:01:54,840 --> 01:02:00,680
Speaker 1: mammoth wouldn't live. I can jump to out that might

990
01:02:00,680 --> 01:02:05,080
Speaker 1: be a paper for you. Obviously he had no legs.

991
01:02:05,680 --> 01:02:08,360
Speaker 1: Do you guys ever find stuff that, um, there's a

992
01:02:08,360 --> 01:02:13,280
Speaker 1: concern for preservation, like it's gonna like somehow deteriorate if

993
01:02:13,280 --> 01:02:19,440
Speaker 1: you don't get it like handled or treated in some way. Well,

994
01:02:19,560 --> 01:02:25,800
Speaker 1: we have, um occasionally found places seen arabone still with

995
01:02:25,920 --> 01:02:31,919
Speaker 1: soft tissue. And Bison Bob, the skeleton we found had

996
01:02:31,960 --> 01:02:34,919
Speaker 1: a lot of soft tissue and so obviously that has

997
01:02:34,960 --> 01:02:40,360
Speaker 1: to be frozen or it would just run away. Tell

998
01:02:40,400 --> 01:02:43,560
Speaker 1: the story of Bison Bob. But like what you were

999
01:02:43,560 --> 01:02:47,160
Speaker 1: doing when we found Bison Bob, we were paddling down

1000
01:02:47,200 --> 01:02:51,040
Speaker 1: the river. We had actually just paddled through a hailstorm

1001
01:02:51,240 --> 01:02:54,680
Speaker 1: and we had a favorite campsite a little bit downriver,

1002
01:02:54,840 --> 01:02:57,880
Speaker 1: so we were looking forward to getting to our campsite.

1003
01:02:58,080 --> 01:03:00,800
Speaker 1: So you've been on one river enough to it you'll

1004
01:03:00,840 --> 01:03:05,240
Speaker 1: do one river more than once. Oh, we've been doing

1005
01:03:05,280 --> 01:03:08,880
Speaker 1: them for twenty years, so every bend has a name

1006
01:03:09,080 --> 01:03:11,080
Speaker 1: and we have our favor Why are you doing the

1007
01:03:11,080 --> 01:03:17,120
Speaker 1: same rivers over and over again? There's a couple of things.

1008
01:03:17,440 --> 01:03:21,560
Speaker 1: First of all, there are not many rivers that have

1009
01:03:21,760 --> 01:03:25,439
Speaker 1: the right characteristics to preserve bone it has to be

1010
01:03:25,480 --> 01:03:30,560
Speaker 1: a fairly slow river with um and fine settlements. If

1011
01:03:30,600 --> 01:03:34,800
Speaker 1: it's a bouldery river that's really fast. Any bones that

1012
01:03:34,960 --> 01:03:39,840
Speaker 1: get incorporated in the river get broken up. And also

1013
01:03:40,320 --> 01:03:45,000
Speaker 1: and going to the same places over and over again

1014
01:03:45,080 --> 01:03:51,120
Speaker 1: for twenty years, you really get to know and understand

1015
01:03:51,160 --> 01:03:53,640
Speaker 1: the system in a way that you can't if you

1016
01:03:53,800 --> 01:03:58,960
Speaker 1: just bop in a couple of times over a space

1017
01:03:59,040 --> 01:04:02,080
Speaker 1: of a few years. Since to me, that's one of

1018
01:04:02,120 --> 01:04:06,400
Speaker 1: the really important lessons of this research we've been doing,

1019
01:04:06,560 --> 01:04:10,520
Speaker 1: is having these long term data sets and really getting

1020
01:04:10,960 --> 01:04:15,400
Speaker 1: to know the area. To me, it's really helped us

1021
01:04:15,600 --> 01:04:20,120
Speaker 1: understand how the system functions and be able to better

1022
01:04:20,240 --> 01:04:25,160
Speaker 1: put together the information we put in papers about how

1023
01:04:25,200 --> 01:04:28,040
Speaker 1: the animals lived. So anyways, what was the first time

1024
01:04:28,080 --> 01:04:30,440
Speaker 1: you go down the river? Is it way better pickings

1025
01:04:30,480 --> 01:04:35,680
Speaker 1: than the second time? Stuff? Con Every year is different,

1026
01:04:35,840 --> 01:04:38,440
Speaker 1: and that's when people say, don't you get bored? And

1027
01:04:38,480 --> 01:04:41,600
Speaker 1: you never get bored because every year is different, and

1028
01:04:42,600 --> 01:04:45,080
Speaker 1: it might be related to how much of a spring

1029
01:04:45,120 --> 01:04:48,959
Speaker 1: flood there was, or you know, if some bank got

1030
01:04:49,000 --> 01:04:52,560
Speaker 1: cut away and so, and how high the river is,

1031
01:04:52,680 --> 01:04:57,280
Speaker 1: how clear the water is. Um one year, it seemed

1032
01:04:57,320 --> 01:05:00,280
Speaker 1: like we drug our canoe almost the whole way because

1033
01:05:00,280 --> 01:05:02,720
Speaker 1: the water was so low, but it was really clear,

1034
01:05:02,840 --> 01:05:05,120
Speaker 1: and so we were finding bones in the bottom of

1035
01:05:05,120 --> 01:05:09,160
Speaker 1: the river channel that we never would have seen. And

1036
01:05:09,360 --> 01:05:12,560
Speaker 1: you'd floated over a bunch of times. Yeah, and so

1037
01:05:12,840 --> 01:05:15,960
Speaker 1: every year it's like a clean slate and you ever

1038
01:05:15,960 --> 01:05:18,600
Speaker 1: got to get in, get into your swimsuit and go

1039
01:05:18,640 --> 01:05:21,320
Speaker 1: down there and swim down and grab something. Well, not

1040
01:05:21,480 --> 01:05:26,280
Speaker 1: a swimsuit, but I sent a picture somewhere of Dan

1041
01:05:26,440 --> 01:05:29,360
Speaker 1: and a dry suit with flippers and a mask. And

1042
01:05:29,440 --> 01:05:31,920
Speaker 1: my niece was with us and she had a wetsuit

1043
01:05:32,480 --> 01:05:37,280
Speaker 1: and they did try snorkeling to look in the bottom

1044
01:05:37,280 --> 01:05:41,560
Speaker 1: of the river. But um, my niece when she came

1045
01:05:41,640 --> 01:05:43,919
Speaker 1: up with us often would just walk in the river

1046
01:05:44,320 --> 01:05:47,640
Speaker 1: and find stuff or you feel stuff with your feet,

1047
01:05:48,160 --> 01:05:51,040
Speaker 1: so so that that snorkel trick didn't work good for you.

1048
01:05:51,640 --> 01:05:56,240
Speaker 1: Uh no, it didn't work well at all. Visibility, let's

1049
01:05:56,280 --> 01:06:00,200
Speaker 1: just leave it down. It's a great photo. Was it

1050
01:06:00,280 --> 01:06:04,880
Speaker 1: a personal comfort thing or a visibility thing? Both? Actually,

1051
01:06:04,880 --> 01:06:06,960
Speaker 1: the river is really cold, So after about an hour

1052
01:06:07,240 --> 01:06:09,920
Speaker 1: of flopping around in there and then you know, it's

1053
01:06:10,000 --> 01:06:12,040
Speaker 1: little things like you know when you have flippers and

1054
01:06:12,120 --> 01:06:14,280
Speaker 1: you gotta walk backwards to get out, and then you

1055
01:06:14,320 --> 01:06:18,840
Speaker 1: fall over and everybody's laughing at you, and you just try.

1056
01:06:18,920 --> 01:06:21,400
Speaker 1: Suit has big bubbles of air and so you kind

1057
01:06:21,400 --> 01:06:23,320
Speaker 1: of look like a hunchback of Notre Dame and you

1058
01:06:23,400 --> 01:06:25,440
Speaker 1: can't dive down. Yeah, it just goes on and on.

1059
01:06:25,480 --> 01:06:30,440
Speaker 1: So that's not recommended now, even though you and I

1060
01:06:30,520 --> 01:06:33,040
Speaker 1: understand going back to the same place twenty years in

1061
01:06:33,040 --> 01:06:35,520
Speaker 1: a row. And I feel like the same way about

1062
01:06:35,640 --> 01:06:37,840
Speaker 1: certain places I like to go hunting, you know, and

1063
01:06:37,880 --> 01:06:41,600
Speaker 1: just the intimacity you gain over and over and over.

1064
01:06:41,680 --> 01:06:44,160
Speaker 1: But at the same time, we all pour over maps

1065
01:06:44,200 --> 01:06:47,080
Speaker 1: all the time looking for like the next great spot.

1066
01:06:47,200 --> 01:06:50,040
Speaker 1: So do you do that also and kind of look

1067
01:06:50,080 --> 01:06:53,280
Speaker 1: at the great certain rivers and go, man, that one

1068
01:06:53,360 --> 01:06:55,880
Speaker 1: could be the honey hoole. And that was the advantage

1069
01:06:55,880 --> 01:06:58,960
Speaker 1: of working with Mike and BLM is having the helicopter.

1070
01:06:59,040 --> 01:07:01,800
Speaker 1: And that's like when we on the Wandering Mammoth, we

1071
01:07:01,880 --> 01:07:06,560
Speaker 1: had the opportunity to fly around to different places, and

1072
01:07:06,560 --> 01:07:09,840
Speaker 1: so over the course of the decades we did check

1073
01:07:09,880 --> 01:07:13,640
Speaker 1: out a lot of other places. But unless you have

1074
01:07:14,000 --> 01:07:19,040
Speaker 1: a helicopter, most of those places you just can't get there.

1075
01:07:19,840 --> 01:07:23,400
Speaker 1: Mike's annual budget for those helicopters. When you were there,

1076
01:07:23,520 --> 01:07:25,960
Speaker 1: it was over a million dollars a year. There were

1077
01:07:25,960 --> 01:07:29,440
Speaker 1: some summers we had three aircraft and so we could

1078
01:07:29,480 --> 01:07:33,080
Speaker 1: literally just look at a map like you were suggesting,

1079
01:07:33,120 --> 01:07:34,520
Speaker 1: and just go, hey, we want to go check out

1080
01:07:34,560 --> 01:07:37,160
Speaker 1: this river, and he should sure go And it would

1081
01:07:37,160 --> 01:07:39,960
Speaker 1: be like, I don't know, twenty grand. We'd blow in

1082
01:07:39,960 --> 01:07:42,880
Speaker 1: an afternoon flying around and sometimes it panned out and

1083
01:07:42,920 --> 01:07:47,320
Speaker 1: sometimes it didn't. Now we're really hobbled because now it

1084
01:07:47,400 --> 01:07:50,080
Speaker 1: cost us if we drive the cold Foot Okay, at

1085
01:07:50,080 --> 01:07:52,040
Speaker 1: the southern edge of the Bricks Ranage, it cost us

1086
01:07:52,040 --> 01:07:56,840
Speaker 1: ten dollars to charter a beaver for a drop off

1087
01:07:57,240 --> 01:07:59,280
Speaker 1: and a pick up. So that means we only get

1088
01:07:59,360 --> 01:08:02,200
Speaker 1: one river, and we only have one reach of that

1089
01:08:02,320 --> 01:08:04,840
Speaker 1: river that we can float where in the old days

1090
01:08:04,880 --> 01:08:07,240
Speaker 1: when Mike before Mike retired and he was the Emperor

1091
01:08:07,240 --> 01:08:09,919
Speaker 1: of the Arctic, and that we could get like ten

1092
01:08:10,000 --> 01:08:13,760
Speaker 1: times more done, you know, in a little field season.

1093
01:08:14,800 --> 01:08:20,559
Speaker 1: So Bob the bison, hailstorm, So hailstorm. We're paddling. We're

1094
01:08:20,560 --> 01:08:23,960
Speaker 1: hoping to get to Cottonwood Bluff campsite, and but as

1095
01:08:24,000 --> 01:08:28,639
Speaker 1: we paddle, we're always looking and there's something up there

1096
01:08:28,640 --> 01:08:30,840
Speaker 1: on the river bank, and then we're we always try

1097
01:08:30,880 --> 01:08:33,280
Speaker 1: and guess ahead what it is. It's a bison, No,

1098
01:08:33,400 --> 01:08:36,360
Speaker 1: it's a muskox. And so we got to it and

1099
01:08:36,720 --> 01:08:42,840
Speaker 1: it was bison skull kind of partially buried right at

1100
01:08:42,880 --> 01:08:46,439
Speaker 1: the river level, upside down, and we could see one

1101
01:08:46,560 --> 01:08:51,400
Speaker 1: horn and part of a mandible, and so we stopped.

1102
01:08:51,439 --> 01:08:55,120
Speaker 1: And for some reason, skulls are the most exciting bones

1103
01:08:55,200 --> 01:08:58,360
Speaker 1: to find, and so we dug it out carefully. Let

1104
01:08:58,360 --> 01:09:01,080
Speaker 1: me stop you real quick when you see a bison skull,

1105
01:09:01,400 --> 01:09:04,000
Speaker 1: you know, just based on what we understand about the

1106
01:09:04,040 --> 01:09:11,840
Speaker 1: timeline there, you know, it's at least what years old,

1107
01:09:12,840 --> 01:09:14,559
Speaker 1: So just the fact that you laid eyes on it,

1108
01:09:14,600 --> 01:09:20,120
Speaker 1: you know, here's something. Yeah, so and um, so we

1109
01:09:20,600 --> 01:09:25,320
Speaker 1: excavated it and it turned out to be a complete

1110
01:09:25,360 --> 01:09:29,760
Speaker 1: skull with the mandible there and one horn sheath. The

1111
01:09:29,800 --> 01:09:33,680
Speaker 1: other side just had a horn core, but it was

1112
01:09:34,240 --> 01:09:37,960
Speaker 1: in immaculate condition. So we dug it out and we

1113
01:09:38,080 --> 01:09:40,840
Speaker 1: put it in the water to kind of rinse it off,

1114
01:09:41,360 --> 01:09:44,120
Speaker 1: and all this gunk came out of the eye orbit

1115
01:09:44,760 --> 01:09:50,360
Speaker 1: like it was the rotten eyeball still in there, and

1116
01:09:50,400 --> 01:09:53,559
Speaker 1: so we were working kind of focused on the skull,

1117
01:09:53,680 --> 01:09:56,599
Speaker 1: and then as we were cleaning it up, looked around

1118
01:09:56,640 --> 01:10:00,400
Speaker 1: and just a little bit up the bank, oh there's

1119
01:10:00,439 --> 01:10:02,840
Speaker 1: a few more bones and oh, look at that's a

1120
01:10:02,920 --> 01:10:11,400
Speaker 1: bison metatarsal, like a kind of risk of like not

1121
01:10:11,600 --> 01:10:16,320
Speaker 1: really with the skull. The skull also had a lot

1122
01:10:16,360 --> 01:10:19,160
Speaker 1: of the brain was still in there, so that all

1123
01:10:19,240 --> 01:10:21,560
Speaker 1: drippled out into the river. I was pretty discussing this

1124
01:10:21,720 --> 01:10:26,439
Speaker 1: kind of white fatty stuff. I've dealt with that inside. Yeah.

1125
01:10:27,760 --> 01:10:31,400
Speaker 1: So so we saw these bones close by, and then

1126
01:10:32,479 --> 01:10:35,560
Speaker 1: you know, we started looking farther and farther up the

1127
01:10:35,680 --> 01:10:38,679
Speaker 1: bluff and there were more and more bones and we go, wow,

1128
01:10:39,160 --> 01:10:43,680
Speaker 1: there's a lot here, and um, but then it was

1129
01:10:43,760 --> 01:10:47,759
Speaker 1: getting late, so we put the skull in the canoe

1130
01:10:47,880 --> 01:10:51,120
Speaker 1: and went and camped, and the next day went back.

1131
01:10:51,320 --> 01:10:54,280
Speaker 1: It was just like a hundred yards back up river

1132
01:10:55,040 --> 01:10:58,640
Speaker 1: and went up the bluff about thirty ft and we

1133
01:10:58,760 --> 01:11:01,680
Speaker 1: could find bone oones sticking out of the bluff. It's

1134
01:11:01,760 --> 01:11:06,879
Speaker 1: very fine sandy sediment, and so we started retrieving bones

1135
01:11:07,920 --> 01:11:11,800
Speaker 1: and then uh, a lot of the bluff was still

1136
01:11:11,920 --> 01:11:14,960
Speaker 1: frozen and the bones were frozen in. So we had

1137
01:11:15,000 --> 01:11:18,040
Speaker 1: this one little bucket and one of us would go

1138
01:11:18,200 --> 01:11:21,000
Speaker 1: down to the river and fill the bucket up and

1139
01:11:21,479 --> 01:11:25,400
Speaker 1: carry it up and pour it over. It took three days,

1140
01:11:25,560 --> 01:11:28,120
Speaker 1: I think to get all the bones out, and as

1141
01:11:28,520 --> 01:11:31,400
Speaker 1: we went farther into the bluff, that's when we started

1142
01:11:31,439 --> 01:11:37,040
Speaker 1: to find hair and uh tissue, and like the front

1143
01:11:37,160 --> 01:11:41,840
Speaker 1: legs when we excavated them, the bones were still articulated,

1144
01:11:42,000 --> 01:11:47,320
Speaker 1: attached to each other, you know, and the um humorous

1145
01:11:47,680 --> 01:11:55,320
Speaker 1: and the radius aulna were attached. And we found, oh,

1146
01:11:55,439 --> 01:11:58,719
Speaker 1: a bunch of the vertebrae from the back. We're still

1147
01:11:59,320 --> 01:12:02,360
Speaker 1: all our puculated. But the neatest thing we're actually the

1148
01:12:02,720 --> 01:12:06,840
Speaker 1: holes because it was a big bison. It was a

1149
01:12:07,000 --> 01:12:09,679
Speaker 1: bowl and they've got three thought it was probably twelve

1150
01:12:09,800 --> 01:12:16,360
Speaker 1: years old, very matura bal and they're they're very tall, tall,

1151
01:12:16,600 --> 01:12:20,439
Speaker 1: and you know how buffalo are kind of um narrow

1152
01:12:20,479 --> 01:12:22,000
Speaker 1: if you look at them from the front or from

1153
01:12:22,000 --> 01:12:24,960
Speaker 1: the back, so like that, but kind of on steroids,

1154
01:12:25,040 --> 01:12:29,080
Speaker 1: so even taller, and but with these dainty little holes.

1155
01:12:29,120 --> 01:12:32,200
Speaker 1: So the holes were like I don't know, something like that, no,

1156
01:12:32,880 --> 01:12:36,840
Speaker 1: and then like a little high heels, and it still

1157
01:12:36,920 --> 01:12:41,320
Speaker 1: had the sheaths, the hoof sheets were still attached. I mean,

1158
01:12:41,400 --> 01:12:43,800
Speaker 1: just so our listeners get a better idea. You're you're

1159
01:12:43,840 --> 01:12:48,600
Speaker 1: showing me like four inches across a little lemon, so

1160
01:12:48,720 --> 01:12:52,439
Speaker 1: like almost smaller than like a caribou. So yeah, yeah, yeah,

1161
01:12:52,880 --> 01:12:56,519
Speaker 1: So again we're talking running on hard surfaces. They're not

1162
01:12:56,680 --> 01:13:01,880
Speaker 1: running on tundra, grassy plane. Yeah yeah. And so that

1163
01:13:02,080 --> 01:13:04,320
Speaker 1: if you look on the bottom of the of the

1164
01:13:04,520 --> 01:13:07,160
Speaker 1: hush sheath that still had the little scratches where he'd

1165
01:13:07,240 --> 01:13:09,639
Speaker 1: like run over rocks and stuff. Really but it looked

1166
01:13:09,680 --> 01:13:13,400
Speaker 1: like it was from an animal that had died like

1167
01:13:13,640 --> 01:13:17,759
Speaker 1: three weeks ago. It was so fresh. And we found

1168
01:13:18,439 --> 01:13:23,560
Speaker 1: three sheets and then we also found it's a sediments

1169
01:13:24,200 --> 01:13:27,200
Speaker 1: um we thought out and came off. There was this

1170
01:13:27,280 --> 01:13:30,639
Speaker 1: little point sticking out and eventually that became the other

1171
01:13:30,800 --> 01:13:39,240
Speaker 1: horn sheath, and so we eventually found the only really

1172
01:13:39,320 --> 01:13:42,760
Speaker 1: big bone we were missing was one scapula, and then

1173
01:13:42,840 --> 01:13:47,600
Speaker 1: there were some of the little wrist and anklebones. But

1174
01:13:47,760 --> 01:13:51,400
Speaker 1: we found all the little vertebrae from the tail go

1175
01:13:51,600 --> 01:13:56,000
Speaker 1: down to these tiny little things like half inch in diameter. So,

1176
01:13:56,160 --> 01:14:01,080
Speaker 1: what what does your canoe look like? Yeah? We we ferried.

1177
01:14:01,680 --> 01:14:04,320
Speaker 1: We made numerous trips back to camp, and we had

1178
01:14:04,400 --> 01:14:06,720
Speaker 1: we actually had a tarp that we spread them out on.

1179
01:14:06,920 --> 01:14:10,720
Speaker 1: But then this was the other lucky thing about Mike

1180
01:14:10,840 --> 01:14:13,519
Speaker 1: if we did have a satellite phone. So we called

1181
01:14:13,600 --> 01:14:18,040
Speaker 1: up and said, hey, Mike, we've got this bison skeleton

1182
01:14:18,360 --> 01:14:22,280
Speaker 1: and it's actually starting to smell, and their flies coming around,

1183
01:14:22,400 --> 01:14:26,200
Speaker 1: and we're worried that some bears gonna come. And so

1184
01:14:27,320 --> 01:14:31,880
Speaker 1: he sent the helicopter over and we uh flew it

1185
01:14:32,000 --> 01:14:35,560
Speaker 1: back to Iva Tuck and then flew it to Fairbanks

1186
01:14:35,600 --> 01:14:37,640
Speaker 1: and stuck it in a freezer. And what were you

1187
01:14:37,640 --> 01:14:40,559
Speaker 1: able to find out about that animal? Um? And why

1188
01:14:40,600 --> 01:14:42,519
Speaker 1: do you think it was so well like? How did

1189
01:14:42,560 --> 01:14:44,880
Speaker 1: it get so well preserved? Yeah? That and if you

1190
01:14:44,960 --> 01:14:48,000
Speaker 1: can't and when you're explaining that, is also explained how

1191
01:14:48,040 --> 01:14:50,720
Speaker 1: an animal of that size could just die out there

1192
01:14:50,840 --> 01:14:53,479
Speaker 1: somewhere and not get scavenged. Well? And then can I

1193
01:14:53,600 --> 01:14:57,519
Speaker 1: ask a follow up? I'm still I'm still stuck on

1194
01:14:57,600 --> 01:15:01,040
Speaker 1: the on the eyeball socket and the brain in there.

1195
01:15:01,200 --> 01:15:03,920
Speaker 1: Is that if there's any like soft tissue from that

1196
01:15:04,160 --> 01:15:06,560
Speaker 1: creature that would be worth saving, that, would you know

1197
01:15:06,720 --> 01:15:13,400
Speaker 1: give you information you couldn't find from from hard tissue bone? Um,

1198
01:15:14,360 --> 01:15:16,400
Speaker 1: I guess it will from the hair. You can do

1199
01:15:16,840 --> 01:15:21,880
Speaker 1: various isotopic analyzes, and we haven't done anything with any

1200
01:15:21,960 --> 01:15:27,120
Speaker 1: of the soft tissue. It's all frozen. But um, what

1201
01:15:27,360 --> 01:15:36,960
Speaker 1: was Janice's question. Well, one theory that we came up

1202
01:15:37,040 --> 01:15:40,360
Speaker 1: with is along that stretch of river there's a lot

1203
01:15:40,439 --> 01:15:45,000
Speaker 1: of quicksand and because sometimes you're walking along dragging the

1204
01:15:45,120 --> 01:15:46,680
Speaker 1: canoe or something, and all of a sudden you go

1205
01:15:47,560 --> 01:15:50,439
Speaker 1: and get sucked in. And so this is another thing

1206
01:15:50,560 --> 01:15:54,720
Speaker 1: about bison with small feet, they'd be really vulnerable to

1207
01:15:54,880 --> 01:16:00,320
Speaker 1: quicksand going in. And um, so one theory he is

1208
01:16:00,640 --> 01:16:03,040
Speaker 1: because he was a bull in his prime, that he

1209
01:16:03,240 --> 01:16:06,680
Speaker 1: got stuck in quicksand and couldn't get out, and so

1210
01:16:06,920 --> 01:16:12,760
Speaker 1: he might have died actually in the river, in which case, uh,

1211
01:16:13,040 --> 01:16:18,200
Speaker 1: he wouldn't have been heavily scavenged because come winter he

1212
01:16:18,240 --> 01:16:20,960
Speaker 1: would have just gotten buried over by the river sediments

1213
01:16:21,120 --> 01:16:27,880
Speaker 1: frozen in. And then we think because the sediments that

1214
01:16:28,000 --> 01:16:31,719
Speaker 1: we actually we found his skeleton in were about eleven

1215
01:16:31,840 --> 01:16:36,360
Speaker 1: thousand years old, so probably he died over forty thousand

1216
01:16:36,479 --> 01:16:39,680
Speaker 1: years ago and was just interred in these sediments and

1217
01:16:39,800 --> 01:16:43,880
Speaker 1: then at some point the river moved away from where

1218
01:16:43,960 --> 01:16:47,600
Speaker 1: he was and then it moved back exposed him. He

1219
01:16:47,800 --> 01:16:51,320
Speaker 1: toppled down the bluff a little and got reburied, and

1220
01:16:51,520 --> 01:16:55,560
Speaker 1: then if we hadn't come along and found him, he

1221
01:16:55,640 --> 01:16:58,720
Speaker 1: would have toppled into the river again, but by then

1222
01:16:59,200 --> 01:17:02,200
Speaker 1: the bones would have gotten dispersed more and more. And

1223
01:17:02,360 --> 01:17:06,000
Speaker 1: because we went back to that section twice more that

1224
01:17:06,200 --> 01:17:09,120
Speaker 1: summer to see if we could find anything else, and

1225
01:17:09,720 --> 01:17:12,680
Speaker 1: the whole face of the bluff had just collapsed. So

1226
01:17:13,040 --> 01:17:17,160
Speaker 1: if we hadn't been there, when we'd been there, you

1227
01:17:17,240 --> 01:17:20,400
Speaker 1: never would have known here. It was totally serendipitous that

1228
01:17:20,640 --> 01:17:25,120
Speaker 1: we do you feel like, um, the permafrost thawing out thing,

1229
01:17:26,080 --> 01:17:28,880
Speaker 1: like is it a raise against time? Like finding super

1230
01:17:28,960 --> 01:17:32,320
Speaker 1: well preserved specimens like that? Like have you run in

1231
01:17:32,520 --> 01:17:35,800
Speaker 1: like have you seen evidence of you know, the permafrost

1232
01:17:35,920 --> 01:17:41,040
Speaker 1: dawing like being a real thing. You're like the lion

1233
01:17:41,160 --> 01:17:47,639
Speaker 1: cubs with with hair on him and the increasing Yeah, yeah,

1234
01:17:47,840 --> 01:17:50,719
Speaker 1: like do you see? Yeah? So you think it would

1235
01:17:50,720 --> 01:17:54,519
Speaker 1: be right? I mean, there's global warming, mean annual temperature

1236
01:17:54,560 --> 01:17:59,000
Speaker 1: of Alaska's going up significantly, But what what's happening is

1237
01:17:59,280 --> 01:18:03,120
Speaker 1: on the ground, there's so much insulation from the overlying

1238
01:18:03,240 --> 01:18:08,720
Speaker 1: vegetation that we're not seen yet widespread summer Carston so

1239
01:18:08,920 --> 01:18:13,600
Speaker 1: melting and thawing. So I don't it's not, um, I

1240
01:18:13,680 --> 01:18:17,200
Speaker 1: don't think thawing is accelerating. What this is why we're

1241
01:18:17,240 --> 01:18:19,400
Speaker 1: working along these rivers because the river is doing the

1242
01:18:19,479 --> 01:18:22,120
Speaker 1: thawing for you, and it's done the same thing for

1243
01:18:22,680 --> 01:18:25,280
Speaker 1: you know, a hundred thousand years, just as it meanders

1244
01:18:25,280 --> 01:18:28,960
Speaker 1: across though, just going back and forth, back and forth

1245
01:18:29,120 --> 01:18:31,479
Speaker 1: over time. So it's not like the whole place is

1246
01:18:31,560 --> 01:18:34,880
Speaker 1: thawing and we're not in a race to save um

1247
01:18:35,680 --> 01:18:37,720
Speaker 1: do you hear Do you hear that all the time? Though,

1248
01:18:37,720 --> 01:18:41,840
Speaker 1: I feel like it's like a like it's like a Natgio. Well,

1249
01:18:41,880 --> 01:18:45,519
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get that funding talking point that

1250
01:18:45,600 --> 01:18:49,280
Speaker 1: it's like everything's coming out it's a race against the clock.

1251
01:18:49,920 --> 01:18:54,599
Speaker 1: On the north coast of Alaska, the rate of coastal

1252
01:18:54,680 --> 01:18:58,840
Speaker 1: erosion is definitely increasing, and that also I think has

1253
01:18:58,920 --> 01:19:02,959
Speaker 1: to do with less sea ice and forming, which protects

1254
01:19:03,000 --> 01:19:08,559
Speaker 1: the coastline storms. It's causing more erosion. Also, I think

1255
01:19:08,840 --> 01:19:12,600
Speaker 1: we're also hearing, you know, the Russians are really in

1256
01:19:12,640 --> 01:19:15,880
Speaker 1: the mammoth tusk hunting now, so you kind of get

1257
01:19:15,920 --> 01:19:18,800
Speaker 1: the impression that, oh, yeah, they're all coming out of

1258
01:19:18,840 --> 01:19:21,680
Speaker 1: the permit frost. Now they're everywhere in Siberia, but they're not.

1259
01:19:22,000 --> 01:19:24,639
Speaker 1: I mean they know exactly where they go and they're

1260
01:19:24,800 --> 01:19:28,320
Speaker 1: using like steam hoses and you know they're mining for

1261
01:19:28,439 --> 01:19:31,800
Speaker 1: mammoth tusk. Yeah. So it's not like the whole Arctic

1262
01:19:31,960 --> 01:19:36,360
Speaker 1: is melting down now. It's just it's happening in specific places,

1263
01:19:36,439 --> 01:19:40,559
Speaker 1: like Pam said, like the coastal zones, but a lot

1264
01:19:40,640 --> 01:19:43,560
Speaker 1: of the you know, the north slope interior is not

1265
01:19:44,439 --> 01:19:47,439
Speaker 1: not yet feeling the big thaw, but it'll happen. It's

1266
01:19:47,479 --> 01:19:50,400
Speaker 1: a bigger issue in places like interior Alaska where the

1267
01:19:50,439 --> 01:19:57,720
Speaker 1: perma frost is much warmer, like Fairbanks, where it's more borderline. Yeah, borderline.

1268
01:19:58,040 --> 01:20:00,320
Speaker 1: It doesn't take that much to melt the firmer frost.

1269
01:20:00,439 --> 01:20:13,120
Speaker 1: If for my frost is one years when I was

1270
01:20:13,200 --> 01:20:15,040
Speaker 1: with Mike Coins, I think I can put this in

1271
01:20:15,120 --> 01:20:18,360
Speaker 1: the thing I wrote. I was saying to Mike, so,

1272
01:20:18,479 --> 01:20:21,800
Speaker 1: what's the coolest thing you could find? And to quote him,

1273
01:20:23,360 --> 01:20:28,080
Speaker 1: he said, I'd be flying along in my helicopter and

1274
01:20:28,160 --> 01:20:34,840
Speaker 1: there would be a fucking hand sticking out of the ground. Yeah,

1275
01:20:36,000 --> 01:20:40,040
Speaker 1: when you're drifted along. Um, yeah, we're always looking that

1276
01:20:40,280 --> 01:20:45,240
Speaker 1: you would find that you would find remains and it

1277
01:20:45,280 --> 01:20:49,240
Speaker 1: would be that here's here's some person from years ago,

1278
01:20:49,320 --> 01:20:52,000
Speaker 1: thirty thousand years or whatever the hell, and it'd rewrite

1279
01:20:52,320 --> 01:20:56,160
Speaker 1: all understanding that would be fully clothed, but have all

1280
01:20:56,200 --> 01:21:02,040
Speaker 1: the tools pointed out the map a Teo del Fuego. Yeah,

1281
01:21:02,120 --> 01:21:05,400
Speaker 1: exactly that. That when when Mike expounded on it um

1282
01:21:05,880 --> 01:21:08,280
Speaker 1: and I know he was we were having you know,

1283
01:21:08,560 --> 01:21:10,320
Speaker 1: I don't mean to make him seem uncouth, but I

1284
01:21:10,400 --> 01:21:12,439
Speaker 1: mean he was. We were just kind of musing around

1285
01:21:12,479 --> 01:21:15,720
Speaker 1: the table and it would be that there would be

1286
01:21:15,800 --> 01:21:19,400
Speaker 1: like a family group of people, I mean, because of

1287
01:21:19,439 --> 01:21:24,599
Speaker 1: the perma frost, would be all the things you never find, Yeah,

1288
01:21:25,120 --> 01:21:28,800
Speaker 1: what was in their bag, how they're tent, like how

1289
01:21:28,840 --> 01:21:31,720
Speaker 1: their shelters were constructed or whatever, Just like that, like

1290
01:21:31,920 --> 01:21:38,400
Speaker 1: the bison bob, the bison bob of a nomadic ice

1291
01:21:38,520 --> 01:21:42,720
Speaker 1: age hunting group. That's one reason Mike flew us up

1292
01:21:42,800 --> 01:21:47,080
Speaker 1: there was he figured if they got these poor people

1293
01:21:47,160 --> 01:21:49,479
Speaker 1: out there looking for bones and if they see a

1294
01:21:49,600 --> 01:21:52,960
Speaker 1: human bone, then they'll call me. So we were like,

1295
01:21:53,360 --> 01:21:56,920
Speaker 1: you know, looking for him. That was part of our mission.

1296
01:21:57,840 --> 01:22:01,200
Speaker 1: Find something unusual, call him, will come fly in. He'll

1297
01:22:01,240 --> 01:22:04,240
Speaker 1: find that little hand sticking up and then he'll he'll say,

1298
01:22:04,280 --> 01:22:06,320
Speaker 1: you guys, go back to camp. I'll take care of this.

1299
01:22:07,520 --> 01:22:11,759
Speaker 1: I'll take it from here. It's an issue of numbers.

1300
01:22:12,280 --> 01:22:14,639
Speaker 1: Like I said earlier, that you know, we find lots

1301
01:22:14,680 --> 01:22:17,720
Speaker 1: of the herbivores, there are a lot more herbivores, and

1302
01:22:17,800 --> 01:22:22,040
Speaker 1: then you find many fewer carnivore bones, and then humans.

1303
01:22:22,680 --> 01:22:26,200
Speaker 1: There were probably even fewer humans than there were carnivores

1304
01:22:26,360 --> 01:22:30,880
Speaker 1: running around up there. So the chances of stumbling upon

1305
01:22:31,840 --> 01:22:36,160
Speaker 1: the family that got stuck in quicksand in the river

1306
01:22:37,240 --> 01:22:41,559
Speaker 1: is really slim, but man like it will probably never

1307
01:22:41,960 --> 01:22:44,760
Speaker 1: who knows, but it has to be there. But we,

1308
01:22:44,920 --> 01:22:47,719
Speaker 1: I mean we were. There has to be a group

1309
01:22:47,840 --> 01:22:52,360
Speaker 1: of you know, ice age hunters that whatever landsliders. All

1310
01:22:52,520 --> 01:22:55,200
Speaker 1: I kept looking just for you know, the clumsy guy

1311
01:22:55,240 --> 01:22:59,800
Speaker 1: who dropped his toolkit. Somewhere you'll find the whole little assemblage.

1312
01:23:00,840 --> 01:23:05,519
Speaker 1: So have you met this guy named Eski Willardslove so

1313
01:23:05,680 --> 01:23:10,479
Speaker 1: he remember that he's Danish and he's a trip but

1314
01:23:11,600 --> 01:23:14,840
Speaker 1: he's one of the DNA guys and he's in Copenhagen.

1315
01:23:14,920 --> 01:23:20,760
Speaker 1: He's a colleague of Dave Meltzers. So archaeology is kind

1316
01:23:20,760 --> 01:23:24,839
Speaker 1: of moving on now getting away from arrowheads and finding

1317
01:23:25,000 --> 01:23:27,719
Speaker 1: you know, people buried in mud, and they're getting into

1318
01:23:27,840 --> 01:23:33,679
Speaker 1: like environmental DNA, so DNA of people that's preserved in sediment,

1319
01:23:34,200 --> 01:23:38,400
Speaker 1: and that's really the new horizon. And I think if

1320
01:23:38,600 --> 01:23:42,000
Speaker 1: Eski had his way, he would um come up to

1321
01:23:42,080 --> 01:23:44,920
Speaker 1: Alaska and other parts of North America and take a

1322
01:23:45,000 --> 01:23:48,040
Speaker 1: bunch of lake corps and try to find a lake

1323
01:23:48,120 --> 01:23:51,400
Speaker 1: where people had camped on the on the beach and

1324
01:23:51,479 --> 01:23:54,280
Speaker 1: then they'd like you know, peat in the water or

1325
01:23:54,360 --> 01:23:57,000
Speaker 1: you know, just the refuge had drained into the water,

1326
01:23:57,080 --> 01:23:59,880
Speaker 1: and we pick up the ancient DNA preserved in these lakes,

1327
01:24:00,200 --> 01:24:02,920
Speaker 1: which would be like final like dead end resting places

1328
01:24:02,960 --> 01:24:06,519
Speaker 1: for it. Yeah, and that would be fairly conclusive. You know.

1329
01:24:06,600 --> 01:24:09,280
Speaker 1: Then you could date the lake sediment and you could say, oh,

1330
01:24:09,320 --> 01:24:11,800
Speaker 1: well look there are people there fifteen thousand years ago

1331
01:24:11,920 --> 01:24:14,880
Speaker 1: or something. That's kind of how can he not have

1332
01:24:15,000 --> 01:24:19,720
Speaker 1: his way money, It's all just I mean, that'd be

1333
01:24:19,880 --> 01:24:23,479
Speaker 1: It's would be a very expensive project, but we'll see

1334
01:24:23,520 --> 01:24:25,639
Speaker 1: what happens, I think, because he'd want to do hundreds

1335
01:24:25,680 --> 01:24:27,560
Speaker 1: of sites. Yeah, you'd have to do it would be

1336
01:24:27,680 --> 01:24:29,559
Speaker 1: like looking for a needle in a haystack, because you'd

1337
01:24:29,600 --> 01:24:32,080
Speaker 1: have to find a lake where people camped, and then

1338
01:24:32,120 --> 01:24:35,240
Speaker 1: they'd have to be enough human DNA excreted into the

1339
01:24:35,320 --> 01:24:37,640
Speaker 1: lake water to show up in the lake sediment. So

1340
01:24:37,840 --> 01:24:39,799
Speaker 1: it's not a sure thing. And if it's on a hillside,

1341
01:24:39,840 --> 01:24:42,120
Speaker 1: there's no way it's can still be there, right. That's

1342
01:24:42,160 --> 01:24:46,559
Speaker 1: the whole geologically stable thing is that because they feel

1343
01:24:46,600 --> 01:24:53,080
Speaker 1: like there's no more surprises with physical artifacts or or

1344
01:24:53,920 --> 01:24:58,320
Speaker 1: physical tissue. I think Steve probably has a good feeling

1345
01:24:58,600 --> 01:25:01,800
Speaker 1: feel for this after you know trapes and around with Mike.

1346
01:25:01,960 --> 01:25:05,000
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a huge piece of real estate and

1347
01:25:05,120 --> 01:25:07,680
Speaker 1: you're looking for these little needles and haystacks and the

1348
01:25:07,840 --> 01:25:11,840
Speaker 1: preservation thing you like, point one of one percent of

1349
01:25:11,960 --> 01:25:13,920
Speaker 1: the sites would ever be preserved and then you'd have

1350
01:25:14,040 --> 01:25:16,759
Speaker 1: to find it. So it actually might be more efficient

1351
01:25:17,000 --> 01:25:20,840
Speaker 1: to go with the lake study with the DNA. And

1352
01:25:21,000 --> 01:25:24,240
Speaker 1: also if you were to find human remains, there are

1353
01:25:24,320 --> 01:25:28,640
Speaker 1: all these ethical and political questions about what kind of

1354
01:25:28,760 --> 01:25:34,679
Speaker 1: sampling you can into a nightmare man, so um, getting

1355
01:25:34,760 --> 01:25:38,559
Speaker 1: the environmental DNA would be a lot more straightforward than

1356
01:25:39,600 --> 01:25:42,080
Speaker 1: and actual although it would be really exciting to find

1357
01:25:42,200 --> 01:25:47,320
Speaker 1: old human remains. Yeah, has anyone ever pulled animal DNA

1358
01:25:47,479 --> 01:25:53,360
Speaker 1: off an ancient arrowhead? Yeah, um, it was first done

1359
01:25:53,400 --> 01:25:59,120
Speaker 1: with proteins from blood, you know, in the little kind

1360
01:25:59,160 --> 01:26:03,120
Speaker 1: of crevices of projectile points, and a lot of people

1361
01:26:03,160 --> 01:26:05,360
Speaker 1: didn't really believe that. They're like, well, how do we

1362
01:26:05,479 --> 01:26:08,320
Speaker 1: know that that animal protein is actually that of a

1363
01:26:08,439 --> 01:26:11,960
Speaker 1: deer or bison or something. But more recently people have

1364
01:26:12,120 --> 01:26:17,760
Speaker 1: been extracting ancient DNA from projectile points. But it's like

1365
01:26:17,880 --> 01:26:20,639
Speaker 1: Pain was saying that there's a huge preservation problem because

1366
01:26:20,720 --> 01:26:24,840
Speaker 1: DNA is a very delicate compound. It breaks down. So

1367
01:26:24,960 --> 01:26:27,400
Speaker 1: the artic is the ideal place if you're gonna find

1368
01:26:27,479 --> 01:26:30,679
Speaker 1: such a thing. And going back to the Masa site,

1369
01:26:31,520 --> 01:26:34,479
Speaker 1: m I really wish that all those old Masa points

1370
01:26:34,960 --> 01:26:37,280
Speaker 1: have been kept in a freezer because maybe they still

1371
01:26:37,360 --> 01:26:42,439
Speaker 1: have the But the trouble there is I don't think

1372
01:26:42,479 --> 01:26:45,080
Speaker 1: they were handled correctly when they were dug out of

1373
01:26:45,120 --> 01:26:47,960
Speaker 1: the ground. This is another thing about archaeologists today. They

1374
01:26:48,080 --> 01:26:50,120
Speaker 1: become enlightened and they always go, well, we're not going

1375
01:26:50,160 --> 01:26:52,880
Speaker 1: to dig the whole site. We're gonna leave that because

1376
01:26:53,320 --> 01:26:55,760
Speaker 1: in ten years will be a whole bunch of new techniques,

1377
01:26:56,680 --> 01:26:58,840
Speaker 1: which you know, tell us a bunch of things. Yeah,

1378
01:26:58,880 --> 01:27:00,719
Speaker 1: that's when I was. When I was with those guys,

1379
01:27:01,080 --> 01:27:04,599
Speaker 1: they would talk about um they were they were always

1380
01:27:04,600 --> 01:27:07,519
Speaker 1: discussing where they might go back, like which these campsites

1381
01:27:07,600 --> 01:27:11,040
Speaker 1: might warrant going back, and like dig it right, and

1382
01:27:11,120 --> 01:27:12,840
Speaker 1: you imagine it's going there with a shovel and digging,

1383
01:27:13,360 --> 01:27:16,360
Speaker 1: But it would be that they might do a square meter, right,

1384
01:27:16,800 --> 01:27:19,200
Speaker 1: just do one square meter and then and then in

1385
01:27:19,280 --> 01:27:22,040
Speaker 1: a hundred or whatever, in three years, when there's completely

1386
01:27:22,080 --> 01:27:25,160
Speaker 1: different innovations and technology, someone could go to another meter

1387
01:27:25,880 --> 01:27:29,000
Speaker 1: and apply there, you know, new academic rigor to that.

1388
01:27:29,200 --> 01:27:30,839
Speaker 1: That was one of the funny things that the Masist

1389
01:27:30,880 --> 01:27:33,840
Speaker 1: site when Tam wasn't there. But I was up there

1390
01:27:33,920 --> 01:27:36,720
Speaker 1: one one summer day with Mike up on top, and

1391
01:27:36,760 --> 01:27:39,000
Speaker 1: they were digging these squares and they were like ten

1392
01:27:39,080 --> 01:27:40,720
Speaker 1: of them, and everybody had a square and they had

1393
01:27:40,720 --> 01:27:43,400
Speaker 1: a little trowel with a brush, and I was like,

1394
01:27:43,520 --> 01:27:45,360
Speaker 1: oh my god, how can you guys be doing this?

1395
01:27:45,520 --> 01:27:48,240
Speaker 1: This is really boring. Why don't just give me the

1396
01:27:48,280 --> 01:27:51,200
Speaker 1: shovel and let me dig find some stuff. Yeah, so

1397
01:27:51,360 --> 01:27:53,840
Speaker 1: Mike goes, oh, you can't do that, but here's one

1398
01:27:53,880 --> 01:27:55,639
Speaker 1: that we've dug and We've dug it all the way

1399
01:27:55,680 --> 01:27:58,840
Speaker 1: down to gravel and there's nothing left. And I said, well,

1400
01:27:58,880 --> 01:28:00,920
Speaker 1: can I dig that? And he goes, yeah, based a

1401
01:28:00,920 --> 01:28:02,760
Speaker 1: waste of time. So I got to shovel. I just

1402
01:28:02,800 --> 01:28:06,120
Speaker 1: started digging, and they were just all aghast, like why

1403
01:28:06,160 --> 01:28:08,400
Speaker 1: are you letting him do this? And sure enough, about

1404
01:28:08,400 --> 01:28:12,000
Speaker 1: two ft down had a little projectile point that it

1405
01:28:12,120 --> 01:28:16,720
Speaker 1: somehow wriggled down through the gravel. But he was likew irritated.

1406
01:28:21,120 --> 01:28:22,840
Speaker 1: I know that this is another thing that changes all

1407
01:28:22,880 --> 01:28:25,719
Speaker 1: the time, Like what happened all the stuff? What happened

1408
01:28:25,760 --> 01:28:30,799
Speaker 1: all the bison and short faced bears and step lines

1409
01:28:31,040 --> 01:28:34,840
Speaker 1: and wooly mammoths? And I was real hot on uh

1410
01:28:35,200 --> 01:28:38,160
Speaker 1: for a long time. I was hot onto the places scene,

1411
01:28:38,280 --> 01:28:42,160
Speaker 1: the blitz Creeg hypothesis because it was so tidy. It

1412
01:28:42,320 --> 01:28:44,640
Speaker 1: was like dudes came and killed them all right, and

1413
01:28:44,760 --> 01:28:48,200
Speaker 1: just just great, you like folded up and put in

1414
01:28:48,280 --> 01:28:52,439
Speaker 1: your pocket. You know, it's just like a perfect explanation. Yeah,

1415
01:28:53,920 --> 01:29:04,320
Speaker 1: what what's the latest? Like why that time did like

1416
01:29:04,600 --> 01:29:09,599
Speaker 1: nine genera like nine genera of animals, so like nine

1417
01:29:09,720 --> 01:29:14,000
Speaker 1: genuses of animals vanished from the Western hemisphere. What was

1418
01:29:14,120 --> 01:29:20,320
Speaker 1: so special that all those dozens of animals when extinct, well,

1419
01:29:20,880 --> 01:29:25,479
Speaker 1: there was significant climate change going on, and I think

1420
01:29:25,920 --> 01:29:31,400
Speaker 1: one thing is you can't give one reason for all

1421
01:29:31,600 --> 01:29:35,440
Speaker 1: extinctions like it very it can vary a lot regionally,

1422
01:29:36,320 --> 01:29:40,080
Speaker 1: and so obviously the area that we know best is

1423
01:29:40,240 --> 01:29:45,000
Speaker 1: northern Alaska. And I think one thing about northern Alaska

1424
01:29:45,360 --> 01:29:50,840
Speaker 1: is the human density was never that high, and it's

1425
01:29:51,040 --> 01:29:57,400
Speaker 1: this vast area where these animals were ranging. So I

1426
01:29:57,520 --> 01:30:02,439
Speaker 1: don't think that human hunting had a huge impact on

1427
01:30:02,640 --> 01:30:08,840
Speaker 1: those animal populations. And are data from our bone collection

1428
01:30:09,120 --> 01:30:16,200
Speaker 1: shows that humans overlapped with horse and bison for probably

1429
01:30:16,200 --> 01:30:21,080
Speaker 1: a couple of thousand years, and possibly even with mammoths

1430
01:30:21,439 --> 01:30:24,960
Speaker 1: for a while, So it seems like they could coexist.

1431
01:30:25,880 --> 01:30:29,559
Speaker 1: And Dan's itching to say something, No, it's just um,

1432
01:30:31,160 --> 01:30:34,040
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of the same old story and science.

1433
01:30:34,320 --> 01:30:36,240
Speaker 1: You know. The first thing we do is we latch

1434
01:30:36,360 --> 01:30:41,000
Speaker 1: on a simple explanation like blitz Creek, people overhunted, they

1435
01:30:41,120 --> 01:30:43,680
Speaker 1: killed all the animals, and then you realize, well, that

1436
01:30:43,760 --> 01:30:46,479
Speaker 1: didn't kind of fit with some of the chronologies where

1437
01:30:46,600 --> 01:30:50,479
Speaker 1: people are rare, like on the North Slope or um

1438
01:30:50,920 --> 01:30:54,040
Speaker 1: other places like on islands in the tropical Pacific it's

1439
01:30:54,120 --> 01:30:57,680
Speaker 1: really well documented that all the endemic bird species went

1440
01:30:57,760 --> 01:31:01,000
Speaker 1: extinct after people showed up, so it was pretty obvious

1441
01:31:01,080 --> 01:31:04,400
Speaker 1: people killed them all or um moa and New Zealand

1442
01:31:04,520 --> 01:31:07,280
Speaker 1: is a really good example of overkill. So it works

1443
01:31:07,320 --> 01:31:09,479
Speaker 1: in some places but not in others. So then the

1444
01:31:09,600 --> 01:31:12,400
Speaker 1: second stages you go, okay, so it's not the same everywhere.

1445
01:31:12,479 --> 01:31:15,599
Speaker 1: It's complex, and then it just kind of keeps getting

1446
01:31:15,680 --> 01:31:17,880
Speaker 1: more and more complex because you realize, I think it

1447
01:31:18,000 --> 01:31:22,640
Speaker 1: was I think it's more like seventy genera globally of megafauna,

1448
01:31:22,760 --> 01:31:26,559
Speaker 1: so animals over a hundred pounds average weight when extinct

1449
01:31:26,680 --> 01:31:30,160
Speaker 1: globally globally. And then but when you start looking at

1450
01:31:30,200 --> 01:31:33,240
Speaker 1: the records globally, you see, well, in Australia, almost all

1451
01:31:33,320 --> 01:31:37,360
Speaker 1: those extinctions happened before forty years ago. In Africa on

1452
01:31:37,479 --> 01:31:40,840
Speaker 1: a like twelve percent of the megafauna when extinct. Well,

1453
01:31:40,840 --> 01:31:43,840
Speaker 1: I can tell you why that's true, because Africa always

1454
01:31:43,880 --> 01:31:46,559
Speaker 1: had humans. Yeah, that's one of the that's probably part

1455
01:31:46,640 --> 01:31:49,840
Speaker 1: of the explanation they could they had evolved together and

1456
01:31:49,920 --> 01:31:54,000
Speaker 1: it wasn't like a surprise attack. Yeah, but Africa is

1457
01:31:54,040 --> 01:31:56,719
Speaker 1: also different in other ways. It's a much more diverse

1458
01:31:57,600 --> 01:32:00,760
Speaker 1: set of habitats Africa is a huge kind and it's

1459
01:32:00,840 --> 01:32:05,280
Speaker 1: run in the equator and um the combination of the

1460
01:32:05,800 --> 01:32:09,639
Speaker 1: evolution with humans plus this kind of diversity of semiar

1461
01:32:09,680 --> 01:32:11,960
Speaker 1: a habitats that are changing all the time. But anyway,

1462
01:32:12,240 --> 01:32:14,240
Speaker 1: so but you see what I mean, The complexity grows

1463
01:32:14,280 --> 01:32:17,120
Speaker 1: on complexity, and I think everybody's kind of come around

1464
01:32:17,160 --> 01:32:19,840
Speaker 1: to this now where there's no one explanation it's going

1465
01:32:19,880 --> 01:32:23,120
Speaker 1: to fit all species. Some cases it is overkill, I

1466
01:32:23,160 --> 01:32:27,599
Speaker 1: think moa. Other cases it's climate change, which is probably

1467
01:32:27,640 --> 01:32:29,720
Speaker 1: what happened on the north slope where we went from

1468
01:32:30,439 --> 01:32:32,800
Speaker 1: um well drained substrate where you could make it with

1469
01:32:32,920 --> 01:32:35,920
Speaker 1: your little dainty bison hoves too. Now there's no way

1470
01:32:35,960 --> 01:32:37,880
Speaker 1: that animal could get around. It would starve in a

1471
01:32:37,960 --> 01:32:41,000
Speaker 1: week just because it's so bog sinking sinking into the

1472
01:32:41,400 --> 01:32:44,000
Speaker 1: in through the tassis and into the into the into

1473
01:32:44,080 --> 01:32:49,760
Speaker 1: the It's kind of counter intuitive that at the end

1474
01:32:49,840 --> 01:32:53,559
Speaker 1: of the last ice Age is the climate got warmer

1475
01:32:54,080 --> 01:32:58,600
Speaker 1: in northern Alaska, it became a less favorable environment for

1476
01:32:58,760 --> 01:33:01,519
Speaker 1: these large animal You kind of think, all it warms

1477
01:33:01,600 --> 01:33:07,280
Speaker 1: up and everything, there's more plants growing, but uh, the

1478
01:33:08,000 --> 01:33:12,479
Speaker 1: warmer temperatures allowed shrubs and peat to come in, which

1479
01:33:12,600 --> 01:33:17,600
Speaker 1: created this really boggy environment than than insulated the permafrost,

1480
01:33:17,680 --> 01:33:21,640
Speaker 1: so the water never drains away, and it's just and

1481
01:33:21,720 --> 01:33:25,760
Speaker 1: these were planes grazing animals for the most parts, or

1482
01:33:26,920 --> 01:33:32,360
Speaker 1: they were mostly grazing animals, so they needed large grasslands,

1483
01:33:32,840 --> 01:33:36,400
Speaker 1: and so in grasslands by their nature are kind of

1484
01:33:36,520 --> 01:33:43,200
Speaker 1: well drained, hard soils. And actually the youngest horse bones

1485
01:33:43,439 --> 01:33:46,200
Speaker 1: that we found on the north slope were in these

1486
01:33:46,680 --> 01:33:52,560
Speaker 1: sandy areas, well drained areas, which suggests to us that

1487
01:33:53,600 --> 01:33:58,760
Speaker 1: the horses retreated to these last little sandy grasslands, but

1488
01:33:59,360 --> 01:34:02,880
Speaker 1: then eventually that became too small to support them and

1489
01:34:03,040 --> 01:34:06,800
Speaker 1: they died out. Do you have a sense of how

1490
01:34:07,240 --> 01:34:12,400
Speaker 1: how long? Like it wasn't like one century the animals

1491
01:34:12,479 --> 01:34:14,720
Speaker 1: were there and then the next like how do you

1492
01:34:14,760 --> 01:34:18,560
Speaker 1: have a sense of how long this extinction event? That?

1493
01:34:18,720 --> 01:34:21,840
Speaker 1: That's a that's an interesting I was weighing on a

1494
01:34:21,880 --> 01:34:24,120
Speaker 1: little bit because I asked melts about that, Like I

1495
01:34:24,240 --> 01:34:26,040
Speaker 1: used to have it that that I don't know in

1496
01:34:26,160 --> 01:34:28,559
Speaker 1: my head, I started pictured that like thirteen thousand years ago,

1497
01:34:29,479 --> 01:34:33,439
Speaker 1: thousand and one day ago, all that ship was there

1498
01:34:33,920 --> 01:34:38,280
Speaker 1: and then and then like you know, twelve thousand and

1499
01:34:38,320 --> 01:34:41,800
Speaker 1: sixty four, whatever the hell, it was all gone, and

1500
01:34:42,040 --> 01:34:45,160
Speaker 1: we talked melts about this. He goes that that window

1501
01:34:45,200 --> 01:34:51,479
Speaker 1: of time keeps bad broadening, And it wasn't like everybody

1502
01:34:51,520 --> 01:34:53,880
Speaker 1: all died on one day. It was there was things

1503
01:34:53,960 --> 01:34:56,840
Speaker 1: that were that were fading out over the course of

1504
01:34:56,920 --> 01:35:00,479
Speaker 1: tenos and I'm sure regionally it was also, you said,

1505
01:35:01,439 --> 01:35:05,800
Speaker 1: back to the DNA preserved in sediment. So when an

1506
01:35:05,840 --> 01:35:10,880
Speaker 1: animal dies um in a permafrosting area, the DNA is

1507
01:35:10,920 --> 01:35:13,720
Speaker 1: often very well preserved if you can find it. So

1508
01:35:13,840 --> 01:35:16,320
Speaker 1: there's been there's two studies now, one from the Yukon

1509
01:35:16,479 --> 01:35:20,200
Speaker 1: one from Siberia who have looked at these LUSS sections

1510
01:35:20,280 --> 01:35:23,519
Speaker 1: so less as wind blown silt ok e s s right,

1511
01:35:23,720 --> 01:35:26,479
Speaker 1: you got it, and it's frozen. So both of them

1512
01:35:26,520 --> 01:35:30,599
Speaker 1: are showing are revealing that um, mammoth, bison and even

1513
01:35:30,640 --> 01:35:35,240
Speaker 1: Woolleye rhinoceros and Siberia survived way into the holy scene,

1514
01:35:35,280 --> 01:35:38,840
Speaker 1: so well into the present interglacial thousands of years after

1515
01:35:38,920 --> 01:35:41,640
Speaker 1: we thought they did based on when the last the

1516
01:35:41,720 --> 01:35:44,439
Speaker 1: most recent dated bonus is an article that came out

1517
01:35:44,439 --> 01:35:48,000
Speaker 1: about yeah right, yeah, you said in that nature. These

1518
01:35:48,040 --> 01:35:50,920
Speaker 1: guys are probably quoted in there, I know, but I

1519
01:35:51,000 --> 01:35:54,680
Speaker 1: was reviewing that paper bit yeah. Yeah. But so that's

1520
01:35:54,680 --> 01:35:57,240
Speaker 1: a really big deal because it suddenly is that gets

1521
01:35:57,400 --> 01:36:00,479
Speaker 1: rid of the overkill hypothesis because people have been in

1522
01:36:00,520 --> 01:36:03,240
Speaker 1: Siberia for thirty thousand years and yet rely ron ostros

1523
01:36:03,280 --> 01:36:06,840
Speaker 1: were stampeding around until eight thousand or six thousand. So

1524
01:36:07,360 --> 01:36:10,160
Speaker 1: it's really kind of this big wake up, like, hey,

1525
01:36:10,200 --> 01:36:12,000
Speaker 1: we got a new source of data. It's telling it's

1526
01:36:12,040 --> 01:36:14,000
Speaker 1: something totally different, and a lot of these animals were

1527
01:36:14,080 --> 01:36:17,200
Speaker 1: hanging on much more recently than we thought they were before.

1528
01:36:17,479 --> 01:36:22,040
Speaker 1: It demonstrates a vulnerability and getting your information from one

1529
01:36:22,360 --> 01:36:27,280
Speaker 1: from bones because like I think that I always returned

1530
01:36:27,280 --> 01:36:29,439
Speaker 1: to when I'm thinking about, you know, antiquity, and it

1531
01:36:29,680 --> 01:36:33,040
Speaker 1: gains it moves some paleontology to archaeology. Is it for

1532
01:36:33,120 --> 01:36:36,240
Speaker 1: a for a period of time, the oldest site in

1533
01:36:36,280 --> 01:36:42,000
Speaker 1: the New World it wasn't Chili, So how much ship

1534
01:36:42,160 --> 01:36:45,240
Speaker 1: is laying between there and the point of entry? Like

1535
01:36:45,400 --> 01:36:48,200
Speaker 1: the oldest site, and I know it's been surpassed since then,

1536
01:36:48,240 --> 01:36:51,040
Speaker 1: but the oldest sort of like academically agreed upon site

1537
01:36:51,600 --> 01:36:54,599
Speaker 1: was thousands of miles away from the point of entry,

1538
01:36:54,600 --> 01:36:59,720
Speaker 1: So you imagine how much junk was laying between there

1539
01:36:59,840 --> 01:37:01,320
Speaker 1: that you never found. And I want to put this

1540
01:37:01,400 --> 01:37:05,559
Speaker 1: to an anthropologist down in Colorado where I was sort

1541
01:37:05,600 --> 01:37:10,800
Speaker 1: of engaging his enthusiasm about finding more stuff, and he was,

1542
01:37:11,400 --> 01:37:14,760
Speaker 1: you know, like the bone thing. He just wasn't like

1543
01:37:14,920 --> 01:37:18,880
Speaker 1: optimistic that you'd find more Clovis sites are more fulsome sites,

1544
01:37:19,040 --> 01:37:20,559
Speaker 1: And I'm like, well, someone will turn it up, because

1545
01:37:20,600 --> 01:37:25,160
Speaker 1: but think of how much ground we've turned up, how

1546
01:37:25,240 --> 01:37:29,360
Speaker 1: many roads, we've built houses, we've built railroads, we've built

1547
01:37:30,280 --> 01:37:35,040
Speaker 1: everything that's happened. We have a few I don't feel

1548
01:37:35,120 --> 01:37:37,479
Speaker 1: that all of a sudden, now it's gonna be that

1549
01:37:37,720 --> 01:37:40,640
Speaker 1: we find tons more sites full of like bones and

1550
01:37:40,680 --> 01:37:44,280
Speaker 1: projectile points. It's gonna need to be. It's gonna be

1551
01:37:44,360 --> 01:37:49,200
Speaker 1: something else. Like it's just we're not gonna keep dragging

1552
01:37:49,280 --> 01:37:51,000
Speaker 1: this stuff off out of you know, this stuff up

1553
01:37:51,000 --> 01:37:52,960
Speaker 1: out of the ground. It's not gonna be come at

1554
01:37:53,000 --> 01:37:55,200
Speaker 1: like an increased ratio. And he was talking about the

1555
01:37:55,240 --> 01:37:58,640
Speaker 1: great planes. But to be able to dig into the

1556
01:37:58,640 --> 01:38:02,839
Speaker 1: stuff you talk about, now we've taken lake bed sediments

1557
01:38:02,880 --> 01:38:05,720
Speaker 1: and finding DNA and stuff, It's like that's a whole frontier. Man.

1558
01:38:07,640 --> 01:38:12,160
Speaker 1: It makes you, guys, help means for you guys, well,

1559
01:38:12,360 --> 01:38:15,320
Speaker 1: give us your job security, give us some money, we'll

1560
01:38:15,320 --> 01:38:18,600
Speaker 1: have job security. But we want to do that, we

1561
01:38:18,720 --> 01:38:21,960
Speaker 1: just don't have the money to get those. Course. One

1562
01:38:21,960 --> 01:38:24,320
Speaker 1: of the interesting things about this, though, is that, um

1563
01:38:24,920 --> 01:38:27,439
Speaker 1: it's I think it's pretty well accepted by most people

1564
01:38:27,520 --> 01:38:32,880
Speaker 1: now that if humans hadn't started producing greenhouse gases in

1565
01:38:33,080 --> 01:38:35,320
Speaker 1: like a mid hole of scenes solicity five or six

1566
01:38:35,360 --> 01:38:37,280
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, a lot of this was coming out

1567
01:38:37,320 --> 01:38:41,320
Speaker 1: of rice agriculture in Asia. If we hadn't started doing that,

1568
01:38:41,560 --> 01:38:44,000
Speaker 1: we would be back in the ice age now, which

1569
01:38:44,120 --> 01:38:47,080
Speaker 1: meant that a lot of those big animals would probably

1570
01:38:47,160 --> 01:38:51,280
Speaker 1: have survived. So we would have had little refugia for Willie.

1571
01:38:51,400 --> 01:38:53,920
Speaker 1: Rhino and mammoth would have been up on Wrangel Island

1572
01:38:54,000 --> 01:38:56,280
Speaker 1: and so forth, and horses would have been running around,

1573
01:38:57,000 --> 01:38:59,479
Speaker 1: you know, in northern Alaska, and we would have gone

1574
01:38:59,520 --> 01:39:02,120
Speaker 1: back into the ice age quick enough that the arranges

1575
01:39:02,160 --> 01:39:05,160
Speaker 1: could have re expanded and we would still have them.

1576
01:39:06,320 --> 01:39:08,759
Speaker 1: Is there an idea that human impact on the environment

1577
01:39:08,840 --> 01:39:12,320
Speaker 1: goes back thousands of years? It goes back probably five

1578
01:39:12,439 --> 01:39:16,720
Speaker 1: or six thousand years through greenhouse gases, And yeah, so

1579
01:39:16,800 --> 01:39:20,920
Speaker 1: we're slash and burn agriculture. We're burnie, we're clearing for us,

1580
01:39:20,960 --> 01:39:23,519
Speaker 1: so all that seal two goes in the atmosphere. We're

1581
01:39:23,640 --> 01:39:26,160
Speaker 1: creating these rice paddies, which are just hot bits for

1582
01:39:26,320 --> 01:39:29,760
Speaker 1: methane production and method is an incredible greenhouse gas. So

1583
01:39:29,920 --> 01:39:34,840
Speaker 1: if if we hadn't started messing around with a muld

1584
01:39:34,840 --> 01:39:36,960
Speaker 1: have stayed on that same cycle. Yeah, we could have

1585
01:39:37,000 --> 01:39:39,360
Speaker 1: stayed on the same cycle. We're during the intergoocials. During

1586
01:39:39,400 --> 01:39:42,120
Speaker 1: the warm times, big animals would have become scarce. They

1587
01:39:42,160 --> 01:39:45,360
Speaker 1: were driven into like far northern refugia, and then when

1588
01:39:45,360 --> 01:39:47,160
Speaker 1: the ice age came on again, it was like, yeah,

1589
01:39:47,240 --> 01:39:50,679
Speaker 1: we're back in business. You know, the Arctic prairie is back,

1590
01:39:51,479 --> 01:39:54,400
Speaker 1: mammoth steps back and they spread all over the place. Again.

1591
01:39:55,520 --> 01:39:57,800
Speaker 1: Here's my last question for you. They're not broading you.

1592
01:39:57,920 --> 01:39:59,559
Speaker 1: You might have a last one for you. How hip

1593
01:39:59,640 --> 01:40:03,400
Speaker 1: are you to the idea? Like, do you care about

1594
01:40:03,720 --> 01:40:09,120
Speaker 1: support these ideas where people are gonna do these sort

1595
01:40:09,160 --> 01:40:14,360
Speaker 1: of cockamami Yeah? Do you like cockamamie genetic things where

1596
01:40:14,439 --> 01:40:19,719
Speaker 1: you can, through various crossbeat breeding processes or whatever, create

1597
01:40:19,840 --> 01:40:26,000
Speaker 1: some approximation of a Pleistocene horse, create some approximation of

1598
01:40:26,120 --> 01:40:30,960
Speaker 1: a mammoth by like taking genetic information from mammoths and

1599
01:40:31,360 --> 01:40:35,160
Speaker 1: working it into contemporary elephants and then turning them back

1600
01:40:35,240 --> 01:40:37,760
Speaker 1: out and bringing back the ice age. Are you hip

1601
01:40:37,840 --> 01:40:40,560
Speaker 1: on this? I mean, like, are you like that's a

1602
01:40:40,560 --> 01:40:45,760
Speaker 1: good idea? Well, the big problem with that is the

1603
01:40:46,160 --> 01:40:51,840
Speaker 1: environment that those animals inhabitant is gone, and uh so

1604
01:40:52,560 --> 01:40:54,720
Speaker 1: where are they going to live? Well that this one

1605
01:40:54,800 --> 01:40:57,600
Speaker 1: feller in Siberia, doesn't he have the idea that just

1606
01:40:57,800 --> 01:41:01,280
Speaker 1: them being there will make the environment like them being

1607
01:41:01,400 --> 01:41:03,240
Speaker 1: there will turn it back into a kind of which

1608
01:41:03,320 --> 01:41:07,400
Speaker 1: came first, the chicken or the egg? And I I

1609
01:41:07,560 --> 01:41:11,000
Speaker 1: think that you have to have the environment before you

1610
01:41:11,080 --> 01:41:14,400
Speaker 1: can have the animal there. I don't think the animal.

1611
01:41:14,800 --> 01:41:16,960
Speaker 1: So you don't think that the grazing animals came and

1612
01:41:17,080 --> 01:41:24,160
Speaker 1: turned tundra into grassland? No? Okay, do you guys haven't

1613
01:41:24,160 --> 01:41:29,240
Speaker 1: talked about this? Yeah, let's put it modely. No, I

1614
01:41:29,280 --> 01:41:32,960
Speaker 1: don't think that's possible. Um, And it's not just me.

1615
01:41:33,200 --> 01:41:36,360
Speaker 1: That's Dale Guthrie, you know that is Yeah, he had

1616
01:41:36,439 --> 01:41:39,160
Speaker 1: that babe, he had that famous he had He had

1617
01:41:39,200 --> 01:41:42,840
Speaker 1: that famous dinner party where they served I don't think

1618
01:41:42,840 --> 01:41:47,040
Speaker 1: anybody really ate it, but but I think the whole

1619
01:41:47,080 --> 01:41:50,200
Speaker 1: rewilding thing is it's kind of like, that's a huge

1620
01:41:50,200 --> 01:41:55,200
Speaker 1: amount of resources, huge amount of scientific input and money input,

1621
01:41:55,640 --> 01:41:58,000
Speaker 1: And why don't we just save the animals we still

1622
01:41:58,120 --> 01:42:01,960
Speaker 1: got rather than trying to recreate something with these weird

1623
01:42:02,040 --> 01:42:05,760
Speaker 1: ass Like what was that that old book about the

1624
01:42:06,520 --> 01:42:09,680
Speaker 1: island of Dr Moreau or something, remember that where he

1625
01:42:09,760 --> 01:42:11,960
Speaker 1: would lived on this island. He created all these weird

1626
01:42:12,000 --> 01:42:14,960
Speaker 1: animals and they all went wild and ate everybody. So

1627
01:42:15,600 --> 01:42:17,519
Speaker 1: why are we messing with that? Why don't we just

1628
01:42:17,640 --> 01:42:20,360
Speaker 1: preserve like the African elephant and the white rhino and

1629
01:42:20,400 --> 01:42:23,880
Speaker 1: so farth and so on, instead of screwing around trying

1630
01:42:23,960 --> 01:42:27,680
Speaker 1: to reinvent something that, yeah it's gone. I'm not I

1631
01:42:27,720 --> 01:42:30,680
Speaker 1: don't get enthusiastic about that idea. I think that if

1632
01:42:30,720 --> 01:42:33,400
Speaker 1: if one if a proponent of that idea, we're here,

1633
01:42:33,479 --> 01:42:35,840
Speaker 1: I think they have this kind of fatalistic attitude that

1634
01:42:35,880 --> 01:42:40,960
Speaker 1: you'll never pull that off. You'll never pull saving like that.

1635
01:42:41,320 --> 01:42:44,160
Speaker 1: You're not going to save those things. And the next

1636
01:42:44,240 --> 01:42:50,479
Speaker 1: best idea would be to create a protectable place, try

1637
01:42:50,560 --> 01:42:52,760
Speaker 1: to like the grizzly bear thing out here on that

1638
01:42:52,920 --> 01:43:00,599
Speaker 1: road they're livingston. Yeah, yeah, that's first place old barrels

1639
01:43:00,640 --> 01:43:04,360
Speaker 1: around inside of inside of a log fortress. It's better

1640
01:43:04,479 --> 01:43:07,000
Speaker 1: that you could genetically engineer those grizzlies so they could

1641
01:43:07,000 --> 01:43:10,400
Speaker 1: be pettible. You know, they'd be nice. Grizzlies would be better.

1642
01:43:10,479 --> 01:43:14,280
Speaker 1: But grizzlies. Yeah, No, I think it's totally ridiculous. And

1643
01:43:14,400 --> 01:43:17,479
Speaker 1: I would think you guys, just the hunting community would

1644
01:43:17,520 --> 01:43:22,439
Speaker 1: be really against rewilding. I mean, it just seems like

1645
01:43:23,760 --> 01:43:27,120
Speaker 1: I haven't taken it seriously. I think you better because

1646
01:43:27,160 --> 01:43:30,639
Speaker 1: it is serious. I mean there's there's a lot of people. Yeah,

1647
01:43:30,720 --> 01:43:38,280
Speaker 1: I haven't taken it seriously as a UM. I only

1648
01:43:38,520 --> 01:43:41,559
Speaker 1: find it problematic when when it when people start talking

1649
01:43:41,640 --> 01:43:46,920
Speaker 1: about trying to like recreate approximations of things. Um, especially

1650
01:43:46,960 --> 01:43:49,400
Speaker 1: if you get into We Explored Us the Best Shapiro

1651
01:43:49,520 --> 01:43:51,560
Speaker 1: one time you get this idea of like what like, so,

1652
01:43:51,680 --> 01:43:55,479
Speaker 1: what exactly is a passenger pigeon? Right, Here's an animal

1653
01:43:55,560 --> 01:44:00,720
Speaker 1: that was in flocks of millions, right if you just

1654
01:44:01,080 --> 01:44:03,080
Speaker 1: you know the last one, like Martha died in the

1655
01:44:03,120 --> 01:44:06,040
Speaker 1: Cincinnati Zoo. Right. So let's say you made a thing

1656
01:44:06,120 --> 01:44:09,240
Speaker 1: and you're like, okay, here's three of them, and that's

1657
01:44:09,280 --> 01:44:11,720
Speaker 1: what they look, that's what they looked like that's them

1658
01:44:13,280 --> 01:44:18,840
Speaker 1: without flocks of millions changing forests, Like have you really

1659
01:44:18,920 --> 01:44:22,040
Speaker 1: made anything? Do you know? I mean? And is there

1660
01:44:22,080 --> 01:44:26,360
Speaker 1: public appetite for flocks of birds that could destroy entire

1661
01:44:26,720 --> 01:44:30,560
Speaker 1: agricultural fields overnight? So it's like to spend all this

1662
01:44:30,840 --> 01:44:32,840
Speaker 1: energy on something that where you can sort of look

1663
01:44:32,880 --> 01:44:35,800
Speaker 1: at and go like, yeah, it's hard to explain why,

1664
01:44:35,960 --> 01:44:38,800
Speaker 1: but that's roughly what you had sitting in that cage.

1665
01:44:39,360 --> 01:44:42,600
Speaker 1: But I don't care. What about a mammoth. But the

1666
01:44:43,120 --> 01:44:47,120
Speaker 1: way if they could honestly go, if they could, and

1667
01:44:47,200 --> 01:44:49,040
Speaker 1: it's been explaining to me that this isn't gonna happen

1668
01:44:49,080 --> 01:44:51,920
Speaker 1: if you could honestly go and find some things in

1669
01:44:51,960 --> 01:44:54,800
Speaker 1: the permit frost and here's a viable egg and here's

1670
01:44:54,800 --> 01:44:59,439
Speaker 1: a viable sperm, all right, and which is not how

1671
01:44:59,479 --> 01:45:04,280
Speaker 1: it's gonna go, and you combine those and create one. Behaviorally,

1672
01:45:04,439 --> 01:45:06,840
Speaker 1: they spent what they spent thirteen years with their mom

1673
01:45:08,960 --> 01:45:11,400
Speaker 1: learning how to do mammoth ship. So let's say you

1674
01:45:11,479 --> 01:45:14,479
Speaker 1: make one. What do you really have? Oh, I'd love

1675
01:45:14,560 --> 01:45:19,200
Speaker 1: to have a pet mammoth. But I don't think it's

1676
01:45:19,439 --> 01:45:21,519
Speaker 1: I just think it's a crazy idea. And I just

1677
01:45:21,680 --> 01:45:25,839
Speaker 1: think We've messed up so many things on this planet

1678
01:45:25,960 --> 01:45:31,639
Speaker 1: ecologically trying to intervene. And so why do that when,

1679
01:45:31,720 --> 01:45:34,519
Speaker 1: as Dan said, we've got all these crises now that

1680
01:45:34,760 --> 01:45:37,160
Speaker 1: we should be trying to overt. I mean, we spent

1681
01:45:37,240 --> 01:45:38,960
Speaker 1: a lot of time in New Zealand, you know, and

1682
01:45:39,080 --> 01:45:46,080
Speaker 1: it's just an ecological disaster there, introduced species and whatnot.

1683
01:45:46,400 --> 01:45:52,280
Speaker 1: And even in Alaska there reintroducing bison to places where

1684
01:45:53,160 --> 01:45:57,000
Speaker 1: they haven't been bison for thousands of years. But they

1685
01:45:57,360 --> 01:46:00,479
Speaker 1: they managed to really muddy the waters on that question.

1686
01:46:00,560 --> 01:46:08,320
Speaker 1: Well exactly, but I think um, even the exactly dubious

1687
01:46:08,360 --> 01:46:13,240
Speaker 1: bone fines. Yeah, and and for that matter, in muskox,

1688
01:46:13,320 --> 01:46:17,880
Speaker 1: which is my beloved species. You know, they were reintroduced

1689
01:46:18,000 --> 01:46:24,040
Speaker 1: to Alaska. Um, but that was after a much shorter

1690
01:46:24,280 --> 01:46:29,200
Speaker 1: time frame. They disappeared from Alaska in the late eighteen hundreds,

1691
01:46:29,520 --> 01:46:34,040
Speaker 1: and they were reintroduced actually not to their native range

1692
01:46:34,080 --> 01:46:38,599
Speaker 1: in Alaska, but to Alaska and Novak in the first place,

1693
01:46:38,720 --> 01:46:41,240
Speaker 1: right nineteen thirties, so actually they were in Fairbanks and

1694
01:46:41,320 --> 01:46:43,960
Speaker 1: then they went to now Novak, and then they made

1695
01:46:44,000 --> 01:46:47,160
Speaker 1: it back to the North Slope in the nineteen seventies.

1696
01:46:47,280 --> 01:46:51,559
Speaker 1: So it was about a hundred years they did. They

1697
01:46:51,680 --> 01:46:54,680
Speaker 1: disappear for the same reasons climate change or was that

1698
01:46:55,360 --> 01:47:00,520
Speaker 1: a legit over hunting. I think that it was basically

1699
01:47:00,720 --> 01:47:05,639
Speaker 1: the climate change. Muskoks populations in our bone collections suggest

1700
01:47:05,760 --> 01:47:09,560
Speaker 1: this that muskox and it persisted in Alaska for a

1701
01:47:09,680 --> 01:47:12,920
Speaker 1: really long time, but always at really low numbers, and

1702
01:47:13,240 --> 01:47:19,599
Speaker 1: so as the climate change, their populations were declining naturally,

1703
01:47:19,680 --> 01:47:24,400
Speaker 1: and they both Muskoks and Cariboo populations fluctuate naturally in

1704
01:47:24,560 --> 01:47:29,280
Speaker 1: response to all kinds of different environmental conditions. And it

1705
01:47:29,520 --> 01:47:34,320
Speaker 1: is possible that humans may have killed the last one

1706
01:47:34,439 --> 01:47:38,800
Speaker 1: or two muskox in in Alaska, but their population had

1707
01:47:38,920 --> 01:47:45,559
Speaker 1: declined on its own. And so that reintroduction I feel

1708
01:47:46,439 --> 01:47:49,679
Speaker 1: better about because it was such a short time frame.

1709
01:47:49,800 --> 01:47:54,800
Speaker 1: It's kind of like the elk reintroductions in Eastern Yeah,

1710
01:47:55,400 --> 01:47:59,479
Speaker 1: that that there's still viable habitat for them, and you're

1711
01:47:59,479 --> 01:48:03,640
Speaker 1: putting that, you're putting the actual animal back and not

1712
01:48:03,800 --> 01:48:07,200
Speaker 1: being like that, you're not adding a new species that

1713
01:48:07,800 --> 01:48:10,680
Speaker 1: you don't you're not sure how it's gonna interact with

1714
01:48:11,040 --> 01:48:14,200
Speaker 1: the other existing species that are already there. Some of

1715
01:48:14,240 --> 01:48:19,920
Speaker 1: the original rewilding people um weren't doing it through like Jeanette,

1716
01:48:19,960 --> 01:48:24,479
Speaker 1: they weren't proposing through genetic wizardry. They were proposing just

1717
01:48:24,600 --> 01:48:27,519
Speaker 1: take the closest ship you can find, so take African

1718
01:48:27,640 --> 01:48:31,439
Speaker 1: animals and cheetahs and whatnot and just caught them loose

1719
01:48:31,520 --> 01:48:35,280
Speaker 1: on the Great Plains and call it good. Which makes

1720
01:48:35,320 --> 01:48:37,320
Speaker 1: a lot more sense. Didn't you guys do a show

1721
01:48:37,400 --> 01:48:42,479
Speaker 1: on nil guy? And Texas? Texas has how many species

1722
01:48:42,520 --> 01:48:48,160
Speaker 1: of African and Asian antelope? Has got some? They have more,

1723
01:48:48,439 --> 01:48:52,160
Speaker 1: there's more in Texas, scimitar horned orcs. They have more

1724
01:48:52,240 --> 01:48:55,360
Speaker 1: in Texas than exist on native range, which you see,

1725
01:48:55,439 --> 01:48:59,879
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of different. That's not the genetic genetic

1726
01:49:00,040 --> 01:49:03,120
Speaker 1: engineering real wilding. And I think that part of real

1727
01:49:03,160 --> 01:49:06,320
Speaker 1: wilding is a you know, valid acceptable Yeah, And they've

1728
01:49:06,320 --> 01:49:10,000
Speaker 1: found they've had some cases where those well the American

1729
01:49:10,200 --> 01:49:12,280
Speaker 1: like you know, our our American bice and they've had

1730
01:49:12,360 --> 01:49:16,439
Speaker 1: cases where a species was saved because of private holders.

1731
01:49:17,200 --> 01:49:19,679
Speaker 1: Like there's no art, like you can't argue the point

1732
01:49:20,320 --> 01:49:26,719
Speaker 1: that private collectors, Britain cowboys who at the last minute

1733
01:49:26,840 --> 01:49:30,360
Speaker 1: went out and gathered up buffalo off the Great Plains,

1734
01:49:30,800 --> 01:49:33,800
Speaker 1: that if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't be any

1735
01:49:34,200 --> 01:49:36,720
Speaker 1: and and put them in a fence somewhere they'd be gone.

1736
01:49:36,760 --> 01:49:38,439
Speaker 1: I mean there's a couple of places where they held out,

1737
01:49:38,479 --> 01:49:40,800
Speaker 1: but you would have had a very very small thing.

1738
01:49:40,880 --> 01:49:43,240
Speaker 1: And if you look at how they actually were respread,

1739
01:49:43,880 --> 01:49:46,400
Speaker 1: so much of it funneled through these private individuals. And

1740
01:49:46,479 --> 01:49:48,439
Speaker 1: you know, it's easy to like look down at Texas

1741
01:49:48,479 --> 01:49:50,640
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, they're messing with this, messing with that,

1742
01:49:50,720 --> 01:49:54,240
Speaker 1: But there are cases where those privately held animals were

1743
01:49:54,320 --> 01:50:00,200
Speaker 1: not becoming like impactful toward putting animals back on the landscape. Um,

1744
01:50:01,200 --> 01:50:04,080
Speaker 1: we revisit the rewilding thing, but I think that, like you,

1745
01:50:04,280 --> 01:50:07,200
Speaker 1: like you said, I would rather take the money and

1746
01:50:07,280 --> 01:50:11,360
Speaker 1: expertise and stop the bleeding. Yeah, and not try to

1747
01:50:11,400 --> 01:50:14,120
Speaker 1: graft new stop the bleeding on the body, and not

1748
01:50:14,200 --> 01:50:21,479
Speaker 1: try to like graft new limbs, especially if it's passenger pigeons.

1749
01:50:23,040 --> 01:50:27,240
Speaker 1: Pigeons are nice. But although it would have been remarkable

1750
01:50:27,360 --> 01:50:31,840
Speaker 1: to see those huge flock. But sure they say the

1751
01:50:31,960 --> 01:50:36,400
Speaker 1: last big the last big flock was killed not far

1752
01:50:36,560 --> 01:50:40,280
Speaker 1: north of where I grew up. Really, do you know

1753
01:50:40,360 --> 01:50:43,400
Speaker 1: that Potoskey, Michigan? I think it was the last big

1754
01:50:43,600 --> 01:50:49,960
Speaker 1: like big Bang? Is there a monument there a big pile.

1755
01:50:51,640 --> 01:50:53,680
Speaker 1: I keep fluctuating on what I want to do when

1756
01:50:53,720 --> 01:50:58,040
Speaker 1: I retire. I was gonna I was gonna spend it

1757
01:50:58,280 --> 01:51:02,160
Speaker 1: devoted to a very arcane or very weird seeming pursuit

1758
01:51:02,280 --> 01:51:07,479
Speaker 1: of getting hunters orange laws standardized around the country. I

1759
01:51:07,560 --> 01:51:10,760
Speaker 1: thought you were going to become a large pumpkin enthusiast. Well,

1760
01:51:11,200 --> 01:51:13,120
Speaker 1: I was gonna become a large I was gonna become

1761
01:51:13,120 --> 01:51:16,479
Speaker 1: a large pumpkin enthusiast. I was gonna push to have

1762
01:51:16,640 --> 01:51:18,160
Speaker 1: it be that you had to wear an orange hat

1763
01:51:18,280 --> 01:51:21,200
Speaker 1: everywhere you went. That's it. Then I was going to

1764
01:51:21,320 --> 01:51:25,439
Speaker 1: push to have National Yelstow National Park turned into a

1765
01:51:25,479 --> 01:51:31,320
Speaker 1: wilderness area and have all the infrastructure removed. Now I

1766
01:51:31,479 --> 01:51:34,680
Speaker 1: might find and make monuments to where I think the

1767
01:51:34,840 --> 01:51:40,839
Speaker 1: last thing, the last big like the last thing went extinct,

1768
01:51:41,200 --> 01:51:46,000
Speaker 1: like on this place four the last buffalo in Kentucky

1769
01:51:46,120 --> 01:51:50,559
Speaker 1: was shot. Yeah, they've that would have redeeming social value,

1770
01:51:52,120 --> 01:51:59,120
Speaker 1: an artistic I do like them, huge freaking pumpkins man palettes.

1771
01:51:59,520 --> 01:52:03,640
Speaker 1: Yeah you can do both. Alright, guys, I'm glad he

1772
01:52:03,680 --> 01:52:06,040
Speaker 1: finally came down. Man, I've been pastoring the ship out

1773
01:52:06,080 --> 01:52:08,120
Speaker 1: of Crene to get you guys on the show. I

1774
01:52:08,200 --> 01:52:10,760
Speaker 1: want you to go back home. Talk to your buddy Mike,

1775
01:52:10,840 --> 01:52:14,559
Speaker 1: cons get him fired up. Tell him the pandemic will

1776
01:52:14,680 --> 01:52:18,519
Speaker 1: never end. It's a soft end. The end will look

1777
01:52:18,600 --> 01:52:21,400
Speaker 1: like this. The end will be that it's like a

1778
01:52:21,520 --> 01:52:25,160
Speaker 1: cold or the flu. That tell him that we're almost

1779
01:52:25,240 --> 01:52:27,240
Speaker 1: to the end. But it wasn't the end. He was

1780
01:52:27,320 --> 01:52:33,599
Speaker 1: looking for New York this fall. He did not. Oh,

1781
01:52:33,720 --> 01:52:37,639
Speaker 1: you shouldn't have told them that, But that really makes

1782
01:52:37,680 --> 01:52:40,599
Speaker 1: Crin seemed like not a strong producer. But she didn't

1783
01:52:40,640 --> 01:52:45,599
Speaker 1: find that. She hasn't been looking at flight Manifest's like, well, Mike,

1784
01:52:45,840 --> 01:52:49,320
Speaker 1: that that's awkward because my research indicates that you have left.

1785
01:52:50,600 --> 01:52:53,360
Speaker 1: I have receipts. I know. We're trying to wrap this up.

1786
01:52:53,400 --> 01:52:55,519
Speaker 1: But so Cal had to leave halfway through. He could

1787
01:52:55,600 --> 01:52:59,400
Speaker 1: not stay away. He asked me to ask a question. Uh,

1788
01:52:59,560 --> 01:53:00,960
Speaker 1: and it's or it's sort of you know, a good

1789
01:53:01,000 --> 01:53:02,519
Speaker 1: boat to put on it? And he said, in the

1790
01:53:02,640 --> 01:53:05,760
Speaker 1: Hunt for Hunting everything ancient, if it's a good bowl,

1791
01:53:05,840 --> 01:53:09,000
Speaker 1: let these guys do their questions, because what if they

1792
01:53:09,000 --> 01:53:12,720
Speaker 1: don't have a tight boat. I don't know, but I'm

1793
01:53:12,760 --> 01:53:15,000
Speaker 1: gonna save it for next time. Speaking of it's been

1794
01:53:15,000 --> 01:53:17,599
Speaker 1: a while since you've you've asked about concluders. That word

1795
01:53:17,640 --> 01:53:21,519
Speaker 1: hasn't been said on this podcast and probably over a year. Okay,

1796
01:53:21,880 --> 01:53:24,639
Speaker 1: get back to that. Here's Cow's concluding, Here's keeps Cows

1797
01:53:24,640 --> 01:53:26,960
Speaker 1: compluiter and the hunt for Everything ancient. Have you ever

1798
01:53:27,080 --> 01:53:30,880
Speaker 1: just discovered something modern that has been equally as surprising

1799
01:53:31,040 --> 01:53:41,280
Speaker 1: or interesting? Okay, yeah, no. So along one of these

1800
01:53:41,400 --> 01:53:45,360
Speaker 1: rivers that we routinely get down one day, we're paddling

1801
01:53:45,360 --> 01:53:50,000
Speaker 1: along and off in the alder choked hell hole was

1802
01:53:50,040 --> 01:53:54,360
Speaker 1: a purple older, and so it was like purple leaves

1803
01:53:54,479 --> 01:53:57,360
Speaker 1: with purple leaves. So you gotta imagine the sea of

1804
01:53:57,880 --> 01:54:01,960
Speaker 1: green green alder thick. It really unpleasant, full of mosquitoes.

1805
01:54:02,240 --> 01:54:05,639
Speaker 1: In the middle is one purple alder. So of course

1806
01:54:05,720 --> 01:54:07,400
Speaker 1: we got off and went in there and stomped around,

1807
01:54:07,439 --> 01:54:09,439
Speaker 1: got bitten by mosquitoes, and it was like, wow, maybe

1808
01:54:09,479 --> 01:54:11,960
Speaker 1: we can take one of these back and grow it

1809
01:54:12,360 --> 01:54:17,080
Speaker 1: and then become multi millionaires from you know, like selling

1810
01:54:17,240 --> 01:54:20,640
Speaker 1: purple alders. You load that in your canoe, load in

1811
01:54:20,680 --> 01:54:24,000
Speaker 1: this little this little route with a little sprout, a

1812
01:54:24,040 --> 01:54:27,320
Speaker 1: little tiny one took it back and spent hours and

1813
01:54:27,400 --> 01:54:29,880
Speaker 1: hours and hundreds of dollars trying to cultivate this thing

1814
01:54:30,040 --> 01:54:32,800
Speaker 1: and it died, so it's still out there though, in

1815
01:54:32,880 --> 01:54:35,880
Speaker 1: the middle of the alder choked hell hole. Yeah, because

1816
01:54:36,400 --> 01:54:40,320
Speaker 1: at least in Fairbanks, landscaping options are kind of limited.

1817
01:54:40,600 --> 01:54:44,560
Speaker 1: But alders grow like anything, so you could have purple

1818
01:54:44,840 --> 01:54:47,920
Speaker 1: alder bushes hedges, so you could have been like from

1819
01:54:47,960 --> 01:54:52,480
Speaker 1: the same mentality that brought as kutzo. Yeah, but there's

1820
01:54:52,520 --> 01:54:57,640
Speaker 1: already alders growing there, so yeah, you must have asked

1821
01:54:58,280 --> 01:55:05,200
Speaker 1: botanist about it. Is it a species or it's a

1822
01:55:05,720 --> 01:55:12,040
Speaker 1: um it's a weird just genetic. It's quite common and

1823
01:55:12,160 --> 01:55:17,520
Speaker 1: you know, plants have their um at variable chromosom numbers.

1824
01:55:17,560 --> 01:55:22,880
Speaker 1: Their genetics are really messy compared to mammalian genetics, and

1825
01:55:23,400 --> 01:55:26,520
Speaker 1: so apparently it's quite common to get these weird little

1826
01:55:27,200 --> 01:55:32,120
Speaker 1: anomalies like that. And um, if we ever go back there,

1827
01:55:32,520 --> 01:55:38,520
Speaker 1: did drop away point on it? Oh yeah, it'll cost

1828
01:55:38,600 --> 01:55:43,560
Speaker 1: you a lot though. All right, guys, thanks for coming down. Yeah, well,

1829
01:55:43,600 --> 01:55:49,360
Speaker 1: thank you. You guys didn't have any concluders anything we

1830
01:55:49,480 --> 01:55:53,760
Speaker 1: missed that you felt that you'd like to share with

1831
01:55:53,800 --> 01:55:56,960
Speaker 1: the world. Yeah, do like how to find your work

1832
01:55:57,040 --> 01:55:58,800
Speaker 1: and how to support your research or something. Yeah, I

1833
01:55:58,880 --> 01:56:00,920
Speaker 1: was gonna say we should it out of call. If

1834
01:56:00,960 --> 01:56:03,480
Speaker 1: there's anybody out there that would like to help fund

1835
01:56:03,760 --> 01:56:07,000
Speaker 1: this lake sediment research, you guys like to do, how

1836
01:56:07,120 --> 01:56:11,720
Speaker 1: they could help that out? Yeah, the University of Alaska

1837
01:56:11,840 --> 01:56:14,080
Speaker 1: has a very nice way to do things like that.

1838
01:56:14,320 --> 01:56:18,200
Speaker 1: You can just been my own. You can send me

1839
01:56:18,240 --> 01:56:20,600
Speaker 1: an email and then, um I'll get in touch with

1840
01:56:20,640 --> 01:56:25,080
Speaker 1: the foundation at University of Alaska. It's tax deductible your money.

1841
01:56:25,520 --> 01:56:28,680
Speaker 1: We've done this before, and money comes in, they put

1842
01:56:28,720 --> 01:56:30,920
Speaker 1: it in a special account. It can't be abused or

1843
01:56:30,960 --> 01:56:34,560
Speaker 1: stolen or anything else. We use that money for our researcher.

1844
01:56:34,640 --> 01:56:37,839
Speaker 1: We write a report to the donor and the foundation.

1845
01:56:37,960 --> 01:56:40,720
Speaker 1: People love it. And that's the Center for Arctic Biology,

1846
01:56:41,320 --> 01:56:45,080
Speaker 1: Institute of Arctic Biologstitute of Art Biology at University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

1847
01:56:45,640 --> 01:56:49,560
Speaker 1: But um, so someone could earmark that money, yeah, and

1848
01:56:49,800 --> 01:56:51,640
Speaker 1: just lock it into this is what it's going to

1849
01:56:51,680 --> 01:56:53,400
Speaker 1: be used for. It's not going to disappear into some

1850
01:56:53,600 --> 01:56:57,080
Speaker 1: overall you know, like university lawnmowering mowing fund or something.

1851
01:56:57,760 --> 01:57:00,839
Speaker 1: But I think I don't know. I hope the listeners,

1852
01:57:00,920 --> 01:57:03,600
Speaker 1: if you're out there somewhere, you realize that This isn't

1853
01:57:03,640 --> 01:57:06,520
Speaker 1: just some arcane field that we're pursuing. It actually has

1854
01:57:06,640 --> 01:57:11,520
Speaker 1: real uh implications for conservation in the future, because we

1855
01:57:12,000 --> 01:57:15,200
Speaker 1: really need to figure out what makes big animals go extinct,

1856
01:57:15,640 --> 01:57:18,120
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of big animals going extinct right now,

1857
01:57:18,160 --> 01:57:20,120
Speaker 1: and the more we can learn, the better. And so

1858
01:57:20,240 --> 01:57:22,560
Speaker 1: there's a lot of really basic research that remains to

1859
01:57:22,600 --> 01:57:25,000
Speaker 1: be done. And I think you kind of gather from

1860
01:57:25,000 --> 01:57:29,560
Speaker 1: our discussion today it reaches into archaeology and also into genetics,

1861
01:57:30,000 --> 01:57:34,200
Speaker 1: like Best Shapiro and my Tons and Dave Meltzer, the

1862
01:57:34,280 --> 01:57:38,200
Speaker 1: other archaeologists. So it's a really active field, this kind

1863
01:57:38,240 --> 01:57:42,040
Speaker 1: of interface between DNA evolution and conservation. I'm just glad

1864
01:57:42,120 --> 01:57:47,240
Speaker 1: they can't keep pointing their finger at hunters. Yeah, overkill

1865
01:57:47,480 --> 01:57:50,080
Speaker 1: is dead except on tropical islands, so you guys should

1866
01:57:50,080 --> 01:57:53,240
Speaker 1: feel relaxed about that. I got a challenge for listeners.

1867
01:57:53,480 --> 01:57:57,040
Speaker 1: Every time you're thumbing through UH I don't know, going

1868
01:57:57,120 --> 01:57:59,520
Speaker 1: through and you're find articles in Wall Street Journal, New

1869
01:57:59,600 --> 01:58:02,200
Speaker 1: York Times, Times, nat GEO dealing with something to do

1870
01:58:02,280 --> 01:58:06,120
Speaker 1: with old ass bones in Siberia or Alaska, or something

1871
01:58:06,160 --> 01:58:09,080
Speaker 1: to do with mammoths, I challenge you to read the

1872
01:58:09,240 --> 01:58:13,560
Speaker 1: article then read all the citations and not encounter the

1873
01:58:13,720 --> 01:58:20,360
Speaker 1: names Pamela Groves and Daniel Man. It's impossible. It's impossible.

1874
01:58:21,640 --> 01:58:24,680
Speaker 1: You're always in there. That's good. I didn't know that

1875
01:58:27,600 --> 01:58:30,440
Speaker 1: al right, guys, thanks for coming down, Thank you, thank you,