Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear
Speaker 1: for every hunt. First like go farther, stay longer. All right, everybody,
Speaker 1: Uh man, We're gonna get into something where this is
Speaker 1: my favorite topic of all time. And these are two.
Speaker 1: We have two guests today that I've been wanting to
Speaker 1: get on. I'm gonna when I get into why uh
Speaker 1: why you're here, You're gonna be extremely embarrassed. Okay, not no,
Speaker 1: flattered and embarrassed. That's how much? How how jealous? I
Speaker 1: am good of you? Too good? But first, your honest
Speaker 1: is here, Brody? Like, how many times have you won
Speaker 1: Media Tribune? Now, Brody? Two out of how many four?
Speaker 1: Bretty got a perfect score. Brody got a perfect score.
Speaker 1: But we realized. I realized something that there's a correlation
Speaker 1: between age and winning. See, I thought it was just
Speaker 1: reading articles, very small sample size. Steve, you can live
Speaker 1: with the head with your head in the hole and
Speaker 1: be old. No, it's over. I realized over the years
Speaker 1: you accumulate answers to things, and it's just a race
Speaker 1: to durking On and Dirk and smoked everybody. Then we
Speaker 1: know what was being on. My wife thinks it has
Speaker 1: to do with memory too, I mean bad, because it's
Speaker 1: not always good to remember everything right. You want a quick,
Speaker 1: funny Pat Dirkin story from last week? You know how
Speaker 1: those Wisconsin boys that Doug Durhan, who's a huge man
Speaker 1: rolls around with, are all large and individuals. Have you
Speaker 1: noticed that? Yeah? And they keep getting bigger as the
Speaker 1: night goes on, and by the time Keefer shows up,
Speaker 1: you think like, there can't be a bigger man in Richland,
Speaker 1: Like the largest man in Richland County is now here.
Speaker 1: And then and then his labrador gets out of the
Speaker 1: truck and it's the only lab on the planet where
Speaker 1: the truck raises the dog gets up. You're like, what
Speaker 1: is going on here? Can you imagine getting punched by Keefer?
Speaker 1: Oh my god? Or punched by Doug No, no, I
Speaker 1: think your bones would come out the other side of
Speaker 1: your skin. They Doug punched you, And you realize why
Speaker 1: they walk around like a little hunched over It's like
Speaker 1: nothing is built for them anyway. Pat Dirkin walks out
Speaker 1: into the middle of this group of gentlemen. And Pat, comparatively,
Speaker 1: he's not from Richland County. He's not from Richland County. Comparatively,
Speaker 1: he is quite small, one could say pint sized. And
Speaker 1: you know, I said, I asked Pat. I was like, Pat,
Speaker 1: what what have you not been eating? And he said,
Speaker 1: I used to march in a company of eighty men.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you right now, I'm average sized. Uh
Speaker 1: who else? Phil Karan? But then I want you guys
Speaker 1: now to introduce yourselves and I'm Gonnay're not gonna embarrass you,
Speaker 1: aren't you? Guests like talk about you, where you work,
Speaker 1: whatever however you want to do it. It's a quick intro. Okay, Um,
Speaker 1: my name is Dan Mann. I work in the University
Speaker 1: of Alaska in Fairbanks, but the Arctic Biology deal, well
Speaker 1: that's changed recently. I used to be in the geography department,
Speaker 1: which was in GA Sciences, and then last year I
Speaker 1: quit and I went to the Now I'm back in
Speaker 1: the Institute of Artic Biology. Senior senior research scientists in
Speaker 1: the Institute of Arctic Biology Pamela uh Ham Groves, and
Speaker 1: I'm also at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and I've
Speaker 1: been in the Institute of Archebiology since. Okay, now comes
Speaker 1: the part where I'll tell you how uh I met you. Guys,
Speaker 1: you probably remember this. Do you know what an individual
Speaker 1: named Mike Cons? Very well? Okay, many years ago, many
Speaker 1: years ago, I was in Mike cons field camp. I
Speaker 1: think it wasn't like by the Iva Tuck Tuck. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was in his field camp doing uh, doing some
Speaker 1: I was working on. I was working on my own
Speaker 1: research project, which involved tagging along on his one of
Speaker 1: his research projects. And we were up hunting arrowheads out
Speaker 1: of helicopters on the north slope, which is prime pickings
Speaker 1: for arrowhead hunting. You two happened to come through while
Speaker 1: I was there. You happened to pass through, Okay, and Dan,
Speaker 1: you said a sentence that I stole from you and
Speaker 1: I have used a thousand times since then. You're the
Speaker 1: one to introduced to me the term alder choked hell hole.
Speaker 1: I think it was alder haunted hell because there was
Speaker 1: also a bear haunted hell hole, and it can be
Speaker 1: a moose haunted hell hole too. No, it might have been,
Speaker 1: but I swear it was alder. You had described going
Speaker 1: through an alder choked hell hole. And you guys were
Speaker 1: coming from doing what I thought would be the greatest
Speaker 1: job of any job on the planet. You were just
Speaker 1: coming off of a river trip where you floated out
Speaker 1: like umpteen dozen miles of Arctic river for the sole
Speaker 1: purpose of finding old asked bones eroding out of the
Speaker 1: river banks. And you had found a horse skull a
Speaker 1: place the scene horse skull that you were feeling good about.
Speaker 1: I just over. So how old were you? Well, I'm
Speaker 1: forty seven now, so I must have been. This has
Speaker 1: been in like two thousand four. So you you were
Speaker 1: working for Outside magazine and did you do a story?
Speaker 1: I'm Mike and his that was a Tony Baker, remember him?
Speaker 1: He was he passed away, but he was an enthusiast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was incredible that he was like the world's expert
Speaker 1: on making certain tool types. Yeah, I think that was amazing. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm curious to know how you how you two passed
Speaker 1: through If you got there by a helicopter. Well, here's
Speaker 1: the deal with like, you'll have to explain that. But
Speaker 1: this place was so out there. Um. I think if
Speaker 1: you like look math mathematically, like what's the remotest place
Speaker 1: in North America. I think it's and you factor in
Speaker 1: I don't know what the what the hell you factor in,
Speaker 1: but like proximity to to any road populations and rolls,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like there, it's the pole of inaccessibility.
Speaker 1: And they had to take a I can't remember what
Speaker 1: aircraft they used, but I was in it. They'd put
Speaker 1: fuel drums in the back of an aircraft on parachutes,
Speaker 1: the CASA from the BLM Fire Service, okay, and they
Speaker 1: kicked the fuel drums out here and there so that
Speaker 1: the helicause the helicopter couldn't get there on a tank
Speaker 1: of gas. And so you'd be flying along in the
Speaker 1: helicopter and you'd have to land on some little knob
Speaker 1: and go down into an alder choked hellhole and roll
Speaker 1: the barrel back up because it would have rolled off
Speaker 1: a where off the landing zone. And they roll the
Speaker 1: barrel back up, uncorked the barrel, hand pump gas into
Speaker 1: a helicopter, and you passed through, I guess, because you
Speaker 1: were just coming or going and it was kind of
Speaker 1: a hub. It's like a well, there's a landing strip
Speaker 1: at Iva Tuck. So you could fly small single engine
Speaker 1: planes in there from Fairbanks and then from Iva Tuck
Speaker 1: in the BLM days. Then there'd be helicopters that would
Speaker 1: ferry us out to wherever we were going to work,
Speaker 1: and then a week or two later, whatever the time
Speaker 1: frame was, pick us up. We'd usually go back to
Speaker 1: Iva Tuck, pick up more food, and go out again.
Speaker 1: And you were you were hiking when you were doing
Speaker 1: these excursions. Most of the time canoeing. We did some hiking,
Speaker 1: but we have inflatable canoes that you could roll up
Speaker 1: and stick in the helicopter. And then that was my
Speaker 1: I was trying to envision a helicopter camp in which
Speaker 1: you were passing through how like you're showing your horse
Speaker 1: hat out the window or you come intro on a canoe.
Speaker 1: I didn't get to see the horse said, so it
Speaker 1: was a landing strip with a camp. And then we
Speaker 1: see this is we do like an aviation version of
Speaker 1: spike camping. So they got the way this this mike
Speaker 1: cons worked. I'll just explain the whole damn thing. Now.
Speaker 1: This is in the npr A, the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska,
Speaker 1: which currently is like relative to everything else, like relative
Speaker 1: to everything else on the continent is like like unexploited wilderness,
Speaker 1: but it is the petroleum reserve, and so they have,
Speaker 1: you know, the powers that be, UM have the right
Speaker 1: to exploit the the oil resources, the mineral oil resources.
Speaker 1: There should there be need for this, And there's how many,
Speaker 1: like there's like four patrolling reserves in the country, a
Speaker 1: couple of mere Ina, California. It's basically like oil in
Speaker 1: the bank for an emergency, but they can tap it
Speaker 1: for whatever reason. And I don't know what it takes
Speaker 1: to be able to tap the oil, but it generally
Speaker 1: just sits there and it's kind of like it's safe
Speaker 1: in the ground. Um should we ever have you know,
Speaker 1: world War three, we have this oil to exploit. They
Speaker 1: were looking to do some leases that but they hadn't mapped, um,
Speaker 1: they hadn't done a cultural survey of the landscape. So
Speaker 1: that was sort of why this big giant arrowhead hunt
Speaker 1: was going on, is they were out mapping cultural sites.
Speaker 1: They didn't call it a giant arrowhead hunt. They were
Speaker 1: out matching. They were out mapping cultural sites which might
Speaker 1: in the future, UM make areas that would be hands
Speaker 1: off two oil X to oil drilling stuff you'd have
Speaker 1: to work around okay, because there's like significant cultural findings there.
Speaker 1: It would basically come down to they'd get helicopters, or
Speaker 1: in our case, we had to our like our group
Speaker 1: had two helicopters that operated out of this big landing strip.
Speaker 1: Or you could also land fixed wing aircraft. But then
Speaker 1: we would spike camp using the helicopters to land in
Speaker 1: places where you couldn't land fixed wing aircraft. So you'd
Speaker 1: go into a new area, like you might go a
Speaker 1: hundred miles over yonder and set up a camp and
Speaker 1: then arrowhead hunt out of a helicopter from the spike camp.
Speaker 1: Were you looking for known cultural sites? Are looking for?
Speaker 1: You look for places where if you were camping, that's
Speaker 1: where you'd camp and you'd land there. Like let's say
Speaker 1: you got two rivers coming together and you got a
Speaker 1: big like v of land and it benches out, so
Speaker 1: like a finger wrinch coming down, it benches out. You're
Speaker 1: twenty ft above the confluence of two streams. You can
Speaker 1: see every direction you got water. There's a big flat spot.
Speaker 1: You land uphill from it or whatever on whatever place
Speaker 1: you could land. You walk down there and a lot
Speaker 1: of times you go down and be like, oh, there's
Speaker 1: a big tent ring. Oh mossed over, but you can
Speaker 1: see the rocks, and you look an exposed ground, and
Speaker 1: everywhere on the exposed ground flint chips, projectile points because
Speaker 1: no one had ever picked it over, no one ever
Speaker 1: picked it over. Everything here's you know, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: still stuff laying around here, but it's been people been
Speaker 1: picking it over since. I mean they knew as sooner
Speaker 1: got done making stone points, they started picking them up.
Speaker 1: And then in the dirty third, he's like in the
Speaker 1: dust bowl it became like a real thing to hunt arrowheads.
Speaker 1: But there it's like some dude dropped something ten years ago,
Speaker 1: just still be laying there. And kind of what prompted
Speaker 1: this area is cons had found this site called the
Speaker 1: Masa site. We're gonna get back to you guys real
Speaker 1: quick here. This maze site is this prominent mesa It
Speaker 1: sits out you get you watch it. Can you guys
Speaker 1: describe the maze site? Yeah, So what happened was, um,
Speaker 1: back in the seventies they were doing some exploratory well drilling.
Speaker 1: You gotta get Mike down here to tell you about
Speaker 1: this dude. We've been trying Oh he'd love this. He
Speaker 1: you gotta do it. Heating. He's waiting for well the
Speaker 1: pandemic to and they have to take is gonna need
Speaker 1: to call them and be like, Mike, the pandemic isn't ending.
Speaker 1: You got to take your studio the Fairbanks. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so they were doing this exploratory well dwelling drilling and
Speaker 1: they had Mike along as the archaeologist, and they were like,
Speaker 1: we need some shot rock, some fill to make road beds.
Speaker 1: So they said, look, there's a mesa over there. When
Speaker 1: you guys go check it out and tell us there's
Speaker 1: no arrowheads, and then we'll go blow it up and
Speaker 1: then we'll make a road and we'll use it all
Speaker 1: for the fill to make highways or the make you know,
Speaker 1: to the drill pad. So Mike went up there and
Speaker 1: he went, holy cow, there's like projectile points everywhere. So
Speaker 1: sad you can't blast this place. So he collected a
Speaker 1: little bag that had some charcoal and it brought it
Speaker 1: back to town and it sat on his shelf for
Speaker 1: like a decade. And then another colleague of ours, Rick Ranier, said,
Speaker 1: one day he goes, you know those stone projectile points
Speaker 1: you found from that may say, they're really strange. Why
Speaker 1: don't you let me radio carbon date that little bag
Speaker 1: of charcoal you brought back. So, yeah, they sent it
Speaker 1: in and it was like eleven thousand years old. It's
Speaker 1: like super old. And the projectile points you've talked to
Speaker 1: Meltzer already. Yeah, so they're they're very close and styled
Speaker 1: to fulsome points which are like early Paleo Indian or
Speaker 1: the kind of late Paleo Indian. Anyway, they're old from
Speaker 1: down here this area. And so suddenly they had this
Speaker 1: really significant site on the Mesa and so Rick and
Speaker 1: Mike published his paper in Science magazine, and Ted Stevens
Speaker 1: saw it in our old Senator and he said, he
Speaker 1: called him up and he invited him to Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: And he said, how much money do you guys need
Speaker 1: to continue this research? And Mike was so, what was
Speaker 1: his interest in it? It was Alaska, So he was
Speaker 1: just a tireless promoter of Alaska, called him n He
Speaker 1: didn't care fills oiler arrowheads. Well, he was interested in
Speaker 1: the native people and stuff. And so Mike, you gotta
Speaker 1: ask Mike this. But the way he's told people will
Speaker 1: come on the show, well he will Eventually Mike said,
Speaker 1: I was just so surprised that I should have said
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand dollars a year, but I just said
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty thousand, and that's what he got.
Speaker 1: And so the next ten years or something, Uncle Ted
Speaker 1: made a line item in the federal budget that Mike
Speaker 1: consit BLM and Alaska we get a hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: thousand years to do whatever he wanted with. Dude, that's
Speaker 1: classic pork barrel, right, And that's that he brought Pam
Speaker 1: and I in then because it was like, oh, we
Speaker 1: need somebody go collect bones. Oh so you guys are
Speaker 1: rolled into the MASA site deal. Yeah, we worked It
Speaker 1: wasn't good introduction. You just stumbled upon Steve so you
Speaker 1: were did you? Uh? So you worked up like talk
Speaker 1: about the Maza, like what it looks like and it's
Speaker 1: not it's not miles long. You've been there, right, Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: so it's it's a Mike again. You have talked to him.
Speaker 1: But it's a place where the Native people came eleven thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred to about ten thou years ago, and it
Speaker 1: was a hunting lookout. So you went there to kind
Speaker 1: of check out the caribou and probably the bison. And
Speaker 1: to repair your stone points, okay, because they was always breaking.
Speaker 1: Whenever you miss something or whatever, you hit a bone,
Speaker 1: you break the point. So that you picture these guys
Speaker 1: sitting up there like telling tall tales and repairing their
Speaker 1: little projectile points. Right, and they left, they'd have little horrors.
Speaker 1: So they're all these horrors. There's probably fifty different little horrors.
Speaker 1: What's that just a pole of charcoal where they had
Speaker 1: little campfires. Take a little fire and it's yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a Tennessee pronunciation of hearth. Yeah, And so I was
Speaker 1: just dragging it out. But they're all these like Steve
Speaker 1: was saying, all this, uh, debotage, all this these flakes,
Speaker 1: and then occasionally they have a broken point they couldn't
Speaker 1: repair and they just toss it. So it's an amazing
Speaker 1: but hundreds of them. Yeah, Now it turned out it
Speaker 1: was a gold mine for these things. But it has
Speaker 1: a very peculiar geology. And this is kind of interesting
Speaker 1: if you're into the geology. A lot of those other
Speaker 1: sites you visited out towards Utkok, they're on sedimentary rock
Speaker 1: and as a result, the frost action breaks up the
Speaker 1: rock and it all kind of um slushes downhill with
Speaker 1: frost action. The Mazis site is peculiar because it's on
Speaker 1: this dolar rite and its deeply fractured bedrock and so
Speaker 1: the water it doesn't frost heave basically, so that anything
Speaker 1: that was there ten thousand years ago is still there.
Speaker 1: But if you go to another kind of outcrop, like
Speaker 1: a lot of those you visited at by Uta Cook,
Speaker 1: it's long gone. It's down in the drainage somewhere. So
Speaker 1: it's just like amazing kind of coincidence of a place
Speaker 1: where ancient people used a lot because it's amazing lookout
Speaker 1: site and the geology was perfect for preservation, and this
Speaker 1: was the oldest site that had been found in Alaska
Speaker 1: at that point of well, in the northern part of
Speaker 1: Alaska when because when humans first came into North America,
Speaker 1: you know, they crossed the Baring Land Bridge and had
Speaker 1: to move through northern Alaska before they could get anywhere
Speaker 1: else on the continent. So these were the early people.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that's kind of interesting is it's
Speaker 1: of course the men that were sitting up on top
Speaker 1: looking out, and nothing has been found of like a
Speaker 1: village or an actual settlement where the women and the
Speaker 1: kids would have been, because that's down in the lower
Speaker 1: landscape that gets washed away as the river's meander and whatnot.
Speaker 1: So that's what's the maids is so special because it's
Speaker 1: such a stable spot geologically. How many yards long is that?
Speaker 1: I mean it was a couple yards on top, it's
Speaker 1: probably two yards, and it's three sides are steep cliffs
Speaker 1: and so there's only one. Remember, there's kind of a
Speaker 1: ramp that goes up outside, so it's kind of the
Speaker 1: other thing. You gotta ask Mike about this, But my
Speaker 1: theory always was that, you know, you you kill cariboo,
Speaker 1: you drag them back there, and then you're probably gonna
Speaker 1: dry the meat because I don't think they're living there
Speaker 1: during the winter. So it would be a perfect place
Speaker 1: to um prepare smoke meat and hides that are safe
Speaker 1: from the predators and the scavengers because you're up on
Speaker 1: this kind of fortress, right, so it'd be easy to
Speaker 1: keep the you know, the bears and so forth away.
Speaker 1: Did you guys find on the maze of did any
Speaker 1: bones come off that? Yeah? There was. You look at
Speaker 1: each other, now, well there was one bone fragment. They
Speaker 1: discovered really late in the excavation, and nobody knew what
Speaker 1: it was. It was just like this little piece of
Speaker 1: burnt long bone. And I'm looking at him because Mike
Speaker 1: was hoping she could figure out from the d NA
Speaker 1: what the species was. But you couldn't get DNA out
Speaker 1: of it. No. Once, maybe now somebody would have the
Speaker 1: tech analogy. This was in uh, the nineties, when the
Speaker 1: ancient DNA technology wasn't so good. And Uh, this DNA
Speaker 1: sits in a dead piece of tissue like bone at
Speaker 1: degrades over time, and especially if it's been burned, the
Speaker 1: high temperatures cause further degradation. So it's really hard to
Speaker 1: get DNA out of old samples like that. Where's that
Speaker 1: bone sitting now? I don't know. But now that you
Speaker 1: brought this up, I think we should send it to
Speaker 1: Beth and see if she can get some DNA out
Speaker 1: of it. Now she's been on the show, Best Shapiro.
Speaker 1: She talked about bison. We talked mostly about mammoths. No,
Speaker 1: we talked a bit about bison. I want to get
Speaker 1: into bison with you guys too. How to clone a mammoth? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we talked about that when we talked about that book
Speaker 1: we're trying to get her back on and apparently her
Speaker 1: husband's and Neanderthal researcher, Yeah, which I think has gone
Speaker 1: back to Neanderthal. How's it that's okay? I think it's
Speaker 1: bags being okay to see Neanderthal. I like, uh, so
Speaker 1: many of these new discoveries are new technology discovering something
Speaker 1: that's been on somebody's shelf or in somebody's drawer that
Speaker 1: was actually taken from the ground and in the seventies
Speaker 1: of the sixties, the fifties, um, and it's just like
Speaker 1: it's the ultimate horders sport, right. It was like, oh,
Speaker 1: don't throw that away. So here's the perfect example of Pam,
Speaker 1: tell them about your polar bear skull from Lonely. But Pam,
Speaker 1: before you do that, I just needed to put a
Speaker 1: button on the bone. So you don't know what You
Speaker 1: don't have a theory about what the bonus. Uh my,
Speaker 1: guess it's probably caribou, just because caribou were by far
Speaker 1: the most common and easy to hunt, and because you
Speaker 1: guys gave each other knowing glance. So I thought maybe
Speaker 1: you felt that it was like a human bone, but
Speaker 1: you didn't want to bring it up. No, And we've
Speaker 1: look for human and bones and never found any. I
Speaker 1: mean when we've collected bits and pieces of bones, we
Speaker 1: could that be human. And I've had brought some back
Speaker 1: and this could be and then it usually ends up
Speaker 1: being a caribou something because it's the size. Okay, So
Speaker 1: so do the polar bearing And I want to return
Speaker 1: later to in your wanderings, um, what would be uh like?
Speaker 1: I want to get back to the human the human
Speaker 1: bone questions. So the polar bear story, of course, starts
Speaker 1: with Mike Couns. So we were and Rick, we're near
Speaker 1: the other guy from the Mesas. So the UM four
Speaker 1: of us were up actually right on the north coast
Speaker 1: of Alaska near an Old It was a do line
Speaker 1: site lonely that distance early warning site or early radar
Speaker 1: site from the Cold War? What was the word? Do
Speaker 1: line line distance early warning to these old big radar
Speaker 1: screens and to prevent red dawn. Right, So anyways, we'd
Speaker 1: we'd land, the helicopter dropped it, the four of us
Speaker 1: off and um Dan and Rick went one way with
Speaker 1: their little handgun, and Mike and I went the other way.
Speaker 1: And Mike had a shotgun and right before we left,
Speaker 1: we said, s Mike, because normally we worked further inland
Speaker 1: and the coast. And do you ever see polar bears
Speaker 1: along this stretch? No, never this time of year. So
Speaker 1: Dan and Rick are walking along with just their little handgun,
Speaker 1: and they look on the beach and there these really
Speaker 1: fresh polar bear tracks, which are really distinctive because in
Speaker 1: polar bears you can see the hair. They have all
Speaker 1: that hair on their feet and so well the hair
Speaker 1: shows up in the track in the moll. They were
Speaker 1: so fresh, and because the tide had just gone out,
Speaker 1: so it was really obvious, and so it was kind
Speaker 1: of foggy. So they're looking around and that the helicopter
Speaker 1: disappeared in the fog, you know, so there was no
Speaker 1: way you could have waved a warning. So they're going
Speaker 1: one way and Mike and I are going the other way.
Speaker 1: And then I said to Mike, so do you ever
Speaker 1: find bones up here along the coast? And he goes nah.
Speaker 1: And so we're just walking along and I looked down
Speaker 1: and there's this bear skull and I pick it up
Speaker 1: and it's a polar bear skull and it's like in
Speaker 1: perfect condition, and so we go, oh, well, it must
Speaker 1: have been a polar bear that just died, and so
Speaker 1: we collected it and then we brought it back and
Speaker 1: had it stored in our bone collection. And then it
Speaker 1: was a couple of years later. We had some extra
Speaker 1: or Mike had extra money for radio carbon dating, which
Speaker 1: is how you can tell how old a bone is,
Speaker 1: and we decided that we wanted to put everybody round
Speaker 1: up the need this thing you can find. Well, when
Speaker 1: we decided, we'd already dated and I'm sure we'll get
Speaker 1: into this. We dated all these different herbivores caribout, mammoth, bison, horse, muscox,
Speaker 1: and so let's do a bunch of carnivores. And you
Speaker 1: don't find nearly as many carnivar bones as you do
Speaker 1: herbivores because there's you go up the trophic levels, there's
Speaker 1: fewer and fewer animals. So I said, oh, I got
Speaker 1: this polar bear skull. You know it's modern, but maybe
Speaker 1: maybe it's a hundred years old or something. So we
Speaker 1: sent in a date and it came back and it
Speaker 1: was greater than forty five hundred years, which is about
Speaker 1: the limit of radio carbon dating. So you say it's infinite.
Speaker 1: And we said, wow, that's amazing. I wonder if that's right.
Speaker 1: So we sent off two more dates to a different lab,
Speaker 1: two more samples to a different lab to get it
Speaker 1: dated as well, and both of those came back at
Speaker 1: greater than fifty thousand years. So it's like, wow, this
Speaker 1: is the way on the beach. Polar bear was just
Speaker 1: sitting just above the high tideline on the beach. And
Speaker 1: so then I started looking and no ancient polar bear
Speaker 1: skulls have ever been found. There's some there's one old
Speaker 1: polar bear bone from Svalbard, part of a jawbone, and
Speaker 1: a couple bone polar bone polar bear bone fragments from
Speaker 1: Norway that are maybe around a hundred thousand years and
Speaker 1: then there's our polar bear skull. Of course, it wasn't
Speaker 1: in any kind of stratigraphic context, so all we could
Speaker 1: say is it's older than radio carbon age. And do
Speaker 1: you think it had been moved a lot over the time. No,
Speaker 1: because it was in such good condition it couldn't have reworked.
Speaker 1: And so we actually ended up, um, we've collaborated with
Speaker 1: Beth Shapiro on a bunch of ancient DNA, And so
Speaker 1: he said to Beth Hey, we got this old polar
Speaker 1: bear skull. Are you interested? She said, of course, and
Speaker 1: so we sent her a sample. And actually last night
Speaker 1: we were just reviewing this manuscript that's um in review
Speaker 1: to be published on the DNA of this polar bear.
Speaker 1: And what all can you tell about it? Are we
Speaker 1: allowed to say anything? Come on? First off, the it's
Speaker 1: a female and um, it's named her Bruno. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: should be Brunella. But but it's in incredibly good shape
Speaker 1: so it hasn't been battered, so we think it was
Speaker 1: probably safely stored in perma frost for ninety thousand plus years.
Speaker 1: I got it. Yeah, but the basic polar bear story,
Speaker 1: you gotta get to talk about this, but you'll be
Speaker 1: really interested because it has a lot to do with
Speaker 1: Southeast Alaska and the ABC bears. So Admiralty Bear enough
Speaker 1: in Chichikov. So if you did you hear all this
Speaker 1: stuff from her about the polar bear jeans, I've heard
Speaker 1: it from other folks, but just remind us like, like, uh,
Speaker 1: polar bears seem to be closely related to brown bears
Speaker 1: from the A. B. C's and they're not. And polar
Speaker 1: bears are you know a younger species than Yeah, then
Speaker 1: brown bears, like the split went that way rather than
Speaker 1: the other way. Yeah, though it's I might be screwing
Speaker 1: us all up. Well, everybody else is confused about it too,
Speaker 1: But what seems to have happened was, um, whenever there's
Speaker 1: a warm time in the Arctic, we start losing sea ice.
Speaker 1: Like what's going on right now. So the polar bears
Speaker 1: are kind of shipped out of luck, so they tend
Speaker 1: to come on shore, and when they come on shore,
Speaker 1: they encounter brown bears, and for some reason, female brown bears,
Speaker 1: female polar bears kind of like male brown bears. So
Speaker 1: there seems to be uh, brown bear jeans go into
Speaker 1: the polar bear population via male brown bears breeding with
Speaker 1: female polar bears. So then during cold time, so picture
Speaker 1: the height of a glaciation, it's super cold. The Arctic
Speaker 1: is frozen. There's no leads, okay, So if you're hunt
Speaker 1: if you're a hyper predator like a polar bear, and
Speaker 1: you're hunting seals, you're kind of out of luck because
Speaker 1: you need a place for the seals to come up, right,
Speaker 1: So the polar bear population, you're saying the lead, you
Speaker 1: mean like cracks in the ice opening, so the polar
Speaker 1: bear populations tend to move south. So during the last
Speaker 1: glacial maximum, like twenty years ago, they were polar bears
Speaker 1: off the coast of Ireland and they were all the
Speaker 1: way down to the southeast Alaska. Oh yeah, so what
Speaker 1: we used to think happened then this was like last year.
Speaker 1: This is what we thought happened, wasn't It's amazing how
Speaker 1: how quickly ship about a long time ago changes. So
Speaker 1: when the glaciers started the retreat about eighteen thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: polar bears got stranded in southeast Alaska, Okay, So you
Speaker 1: picture the sea ice is retreating back across the gulf
Speaker 1: and then up the bearing straight. So you got these
Speaker 1: poor polar and they're like stranded on these islands. And
Speaker 1: then what we think happened that we thought last year,
Speaker 1: what happened. Brown bears invaded from like Yellowstone and down
Speaker 1: here southeat the ice sheet, and they came in and
Speaker 1: they met these beautiful female polar bears and they made it.
Speaker 1: And then we had polar bear mitochondrial DNA, because that's
Speaker 1: inherited from the females, is now in the DNA of
Speaker 1: these brown bears around you know on Prince of Wales
Speaker 1: Island and so forth. Okay, so, um, there's this inner breeding,
Speaker 1: but it turns out from the old fall Bard mandible
Speaker 1: that pay mentioned in this from Bruno, this new bear
Speaker 1: it's much more complicated, and there's been multiple hybridizations between
Speaker 1: these two bear species and that's continuing today, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: the today it's kind of confusing because the you know,
Speaker 1: you read about like in Churchill where there's brown bears
Speaker 1: and polar bears are mating, but apparently there's only one
Speaker 1: female polar bear that's actually produced fertile offspring from those crosses.
Speaker 1: She's had like eight cubs. She's had eight cross cubs
Speaker 1: that they were all sexually viable. Well supposedly, yeah, but
Speaker 1: I mean he really knows because they're all wondering around everywhere.
Speaker 1: But so, yeah, which is where the name groller bear
Speaker 1: comes from. It's only groller right because oh yeah right,
Speaker 1: people screwing it up. But what's the larger thing is
Speaker 1: interesting though, is that you know, we used to think
Speaker 1: that species were just like unique, right and like to
Speaker 1: be like a black bear and um, a polar bear
Speaker 1: and a brown bear. But that's not true at all.
Speaker 1: That we're finding more and more species, and bears are
Speaker 1: not alone in this. Ravens are another group That's this
Speaker 1: is becoming more more and more apparent. Is the species
Speaker 1: aren't like ice later little islands. There's often a lot
Speaker 1: of hybridization going on and this has been really important
Speaker 1: in their evolution. And if you want to be hopeful
Speaker 1: about something in a time like this, where the climate
Speaker 1: is changing really rapidly and we have all these ecosystems
Speaker 1: moving around, this is the perfect time for that. So
Speaker 1: in some ways we see a lot of extinction, but
Speaker 1: we also see a lot of new things happening evolutionarily. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we were just talking about mule deer moving into Alaska. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so maybe it will get mule deer and caribou Hybrid'll
Speaker 1: think of a good name for a mule deer caribou
Speaker 1: hybrid as you're sitting there, mulebo. Hey, before we move on,
Speaker 1: I have a question. One more question about the mazis
Speaker 1: that you were saying that they were often sitting up
Speaker 1: there repairing their points. How do you know they were
Speaker 1: repairing and not just making new ones? Um again, this
Speaker 1: you gotta talk to the archaeologist, but he won't come
Speaker 1: on the show. Well, you just gotta go to him
Speaker 1: because around these little horrors, okay, they're all these broken points. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we know that they were once mounted. They had
Speaker 1: these little fore shafts. We're talking about not bows and arrows.
Speaker 1: We're talking about spear throwers here. So you had a
Speaker 1: little foreshaft that went on a longer thing and have
Speaker 1: feathers on the end, and then you're throwing it with
Speaker 1: an out laddle. So they often break, and so little horrors,
Speaker 1: broken points, and then a lot of flakes from making
Speaker 1: new points of repairing the old ones. And it's really funny.
Speaker 1: If you look at some of the Mason points or
Speaker 1: fulsome points, you'll see that they have a beautiful bass
Speaker 1: and they go up and then they had the shoulder
Speaker 1: and the shoulders where the point broke, and then the
Speaker 1: guys were like, oh, hell, I could fix this, and
Speaker 1: they just sharpen it up again. At the time that
Speaker 1: I was up at the Mason site, I do want
Speaker 1: to move away from archaeology and get into you guys,
Speaker 1: especially which is paleontology, right, But the last arc alogy
Speaker 1: point here when I was up there, the enthusiasm around
Speaker 1: the site was that there was a lot of people
Speaker 1: talking about in that community, people talking about like pre Clovis.
Speaker 1: So at that time, for for for many decades, I
Speaker 1: think it was held that like Clovis was this initial
Speaker 1: human culture. And then uh, there was this theory that
Speaker 1: there had to have been like Clovis had to have
Speaker 1: arisen from something, right, there had been a culture that
Speaker 1: created Clovis. So people were excited about that. And if
Speaker 1: I remember right back then, a possible explanation for the
Speaker 1: Masas site was that these people that that were occupying
Speaker 1: that site and hunting there had possibly hadn't come like
Speaker 1: their direct ancestors and in a few generations hadn't arrived
Speaker 1: from Siberia, but had maybe back filled they had been.
Speaker 1: They were coming from the south and sort of recolonizing
Speaker 1: the north which their very distant ancestors might have passed through.
Speaker 1: Is that still a fashionable notion or don't you track
Speaker 1: the changing theories that much? You know what what melts
Speaker 1: you say? I can't remember. I asked him about it too,
Speaker 1: Do you remember what melts you said about that? Joan
Speaker 1: and Yanni got to hold those fulsome schools when we
Speaker 1: when we visited Meltzer, Dan and Meltzer were in grad
Speaker 1: school together. So you guys still friends, are you like rivals?
Speaker 1: I'm not an archaeologist. Yeah, I've worked with David the
Speaker 1: Fulsome site. Oh you did the Fulsom site. Well, I
Speaker 1: was doing the geomorph around the Wholesome site. Oh man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a great place. Steve, he's like, he's like Forrest
Speaker 1: Gump archaeology. I've never been in the full Som site.
Speaker 1: You gotta go there because it's an amazing, amazing place.
Speaker 1: But um, yeah, so that's just the backwash hypothesis is
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. It doesn't like this, so that's
Speaker 1: why we're hesitating. Tony Baker was big into it, was he?
Speaker 1: But he was he was an enthusiast. Yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of people are big into it because it's looking now.
Speaker 1: And you guys know this from talking to day Meltzer.
Speaker 1: Is it um first um dispersal the humans into the
Speaker 1: New World was probably along the Northwest coast, so probably
Speaker 1: down to southeast Alaska, and so then Clovis took off,
Speaker 1: probably as people broken from the coast into the interior
Speaker 1: kind of habitats and bison by that time would have
Speaker 1: ranged all the way up through the ice free Corridor
Speaker 1: up into the Yukon and onto the north slope, and
Speaker 1: so it would have been you know, probably good hunting.
Speaker 1: So they could well have spread back to the north.
Speaker 1: And that's why Mason Points look so much like Falsome
Speaker 1: Points is because they originated from the lower forty eight.
Speaker 1: Those people. But you're you're like on the edge of
Speaker 1: there's still a lot of archaeological controversy about this. Shouldn't
Speaker 1: listen to us. Yeah, we're not archaeologists. Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna swing us into paleontology. But watch watch all
Speaker 1: smoothly I do it. Okay, okay, Uh those fellers sitting
Speaker 1: on top of the Maza site, what are they? What
Speaker 1: were they seeing? You put in a good four day
Speaker 1: hunt on the Maza site, like what walks past? And
Speaker 1: had they been there a thousand years earlier, would it
Speaker 1: have looked way different in terms of what would have
Speaker 1: walked past? Um, it could have. The thing is you
Speaker 1: probably could have sat there for a couple of days
Speaker 1: and not seeing anything walk past. That's one thing that
Speaker 1: people familiar with exchanged people think Alaska is you know,
Speaker 1: this wilderness just crawling with animals and even back then
Speaker 1: that there were all these mega fauna we call them
Speaker 1: the large animals. Still they were dispersed over a huge
Speaker 1: area and the caring capacity of the land probably wasn't
Speaker 1: all that huge, so um, that's why it was important
Speaker 1: to have a strategic lookout. And since there's no trees,
Speaker 1: you could see a long way, so especially if it
Speaker 1: happened to be a mammoth, you could probably spot it
Speaker 1: way off in the distance. And so like, these animals
Speaker 1: aren't like they're not living in a valley, like they're
Speaker 1: constantly traveling as like for their food needs or reproduction
Speaker 1: or migration or it's it's not clear how far they
Speaker 1: would have traveled. Basically, an animal wants to travel as
Speaker 1: little as possible because moving uses up energy and it
Speaker 1: just depends on what food resources are available to you.
Speaker 1: But they probably had some seasonal movements between winter and
Speaker 1: summer feeding grounds. And just like caribos, most caribou populations
Speaker 1: in the north are migratory and some of them travel
Speaker 1: a thousand kilometers, some of them travel fifty kilometers, so
Speaker 1: it really depends on their habitat. But that said that
Speaker 1: the herbivores that could have been seen from the masa
Speaker 1: site would have included caribou and musk oxen and which
Speaker 1: still exists on the north slope today. And then there
Speaker 1: also could have been mammoths, bison, and horses. And then
Speaker 1: if they had really sharp eyes, they could have also
Speaker 1: seen bears, wolves, And there were lions running around up there,
Speaker 1: and not a lot of them, but they could have
Speaker 1: seen those animals. What was the lion like big, a
Speaker 1: little like a mountain, like an African lion, a little
Speaker 1: bit bigger than any living lion um And their thought
Speaker 1: because of the lack of a maine, and we know
Speaker 1: the lack of a man from the cave paintings in Europe,
Speaker 1: that they were probably not living in prides. They were
Speaker 1: probably much smaller social groups, because that's what the main
Speaker 1: is for as the boss around other big lions. So,
Speaker 1: but one of the interesting things we found with our
Speaker 1: bone collections on our slope is that the horses are
Speaker 1: the main um large animal as the numerous really like
Speaker 1: they would outnumber caribou back then. Probably yeah, how many
Speaker 1: kinds of horses? Just one? Okay, in the late part
Speaker 1: of the ice age they were more earlier. But what
Speaker 1: did it look like? It looked kind of like, um,
Speaker 1: you ever seen pictures of the little ponies from yakutsk,
Speaker 1: Okay and they have this incredibly long hair I know
Speaker 1: what only my daughter has, like a like an encyclopedia
Speaker 1: of horses. Yeah, okay, so the picture a kind of
Speaker 1: a large, fat Sutland pony with really really long, real sturdy,
Speaker 1: very sturdy, and these little tiny holes like you know,
Speaker 1: like this big which immediately tells you something about the landscape, right,
Speaker 1: because they wouldn't have all that tussocks and pete up there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: big feet, you would think you would associate larger feet
Speaker 1: would always be the preferable foot for anything to do
Speaker 1: with Alaska. Yeah, we can talk about that when we
Speaker 1: talk about why they're not there anymore. But the thing
Speaker 1: about um that Dan started to allude to is the
Speaker 1: horses and lions. When we compiled this huge collection of
Speaker 1: all these bones, the lion bones that we had dated
Speaker 1: track and number the horse bones. So our theory is
Speaker 1: is that lions specialized in hunting horses. Horses went down,
Speaker 1: lion numbers went down. Yeah, And and that would make sense,
Speaker 1: especially if they were solitary or small groups like a
Speaker 1: horse would be much easier prey than say a mammoth
Speaker 1: or even a bison with horns. And it appears that
Speaker 1: there were lots of horses, so it would have been
Speaker 1: easier to find a horse to munch on if you
Speaker 1: were a lion. Can you, guys, explain a little bit
Speaker 1: about you elude your bone collection? Explain a little bit
Speaker 1: about how you built up a bone collection. The first
Speaker 1: thing that we should say is, uh, collecting these bones.
Speaker 1: It was all on federal property and we did it
Speaker 1: either while we were working for the Bureau of Land
Speaker 1: Management or when we had a permit from the Bureau
Speaker 1: of Land Management to collect these bones. And all the
Speaker 1: bones are in the University of Alaska Museum or Sciences. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your chel we don't have our walls adorned with skulls
Speaker 1: and tusks. It's all federal property and it's all Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a database you can access online and all the
Speaker 1: bones are listed in there. And you're probably and I'm guessing,
Speaker 1: very meticulous about where it came from. What was the context? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have all that information on my computer. But um, yeah,
Speaker 1: So so that's the first thing that we collected these bones,
Speaker 1: and it's it's a federal crime to go onto federal
Speaker 1: property and collect archaeological or paleontological specimens. You can end
Speaker 1: up in jail or with a big fine. That's if
Speaker 1: it's fossilized. Right. Well, no, it doesn't have to be
Speaker 1: fossilized because many of these bones that we find they've
Speaker 1: been stored in a deep freezer in the Arctic for
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands. But you can pick up a shed
Speaker 1: antler from a caribou, right, But if you found a
Speaker 1: mammoth bone, that would be regarded as paleontological, even if
Speaker 1: it was just came out of tundra and was looked
Speaker 1: like a fresh bone, even if it had meat on it,
Speaker 1: it's still so um. Yeah, the key thing is the
Speaker 1: paleontological aspect, in other words, how old the thing is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's been a couple of incidents where professional like
Speaker 1: river guides have the story. Yeah, okay, so we don't
Speaker 1: need to go into that. So but if you could
Speaker 1: tell the story, I would love. I never knew enough
Speaker 1: detail to tell the story. Can I tell you a
Speaker 1: version I've heard? Is that uncomfortable? Sure? You want to
Speaker 1: put this on your podcast? Well know what kind of Okay? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know this lady? Huh no, no, But let me
Speaker 1: tell you a version I heard. I heard that there
Speaker 1: was a gentleman in the lower forty eight who had
Speaker 1: a living room display. Am I right, had a living
Speaker 1: room display of a nice man with tusk and someone
Speaker 1: got to wonder and how the hell did he get
Speaker 1: a man with tusk? And that led to a UM investigation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The story I heard was somehow a photograph got on
Speaker 1: a website and it was like, come on my river
Speaker 1: guided tour and you might be able to find things
Speaker 1: like this. And then there was some photograph floating around
Speaker 1: of the guy's living room. So that was how the
Speaker 1: two were connected. But it's so ironic, like if you
Speaker 1: still remember going to this uh uh pilot's house and
Speaker 1: Kotsubue once and you know, I was like, hey, do
Speaker 1: you ever spind any bones? And he goes, come on in,
Speaker 1: I'll show you. And the guy had this incredible collection
Speaker 1: of mainly bison but also um bear and mammoth, and
Speaker 1: I was like, what are you gonna do with this?
Speaker 1: And he goes, don't tell anybody I have it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of this stuff floating around. It
Speaker 1: is legal if it is from your your mining claim
Speaker 1: is it is it all? Isn't there also something where
Speaker 1: Native Alaskans are allowed to take those things and keep
Speaker 1: them or am I am I wrong? But I think
Speaker 1: if it's on their private property, so it's like their
Speaker 1: own allotment or their corporation tribal lands, Yeah, than it is.
Speaker 1: But anyway, it's it's a sensitive thing, and you know,
Speaker 1: you really got to be careful because there's what shocked
Speaker 1: me about this river Guide incident. Was it Bureau of
Speaker 1: Land Management, Department of Interior actually has a task force
Speaker 1: whose job it is to investigate these things and go
Speaker 1: after people. And it was like, holy, they have undercover
Speaker 1: agents and yeah, it's it's like I think, scaring online
Speaker 1: sales and stuff of Yeah, I think it'd be important
Speaker 1: to talk about why we have these laws. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: the most, probably the strongest emotions about this come from
Speaker 1: the archaeologist, because they go, do not pick up an arrowly.
Speaker 1: I've gotten I've gotten a huge trouble just picking up something.
Speaker 1: You look at this saying where do you get that?
Speaker 1: Put that down because you're you're taking it out of context.
Speaker 1: And so therefore they go out and they're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out something about some archaeological site you've you've been
Speaker 1: messing with the day and be like if someone messed
Speaker 1: up a crime scene almost, yeah, exactly. That's a really
Speaker 1: good analogy. So the same with these bones. You know,
Speaker 1: you a bone that's out of context that you don't know,
Speaker 1: somebody's uncle found it, you know, like who knows where,
Speaker 1: and it's it's pretty much useless scientifically, and it's just
Speaker 1: gonna sit in somebody's you know, coffee table and decay
Speaker 1: and then they'll somebody will throw it away, so it's
Speaker 1: it's like gone. So the best thing is if you
Speaker 1: ever run across one of these things, even like an
Speaker 1: arrowa just take a photograph of it and then I
Speaker 1: call up your friendly archaeologists and say, hey, I found
Speaker 1: this amazing point and it's going to change our ore
Speaker 1: the history of the world. I think it's pretty interesting
Speaker 1: that at some point in our recent past, we you know,
Speaker 1: thought to think that far ahead, that hey, this stuff
Speaker 1: is so important that we should make like federal rules
Speaker 1: and laws, you know, to protect it. Like it seems
Speaker 1: like a lot of foresight for I don't know, sometimes
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem like we have that. Yeah, because you know,
Speaker 1: there are all those museums that have human archaeological remains,
Speaker 1: and now they're busy repatriating remains to the uh oh yeah,
Speaker 1: digging people's graveyards. Hundred fifty years ago, people just ransacked
Speaker 1: archaeological sites. And you know, I was reading a thing
Speaker 1: recently about the there was a thing in the Atlantic
Speaker 1: about um people working on the coastal passage of early
Speaker 1: humans and they were talking about remember when we went
Speaker 1: spear fishing with Greg and Alex the Channel Islands. They're
Speaker 1: talking about in the Native people's on the Channel Islands,
Speaker 1: them remembering people digging they're grave the graveyards of their ancestors.
Speaker 1: They remember archaeologists digging those graveyards, complaining about the stench
Speaker 1: of rotting carcasses. Wow, digging active. Yeah, And what it
Speaker 1: got into was it got into a uh why there's
Speaker 1: a great reluctance on the part of some Native people
Speaker 1: to participate and the archaeological process like a star in
Speaker 1: their mind is like like like literally the bones of
Speaker 1: their grandfather's being hauled off. Yeah, like literally the bones
Speaker 1: of their grandfather's being dug up by archaeologists and haul
Speaker 1: the way to a museum. So back to how you
Speaker 1: make a bone collection. So yeah, so you ca you
Speaker 1: covered your ass. It's a legit bone collection and it's
Speaker 1: not into your living room. So we fly into a
Speaker 1: place like I've a tuck and then put all our
Speaker 1: stuff on helicopter and get flown out and we say, oh,
Speaker 1: that looks good and the helicopter what is all your stuff?
Speaker 1: So if it's just the two of us, we have
Speaker 1: one inflatable canoe. We have a sleeping tent and a
Speaker 1: cook tent um some years we carry it an electric
Speaker 1: fence for bears and then you know, just a little
Speaker 1: camp stove and food freeze dry food. No, you're not
Speaker 1: an actual food. You pack food, do a little fishing
Speaker 1: on the way when you're floating. Occasionally we don't because
Speaker 1: of the bears, just you know, just complicates things. But
Speaker 1: we usually eat until Dan couldn't eat couscouse anymore, couscous
Speaker 1: polenta rice. So we're usually happy for three weeks or so.
Speaker 1: So three week river trips. Yeah, so that I mean
Speaker 1: it's actually kind of boring. You you float along and
Speaker 1: then she says, oh, there's a good gravel bar, So
Speaker 1: she gets off and she walks the gravel bar and
Speaker 1: I peddled the canoe up wind to the other end
Speaker 1: of the gravel bar and pick her up. And then
Speaker 1: she usually shows up with a bunch of bone fragments
Speaker 1: and we lay them down the sand and we look
Speaker 1: through them and go, well, that's interesting, that's not interesting.
Speaker 1: That's well preserved, that's not well preserved. And if they're
Speaker 1: not if they're not collectible, we just thrown back in
Speaker 1: the river, so they never leave the place where they were. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we we rarely. I mean we probably collect like
Speaker 1: one percent of the bones that we actually encounter on
Speaker 1: a good day. How many bones do you find doing
Speaker 1: a trip like that, Oh, on a really good day. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because there's a sort of assorting process that
Speaker 1: the river does with bones, and so there are certain
Speaker 1: places and gravel bars that kind of accumulate bones. And
Speaker 1: so you could on one gravel bar fine like maybe
Speaker 1: five t b o s or humorous or femurs from
Speaker 1: different species. Um. But on a really good day, I
Speaker 1: would guess we might end up collecting fifty bones. And
Speaker 1: most most commonly you'd find longbones like the leg and
Speaker 1: armbones and footbones. And then of course a mammoth bone
Speaker 1: is a lot more significant than a little caribou bone um.
Speaker 1: And then skulls are pretty exciting when you find skulls.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a lot of mammoths are big animals, right,
Speaker 1: so they're bones just blow up sort of. So there's
Speaker 1: a lot of mammoth material, and tusk are big and
Speaker 1: they're well preserved. But we never collect husk anymore, you
Speaker 1: don't know. So if you find a tusk, you kind
Speaker 1: of go, that's cool, and you put it back in
Speaker 1: the river, just leave it land. Do you throw it
Speaker 1: out in a deep hole or do you just leave
Speaker 1: it lane where you found it. Usually put it back
Speaker 1: in the water because it's easier on him and they'll
Speaker 1: get reburied that way. But the st just I've told
Speaker 1: his story hunter times. But when I was doing that
Speaker 1: stuff with cons and they'd find those sweet spear points
Speaker 1: and then uh, photograph them drawn, they showed me how
Speaker 1: they draw them. They sketch them, photograph and then just
Speaker 1: stick them right back in the moss. Man. It was
Speaker 1: like it took every like to walk away, like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna sneak back here in the dark, but it never
Speaker 1: got dark. We have collected some big tusks, and yeah,
Speaker 1: one of the tuts we collected. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you saw this article that Matt Willer was the first
Speaker 1: author on that came out and just recently. Yeah, oh yeah, no,
Speaker 1: we're hot on that wondering mammoth thing. Yeah, so this
Speaker 1: was a tusk that we found. Have you guys found
Speaker 1: that tusk? Yeah? So this is another Mike kun story.
Speaker 1: So Mike said, he said, well, you guys go out
Speaker 1: and to the eastern part of the dune field, which
Speaker 1: is kind of the northern part of the n p
Speaker 1: r A. So we were flying around and we saw
Speaker 1: this gigantic mammoth tusk. Home at backup you're bone hunting
Speaker 1: from the air, or you're flying to a river to
Speaker 1: float it. Well, we were kind of doing both, but
Speaker 1: it's a land it's so pactful of good stuff. You
Speaker 1: can just fly over and pick it out with the
Speaker 1: naked The tusk was so big that you could see
Speaker 1: it from the helicopter at about five feet. So we
Speaker 1: land and it's what is it doing. It's just sitting
Speaker 1: on the side of the river. So we're like looking
Speaker 1: at this thing that, No, this is not worth anything.
Speaker 1: It's a bold tusk. So it's a huge diameter. It's
Speaker 1: probably eight feet along the arc, but it's all just
Speaker 1: laying out, just laying there. Would you say it's not
Speaker 1: worth any thing? Already? It was like a beam of
Speaker 1: sunlight shining through. Do you gather that it's worth a
Speaker 1: lot to the folks in this room? There is a
Speaker 1: lot of interest here. Yeah, So what we told Mike
Speaker 1: can He goes, well, what was your question? I couldn't
Speaker 1: you were being facetious? Are serious that you just you're
Speaker 1: seeing like that something like this? And you go it
Speaker 1: wasn't well enough preserved. But wait, we're gonna get to
Speaker 1: what happens when you find it really well preserved one.
Speaker 1: So we go back and Mike goes, well, I want
Speaker 1: to see this thing. So it comes out with a shovel,
Speaker 1: and sure enough he finds the pair because the other one,
Speaker 1: So then we have this was the other one. It
Speaker 1: was in the creek. It was like right there because
Speaker 1: they're really big, so the creek is not able to
Speaker 1: move it very far. So we have these these folks,
Speaker 1: these ridiculous photographs of Mike posing with these two enormous
Speaker 1: mammoth tests. I think he used it for his Christmas
Speaker 1: card or something that way, Like I said that, we
Speaker 1: brought this bathroom scale out there with us. The way
Speaker 1: they were like a hundred and four he pounds. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine this bull mammoth is carrying this weight. Okay,
Speaker 1: So we're there and it's like, I'm like, this is
Speaker 1: a total waste of time, you know. So we started
Speaker 1: looking around and we find another tusk and it's sticking
Speaker 1: out of the gravel. So um. We started digging around
Speaker 1: and we would come up with the skull. Two beautiful
Speaker 1: tusks there, exquisitely preserved. Also a bull, so the really
Speaker 1: big diameter at the base but not so long. They
Speaker 1: must have died in a fight. Well, this was a
Speaker 1: little bit up stream. So we brought this back of
Speaker 1: radio carbent dated it and it was very young, relatively young.
Speaker 1: It was like eighteen nineteen thousand, and that's the one.
Speaker 1: It was so well preserved that we decided to section
Speaker 1: that one and do the um the annual growth ring. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tell the whole damn story now. But they fit to
Speaker 1: go to like ice cream cones and all that stuff. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: so hey, he said it so that the tust grow
Speaker 1: kind of in a con cold it's like a stack
Speaker 1: of ice cream cones, okay, And so by the hardest
Speaker 1: thing about this whole analysis was we have this machinist friend,
Speaker 1: and it was how are we going to cut this
Speaker 1: thing down the axis? And it's it's cut this kind
Speaker 1: of slow helical bend to it. So that that took
Speaker 1: us eight took eight people eight hours with the band
Speaker 1: saw to cut the thing, and it was it was
Speaker 1: incredibly complicated, but we ended up section it in two
Speaker 1: and hopefully one half is going to show up in
Speaker 1: the museum at some point. And so then you could
Speaker 1: see the little growth rings and you have to sand
Speaker 1: it way down. Yeah, So then it's polished and then
Speaker 1: it can be analyzed for these and once it's polished,
Speaker 1: you can see the growth rings. Yeah. So then from
Speaker 1: that it was apparent the thing was about what thirty
Speaker 1: five years old or so he wasn't very old young
Speaker 1: what was their lifespan, assuming they you know, hauled Ukraine? Yeah,
Speaker 1: if they reached it's not it's like elephants, yeah, somewhere
Speaker 1: like that. So he wasn't old at old, he was
Speaker 1: kind of middle aged crime yeah, and he's a middle
Speaker 1: age at thirty five. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, So when Matt
Speaker 1: Wilder did the strontium isotopes and the nitrogen isotopes on
Speaker 1: this thing. He put together the scheme where he could
Speaker 1: track what you gotta explain that, but how he went
Speaker 1: around gathering up all those rodent teeth and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's there's actually more to it than that, because
Speaker 1: there was a there was a grad student before who
Speaker 1: started this thing working on salmon because you can trace
Speaker 1: where the salmon are coming from from the strontium in
Speaker 1: the the water from their streams stable is tope and
Speaker 1: it um. It's the same as true of carbon, and
Speaker 1: that's what radio carbon dating is based on, these stable
Speaker 1: isotopes that can break down over time. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: so Alaska has this really diverse geology and it it
Speaker 1: varies in the amount of the strontium, this rare earth element.
Speaker 1: So by looking at the amount of strontium in different
Speaker 1: years of the mammoth tust he was able to figure out, well,
Speaker 1: where did that mammoth probably lived during that year of
Speaker 1: his life? And and if you looked at like a
Speaker 1: mouse that has a very small home range, it would
Speaker 1: just an all consistent strong teum value because he wasn't
Speaker 1: ranging across different zones with different strong levels exactly. So
Speaker 1: from that um they were able to put together where
Speaker 1: this animal probably ranged. And we think it probably was
Speaker 1: born somewhere down kind of on the lower Yukon and
Speaker 1: then wandered around up past Fairbanks and then later in
Speaker 1: life came back across up the Coya Cock when across
Speaker 1: the bricks range, ended up on the north slope where
Speaker 1: we found it. And the interesting thing from the nitrogen isotopes, um,
Speaker 1: it looks like the thing probably starved the death, because
Speaker 1: when you begin to starve to death, you begin to
Speaker 1: break down your muscles and they have a characteristic um
Speaker 1: nitrogen isotope ratio, so you're like eating yourself. And so
Speaker 1: we think the things starved the death. And your question is, well,
Speaker 1: why would a thirty five year old middle age bull
Speaker 1: mammoth starved the death? I don't know why the animals die.
Speaker 1: But we never found any of his leg bones. We
Speaker 1: dug and doug we never found any, so we don't know.
Speaker 1: So we didn't find the rest of his skeleton to
Speaker 1: know if see if he had any injuries that were
Speaker 1: obvious or anything. Yeah, you can see why a leglass
Speaker 1: mammoth wouldn't live. I can jump to out that might
Speaker 1: be a paper for you. Obviously he had no legs.
Speaker 1: Do you guys ever find stuff that, um, there's a
Speaker 1: concern for preservation, like it's gonna like somehow deteriorate if
Speaker 1: you don't get it like handled or treated in some way. Well,
Speaker 1: we have, um occasionally found places seen arabone still with
Speaker 1: soft tissue. And Bison Bob, the skeleton we found had
Speaker 1: a lot of soft tissue and so obviously that has
Speaker 1: to be frozen or it would just run away. Tell
Speaker 1: the story of Bison Bob. But like what you were
Speaker 1: doing when we found Bison Bob, we were paddling down
Speaker 1: the river. We had actually just paddled through a hailstorm
Speaker 1: and we had a favorite campsite a little bit downriver,
Speaker 1: so we were looking forward to getting to our campsite.
Speaker 1: So you've been on one river enough to it you'll
Speaker 1: do one river more than once. Oh, we've been doing
Speaker 1: them for twenty years, so every bend has a name
Speaker 1: and we have our favor Why are you doing the
Speaker 1: same rivers over and over again? There's a couple of things.
Speaker 1: First of all, there are not many rivers that have
Speaker 1: the right characteristics to preserve bone it has to be
Speaker 1: a fairly slow river with um and fine settlements. If
Speaker 1: it's a bouldery river that's really fast. Any bones that
Speaker 1: get incorporated in the river get broken up. And also
Speaker 1: and going to the same places over and over again
Speaker 1: for twenty years, you really get to know and understand
Speaker 1: the system in a way that you can't if you
Speaker 1: just bop in a couple of times over a space
Speaker 1: of a few years. Since to me, that's one of
Speaker 1: the really important lessons of this research we've been doing,
Speaker 1: is having these long term data sets and really getting
Speaker 1: to know the area. To me, it's really helped us
Speaker 1: understand how the system functions and be able to better
Speaker 1: put together the information we put in papers about how
Speaker 1: the animals lived. So anyways, what was the first time
Speaker 1: you go down the river? Is it way better pickings
Speaker 1: than the second time? Stuff? Con Every year is different,
Speaker 1: and that's when people say, don't you get bored? And
Speaker 1: you never get bored because every year is different, and
Speaker 1: it might be related to how much of a spring
Speaker 1: flood there was, or you know, if some bank got
Speaker 1: cut away and so, and how high the river is,
Speaker 1: how clear the water is. Um one year, it seemed
Speaker 1: like we drug our canoe almost the whole way because
Speaker 1: the water was so low, but it was really clear,
Speaker 1: and so we were finding bones in the bottom of
Speaker 1: the river channel that we never would have seen. And
Speaker 1: you'd floated over a bunch of times. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: every year it's like a clean slate and you ever
Speaker 1: got to get in, get into your swimsuit and go
Speaker 1: down there and swim down and grab something. Well, not
Speaker 1: a swimsuit, but I sent a picture somewhere of Dan
Speaker 1: and a dry suit with flippers and a mask. And
Speaker 1: my niece was with us and she had a wetsuit
Speaker 1: and they did try snorkeling to look in the bottom
Speaker 1: of the river. But um, my niece when she came
Speaker 1: up with us often would just walk in the river
Speaker 1: and find stuff or you feel stuff with your feet,
Speaker 1: so so that that snorkel trick didn't work good for you.
Speaker 1: Uh no, it didn't work well at all. Visibility, let's
Speaker 1: just leave it down. It's a great photo. Was it
Speaker 1: a personal comfort thing or a visibility thing? Both? Actually,
Speaker 1: the river is really cold, So after about an hour
Speaker 1: of flopping around in there and then you know, it's
Speaker 1: little things like you know when you have flippers and
Speaker 1: you gotta walk backwards to get out, and then you
Speaker 1: fall over and everybody's laughing at you, and you just try.
Speaker 1: Suit has big bubbles of air and so you kind
Speaker 1: of look like a hunchback of Notre Dame and you
Speaker 1: can't dive down. Yeah, it just goes on and on.
Speaker 1: So that's not recommended now, even though you and I
Speaker 1: understand going back to the same place twenty years in
Speaker 1: a row. And I feel like the same way about
Speaker 1: certain places I like to go hunting, you know, and
Speaker 1: just the intimacity you gain over and over and over.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, we all pour over maps
Speaker 1: all the time looking for like the next great spot.
Speaker 1: So do you do that also and kind of look
Speaker 1: at the great certain rivers and go, man, that one
Speaker 1: could be the honey hoole. And that was the advantage
Speaker 1: of working with Mike and BLM is having the helicopter.
Speaker 1: And that's like when we on the Wandering Mammoth, we
Speaker 1: had the opportunity to fly around to different places, and
Speaker 1: so over the course of the decades we did check
Speaker 1: out a lot of other places. But unless you have
Speaker 1: a helicopter, most of those places you just can't get there.
Speaker 1: Mike's annual budget for those helicopters. When you were there,
Speaker 1: it was over a million dollars a year. There were
Speaker 1: some summers we had three aircraft and so we could
Speaker 1: literally just look at a map like you were suggesting,
Speaker 1: and just go, hey, we want to go check out
Speaker 1: this river, and he should sure go And it would
Speaker 1: be like, I don't know, twenty grand. We'd blow in
Speaker 1: an afternoon flying around and sometimes it panned out and
Speaker 1: sometimes it didn't. Now we're really hobbled because now it
Speaker 1: cost us if we drive the cold Foot Okay, at
Speaker 1: the southern edge of the Bricks Ranage, it cost us
Speaker 1: ten dollars to charter a beaver for a drop off
Speaker 1: and a pick up. So that means we only get
Speaker 1: one river, and we only have one reach of that
Speaker 1: river that we can float where in the old days
Speaker 1: when Mike before Mike retired and he was the Emperor
Speaker 1: of the Arctic, and that we could get like ten
Speaker 1: times more done, you know, in a little field season.
Speaker 1: So Bob the bison, hailstorm, So hailstorm. We're paddling. We're
Speaker 1: hoping to get to Cottonwood Bluff campsite, and but as
Speaker 1: we paddle, we're always looking and there's something up there
Speaker 1: on the river bank, and then we're we always try
Speaker 1: and guess ahead what it is. It's a bison, No,
Speaker 1: it's a muskox. And so we got to it and
Speaker 1: it was bison skull kind of partially buried right at
Speaker 1: the river level, upside down, and we could see one
Speaker 1: horn and part of a mandible, and so we stopped.
Speaker 1: And for some reason, skulls are the most exciting bones
Speaker 1: to find, and so we dug it out carefully. Let
Speaker 1: me stop you real quick when you see a bison skull,
Speaker 1: you know, just based on what we understand about the
Speaker 1: timeline there, you know, it's at least what years old,
Speaker 1: So just the fact that you laid eyes on it,
Speaker 1: you know, here's something. Yeah, so and um, so we
Speaker 1: excavated it and it turned out to be a complete
Speaker 1: skull with the mandible there and one horn sheath. The
Speaker 1: other side just had a horn core, but it was
Speaker 1: in immaculate condition. So we dug it out and we
Speaker 1: put it in the water to kind of rinse it off,
Speaker 1: and all this gunk came out of the eye orbit
Speaker 1: like it was the rotten eyeball still in there, and
Speaker 1: so we were working kind of focused on the skull,
Speaker 1: and then as we were cleaning it up, looked around
Speaker 1: and just a little bit up the bank, oh there's
Speaker 1: a few more bones and oh, look at that's a
Speaker 1: bison metatarsal, like a kind of risk of like not
Speaker 1: really with the skull. The skull also had a lot
Speaker 1: of the brain was still in there, so that all
Speaker 1: drippled out into the river. I was pretty discussing this
Speaker 1: kind of white fatty stuff. I've dealt with that inside. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so we saw these bones close by, and then
Speaker 1: you know, we started looking farther and farther up the
Speaker 1: bluff and there were more and more bones and we go, wow,
Speaker 1: there's a lot here, and um, but then it was
Speaker 1: getting late, so we put the skull in the canoe
Speaker 1: and went and camped, and the next day went back.
Speaker 1: It was just like a hundred yards back up river
Speaker 1: and went up the bluff about thirty ft and we
Speaker 1: could find bone oones sticking out of the bluff. It's
Speaker 1: very fine sandy sediment, and so we started retrieving bones
Speaker 1: and then uh, a lot of the bluff was still
Speaker 1: frozen and the bones were frozen in. So we had
Speaker 1: this one little bucket and one of us would go
Speaker 1: down to the river and fill the bucket up and
Speaker 1: carry it up and pour it over. It took three days,
Speaker 1: I think to get all the bones out, and as
Speaker 1: we went farther into the bluff, that's when we started
Speaker 1: to find hair and uh tissue, and like the front
Speaker 1: legs when we excavated them, the bones were still articulated,
Speaker 1: attached to each other, you know, and the um humorous
Speaker 1: and the radius aulna were attached. And we found, oh,
Speaker 1: a bunch of the vertebrae from the back. We're still
Speaker 1: all our puculated. But the neatest thing we're actually the
Speaker 1: holes because it was a big bison. It was a
Speaker 1: bowl and they've got three thought it was probably twelve
Speaker 1: years old, very matura bal and they're they're very tall, tall,
Speaker 1: and you know how buffalo are kind of um narrow
Speaker 1: if you look at them from the front or from
Speaker 1: the back, so like that, but kind of on steroids,
Speaker 1: so even taller, and but with these dainty little holes.
Speaker 1: So the holes were like I don't know, something like that, no,
Speaker 1: and then like a little high heels, and it still
Speaker 1: had the sheaths, the hoof sheets were still attached. I mean,
Speaker 1: just so our listeners get a better idea. You're you're
Speaker 1: showing me like four inches across a little lemon, so
Speaker 1: like almost smaller than like a caribou. So yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So again we're talking running on hard surfaces. They're not
Speaker 1: running on tundra, grassy plane. Yeah yeah. And so that
Speaker 1: if you look on the bottom of the of the
Speaker 1: hush sheath that still had the little scratches where he'd
Speaker 1: like run over rocks and stuff. Really but it looked
Speaker 1: like it was from an animal that had died like
Speaker 1: three weeks ago. It was so fresh. And we found
Speaker 1: three sheets and then we also found it's a sediments
Speaker 1: um we thought out and came off. There was this
Speaker 1: little point sticking out and eventually that became the other
Speaker 1: horn sheath, and so we eventually found the only really
Speaker 1: big bone we were missing was one scapula, and then
Speaker 1: there were some of the little wrist and anklebones. But
Speaker 1: we found all the little vertebrae from the tail go
Speaker 1: down to these tiny little things like half inch in diameter. So,
Speaker 1: what what does your canoe look like? Yeah? We we ferried.
Speaker 1: We made numerous trips back to camp, and we had
Speaker 1: we actually had a tarp that we spread them out on.
Speaker 1: But then this was the other lucky thing about Mike
Speaker 1: if we did have a satellite phone. So we called
Speaker 1: up and said, hey, Mike, we've got this bison skeleton
Speaker 1: and it's actually starting to smell, and their flies coming around,
Speaker 1: and we're worried that some bears gonna come. And so
Speaker 1: he sent the helicopter over and we uh flew it
Speaker 1: back to Iva Tuck and then flew it to Fairbanks
Speaker 1: and stuck it in a freezer. And what were you
Speaker 1: able to find out about that animal? Um? And why
Speaker 1: do you think it was so well like? How did
Speaker 1: it get so well preserved? Yeah? That and if you
Speaker 1: can't and when you're explaining that, is also explained how
Speaker 1: an animal of that size could just die out there
Speaker 1: somewhere and not get scavenged. Well? And then can I
Speaker 1: ask a follow up? I'm still I'm still stuck on
Speaker 1: the on the eyeball socket and the brain in there.
Speaker 1: Is that if there's any like soft tissue from that
Speaker 1: creature that would be worth saving, that, would you know
Speaker 1: give you information you couldn't find from from hard tissue bone? Um,
Speaker 1: I guess it will from the hair. You can do
Speaker 1: various isotopic analyzes, and we haven't done anything with any
Speaker 1: of the soft tissue. It's all frozen. But um, what
Speaker 1: was Janice's question. Well, one theory that we came up
Speaker 1: with is along that stretch of river there's a lot
Speaker 1: of quicksand and because sometimes you're walking along dragging the
Speaker 1: canoe or something, and all of a sudden you go
Speaker 1: and get sucked in. And so this is another thing
Speaker 1: about bison with small feet, they'd be really vulnerable to
Speaker 1: quicksand going in. And um, so one theory he is
Speaker 1: because he was a bull in his prime, that he
Speaker 1: got stuck in quicksand and couldn't get out, and so
Speaker 1: he might have died actually in the river, in which case, uh,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't have been heavily scavenged because come winter he
Speaker 1: would have just gotten buried over by the river sediments
Speaker 1: frozen in. And then we think because the sediments that
Speaker 1: we actually we found his skeleton in were about eleven
Speaker 1: thousand years old, so probably he died over forty thousand
Speaker 1: years ago and was just interred in these sediments and
Speaker 1: then at some point the river moved away from where
Speaker 1: he was and then it moved back exposed him. He
Speaker 1: toppled down the bluff a little and got reburied, and
Speaker 1: then if we hadn't come along and found him, he
Speaker 1: would have toppled into the river again, but by then
Speaker 1: the bones would have gotten dispersed more and more. And
Speaker 1: because we went back to that section twice more that
Speaker 1: summer to see if we could find anything else, and
Speaker 1: the whole face of the bluff had just collapsed. So
Speaker 1: if we hadn't been there, when we'd been there, you
Speaker 1: never would have known here. It was totally serendipitous that
Speaker 1: we do you feel like, um, the permafrost thawing out thing,
Speaker 1: like is it a raise against time? Like finding super
Speaker 1: well preserved specimens like that? Like have you run in
Speaker 1: like have you seen evidence of you know, the permafrost
Speaker 1: dawing like being a real thing. You're like the lion
Speaker 1: cubs with with hair on him and the increasing Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like do you see? Yeah? So you think it would
Speaker 1: be right? I mean, there's global warming, mean annual temperature
Speaker 1: of Alaska's going up significantly, But what what's happening is
Speaker 1: on the ground, there's so much insulation from the overlying
Speaker 1: vegetation that we're not seen yet widespread summer Carston so
Speaker 1: melting and thawing. So I don't it's not, um, I
Speaker 1: don't think thawing is accelerating. What this is why we're
Speaker 1: working along these rivers because the river is doing the
Speaker 1: thawing for you, and it's done the same thing for
Speaker 1: you know, a hundred thousand years, just as it meanders
Speaker 1: across though, just going back and forth, back and forth
Speaker 1: over time. So it's not like the whole place is
Speaker 1: thawing and we're not in a race to save um
Speaker 1: do you hear Do you hear that all the time? Though,
Speaker 1: I feel like it's like a like it's like a Natgio. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get that funding talking point that
Speaker 1: it's like everything's coming out it's a race against the clock.
Speaker 1: On the north coast of Alaska, the rate of coastal
Speaker 1: erosion is definitely increasing, and that also I think has
Speaker 1: to do with less sea ice and forming, which protects
Speaker 1: the coastline storms. It's causing more erosion. Also, I think
Speaker 1: we're also hearing, you know, the Russians are really in
Speaker 1: the mammoth tusk hunting now, so you kind of get
Speaker 1: the impression that, oh, yeah, they're all coming out of
Speaker 1: the permit frost. Now they're everywhere in Siberia, but they're not.
Speaker 1: I mean they know exactly where they go and they're
Speaker 1: using like steam hoses and you know they're mining for
Speaker 1: mammoth tusk. Yeah. So it's not like the whole Arctic
Speaker 1: is melting down now. It's just it's happening in specific places,
Speaker 1: like Pam said, like the coastal zones, but a lot
Speaker 1: of the you know, the north slope interior is not
Speaker 1: not yet feeling the big thaw, but it'll happen. It's
Speaker 1: a bigger issue in places like interior Alaska where the
Speaker 1: perma frost is much warmer, like Fairbanks, where it's more borderline. Yeah, borderline.
Speaker 1: It doesn't take that much to melt the firmer frost.
Speaker 1: If for my frost is one years when I was
Speaker 1: with Mike Coins, I think I can put this in
Speaker 1: the thing I wrote. I was saying to Mike, so,
Speaker 1: what's the coolest thing you could find? And to quote him,
Speaker 1: he said, I'd be flying along in my helicopter and
Speaker 1: there would be a fucking hand sticking out of the ground. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you're drifted along. Um, yeah, we're always looking that
Speaker 1: you would find that you would find remains and it
Speaker 1: would be that here's here's some person from years ago,
Speaker 1: thirty thousand years or whatever the hell, and it'd rewrite
Speaker 1: all understanding that would be fully clothed, but have all
Speaker 1: the tools pointed out the map a Teo del Fuego. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly that. That when when Mike expounded on it um
Speaker 1: and I know he was we were having you know,
Speaker 1: I don't mean to make him seem uncouth, but I
Speaker 1: mean he was. We were just kind of musing around
Speaker 1: the table and it would be that there would be
Speaker 1: like a family group of people, I mean, because of
Speaker 1: the perma frost, would be all the things you never find, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what was in their bag, how they're tent, like how
Speaker 1: their shelters were constructed or whatever, Just like that, like
Speaker 1: the bison bob, the bison bob of a nomadic ice
Speaker 1: age hunting group. That's one reason Mike flew us up
Speaker 1: there was he figured if they got these poor people
Speaker 1: out there looking for bones and if they see a
Speaker 1: human bone, then they'll call me. So we were like,
Speaker 1: you know, looking for him. That was part of our mission.
Speaker 1: Find something unusual, call him, will come fly in. He'll
Speaker 1: find that little hand sticking up and then he'll he'll say,
Speaker 1: you guys, go back to camp. I'll take care of this.
Speaker 1: I'll take it from here. It's an issue of numbers.
Speaker 1: Like I said earlier, that you know, we find lots
Speaker 1: of the herbivores, there are a lot more herbivores, and
Speaker 1: then you find many fewer carnivore bones, and then humans.
Speaker 1: There were probably even fewer humans than there were carnivores
Speaker 1: running around up there. So the chances of stumbling upon
Speaker 1: the family that got stuck in quicksand in the river
Speaker 1: is really slim, but man like it will probably never
Speaker 1: who knows, but it has to be there. But we,
Speaker 1: I mean we were. There has to be a group
Speaker 1: of you know, ice age hunters that whatever landsliders. All
Speaker 1: I kept looking just for you know, the clumsy guy
Speaker 1: who dropped his toolkit. Somewhere you'll find the whole little assemblage.
Speaker 1: So have you met this guy named Eski Willardslove so
Speaker 1: he remember that he's Danish and he's a trip but
Speaker 1: he's one of the DNA guys and he's in Copenhagen.
Speaker 1: He's a colleague of Dave Meltzers. So archaeology is kind
Speaker 1: of moving on now getting away from arrowheads and finding
Speaker 1: you know, people buried in mud, and they're getting into
Speaker 1: like environmental DNA, so DNA of people that's preserved in sediment,
Speaker 1: and that's really the new horizon. And I think if
Speaker 1: Eski had his way, he would um come up to
Speaker 1: Alaska and other parts of North America and take a
Speaker 1: bunch of lake corps and try to find a lake
Speaker 1: where people had camped on the on the beach and
Speaker 1: then they'd like you know, peat in the water or
Speaker 1: you know, just the refuge had drained into the water,
Speaker 1: and we pick up the ancient DNA preserved in these lakes,
Speaker 1: which would be like final like dead end resting places
Speaker 1: for it. Yeah, and that would be fairly conclusive. You know.
Speaker 1: Then you could date the lake sediment and you could say, oh,
Speaker 1: well look there are people there fifteen thousand years ago
Speaker 1: or something. That's kind of how can he not have
Speaker 1: his way money, It's all just I mean, that'd be
Speaker 1: It's would be a very expensive project, but we'll see
Speaker 1: what happens, I think, because he'd want to do hundreds
Speaker 1: of sites. Yeah, you'd have to do it would be
Speaker 1: like looking for a needle in a haystack, because you'd
Speaker 1: have to find a lake where people camped, and then
Speaker 1: they'd have to be enough human DNA excreted into the
Speaker 1: lake water to show up in the lake sediment. So
Speaker 1: it's not a sure thing. And if it's on a hillside,
Speaker 1: there's no way it's can still be there, right. That's
Speaker 1: the whole geologically stable thing is that because they feel
Speaker 1: like there's no more surprises with physical artifacts or or
Speaker 1: physical tissue. I think Steve probably has a good feeling
Speaker 1: feel for this after you know trapes and around with Mike.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a huge piece of real estate and
Speaker 1: you're looking for these little needles and haystacks and the
Speaker 1: preservation thing you like, point one of one percent of
Speaker 1: the sites would ever be preserved and then you'd have
Speaker 1: to find it. So it actually might be more efficient
Speaker 1: to go with the lake study with the DNA. And
Speaker 1: also if you were to find human remains, there are
Speaker 1: all these ethical and political questions about what kind of
Speaker 1: sampling you can into a nightmare man, so um, getting
Speaker 1: the environmental DNA would be a lot more straightforward than
Speaker 1: and actual although it would be really exciting to find
Speaker 1: old human remains. Yeah, has anyone ever pulled animal DNA
Speaker 1: off an ancient arrowhead? Yeah, um, it was first done
Speaker 1: with proteins from blood, you know, in the little kind
Speaker 1: of crevices of projectile points, and a lot of people
Speaker 1: didn't really believe that. They're like, well, how do we
Speaker 1: know that that animal protein is actually that of a
Speaker 1: deer or bison or something. But more recently people have
Speaker 1: been extracting ancient DNA from projectile points. But it's like
Speaker 1: Pain was saying that there's a huge preservation problem because
Speaker 1: DNA is a very delicate compound. It breaks down. So
Speaker 1: the artic is the ideal place if you're gonna find
Speaker 1: such a thing. And going back to the Masa site,
Speaker 1: m I really wish that all those old Masa points
Speaker 1: have been kept in a freezer because maybe they still
Speaker 1: have the But the trouble there is I don't think
Speaker 1: they were handled correctly when they were dug out of
Speaker 1: the ground. This is another thing about archaeologists today. They
Speaker 1: become enlightened and they always go, well, we're not going
Speaker 1: to dig the whole site. We're gonna leave that because
Speaker 1: in ten years will be a whole bunch of new techniques,
Speaker 1: which you know, tell us a bunch of things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's when I was. When I was with those guys,
Speaker 1: they would talk about um they were they were always
Speaker 1: discussing where they might go back, like which these campsites
Speaker 1: might warrant going back, and like dig it right, and
Speaker 1: you imagine it's going there with a shovel and digging,
Speaker 1: But it would be that they might do a square meter, right,
Speaker 1: just do one square meter and then and then in
Speaker 1: a hundred or whatever, in three years, when there's completely
Speaker 1: different innovations and technology, someone could go to another meter
Speaker 1: and apply there, you know, new academic rigor to that.
Speaker 1: That was one of the funny things that the Masist
Speaker 1: site when Tam wasn't there. But I was up there
Speaker 1: one one summer day with Mike up on top, and
Speaker 1: they were digging these squares and they were like ten
Speaker 1: of them, and everybody had a square and they had
Speaker 1: a little trowel with a brush, and I was like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, how can you guys be doing this?
Speaker 1: This is really boring. Why don't just give me the
Speaker 1: shovel and let me dig find some stuff. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: Mike goes, oh, you can't do that, but here's one
Speaker 1: that we've dug and We've dug it all the way
Speaker 1: down to gravel and there's nothing left. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: can I dig that? And he goes, yeah, based a
Speaker 1: waste of time. So I got to shovel. I just
Speaker 1: started digging, and they were just all aghast, like why
Speaker 1: are you letting him do this? And sure enough, about
Speaker 1: two ft down had a little projectile point that it
Speaker 1: somehow wriggled down through the gravel. But he was likew irritated.
Speaker 1: I know that this is another thing that changes all
Speaker 1: the time, Like what happened all the stuff? What happened
Speaker 1: all the bison and short faced bears and step lines
Speaker 1: and wooly mammoths? And I was real hot on uh
Speaker 1: for a long time. I was hot onto the places scene,
Speaker 1: the blitz Creeg hypothesis because it was so tidy. It
Speaker 1: was like dudes came and killed them all right, and
Speaker 1: just just great, you like folded up and put in
Speaker 1: your pocket. You know, it's just like a perfect explanation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what what's the latest? Like why that time did like
Speaker 1: nine genera like nine genera of animals, so like nine
Speaker 1: genuses of animals vanished from the Western hemisphere. What was
Speaker 1: so special that all those dozens of animals when extinct, well,
Speaker 1: there was significant climate change going on, and I think
Speaker 1: one thing is you can't give one reason for all
Speaker 1: extinctions like it very it can vary a lot regionally,
Speaker 1: and so obviously the area that we know best is
Speaker 1: northern Alaska. And I think one thing about northern Alaska
Speaker 1: is the human density was never that high, and it's
Speaker 1: this vast area where these animals were ranging. So I
Speaker 1: don't think that human hunting had a huge impact on
Speaker 1: those animal populations. And are data from our bone collection
Speaker 1: shows that humans overlapped with horse and bison for probably
Speaker 1: a couple of thousand years, and possibly even with mammoths
Speaker 1: for a while, So it seems like they could coexist.
Speaker 1: And Dan's itching to say something, No, it's just um,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of the same old story and science.
Speaker 1: You know. The first thing we do is we latch
Speaker 1: on a simple explanation like blitz Creek, people overhunted, they
Speaker 1: killed all the animals, and then you realize, well, that
Speaker 1: didn't kind of fit with some of the chronologies where
Speaker 1: people are rare, like on the North Slope or um
Speaker 1: other places like on islands in the tropical Pacific it's
Speaker 1: really well documented that all the endemic bird species went
Speaker 1: extinct after people showed up, so it was pretty obvious
Speaker 1: people killed them all or um moa and New Zealand
Speaker 1: is a really good example of overkill. So it works
Speaker 1: in some places but not in others. So then the
Speaker 1: second stages you go, okay, so it's not the same everywhere.
Speaker 1: It's complex, and then it just kind of keeps getting
Speaker 1: more and more complex because you realize, I think it
Speaker 1: was I think it's more like seventy genera globally of megafauna,
Speaker 1: so animals over a hundred pounds average weight when extinct
Speaker 1: globally globally. And then but when you start looking at
Speaker 1: the records globally, you see, well, in Australia, almost all
Speaker 1: those extinctions happened before forty years ago. In Africa on
Speaker 1: a like twelve percent of the megafauna when extinct. Well,
Speaker 1: I can tell you why that's true, because Africa always
Speaker 1: had humans. Yeah, that's one of the that's probably part
Speaker 1: of the explanation they could they had evolved together and
Speaker 1: it wasn't like a surprise attack. Yeah, but Africa is
Speaker 1: also different in other ways. It's a much more diverse
Speaker 1: set of habitats Africa is a huge kind and it's
Speaker 1: run in the equator and um the combination of the
Speaker 1: evolution with humans plus this kind of diversity of semiar
Speaker 1: a habitats that are changing all the time. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so but you see what I mean, The complexity grows
Speaker 1: on complexity, and I think everybody's kind of come around
Speaker 1: to this now where there's no one explanation it's going
Speaker 1: to fit all species. Some cases it is overkill, I
Speaker 1: think moa. Other cases it's climate change, which is probably
Speaker 1: what happened on the north slope where we went from
Speaker 1: um well drained substrate where you could make it with
Speaker 1: your little dainty bison hoves too. Now there's no way
Speaker 1: that animal could get around. It would starve in a
Speaker 1: week just because it's so bog sinking sinking into the
Speaker 1: in through the tassis and into the into the into
Speaker 1: the It's kind of counter intuitive that at the end
Speaker 1: of the last ice Age is the climate got warmer
Speaker 1: in northern Alaska, it became a less favorable environment for
Speaker 1: these large animal You kind of think, all it warms
Speaker 1: up and everything, there's more plants growing, but uh, the
Speaker 1: warmer temperatures allowed shrubs and peat to come in, which
Speaker 1: created this really boggy environment than than insulated the permafrost,
Speaker 1: so the water never drains away, and it's just and
Speaker 1: these were planes grazing animals for the most parts, or
Speaker 1: they were mostly grazing animals, so they needed large grasslands,
Speaker 1: and so in grasslands by their nature are kind of
Speaker 1: well drained, hard soils. And actually the youngest horse bones
Speaker 1: that we found on the north slope were in these
Speaker 1: sandy areas, well drained areas, which suggests to us that
Speaker 1: the horses retreated to these last little sandy grasslands, but
Speaker 1: then eventually that became too small to support them and
Speaker 1: they died out. Do you have a sense of how
Speaker 1: how long? Like it wasn't like one century the animals
Speaker 1: were there and then the next like how do you
Speaker 1: have a sense of how long this extinction event? That?
Speaker 1: That's a that's an interesting I was weighing on a
Speaker 1: little bit because I asked melts about that, Like I
Speaker 1: used to have it that that I don't know in
Speaker 1: my head, I started pictured that like thirteen thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: thousand and one day ago, all that ship was there
Speaker 1: and then and then like you know, twelve thousand and
Speaker 1: sixty four, whatever the hell, it was all gone, and
Speaker 1: we talked melts about this. He goes that that window
Speaker 1: of time keeps bad broadening, And it wasn't like everybody
Speaker 1: all died on one day. It was there was things
Speaker 1: that were that were fading out over the course of
Speaker 1: tenos and I'm sure regionally it was also, you said,
Speaker 1: back to the DNA preserved in sediment. So when an
Speaker 1: animal dies um in a permafrosting area, the DNA is
Speaker 1: often very well preserved if you can find it. So
Speaker 1: there's been there's two studies now, one from the Yukon
Speaker 1: one from Siberia who have looked at these LUSS sections
Speaker 1: so less as wind blown silt ok e s s right,
Speaker 1: you got it, and it's frozen. So both of them
Speaker 1: are showing are revealing that um, mammoth, bison and even
Speaker 1: Woolleye rhinoceros and Siberia survived way into the holy scene,
Speaker 1: so well into the present interglacial thousands of years after
Speaker 1: we thought they did based on when the last the
Speaker 1: most recent dated bonus is an article that came out
Speaker 1: about yeah right, yeah, you said in that nature. These
Speaker 1: guys are probably quoted in there, I know, but I
Speaker 1: was reviewing that paper bit yeah. Yeah. But so that's
Speaker 1: a really big deal because it suddenly is that gets
Speaker 1: rid of the overkill hypothesis because people have been in
Speaker 1: Siberia for thirty thousand years and yet rely ron ostros
Speaker 1: were stampeding around until eight thousand or six thousand. So
Speaker 1: it's really kind of this big wake up, like, hey,
Speaker 1: we got a new source of data. It's telling it's
Speaker 1: something totally different, and a lot of these animals were
Speaker 1: hanging on much more recently than we thought they were before.
Speaker 1: It demonstrates a vulnerability and getting your information from one
Speaker 1: from bones because like I think that I always returned
Speaker 1: to when I'm thinking about, you know, antiquity, and it
Speaker 1: gains it moves some paleontology to archaeology. Is it for
Speaker 1: a for a period of time, the oldest site in
Speaker 1: the New World it wasn't Chili, So how much ship
Speaker 1: is laying between there and the point of entry? Like
Speaker 1: the oldest site, and I know it's been surpassed since then,
Speaker 1: but the oldest sort of like academically agreed upon site
Speaker 1: was thousands of miles away from the point of entry,
Speaker 1: So you imagine how much junk was laying between there
Speaker 1: that you never found. And I want to put this
Speaker 1: to an anthropologist down in Colorado where I was sort
Speaker 1: of engaging his enthusiasm about finding more stuff, and he was,
Speaker 1: you know, like the bone thing. He just wasn't like
Speaker 1: optimistic that you'd find more Clovis sites are more fulsome sites,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, well, someone will turn it up, because
Speaker 1: but think of how much ground we've turned up, how
Speaker 1: many roads, we've built houses, we've built railroads, we've built
Speaker 1: everything that's happened. We have a few I don't feel
Speaker 1: that all of a sudden, now it's gonna be that
Speaker 1: we find tons more sites full of like bones and
Speaker 1: projectile points. It's gonna need to be. It's gonna be
Speaker 1: something else. Like it's just we're not gonna keep dragging
Speaker 1: this stuff off out of you know, this stuff up
Speaker 1: out of the ground. It's not gonna be come at
Speaker 1: like an increased ratio. And he was talking about the
Speaker 1: great planes. But to be able to dig into the
Speaker 1: stuff you talk about, now we've taken lake bed sediments
Speaker 1: and finding DNA and stuff, It's like that's a whole frontier. Man.
Speaker 1: It makes you, guys, help means for you guys, well,
Speaker 1: give us your job security, give us some money, we'll
Speaker 1: have job security. But we want to do that, we
Speaker 1: just don't have the money to get those. Course. One
Speaker 1: of the interesting things about this, though, is that, um
Speaker 1: it's I think it's pretty well accepted by most people
Speaker 1: now that if humans hadn't started producing greenhouse gases in
Speaker 1: like a mid hole of scenes solicity five or six
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, a lot of this was coming out
Speaker 1: of rice agriculture in Asia. If we hadn't started doing that,
Speaker 1: we would be back in the ice age now, which
Speaker 1: meant that a lot of those big animals would probably
Speaker 1: have survived. So we would have had little refugia for Willie.
Speaker 1: Rhino and mammoth would have been up on Wrangel Island
Speaker 1: and so forth, and horses would have been running around,
Speaker 1: you know, in northern Alaska, and we would have gone
Speaker 1: back into the ice age quick enough that the arranges
Speaker 1: could have re expanded and we would still have them.
Speaker 1: Is there an idea that human impact on the environment
Speaker 1: goes back thousands of years? It goes back probably five
Speaker 1: or six thousand years through greenhouse gases, And yeah, so
Speaker 1: we're slash and burn agriculture. We're burnie, we're clearing for us,
Speaker 1: so all that seal two goes in the atmosphere. We're
Speaker 1: creating these rice paddies, which are just hot bits for
Speaker 1: methane production and method is an incredible greenhouse gas. So
Speaker 1: if if we hadn't started messing around with a muld
Speaker 1: have stayed on that same cycle. Yeah, we could have
Speaker 1: stayed on the same cycle. We're during the intergoocials. During
Speaker 1: the warm times, big animals would have become scarce. They
Speaker 1: were driven into like far northern refugia, and then when
Speaker 1: the ice age came on again, it was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're back in business. You know, the Arctic prairie is back,
Speaker 1: mammoth steps back and they spread all over the place. Again.
Speaker 1: Here's my last question for you. They're not broading you.
Speaker 1: You might have a last one for you. How hip
Speaker 1: are you to the idea? Like, do you care about
Speaker 1: support these ideas where people are gonna do these sort
Speaker 1: of cockamami Yeah? Do you like cockamamie genetic things where
Speaker 1: you can, through various crossbeat breeding processes or whatever, create
Speaker 1: some approximation of a Pleistocene horse, create some approximation of
Speaker 1: a mammoth by like taking genetic information from mammoths and
Speaker 1: working it into contemporary elephants and then turning them back
Speaker 1: out and bringing back the ice age. Are you hip
Speaker 1: on this? I mean, like, are you like that's a
Speaker 1: good idea? Well, the big problem with that is the
Speaker 1: environment that those animals inhabitant is gone, and uh so
Speaker 1: where are they going to live? Well that this one
Speaker 1: feller in Siberia, doesn't he have the idea that just
Speaker 1: them being there will make the environment like them being
Speaker 1: there will turn it back into a kind of which
Speaker 1: came first, the chicken or the egg? And I I
Speaker 1: think that you have to have the environment before you
Speaker 1: can have the animal there. I don't think the animal.
Speaker 1: So you don't think that the grazing animals came and
Speaker 1: turned tundra into grassland? No? Okay, do you guys haven't
Speaker 1: talked about this? Yeah, let's put it modely. No, I
Speaker 1: don't think that's possible. Um, And it's not just me.
Speaker 1: That's Dale Guthrie, you know that is Yeah, he had
Speaker 1: that babe, he had that famous he had He had
Speaker 1: that famous dinner party where they served I don't think
Speaker 1: anybody really ate it, but but I think the whole
Speaker 1: rewilding thing is it's kind of like, that's a huge
Speaker 1: amount of resources, huge amount of scientific input and money input,
Speaker 1: And why don't we just save the animals we still
Speaker 1: got rather than trying to recreate something with these weird
Speaker 1: ass Like what was that that old book about the
Speaker 1: island of Dr Moreau or something, remember that where he
Speaker 1: would lived on this island. He created all these weird
Speaker 1: animals and they all went wild and ate everybody. So
Speaker 1: why are we messing with that? Why don't we just
Speaker 1: preserve like the African elephant and the white rhino and
Speaker 1: so farth and so on, instead of screwing around trying
Speaker 1: to reinvent something that, yeah it's gone. I'm not I
Speaker 1: don't get enthusiastic about that idea. I think that if
Speaker 1: if one if a proponent of that idea, we're here,
Speaker 1: I think they have this kind of fatalistic attitude that
Speaker 1: you'll never pull that off. You'll never pull saving like that.
Speaker 1: You're not going to save those things. And the next
Speaker 1: best idea would be to create a protectable place, try
Speaker 1: to like the grizzly bear thing out here on that
Speaker 1: road they're livingston. Yeah, yeah, that's first place old barrels
Speaker 1: around inside of inside of a log fortress. It's better
Speaker 1: that you could genetically engineer those grizzlies so they could
Speaker 1: be pettible. You know, they'd be nice. Grizzlies would be better.
Speaker 1: But grizzlies. Yeah, No, I think it's totally ridiculous. And
Speaker 1: I would think you guys, just the hunting community would
Speaker 1: be really against rewilding. I mean, it just seems like
Speaker 1: I haven't taken it seriously. I think you better because
Speaker 1: it is serious. I mean there's there's a lot of people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I haven't taken it seriously as a UM. I only
Speaker 1: find it problematic when when it when people start talking
Speaker 1: about trying to like recreate approximations of things. Um, especially
Speaker 1: if you get into We Explored Us the Best Shapiro
Speaker 1: one time you get this idea of like what like, so,
Speaker 1: what exactly is a passenger pigeon? Right, Here's an animal
Speaker 1: that was in flocks of millions, right if you just
Speaker 1: you know the last one, like Martha died in the
Speaker 1: Cincinnati Zoo. Right. So let's say you made a thing
Speaker 1: and you're like, okay, here's three of them, and that's
Speaker 1: what they look, that's what they looked like that's them
Speaker 1: without flocks of millions changing forests, Like have you really
Speaker 1: made anything? Do you know? I mean? And is there
Speaker 1: public appetite for flocks of birds that could destroy entire
Speaker 1: agricultural fields overnight? So it's like to spend all this
Speaker 1: energy on something that where you can sort of look
Speaker 1: at and go like, yeah, it's hard to explain why,
Speaker 1: but that's roughly what you had sitting in that cage.
Speaker 1: But I don't care. What about a mammoth. But the
Speaker 1: way if they could honestly go, if they could, and
Speaker 1: it's been explaining to me that this isn't gonna happen
Speaker 1: if you could honestly go and find some things in
Speaker 1: the permit frost and here's a viable egg and here's
Speaker 1: a viable sperm, all right, and which is not how
Speaker 1: it's gonna go, and you combine those and create one. Behaviorally,
Speaker 1: they spent what they spent thirteen years with their mom
Speaker 1: learning how to do mammoth ship. So let's say you
Speaker 1: make one. What do you really have? Oh, I'd love
Speaker 1: to have a pet mammoth. But I don't think it's
Speaker 1: I just think it's a crazy idea. And I just
Speaker 1: think We've messed up so many things on this planet
Speaker 1: ecologically trying to intervene. And so why do that when,
Speaker 1: as Dan said, we've got all these crises now that
Speaker 1: we should be trying to overt. I mean, we spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time in New Zealand, you know, and
Speaker 1: it's just an ecological disaster there, introduced species and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And even in Alaska there reintroducing bison to places where
Speaker 1: they haven't been bison for thousands of years. But they
Speaker 1: they managed to really muddy the waters on that question.
Speaker 1: Well exactly, but I think um, even the exactly dubious
Speaker 1: bone fines. Yeah, and and for that matter, in muskox,
Speaker 1: which is my beloved species. You know, they were reintroduced
Speaker 1: to Alaska. Um, but that was after a much shorter
Speaker 1: time frame. They disappeared from Alaska in the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and they were reintroduced actually not to their native range
Speaker 1: in Alaska, but to Alaska and Novak in the first place,
Speaker 1: right nineteen thirties, so actually they were in Fairbanks and
Speaker 1: then they went to now Novak, and then they made
Speaker 1: it back to the North Slope in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: So it was about a hundred years they did. They
Speaker 1: disappear for the same reasons climate change or was that
Speaker 1: a legit over hunting. I think that it was basically
Speaker 1: the climate change. Muskoks populations in our bone collections suggest
Speaker 1: this that muskox and it persisted in Alaska for a
Speaker 1: really long time, but always at really low numbers, and
Speaker 1: so as the climate change, their populations were declining naturally,
Speaker 1: and they both Muskoks and Cariboo populations fluctuate naturally in
Speaker 1: response to all kinds of different environmental conditions. And it
Speaker 1: is possible that humans may have killed the last one
Speaker 1: or two muskox in in Alaska, but their population had
Speaker 1: declined on its own. And so that reintroduction I feel
Speaker 1: better about because it was such a short time frame.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like the elk reintroductions in Eastern Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that there's still viable habitat for them, and you're
Speaker 1: putting that, you're putting the actual animal back and not
Speaker 1: being like that, you're not adding a new species that
Speaker 1: you don't you're not sure how it's gonna interact with
Speaker 1: the other existing species that are already there. Some of
Speaker 1: the original rewilding people um weren't doing it through like Jeanette,
Speaker 1: they weren't proposing through genetic wizardry. They were proposing just
Speaker 1: take the closest ship you can find, so take African
Speaker 1: animals and cheetahs and whatnot and just caught them loose
Speaker 1: on the Great Plains and call it good. Which makes
Speaker 1: a lot more sense. Didn't you guys do a show
Speaker 1: on nil guy? And Texas? Texas has how many species
Speaker 1: of African and Asian antelope? Has got some? They have more,
Speaker 1: there's more in Texas, scimitar horned orcs. They have more
Speaker 1: in Texas than exist on native range, which you see,
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of different. That's not the genetic genetic
Speaker 1: engineering real wilding. And I think that part of real
Speaker 1: wilding is a you know, valid acceptable Yeah, And they've
Speaker 1: found they've had some cases where those well the American
Speaker 1: like you know, our our American bice and they've had
Speaker 1: cases where a species was saved because of private holders.
Speaker 1: Like there's no art, like you can't argue the point
Speaker 1: that private collectors, Britain cowboys who at the last minute
Speaker 1: went out and gathered up buffalo off the Great Plains,
Speaker 1: that if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't be any
Speaker 1: and and put them in a fence somewhere they'd be gone.
Speaker 1: I mean there's a couple of places where they held out,
Speaker 1: but you would have had a very very small thing.
Speaker 1: And if you look at how they actually were respread,
Speaker 1: so much of it funneled through these private individuals. And
Speaker 1: you know, it's easy to like look down at Texas
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, they're messing with this, messing with that,
Speaker 1: But there are cases where those privately held animals were
Speaker 1: not becoming like impactful toward putting animals back on the landscape. Um,
Speaker 1: we revisit the rewilding thing, but I think that, like you,
Speaker 1: like you said, I would rather take the money and
Speaker 1: expertise and stop the bleeding. Yeah, and not try to
Speaker 1: graft new stop the bleeding on the body, and not
Speaker 1: try to like graft new limbs, especially if it's passenger pigeons.
Speaker 1: Pigeons are nice. But although it would have been remarkable
Speaker 1: to see those huge flock. But sure they say the
Speaker 1: last big the last big flock was killed not far
Speaker 1: north of where I grew up. Really, do you know
Speaker 1: that Potoskey, Michigan? I think it was the last big
Speaker 1: like big Bang? Is there a monument there a big pile.
Speaker 1: I keep fluctuating on what I want to do when
Speaker 1: I retire. I was gonna I was gonna spend it
Speaker 1: devoted to a very arcane or very weird seeming pursuit
Speaker 1: of getting hunters orange laws standardized around the country. I
Speaker 1: thought you were going to become a large pumpkin enthusiast. Well,
Speaker 1: I was gonna become a large I was gonna become
Speaker 1: a large pumpkin enthusiast. I was gonna push to have
Speaker 1: it be that you had to wear an orange hat
Speaker 1: everywhere you went. That's it. Then I was going to
Speaker 1: push to have National Yelstow National Park turned into a
Speaker 1: wilderness area and have all the infrastructure removed. Now I
Speaker 1: might find and make monuments to where I think the
Speaker 1: last thing, the last big like the last thing went extinct,
Speaker 1: like on this place four the last buffalo in Kentucky
Speaker 1: was shot. Yeah, they've that would have redeeming social value,
Speaker 1: an artistic I do like them, huge freaking pumpkins man palettes.
Speaker 1: Yeah you can do both. Alright, guys, I'm glad he
Speaker 1: finally came down. Man, I've been pastoring the ship out
Speaker 1: of Crene to get you guys on the show. I
Speaker 1: want you to go back home. Talk to your buddy Mike,
Speaker 1: cons get him fired up. Tell him the pandemic will
Speaker 1: never end. It's a soft end. The end will look
Speaker 1: like this. The end will be that it's like a
Speaker 1: cold or the flu. That tell him that we're almost
Speaker 1: to the end. But it wasn't the end. He was
Speaker 1: looking for New York this fall. He did not. Oh,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't have told them that, But that really makes
Speaker 1: Crin seemed like not a strong producer. But she didn't
Speaker 1: find that. She hasn't been looking at flight Manifest's like, well, Mike,
Speaker 1: that that's awkward because my research indicates that you have left.
Speaker 1: I have receipts. I know. We're trying to wrap this up.
Speaker 1: But so Cal had to leave halfway through. He could
Speaker 1: not stay away. He asked me to ask a question. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it's or it's sort of you know, a good
Speaker 1: boat to put on it? And he said, in the
Speaker 1: Hunt for Hunting everything ancient, if it's a good bowl,
Speaker 1: let these guys do their questions, because what if they
Speaker 1: don't have a tight boat. I don't know, but I'm
Speaker 1: gonna save it for next time. Speaking of it's been
Speaker 1: a while since you've you've asked about concluders. That word
Speaker 1: hasn't been said on this podcast and probably over a year. Okay,
Speaker 1: get back to that. Here's Cow's concluding, Here's keeps Cows
Speaker 1: compluiter and the hunt for Everything ancient. Have you ever
Speaker 1: just discovered something modern that has been equally as surprising
Speaker 1: or interesting? Okay, yeah, no. So along one of these
Speaker 1: rivers that we routinely get down one day, we're paddling
Speaker 1: along and off in the alder choked hell hole was
Speaker 1: a purple older, and so it was like purple leaves
Speaker 1: with purple leaves. So you gotta imagine the sea of
Speaker 1: green green alder thick. It really unpleasant, full of mosquitoes.
Speaker 1: In the middle is one purple alder. So of course
Speaker 1: we got off and went in there and stomped around,
Speaker 1: got bitten by mosquitoes, and it was like, wow, maybe
Speaker 1: we can take one of these back and grow it
Speaker 1: and then become multi millionaires from you know, like selling
Speaker 1: purple alders. You load that in your canoe, load in
Speaker 1: this little this little route with a little sprout, a
Speaker 1: little tiny one took it back and spent hours and
Speaker 1: hours and hundreds of dollars trying to cultivate this thing
Speaker 1: and it died, so it's still out there though, in
Speaker 1: the middle of the alder choked hell hole. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: at least in Fairbanks, landscaping options are kind of limited.
Speaker 1: But alders grow like anything, so you could have purple
Speaker 1: alder bushes hedges, so you could have been like from
Speaker 1: the same mentality that brought as kutzo. Yeah, but there's
Speaker 1: already alders growing there, so yeah, you must have asked
Speaker 1: botanist about it. Is it a species or it's a
Speaker 1: um it's a weird just genetic. It's quite common and
Speaker 1: you know, plants have their um at variable chromosom numbers.
Speaker 1: Their genetics are really messy compared to mammalian genetics, and
Speaker 1: so apparently it's quite common to get these weird little
Speaker 1: anomalies like that. And um, if we ever go back there,
Speaker 1: did drop away point on it? Oh yeah, it'll cost
Speaker 1: you a lot though. All right, guys, thanks for coming down. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: thank you. You guys didn't have any concluders anything we
Speaker 1: missed that you felt that you'd like to share with
Speaker 1: the world. Yeah, do like how to find your work
Speaker 1: and how to support your research or something. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was gonna say we should it out of call. If
Speaker 1: there's anybody out there that would like to help fund
Speaker 1: this lake sediment research, you guys like to do, how
Speaker 1: they could help that out? Yeah, the University of Alaska
Speaker 1: has a very nice way to do things like that.
Speaker 1: You can just been my own. You can send me
Speaker 1: an email and then, um I'll get in touch with
Speaker 1: the foundation at University of Alaska. It's tax deductible your money.
Speaker 1: We've done this before, and money comes in, they put
Speaker 1: it in a special account. It can't be abused or
Speaker 1: stolen or anything else. We use that money for our researcher.
Speaker 1: We write a report to the donor and the foundation.
Speaker 1: People love it. And that's the Center for Arctic Biology,
Speaker 1: Institute of Arctic Biologstitute of Art Biology at University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
Speaker 1: But um, so someone could earmark that money, yeah, and
Speaker 1: just lock it into this is what it's going to
Speaker 1: be used for. It's not going to disappear into some
Speaker 1: overall you know, like university lawnmowering mowing fund or something.
Speaker 1: But I think I don't know. I hope the listeners,
Speaker 1: if you're out there somewhere, you realize that This isn't
Speaker 1: just some arcane field that we're pursuing. It actually has
Speaker 1: real uh implications for conservation in the future, because we
Speaker 1: really need to figure out what makes big animals go extinct,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of big animals going extinct right now,
Speaker 1: and the more we can learn, the better. And so
Speaker 1: there's a lot of really basic research that remains to
Speaker 1: be done. And I think you kind of gather from
Speaker 1: our discussion today it reaches into archaeology and also into genetics,
Speaker 1: like Best Shapiro and my Tons and Dave Meltzer, the
Speaker 1: other archaeologists. So it's a really active field, this kind
Speaker 1: of interface between DNA evolution and conservation. I'm just glad
Speaker 1: they can't keep pointing their finger at hunters. Yeah, overkill
Speaker 1: is dead except on tropical islands, so you guys should
Speaker 1: feel relaxed about that. I got a challenge for listeners.
Speaker 1: Every time you're thumbing through UH I don't know, going
Speaker 1: through and you're find articles in Wall Street Journal, New
Speaker 1: York Times, Times, nat GEO dealing with something to do
Speaker 1: with old ass bones in Siberia or Alaska, or something
Speaker 1: to do with mammoths, I challenge you to read the
Speaker 1: article then read all the citations and not encounter the
Speaker 1: names Pamela Groves and Daniel Man. It's impossible. It's impossible.
Speaker 1: You're always in there. That's good. I didn't know that
Speaker 1: al right, guys, thanks for coming down, Thank you, thank you,