Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten in my case underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by first Light, Go Farther, stay longer,
Speaker 1: joined today by my favorite ever podcast guest. Now, I
Speaker 1: say I throw that around, not liberally by throwing around,
Speaker 1: but this is true. Professor David Meltzer, Who just were
Speaker 1: you in this studio when you just did your online class?
Speaker 1: I did? I did? He just taught an online class
Speaker 1: in the studio prior to the recording about Clovis. Perfect timing,
Speaker 1: wasn't it. I wish I would have been here early. Well,
Speaker 1: you know when you show up late for class D.
Speaker 1: This is the this is the price you miss. You miss,
Speaker 1: you missed the good stuff. In fact, it was the
Speaker 1: best lecture I ever gave you. I was rolling and
Speaker 1: were you. I'm looking out the window thinking where Steve.
Speaker 1: He's supposed to be here. You were bringing it. Um,
Speaker 1: we have a guy, uh engineer accepted our challenge. We
Speaker 1: wanted to get a a light Let me back up.
Speaker 1: A body mine years ago was getting paid to go
Speaker 1: watch commercials, and beer commercials in particular, and they would
Speaker 1: pay him to watch beer commercials, and he had a dial,
Speaker 1: and the more he liked the beer commercial, he turned
Speaker 1: his dial up. A whole bunch of guys watching beer
Speaker 1: commercials and they dial what parts they have, you know,
Speaker 1: whether they're into it or not. And I wanted to
Speaker 1: get one of those for this room. And an electrical
Speaker 1: engineer is making this one that has five dials. Mechanical
Speaker 1: engineer has five dials. And as someone's talking what you
Speaker 1: don't need, you don't know where it's coming from. But
Speaker 1: I could like turn mine down and the light in
Speaker 1: the middle with dim and that would know that that
Speaker 1: there's fading interest. I would right now if I had
Speaker 1: that here, right now, I would turn mine on full
Speaker 1: blast and I wouldn't catch it. Could already be on
Speaker 1: full blast. When I re listened to the last episode
Speaker 1: you were on, David Steve introduced you the same way,
Speaker 1: said you're his favorite guest. So what he means it,
Speaker 1: I think he means it. I told him earlier that
Speaker 1: he was he used to be. Uh. We thought that
Speaker 1: he his his bridges were too big for us, and
Speaker 1: so we would go after. We would target his students
Speaker 1: and then got the man himself. And what was the
Speaker 1: analogy he made that. Um, it's like if we were
Speaker 1: trying to get John Lennon on the show and got
Speaker 1: stuck with a ringo. We're not going to name names
Speaker 1: of the students, who, incidentally, is how I get some
Speaker 1: of my speaking gigs. So that was good. The next
Speaker 1: time you bump into Steve, say hi, it doesn't return
Speaker 1: to emails that I have, but we still like them
Speaker 1: being ringos. That still bad though? Uh? Is he the one?
Speaker 1: There's still a beat? Are any of them left? And ringo? Sure?
Speaker 1: Yeah huh? Also joined by, of course, filled the engineer,
Speaker 1: crns here, Spencer's here, Cal's here. Um, so that that's
Speaker 1: for Yanni's dad. The High Life Man series of beer
Speaker 1: commercials will go down in history has the best beer commercials.
Speaker 1: We'll just say that before we move on. You might
Speaker 1: be a Highlife Man? Is that old one? Oh? They're
Speaker 1: not that old. But they're just like nostalgic and hilarious
Speaker 1: and well written. But but but but was the beer
Speaker 1: any good? I mean, isn't That doesn't matter when it
Speaker 1: comes to beer commercials. It's not They're not tying it
Speaker 1: to the taste of the beer I used to drink. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't want to explain what beer I used to
Speaker 1: drink and why they want you to associate with the product. Yeah,
Speaker 1: haven't be representative of you, right, And if the first
Speaker 1: taste is no good and you spit it out, they've
Speaker 1: lost the war. Well, mg D for a long time,
Speaker 1: you would look in your bottle. So if you look
Speaker 1: through your bottle to the label on the other side,
Speaker 1: it would be people partying. There's like pictures of people partying.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to drink that because I could look
Speaker 1: in there and I feel like I was partying that.
Speaker 1: Yeah that one day look in there and it's a
Speaker 1: basketball hoop. Yeah, never ordered that stuff. We got a
Speaker 1: quick clarification. So, uh, I'm gonna call them are good friends.
Speaker 1: At Murdocks If you don't have murdocks around, Murdocks is
Speaker 1: like a farming ranch. I think it's pretty regional, right,
Speaker 1: It's a farm and ranch supply place. I was observing
Speaker 1: how I was in at Murdocks buying some stuff. I'll
Speaker 1: say what I was buying. I was buying a syringe
Speaker 1: from the livestock, the cattle syringe stuff, and uh, and
Speaker 1: noticed that you could round up your donation and I
Speaker 1: noticed it was for the it said the Humane Society
Speaker 1: on it, and I thought that was weird because the
Speaker 1: Humane Society, as we all know, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: the leading one of the leading anti hunting organizations out there,
Speaker 1: and they're always filing, you know, every time there's a
Speaker 1: suit file that you always see that they're like a
Speaker 1: signator to the suit. But when I was screwed up
Speaker 1: about we're kind of each a little bit wrong because
Speaker 1: I was there's there's an organization called the Humane Society
Speaker 1: of the United States, and they're the ones that's always
Speaker 1: they're always sueing everybody, like they're suing to stop that,
Speaker 1: you know, they don't want you to be able to
Speaker 1: fish in the local pond or whatever to be them
Speaker 1: suing um. Not to be confused like Humane Society is
Speaker 1: more generally around animal shelters. So anyways, we talked about
Speaker 1: this and then Kran has some back and forth with
Speaker 1: Murdoch's the store and they're they're changing their thing around
Speaker 1: and apparently we're the first people to bring that up.
Speaker 1: No affiliation, it's local animal shelters, Yeah, exactly, they're raising
Speaker 1: up money. So as Krann brought in an exam don't
Speaker 1: know why she brought this example if your purchase was
Speaker 1: ten dollars and sixty two cents just what I don't know,
Speaker 1: Like Curran pointed out that you would be donating thirty
Speaker 1: eight cents if you round it up. That's great. It's
Speaker 1: a great example because I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: can't picture it right. And then you put it in
Speaker 1: those concrete terms, and then you're like, oh, yeah, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you you you put your I don't know, liquorice,
Speaker 1: and because you've always got those weird huge like some
Speaker 1: you know, dog dog bones or something, and your purchases
Speaker 1: ten sixty two and when you're about to make your
Speaker 1: purchase on the pin pad, it'll say, would you like
Speaker 1: to round to the nearest dollar? And this is the charity,
Speaker 1: this is the organization we donate to. It's not going
Speaker 1: to say animal shelters. I feel like that that think
Speaker 1: about it like this a long time ago. If your
Speaker 1: name was Richard, what would be your nickname Dick? Over
Speaker 1: the years though, uh the name Dick parallel path with
Speaker 1: another use of the word. Now Richards go by Rick. Oh.
Speaker 1: I feel like humane, like like I feel like this
Speaker 1: has happened with the Humane society question it's gonna be
Speaker 1: a while until girls start being named Karen again. I
Speaker 1: feel like, oh that that name has been sullied. Uh
Speaker 1: and talking about wolves are good friend, Jim Halflfinger wrote
Speaker 1: in Um, of course, Jim is a wildlife expert and
Speaker 1: policy guy and biology guy down in Arizona. The hell's
Speaker 1: this official title? He's an academic. I was pointing out,
Speaker 1: this is a correction. I was saying that the Mexican
Speaker 1: gray wolf had no geographical separation from other wolves, and
Speaker 1: they all just bled into each other. That's my understanding, right,
Speaker 1: there's no it would be like the only we to
Speaker 1: put in terms of turkeys real quick. So we have
Speaker 1: these five varieties of subspecies of turkeys, and um, we
Speaker 1: talked about the Osceola, which the osceolil turkey is sits
Speaker 1: kind of like south of Lake okachobe in Florida, and
Speaker 1: then the eastern turkey is north of Lake Okachobee in Florida.
Speaker 1: There's no fence between Osceolas and Easterns. They just just
Speaker 1: we arbitrarily drew a line. And I was done the
Speaker 1: impression with wolves that there was this sort of like
Speaker 1: arbitrary line drawn where um, the Mexican wolf. You know,
Speaker 1: we just drew a line and said, Okay, if it's
Speaker 1: south of that, it's a Mexican wolf, it's north of that,
Speaker 1: it's not. And heffel Finger pointed out that's in fact
Speaker 1: not the case. And there were these very arid prey
Speaker 1: scarce areas um areas around between Colorado and Utah Um
Speaker 1: that did cause some genetic bear years historic genetic barriers
Speaker 1: between different groups of wolves. And he goes on to
Speaker 1: say that the Mexican gray wolf is the most genetically
Speaker 1: distinct wolf subspecies in North America, and that would not
Speaker 1: be true if they had historically blended in with other
Speaker 1: types of wolves. Half a Finger also has this to say, this,
Speaker 1: you'll appreciate this cow for hunters in Colorado to be
Speaker 1: griping about funding wolf recovery, which we talked about, and
Speaker 1: I kind of graped about it myself. Um, he thinks
Speaker 1: it's a it's a it does a disservice to hunters. Um.
Speaker 1: And how can we run around so proudly talking about
Speaker 1: recovering wild turkeys, recovering deer, right, recovering all these species,
Speaker 1: but then it comes to recovering wolves. Will will be
Speaker 1: like I want nothing to do with that. He said,
Speaker 1: what a pr triumph? Do that too, And if it
Speaker 1: costs you a couple of elk tags because of wolves
Speaker 1: eaten some elk here and there, who cares. It's like
Speaker 1: you're if if hunters want to claim you're in the
Speaker 1: business of recovery, you're in the business of wildlife. Um,
Speaker 1: be true to your message. I agree with that, he
Speaker 1: goes He goes on to say anti hunters would be
Speaker 1: besides themselves in conflicted confusion if you could pull out.
Speaker 1: So there's a the theory of biological selection based on
Speaker 1: like game uh conditions is something do you know this
Speaker 1: with a with a ladder? And I can't come up
Speaker 1: with a term right now, but that that's what it is.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, you're defined by your environment and
Speaker 1: so there is no like state line or you know
Speaker 1: fans that there's gonna be one species on one side
Speaker 1: of and the other. It's just like this developed thing
Speaker 1: over millennia of certain body types are selected for certain
Speaker 1: environments where that body type is going to be way
Speaker 1: better at surviving based on the game the rainfall uh,
Speaker 1: you know, places to hide one way dubs, stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Dr Meltzer. He will probably give us the right terminology
Speaker 1: by here described as morphological distinctions rather than genetic distinctions.
Speaker 1: Is that okay, Yeah, I suspect these are all subspecies
Speaker 1: and that um, what you've got are different subspecies that
Speaker 1: have adapted better to those particular niches um, those particular
Speaker 1: kind of ecosystems. And so really what you're seeing is
Speaker 1: um populations that are settling into a range, and they're
Speaker 1: staying in that range. Uh, And there will be introgression,
Speaker 1: They'll be gene flow between these populations because they are
Speaker 1: part of the same species. There's no reason why they
Speaker 1: couldn't interbreede and probably did out on the boundaries of
Speaker 1: each of those their ranges, right where the two of
Speaker 1: them would occasionally uh intersect one another. So, yeah, you're
Speaker 1: going to have that kind of movement. But you're right.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you've got particular taxa or particular populations
Speaker 1: that natural selection you know, by the luck of the
Speaker 1: draw uh and over time and adaptation, over time, they
Speaker 1: will be better adapted to a particular environment, a more
Speaker 1: desert environment or a more wooded environment, whatever. Right, that's
Speaker 1: just down. Natural selection works over time. Now you give
Speaker 1: it a long enough time and you make those um,
Speaker 1: those those ecological areas distinct enough, and you know, reduce
Speaker 1: any kind of gene flow or introgression ultimately, and you've
Speaker 1: got to give it tens of thousands, if not hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of years, which we have no patience for,
Speaker 1: by the way, not in this room. Um, you could
Speaker 1: end up with different species species. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just evolution. You know. Darwin had all this figured out
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty nine. Yeah, And so like I went
Speaker 1: down the rabbit hole on this thing, speaking a gam
Speaker 1: and then speaking with a bunch of the pro Colorado
Speaker 1: wolf reintroduction at folks, you know, and there is a
Speaker 1: serious division on well, who cares if this larger gray
Speaker 1: wolf intermingles with the Mexican wolves because that's like a
Speaker 1: natural thing and they'll figure it out right, And then
Speaker 1: you get into this genetic swamping uh type of discussion,
Speaker 1: where um, there now we're dealing with such a small
Speaker 1: population of Mexican wolves that there there is a real
Speaker 1: possibility of genetic swamping and how this larger wolf, all
Speaker 1: the trades of the larger wolf are going to overrun
Speaker 1: the traits of this this smaller genetic pool of Mexican
Speaker 1: wolves and we just don't have the luxury of a
Speaker 1: big gene pool down here and a big gene pool
Speaker 1: up here and tens of thousands of years for them
Speaker 1: to and if million dollars getting that very small group
Speaker 1: of Mexican wolves going, yes, so of then have a
Speaker 1: bunch of ye who's in Colorado vote for this and
Speaker 1: which is funny because it's citizens vote for this, and
Speaker 1: then undo that there's probably a lot of people that
Speaker 1: are dedicated to that that great that Mexican wolf recovery
Speaker 1: who are kind of like and it's also an Endangered
Speaker 1: Species Act thing, right, so you can argue that the
Speaker 1: reintroduction of these wolves is like actually anti Endangered Species
Speaker 1: Act because it threatens this listed wolf that we are
Speaker 1: dedicated to recovery. Yeah, you can make one of those
Speaker 1: documentaries that no one watches about all this. Uh okay,
Speaker 1: cal Um, did you see how Creant even wrote a
Speaker 1: transition for you? I did. It's good. That's full that's
Speaker 1: full service right there. Dude. She's like with Cal, she's
Speaker 1: still worried about Cal's performance. She had to write a
Speaker 1: transition for him. She's like, he'll never he'll never, he's
Speaker 1: got nothing. I need more. Moms wrote his transition for him,
Speaker 1: so I got I was. I was also a hand
Speaker 1: delivered a joke the other day because I selected a
Speaker 1: bugs bunny. Um uh, you know what do you call it?
Speaker 1: He's on your little kids? But band aids? Uh and uh.
Speaker 1: I was supposed to take that picture of that band
Speaker 1: aid on my shoulder and say, that's all folks posted
Speaker 1: on Instagram. Yeah, um, let's do it. No, I had
Speaker 1: the band aid came off too fast for my brain
Speaker 1: to react. I just had a guy in New Zealand
Speaker 1: send me this is a the nice idea. This is
Speaker 1: right up your alley. Cow sent me. He's making band aids,
Speaker 1: no plastics, band aids out of marino wool, which is
Speaker 1: naturally anti microbial because the fibers are so fine reduces
Speaker 1: the amount of surface area that bacteria grows on. Everybody
Speaker 1: knows that I didn't need a MoMA for that. Okay,
Speaker 1: he accounts, and I'm getting nervous. Sorry, okay. COVID vaccine
Speaker 1: was recently used on great apes. Isn't a gorilla part
Speaker 1: of the great ape family? Not just eight it's all
Speaker 1: the dudes with no tails. I think isn't it Bobo, Yeah, chips,
Speaker 1: the ranks and gorillas. Yeah. Um, so there is a
Speaker 1: COVID vaccine trialed on mink. And the mink part of
Speaker 1: the story is pretty interesting because if you go over
Speaker 1: to Europe, big mink farms were cold. Like we're talking
Speaker 1: to the tune of hundreds of thousands of mink right, yes,
Speaker 1: in Denmark, sorry Denmark. Yeah, I bet they didn't have
Speaker 1: a lot of press show up on that day. Oh
Speaker 1: what are they? I guess they're probably like gas and
Speaker 1: gas chambers and stuff. Yeah, I don't know, take a
Speaker 1: lot of water to anyway. Um and but we so
Speaker 1: we also had COVID show up in farmed mink populations
Speaker 1: in in Utah here in the States, but they were
Speaker 1: not cold. Um, there's a trial vaccine that was used
Speaker 1: on mink. And then they're using this vaccine on the
Speaker 1: Grade eight population in the San Diego Zoo. And I
Speaker 1: thought they did this in New York as well. But um,
Speaker 1: and the you know, it's a little interesting, it's a
Speaker 1: little controversial. Brings to brings to mind a bunch of
Speaker 1: like sci fi books and stuff I've read over the years.
Speaker 1: I could I could identify a couple areas of controversy
Speaker 1: is on one hand, you probably have the crowd who
Speaker 1: would say, well, how could they be vaccinating mink and
Speaker 1: grillis and whatnot? And I haven't got mine yet, Like
Speaker 1: that's that, like as though it would have gone to them,
Speaker 1: like as though they would have gotten it. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: sure that there's that. There's probably man things, But I
Speaker 1: was surprised to see in this story that an asymptomatic
Speaker 1: zoo keeper um spread the virus to eight gorillas that
Speaker 1: tested positive. Yeah, do you know what, Maggie here in
Speaker 1: our office is convinced that her dog died of COVID.
Speaker 1: She's got a very compelling, very compelling timeline symptomology. But
Speaker 1: that's the origin of many of our diseases. They're zoonotic,
Speaker 1: and they get something that's relatively benign in one species,
Speaker 1: when it gets into another can become very deadly and virulent.
Speaker 1: And most of the major epidemic disease us is that
Speaker 1: humans have suffered from over the last ten thousand years
Speaker 1: have come from animals originally, And why can't they go
Speaker 1: back in the other direction? Exactly to me? And that
Speaker 1: that is the argument here, right, It's like uh, we
Speaker 1: need especially maybe not so much the great you know,
Speaker 1: the limited Great eight population the San Diego Zoo of
Speaker 1: eight individuals. But if you look at how uh something
Speaker 1: could transform in like a mink farm with thousands of individuals,
Speaker 1: or let's say like a chicken farm or a hog
Speaker 1: farm where you have thousands of individuals in close contact
Speaker 1: in one space, you could see how um a virus
Speaker 1: could evolve very quickly. Right, So yes, I mean super
Speaker 1: super interesting. I'll tell you a take on this this farm,
Speaker 1: this this mink farm thing is um. Wild fur prices
Speaker 1: are often tied very directly to ranch output. So I
Speaker 1: remember that guy I can't remember said it's like globally
Speaker 1: or something, the not trapped in the wild ye and
Speaker 1: people used you know, they used to be like all
Speaker 1: over fox farms and mink farms and everything when people
Speaker 1: back when people wore a lot of fur. UM. I
Speaker 1: wonder if these die offs and killoffs at these ranch
Speaker 1: facilities will in a year or two is time result
Speaker 1: in like an explosion and value of wild fur as
Speaker 1: the ranch facsimile as their production falters, and and no
Speaker 1: doubt it probably takes to get to get going and
Speaker 1: retooled I'd be curious to watch how that plays out.
Speaker 1: I think Michigan is our number one farmed first aig.
Speaker 1: I believe so. No, man, that makes me think they
Speaker 1: don't do much of it really just well, I don't
Speaker 1: think there's like big signs around and say hey we're
Speaker 1: firing third bring me kids, all right, Spencer Krin didn't
Speaker 1: give you a transition. What you guys see you help
Speaker 1: this guy out. This guy looks slick. This guy looks slick,
Speaker 1: and Spencer over here, you guys trying to set you
Speaker 1: up for failure. I know you guys have gotten many
Speaker 1: emails about that episode of Dr Alan Lazara, like saving lives,
Speaker 1: specifically talking about the tourniquet. Three lives, three lives. That's many.
Speaker 1: We got our first email about meat eater saving a
Speaker 1: bird's life, Spencer's in particular, right, this is all Spencer
Speaker 1: by example. Yeah, back in November. Back in November, I
Speaker 1: told a story about how I found a an owl
Speaker 1: in a barbedwire fence that I tried to save. Um
Speaker 1: cute little story. Yeah, yeah, it didn't work out, but
Speaker 1: it led me to a different part of the horrible,
Speaker 1: got real plot twist. That story it was like when
Speaker 1: you're watching The Departed and all of a sudden, the guy,
Speaker 1: the main guy, got shot in the elevator. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, that's not where I saw this going
Speaker 1: quite all of the character in that minute. And I
Speaker 1: was like, that's what I didn't picture that. The Spencer
Speaker 1: story has a lot it's very similar to The Departed.
Speaker 1: So we got an email from Robbie from the Montana
Speaker 1: f WP Region five h Q and Billings. He said
Speaker 1: that he got a phone call from motorists that was
Speaker 1: traveling east of Billings on the interstate. This motorist pulled
Speaker 1: over to check on a hawk that was in the
Speaker 1: ditch that looked injured. Excuse me, not a hawk and owl,
Speaker 1: a great horned owl, great horned owl to check on it?
Speaker 1: Is it proper to say horn or horned horned owl? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we stopped to check on this owl. Uh, that
Speaker 1: was very much alive, but in very rough condition. So
Speaker 1: this motorist, who it says was driving a produced truck,
Speaker 1: which leaves me with some questions. And I don't know
Speaker 1: what sort of produce he'd be hauling. Yeah, good question.
Speaker 1: He was driving an autoparts truck. Would you wonder what
Speaker 1: auto parts he was on, wouldn't It's like all tators
Speaker 1: in college. I worked at Walmart for about six months
Speaker 1: in the produce section, so I I love produce. Your
Speaker 1: produce man, Yeah, to make up for the minimum wage
Speaker 1: you got paid, I would just like graze on apples
Speaker 1: and oranges all day. So I very particular about produce.
Speaker 1: We know, we know the guys from Idahou, So maybe
Speaker 1: some potato. Maybe there were seed potatoes or something potatoes
Speaker 1: on the edge of my seat. He stopped to check
Speaker 1: on this owl, calls the f w P UM and
Speaker 1: he's talking to the guy at the f w P
Speaker 1: who's named Robbie, and he says, yeah, I stopped to
Speaker 1: check on this owl because I heard on the Meat
Speaker 1: Eater podcast that there was a place in Montana that
Speaker 1: will rehabilitate injured birds. And he said, what kind of
Speaker 1: truck did he get hit by? When do you say produce?
Speaker 1: Hold on before we're talking about this ol. So Robbie
Speaker 1: confirms that the place that he uh sort of heard
Speaker 1: about in the Mediator podcast is the Montana Raptor Conservation
Speaker 1: Center in Bozeman. It turns out that the guy is
Speaker 1: on his way through Bozeman on his way back to Idaho.
Speaker 1: So they coordinated drop off at the Raptor Center and
Speaker 1: the guy puts the owl in his produced truck and
Speaker 1: he meets him at the exit at Bozeman. So Robbie
Speaker 1: writes in to tell us that I think it's safe
Speaker 1: to say the Meat Eater podcast saved the life of
Speaker 1: an owl today if we ended the if only the
Speaker 1: story end there, that's right, like my story. We have
Speaker 1: a story. But then Karan had to go and check
Speaker 1: had to go and see how Yeah that doesn't fit
Speaker 1: with the news cycle, right, So Karan, what did you hear? Okay? Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh so sad so sadly. And they named this owl
Speaker 1: great horn owl, number twenty. This owl did not make
Speaker 1: it explain they're not their naming system. That's interesting. So
Speaker 1: what I deduced is they will uh name the animal
Speaker 1: based upon like its species, so great horn owl. And
Speaker 1: apparently this is case number twenty, so this is Raptor
Speaker 1: of the year number twenty, so great horn owl number twenty. Um.
Speaker 1: When when they when they named mine, I think it
Speaker 1: was g h O and then I don't remember the number.
Speaker 1: It was like something but that was in right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So of last year, right, so this is this year.
Speaker 1: The injuries to the owl were there was a compound
Speaker 1: fracture around its or on its left humorous shoulder, and
Speaker 1: they didn't put the owl through kind of the trauma
Speaker 1: of surgery UM because the problem with the compound fracture
Speaker 1: for something like a bird is what they would normally
Speaker 1: do UM is put a pin through the bone to
Speaker 1: kind of stabilize it. But you can't with the shoulder.
Speaker 1: You can't really do that. It would cause tissue damage.
Speaker 1: And even if surgery was performed on the bird, he
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to fly, you know, even after he
Speaker 1: had healed up, So he would have one working wing
Speaker 1: and another non working wing, so be ground based owl. Yes,
Speaker 1: it would be hopping around. Al I'm gonna walk over
Speaker 1: and get that right, um. Yeah. So they discovered this
Speaker 1: in an X ray and found also many the bone
Speaker 1: had shattered, So instead of put the owl through the
Speaker 1: trauma of surgery, they knew he wasn't going to make
Speaker 1: it anyway, and they euthanized him. The phone call that
Speaker 1: I received from the Montana Raptor Center when they happened
Speaker 1: back in November, it was unlike any I had before.
Speaker 1: They handled me very very gently, as though they were
Speaker 1: delivering the news that I lost my mother or something
Speaker 1: like that. Um, they like had to build up to it,
Speaker 1: explained what happened, and then they delivered the news and
Speaker 1: they were like real apologetic and explained why this had
Speaker 1: to happen, uh the way it did and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So they are a great crew. There's an old joke
Speaker 1: about that. I'll tell you the punch line. The punch
Speaker 1: line is how's mom? Uh, she's up on the roof.
Speaker 1: It's a great joke. Um, I don't get it. You don't.
Speaker 1: I didn't tell you the joke. I still the punch line.
Speaker 1: You have to look it up. This guy, this guy
Speaker 1: goes this Okay, this guy loves his cat. He's got
Speaker 1: to go overseas for a work trip. He leaves his
Speaker 1: cat with his brother right away, lands calls his brother
Speaker 1: and brothers like cats dead. And later he's like, man,
Speaker 1: you could you know, kind of delivered it more slowly,
Speaker 1: like maybe like the cats on the roof and then
Speaker 1: you know the cats, We got the cat off the roof.
Speaker 1: He's not looking too good, you know. So he goes anyways,
Speaker 1: Hell's Mom? And he's like, ah, she's up on the roof.
Speaker 1: So um. Oh, last thing, you were drawing parallels between
Speaker 1: saving lives with tourniquets and birds. But people write us
Speaker 1: in about saving lives with tourniquets, right, it'd be great
Speaker 1: if you can find us a happy ending rafter story.
Speaker 1: From what I get, they're talking to them that there's
Speaker 1: not a whole lot of them when it all gets
Speaker 1: hit by vehicle. Vehicle collisions are hard on him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: winds it up in a fence. Not a whole lot
Speaker 1: of them make it. You'll be searching for a while. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wonder what the percentage of you know, over the
Speaker 1: course of a year, how many birds they accept and
Speaker 1: what percentage? Uh you know, actually the fact that they
Speaker 1: entertained it must mean that it's not impossible. Oh sure, Yeah,
Speaker 1: mom thump day owl and her school bus the other
Speaker 1: day had what happened. You know, a mom drives school
Speaker 1: bus and she she thumped an owl in the school
Speaker 1: bus with kids on board. Well, that's what I asked,
Speaker 1: and she said no. But that was like so obviously good,
Speaker 1: you know, no trauma for the kids. And and apparently
Speaker 1: mom stopped the school bus on the road and searched
Speaker 1: for the owl for a while and I couldn't find it.
Speaker 1: You'll appreciate this, David, No, not that, but this. I
Speaker 1: have a friend named Ray the Rockman Baker, who's a
Speaker 1: big arrowheadhunter. And he was a professional ego. He collected ego,
Speaker 1: but walking around looking at the ground, you inevitably turn
Speaker 1: up stuff. He was so good at finding arrowheads. He
Speaker 1: told me a story and he showed me where it happened.
Speaker 1: He was a bus driver. He one time swung his door,
Speaker 1: you know they got that hand crank, swung the door
Speaker 1: open to let a kid on, looked and saw and
Speaker 1: found the arrowhead off on the side of a dirt road,
Speaker 1: picking a kid up out the school bus door. That's
Speaker 1: how good that guy was. Um. Okay, last time we spoke,
Speaker 1: you were I can't remember to what degree did you
Speaker 1: tease you're you're you're new. Do you call a book mountaineer? No?
Speaker 1: That was the first people's book that was I was
Speaker 1: finishing up well. No, no, no, you like either we
Speaker 1: got done recording and you brought it up, or you
Speaker 1: teased what would become your new, your forthcoming book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't remember, but you didn't go into any kind
Speaker 1: of great detail. So for our discussion day, you want
Speaker 1: to start out in the mountaineer. Yeah, let's start on
Speaker 1: top of the mountain in the Rockies, because this is
Speaker 1: a crazy story. Yeah. So this is a site that
Speaker 1: was discovered by a colleague of mine, Mark Steiger, at
Speaker 1: what's called Western Colorado University in Gunnison, and I had
Speaker 1: just finished up a few years earlier, my excavations at
Speaker 1: the Folsome type site. Did we talk about Folsome last time? No? Man,
Speaker 1: we could put this mountaineer thing on the hold. You
Speaker 1: could talk about Okay, let's let's start with Falsome. What
Speaker 1: the hell we did talk about Falsom? But we'll just
Speaker 1: give it a review, Okay, okay for the kids that
Speaker 1: weren't listening the first time we did this. Uh, Falsome
Speaker 1: is an extraordinarily important site. And it's not because I
Speaker 1: excavated there for three years. It's because of what happened
Speaker 1: there in the nineteen twenties. And what happened there in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties was that after fifty years of bitter,
Speaker 1: long standing dispute and controversy over how long people have
Speaker 1: been in the America's Fulsome was the site that provided
Speaker 1: the the best, most secure and convincing evidence that indeed
Speaker 1: people had been here since the Ice Age in the Americas.
Speaker 1: And that evidence was, and this is for all you
Speaker 1: hunters out there, it was a stone spear point in
Speaker 1: between the ribs of a now ext inked bison bison antiquis.
Speaker 1: There was no question that that artifact was stabbed into
Speaker 1: that animal when that animal was alive. And so if
Speaker 1: that animal was alive at the end of the place
Speaker 1: to scene, that meant people were there too. In the
Speaker 1: years after Fulsome, lots more sites were found which confirmed
Speaker 1: that in fact, people had been here since the Ice Age,
Speaker 1: that they've been hunting big game like giant bison, mammoths,
Speaker 1: maybe even some mastodons. But nobody ever went back to
Speaker 1: the Fulsome site, and the reason was that when they
Speaker 1: finished up there in the nineteen twenties, they said, well,
Speaker 1: there's nothing left. So I went back there in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties and I excavated there, and we learned a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of things about Fulsome, and one of the
Speaker 1: things that was really the sort of key message that
Speaker 1: came out of that was that these are highly mobile people.
Speaker 1: They are tracking great distances across the landscape, and we
Speaker 1: know that by looking at the stone that they picked
Speaker 1: up because they tended to I mean, when you're out hunting,
Speaker 1: you want the best weaponry that you can get. You
Speaker 1: don't want something to fail when you're about to take
Speaker 1: a shot. Right, these folks were using really high quality stone.
Speaker 1: And the high quality stone that they were using is
Speaker 1: very distinctive in terms of its color, in terms of
Speaker 1: the fossils that might be within the rock as well.
Speaker 1: And so we knew from where they picked up the
Speaker 1: stone how far they traveled across the landscape, and in
Speaker 1: the case of fulsome it was literally hundreds of kilometers.
Speaker 1: They had been down to quarries in the Panhandle of
Speaker 1: Texas place called Alibate's National Monument, just outside of m
Speaker 1: Alibates National Monument, because it was a quarry, like that's
Speaker 1: the monuments. Absolutely, yeah, it is. It is based not
Speaker 1: coincidental like that, that's what they're celebrating with the monument. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: this is the home depot to beat all home depots
Speaker 1: at the end of the place to see and for
Speaker 1: that matter, for the next ten thousand years, right, people
Speaker 1: have been going to that place to collect stone, and
Speaker 1: so we knew they'd been there. We knew they'd been
Speaker 1: up in Sterling, Colorado. They've been making this big, long loop.
Speaker 1: So what were they doing. They were probably we know
Speaker 1: they were bison hunters, big time bison hunters. So we've
Speaker 1: got highly mobile bison hunters. They're there at the fulsome site.
Speaker 1: We were able to ascertain when they were there. We
Speaker 1: know they were there in the fall. And the reason
Speaker 1: we know they were there in the fall is that
Speaker 1: you look at the eruption patterns of their molders, you
Speaker 1: look at the wear patterns on their teeth. You make
Speaker 1: certain assumptions about when bison cabs will pop out generally,
Speaker 1: you know, mid April to mid May, and so by
Speaker 1: looking at that, you can infer that they were there
Speaker 1: and say September or October. They didn't stay long. We
Speaker 1: looked for a camp. We looked all over for a camp.
Speaker 1: We found absolutely no evidence that they spent more than
Speaker 1: the three or four days that they would have needed
Speaker 1: to butcher the animals. They killed thirty two of them,
Speaker 1: we know that too. And a little kind of trapped
Speaker 1: them in a little box. Came exactly right, exactly right.
Speaker 1: They moved him into an arroyo and arroyal that they
Speaker 1: couldn't necessarily get out of. And I suspect the hunters
Speaker 1: were positioned on the uplands right a above where all
Speaker 1: these animals were thrashing around and trying to escape, killed them,
Speaker 1: butchered them. And what they did, and we see this
Speaker 1: a lot in the archaeological record. They they were gourmet butcher's.
Speaker 1: They took all the good bits, right, so they got
Speaker 1: rib racks, they got shoulder humped meat, they took some
Speaker 1: of the long bones, you're basic bitson drumsticks. They hauled
Speaker 1: all that away. What did they leave behind? They left
Speaker 1: behind heads, butts and feet, because there's just not a
Speaker 1: lot of meat on heads, butts and feet. Now, you
Speaker 1: can do some things with brains, you know, tanning hides,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. But they weren't lingering, they weren't
Speaker 1: sticking around. Folsome is it about seven thousand feet elevation,
Speaker 1: and so my conclusion was, it's September. You're at seven
Speaker 1: thousand feet. Winter's coming. This is an area that gets
Speaker 1: a lot of snow. And I figured they're just gonna
Speaker 1: bug out. They're gonna go find someplace warmer. They're gonna
Speaker 1: go lower elevation, they're gonna get off into a more
Speaker 1: protected area, you know, case closed. So a few years
Speaker 1: after that, Mark Steiger invites me up to work in
Speaker 1: Gunnison with him on a site that he has on
Speaker 1: top of a mountain. The mountain is at an elevation,
Speaker 1: it's a mesa in the Gunnison basin. So picture it's
Speaker 1: not quite a park like South Park or North Park
Speaker 1: or Middle Park in Colorado, but it's the same kind
Speaker 1: of principle where you've got high uh. You're basically on
Speaker 1: just the west side of the Continental Divide. From there
Speaker 1: you see all these fourteen thousand foot peaks. The lowest
Speaker 1: pass into that area is a ten thousand feet You
Speaker 1: get down onto the basin floor basin floors at about
Speaker 1: seventy feet. And just as a side note, the airport
Speaker 1: there in Gunnison, because you're at such high elevation as
Speaker 1: a really extra long runway and so when we were
Speaker 1: working there, were literally working right above the airport and
Speaker 1: the air Force is sending all these gigantic uh you know,
Speaker 1: those Galaxy planes, the ones that they put tanks into.
Speaker 1: They come there and they do touch and goes to
Speaker 1: sort of practice landing at high elevation anyway, So he says,
Speaker 1: why don't you come up and work on this site?
Speaker 1: Joined the efforts, I said, sure. So this site was
Speaker 1: hiding in plain sight. You literally see it from town.
Speaker 1: You just look up and say, okay, well, there's a
Speaker 1: fulesome site right on top of that, of course if
Speaker 1: you knew that, right, But their dogs up there for
Speaker 1: well exactly, and and Mark discovered the site because they
Speaker 1: were putting in some radio towers. Okay, so you've got
Speaker 1: this mesa, this isolated mason in the midst of this
Speaker 1: basin thousand feet above the basin floor, and we're looking
Speaker 1: at a surface that is just flattest can be, and
Speaker 1: it's very rocky. It's a rock strewn surface. And we
Speaker 1: noticed Mark noticed first, uh, and I noticed when we
Speaker 1: started to work in a different area of the site
Speaker 1: that you know, there's some patterns to these rocks. And
Speaker 1: the more we excavated, the more the patterns became clear.
Speaker 1: What we were seeing were sort of large circular areas
Speaker 1: with very large rocks forming the circle, and then kind
Speaker 1: of a cleared area in the middle, and in our case,
Speaker 1: what appeared to be a doorway leading into one of
Speaker 1: these sort of circular structures. Um, it was facing east,
Speaker 1: and I think, okay, well you've got a circular structure,
Speaker 1: you've got a doorway, it's facing east. That's maybe a house.
Speaker 1: So over a number of years we were explained the
Speaker 1: east rising sun rising sun a lot. You know, you
Speaker 1: sort of look worldwide. There are certain kind of universal patterns,
Speaker 1: not not truly universal, but it's common enough that it's
Speaker 1: clearly something meaningful that you know, you have the sun
Speaker 1: coming in first thing in the morning. So, um, we're
Speaker 1: excavating these these uh, what looked to be structures, we're
Speaker 1: finding very distinctive patterns. So right outside the front door,
Speaker 1: it's been clear of rock and there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: scrapers there. Okay, well, if you're going to stretch out
Speaker 1: of bison hide and clean it, you want to kind
Speaker 1: of smooth out the surface that you're working on. Um,
Speaker 1: we're you know, we're spending a lot of time up there,
Speaker 1: and we're thinking about it, and we're thinking, why the
Speaker 1: hell are you building stone walled structures which in fact
Speaker 1: we know had wooden superstructures. That is to say, put
Speaker 1: it in just plain English, they had aspen poles that
Speaker 1: had been anchored by these large rocks. We know they
Speaker 1: were aspen poles because one of these structures burned. And
Speaker 1: what had happened was the structure had been built, the
Speaker 1: aspen poles had been put up, mud had been packed
Speaker 1: in and around all the poles to insulate the structure,
Speaker 1: and then when it burned, it basically turned the mud
Speaker 1: into ceramic, which preserved the bark of the imprint of
Speaker 1: the aspen pole park. Right. So, okay, we're a thousand
Speaker 1: feet above the valley floor. There no water up there. Now,
Speaker 1: you know how much water ways? Right? Seven ponds of gallon?
Speaker 1: Right about eight? That's good though, maybe that was gas something. Um.
Speaker 1: If the nearest water is a thousand feet below you,
Speaker 1: and you know how much humans have to drink, right,
Speaker 1: we have water cooled engines. You don't want to spend
Speaker 1: a good part of your day going up and down
Speaker 1: a thousand feet hauling water. Do you also want to
Speaker 1: build a stone structure with insulated walls in the summer
Speaker 1: on top of a mountain where there's no water. It
Speaker 1: didn't make a lot of sense, and it finally had
Speaker 1: dawned on us. Well, maybe this wasn't occupied in the
Speaker 1: summer as we thought about it and thought about it
Speaker 1: some more, what we realized was this is likely a
Speaker 1: winter hamlet. There are are what appeared to be at
Speaker 1: least four of these large structures on top of this.
Speaker 1: Can you can you tell me the circumference of one
Speaker 1: of these structures. It's about five meters to make it
Speaker 1: about fifteen feet in diameter UM and yeah, generally plus
Speaker 1: or minus that um And they're kind of in a
Speaker 1: big arc up on top of the hill there. And
Speaker 1: so what we also realized, so this is a closed
Speaker 1: basin in the winter. And mind you, this is Gunnison, Colorado. Gunnison,
Speaker 1: Colorado was one of the coldest places in the lower
Speaker 1: forty eight of the United States. This was a site
Speaker 1: that was occupied in fulsome times. And the radio carbon
Speaker 1: dates we have come in around ten thousand, four hundred
Speaker 1: radio carbon years, which is about twelve four in in
Speaker 1: real years. And so this was the end of the
Speaker 1: Palisto scene. So you can be sure it wasn't any
Speaker 1: warmer than than it is today. Right. So one of
Speaker 1: the things that we realized was that in a cold
Speaker 1: closed basin like that, cold air sinks. So if you're
Speaker 1: a thousand feet above the valley floor. It's actually warmer
Speaker 1: there then if you were down on the valley floor itself.
Speaker 1: And the other thing is is you're on top of
Speaker 1: this mesa. There's no mountains that are shading you, so
Speaker 1: you're getting maximum daylight during those winter months, and it's
Speaker 1: going to be more comfortable up there. And if you're
Speaker 1: there in the winter, you don't have to worry about
Speaker 1: water because the snow is going to collect on the
Speaker 1: side of the houses, it's going to collect in the
Speaker 1: cornices on the edge of the mesa. This is a
Speaker 1: really good place to spend the winter, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: because not only do you have um, well, let me
Speaker 1: back up, you have from the top of that mesa,
Speaker 1: if you walk around the perimeter of it, it's a
Speaker 1: couple of miles just all around the edge of this mesa.
Speaker 1: I don't know if the viewers at home can see
Speaker 1: me circling my finger, just sort of circling. Wait, this
Speaker 1: isn't on TV. Um you see uh, you see forever,
Speaker 1: you see forever. So if you're a hunter and you're
Speaker 1: sitting up on the edge of this mesa and the
Speaker 1: valley floor is dusted with snow, if there's a herd
Speaker 1: of bison down there, you're gonna see him, and you've
Speaker 1: got time to figure out. Okay, how do we get down,
Speaker 1: how do we circle? What's the what's the hunt strategy here?
Speaker 1: How are we going to do this? And think about this.
Speaker 1: If you're in a closed basin and the lowest elevation
Speaker 1: mountain pass out of that basin, is it ten tho feet? Yeah?
Speaker 1: But what what's the outlet? What? What is it? Is
Speaker 1: a canyon like a gorge the Gunnison River out of
Speaker 1: the west. Yeah, but that gorge is incredibly narrow and
Speaker 1: incredibly deep, and it's a very treacherous outlet. And in fact,
Speaker 1: one of the things that's really distinctive about the ecology.
Speaker 1: We were talking about the ecology of different regions earlier, Right,
Speaker 1: the Gunnison Basin has a number of endemic species, which
Speaker 1: basically means these are animals and plants that have been
Speaker 1: isolated for thousands and thousands of years and hence have
Speaker 1: developed new species. Right. So that tells you that it's
Speaker 1: not easy getting in and out of that basin over
Speaker 1: the long geological time. But if you're a hunter gatherer
Speaker 1: and you're in this basin and it's in the dead
Speaker 1: of winter, they're getting just tons of snow up on
Speaker 1: these passes. You're essentially stuck there. But here's the good news.
Speaker 1: The animals are stuck there too, right. So if you've
Speaker 1: got elk and bison that are spending the summer up
Speaker 1: at twelve or thirteen thousand feet, you know they can
Speaker 1: do okay in snow, but you know they're going to
Speaker 1: come down, and so are all the other animals. And
Speaker 1: so you've basically got a walking refrigerator on the valley
Speaker 1: floor below you that you can see from miles away.
Speaker 1: You've got ample stone, you've water. Why not just park
Speaker 1: yourself here at eight thousand feet in the rockies. So
Speaker 1: my thinking, you know, coming trying to freeze your butt.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, but um, these folks knew what they were
Speaker 1: in for, because they clearly this wasn't a case where
Speaker 1: they kind of came in the summer they were hunting
Speaker 1: and oh the first snowfall, we're stuck here. They knew
Speaker 1: exactly what they were doing. They found one of the
Speaker 1: most ideal spots in that entire basin to set up
Speaker 1: their winter camp and stayed there through the winter. Have
Speaker 1: you guys found any funnel remains at all. There's the
Speaker 1: you know, there's a beautiful theory killed by a horrible fact.
Speaker 1: The fact is is that we we haven't found anything
Speaker 1: to empirically demonstrate. And this is the frustrating part of
Speaker 1: that whole project to found to find anything that would
Speaker 1: clearly and securely confirmed that this was a winter occupation.
Speaker 1: It's just not there. We found thirty four thousand bones,
Speaker 1: scraps of which are no bigger than your thumbnail. Because
Speaker 1: this is a very cold environment. It's a very harsh environment.
Speaker 1: You've got a lot of freeze, thraw and cracking, and
Speaker 1: you know, bone just doesn't preserve. And that's the problem
Speaker 1: as an interesting shed hunting observation in areas like that
Speaker 1: high elevation, serious exposure, find a lot of cracked antler yep,
Speaker 1: goes quick. Yeah, like the the that freeze thaw and
Speaker 1: and how hot the sun gets on those south facing slopes.
Speaker 1: The brown antlier once it falls off cracks. What critters
Speaker 1: besides elk and bison or you finding bones of up there, Well,
Speaker 1: mostly it's just elk and bison because the larger mammals,
Speaker 1: you know, you're gonna get more option or opportunity or
Speaker 1: likelihood of getting their bones preserved. We the largest chunk
Speaker 1: that we got was a distal tibia of a bison. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it was just a chunk of the distal tibia,
Speaker 1: so you know, the lower leg bone larger of the two. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that was you know, that piece was maybe just
Speaker 1: a couple of inches uh in length. So we did
Speaker 1: find some fetal bone, which we thought, okay, so maybe
Speaker 1: we had they killed an arch or whatever exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: but when we radiocarbon dated it, it wasn't fulsome in age. Uh.
Speaker 1: Have you been able to radio carbon date any of
Speaker 1: the bone? Oh? Yeah, no, the bison bone that was
Speaker 1: large enough. Yeah. Absolutely. Now we have we have really
Speaker 1: good solid radio carbon ages on that site. Uh. And
Speaker 1: as I said, it's about twelve four and it's there's
Speaker 1: fulsome points all over the place. We have over a
Speaker 1: hundred of them. Any nice ones? Oh yeah, are they
Speaker 1: in your book? Um? Well, yeah, like pictures of them.
Speaker 1: My kid just got a shark book or like if
Speaker 1: they're like reading want that school. He got a book
Speaker 1: about sharks that came with two shark teeth. Well in
Speaker 1: a little plastic container setting foam built into the cover
Speaker 1: of the book. Now, if you sold that book with
Speaker 1: the point the falsome point, well I don't. Yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: but I don't have a hundred books to sell and
Speaker 1: i'd have to charge for each. I feel like, you
Speaker 1: get it, your reputation destroyed. Well, I do have co authors,
Speaker 1: so I just point to them. So why why did
Speaker 1: you guys think of that? Um? So, yeah, no, it's uh,
Speaker 1: but this getting back to the fulsome story, right. I
Speaker 1: was convinced. I was convinced that these guys, I want
Speaker 1: to get back to the points for a minute. Okay,
Speaker 1: are the points um in the houses, like out front
Speaker 1: of the doors, just kind of everywhere? Well, one of
Speaker 1: the houses has a lot of them, and I think
Speaker 1: that that's you know, we had a bunch of folks
Speaker 1: kind of sitting around, this is winner. What are you
Speaker 1: gonna do. You're gonna gear up, You're gonna get ready
Speaker 1: for the hunt. And so they were making a lot
Speaker 1: of points. And the really interesting thing that we found
Speaker 1: were one of the really interesting things that we found
Speaker 1: was a point that had been made at the site.
Speaker 1: And we know it was made at the site because
Speaker 1: we found the channel flake. The channel flake is the
Speaker 1: flake that is from the flute that you remove from
Speaker 1: the face of a falsome point, which makes you a
Speaker 1: hell of a flint napper. Right, that's still of the
Speaker 1: time it's going to fail. So if you get that
Speaker 1: pinnacle moment and yeah they break, well, you know, you
Speaker 1: invest forty five minutes and something, and then what's the
Speaker 1: next to last thing that you do. You flute it
Speaker 1: where you have a failure risk. What were they thinking? Anyway?
Speaker 1: So we find um a point, and then find a
Speaker 1: point base from a clearly at a point that it's
Speaker 1: snapped in half and had been brought back to the site.
Speaker 1: It refit to that channel flake, which meant that they Okay,
Speaker 1: you make a point, you leave a certain amount of
Speaker 1: debris behind, including channel flakes. You attach that point to
Speaker 1: a spear, You go down down slope down a thousand feet,
Speaker 1: you go out onto the basin floor, you kill an animal,
Speaker 1: You bring back your busted spear, you unwrap it from
Speaker 1: its half, the thing that mounts it to the spear,
Speaker 1: and you just you know, sort of discard the base
Speaker 1: of the point right there, and then ten thousand radio
Speaker 1: carbon years later we come along and we refit that
Speaker 1: channel flake to the point. There's the story. The story
Speaker 1: is is that they made it here, used it on
Speaker 1: the floor, brought it back right. So you know, they
Speaker 1: were basically just hanging around the basic the tip was
Speaker 1: probably sticking in an animal somewhere and got lost forever.
Speaker 1: You know what I would do if I was an anthropologists,
Speaker 1: I would find I'd go down to the folsome site
Speaker 1: m hm, and I'd find some channel flake that matches
Speaker 1: one at your news site, and I would tell everybody
Speaker 1: how that was those guys and that's where they went.
Speaker 1: You know what. I was so tempted. I was so
Speaker 1: tempted to connect the two dots um, except they're um,
Speaker 1: they're different ages. How far a part of it? Um?
Speaker 1: Less than a century? But less than a century? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they might very well have known people. Well, you know
Speaker 1: that's entirely possible, because you know, there were a few
Speaker 1: enough of those folks out there on the landscape. How many,
Speaker 1: like how few do you think? I know you can't say,
Speaker 1: but like, let's give me a plausible idea of how few,
Speaker 1: Like if you were in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana
Speaker 1: and there's only one source of stone. Just to clear
Speaker 1: this up, there's only one source of stone at the
Speaker 1: Gunnison site. Um, okay, so no outside that, that's there's
Speaker 1: an interesting story. And then I'm gonna try and ignore
Speaker 1: Steve's question because I don't know the answer, so help
Speaker 1: me not come back. But there has to be there
Speaker 1: has to be a framework. I'll give you, give me
Speaker 1: the framework to answer Steve's question, and then I'll get
Speaker 1: back because there's stone moving around that could be independent
Speaker 1: of the people because of overlapping groups. And absolutely here's
Speaker 1: your question. Here's the answer to your question. We actually
Speaker 1: know a lot more about population than we did the
Speaker 1: last time I talked to you. And the reason is
Speaker 1: is that UH continue to work on ancient DNA and
Speaker 1: genetics is giving us a much better picture of population
Speaker 1: history and demography. And one of the things that's come
Speaker 1: out in just the last couple of years is that
Speaker 1: populations as soon as they got into the America's boomed
Speaker 1: a sixtyfold increase over about a three thousand year period.
Speaker 1: Now that doesn't give you absolute numbers. You know, how
Speaker 1: many did they start with? Did they start with a hundred,
Speaker 1: did they start with a thousand? We have no idea.
Speaker 1: What we do know is that the rate of population
Speaker 1: increase was spectacularly high. This might have been sort of
Speaker 1: one of the biggest population booms ever in human prehistory,
Speaker 1: which basically means that when people got here, this was
Speaker 1: a rich environment in which they were highly suc It
Speaker 1: was the honeyhole. There you go. You know, you you
Speaker 1: crossed all of your you're, you're It's like you're getting
Speaker 1: an opportunity to come in and, um pick over things
Speaker 1: that have never been picked over. Well, not only it
Speaker 1: was like oysters, Like here's an oyster bed, it's never
Speaker 1: been picked over. Well, let's let's talk about large mammals.
Speaker 1: They've never seen a two legged predator. Now, they're not stupid,
Speaker 1: they're going to pretty quickly figure it out that you're
Speaker 1: bad news. Okay, But those first couple of times when
Speaker 1: you rock ride up to him and whack them on
Speaker 1: the head. You know, this is like those stories. I mean,
Speaker 1: we have examples of this because in more we have
Speaker 1: like very um elaborate descriptions of people arriving on remote
Speaker 1: islands they had never been inhabited, and they literally walk around,
Speaker 1: um oftentimes to the point where it's all gone pretty soon,
Speaker 1: walk around clubbing everything to death. Well your oyster example too, right,
Speaker 1: there's descriptions of like and re oyster is the size
Speaker 1: of your hand like an outstretched you know, absolutely yeah,
Speaker 1: and the chest peak Bay. There's historical studies that show
Speaker 1: there's this massive shrinkage of oysters because of overharvesting over
Speaker 1: the years. But to your question, cal about the stone, Um,
Speaker 1: they did in fact bring in outside stone to the
Speaker 1: gun of Some site. Yeah. So presumably when they first
Speaker 1: showed up they had material that they'd collected elsewhere. But
Speaker 1: then once you're sort of in that basin, over the
Speaker 1: course of the winter, your stone is gonna get used up.
Speaker 1: But fortunately they had access to really high quality court site.
Speaker 1: Now I should explain court site is not you know,
Speaker 1: sort of your favored fulsome stone making or tool making
Speaker 1: materials Church cal Sdney Jaspers, and you know, these folks
Speaker 1: went for the good stuff. Uh. And they certainly did
Speaker 1: at the Fulsome site. But here in Gunnison they were
Speaker 1: making points out of court site, um, which was high
Speaker 1: quality court site, and so they were very adept at it.
Speaker 1: But they had an unlimited supply. So again this gets too.
Speaker 1: If you're gonna hunker down for a long period of time,
Speaker 1: you want food, you want water, you want stone. They
Speaker 1: had all three, and it just so happens that they're
Speaker 1: on top of this mountain in the Rockies where it's
Speaker 1: one of the coldest places in North America now and
Speaker 1: probably was one of the coldest places in North America then.
Speaker 1: But they did just fine. Do you might walking through
Speaker 1: a uh, this is on Cow's stone question, do you
Speaker 1: might walking through a plausible explanation of how in what
Speaker 1: form stone was transported? Because I've seen these references to
Speaker 1: um cores and by faces and things. That's a good Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that, that's good. Yeah. So uh, euro pedestrian
Speaker 1: hunter gather you don't really have a lot of beasts
Speaker 1: of burden. Um, the best you've got is a dog,
Speaker 1: and you can load a bunch of stuff on dogs.
Speaker 1: You could load just tons of stuff on Karn's Newfoundland
Speaker 1: out there, but these dogs were probably not that large. Um.
Speaker 1: Just in case you big needs. This is a beautiful
Speaker 1: seg by the way, beautiful segue. Well I knew where
Speaker 1: we were going. I didn't need Korean's script. David. So, Um,
Speaker 1: you're a hunter gatherer, right, you go to the you
Speaker 1: go to these outcrops and there's just a big, massive
Speaker 1: blocks of stuff you're not going to slip one of
Speaker 1: those things across the landscape a because well you held
Speaker 1: your arms out. But an outcrop is I mean it
Speaker 1: could be like a car sized out crop. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I have good stone. I've been to I've
Speaker 1: been to Alibates and actually on the other side of
Speaker 1: the river from the National Monument on on a private
Speaker 1: ranch where I literally saw a block of Alibates the
Speaker 1: size of the pickup truck just peer like could take
Speaker 1: the whole thing and make it. You can make tens
Speaker 1: of thousands and then sell them with that book that
Speaker 1: you know you want to publish. Yeah. Um, so what
Speaker 1: you're gonna do and and not just the weight and
Speaker 1: the size, you also want to get the quality. So
Speaker 1: you're gonna spend a little bit of time at the outcrop,
Speaker 1: You're gonna spend a little bit of time at the quarry,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna fashion. Um, you're gonna reduce the stone
Speaker 1: into manageable packages for carrying. And oftentimes what you're producing
Speaker 1: is kind of a large platter like thing which um
Speaker 1: is easily transported. You put it in a bag, a
Speaker 1: leather bag or whatever. And we know this because oftentimes
Speaker 1: if we occasionally find these things. Oftentimes we'll see that
Speaker 1: the flake scars have been rubbed and they're polished, and
Speaker 1: it's because they were in a bag with something else
Speaker 1: a braiding them. In essence, you can take that large
Speaker 1: platter of stone and you can turn it into anything
Speaker 1: you want, right, So it's an easily transportable form. It's
Speaker 1: reduced the weight. You know, it's good stone, and it
Speaker 1: can be morphed into whatever particular tool that you need.
Speaker 1: So you don't necessarily want to go to the quarry
Speaker 1: and make really highly specific Okay, a gonna need three
Speaker 1: end scrapers, so I'm gonna make them now, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: need for that's all you're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 1: why not just take something that you can turn in
Speaker 1: into a number of other different things. And that's probably
Speaker 1: how they were transporting stuff. And that's called a core. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the core is basically the stone from which you
Speaker 1: are making other tools. And you guys will find cores
Speaker 1: now and then oh yeah um and in fact um,
Speaker 1: in the case of Mountaineer, we do find court site cores.
Speaker 1: What we don't find is cortex, and and don't sort
Speaker 1: of associate core with cortex. Cortex is simply the outer
Speaker 1: rind of a block of stone, so when it's been weathered, Um,
Speaker 1: it'll get that. Yeah, okay, well there's a word for
Speaker 1: that though, right. Cortex is the word c O R
Speaker 1: T E X another like I want to get that
Speaker 1: kind of man, there's a it'll come to you. It'll
Speaker 1: come to you. Um, we don't find any cortex, which
Speaker 1: means that they you know, they went to the source,
Speaker 1: they got a cobble, They busted open the cobble. They
Speaker 1: could see the good stuff inside, so they removed all
Speaker 1: the junk and then they just carried it back to
Speaker 1: the site and then they used that to make blades
Speaker 1: or scrapers or whatever. And you're not finding the outer
Speaker 1: nasty correct Correctly, they were coming. Yeah, they were coming
Speaker 1: into that place with with stuff that was ready to
Speaker 1: ready to work with. Again, this gets back to your
Speaker 1: thousand feet above the valley floor. The stone sources are
Speaker 1: on the valley floor. Why carry extra weight? I mean,
Speaker 1: I can tell you when we were working there, we
Speaker 1: would occasionally hike up to the top or run down
Speaker 1: from the top to the bottom just to see. That
Speaker 1: was back when my knees worked and I could go
Speaker 1: from you know, hiking to the top would take you know,
Speaker 1: you're at eight hundred eight thousand feet or so, it
Speaker 1: would take about half an hour, uh to sort of
Speaker 1: make your way up the mountain. I could get down
Speaker 1: in fifteen minutes running, so, uh, you can, you can
Speaker 1: make that trip pretty quickly. Now, of course, if there's
Speaker 1: snow on the ground, it's going to be longer and
Speaker 1: everything like that. But they probably had snowshoes, they probably
Speaker 1: had something that they could get around in the snow.
Speaker 1: But we also know that in another area of that
Speaker 1: Mesa top there was a summer occupation, or what we
Speaker 1: interpret as a summer occupation. It's very close to the
Speaker 1: edge of the Mesa and we have um a bunch
Speaker 1: of um busted up, used up projectile points. I think
Speaker 1: we had hunters sitting on the edge, watching the valley
Speaker 1: floor below and retooling their weaponry and just you know,
Speaker 1: kind of watching to see who's walking by. You know,
Speaker 1: there's cows, you know, they the runway for the Gunnison
Speaker 1: Crest Debut Airport is right below you, but just off
Speaker 1: to the side there, Uh, somebody's got a bunch of
Speaker 1: cows on the field, and so you know, I could
Speaker 1: sit up there from a thousand feet away and yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I can count the number of animals that are down
Speaker 1: there on the ground. It was a perfect vantage point
Speaker 1: and it turns out a great place to spend the
Speaker 1: wind or because you had everything you needed. Did you
Speaker 1: guys find any kind of thing that represents UM weapon
Speaker 1: types besides stone? Any kind of uh other would besides
Speaker 1: the remnants of the tent poles? No? No, And it's
Speaker 1: too harsh. It's just too harsh. And the thing is,
Speaker 1: where you do have sites UM in in northern Mexico,
Speaker 1: they're they're dry where the climate has been very, very
Speaker 1: dry for a long time, you've got good preservation. And
Speaker 1: when you have sites like that, and there was a
Speaker 1: study done in one of these sites, there's something like
Speaker 1: for every single item made out of stone, there's twenty
Speaker 1: different things made out of wood or bone. And that's
Speaker 1: just giving you the ratio of how much you're not
Speaker 1: seeing in these sites because the only thing that's preserving
Speaker 1: is stone and the occasional bits of bone. What's what's
Speaker 1: like the most interesting source material you've come across that
Speaker 1: they grabbed some sort of rock and made tools out
Speaker 1: of it, Like when I look at it back light,
Speaker 1: I found a few of I'm like, man, that would
Speaker 1: be perfect. It's um like an extinct squid species leaves
Speaker 1: behind what looks like a female right. Yeah, we're like
Speaker 1: a like a piece of petrified would Um. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: they have there's a there's a material up there that
Speaker 1: we haven't quite figured out. It's called opal c t.
Speaker 1: It's an opal light and it occurs in little tiny bits.
Speaker 1: Presumably it occurred in much larger blocks, and it's in
Speaker 1: and around these houses. It has no obvious functional purpose
Speaker 1: that we've been able to discern. Um. We don't know
Speaker 1: where it comes from. It's not native to the top
Speaker 1: of that mesa, but clearly somebody hauled it up on
Speaker 1: top of there, and we have no idea why or
Speaker 1: what its purpose was. You know, at first I thought
Speaker 1: it was maybe some sort of pigment type thing, but
Speaker 1: that's not necessarily the case. So I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a puzzle to us. Um. We know it's there,
Speaker 1: but we don't know why. In your dealings with anthropology
Speaker 1: and antiquities in the American Southwest, do you ever crossed
Speaker 1: paths with forest fend We did a whole podcast on
Speaker 1: him once there's some interest in this room about him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know. Forest, of of course, just recently passed away.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, um Forest. Forest was indeed a character, a
Speaker 1: very interesting character, and um was very supportive of archaeology,
Speaker 1: but also arguably um across some lines if you will. Uh. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Forest basically I think purchased a pueblo and then you know,
Speaker 1: had it excavated. Um, but he had um professional archaeologists
Speaker 1: excavating it. So it's it's kind of a it's there's
Speaker 1: a lot of ambiguity around Forest. I liked Forest. He
Speaker 1: was a very interesting character. UM. So yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: a great question, like where like how do you in
Speaker 1: in current times like decide on when to excavate something
Speaker 1: like what what are the factors now? Because it used
Speaker 1: to be like, oh, here's a site, We're gonna dig
Speaker 1: it up and find out everything there is to know.
Speaker 1: But now there's a mindset of like, great, we know
Speaker 1: there's a site here, Um, we know of other sites
Speaker 1: in the general area. We can draw a lot of conclusions.
Speaker 1: The most preserved we can make this site is to
Speaker 1: not dig it up. Well, that's right, and the reality is,
Speaker 1: of course is that nobody's making ten thousand year old
Speaker 1: sits anymore. Right, they're gone their finite Um, are there
Speaker 1: more out there? Yeah? Probably? Uh do we need to
Speaker 1: continue to dig them? Well, it really all depends if
Speaker 1: you know about that time period, you know about that region.
Speaker 1: What's the point of digging yet an other fulsome site,
Speaker 1: for example, because you might find a body and there's
Speaker 1: not many bodies. Well, that gets us into a very
Speaker 1: different set of ethical questions, right Na, Yeah, sorry, Steve Um, Look,
Speaker 1: I'm well, okay, let's we'll get to that in a sect. Well,
Speaker 1: it's just it's a great question. Yeah right, No, so um,
Speaker 1: there are sites that I have excavated that I haven't
Speaker 1: fully excavated save a chunk, save a chunk. Well, Fulsome
Speaker 1: is the best example. Right. There's a certain point when
Speaker 1: you're doing excavation and analysis that you sort of hit
Speaker 1: the point of redundancy. You've learned a whole bunch, but
Speaker 1: the further and more you dig, you're not really learning
Speaker 1: that much more. At that point you should stop because
Speaker 1: at that point, all you're doing is adding to the
Speaker 1: collection that you don't really need because it's not telling
Speaker 1: you anything new. On the other hand, somebody could come
Speaker 1: along to fulsome seventy years after me, as I came
Speaker 1: along seventy years after the first excavation, and I learned
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot that they didn't learn because well,
Speaker 1: they were just paleontologists hauling bison bones out of the ground. Right,
Speaker 1: So if I leave a chunk of that there and
Speaker 1: I did, somebody coming along seventy years later can figure
Speaker 1: out all the things that I did wrong because the
Speaker 1: questions and they might have better, they might different questions,
Speaker 1: just as I did after the first one. Um Neanderthal
Speaker 1: A Right, it's like we can't like it seems like
Speaker 1: it's monthly at this point, there's some new thing about Neandertal.
Speaker 1: It's all. It's all the genetics, it's all the ancient DNA.
Speaker 1: But to Steve's question about a body, so um, we've
Speaker 1: learned a tremendous amount about human population history of the
Speaker 1: America's in literally just the last seven years, because it
Speaker 1: was just seven years ago that ESK. Wheeler Slives group
Speaker 1: of which I'm a part of, UH provided the first
Speaker 1: sequence of a Clovis individual. So we have a genome
Speaker 1: of a Clovis person from the antics in that oh yeah,
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, because that boy's name is zik One, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's near will Sall, how far as will saw
Speaker 1: from here far? So in that seven years, we've sequenced
Speaker 1: and other labs have as well a number of ancient genomes.
Speaker 1: And these are things that I mean, look, there's a
Speaker 1: lot I can learn as an archaeologist. I can learn
Speaker 1: about what people hunted. I can learn about how far
Speaker 1: they traveled across the landscape. I can learn about how
Speaker 1: they responded to different environments, how they were impacted by
Speaker 1: different environments, what their impacts were on different environments. The
Speaker 1: one thing I can't do as an archaeologist is population history.
Speaker 1: If you've got an artifact over you know, in this
Speaker 1: site over here, and I've got an artifact in that
Speaker 1: side over here, and they kind of look alike, we
Speaker 1: might want to say, oh, well, they're part of the
Speaker 1: same population, But we would have no idea, right because
Speaker 1: artifacts can look alike for a variety of reasons, not
Speaker 1: necessarily just because they're historically related. If you've got a
Speaker 1: genome and I've got a genome, I can tell you
Speaker 1: precisely how closely they're related. I can look at I
Speaker 1: can look at patterns of admixture. You know, we know
Speaker 1: when different groups got together because we see gene flow,
Speaker 1: just as all of us have a bit of neandertal
Speaker 1: DNA and US, right, so we know there was well
Speaker 1: sex between early modern humans and neandertals. So yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount to be learned from ancient skeletons. The
Speaker 1: flip side is there's some ethical issues and concerns when
Speaker 1: you're doing genetic research with populations, regardless of you know,
Speaker 1: sort of where they are and who they are. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a certain amount of protocols that you know,
Speaker 1: one goes through to get permission to do genetic research
Speaker 1: because you can learn a lot, not all of it good,
Speaker 1: about a population. It's a particularly challenging issue here in
Speaker 1: the Americas because the relationship between the indigenous Native American
Speaker 1: communities and the scientific communities have not always been good
Speaker 1: because you know, on the scientific side, we have a
Speaker 1: lot of sins to atone for you know, for the
Speaker 1: first hundred or two hundred fifty years of anthropology, we
Speaker 1: have anthropologists, you know, having skulls sent to them from
Speaker 1: Native American um battle sites right where the U. S.
Speaker 1: Army would go in and just sort of gather up
Speaker 1: a bunch of the heads and shipping back to Washington.
Speaker 1: Uh So there's a long and kind of sorted and
Speaker 1: unfortunate history in the relationship between Native Americans and you know,
Speaker 1: the scientific community and getting into genes, getting into d
Speaker 1: n A is a particularly invasives the wrong word, but
Speaker 1: it can be viewed in that way. It can be
Speaker 1: you as a contradictory, right. Well, I mean what it
Speaker 1: is is it's you know, it's taking your essence, it's
Speaker 1: taking your d n A. And I know a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of people are concerned about, well, how
Speaker 1: much do people know about me from my genes? How
Speaker 1: much do they know about me from my d n A?
Speaker 1: And so you a hatch that to this sort of
Speaker 1: difficult history between the scientific community in the Native American
Speaker 1: community and their feelings about their DNA being part of
Speaker 1: somebody else's study. You know, we understand our history. We
Speaker 1: don't necessarily need you telling us stories about who we
Speaker 1: are and where we come from. I think you'd be
Speaker 1: able to speak to this better me. But there's also
Speaker 1: an issue of of defending a narrative against people who
Speaker 1: want to like un see a narrative like if you
Speaker 1: remember with kennewick Man, some guy took a look at
Speaker 1: the nine thousand year old school that comes out of
Speaker 1: the Columbia, right, He's like, Hi, that looks like a
Speaker 1: European to me. Yeah, I got a white guy with
Speaker 1: a spear point in him. That's exactly what. And then
Speaker 1: you're like, guess the first Americans weren't who we thought
Speaker 1: exactly well, in fact, good old Europeans it was. It
Speaker 1: was Esky's group. It was our group that in fact
Speaker 1: sequence the kind of wig genome, and we showed that
Speaker 1: in fact, he's native American through and through. Okay, so
Speaker 1: it's a and you know, we always ask permission to
Speaker 1: get a genetic example from the living, But how do
Speaker 1: you how do you deal with the dead? Would imagine
Speaker 1: if you're talking about something that's twelve thousand years old,
Speaker 1: I don't know that someone has a real legitimate claim
Speaker 1: on that. Well, now see, there's a really interesting would
Speaker 1: be interesting for me to go and and and argue that. Uh,
Speaker 1: for me to for me to take offense about excavations
Speaker 1: of Italians in Italy that were from even a thousand
Speaker 1: years ago would be a stretch for me to act
Speaker 1: like I had input on that. But my ancestors are
Speaker 1: you know, some of my ancestors are from Sicily, So
Speaker 1: is that my business? If you're looking at something that's
Speaker 1: twelve tho years old, you're looking at groups that no
Speaker 1: doubt went through radical migrations, influxes of new people. Because
Speaker 1: someone's in Colorado now, or if someone's standing in Colorado
Speaker 1: twelve years ago, I think it'd be a pretty dubious
Speaker 1: assumption to say that that became the Northern Cheyenne or
Speaker 1: the you like, who knows, well, so, um, somebody twelve
Speaker 1: thousand years ago could have no answer, no ascendants at all,
Speaker 1: or they could have thousands, and we won't know unless
Speaker 1: we basically do the sort of before and after Florida
Speaker 1: exactly right. And and so the question also becomes, at
Speaker 1: what point, when you go back into the past, does
Speaker 1: something stop being tribal and just become human? Right? You
Speaker 1: know that this is in a sense, I don't know where,
Speaker 1: but I feel like that happened at twelve tho years ago.
Speaker 1: I don't I wouldn't want to be the guy that
Speaker 1: picks the number, but to me that look at the
Speaker 1: histories right, like Aboriginal oral histories Australia. They you know,
Speaker 1: they have this case of being able to talk about
Speaker 1: their history for thousands and thousands of years right, without question,
Speaker 1: without question. Oral history is remarkably uh strong, back to
Speaker 1: a certain point you know where you're you know, at
Speaker 1: that point you're just sort of getting the distant echoes
Speaker 1: and you know, how how valid is that are how
Speaker 1: reliable is it? The all of this is now sort
Speaker 1: of part and parcel of um NAGPRA, which is the
Speaker 1: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which was intended
Speaker 1: to write a lot of those wrongs by saying that
Speaker 1: human skeletal material, which is simply sitting in boxes in
Speaker 1: museums and universities, needs to be returned to the descendant communities.
Speaker 1: And how do you determine lineal descent, you know, over
Speaker 1: thousands just based on geography. Well, it's based on about
Speaker 1: ten different criteria, of which geography is one of them.
Speaker 1: And that's what made Kennewick so problematic was that here
Speaker 1: you've got an ancient individual who's talk about tell people
Speaker 1: what is okay. So kenna Wick was a human skeleton
Speaker 1: found in nine six on the banks of the Columbia
Speaker 1: River fourth of July or something, right, Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: the speedboat races that they have um on the Columbia
Speaker 1: and a couple of guys, a couple of twenties some things.
Speaker 1: We're trying to sneak in to watch the boat races.
Speaker 1: So they were walking along the river bank and they
Speaker 1: were going to climb the fence and get into the
Speaker 1: area to watch the races, and you know, one of
Speaker 1: them stepped on some of the bones. So they call
Speaker 1: in the corners. Right away, You're thinking it's a murder victim.
Speaker 1: Well exactly, So they called the coroner, and the coroner
Speaker 1: comes out there with um, a local archaeologist forensic anthropologist
Speaker 1: named Well. So he was already thinking this could be
Speaker 1: not but recently, this could not be a recent murderer.
Speaker 1: I think. I think what they what they would often
Speaker 1: do is turn the bones over to him and say,
Speaker 1: you know, tell us a story about how this person died. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so that's when he discovered the stone point, and
Speaker 1: then they radiocarbon dated it. That's when he gave the
Speaker 1: quote to the New York Times that said, I've got
Speaker 1: a white guy with a stone point in them because
Speaker 1: based on his look at the skull. It looked like
Speaker 1: a European. Isn't that called cranial morphology or something that's
Speaker 1: not even in the next step New York Times. It's undisciplined,
Speaker 1: is what it is? That that that whole that whole
Speaker 1: school thought about measuring relative These relative measurements on your
Speaker 1: skull very problematic, very problematic, because you know, the skull
Speaker 1: is incredibly plastic in an anatomical sense. It just it
Speaker 1: morphs over time and in very complex ways. Anyway, so
Speaker 1: they get a radio carbon date back on it, and
Speaker 1: suddenly you know, you've got a European on the banks
Speaker 1: of the Columbia. Excuse me, it's hard not to get
Speaker 1: cocked up about the banks of the Columbia. UM. They've
Speaker 1: got somebody here, UM who's not Native American. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: that that triggered a long running lawsuit several million dollars
Speaker 1: of you know, US tax dollars because the banks of
Speaker 1: the Columbia were controlled by UM Army Corps of Engineers,
Speaker 1: Department of Interior, you know, sort of picked up a
Speaker 1: portion of the U. The lawsuit bringing in their archaeologists.
Speaker 1: The long and short of it is is that the
Speaker 1: UM it went into the court and then into appeals court,
Speaker 1: and they said that, well, this isn't an end of
Speaker 1: American because it doesn't look one, and because it's that old. Well, um,
Speaker 1: so they did this analysis um of the skeletal material.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, we're into a weird um semantics thing,
Speaker 1: but this doesn't Let's let's say that had been true,
Speaker 1: they would draw into question what is a Native American?
Speaker 1: M Yeah, well what they what they decided was that
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't and therefore NAG he wasn't and
Speaker 1: therefore NAG did not apply. So just based on just
Speaker 1: based on the appearance of the skull mhm, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: problematic science. And so Kennewick hit nagper right where it's
Speaker 1: weakest for just the reasons that you brought up a
Speaker 1: few moments ago. At that antiquity, how can you tell
Speaker 1: if in in in what way he's related. So one
Speaker 1: of the things that's come about in the last years
Speaker 1: since then is that NAGPRA now pays more attention to um.
Speaker 1: If you can't sort of determine lineal descent, then who
Speaker 1: were the tribes that live in the region, right? Uh?
Speaker 1: And so it's but we were able. We obtained a
Speaker 1: piece of a fingerbone of Kennewick. And this is Eski's team.
Speaker 1: I'm just the archaeologist with him, so I kind of
Speaker 1: provide the context and they do all the really heavy
Speaker 1: lifting in terms of the genetic work. And we were able,
Speaker 1: fortunately to obtain DNA samples from a number of the
Speaker 1: Callville tribe, the Confederated Tribe Callville, and they provided DNA
Speaker 1: samples that made it possible to sort of look at
Speaker 1: Kennewick relative to one of the tribes. In the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 1: There were five tribes that had claimed Kennewick as a
Speaker 1: potential ancestor of theirs. So we did our sequencing, we
Speaker 1: produced our results, UM and it was a really interesting UM,
Speaker 1: a really interesting event because we published the paper in
Speaker 1: Nature in two thousand fifteen, major scientific journal, and they
Speaker 1: wanted to do a press conference because kind of Wei
Speaker 1: had been so controversial. They said, you know, we should
Speaker 1: really do a big announcement. And Eski called me and
Speaker 1: he said, We're going to do a press conference in London,
Speaker 1: and I said, nobody in London cares. Let's do it
Speaker 1: in Seattle. And so we did. Uh. And so that summer.
Speaker 1: I was I was in the field somewhere and I
Speaker 1: just got on a plane, went to Seattle, met up
Speaker 1: with Sky and Morton Rasmussen, who had done a lot
Speaker 1: of the work, and a number of the representatives of
Speaker 1: each of the five tribes showed up. We um, we
Speaker 1: gave our results, and one of the reporters at the
Speaker 1: time in the room said, well, what are the what
Speaker 1: are the tribes think? And Eski said, well, you've got
Speaker 1: representatives of them here, why don't you just ask and
Speaker 1: and after another representative each of the five tribes got
Speaker 1: up and talked about what it meant to have Kennewick
Speaker 1: shown to be a Native American. And it was really profound.
Speaker 1: I mean, we just gave the results. They gave the results,
Speaker 1: meaning they were able to say, look, you know, we
Speaker 1: felt very strongly about this from the get go that
Speaker 1: Kennewick was a Native American. We've been deeply unhappy and
Speaker 1: in fact resentful of all of the stuff that's been
Speaker 1: surrounding Kennewick, the lawsuit and everything like that. Um, they
Speaker 1: didn't appreciate, well, that's harsh. They wished it hadn't had
Speaker 1: to come to you know, all of the science and
Speaker 1: the genetics and everything like that, because they felt they
Speaker 1: understood what the answer was all along, but they were
Speaker 1: at least glad for that. So our results were obviously published.
Speaker 1: Um the uh the results were then checked by a
Speaker 1: group at the University of Chicago, and things just snowballed
Speaker 1: right after that. UM, I think the Senator from Washington
Speaker 1: put in a piece of legislation that said, Okay, it's done.
Speaker 1: Kennewick has been out of the ground long enough. It's
Speaker 1: time for him to be returned to the tribes and reburied.
Speaker 1: And uh. President Obama signed the legislation and literally Kennewick.
Speaker 1: A funny side note at the at the news conference,
Speaker 1: the reporter when the tribe said, we've agreed, as even
Speaker 1: though we we have our differences among the five of us,
Speaker 1: we've agreed that we're going to jointly rebury Kennewick, and
Speaker 1: one of the reporters said, where are you going to
Speaker 1: rebury it? I thought, do you really think they're gonna
Speaker 1: tell you after all of this, they're gonna tell you
Speaker 1: so that you can go look. Uh No, they said, no,
Speaker 1: well we're gonna this will be a private ceremony. So
Speaker 1: was there um, what was what was learned from the
Speaker 1: from the genetic sequencing of Kennewick, Well, in the comparison
Speaker 1: with with with indigenous groups that know what, the indigenous
Speaker 1: groups that provided samples. Okay, so what we learned was
Speaker 1: Kennewick is or was a part of a population that
Speaker 1: was ancestral to these populations. Could we draw a direct
Speaker 1: ancestry line. No, we could not. We would need a
Speaker 1: hell a lot more modern day samples to sort of
Speaker 1: figure out. So that didn't preclude other groups being related
Speaker 1: to Kennewick, but it showed that at least the tribe
Speaker 1: that provided the samples was in some fashion related to Kennewick,
Speaker 1: more related than someone in Coastal Alaska. We don't know.
Speaker 1: We don't have a we don't have a genome from
Speaker 1: coastal Alaska. Uh yeah, But the key thing was was
Speaker 1: unequivocally Native American, despite what his head shape was. Uh
Speaker 1: So get into anzik mhm, like talking about who like
Speaker 1: the specimen anzick one. So an zick Um was a
Speaker 1: really important study because what it showed us for the
Speaker 1: first time was that the Native American population, the ancestral
Speaker 1: Native American population that came into the America's got south
Speaker 1: of the big continental ice sheets, soon thereafter split into
Speaker 1: two major lineages. One of the lineages stayed up north
Speaker 1: and the other made it all the way to Tierra
Speaker 1: del Fuego. We call those Northern Native Americans and Southern
Speaker 1: Native Americans. And Anzick is actually a Southern Native American,
Speaker 1: even though of course he's hair in Montana, right. But
Speaker 1: descendants of Anzec make it all the way down through
Speaker 1: the hemisphere and rapidly. We have now genomes from other
Speaker 1: places in North America and a key one in south
Speaker 1: eastern Brazil, which indicate a very close relationship to the
Speaker 1: population of which Anzick was a part. So again this
Speaker 1: gets back to the issue of populations exploding. People doing
Speaker 1: really well. Turns out they're just hoofing it. They're moving
Speaker 1: really great distances and are being very successful at it.
Speaker 1: M HM. Was that that boy was buried with Ochre
Speaker 1: and Clovis points and things. Who holds those Clovis points Now?
Speaker 1: I do not know the answer to that, UM, but
Speaker 1: the individual himself has been reburied MHM. After the study
Speaker 1: Sarah and Zick, who's father I understand was the one
Speaker 1: who discovered it. UM actually was was one of the
Speaker 1: key persons who sort of triggered the re analysis of
Speaker 1: Antick and said, you know, she she felt that, you know,
Speaker 1: we shouldn't just have these bones just sitting around. Let's
Speaker 1: let's let's be done with this. Let's learn what we
Speaker 1: can and then let's rebury. Uh. You have the first
Speaker 1: book I had of years and for men, it sat
Speaker 1: my coffee table for many years. Was your Folsome book.
Speaker 1: I think you did Foalsome first, right in terms of
Speaker 1: your big like popular coffee table books. I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: thought of that as a coffee table book, but I'm
Speaker 1: glad you found room for it on yours. Well by that,
Speaker 1: I mean large format color photography. Yeah, okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the hell is that's that's that
Speaker 1: is a coffee table book. It was all black and
Speaker 1: white pictures. Really, yeah, sorry, it's got a color photo.
Speaker 1: Well that in your memory memories are always in color, right, Steven.
Speaker 1: But yeah, but I have the damn book. Okay, what
Speaker 1: are you called? You described the book to me. It's
Speaker 1: a big gas it's it's a large study of the
Speaker 1: Falsome site. Yeah, not a coffee Oh you're taking insult
Speaker 1: that I called that okay his magnum opus. Sure, and
Speaker 1: then you did. I'm glad you bought the book First
Speaker 1: People in a New Worlds, which which is that its color?
Speaker 1: Now that book, that book lays out the whole damn deal.
Speaker 1: That's the whole damn deal. I mean, it's just the
Speaker 1: title says it all. First People's in a New World
Speaker 1: If you're interested in ice age hunters and clovis and
Speaker 1: killing mammoth or not or not, that's the important This
Speaker 1: is your book. And then a decade went by and
Speaker 1: you had to update it, so you got a new
Speaker 1: one coming out. Well, listen, I had to update. I
Speaker 1: want to get a full signed collection of your well okay, okay, um,
Speaker 1: do you want the fulsome points with him? Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so um. That book was actually almost obsolete as soon
Speaker 1: as it came out First People's in two thousand nine.
Speaker 1: And the reason was in two thousand nine, I could
Speaker 1: see ancient genomes on the horizon. I knew, you know,
Speaker 1: because in those days, the genetic information that we were
Speaker 1: getting was extraordinarily limited. We hadn't quite broken through the
Speaker 1: barrier of getting genome wide data. All we were getting
Speaker 1: were mitochondrial DNA and y chromosome DNA, and just to
Speaker 1: give the really version of it, it's only telling you
Speaker 1: about a single ancestor on your mother's side and your
Speaker 1: father's side. The genome tells you about all the people. Well,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a whole lot of complications to that statement,
Speaker 1: but it tells you about thousands of ancestors that you have,
Speaker 1: whereas mitochondrial and y chromosome DNA only a single ancestor
Speaker 1: a piece. I knew that genome wide studies were coming
Speaker 1: when I was writing First People's I knew that we
Speaker 1: would get ancient DNA, but it was still I mean,
Speaker 1: I didn't know how far off it was in the future. Um,
Speaker 1: But I published the book and literally, you know, the
Speaker 1: book comes out in two thousand nine, in two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: is the first ancient genome published? Yeah? But was anything
Speaker 1: in the book down't? I mean, I haven't read it
Speaker 1: a long time. I mean I read, I read the
Speaker 1: whole damn book. But was anything in there flat out
Speaker 1: contradicted or was it just missing explanation that you would
Speaker 1: have liked to have included? Do you really want me
Speaker 1: to air the dirty laundry and why I had to
Speaker 1: write a new edition And sort of quietly, I guess
Speaker 1: that question was anything in there? Was it just that you,
Speaker 1: let's say you were gonna you were trying to um,
Speaker 1: you're trying to publish the alphabet R A to Z
Speaker 1: and you did A to X perfectly, and then they
Speaker 1: add y and Z and you're like, darn, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do a new one has y and z. Or
Speaker 1: was it that you had the whole alphabet wrong? Well,
Speaker 1: I'd like to think I had most of the alphabet right. Um.
Speaker 1: There were things that um, I have changed and changed
Speaker 1: significantly in the new edition. But the real, uh, the
Speaker 1: real novel parts are the last ten years of the
Speaker 1: genetic work. There's been just a huge amount of information
Speaker 1: that's come out about population history, but there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of changes in other sections about sea level change.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch more sites that have come out there
Speaker 1: as being especially old, sort of so called preclue of
Speaker 1: his sites. UM. So yeah, there's a lot that's new.
Speaker 1: But the real, the real push, the real impetus for
Speaker 1: me to do the new addition was the genetics, because
Speaker 1: I've been heavily involved in that pretty much almost since
Speaker 1: the book came out working with Willerslevski Willerslev and his group.
Speaker 1: So I've been basically I've had a seat at the
Speaker 1: table watching all of this stuff unfold. And so when
Speaker 1: I looked at the book, um, I thought, you know, jeez,
Speaker 1: this is really dated. Uh, and people are getting you know,
Speaker 1: circa two thousand eight when I wrote it the view then,
Speaker 1: and it's just an terribly incomplete We were definitely missing
Speaker 1: Y and Z in the alphabet. What's that book coming out?
Speaker 1: Both of them? So both of them were supposed to
Speaker 1: be out a year or so ago, but as we
Speaker 1: all know, uh, two thousand twenty was the year time
Speaker 1: stood still and nothing happened, um because of the pandemic
Speaker 1: and so everything just ground to a halt. But both
Speaker 1: then will be out one in June. This is the
Speaker 1: Mountaineer Book will be out in June, and the new
Speaker 1: First People's Book will be out in July. Now, why
Speaker 1: did you not roll the Mountaineer information into Oh, there's
Speaker 1: some of it in the First People's Book, so one
Speaker 1: can get a good sense of that site. In the
Speaker 1: First People's Book, did you cover the Cooper's Ferry? Idaho?
Speaker 1: I do, I do? That's the new one. Yeah, oh yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I well, because of the pandemic, um I spent I
Speaker 1: didn't go out in the field. In I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time writing, and I spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time riding, right, you know, because you can only write
Speaker 1: for you know, ten fourteen hours a day, and you
Speaker 1: just got to get on your bicycle and burn thirty
Speaker 1: or forty miles just to sort of do something. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I was actually updating the book because nothing was happening
Speaker 1: with it, so I just kept heading material to it.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure the publisher was all that thrilled. Because
Speaker 1: can I can I squeeze this in? Can I? Can
Speaker 1: I ask you about what what you think of the
Speaker 1: um the stone samples like the possible origin points of
Speaker 1: the stone samples found it at Cooper's Ferry? So one,
Speaker 1: do you want you better explain what you're talking about? Okay? So, um,
Speaker 1: do you mind if I let the doctor? The doctor
Speaker 1: will see you know, So cal Um, I think what
Speaker 1: you're referring to are the projectile points that they argue
Speaker 1: have affinities to ones from northern Japan that you're making. Yeah, ah,
Speaker 1: they never quit do it? Well? Okay, let me let me.
Speaker 1: Let me first start by saying uh, and then the
Speaker 1: other shoe will drop in a minute. Um. The site
Speaker 1: is exquisitely excavated. Uh. Lauren Davis is a terrific archaeologist. UM.
Speaker 1: And the dates on the site, you know, there's been
Speaker 1: some put back on it, but UM, I think that
Speaker 1: site falls in in the range of a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of other sites that we have in the Americas that
Speaker 1: sort of date around fifteen and a half thousand or
Speaker 1: so years ago. Um. It's an old site that that
Speaker 1: part I get old site. Yeah. Well, and and in
Speaker 1: controversial to some people because for for the location, right,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, it could be so old that it
Speaker 1: should be completely under ice A. No, no, no, um,
Speaker 1: not at that point. No. UM. But the UM, Well,
Speaker 1: so you've got this site at fifteen five, You've got
Speaker 1: other sites around that's sort of same chronological ballpark fifteen
Speaker 1: five to fifteen and and it actually matches up pretty
Speaker 1: nicely with the genetic evidence, because we've got genetic evidence
Speaker 1: that we've got these populations splitting out and coming into
Speaker 1: the America's around fifteen and a half or sixteen thousand.
Speaker 1: So we're starting to get actually a really nice consistent
Speaker 1: story about the people in process. The the part where
Speaker 1: I sort of depart from the um. The argument that
Speaker 1: Lauren Davis and colleagues have made is tying it to
Speaker 1: northern Japan and the sort of paleolithic occupation in that
Speaker 1: part of the world. And they're basing it on similarities
Speaker 1: in the projectile points in the spear points. And the
Speaker 1: problematic aspect is, uh, what they've got are some fragmentary
Speaker 1: points there in Idaho, which they say, oh, well, these
Speaker 1: look like, you know, these full blown points, uh, these
Speaker 1: complete points over here in Japan, and they sort of
Speaker 1: make the match by just taking a little tiny fragment
Speaker 1: and kind of putting it on top of one of
Speaker 1: these Japanese points and saying, look, it's the same form. Well,
Speaker 1: you can't do that, right, because that's also the same
Speaker 1: form as a bunch of projectile points in other parts
Speaker 1: of the world at other times as well. If you're
Speaker 1: going to draw a direct link, it's going to be
Speaker 1: And this gets back to what I was saying earlier.
Speaker 1: Population history and identifying whose related to who is not
Speaker 1: something we can do readily with the archaeological record, and
Speaker 1: especially with little fragments of points that you say, Okay,
Speaker 1: well this one matches that. No, it's just a little
Speaker 1: tiny fragment. You know, you can't say that if this
Speaker 1: thing was full blown and complete that it would in
Speaker 1: fact resemble this one over here in Japan thousands of
Speaker 1: miles away, right, And how would you? Maybe it's the
Speaker 1: base of a little doll. Well, that's it, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just a point base or a point tip, and
Speaker 1: point bases and point tips can be pretty damn generic.
Speaker 1: That that being said, do you what do you think about?
Speaker 1: Because also this because of the water access, right, there
Speaker 1: are some conclusions that were kind of drawn as far
Speaker 1: as like people could have gotten here through a coastal migration, right, right,
Speaker 1: and so like early boat use and and in traveling
Speaker 1: some open water in early early boats, like do you
Speaker 1: do hold with any of that? Okay? Okay? Which is
Speaker 1: why I like it? Okay, Well, I'm gonna make you
Speaker 1: a happy guy that it's fun to think about, Okay,
Speaker 1: why I like it? So another another thing that's come
Speaker 1: out of ancient DNA, it's the gift that keeps on giving,
Speaker 1: is that you can extract DNA at a sediment. And
Speaker 1: one of the projects really Steve is looking skeptical here. Well, no,
Speaker 1: I'm just not skeptical surprised. What's in there? Mark? Oh,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't believe a DNA type of term? Yeah, well
Speaker 1: that's that's the sort of accepted scientific term. Um. Sorry, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So what's hiding in there? It's basically anything that shed
Speaker 1: any DNA over that particular quadic vegetation. You name it,
Speaker 1: you name it vegetation. So. Another of the projects that
Speaker 1: I was involved with Eski's group was so the Ice
Speaker 1: Free Corridor. We must have talked about it the last
Speaker 1: time I was here. Oh yeah, I used to be
Speaker 1: a big fan of that thing. Yeah, well we're not
Speaker 1: anymore neither. You go, and well you can't. I like
Speaker 1: a lot of people like, you know, like Whens is
Speaker 1: part of the Red Yeah, that's exactly like this wall
Speaker 1: of ice, right, and he's like badass hunters. This little
Speaker 1: gap cracks through and it come out, and there's just
Speaker 1: the American Great Plains story. It's just it's just not true. Sad,
Speaker 1: isn't it. Um. So, one of the projects that we
Speaker 1: did was Michael Peterson, one of Eski's guys, cored a
Speaker 1: couple of lakes, right, in the dead center of that corridor,
Speaker 1: and the corridor opened like a zipper, a zipper jacket
Speaker 1: that opens from the top and the bottom, So the
Speaker 1: top and the bottom opened earliest, but the middle part
Speaker 1: of the zipper, you know, stay closed. So he got
Speaker 1: a couple of cores from lakes right in that sort
Speaker 1: of un zippered part, right right after it opened. And
Speaker 1: what we found was nothing was living there until around
Speaker 1: twelve thousand, six years ago. So even if you round
Speaker 1: up we were talking about rounding up earlier, right, even
Speaker 1: if you round up to thirteen thousand, that's still too
Speaker 1: late to get people south of the ice They were
Speaker 1: already down there. They were already down there fishing, fishing
Speaker 1: and cows little spot exactly, fishing, at least at least
Speaker 1: they well. In fact, one of the arguments that's been
Speaker 1: made is that people were sort of coming down the
Speaker 1: coast following these salmon runs, and then when they got
Speaker 1: south of the ice sheet, they headed up the major
Speaker 1: river systems, head up to Columbia, get onto the snake,
Speaker 1: move yourself interior. Doesn't that change because it was supposed
Speaker 1: to be mammoth hunters, not salmon fisherman. Yeah, does that
Speaker 1: offend you as an old river at myself. I have
Speaker 1: no problem with it. I have no problem with it.
Speaker 1: I just it's not the romantic vision that we always
Speaker 1: had held to. Yeah, but then it never made much sense.
Speaker 1: Are you going to go after three and a half
Speaker 1: four ton animal that doesn't like you with a stick
Speaker 1: with a sharp rock at the end of it when
Speaker 1: you're just tripping over seafood or whatever? Right? Or turtles
Speaker 1: turtles Kelp for us Kelp Forest. I'm not sure I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go with Kelp Forest with the Kelp just because
Speaker 1: we we don't really know what the place to see
Speaker 1: sort of seascape. But that's another theory, right, it's like
Speaker 1: the Kelp Forest Kelp Highway. That's right, cruising down the
Speaker 1: Kelp Highway. Yeah, it just breaks the seeds magically, and
Speaker 1: you can travel from Japan, yeah, big Stone Point and
Speaker 1: get it all the way to Cooper's and then break
Speaker 1: it into pieces. Yeah eventually. Like man, I've been carrying
Speaker 1: around this Big Stone Point for yeah, generations and no
Speaker 1: one's used it yet. My daddy hand down to me.
Speaker 1: But we don't necessarily think they had boats either, because
Speaker 1: we now and this is again you know, it's in
Speaker 1: the new book. Any kind of water craft. They didn't
Speaker 1: have to have it because by the time we think
Speaker 1: people were moving down the coast, the coast was clear
Speaker 1: by around sixteen and a half to seven. How they
Speaker 1: going to cross like the Stikeen? And well, now that
Speaker 1: is you know, that's a question, right, So if you're
Speaker 1: coming down in winter, are these things going to be frozen? Oh?
Speaker 1: I don't know how hard would it have been to make? Uh?
Speaker 1: I am getting into the game. I was not going
Speaker 1: to becoming an anthropologist, but I am. Now are you
Speaker 1: gonna approach it from? I've drawn some conclusions. How I
Speaker 1: need to go out and in your in your bizs
Speaker 1: Dr Melic, what do you call the kind of paper
Speaker 1: where you just throw out an idea? Oh, a speculative paper, okay,
Speaker 1: a doctor, But you play one on the radio saying
Speaker 1: that they had to have had some type of small
Speaker 1: skin craft that they could use a scoot across the river.
Speaker 1: I think that's about the extent of my paper, okay,
Speaker 1: And that's actually a fine paper. The problem is that
Speaker 1: you're going to get in that skin craft and you know,
Speaker 1: somewhere on the Aleutian Islands and paddle all the way down. No,
Speaker 1: because you're gonna have to constantly haul it out now
Speaker 1: and then you're like, we gotta make another boat. Oh absolutely, Well,
Speaker 1: look people cross the Mississippi. They had to have something
Speaker 1: to get across these kind of making your children and
Speaker 1: your gear craft. Yeah, yeah, no, so they had watercraft.
Speaker 1: What I was you mean like watercraft water? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I mean I'm talking about the idea that they
Speaker 1: actually made boats and sort of traveled down the coast
Speaker 1: without one setting foot on land, which is one of
Speaker 1: the theories that's that's been out already paper about that.
Speaker 1: I'll let you I'm already got I've already got a PhD.
Speaker 1: You can you can be senior author. Want Oh sorry, Spencer,
Speaker 1: go ahead. Last month, my wife and I went to
Speaker 1: Utah and we were camping. We spent a whole day
Speaker 1: hiking two different petrol glyphs in the area. And there
Speaker 1: was this one site that you hiked, you and there's
Speaker 1: these petrol glyphs amazing, and then a hundred feet further
Speaker 1: there's these dinosaur tracks that are fossil lives petrol glyphs
Speaker 1: five thousand years old. Dinosaur tracks were like hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty million years old at least, and it like put
Speaker 1: me in a real brain pretzel and it was like
Speaker 1: real hard to calibrate. Does that ever happen where you're
Speaker 1: like excavating some site that's like three thousand and you'd
Speaker 1: like collide with something that's a hundred million years old?
Speaker 1: That's significant? Well, sure, because people are people and people
Speaker 1: pick up things. So um, I don't know if this
Speaker 1: story is true or not, but I've heard it that
Speaker 1: in some of the excavations at one of the pueblos
Speaker 1: um ancient pueblos and maybe Choco Canyon, they found a
Speaker 1: falsome point. Now, obviously falsome people weren't living in Chaco
Speaker 1: Canyon a thousand years ago, but somebody there saw a
Speaker 1: falsome point on the ground and thought, oh wow, that's
Speaker 1: pretty cool, brought it home. Right, So collectors, right, we
Speaker 1: were talking about people that like to go out and
Speaker 1: collect stuff. They collect crnoids, they collect fossils. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's actually not uncommon uh too. I mean it's not
Speaker 1: common necessarily, but it's not uncommon to have that sort
Speaker 1: of asynchronous uh set of materials actually out on a
Speaker 1: site where you've got something that's millions or many many
Speaker 1: millions of years old next to something that's fairly recent.
Speaker 1: Have you been following We're gonna we're trying to get
Speaker 1: him on the show once he gets vaccinated. But we're
Speaker 1: Mike kuns is crazy glass beads out of Genera, Italy
Speaker 1: in Alaska. He sent me that paper he was talking
Speaker 1: about that in two thousand eight. Yeah, well it took
Speaker 1: a while to get that paper published. In fact, it
Speaker 1: may not even have appeared yet. Are you buying it?
Speaker 1: Am I by doing something bad by talking about it? No? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's impressed. It's impressed. It's just I don't think the
Speaker 1: issue is shown up in my anyways. Glass beads, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not made in Italy. That that would have had
Speaker 1: to have come the hard way, the hard way out
Speaker 1: of like through Europe, cross headed east, then crossed the
Speaker 1: Bearing straight and landed in Alaska, way before anybody you
Speaker 1: would have ever thought about bringing them from the other
Speaker 1: through the America's those some crazy ass beads. Well, but
Speaker 1: think about the Silk road. I think how easy they
Speaker 1: are to transport. Well, and you forget about in your pocket? Boy, Well,
Speaker 1: we need to move on to dogs. Go ahead. You
Speaker 1: think that the beads were carried by dogs. That's very plausible.
Speaker 1: There's some fancy leashes and stuff in Mexico. I've seen
Speaker 1: turquoise Yeah, alright, dogs. Yeah, what do you do you?
Speaker 1: I feel that because Americans have I shouldn't just say
Speaker 1: it's probably's probably some global aspect to this, just an
Speaker 1: insatiable appetite for dog information. Dogs are cool. I mean,
Speaker 1: people eat it up, man um. And I feel that
Speaker 1: in the last I don't know how long it's been
Speaker 1: going on decades whatever, years, you see a hell of
Speaker 1: a lot of news speculation, publications about hey, where do
Speaker 1: these things come from? Anyway, it's like a hot question
Speaker 1: right now. It's it's genetics again, Steve, because is that
Speaker 1: what's just opening up new just opening up new windows
Speaker 1: of opportunity? Absolutely? Absolutely, and and it's now becoming clear that, um,
Speaker 1: the dog history is incredibly complicated. It's incredibly interesting too,
Speaker 1: in the sense that that's the first species humans domesticated.
Speaker 1: We've been around like that. That feels ironclad. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, because it's by like a huge amount of time, right,
Speaker 1: ten thousand plus years, ten thousand plus so uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean dogs have been our pals for a long time.
Speaker 1: And they've been not just our pals, but they've been
Speaker 1: our sort of workhorses, work dogs. They've been part of
Speaker 1: our cultural repertoire as it were. Uh, you know, for
Speaker 1: many groups, dogs were a tool. They were used for hunting,
Speaker 1: they were used for defense, guarding, warning systems. I mean,
Speaker 1: dogs are great. In fact, when I got together with
Speaker 1: these folks too, uh produce this dog paper that we
Speaker 1: had just just published this past well just a couple
Speaker 1: of months ago actually, Um, I was really excited about it,
Speaker 1: but I told him that, you know, if this was
Speaker 1: a story about cats, they'd have to find somebody else
Speaker 1: to work with them. I don't do cats, big cat down,
Speaker 1: the big time cat guy right there. Sorry, Spencer, you
Speaker 1: can write the paper the next time, you know, cats
Speaker 1: come along. Yeah, yeah, all right, So you want to
Speaker 1: talk about the paper. I want to talk about the paper.
Speaker 1: Um Can I tell you my thing first or later?
Speaker 1: Like I think I might have uncovered some good source
Speaker 1: material for you. You're the host, you go, I'm reading
Speaker 1: a book and I'm gonna do a big, big, huge
Speaker 1: book report on this show coming soon. I'm reading a
Speaker 1: book with don't judge my brother said to me. Listen.
Speaker 1: My brother said to me, said, don't look at the title.
Speaker 1: Just read the book. Okay, the title is Alaska's Wolf Man. No,
Speaker 1: but it's in red. What it's about the guy that
Speaker 1: goes up to Alaska. He's a market hunter, so he
Speaker 1: for road building crews and mining camps. He hunts dollsheep
Speaker 1: and caribou. But in the early days, like leading up
Speaker 1: to statehood, he becomes a government wolfer and he winds
Speaker 1: up doing a bunch of like at the same time,
Speaker 1: out in western Alaska, Askimo groups are trying to they're
Speaker 1: trying to help Askimo groups diversify their economy by reindeer
Speaker 1: with bringing in reindeer herds. But wolf predation on these
Speaker 1: reindeer heers is horrible because reindeer just don't get it right.
Speaker 1: They just you know, they're coming in from somewhere else,
Speaker 1: term loose, and they're just picking sitting targets. He winds
Speaker 1: up doing a bunch of He winds up doing a
Speaker 1: bunch of wolf work all around the state, usually where
Speaker 1: there's like a faltering caribou herd. Dollsheet numbers get really depressed,
Speaker 1: and he would go in and do this heavy duty wolfwork.
Speaker 1: But in the book he's got some fascinating observations about um,
Speaker 1: he's doing much of his work but dog teams, so
Speaker 1: he catches wolves now then, and his findings about how, like,
Speaker 1: what you can actually get done with a wolf, what
Speaker 1: happens when he breeds a wolf with whatever he breeds
Speaker 1: a wolf of the Mala mute, what the attributes of
Speaker 1: that generation is, what the attributes of the next generation is.
Speaker 1: The difficulty that he encountered. He basically got you cannot
Speaker 1: take a wolf, like, in his view, you cannot take
Speaker 1: a pure wolf. There's nothing you will do that will
Speaker 1: ever make that a predictable pet. A wolf is a
Speaker 1: wild animal. He's like, you can't do it. No, A
Speaker 1: dog has been a domesticated animal for over twenty years,
Speaker 1: and it's just a it's night and day. The interesting
Speaker 1: thing about wolves and dogs in terms of gene flow
Speaker 1: is that there's there's dog danna and wolves, but not
Speaker 1: the reverse in modern days. I gotta say that, I
Speaker 1: gotta do that real slow in my head say it again.
Speaker 1: So when dog in dog populations today, there's no wolf DNA,
Speaker 1: but in wolf populations there is dog DNA. So the introgression.
Speaker 1: Understand what it's a one way it's a one way
Speaker 1: gene transfer. It's not it's not going both ways. So well,
Speaker 1: I don't understand why it happened that way. But my
Speaker 1: colleague Gregor Larson, who was one of the principles on
Speaker 1: this dog paper part again, I'm sorry, I'm struggling. Okay,
Speaker 1: So you've got you've got dogs and wolves mating, but
Speaker 1: they're not producing. The wolves are not producing. Um, they're
Speaker 1: producing mates or descendants that have dog DNA in them,
Speaker 1: but the dogs are not producing viable offspring from the
Speaker 1: wolf mating kind of more. Yeah, yeah, um, well, I
Speaker 1: mean it's not entirely clear why that is, because oftentimes,
Speaker 1: when you've got two species that are kind of on
Speaker 1: the edge of biological compatibility, they can produce viable offspring.
Speaker 1: So humans and neandertal has produced viable offspring. But we
Speaker 1: know that today only because we all have some amount
Speaker 1: I have less than normal. Okay, about that we think
Speaker 1: about this genetically your behaviorally, I think Joe Rogan's is
Speaker 1: extraordinarily So I was thinking about the whole twenty three
Speaker 1: and me during our earlier conversation because it's like I
Speaker 1: want like the oral history versus what you draw the
Speaker 1: conclusions you come to from looking at like a twenty
Speaker 1: three and me report versus the oral history that you've
Speaker 1: been subject to your entire life. I think it is
Speaker 1: like an interesting headspace to be in and listen to
Speaker 1: this podcast. Right, it's like, well, I my family has
Speaker 1: done this. And then it's like, oh, but we know
Speaker 1: what happened. One YI took it no very lavian they were.
Speaker 1: They were lying. Yeah, but I mean genetics is genetics
Speaker 1: and identity is not right. Uh, and so whatever they
Speaker 1: told you about your your people, it was probably the
Speaker 1: true story in a cultural sense. Right, this is who
Speaker 1: we are, this is who we become, this is who
Speaker 1: we were. Uh, these are your ancestors. Um, what the
Speaker 1: genetics is telling you about is sort of the deeper past. Uh,
Speaker 1: and the other populations that your relatives and ancestors have
Speaker 1: sort of interacted with. The stories didn't get woven into
Speaker 1: the narrative. Yeah, yeah, because you know, the narrative is
Speaker 1: a cultural narrative. The narratives not a genetic area. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're picture this is way off dogs. But if
Speaker 1: you're adopted into say, I'll say this let's say you're
Speaker 1: adopted into an Italian family, you know, and that's you identify,
Speaker 1: and of course, and what one day you'd be like
Speaker 1: becausel was all wasted time. Yeah, um, all right, so
Speaker 1: you want to go back to the dogs. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we should get back. And dogs and wolves became
Speaker 1: two very different things ten thousand years ago. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I suspect. Okay, So let's think about the context in
Speaker 1: which this is happening. This is the glacial period. It's
Speaker 1: probably happening during what's known as the Last Glacial Maximum.
Speaker 1: That's about a three four thousand year window during this
Speaker 1: last glacial period when times were really tough. It was
Speaker 1: really cold, it was really harsh, very severe conditions. And
Speaker 1: you've got isolated human populations living somewhere in northeast Asia.
Speaker 1: We know they're isolated because we can see it in
Speaker 1: the ancient DNA. We know we have new lineages that
Speaker 1: are emerging. Wolves are living in that same part of
Speaker 1: the world, and they're just as um, they weren't just
Speaker 1: as much trouble. Right, it's cold, it's harsh, there's probably
Speaker 1: not a lot of game running around, right, and so
Speaker 1: they're you know, sticking their noses up in the air
Speaker 1: and they're smelling stuff, right, they're smelling food, and they're
Speaker 1: kind of creeping around these, um, these camps, and at
Speaker 1: some point, you know, somebody's throwing them meat or maybe
Speaker 1: they're just kind of moving in after the humans leave
Speaker 1: and kind of knowing on the bones that are left
Speaker 1: behind on the camp. And over time they start to
Speaker 1: become commence als. Basically they're hanging around with one another, um.
Speaker 1: And and it is a process. It's not an event, right,
Speaker 1: you don't just sort of turn a wolf into a
Speaker 1: dog in a day. Um. It's a long drawn out process.
Speaker 1: And these you know, and they're sort of they're finding
Speaker 1: themselves together kind of isolated on this landscape, and in
Speaker 1: that long term process, they're understanding that they're not necessarily
Speaker 1: i mean, in principle their predator, their competitors as predators,
Speaker 1: right because in principle people are hunting meat. They're hunting
Speaker 1: meat too. But they found a way to get along, uh,
Speaker 1: and they found a way to sort of help one another.
Speaker 1: And so the dogs, you know, start to aid in
Speaker 1: the hunting as they become dogs, right, as they're kept
Speaker 1: by the people, they're fed by the people, they're raised
Speaker 1: by the people. They get a they get habituated to
Speaker 1: the people. There's a it might maybe you think it's fanciful,
Speaker 1: but I've even read I don't know. It's like it's
Speaker 1: someone postulating what might have been the reciprocity that like
Speaker 1: a early warning system. Oh absolutely, absolutely, like how they
Speaker 1: just go ballistic when something strange is happening, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, No.
Speaker 1: That's why I say they're part of the cultural repertoire.
Speaker 1: They were a tool. They were a tool for people,
Speaker 1: especially if you're on a vast unknown landscape, like say
Speaker 1: the America's right, you're making that left turn, you've gotten
Speaker 1: around the continental ice sheets, you're spreading out into the
Speaker 1: northern hemisphere. You have no idea what's around the corner,
Speaker 1: and you have no idea what's going to feed you,
Speaker 1: hurt you, try and kill you. Right, if you've got
Speaker 1: a dog with you, that's a pretty good thing. And
Speaker 1: that's that's what came out of this this work that
Speaker 1: we just published. Was I was in Oxford a year
Speaker 1: or two ago, and I was talking to Gregor Larson,
Speaker 1: my colleague who works on ancient dogs doing the genetics,
Speaker 1: and I said to him, you know, you're beers over beers, right, No, No,
Speaker 1: that made a good story. But the beers actually came
Speaker 1: after we figured all this out. This was not some
Speaker 1: sort of drunken old whol over just beer, grainbelt beer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is not an ad for it. We didn't. We
Speaker 1: start out this conversation about boy hit me. I was,
Speaker 1: you guys were real casual in this person's office, and
Speaker 1: we were. We were casually in the office. I was
Speaker 1: there talking shop. I was talking shop. I had gone
Speaker 1: there to give a series of lectures to Oxford, and
Speaker 1: I said, you know, Gregor, your dog dates look a
Speaker 1: lot like our people dates, and explain that. Okay, so
Speaker 1: we know from the age. Okay, do you want to
Speaker 1: because other people might be listening, Steve, I think it
Speaker 1: cal al right. Here here's how it works, bense Um.
Speaker 1: So human lineages, Um, we were just talking about this.
Speaker 1: They split over time, so groups become isolated. They you know,
Speaker 1: one group goes and stays in the northeast Siberia, another
Speaker 1: group goes into the America's and then in the Americas,
Speaker 1: some of them stay north, others go south. And so
Speaker 1: we see this in the genetic record. We see different
Speaker 1: um lineages happle groups. You can call them different names,
Speaker 1: but lineages works. And these are groups that are historically
Speaker 1: related to one another, but over time they've become separated. Okay,
Speaker 1: So we have a record of when those sort of
Speaker 1: lineages emerge. So we know that ancestral Native Americans split
Speaker 1: off from groups that would stay in Asia sometime around
Speaker 1: twenty three thousand years ago. We know that when they
Speaker 1: get into the America's sometime around sixteen thousand or so
Speaker 1: years ago, they split off again. Some of them stay north,
Speaker 1: others go south um and then later on we see
Speaker 1: more splits as they move further and further south into
Speaker 1: the hemisphere. So we've got a record of all these
Speaker 1: kind of turnpoints along the way as people are moving
Speaker 1: into this hemisphere. And when Gregor showed me the results
Speaker 1: with the dogs, he said, well, you know, we've got
Speaker 1: a split here. We've got two lineages developing at this time.
Speaker 1: We've got a bunch of lineages developing at this time.
Speaker 1: That's when I said to him, you know, you're split
Speaker 1: times kind of look like our split times. And then
Speaker 1: there was that sort of oh why didn't I think
Speaker 1: of this before? It's called eureka moment. It wouldn't even
Speaker 1: I don't want to call it a Eureka moment because
Speaker 1: that implies it was a really deep and profound insight. No,
Speaker 1: this was, well, of course people can come into the
Speaker 1: America's without dogs, but dogs are not going to come
Speaker 1: into the America because without people. So of course the dog,
Speaker 1: the dog history is gonna mimic and match and coincide
Speaker 1: with human history. Now, whether they came in with the
Speaker 1: very first people was, you know, kind of a different issue,
Speaker 1: but clearly they must have come with people, so at
Speaker 1: some point their histories aligned. And so when we so
Speaker 1: I then went to the white board, he said, okay,
Speaker 1: well let's kind of try and figure this out. So
Speaker 1: I drew Siberia, com Chaca Peninsula, I drew Alaska, and
Speaker 1: I said, okay, here's where we have groups splitting off
Speaker 1: at different times. Here's where they are at this point,
Speaker 1: here's where they are at that point. And then they
Speaker 1: put the dog story on, and you had a beer
Speaker 1: in your hand while you were well. Then we went
Speaker 1: to the bar afterwards and congratulated ourselves having figured this out.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, that's uh. And it was just so
Speaker 1: obvious that well, of course it had to happen this. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's a couple of questions for did this happened again,
Speaker 1: Did the same thing that we're talking about happening in
Speaker 1: Siberia with dogs happened in other places completely unrelated? Or
Speaker 1: did that then? Like that, did the dog then sort
Speaker 1: of like backfill along the path that humans have been
Speaker 1: taken since the African diaspora? Right? So, um, dogs go
Speaker 1: both directions, right, So they're going to be domesticated, and
Speaker 1: some of them are heading east, some of them are
Speaker 1: heading into the America's others presumably went west with people.
Speaker 1: We know that populations that are in this part of
Speaker 1: northeast Asia at the end of the ice age, after
Speaker 1: the last glacial maximum, they're moving all over the Eurasian
Speaker 1: But that was it's possible that there was a singular
Speaker 1: domestication event. Well, now that's controversial, and you'll have to
Speaker 1: get a dog person on here to defend either the
Speaker 1: single origin point or the multiple origin point, because I
Speaker 1: don't do dogs. If it's multiple, how many how like
Speaker 1: what's like a fashionable multiple? Has that happened twice or
Speaker 1: ten times? Um? I think the argument is is that
Speaker 1: there might have been sort of three centers of domestication.
Speaker 1: But again, it's not my thing, and this dog group
Speaker 1: is my second question. Um, I know you're not a
Speaker 1: dog guy, but you probably know this. This These dogs
Speaker 1: are they need they're adding like they're adding as people
Speaker 1: moving to new areas. No doubt there has to be
Speaker 1: some crossbreeding occurring where they're they're bumping into like all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you come here and the Mexican gray wolf.
Speaker 1: Let's say, let's say the Mexican gray wolf was a thing,
Speaker 1: then maybe it wasn't um at some point their dogs
Speaker 1: pick that up a little bit, right, pick it up
Speaker 1: to some degree. Maybe I don't. I don't know that
Speaker 1: we have enough resolution of the dog genetic record to
Speaker 1: say that. What I do know, and this is, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of an answer to a different part of the
Speaker 1: question that you were asking, is that this is not
Speaker 1: the first time it's happened. We know that when people
Speaker 1: move across the Far North around five thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: they're taking dogs with him as well. And that's a
Speaker 1: completely separate event where people are tracking across the landscape
Speaker 1: bringing their dogs with them, but but possibly dogs that
Speaker 1: had been in a sort of rolling lineage with these
Speaker 1: early dogs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and think about it,
Speaker 1: do you think of them as a technology? Was like
Speaker 1: a technology that's been transferred. Well, and and let's let's
Speaker 1: kind of riff on that transfer notion. You know, when
Speaker 1: you've got a dog and you see other people with
Speaker 1: their dogs, your dog is gonna go running over there,
Speaker 1: unless it's on a leash, and it's gonna go hanging
Speaker 1: out with them for a while and may or may
Speaker 1: not come back. So I suspect when you know, sort
Speaker 1: of groups were um, you know, encountering one another after
Speaker 1: sort of long separations, I suspect the dogs were probably
Speaker 1: moving back and forth between groups um as well. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, they were part of the They were part
Speaker 1: of the colonization process. They were part of the dispersal
Speaker 1: process into the Americas and probably served, you know, really
Speaker 1: important rolls because think about it, if you're coming into
Speaker 1: a completely unknown landscape, not a bad idea to have
Speaker 1: a dog with you. What's the oldest dog bone that's
Speaker 1: been found and what's now the lower forty eight it's
Speaker 1: around ten thousand years old from a couple of sites
Speaker 1: in Illinois. And what can they tell about those? What
Speaker 1: they look like? How big were they? Oh? Gosh, you'd
Speaker 1: have to ask a dog person. But I don't think
Speaker 1: they were terribly large. Don't think big wolves. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: sites are called Coster KOs t e R. And Still
Speaker 1: Well are the sites that have produced these sort of
Speaker 1: ten thousand year old dogs. Had the dogs been butchered
Speaker 1: or just dead again, you'd have to ask a person
Speaker 1: who's a dog. You gotta tell us a good dog person.
Speaker 1: I gave you a name, Gregor Larson and Angela Perry.
Speaker 1: Have you spoken this person? No, not yet, but they
Speaker 1: were on my list. They're on your list? Yeah? No, Um,
Speaker 1: dogs were food too. Look, times get tough, you know, Sorry,
Speaker 1: you've been a really good dog. But you know it's
Speaker 1: either you or me. Oh it's the Swiss Army knife
Speaker 1: of companions, you know. I mean there's a lot exactly
Speaker 1: what criticisms their objections have there been to your conclusion
Speaker 1: about this? Well, the um the argument. So there were
Speaker 1: two pieces to that that piece we just published. One
Speaker 1: was the sort of um kind of coinciding histories, uh,
Speaker 1: and that part I think seems fairly robust and sound.
Speaker 1: The other thing was, though that we drew the conclusion
Speaker 1: that domestication took place in northeast Asia rather than sort
Speaker 1: of further west. And I know some of the dog
Speaker 1: genetic folks, um pushed back on that a bit because
Speaker 1: they think domestication Again, this gets to the issue of
Speaker 1: you know, was there a single center of dog domestication
Speaker 1: or multiple Uh that's it's unresolved. But we offered that
Speaker 1: hypothesis in the paper that we think you know, they
Speaker 1: were domesticated in northeast Asian went both ways east and west.
Speaker 1: Good stuff, man, Oh, it's fantastic. The Spencer brought up,
Speaker 1: uh the college days, which a long long time ago now,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, you always you gotta mix of
Speaker 1: people who want to be in class and you gotta
Speaker 1: mix people who gotta be in class in order to
Speaker 1: check that box on their requirement list. And you got
Speaker 1: some people that ran in both both crowds depending on
Speaker 1: the class. Yeah. Oh yeah for sure. Uh. I can't
Speaker 1: help but think. I'm like, what's your take, Dr Meltzer, Like,
Speaker 1: how many of your students are going? You know, I
Speaker 1: listen to the Mediator podcast to get away from Dr Meltzer.
Speaker 1: Damn he followed me here. Um he stole that from
Speaker 1: the lecture. Look, you know today's today's college students. Um,
Speaker 1: I think it's a tough time to be in college.
Speaker 1: Just I mean, we have pemic, pandemic, the economic situation,
Speaker 1: you know what it, the likelihoods of jobs, all that
Speaker 1: good stuff, right, Um, And I know that what I
Speaker 1: do is not terribly useful. Just because it's not useful
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's meaningless and so useful in the nuts
Speaker 1: and bolts kind of like, yeah, yeah, what are you
Speaker 1: gonna do? You're gonna make yourself a Clovis point and
Speaker 1: go out and survive. I don't think so. Um, maybe
Speaker 1: you could, Steve, but I couldn't. The line I got.
Speaker 1: I was a history anthropology major, and the line I
Speaker 1: got was are you gonna open a history store? Yeah?
Speaker 1: There you go, and you could. So my my job
Speaker 1: is to say, Okay, I know you're not coming in
Speaker 1: here necessarily because you're interested in what I do, but
Speaker 1: I will do my best to make it interesting for you.
Speaker 1: I will do my best to help you think about
Speaker 1: things that you otherwise wouldn't think about, and think about
Speaker 1: them in critical ways, and try and sort of transport
Speaker 1: yourself out of your business school environment. Right, let's take
Speaker 1: you back fifteen thousand years and think about what it's
Speaker 1: like to be on a landscape where you haven't seen
Speaker 1: any smoke on the horizon, you haven't seen any freshly
Speaker 1: killed animals, you haven't seen any other humans in a
Speaker 1: very long time, and you realize, wait a minute, I'm
Speaker 1: all alone here. But hey, the living looks pretty good here.
Speaker 1: How do I do that? How do I how do
Speaker 1: I make a living on this landscape? Right? So I
Speaker 1: try and and give people the sense of what it
Speaker 1: would have been like to come into a completely new world,
Speaker 1: not a new world in the European sense of well,
Speaker 1: you know, we finished trashing the old world, now we're
Speaker 1: going to go to the new world. This this truly
Speaker 1: was a new world back then, and what would that
Speaker 1: have been like? So yeah, I get it that they're
Speaker 1: not necessarily coming in because they really want to learn
Speaker 1: about archaeology, um, but I think they'll take something away
Speaker 1: from it, or at least I hope they do. I
Speaker 1: double minored in college. I got a minor and anthropology
Speaker 1: and a minor and health. And what I told people
Speaker 1: when I did this was that I got the minor
Speaker 1: and health because I also had a biology major, and
Speaker 1: so I could go into the midfield. If I wanted
Speaker 1: that the health minor would help me. The reality was
Speaker 1: that I was interested in anthropology, but I was a
Speaker 1: C student there. So if I also minored in health,
Speaker 1: I was an A student there and so I could
Speaker 1: carry my g p A. The anthropology was to entertain me.
Speaker 1: The health was just to like help with my resume.
Speaker 1: So anthropology is resume building, like the health. That's why
Speaker 1: we picked him off. He tanked the interview that I
Speaker 1: got looking at him. Yeah, classes like yours, you got
Speaker 1: to see an anthropologist. Classes like yours kept me wildly entertained.
Speaker 1: Favorite stuff. Yeah, I like it. I know they lean
Speaker 1: on you a little bit over there and in the
Speaker 1: Ivory Tower, but uh, I like it that you take
Speaker 1: the time to come explain your work to people. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, look, the greater public um genuinely is interested
Speaker 1: in what we do. They're not necessarily, you know, going
Speaker 1: to be taking a lot of classes and everything like that.
Speaker 1: But you know, people can find interest in things from
Speaker 1: the ancient past and do uh. And because a lot
Speaker 1: of archaeological research is supported by the greater public, it's
Speaker 1: it's only fair that we give back. Uh. So I
Speaker 1: don't like to just publish for my colleagues. I like
Speaker 1: to publish for a broader audience so that I can
Speaker 1: give back. So it's part of my responsibility as somebody
Speaker 1: who has spent his life in an Ivory tower, and
Speaker 1: I gotta say, Evory towers are awfully nice. Um. But
Speaker 1: it's also nice to get out once in a while, um,
Speaker 1: and to be able to share what I've learned because fundamentally,
Speaker 1: you know, it's the thing that interests me and I
Speaker 1: just think, well, it's going to interest others as well.
Speaker 1: Be fantastic. Okay, So uh, okay, how do they find
Speaker 1: if you want to see Mountaineer? What form is it? Like?
Speaker 1: How do they find it? Well, it's just on the
Speaker 1: south edge of town of Gunnison and you can't get
Speaker 1: the site the book starting on June. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: is my opportunity to Yeah, okay, if you were a
Speaker 1: big im I'm venturing you're not a big Instagram guy.
Speaker 1: Well you know. Okay, So I have to apologize to
Speaker 1: all the people who listened to the podcast the last
Speaker 1: time because you asked me at the very end, are
Speaker 1: you on Twitter? Are you on Instagram? And I admitted
Speaker 1: that I was on Instagram. What I didn't tell you
Speaker 1: was I only had six followers and they were my kids.
Speaker 1: And the only reason I was on Instagram was to
Speaker 1: send them pictures of where I was in the world
Speaker 1: at any given time. And I got literally almost three
Speaker 1: requests to join me on Instagram. Deny them all. I
Speaker 1: I just again, I apologize to everybody can listen, but
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't publish anything of interest on Instagram,
Speaker 1: So speak to them. Uh, this is your It's an
Speaker 1: elaborate Instagram post called a book. It's like if you
Speaker 1: could pack a whole lot of pictures and a whole
Speaker 1: lot of texts a single Instagram post, it would be
Speaker 1: called and bundle it as a book. It would be
Speaker 1: called The Mountaineer Site and it will be out in
Speaker 1: June from the University of Colorad. It's called the Mountaineer Site. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm confirming with Karan. It's got a subtitle to um,
Speaker 1: what's the subtitle? I don't know. We're checking, but it's
Speaker 1: like it's a book. Yeah, oh yeah, it's a book.
Speaker 1: It's a book. Um. And and then color photos No, sorry,
Speaker 1: but I'll tell you. The cover photo is gorgeous. The
Speaker 1: cover photo was taken by my colleague, uh, Steve Emsley
Speaker 1: of the Mountain in Winter. Oh here we go. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what's the subtitle? Hard to read on my website,
Speaker 1: it's something like a Fulesome Winter Camp in the Rockies
Speaker 1: or the Mountaineer site a Fulesome Winter Camp in the Rockies.
Speaker 1: Or you could learn about the Mountaineer site, which is
Speaker 1: a new site in the revised update the tenuere revised
Speaker 1: update of First People's in a New World, which is
Speaker 1: it's a compending. I don't know how you describe it's
Speaker 1: it's just like I said earlier, it's the whole damn store.
Speaker 1: It's everything I know. There's nothing left, guys to someone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I remember the old days, like the Greeks
Speaker 1: or whoever. They were into this idea called the sum
Speaker 1: of all knowledge. Like they had the idea that a
Speaker 1: person could um no everything that was known the last person.
Speaker 1: That's hard to pull off now, yeah, I know, I
Speaker 1: think good. It was the last person in the or something,
Speaker 1: the last person who knew everything, like like all knowledge
Speaker 1: all you know, mathematics, astronomy, all, yeah, I know every
Speaker 1: I know a lot of things in a very small
Speaker 1: niche and that's about the best I can and it's
Speaker 1: captured beautifully, beautifully and first people in the New World,
Speaker 1: Dr David Meltzer, I'm gonna I remembered from last last time,
Speaker 1: it was David J. Meltzer. Not to be confused with
Speaker 1: the beat poet, not to be confused with the guy
Speaker 1: that writes about wrestling, and not to be confused with
Speaker 1: the business person David Meltzer who I get all sorts
Speaker 1: of David J. Meltzer, Anthropologists, Southern Methods, Methodist Universe, Southern
Speaker 1: Methoist University SMU in Texas. That one for as great
Speaker 1: as uh your work is, and it's how smart you are. Um.
Speaker 1: I fell into this trap after the last podcast. I
Speaker 1: typed in David Meltzer books and I found a book
Speaker 1: called Mushroom Cultivation Self Guide to Mushrooms from all over
Speaker 1: the World. When I was real like, I was like this,
Speaker 1: this guy just has all my interest and then and
Speaker 1: then I was like, he's got to have a cat book,
Speaker 1: the perfect guy. Thanks for having me, honest, I really
Speaker 1: appreciate your work on mushrooms. Oh and also North Thing
Speaker 1: Bear Grease podcast. Clay Newcombe. Newcombe who's been on this
Speaker 1: show many times. Every time Clay's on the show, people
Speaker 1: are like, man, that guy ought to have his own podcast.
Speaker 1: Well he does. It's called bear Grease. It's like a
Speaker 1: it's a history podcast, history, history, folklore, culture, history done
Speaker 1: and Clay's unique style. It's investigative. Bear Grease Podcasts part
Speaker 1: of the Meat Eater podcast Network. Listen now, Thank you everybody,