Speaker 1: If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast, you
Speaker 1: can't predict anything.
Speaker 2: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
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Speaker 2: dot com. F I R S T L I T
Speaker 2: E dot com. All Right, everybody, Today we're gonna dive
Speaker 2: in once again on my favorite subject of all subjects
Speaker 2: on the planet, which is First Americans. Who got here first?
Speaker 2: What were they doing when they come? How'd they get here?
Speaker 2: Did they kill everything? Did they kill all the mammoths?
Speaker 2: All this question? And uh, we have found I'm gonna
Speaker 2: explain in a all in greater detail, we have found
Speaker 2: some fresh perspectives coming out of fresh to me at
Speaker 2: least because I'll explain the whole controversy. This is a
Speaker 2: very this is a controversial subject the First Americans, and
Speaker 2: we have had on in the past a number of times,
Speaker 2: David Meltzer uh to talk about the peopling of the Americas.
Speaker 2: And today we're going to hear from. Is it fair
Speaker 2: to call you guys all colleagues because you talk about
Speaker 2: the same stuff. Oh yeah, enemies enemies And I'm trying
Speaker 2: to soup it up.
Speaker 3: We have enemies, we have disagreements, but we work well together.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, he respects you guys, and he says he does
Speaker 2: do good work. So who I'm talking about here today
Speaker 2: in the in the studio with this is Todd Serravell,
Speaker 2: who is the director of the George C. Frison Institute
Speaker 2: of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. If
Speaker 2: you're interested in the peopling of the Americas and Clovis
Speaker 2: hunters and stuff, you might go in and check out
Speaker 2: the late George C. Frison because he did a lot
Speaker 2: of I guess you call experimental archaeology, right, Like, he
Speaker 2: went to Africa.
Speaker 4: And experiments stuck some some of the most major sites.
Speaker 4: He's just kind of like what we call him the
Speaker 4: godfather of Wyoming archaeology.
Speaker 2: And and and he went to Africa to test out
Speaker 2: stone tools on elephants.
Speaker 3: Correct, Yeah, he did. In Zimbabwe, they were they had
Speaker 3: an overpopulation problem of elephants and they were calling them
Speaker 3: so he took advantage of that opportunity to test Clovis
Speaker 3: weapons on actual African elephants alive, sensibly dead, and dying.
Speaker 3: Is my understanding, got finish them off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he just wanted to see how it would perform.
Speaker 3: Yeah, was it a functional weapon for killing an elephant?
Speaker 2: And what did he determined?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, he had no doubt. He's the only guy in
Speaker 3: recent time who's hit an elephant with a Clovis weaponry. Yeah,
Speaker 3: a lot of people have done it, actually with deceased elephants,
Speaker 3: but George did it with living elephants.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Nowadays, you guys are constrained by the the ethics folks.
Speaker 2: That's a hard one to get across.
Speaker 4: Here's what I'd like to do.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna stab some elephants. Uh. And Spencer Pelton from
Speaker 2: the he's the Wyoming State archaeologist and an adjunct at
Speaker 2: the University of Wyoming's Archaeology and Anthropology department.
Speaker 4: That's correct. We should also clarify Todd was my major advisor.
Speaker 4: This is like, this is kind of like your Matt
Speaker 4: and Meltzer relationship. Oh, a little bit of uh, you know,
Speaker 4: he brainwashed me into thinking like like he did.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so now you have strengthen numbers.
Speaker 2: Man, I'm reading a book right now. We're trying it
Speaker 2: was a guy we had on the show. Do you remember,
Speaker 2: remember the gun writer And he's a big Safari dude.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to get him to come back on Thomas
Speaker 2: uh McIntyre. But his name doesn't look quite like McIntire.
Speaker 2: Thomas McIntyre, you know him. He's like a gun like
Speaker 2: a like a gun writer. Yeah, you know what I'm
Speaker 2: talking about. I remember listening to that. Yeah, Like what's
Speaker 2: super interesting about him is I mean a bunch of things.
Speaker 2: But he went he got super into Africa and spent
Speaker 2: his whole life hunting in Africa. And a lot of
Speaker 2: the places he hunted in Africa has now been taken
Speaker 2: over by Islamic radicals, Islamic fundamentalists. So like like he
Speaker 2: used to hunt and there's a country no one's ever
Speaker 2: heard of in Africa called see.
Speaker 3: Eritre no no.
Speaker 2: West, not on the coast. But it's like, uh damn.
Speaker 4: Democratic Republic of Condo.
Speaker 3: Cameras, humiliating, come.
Speaker 4: On, come on.
Speaker 2: Here, you can't do that, Hey, you can't bring it up.
Speaker 2: It's like it's like, okay, Africa countries map uh right
Speaker 2: where it is.
Speaker 6: This should go quick.
Speaker 2: It's uh no, it is got some coasts.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, yeah, see, no one's ever heard of it.
Speaker 2: You can't hunt there anymore. And those same dudes that
Speaker 2: those green brays were mixing it up with, like in Chad,
Speaker 2: are in that area. Anyhow. In his book, he has
Speaker 2: a long thing. The book is called Rain without Thunder
Speaker 2: or Thunder without Rain, Thunder without rain. It's about it's
Speaker 2: like a history of the Cape Buffalo. But in there
Speaker 2: he's got a lot of stuff about human history. And
Speaker 2: he's in this big section right now about poisons, like
Speaker 2: poisoning spear points. Oh well, you you might think that
Speaker 2: til you read the book. It was very important to
Speaker 2: poison the shaft.
Speaker 4: Hum hmm.
Speaker 2: Not the point anyhow, The stuff they could take down
Speaker 2: with plant poisons, plant toxins and quick hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3: There's a there's a classic anthropological video of the conkson
Speaker 3: of the jo Uonci the bushmen in the Kalahari no
Speaker 3: hunting giraffe with these tiny little arrows. They just got
Speaker 3: to get a couple of arrows in it and then
Speaker 3: track it till it dies. I thought their poison was
Speaker 3: insect based, though.
Speaker 2: He gets into the No, there's three. He gets into
Speaker 2: the three plant genuses. This is a big, thick book.
Speaker 2: He gets into the like the dead, the big sort
Speaker 2: of the Big three, the Big three of plant poisons,
Speaker 2: and he kind of juxtaposes those to the toxins that
Speaker 2: they use, the South American toxins, which are more of
Speaker 2: like a paralyzing toxin, and then these different plant toxins
Speaker 2: they use. But it just gave him like tremendous efficacy
Speaker 2: on huge ship killing, huge shit, and some of his
Speaker 2: stuff just tips right over.
Speaker 6: You're trying to interview him again. Yeah, I don't think
Speaker 6: it'll happen. He's dead. No, yeah, when twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Two, his book, he came dead in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: His book came out in twenty three.
Speaker 6: No More Canvas Safari's No Outdoor writer Thomas McIntyre dies
Speaker 6: at seventy That is November seven, twenty two. We're gonna
Speaker 6: need to do it.
Speaker 2: This book come out in twenty three.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 6: We talked about Yeah, Chris hart Fardley's last movie came
Speaker 6: out six months after he was dead. No shit, really, Yeah,
Speaker 6: I don't think it's that uncommon. Well, he Fledger's joker
Speaker 6: came out how long philed?
Speaker 2: I'm just talking about did he die? I feel like
Speaker 2: we should in the studio. We should have a picture
Speaker 2: of people be passed on.
Speaker 4: Okay, show there.
Speaker 2: I don't know, you shouldn't be We'll all be there someday, Spencer.
Speaker 2: It's good little bit of research right there.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Damn.
Speaker 5: When I was doing my uh my research in graduate school,
Speaker 5: I came across articles from like the sixties and seventies
Speaker 5: where they were saying the next big thing in archery
Speaker 5: hunting was going to be poison.
Speaker 2: Well they use it in Mississippi, you know, yeah.
Speaker 3: And that.
Speaker 5: But they were like a spade of law after this
Speaker 5: became like a thing, there's a spade of laws passed
Speaker 5: to prevent you from using.
Speaker 6: Yeah, a lot of stories explicitly.
Speaker 7: Say blood clotting, what poison?
Speaker 3: Didn't they Who does?
Speaker 7: I think that's what?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: They do?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you can still use that poison. It's real.
Speaker 2: It's common there. Like I got a buddy, I got
Speaker 2: a buddy. You look at him, you just think he's
Speaker 2: a normal guy walking down the street, but he's poison
Speaker 2: arrows that deer. What what? What? The late Tom the
Speaker 2: late Thomas McIntire gets into that's really heartbreaking me.
Speaker 4: I like that guy.
Speaker 2: Well he gets into is that there's this other book. See,
Speaker 2: I'm going to be going to Africa this summer, so
Speaker 2: I'm kind of going to move in. I've been reading
Speaker 2: a lot about the World War two Pacific theater, but
Speaker 2: I'm gonna start moving into Africa stuff. There's a book
Speaker 2: called White Hunter, Black Poacher that I want to read next,
Speaker 2: and it kind of gets in to this with like,
Speaker 2: as whites were coming in and Safari culture was taken off,
Speaker 2: there was this effort to sort of like demonize indigenous
Speaker 2: hunting methods and so because they were pushing this like
Speaker 2: the only humane way is shooting these large boar rifles
Speaker 2: and poisons, are that all these methods they use are
Speaker 2: inhumane and this is more humane and like and then
Speaker 2: this effort too to declare these big game ranges and
Speaker 2: if you're like a white dude hunting the game ranges,
Speaker 2: you're like on Safari. If you're a black dude hunting
Speaker 2: the game ranges, you're not doing conservation. You're a poacher.
Speaker 2: You're this, you're that, And this sort of ethical battle
Speaker 2: over who has access to the resources, which I'm just
Speaker 2: now digging into. But I was I wanted to have
Speaker 2: Mono talk about Kate Buffalo.
Speaker 6: I'm looking at his Goodreads page. His last published work,
Speaker 6: according to them as twenty twelve. They're pretty thorough.
Speaker 2: That's a bald faced live buddy. Because did you type
Speaker 2: in second edition? Did you type in thunder without rain?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 2: But you're lying bald facedly. Well, Spencer's not lying, then,
Speaker 2: that's what I meant. Well, no, because I feel like
Speaker 2: if you read lies and put them out, you're a
Speaker 2: liar too. You're a liar too. All Right, moving on,
Speaker 2: we're gonna get We're gonna die. We gotta have plenty
Speaker 2: of time to talk about Clovis Clovis hunters. But real quick,
Speaker 2: someone wrote in mad because I have there's a few problems.
Speaker 2: I always have that like it would take like electroshock
Speaker 2: treatment to have you quit having the problems. One problem
Speaker 2: is the whole Roosevelt Roosevelt thing, which like Franklin Ruse
Speaker 2: Theodore Rose, did you know there's a split in the family. No,
Speaker 2: I didn't. That screws me up. And the other thing
Speaker 2: is what else screws me up? Is one of my
Speaker 2: one of the the proper name for my highest honor,
Speaker 2: not referring to my honorary PhD, but refer to me
Speaker 2: being a National Wild Turkey or like to me being
Speaker 2: a Royal Slam holder, which I often refer to as
Speaker 2: a Super Slam holder. The guy wrote in Very Mad
Speaker 2: that I routinely get wrong what it is and insult
Speaker 2: the good folks at National Wild Turkey Federation. It's a
Speaker 2: Royal Slam.
Speaker 7: And you're saying, what a super Slam?
Speaker 2: I always say super Slam, which is like less than
Speaker 2: what I have.
Speaker 4: No, it's not.
Speaker 2: This guy's wild.
Speaker 7: It's harvesting one wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no, dude, it's right here. The Royal Slam.
Speaker 2: According to this joker, if you'll get on Goodreads, what's
Speaker 2: his name? According to Brett, Brett says just it just
Speaker 2: seems like that this is the kind of thing you
Speaker 2: don't need to argue about since the internet came out.
Speaker 2: But like, mmmm, it's like, I.
Speaker 6: Will read you what nd n w TF. Let's go
Speaker 6: with n WTF. Grand Slam is all for us subspecies.
Speaker 6: Royal Slam is the Grand Slam. Plus the Goulds got
Speaker 6: it World Slam, Royal Slam plus the oscillated wild turkey.
Speaker 2: That's where I'm That's where I that's where i'm. That's
Speaker 2: where I'm not Hill.
Speaker 6: And then what Brody was talking about, the US Super
Speaker 6: Slam harvest one wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska.
Speaker 2: So you're you so Brett is right, you say that
Speaker 2: you're a super Slam holder or well, I but I
Speaker 2: say it wrong.
Speaker 3: That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: I am a Royal.
Speaker 6: Slam holder, which is all four U s subspecies plus
Speaker 6: the goul.
Speaker 5: So does that change hot matches up against your honorary
Speaker 5: doctorate roy royal?
Speaker 2: You know the problem with having an honorary doctor as
Speaker 2: opposed to regular one. You're like, if you do your
Speaker 2: I don't have a resume. But we're at to make
Speaker 2: a resume. You're not allowed to put it under education.
Speaker 6: Oh where do you put it?
Speaker 4: Honors award? And that's a problem. It's a tell.
Speaker 2: It's a real tell. Yeah, because then people look and
Speaker 2: they're like, uhh yeah, I don't like that. But if
Speaker 2: I had an honors thing in my resume, it would
Speaker 2: be like Royal Slam holder, And then okay, we're not
Speaker 2: going to talk about these artifacts. It just came out
Speaker 2: of just not even going to talk about it. The artifact,
Speaker 2: the six thousand year old hunting kit which is in
Speaker 2: like pretty nice shape coming out of a cave in
Speaker 2: Big Ben National Park in Texas, because on Radio Live,
Speaker 2: Spencer's gonna be talking about the guy that did the work.
Speaker 6: In a few weeks, we're going to interview the guy
Speaker 6: who found it.
Speaker 2: Can't talk about it now, Okay, hold on, hold that
Speaker 2: thought for a minute. There's one nice thing I wanted
Speaker 2: to talk about because this is gonna segue forget. I
Speaker 2: said that because I want to segue that into these boys.
Speaker 2: But you know what's really funny they've been laughing about
Speaker 2: is uh a word choice thing. Alaska Fish and Game Department.
Speaker 2: You know, they're doing like they're doing like a tag lottery,
Speaker 2: and they referred to a tag. I can't get enough
Speaker 2: of this. They referred to a big game tag as prestigious.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm, as though holding it like if you look up,
Speaker 2: like look up the word prestigious. Just read it real quick.
Speaker 2: What does prestigious mean? I'd be like holding the tag,
Speaker 2: you'd put it in the honor section of your resume.
Speaker 6: Inspiring respect and admiration, having high status.
Speaker 2: Yes, so you're like, yeah, you'd be like that would
Speaker 2: be like a like a thing you had, like you'd
Speaker 2: bring if you're on a date. Yeah, it's good marketing
Speaker 2: if someone is a little bit out of your league, prestigious,
Speaker 2: like you know, you might be curious to know that
Speaker 2: I own a that I hold a keen eye caribou
Speaker 2: tag in Alaska, you know, And she'd be like, prestige.
Speaker 2: I thought that was a great word choice, prestigious. It's
Speaker 2: a prestigious caribou tag. Oh so back to this Adelado
Speaker 2: kit the other I want to hear what you guys
Speaker 2: think about this. This will be our this will be
Speaker 2: how we get into it. You guys know meton Aaron
Speaker 2: who's been on the show.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: Recently, one of our one of our esteemed colleagues, one
Speaker 2: of our esteemed colleagues, Clay Nukeombe, did a Bear Grease
Speaker 2: podcast about some of the ins and outs of the
Speaker 2: Clovis first uh idea and you know, the peopling of
Speaker 2: the Americas. He did a little thing on that. A
Speaker 2: lot of the guys we work with are all equally
Speaker 2: fascinated by this subject. And in there, uh, Clay is
Speaker 2: at with Metton, and Clay is observing that what I
Speaker 2: always tell him, which is during the ice age period,
Speaker 2: we're talking about whether you go back. Let let's just
Speaker 2: for just for convenient memory sake, we go back like
Speaker 2: like ten thousand years ago they weren't shooting bows. And
Speaker 2: he's like, well, how do you know they weren't? And
Speaker 2: he see he correct so he cracks playing like, oh
Speaker 2: tell me more, like, how do you know that there
Speaker 2: were no bows? And he said, well because I told him.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 2: So when this six thousand year old hunting kit comes
Speaker 2: out of this cave in Texas and lo and behold,
Speaker 2: it's not a damn bow. I sent it to Clay
Speaker 2: to say, no notice, no bow, it's an ad a
Speaker 2: laddle n B. And are you guys at a laddle
Speaker 2: or at laddle?
Speaker 4: Guys add a laddle all the way, I.
Speaker 3: Say a little oh wow.
Speaker 4: Getting heated interview?
Speaker 2: So am I?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 4: Who's right?
Speaker 2: Is it just impossible to say what? What?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: If someone when when when humans and what is now
Speaker 2: the United States of America interacted with with mammoths, is
Speaker 2: it impossible to say that they were Is it impossible
Speaker 2: to say they weren't shooting bows at them.
Speaker 4: I don't think it's impossible. I mean, those those projectiles
Speaker 4: are just so big. I just don't think they would
Speaker 4: work very well on a boat. And I think that's
Speaker 4: the assumption, right. Also, like what the oldest direct evidence
Speaker 4: for bos in the world is probably the Mesolithic.
Speaker 3: In europeith twenty thousand. That's real.
Speaker 2: Probably, Oh really, they haven't that long ago.
Speaker 3: Well, it depends. I mean the way we infer bows
Speaker 3: is usually based on the size of the stone point
Speaker 3: because we very rarely find the bows themselves. Actually found
Speaker 3: one once in Denmark that was six thousand years old.
Speaker 3: That's incredibly rare.
Speaker 2: Right, So what was that boat made out of?
Speaker 3: I don't know. I was a kid at the time.
Speaker 3: I was maybe twenty two. Is my first archaeological field experience.
Speaker 3: It was a It was a about a ten inch
Speaker 3: piece of a bow that had broken and it was
Speaker 3: recycled as part of a fish trap. But yeah, we
Speaker 3: were digging in this like they call it Gutcha. It's
Speaker 3: like this really muddy sediment and they would make these
Speaker 3: fish traps that were like V shaped fences that went
Speaker 3: to a woven fish trap and the tide would come in,
Speaker 3: then would go out, and the fish would get funneled
Speaker 3: into that trap. So that we were coming across all
Speaker 3: these little round pieces of wood standing vertically that were
Speaker 3: the posts for that fence, and I came down on
Speaker 3: one that was d shaped, and that the old guy
Speaker 3: who had been doing archaeology over there forever took one
Speaker 3: look at it and he's like, that's a bow, and
Speaker 3: he dug it out and sure enough it was nice
Speaker 3: shaped and piece of a bow. Yeah, it was wild,
Speaker 3: but that's really rare. Like normally we're inferring the technology
Speaker 3: from the hard parts that are preserved, right, so finding
Speaker 3: bows themselves is really really uncommon. We do have at lattles.
Speaker 3: We do have bows, but the basic argument that's usually
Speaker 3: made and distinguishing between bow and arrow and at lattle
Speaker 3: is the size of the point. Once they get really small,
Speaker 3: we say, well arrow said there, we have bow and arrow.
Speaker 2: But that's testable, right, I mean, like, I'm sure people
Speaker 2: could mess around and see can you shoot a Clovis point.
Speaker 4: I think people have done like polatics experiments.
Speaker 3: David did that for his thesis.
Speaker 4: Yeah, David Howe, one of our master students, has a
Speaker 4: great he's a great public science communicator in his own right.
Speaker 4: But he did some holistic experiments with like a crossbow
Speaker 4: and it's basically made points of you know, from that
Speaker 4: big like you know, say a centimeter long, up to
Speaker 4: the size of like a Clovis point mm hmm, and
Speaker 4: tested the accuracy of those things the further like according
Speaker 4: to size. And I don't remember his conclusions, but.
Speaker 3: He concluded that you get to a certain size and
Speaker 3: the accuracy declines dramatically with bow.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And if you look, so, if you look in
Speaker 4: like a stratified archaeological site, like a rock shelter that's
Speaker 4: just got layers and layers of stuff in it. If
Speaker 4: you map out the wits of those projectiles through time,
Speaker 4: there's usually this dramatic decrease in width. In Wyoming, for instance,
Speaker 4: it's like fifteen hundred years ago or so, and that's
Speaker 4: generally assumed to be demarketing the transition to bow and arrow.
Speaker 4: Or you've been using spear throwers, spear throwers, spear throws,
Speaker 4: and all of a sudden you get a bow and
Speaker 4: your projectiles just decrease in size really rapidly.
Speaker 3: Got it?
Speaker 2: You know that, dude, I was talking about Clay nukembe Yeah,
Speaker 2: he killed it. He put a he put a fullsome
Speaker 2: point on an arrow and killed a bear with it,
Speaker 2: and the bear piled up in twenty yards.
Speaker 3: I think was there was that on YouTube? Yeah, I
Speaker 3: think I saw that.
Speaker 2: I mean he shot what he shot it from my
Speaker 2: three yards or something like that. He dug a underground
Speaker 2: he dug an underground pit and then had a bait
Speaker 2: pile because he knew he wanted to, like he wanted
Speaker 2: to almost be shooting up into the bear, so he
Speaker 2: was underground because he wanted a good angle on it.
Speaker 4: That's the next level shit man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know full some points are interesting because it's
Speaker 3: really really fine, like a nice, really well made fallso
Speaker 3: points really light. I think it would work just fine
Speaker 3: as an arrow point.
Speaker 4: Let me hit.
Speaker 2: I want I want to do something real quick. I'm
Speaker 2: trying to do it quick. I want I want to
Speaker 2: lay out the current. I want to lay out the
Speaker 2: what is the debate?
Speaker 3: Which debate? There's many debates, the big debate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the big debate. I want to lay out the
Speaker 2: or let maybe you guys, what do you guys want
Speaker 2: to do? It lay out to me? But I want
Speaker 2: you to give the other side a fair shake. No,
Speaker 2: I want to do it because I don't want to
Speaker 2: make I don't want I don't want to make you
Speaker 2: argue someone else's argument.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't mind making that argument.
Speaker 2: Okay, layout the debate unless you want me to do.
Speaker 4: Well. You did just get this on a a PhD.
Speaker 4: Maybe this is your oral examples.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 2: For most of my life. The for most of my
Speaker 2: life that the dominant narrative about the first peoples to
Speaker 2: come into what is now the United States of America
Speaker 2: was that sometime, you know, thirteen thousand years ago, some
Speaker 2: big game hunters came over the Bearing Land Bridge, not
Speaker 2: thinking they were probably not thinking they were going somewhere
Speaker 2: like the Bearing Land Bridge was not a narrow It's
Speaker 2: not like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was like
Speaker 2: a body of land the size of Texas. Generations probably
Speaker 2: lived and died on it without knowing they were going anywhere.
Speaker 2: Came into Alaska, were prevented from going south because there
Speaker 2: was just massive ice sheets. This is like the Ice Age,
Speaker 2: big glacial ice sheets. Eventually this thing opened up, it's
Speaker 2: been described like an ice free cordor opened up and
Speaker 2: it's been subscribe described as if you imagine a long
Speaker 2: coat that has a zip around the bottom and a
Speaker 2: zip around the top. The glaciers melted, created this thing
Speaker 2: called the ice free Corridor, and these hunters kind of
Speaker 2: spilled down onto the American Great Plains around the site
Speaker 2: of Edmonton, Alberta, and then raised hell on mammoths, killed, wipe,
Speaker 2: managed to wipe out mammoths and a bunch of other megafauna.
Speaker 2: And it was this like distinct culture. They had a
Speaker 2: distinct projectile point they made and with stunning speed, colonized
Speaker 2: the United States down in New Mexico. They were everywhere.
Speaker 3: They were to Florida, South America too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were in Florida, They're in Washington State, their
Speaker 2: points are up in Michigan. They were just everywhere. And
Speaker 2: then out of that group eventually like came all these
Speaker 2: different cultures and then you start seeing these distinctive cultural markings.
Speaker 2: In the last I don't know a handful of years,
Speaker 2: it's become these these new archaeological sites have thrown this
Speaker 2: into question, putting forward the idea that people were here
Speaker 2: much longer, that the people that were here earlier weren't
Speaker 2: Clovis and that Clovis kind of came Clovis evolved here
Speaker 2: from other peoples that showed up here. The ice free
Speaker 2: corridor thing isn't true, and these new people seem these
Speaker 2: new people instead came earlier. They came in boats down
Speaker 2: the coast, and then they somehow morphed into these mammoth
Speaker 2: hunting Clovis people.
Speaker 4: How is that?
Speaker 3: It's pretty good?
Speaker 4: Really, that's a good synopsis.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean there's a number of different issues there, right,
Speaker 3: Like there's the date of arrival to Alaska. There's the
Speaker 3: date of getting south of the ice sheets. There's the
Speaker 3: issue of how did they make a living? Did they
Speaker 3: drive this extinction event? There's a number of separate issues there.
Speaker 3: Did they take the coastal route versus the inland route?
Speaker 3: And you're right that we've sort of tied up Clovis
Speaker 3: with ice free corridor, pre Clovis with coastal We don't
Speaker 3: necessarily have to tie these things together or like Clovis
Speaker 3: with over kill at pre Clovis with not overkill. Right,
Speaker 3: all these things we can sort of view independently.
Speaker 2: Let's start with this. When I say, like what is
Speaker 2: tell people like what is Clovis? When we say Clovis,
Speaker 2: what are we talking about?
Speaker 4: The stone tool technology at the most basic level. But
Speaker 4: I think it's also come to be associated with a LifeWay,
Speaker 4: highly mobile, use of really high quality raw materials, seemingly
Speaker 4: a preference towards hunting large bodied animals, widespread across North America,
Speaker 4: and you know something sitting in South America if you're
Speaker 4: looking at like fluted sales, cave points.
Speaker 3: Fishtail points.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And another really clear attribute of Clovis is wherever you
Speaker 3: find it, it dates within a very very narrow time range.
Speaker 3: Depending on who you ask. The Clovis period is three
Speaker 3: hundred to five hundred years m and that was it. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that like that the really consistent day across the country.
Speaker 3: What Spencer mentioned that it's sort of a pan continental phenomenon.
Speaker 3: I think that's a really important part of the story
Speaker 3: because that's not really a thing. After Clovis, you do
Speaker 3: get this regional differentiation and never again do you see it. Right,
Speaker 3: So it suggests that there's really something special about Clovis.
Speaker 3: And right, the traditional explanation was is that this was
Speaker 3: the technology made by the first people and they're spreading
Speaker 3: this technology across the continent. That's why it's everywhere. It's
Speaker 3: interesting because it's a really unique kind of spear point.
Speaker 3: It wasn't used as fluted points right where they take
Speaker 3: these flakes from the base. We're used for a very
Speaker 3: brief period of time and never again. So it's like
Speaker 3: this really really good cultural marker of this particular time period,
Speaker 3: and it is a pan continental phenomenon. So how does
Speaker 3: that happen if people are already here? Well, the argument
Speaker 3: I suppose is it's like a really popular stylistic idea
Speaker 3: of how to make a point that spreads among existing populations.
Speaker 5: Can you describe what you mean by a flute and
Speaker 5: a point? Like if someone's never if they picture a
Speaker 5: stone point, they have one image in their mind, maybe
Speaker 5: a couple images, but like, what is a flute? What's
Speaker 5: what does a Clovis point look like if you're going
Speaker 5: to draw it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the I would say when most people think
Speaker 3: of an arrowhead or spear point, right, they're thinking sort
Speaker 3: of a notched variety. We've got sort of a triangular,
Speaker 3: bifacially flaked piece of stone that have not just coming
Speaker 3: in from the corners or the sides. That's a later
Speaker 3: invention that comes a few thousand years after Clovis. With Clovis,
Speaker 3: we're talking about what we call a lanceolate point. So
Speaker 3: it's it's it's long, it's narrow, it comes to a
Speaker 3: tapered and in the base is basically indented. It's concaves old.
Speaker 2: I thought, Brodie, would you mean mega favor?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 2: Can you run in my office and grab my Clovis
Speaker 2: thrusting spear in the corner. And then I got on
Speaker 2: my desk. I got some clover, some poles and points.
Speaker 3: Yep, and then and then the flute. The word comes
Speaker 3: from like the flute. It's in a column, right, It's
Speaker 3: like it's a groove. So the really special thing about
Speaker 3: Clovis points and similar points that follow like folsome points
Speaker 3: and other regional varieties of Spencer's got something.
Speaker 4: That's badass. You met this dude when this is a
Speaker 4: good visual aid? Tyson Arnold drew that wanted me to
Speaker 4: hand it off to you as a gift for your studio.
Speaker 2: So where do I hold this film?
Speaker 4: That's right? There is great the line drawing of one
Speaker 4: of the points from a psych called the East win At.
Speaker 2: What's nuts is this is? This is like the size
Speaker 2: that's yeah, that's like a giant.
Speaker 3: That's a really big one. Usually they're like a big
Speaker 3: Clovis point is usually half that long. That's that's exceptionally large.
Speaker 2: But when we're talking about for for folks watch it
Speaker 2: on YouTube, this is the that's a real if you're
Speaker 2: a flint nap, it's really hard to do that, like
Speaker 2: a high failure rate.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's almost like if you picture a blade, if
Speaker 5: you were to be able to pin sort of on
Speaker 5: the back end, that's sort of the shape, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you know they when they were first found
Speaker 3: that archaeologists sort of made analogies to blood grooves some banets,
Speaker 3: and I've never read that. Yeah, that was like one
Speaker 3: of the original ideas as to why they were doing that.
Speaker 2: Uh, that three to five hundred to your period, can
Speaker 2: I U I want to take a stab at like
Speaker 2: a little bit, just trying to describe what you're saying about.
Speaker 2: Did that mean that everybody caught on or did that
Speaker 2: mean like, does it make more sense that the reason
Speaker 2: everybody was I can't say everybody. Well, let me ask
Speaker 2: this question. During this three to five hundred to year period,
Speaker 2: if you find a Clovis point, you date it, it's
Speaker 2: this three to five hundred of your period. Can do
Speaker 2: you go anywhere else? Can you go anywhere in the
Speaker 2: US and find other technologies that sit right inside that too?
Speaker 2: Like there was different? Or is everything from that window Clovis.
Speaker 3: It's a really good question. Generally speaking, everything from that
Speaker 3: window is Clovis except for the site we just dug.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean there's a little bit of evidence that
Speaker 4: Great Basin has some different stuff going on. Some stem
Speaker 4: point components, but by standpoints, I mean they're not fluted,
Speaker 4: they're kind there's more of a stem so at the
Speaker 4: bottom the base of the point kind.
Speaker 3: Of constricts more as a shoulder.
Speaker 4: Some of those components seem to overlap with Clovis a
Speaker 4: little bit from the Great Basin, very different technology, and
Speaker 4: you look in some of those rock shelters there and
Speaker 4: the lowest most components there seem to overlap with Clovis slightly,
Speaker 4: although Clovis still seems to have some some slightly older
Speaker 4: dates in that stuff.
Speaker 2: Got it, And then we talked about this spence. We
Speaker 2: talked about this work. What's kind of upset this idea
Speaker 2: that clobus the Clovis first idea was it they keep
Speaker 2: they find these older sites. And I don't know if
Speaker 2: you're gonna regret your word choice, but you said a
Speaker 2: problem with these really old archaeological sites is they're not
Speaker 2: normal sites.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like there's been tons of stuff in the media, you know,
Speaker 2: or it was at a time, like the footprints in
Speaker 2: White Sands. Okay, you got that. You got the dude
Speaker 2: out in Chesapeake Bay. Who's who's finding claiming to find
Speaker 2: really old stuff? Or roading out of banks in Chesapeake Bay.
Speaker 2: I know you're only here. Oh, here's the points. See
Speaker 2: we wound up having this picture show up. Brody, Oh well,
Speaker 2: this is like an actual size. Would you guys say
Speaker 2: that's a more normal Yeah, that's a I can't remember
Speaker 2: what one. That's a repel club, that's a replic club, No, no, no,
Speaker 2: this is a handmade one. And then here's one half
Speaker 2: to to a knife these met and met in pieces.
Speaker 2: And here's one a half to two a dangle that
Speaker 2: spear right in front of this built Phil's picture. Here's
Speaker 2: a here's a Clovis point half to and it's like
Speaker 2: gripping it like imagine there's that that the wood is
Speaker 2: grabbing it like this and it's bound.
Speaker 4: Got the hell flapper.
Speaker 3: Yeah, split shaft we call it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Uh, tell me about these really old sites.
Speaker 3: And and and well let's I mean, if we're going
Speaker 3: to talk about them not being normal, let's talk about
Speaker 3: what is normal.
Speaker 2: Tell me what what's a normal site?
Speaker 3: So, you know a lot of Clovis sites. Many of
Speaker 3: the early ones were large mammal kill sites. The first
Speaker 3: excavated Clovis site was actually the Dent site in Colorado.
Speaker 3: It's mammoth kill. A few years later Clovis points flakes, tools,
Speaker 3: bone rod. It's found with mammoth bones at Blackwater Draw,
Speaker 3: the Clovi site that gives the Clovis Complex its name.
Speaker 3: That pattern has been repeated over and over and over
Speaker 3: again at depending on who you ask, fifteen to twenty
Speaker 3: sites where we have Clovis artifacts associated with mammoths, mastenons,
Speaker 3: and gomphathiers. You know what gomphathias are.
Speaker 2: No, oh, yeah, it's that kind of They got those
Speaker 2: big armored plates on them. No oh, that's not it. Okay, No,
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Gomfatheer is related to a masdon. They're in Central America
Speaker 3: and South America. So in northern Sonora, Mexico. The last
Speaker 3: twenty years or so a Clovis Gomfithear kill site was found.
Speaker 3: So this pattern people, phil, you put one of those
Speaker 3: on the screen, they have a shorter trunk.
Speaker 4: I am not an expert in They oftentimes have two
Speaker 4: tusks too. Write I can't, there's some difference.
Speaker 5: That's what I was for whatever reason, That's what I
Speaker 5: was picturing in my head.
Speaker 3: That the early ones definitely have strange cranium morphology things
Speaker 3: going on.
Speaker 4: You want to spell that for me if you can't,
Speaker 4: A G O M P H.
Speaker 3: O T H E R E. So that's one aspect
Speaker 3: of Clovis. We also have Clovis bison kills, at least
Speaker 3: two of those, one in Oklahoma, one in Arizona. And
Speaker 3: then we have Clovis campsites, and these are basically you
Speaker 3: have heart features, fire pits, people working around them, and
Speaker 3: you have butchered remains of usually large mammals. The site
Speaker 3: we recently dug a lot of bison. And this is
Speaker 3: sort of typical hunter gathering archaeology. Right. You have the
Speaker 3: things that hunter gatherers do. You have heart, yeah, they
Speaker 3: have the downward facing tusks and upward Oh yeah.
Speaker 2: Man, I'd get after one of those, man that'd be
Speaker 2: a sweet school to have. Look at that thing.
Speaker 3: Was that called again gomfa there? Yeah, the genus star
Speaker 3: wars looking.
Speaker 6: That's a good way to describe it.
Speaker 2: So that was like an elephant species down in South America.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in Central America. They probably made it in
Speaker 3: the southern US because because this this one clove is
Speaker 3: Gonfitthier killed. It's called Elphine del Mundo. It's it's not
Speaker 3: far from the Arizona border, maybe one hundred miles south
Speaker 3: in Sonora.
Speaker 4: Hm.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 6: It says they were on all continents except Australia and Antarctic.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So so clove is archaeology is pretty typical for hunter
Speaker 3: gathered archaeology. I mean, you have these domestic sites where
Speaker 3: people are camping, sitting around fires, making and repairing tools, cooking, scrape,
Speaker 3: scraping hides. Then we have bone beds, and we also,
Speaker 3: of course have the Anzac Burial not far from here, right,
Speaker 3: we have human remains. Uh.
Speaker 2: Is it is it true that no? Is it true
Speaker 2: that no one's ever found a cloves point actually stuck
Speaker 2: into mammoth bone?
Speaker 3: That is true?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, there was a case from Brazil somewhere where there
Speaker 3: was a some kind of lithic stuck and I want
Speaker 3: to say gonfity or skull. But I saw that a
Speaker 3: long time ago. I need to check that.
Speaker 4: Are you do you know that?
Speaker 2: There was a rumor at the close type site for
Speaker 2: a long time peop were just hauling that stuff away.
Speaker 2: And I went there once and did a lot of
Speaker 2: reading about it. And there was like a rumor that
Speaker 2: some bus driver that like they took kids out to
Speaker 2: see it, and some bus driver allegedly took home a
Speaker 2: mama's school that had a point embedded in his eye socket.
Speaker 2: But it's just like, it's just it's just rumor.
Speaker 4: I've never heard that.
Speaker 2: You never heard that rumor.
Speaker 3: I've heard that rumor twice because I listened to your conversations.
Speaker 3: I think both times it came from you, dude.
Speaker 2: Everybody find I'm going to find where I'm gonna find, Like,
Speaker 2: I couldn't have made that up. A bus driver like
Speaker 2: did a bus driver took some kids to see in
Speaker 2: the hall of thing home with them. I wouldn't have
Speaker 2: made that up. It's too like much detail. I gotta
Speaker 2: find where I read that. Wherever I read it, I
Speaker 2: think is on my bookshelf.
Speaker 3: I know if you find let me know, I don't
Speaker 3: want to see that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think when I made that comment
Speaker 4: to you about Clovis sites looking normal and everything before
Speaker 4: it not, this is exactly what I'm meaning. Like, you
Speaker 4: can dig a site that's two thousand years old, five
Speaker 4: thousand years old, six thousand years old, it all has
Speaker 4: roughly the same characteristics as like a Barry Clovis campsite,
Speaker 4: because hunter gathered campsites look a certain way. There's like
Speaker 4: concentrations of artifacts where people flint napped, and there's hard
Speaker 4: features that people congregated around to talk and eat and work,
Speaker 4: hide and things like that. The pre Clovis record to
Speaker 4: this point has nothing like that. It's all weird stuff.
Speaker 4: And I think in a more general sense, like the
Speaker 4: burden approved for this stuff for like over a hundred
Speaker 4: years now has simply been find obvious human made artifacts
Speaker 4: in a sealed geologic context, just a good stratigraphic context.
Speaker 4: And I think in our view, you can point to
Speaker 4: any number of these sites that date before Clovis, and
Speaker 4: you can and you can say either the artifacts look
Speaker 4: a little weird or there was some kind of stop.
Speaker 7: When you say weird, what do you mean, I.
Speaker 4: Mean not obviously human made. There's a lot of natural
Speaker 4: processes that can produce things that look like artifacts and
Speaker 4: rocks falling off a cliff and striking something, getting entrained
Speaker 4: in a watercourse and breaking up that way. This is
Speaker 4: one of the brilliant projects that met and actually initiated,
Speaker 4: looking at rocks and Antarctica where we know there wasn't
Speaker 4: people and seeing the range of variation and how rock
Speaker 4: is just naturally modified by the by the environment. Really
Speaker 4: great idea that that's why he's doing that is because
Speaker 4: there's a lot of natural process as as they can
Speaker 4: break up rock to make them look like maybe they
Speaker 4: were broken by people when they actually weren't.
Speaker 2: So these old old sites, well what is okay? At
Speaker 2: what date does it become in your mind? When does
Speaker 2: it when does it like tail off? Like you got
Speaker 2: really good sights up to what date and then and
Speaker 2: then you got your weird sites thirteen thousand and that's
Speaker 2: all the calibration stuff is that, like as we understand you.
Speaker 3: Calendar yeares, and we're talking about south of the ice sheets.
Speaker 3: North of the ice sheets, it's a different story. But
Speaker 3: south of the ice sheets thirteen thousand and onward, beautiful
Speaker 3: normal typical hunter gather archaeology. To give you an example
Speaker 3: of the kind of thing Spencer was talking about, he
Speaker 3: and I and Sarah Lawn excavated a mammoth two three
Speaker 3: years ago. That mammoth was thirteen thousand, two hundred years old.
Speaker 3: We were really excited to excavate it because you know,
Speaker 3: it's right on the cusp of Clovis, and we thought, eyah,
Speaker 3: maybe this is a mammoth by people. Right above the mammoth,
Speaker 3: Benmouths was strangely kind of near the top of a
Speaker 3: hill on this on this slope, on the top of
Speaker 3: that hill, there's a bunch of shirt or flint, like
Speaker 3: really good material for making stone tools, and that mammoth
Speaker 3: is buried down on these old gravels, kind of like
Speaker 3: in a base of a little draw and we kept
Speaker 3: finding little flakes but all of this local raw material,
Speaker 3: and they're all tiny, like you know, two millimeters, And
Speaker 3: this is this is like a perfect scenario for producing
Speaker 3: things that you could interpret as human made artifacts that
Speaker 3: clearly aren't. All of the local material most of it
Speaker 3: has cortex, meaning it's just like a little chip taken
Speaker 3: off of a natural cobble, looked nothing like a typical
Speaker 3: mythic assemblage, and that there are pre Clovis sites like
Speaker 3: that where you have these things that looks sort of
Speaker 3: like artifacts, but they're they're probably not, but they're interpreted
Speaker 3: to be artifacts. And there's also a lot of really
Speaker 3: strange things that show up in pre Clovid sites that
Speaker 3: are argued to be evidence of humans that aren't the
Speaker 3: typical things like chipstone artifacts. And I made a list
Speaker 3: of those kinds of things. If you're curious, hit me
Speaker 3: with the list.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, so.
Speaker 3: Footprints, drag marks, fingerprints, copper lights, copper lights are cross poops, seaweed,
Speaker 3: balls of seaweed. Uh, underwater meat caches, Spencer pointed. That
Speaker 3: went out to me, there's three cases. Yeah I do.
Speaker 3: There are no no underwater meat caches after Clovis to
Speaker 3: my mind, they're only a pre Clovis thing.
Speaker 2: Oh really, Yeah, I'm gonna stop telling people about underwater.
Speaker 3: Meat cut marks. So, like Mark's on bone, right, you
Speaker 3: guys know about that.
Speaker 2: Can we back up to the underwater meat cash? What
Speaker 2: was the site that was interpreted to be this. There's
Speaker 2: a site somewhere where someone had piled up mammoth meat
Speaker 2: under a pond filled the intestines full of gravel and
Speaker 2: then use these gravel filled intestines to weigh it down
Speaker 2: under that pond. That's badass.
Speaker 3: That site is in the Midwest. I think it's the
Speaker 3: Burning Tree mas it On. It's one that Dan Fisher
Speaker 3: at the University of Michigan published. Okay, yeah, I think
Speaker 3: that's the one. I'm not sure that certain.
Speaker 2: And obviously the intestine rotted away, so it's just gravel
Speaker 2: in a line. You're not buying it.
Speaker 3: I mean weird stuff, right, this is this is our point.
Speaker 3: I don't even keep going now, Okay, bone embedded and bone.
Speaker 2: What does that mean?
Speaker 3: Like you have a mass it on bone and there's
Speaker 3: like another piece of bone like stuck into the rib.
Speaker 4: That was healed around it that they argued was a spear.
Speaker 2: Point and not to not two of them duking it out.
Speaker 3: That's what other people have said. Yeah, their bone modifications,
Speaker 3: like the ways that bones have been fractured, Like you
Speaker 3: have no artifacts, but bones are fractured in weird ways.
Speaker 3: It seemed like only humans could do it. And the
Speaker 3: last one on the list is a pit full of grasshoppers. Okay,
Speaker 3: so this is I just told you about probably twenty
Speaker 3: pre Clovis claims, right, all this weird stuff as opposed
Speaker 3: to like, what I'd like to see is like, let's
Speaker 3: just say some flakes from from napping Stone around a
Speaker 3: heart feature and a really good stratigraphic context. It's well dated.
Speaker 3: There are millions of those on this continent. There are
Speaker 3: zero of those in pre Clovis. Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: That's it.
Speaker 5: When you're talking about stratigraphic stratigraphic context, like we're talking
Speaker 5: about eroading banks, you're talking about digging out a hillside,
Speaker 5: like what are what are you when you're thinking about
Speaker 5: where to look.
Speaker 2: For a site?
Speaker 5: Sort of what are the considerations in mind? What is
Speaker 5: like a normal site versus what makes things unusual?
Speaker 4: I can speak to Wyoming at least the best place
Speaker 4: is define buried archaeology in Wyoming or like rock shelters
Speaker 4: and floodplains in Wyoming and Montana. You walk around the landscape,
Speaker 4: which you guys do a lot, hunting, fishing, whatever, most
Speaker 4: of the landscape that you're walking across has basically zero
Speaker 4: potential to preserve an archaeological site. If you're on the
Speaker 4: side of a hill, if you're on a really high
Speaker 4: surface that gets wind scoured. All those areas you can
Speaker 4: drop artifacts there, but if they aren't buried immediately with
Speaker 4: like datable material or whatever, you can't really preserve that
Speaker 4: archaeological site. Right, you have no idea how old it is.
Speaker 4: But if you drop that stuff in a floodplain that
Speaker 4: receives annual flood events, it's going to get buried slowly
Speaker 4: over time and get sealed within that. That's your tigraphy
Speaker 4: and allows us to go back later and actually have
Speaker 4: with some degree of certainty an idea of how old
Speaker 4: that stuff is and that it's not say, mixed with
Speaker 4: something that's like ten thousand years younger or ten thousand
Speaker 4: years older. It it was just laid down in a
Speaker 4: really specific location conduced with the preservation. It's actually kind
Speaker 4: of rare. Like if you think about just the range
Speaker 4: of human behaviors that you do every day, even if
Speaker 4: you're out hunting or whatever, most of the stuff you
Speaker 4: do is not going to be preserved in the archaeological record.
Speaker 4: It has to be this confluence of like behavior and
Speaker 4: geologic context coming together to really preserve that activity.
Speaker 6: When Clovis was happening in the America, is what did
Speaker 6: the technology look like on the rest of the planet,
Speaker 6: like during that three to five hundred year window.
Speaker 3: Well, that's a lot of planet.
Speaker 6: What about where they just came from, like the last
Speaker 6: place they were before the America.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that Slana River site where they had that badass
Speaker 2: wooly rhinoceros.
Speaker 3: Yanayana rights way up and yeah on bought that those guys.
Speaker 3: That's that's twenty thousand years before Clovis in the High
Speaker 3: Arctic and in a warm period in the Middle Last
Speaker 3: Glaciation where they've got I think spear shafts made out
Speaker 3: of rhinoceros, horn bow needles, beads, amazing things.
Speaker 6: But what about during that same era as Clovis.
Speaker 3: So if we go north to Alaska, just prior to Clovis,
Speaker 3: there's plenty of good archaeology starting with about fourteen thousand,
Speaker 3: it looks similar to Clovis. I mean, people are making
Speaker 3: bifacial projectile points. The one big difference is they're making
Speaker 3: a lot of microblades. It's really tiny, really long, skinny,
Speaker 3: sharp flakes that then they you know, they'll have in
Speaker 3: a long piece of bone to make a really deadly
Speaker 3: spear point. You have end scrapers, pretty typical hunter gatherer stuff. Really.
Speaker 3: Maybe the biggest difference at that time is if you're
Speaker 3: to go, say to Israel, Middle East, you're right on
Speaker 3: the cusp of the origins of agriculture around clover times,
Speaker 3: and within a thousand years people are growing crops.
Speaker 2: I think, what's your take on the overkill hypothesis.
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of really strong evidence for it.
Speaker 2: I love it, and you know I love it. It's
Speaker 2: not not light more than the overkill hypothes you're talking
Speaker 2: about the blitz kreeg. Right, Yeah, the idea, well, the
Speaker 2: idea that there's a there's again there's an ongoing debate
Speaker 2: about what role did humans have in wiping out everything
Speaker 2: that was bigger than a modern American buffalo like when
Speaker 2: it was over like now that during this period of time,
Speaker 2: like let's say, from twenty thousand years ago to ten
Speaker 2: thousand years ago, I think nine genuses, So nine genera
Speaker 2: of animals when extinct, thirty five genera thirty five genera
Speaker 2: in North America.
Speaker 3: And forty some genera in South America. So let me
Speaker 3: let me be caun.
Speaker 2: I hate you. What can I want to add? The
Speaker 2: little wrinkle before you start. Yeah, folks will say, we
Speaker 2: have thirteen, fourteen, fifteen mammoth kill sites. We have zero
Speaker 2: giant groundsloft kill sites, we have zero. What was that
Speaker 2: big ass one hundred pound beaver catch?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Where are all the kill sites of those? Like, where
Speaker 2: are all the short faced bear kill sites? If they
Speaker 2: were killing all this, where.
Speaker 4: Is it all?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the right question, you know that. I I
Speaker 3: was telling Spencer this this morning that I started out
Speaker 3: incredibly skeptical of overkill for exactly that reason, right, Like,
Speaker 3: as archaeologists, we work at a material world and we
Speaker 3: look at material evidence, and when there's no material evidence,
Speaker 3: it's like, how do you believe something actually happened if
Speaker 3: there's no evidence for it? So, yeah, it's a sticky
Speaker 3: problem when we talk about mammoths. Is actually a huge
Speaker 3: number of mammoth kill sites. When you say only fourteen,
Speaker 3: it's actually a huge number given the amount of time
Speaker 3: and space we're talking about, Like you feel that that
Speaker 3: is a lot, It's it's a gigantic number. We did
Speaker 3: a study comparing the density of mammoth kill sites in
Speaker 3: Clovis times to all other elephant kill sites from the
Speaker 3: rest of the world. Elephants are interesting, right because, as
Speaker 3: you mentioned, they used to occupy every part of the
Speaker 3: world except places they couldn't swim to, Right, So you
Speaker 3: have them in Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America.
Speaker 3: It's really their absence that's the unusual thing, even like
Speaker 3: Wrangle Island, Yeah, the Greek Islands Islands dwarf mammoths, and
Speaker 3: the Mediterranean Islands Channel Islands. Yeah. And if you look
Speaker 3: at it in terms of the density of mammoth kills
Speaker 3: in time, especially a four hundred year time period, I mean,
Speaker 3: it's a huge number of sites that it's really surprising
Speaker 3: to me that we're questioning whether Clovis people were hunting
Speaker 3: moments and whether they affected their populations, given to the
Speaker 3: absolute incredible abundance of evidence that we have for it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: fourteen is not a very big number, but given the
Speaker 3: total number of Clovi sites that actually speak to what
Speaker 3: Clovis people were doing, what they were hunting, it's a
Speaker 3: huge number.
Speaker 7: Is there any guesses, like during that Clovis period, Is
Speaker 7: there any guesses how many of them were, like, say,
Speaker 7: in North America in that time.
Speaker 3: How many clothes people? Yeah, sure, we can we can
Speaker 3: sort of estimate that by looking at modern hunter gatherer
Speaker 3: population densities, it's a it's a really complicated problem because
Speaker 3: you know, first, if they're first they started basically a
Speaker 3: population of zero, and then they grow to some presumably
Speaker 3: some caring capacity or some environmental limit, right, and the
Speaker 3: number of people is going to very across the continent.
Speaker 3: But when I tried to estimate it once, I got
Speaker 3: numbers in the neighborhood of thirty thousand to one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand people.
Speaker 6: What about mammoth's populations.
Speaker 3: We can estimate that too. I'm not going to make
Speaker 3: up numbers, but I don't know. I don't know off
Speaker 3: the top of my head. But it's a lot. It's
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 2: Is it fair when you talk about that? Fourteen is
Speaker 2: a lot of sights. As you're saying that, I'm kind
Speaker 2: of thinking in my head of you know, I've done
Speaker 2: a lot of hunting throughout my life. I'm trying to
Speaker 2: think about ever made if I ever made a archaeological site, Well,
Speaker 2: you absolutely have know what I'm saying, Like that I
Speaker 2: made a discernible that was preserved. Like we're they're like, oh,
Speaker 2: a guy killed a deer and then left his like
Speaker 2: like bullet fragments, a knife blade, and it's all sealed
Speaker 2: up in some river bottom somewhere.
Speaker 4: I think it'd be. I think it's probably pretty rare.
Speaker 2: I mean, you've probably had so that's what I'm thinking.
Speaker 4: It is like most of the animals you've butchered out right,
Speaker 4: You've you've left some stuff. The coyotes have dispersed it.
Speaker 4: So what was an archaeological site in the moment now
Speaker 4: becomes just kind of a scatter of chewed up deer
Speaker 4: bone or whatever, and it's no longer really discernible as
Speaker 4: an archaeological site. So yeah, I mean, just like the
Speaker 4: preservation of archaeological sites period is kind of a miraculous
Speaker 4: thing and to have That's why I taught saying fourteen
Speaker 4: mammoth kills, given all the ravages of time and the
Speaker 4: unlikelihood for these things to be preserved, and the very
Speaker 4: small number of sites from that time period, in general,
Speaker 4: it's a lot. It's like a substantial percentage of the
Speaker 4: Clovis sites that have ever been excavated are mammoth kills.
Speaker 3: It's the most common animal in Clovis funnel assemblage is mammoth,
Speaker 3: which is which is shocking right, because if you just
Speaker 3: go out there hunting, you and you sort of if
Speaker 3: you take the attitude I'm gonna kill whatever I come across,
Speaker 3: You're not gonna encounter mammoths a lot, right, You're gonna
Speaker 3: have funnel asemblages dominated by rabbits, squirrels. It's gonna be
Speaker 3: way more dear kills than mammoth kills. The bigger the
Speaker 3: animal is, the less common they are in the landscape. Right,
Speaker 3: So when you see this real focus on these large animals,
Speaker 3: it tells you they're going after those things and they're
Speaker 3: ignoring opportunities to go after these smaller animals. Not to
Speaker 3: say they didn't occasionally take them, but they're really specializing
Speaker 3: in the predation of these large animals. Why, because you
Speaker 3: get the most bang for your buck. I mean, you
Speaker 3: bring down a mammoth, let's say it takes you two days,
Speaker 3: you get enough food to feed thirty people for a month.
Speaker 3: It's sort of like wow, yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I was gonna ask, is there any evidence like
Speaker 7: average size of like a Clovis group, Like how many
Speaker 7: people would be.
Speaker 3: Eh, this guy just tried to answer that question.
Speaker 2: How many.
Speaker 4: We've been working on this laprel Clovis site in Wyoming
Speaker 4: for how we worked on it for a decade, opened
Speaker 4: up the site in twenty fourteen. A few years ago
Speaker 4: we decided we try to actually chase out how big
Speaker 4: this is. The site's very ten to fifteen feet deep,
Speaker 4: so it's not like you can just walk over and
Speaker 4: chase out the artifacts and say like, okay, the site's
Speaker 4: right here. So we ended up sinking all these really
Speaker 4: deep augurs and this systematic grid over the site, screening
Speaker 4: all the dirt out of it, and finding these little
Speaker 4: tiny artifacts. We ended up finding a site that was
Speaker 4: a couple of acres big. If you compare that to
Speaker 4: the size of ethnographic we documented campsites where we have
Speaker 4: known numbers of people. It's somewhere between thirty and fifty people.
Speaker 4: So in that site in particular, too, it looks like
Speaker 4: there's it's kind of these clusters of houses kind of
Speaker 4: around this mammoth kill got at least three of these
Speaker 4: pretty big clusters east of which might contain say two
Speaker 4: to four houses, so it all kind of adds up
Speaker 4: to about that number. We might not have found the
Speaker 4: edge of the site. I think we did our best,
Speaker 4: but it seemed like it seemed like we about chased
Speaker 4: the edge of it out. So if you compare just
Speaker 4: the amount of space that hunter gatherers use in the
Speaker 4: campsite to the space of that site, we land on
Speaker 4: this number of about thirty five people or so hm.
Speaker 2: Hm and nothing could feed them for a month.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that mammoth, I don't think they ate much
Speaker 3: of it. That's that's my interpretation was that this mammoth,
Speaker 3: it was largely an anatomical order when it was excavated,
Speaker 3: meeting the bones, it's still sort of laid out in
Speaker 3: anatomical order, So it wasn't heavily butchered if they if
Speaker 3: they did butcher it, they did not move any bones.
Speaker 3: So it's possible like and all these.
Speaker 2: Called gauntless methods.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, no, they certainly the certainly could have filated
Speaker 3: a lot of meat off of this mammoth. But in
Speaker 3: all these house areas that we dug, we dug four
Speaker 3: of them, the only mammoth we got was ivory, and
Speaker 3: they were working the ivory. But we have no no
Speaker 3: rib fragments, no footbones. And we also have a lot
Speaker 3: of evidence for use of other big animals, mostly bison
Speaker 3: around these in these houses. So they're sitting next to
Speaker 3: this big dead elephant. It's a subadult's probably in its twenties.
Speaker 3: It's probably I don't know, five ton animal. It seems
Speaker 3: barely butchered and they're not really moving the bones around
Speaker 3: except for the ivory, and they're and they're eating bison.
Speaker 2: So what do you big of that? I guess you don't.
Speaker 2: Who knows.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of animals, And I mean, like when
Speaker 4: you all butcher animals, right, like, you can kind of
Speaker 4: stop whenever you can. You can always get a little
Speaker 4: bit more marrow out of the animal or do or
Speaker 4: you can like maybe you want to take the liver
Speaker 4: or whatever. Well, a lot of times you don't do
Speaker 4: that right because you don't need to same thing here.
Speaker 4: If you have animals at your disposal and you don't
Speaker 4: need to go to all that crazy effort to get
Speaker 4: every last calorie out of that animal, then you're just
Speaker 4: gonna take what.
Speaker 3: You want and move on do the gourmet butchery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, you hear people talk about and when
Speaker 2: I say people, I mean like people in the discipline
Speaker 2: that you're in. Right now, I'm holding in my hand.
Speaker 2: If you're watching, I'm holding my hand a Clovis point
Speaker 2: that's half to don d a knife blade. So I'm
Speaker 2: doing some devil's advocacy here. So what we know if
Speaker 2: you look at the archaeological record, this is half the
Speaker 2: DOWNTO wouldn't handle with sinews. Okay, the sinews ride away,
Speaker 2: the wood rots away, and all you have is the
Speaker 2: stone left and some bone. Earlier, I mentioned that they've
Speaker 2: never found one of these points embedded into mammoth bone,
Speaker 2: and I don't even know how possible that is. I'm
Speaker 2: sure you could study it, whether it's some pot like
Speaker 2: if you took a mammoth femur and jabbed it with this,
Speaker 2: do you ever get it to actually stick and dry
Speaker 2: in there or not? I don't know. So you have
Speaker 2: bones and you have stone. We assume because the stone's there,
Speaker 2: were like, oh they stabbed it. They stabbed it, and
Speaker 2: these are stuck in there because that's how they killed it,
Speaker 2: all right. Someone else, who's pushing a narrative that they
Speaker 2: weren't mammoth hunters, says, well, they found it lay in dead,
Speaker 2: and then they not that the stone. The point didn't
Speaker 2: get there on the end of a spear shaft. It
Speaker 2: was there because it was on their little knife which
Speaker 2: they cut this dead one up with. As a like
Speaker 2: as an outdoorsman. What I always laugh about about that
Speaker 2: explanation is, and you guys could bat me up on this,
Speaker 2: when you're out wandering around the mountains or out wandering
Speaker 2: around the woods, you do not often encounter fresh dead stuff.
Speaker 3: Like it.
Speaker 2: It vert like I can almost go out and say, like,
Speaker 2: it doesn't happen the ju lane highway. Yes, yeah, but
Speaker 2: I'm saying out right out yeah, encountering all this fresh
Speaker 2: dead stuff, if you wanted me to produce a dead thing,
Speaker 2: it'd be much more like I would be much quicker
Speaker 2: at producing a dead thing by killing it than I
Speaker 2: would wander around. So I found it, you know what
Speaker 2: I'm saying. So I've always laughed at but that's like
Speaker 2: an idea, is that is that they were just finding
Speaker 2: them laying around.
Speaker 4: Everyone And if you did find one, would you go
Speaker 4: shoe that's a good eating I don't think so.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean I've had this argument with colleagues, right
Speaker 3: they're like this this this site we're digging laprell, there's
Speaker 3: this dead mammoth there. There's not a clovise point in it.
Speaker 3: There's a Clovis Point about forty feet away from it.
Speaker 3: You're yeah, people said, yeah, somebody we paid to dig.
Speaker 4: Seriously, yeah, in an excavation, know, yeah, forty ft away.
Speaker 3: It's a big sight. Is this camp. There's this dead
Speaker 3: mammoth in this really cool camp around it, right, and
Speaker 3: that the the Clovise point is in the camp area.
Speaker 3: But people were not in with it, not in the mammoth.
Speaker 3: People will say to me, how do you know that
Speaker 3: mammoth wasn't scavenge? And the argument I make is exactly
Speaker 3: what you just made, which is there a hell of
Speaker 3: a lot more opportunities to exploit a live mammoths than
Speaker 3: dead ones. Also, you know this this this sort of
Speaker 3: this divide in the discipline about whether we see Clovis
Speaker 3: hunters a sort of living in this land of abundance.
Speaker 3: As Spencer sort of just described, why eat this really
Speaker 3: lean mammoth if I can access bison any time I want?
Speaker 3: Sort of the idea, I'm the first person in this
Speaker 3: land and these animals are naive to me and like
Speaker 3: it's easy living versus these are the first people in
Speaker 3: the land. They're kind of lost, they're scared of these
Speaker 3: big animals. They don't know the animal behavior. It's dangerous
Speaker 3: to hunt them, so they're being really cautious, right, mammoths
Speaker 3: are too dangerous.
Speaker 2: But that Yeah, but they've been dealing with them for
Speaker 2: They've been dealing with them for generations and thousands of miles.
Speaker 3: I'm on your side, man, I mean, I think people
Speaker 3: they were they but their right, they have like one
Speaker 3: hundred year generation.
Speaker 2: Because they were there's mamoson Siberia. Absolutely, they'd know no like,
Speaker 2: they would know no reality. They would know no reality
Speaker 2: in which even their most distant ancestor wasn't dealing with them.
Speaker 3: I would say even if they came into the America's
Speaker 3: and had never seen a mammoth, they would really quickly
Speaker 3: learn learn how to expertly prey on that animal, and
Speaker 3: they would enjoy the hell out of it, in part
Speaker 3: because of the danger, in part because you bring down
Speaker 3: all this meat. You can make your life for all
Speaker 3: your friends better. You can use that for social capital.
Speaker 3: You get a lot of prestige you bring down an
Speaker 3: animal like that. Right, So yeah, I very much think
Speaker 3: this was a good time to be a human. When
Speaker 3: you're the first first person in a place, you guys
Speaker 3: understand that as hunters, right, you want to hunt where
Speaker 3: nobody else hunts. Yeah, so the big animals are so
Speaker 3: we have the best opportunities, So we have the most animals.
Speaker 2: Right, we see this. This is how I've explained at
Speaker 2: various times of people is like you can find isolated
Speaker 2: instances of what it might have been like for them.
Speaker 2: Because when you look at when whaler's or like as
Speaker 2: soon as trans oceanic shipping and whalers started hitting these
Speaker 2: islands that no one had ever been on, like, no
Speaker 2: one found the say shells until transoceanic shipping, Like no
Speaker 2: one found it. There's one mammal of fruit bat like one.
Speaker 2: It's so far out there, like no mammal had found
Speaker 2: it except for a flying mammal. When dudes get on
Speaker 2: these islands, they're just picking shit up. They're walking around us,
Speaker 2: grabbing birds by the neck, birds are trying to land
Speaker 2: on them. They're like literally carrying just like picking up
Speaker 2: and carrying turtles and stacking them in their boats upside down.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: This the survival of giant tortoises on the Seychelles, the
Speaker 3: survival of giant tortoises and the Galapagos, both things and
Speaker 3: both both the same thing in both cases. Right, no humans,
Speaker 3: no historic period.
Speaker 2: We just filled our boat like with live ones.
Speaker 3: So we about the knife question. You know, I did
Speaker 3: a study with Dave Kilby and Bruce Huckle and others
Speaker 3: looking at this question of Clovis's knives and the idea
Speaker 3: of whether you know, Clovis points could actually kill a
Speaker 3: mammoth or not. And and one thing we looked at
Speaker 3: was where you find complete points versus broken points. Complete
Speaker 3: points and people generally don't discard functional tools, right, And
Speaker 3: we know from the like later bison kills that you
Speaker 3: really commonly find complete points and bison kills because you
Speaker 3: kill this big mass of animals, you lose the points,
Speaker 3: You lose them in the mess, and you don't get
Speaker 3: them back. It's like a really commonplace to find complete points.
Speaker 3: In camps. You find the broken points when they do
Speaker 3: retrieve the weapons, they're broken and they retooled. You find
Speaker 3: the broken ones in camps and the complete ones and kills.
Speaker 3: So we looked at this for Clovis and we find
Speaker 3: absolutely in these mammoth kills you have a lot of
Speaker 3: complete points. If these are knives, you have to ask yourself,
Speaker 3: why are these people discarding six inch beautifully functional.
Speaker 5: Well, it takes in their hand the whole time, presuming right, like.
Speaker 3: At the Knocko mammoth, you've got eight of these inside
Speaker 3: the animal. And by the way, you keep asking about
Speaker 3: like artifacts embedded in the bone, and mammoth bone that
Speaker 3: has been found twice I think in the Upper Paralytic
Speaker 3: of Europe. At the layer site, which is a mammoth
Speaker 3: kill in Arizona, there are two Clovis points right between
Speaker 3: the ribs of them, right, we'd expect them to find them,
Speaker 3: you know. So yeah, not embedded in the bone, but
Speaker 3: pretty much in a place where you shouldn't be questioning
Speaker 3: what this association between a weapon and a dead animal is.
Speaker 2: Right. That is a good point that if you got
Speaker 2: that big old pile on them, guts and shit, you
Speaker 2: know that if you had stabbed them in there, you
Speaker 2: might not retrieve them out. I mean, I've cut my
Speaker 2: hand on broad heads I couldn't find inside deer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and especially if they have a foreshaft, right, because
Speaker 3: the fore shaft detaches in its way in the body cavity.
Speaker 3: And if you know one thing interesting about butchering mamot's,
Speaker 3: if they fall on one side. Forget about that stiff. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it really only but like one side of the animal,
Speaker 3: because if you can't turn it over right, so if
Speaker 3: you shot it from that side, you might lose every
Speaker 3: weapon that went in from that side.
Speaker 6: What are their tools did Clovis people have? Like was
Speaker 6: there anything that would be redundant if you were to
Speaker 6: use that as a knife? Like do we already know?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 6: They had a knife sort of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it.
Speaker 2: I mean, oh, Brodie, can you can you run me
Speaker 2: another hair and do?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: You didn't grab did you bring my bone? My bone
Speaker 2: shafts down?
Speaker 7: The little white ones?
Speaker 2: Keep grabbing those, see you guys in a minute. Brody's
Speaker 2: getting the workout. We've got a why don't sit in
Speaker 2: that chair.
Speaker 4: It's a pretty great sample of Clovis tools from this
Speaker 4: Laprell site we keep talking about, Uh, you know, stone
Speaker 4: age toolkits don't actually change a ton between Clovis and
Speaker 4: like the recent pass on the planes. You need the
Speaker 4: same stuff. You need stuff to cut things with, you
Speaker 4: need stuff to poke holes with, you need stuff to
Speaker 4: scrape with. It's like basically the three things that stone
Speaker 4: tools do. So stone knives and Clovis as sandwiches and
Speaker 4: my experience are just really large flakes. Sometimes they're retouched
Speaker 4: on one edge and in my experience just messing with
Speaker 4: hides and to find quart site to be the best
Speaker 4: medium to use it. I think it's because it got
Speaker 4: a little grit to it. It kind of cuts into
Speaker 4: the meat a little better. There's also at the laprel
Speaker 4: site of big chopper. I watched you guys as bison
Speaker 4: butchery experiment. One thing you're missing it met and tried
Speaker 4: to make you as a big chopper to get those
Speaker 4: ribs off. Got it. But at La probably have this cobble.
Speaker 4: We have two of them, two choppers. Yeah, cobble that
Speaker 4: fits just perfectly in your hand with like three flakes
Speaker 4: taken off of the edge of it. Something you can
Speaker 4: just bash with really common tool type, like in any
Speaker 4: large mammal butcherings with a hand axe basically. Yeah.
Speaker 3: In fact, you find them in an old one like
Speaker 3: one point eight million years old, the oldest choppers, and
Speaker 3: you find them in Clovis too.
Speaker 4: I'd say one underappreciated aspect of these hunter gathered toolkits,
Speaker 4: the stuff to they close with. This is what I
Speaker 4: studied primarily for my dissertation and that's scrapers, so you
Speaker 4: just a stone scraper retouched it on one end. You
Speaker 4: stick it into a handle to get some leverage, and
Speaker 4: it's what used to scrape dry high to make it
Speaker 4: more pliable. Also perforating tools that you'd use to prepare
Speaker 4: seams to sew clothing with, because you're using using these
Speaker 4: bone needles right and with bone needles don't have really
Speaker 4: the tensile strength to perforate leather all the time, so
Speaker 4: you prepare a scene with little perforators and stitch it up.
Speaker 4: It's really kind of the the bread and butter of
Speaker 4: a stone age tool gets these things where you scrape things,
Speaker 4: a scrape hide, perforate hide, and cut up animals with.
Speaker 3: I would say there is one knife form possibly which
Speaker 3: is the ultra thin Byface, which is a really really
Speaker 3: beautifully made, super thin bifacial knife that we've found a
Speaker 3: few of, the prowl. They're more commonly associated with Folsom,
Speaker 3: which follows Clovis in the West, but there are non
Speaker 3: Clovis examples, probably knives.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I have a confession to make in all
Speaker 2: my casual Joe below reading about Clovis hunters and fulsome
Speaker 2: hunters I had never heard of what I'm holding in
Speaker 2: my hand until I was looking at that chart hanging
Speaker 2: at your office. Like then Meton sends me some of
Speaker 2: these these are out of Uh, these are replicas of
Speaker 2: some pieces that came out.
Speaker 3: Of Ohio, I believe Sheridan Cave.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd never even heard of this. When I opened
Speaker 2: the package up, I thought it was some kind of
Speaker 2: little point. But this is like a piece. This is
Speaker 2: a piece of a Clovis toolkit. That is, people debate
Speaker 2: what the hell this was?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, talk about that. Can you get a good on that?
Speaker 2: Phil You're getting it looks great? Uh, just to give
Speaker 2: it quick a little more analysis. It's there's this bevel
Speaker 2: cut into it and it's strided like it's caught like
Speaker 2: you wanted to just going out on a limb here,
Speaker 2: like you wanted to make it a little more grippy.
Speaker 2: All right, Michael.
Speaker 4: So these are bone rods, commonly called bone rods. They've
Speaker 4: been found in a lot of clovi including the Clovis
Speaker 4: Typesite has a really beautiful example of one of these.
Speaker 4: I've only found one in my career, was that the
Speaker 4: powers to hematite.
Speaker 2: Corey, what kind of bones.
Speaker 4: I'm guessing it was a piece of cortical bone, like
Speaker 4: a long bone from a bison. Not exactly sure. I
Speaker 4: don't know what these are, but my assumption is that
Speaker 4: it has something to do with the weaponry system powers Too.
Speaker 4: This okre mine is, for whatever reason, just completely filled
Speaker 4: with paleo Indian weaponry. We found like one hundred and
Speaker 4: seventy points at this site set an okre mine, an
Speaker 4: ochre mine in Southeast Wyoming, and we found one of
Speaker 4: these associated with the Clovis fulsome layer at powers Too,
Speaker 4: which is also filled with projectile points and flakes and stuff.
Speaker 4: So my assumption is that it has something to do
Speaker 4: with the weaponry system. What that is. I don't think
Speaker 4: anybody has really ever satisfactorily explained that.
Speaker 7: When you say weaponry system, you mean it was linked
Speaker 7: to the Clovis point somehow, or.
Speaker 4: Perhaps using the hafting system or something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you could see this as a four cheft somehow, right,
Speaker 3: the Clovis point there and then some other kind of
Speaker 3: wedge on the other side.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a guy online figured it out. I was that
Speaker 2: guy figures out a lot I saying, So I got
Speaker 2: to about different dudes debating it, right, and there's a
Speaker 2: dude saying that, like if you wedge that thing and
Speaker 2: when you're trying to I couldn't. He didn't have any visuals,
Speaker 2: but basically saying like he wedged it on the hafting
Speaker 2: process and then as you lash that piece it like titans.
Speaker 4: That was his take on it.
Speaker 2: It like it tightens the spear point. But he didn't
Speaker 2: have any pictures to explain what the hell he was
Speaker 2: talking about. But it's like, I had never heard of
Speaker 2: that thing.
Speaker 3: They're not common, you know. There's in nineteen thirty six
Speaker 3: in the Clovis site when they found the first mammoth
Speaker 3: remains in Clovis Points, they had one of these in
Speaker 3: the mammoth bone bed, but it's not common to find
Speaker 3: them in mammoth bum beds. That that might be the only.
Speaker 2: Case because it's like also I imagine, because it's organic
Speaker 2: and ship hauls it away or it rots.
Speaker 3: If you have bone preserved, these will be deserved if
Speaker 3: they were there and they were left there. But again,
Speaker 3: like nice functional implements, which these appear to be right,
Speaker 3: they don't appear to be broken. People tend not to
Speaker 3: leave these things behind. Pretty sure there were some of
Speaker 3: these in the Anziki.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then the East Winnachi site. There's several of
Speaker 4: these associated with, like, I don't know how many points
Speaker 4: are from there, a couple dozen Clovis points. It seems
Speaker 4: to be consistently associated with weaponry, though. The only other
Speaker 4: theory I've heard about these is dog sleds or something.
Speaker 3: That's That was Gramley's argument about East and I think
Speaker 3: those were bi beveled, so they didn't have a point
Speaker 3: on one end. They had a bevel this way and
Speaker 3: a bevel an alternate bevel on the other side. And
Speaker 3: Gramley argued that they were lashed together to make it
Speaker 3: the runner on the heads. That's really silly idea.
Speaker 6: Come on, do you ever find evidence of clodest points
Speaker 6: being picked up by ancient humans, like five thousand years
Speaker 6: later and they find a use for them in all
Speaker 6: of a sudden, there's a clothes point in with like
Speaker 6: a woodland site somewhere.
Speaker 4: Yes, I know one example off the top of my head,
Speaker 4: and I'm pretty sure everybody cites this one example. I've
Speaker 4: actually never tracked down the citation to it, but I've
Speaker 4: heard over and over again my entire career that somebody
Speaker 4: found a fulsome point of Pueblo.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, that's what I mean.
Speaker 6: That's the one example of that like happening like.
Speaker 2: An Sazi what what so the so called honestas your
Speaker 2: ancient puebloans that some pueblo had one where some dude's like,
Speaker 2: look at that, brought it home.
Speaker 4: M I think everyone's everyone's into old stuff, right, That's
Speaker 4: why I'm into archaeology. I think we have to assume
Speaker 4: people had a fascination for the past.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I bring home old shell casings. It wouldn't bring
Speaker 2: home a new shell casing from If I find a
Speaker 2: straight ball shellcasing that's got some holes rotten through it,
Speaker 2: I'm going to bring that sucker homered percent. Man, you
Speaker 2: got if I found one of my buddies, I'm not
Speaker 2: bringing it home.
Speaker 4: I got a spot in your garage where you just
Speaker 4: stack your old or your treasures.
Speaker 5: Look at there's a twenty seven nozzler case. It's got
Speaker 5: to be you know, we could be up to fifteen
Speaker 5: years old.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm bringing that home.
Speaker 3: Steve, Like, like twenty minutes ago, you asked about the
Speaker 3: absence of evidence for like hunting all these megafaunas. Yeah,
Speaker 3: can I say something about that?
Speaker 2: Say everything you want to say about that.
Speaker 3: So when you talk about like the giant beaver, right,
Speaker 3: those guys, my understanding is are living in the northeast,
Speaker 3: in the Midwest. In terms of what are evidence for
Speaker 3: Clovis subsistence in that part of the world, we have
Speaker 3: about two bones that happen to preservative fire and they're
Speaker 3: both caribou. Bottom line is there's this huge blank spot
Speaker 3: in what Clovist people were doing in that part of
Speaker 3: the country where that animal lives. We basically have no
Speaker 3: evidence for anything any subsistence.
Speaker 2: At all because it's not suitable to preserve.
Speaker 3: Right, right, So is the absence of evidence of hunting
Speaker 3: of giant beaver meaningful? Probably not right. We can't really
Speaker 3: interpret it one way or another. And a lot about
Speaker 3: the Clovis record of finnel uses that way. Like if
Speaker 3: you say, well, there's no evidence for Clovis use of sloth, well,
Speaker 3: would you expect to see it in a mammoth kill site?
Speaker 3: Probably not right, And that's what most of our sites are.
Speaker 3: So is the absence of sloth and mammoth kill sites interesting?
Speaker 3: Probably not. Now, if we go to the Aubrey site
Speaker 3: in Texas, this big Clovis campsite. They do have sloth
Speaker 3: dermal oscacles, which are these little like pieces of bone
Speaker 3: embedded in the skin that armored these giant ground sloths.
Speaker 3: Is that evidence for Clovis hunting of ground sloth? A
Speaker 3: couple of derm oscles and a Clovis campsite. It's pretty ambiguous, right,
Speaker 3: so the record is really hard to interpret. I will
Speaker 3: say there is recently published a sloth kill from Argentina
Speaker 3: called Campo Laborde. It's late places seen big. I think megathereum.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure which sloth. So there is some evidence
Speaker 3: for sloth use in South America. But just maybe to
Speaker 3: end this this big train of thought, the most damning
Speaker 3: evidence for human causation of the megaphonal extinctions to me
Speaker 3: is you didn't have to do archaeology if you just
Speaker 3: did paleontology around the world, everywhere that people went to,
Speaker 3: and you you just looked for a big extinction event
Speaker 3: in the last eighty thousand years, and you find one
Speaker 3: in every case, in every land mass that marks human
Speaker 3: arrival percent And it's not just the North American thing, right,
Speaker 3: It's not just a South American thing. It's an Australian thing.
Speaker 3: It's a New Zealand thing. It's a Europe thing. It's
Speaker 3: an Asia thing. It's all the islands Hawaii, it's a
Speaker 3: Polynesia thing. It's the Caribbean. They were a giant ground
Speaker 3: slaws in Caribbean that survived the places in a hall
Speaker 3: of same transition until six thousand years ago.
Speaker 2: That that, that's one of the biggest smoke and guns
Speaker 2: in my view on the overkill hypothesis. We get Wrangle
Speaker 2: Island off Siberia. No one found it man and man
Speaker 2: stayed there till four thousand years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I remember reading uh, Paul Martin's book Twilight of the Mammoths,
Speaker 5: and I don't I forget where it is in the book.
Speaker 5: It's either at the beginning or the end. But he
Speaker 5: tracks the spread of humans around the globe and lists
Speaker 5: all the stuff that went missing at the exact same time,
Speaker 5: and he get through to the end of it. I
Speaker 5: just remember reading that segment and just being like, God,
Speaker 5: it's almost too.
Speaker 3: Perfect, Like how did It's remarkable?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean like I put that book down and it
Speaker 5: was like you just watched a video on YouTube that's
Speaker 5: meant to convince you of something.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It was just like I don't nothing else makes sense
Speaker 2: to me. Now you know what else is great about it?
Speaker 2: As you say, what about Africa? Doesn't happen in Africa?
Speaker 2: And it's cause get like co evolution.
Speaker 4: Was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was no there was no sudden arrival. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the animals there had been like hey that little thing,
Speaker 2: you see something walking around two feet watch your ass?
Speaker 2: Like word got out.
Speaker 7: So what would you guys say then, if you're leaning
Speaker 7: towards human cause, what would you say to the people
Speaker 7: that are like, well, it was like the climate was changing,
Speaker 7: the environment was changing, Like these animals just couldn't adapt.
Speaker 4: The climate environment had been changing for millions of years
Speaker 4: prior to that. That'd be my response.
Speaker 3: You know, the North American and South American cases, they're
Speaker 3: especially tricky because it happens at this really wild time
Speaker 3: when we're coming out of the glaciation. Right, these massive
Speaker 3: mile mile thick sheets of ice are melting, back sea
Speaker 3: levels rising, all these ecological communities are reorganizing. You can
Speaker 3: imagine that could wreak havoc on animal populations, right, and
Speaker 3: at the same time, you bring in this highly effective
Speaker 3: cultural predator that these animals have no experience with, and
Speaker 3: it's the coincidence of all this stuff in time that
Speaker 3: has made it such like a difficult problem to answer,
Speaker 3: and it's why we're still debating about it. But I
Speaker 3: would say, tell me, tell me a climatic or ecological
Speaker 3: explanation that can drive an extinction event over two continents
Speaker 3: from the Arctic to the tropics and back to the
Speaker 3: sub arctic in South America, from the arid west to
Speaker 3: the humid east. What climate change can do that? What
Speaker 3: is the actual mechanism that could drive an extinction event
Speaker 3: so severe? And I don't know of one.
Speaker 2: And there's the other thing is that as dramatic as
Speaker 2: that seemed, these species had survived other cycles.
Speaker 3: Like that, dozens of them.
Speaker 2: I mean, there were there were interglacial periods where sea
Speaker 2: levels were hot, like right now you hear a lot
Speaker 2: about rising sea levels. There were there were periods between
Speaker 2: glaciations during the Ice Age when like the Pedestal, when
Speaker 2: the Statue of Liberty would be standing in water, like
Speaker 2: the Pedestal would be underwater during some of these periods,
Speaker 2: and the ship didn't go extinct then yep, yeah, And that.
Speaker 3: Was that was the most recent interglacial we call Stage
Speaker 3: five E one hundred and twenty thousand years ago was
Speaker 3: warmer than today. There are hippos living in England, for example. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: and that was one of many previous interglacials. It happened
Speaker 3: over and over and over and over again. The ice
Speaker 3: sheets oscillated back and forth and back and forth, and
Speaker 3: there are ecological transitions with all these These animals made
Speaker 3: it through, that's right, And tell people show up and
Speaker 3: if we look at the last dates and these animals,
Speaker 3: at least the ones that we have good samples for,
Speaker 3: they all go extinct within three hundred years of Clovis arrival,
Speaker 3: except for caribou. Caribou make it through, bison making moose
Speaker 3: make it through, el Caa make it through. We can
Speaker 3: talk about why if you want to talk about that. Why.
Speaker 3: So I think there's a single unifying explanation for all
Speaker 3: large mammals survival that even applies to sub Saharan Africa
Speaker 3: and Southeast Asia, which is that large animals survive in
Speaker 3: places where people can't reach the fishing populations in cities
Speaker 3: to drive them to extinction. Okay, so let's just take
Speaker 3: the case of bison, right, Bison survived, but actually bison
Speaker 3: went extinct over most of their range at the end
Speaker 3: of the place to see and they live coast to coast.
Speaker 3: You find bison and the rivers in Florida, you find
Speaker 3: them at the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, you find them
Speaker 3: in Mexico. Rocha Libreae full of bison. Right today, bison
Speaker 3: pretty much limited to the Mid Continent, or at least
Speaker 3: historically they were. Why is that, Well, when people don't
Speaker 3: have other foods to fall back on. Basically, the only
Speaker 3: way a predator can drive a prey to extinction is
Speaker 3: if they have another food to fall back on. This
Speaker 3: is why a lynx can't drive snowshoe hair to extinction,
Speaker 3: right because as soon as they that hair population goes down,
Speaker 3: the lynx population goes down with them, and the hair
Speaker 3: rebounds and the lynx rebound.
Speaker 2: That's a good point, man, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, So it's hard for a predator to drive its
Speaker 3: prey to extinction. It can only do that if it
Speaker 3: can switch to something else. Right. So, what I would
Speaker 3: argue if we're talking about bison is that in the
Speaker 3: Great Plains, there really weren't good switching options for people
Speaker 3: who lived in this part of the world that could
Speaker 3: really sustain, Like you couldn't drive bison to extinction and
Speaker 3: then switch and basically make your entire economy based on
Speaker 3: pronghorn or something else. And that's also I think the
Speaker 3: general story that explains like the survival of animals in
Speaker 3: the hierarchic Let's say in you know, muskox and caribou.
Speaker 3: There's no real switching options there, right, So if you
Speaker 3: really slam those populations, your population gets slammed right behind them.
Speaker 3: If we're going to talk about Southeast Asia, we're talking
Speaker 3: about dense tropical forests that there are very few people
Speaker 3: in until very recently. If we're talking about sub Saharan Africa,
Speaker 3: we're talking about a massive, absolutely massive semi arid desert
Speaker 3: that people have been living in in very very low
Speaker 3: population densities for a long time. You didn't really have
Speaker 3: pastoralists people hurting until the last two thousand years, and
Speaker 3: that's really when those animals started getting slammed in Africa.
Speaker 3: So in general, I would say, you know, you have
Speaker 3: these large mammals, cases of large mammals survival and environments
Speaker 3: where people simply couldn't reach sufficient densities to drive them
Speaker 3: to extinction.
Speaker 2: Mhmm. You know what comes out of like contemporary biology
Speaker 2: that what you're talking about makes me think of is
Speaker 2: if you look at the Southern caribou herds. So we
Speaker 2: used to have cariboo. I mean when I say used to,
Speaker 2: I mean even in the nineteen hundreds, right, Yeah, you
Speaker 2: know in nineteen twenty, nineteen thirty, you had I don't
Speaker 2: want to say decent numbers, but you had caribou in Washington,
Speaker 2: you had caribou and the Idaho Panhandle. You had caribou
Speaker 2: in Montana.
Speaker 7: Minnesota, and Maine.
Speaker 2: And I've heard biologist when talking about like, well, what
Speaker 2: was different? Is it be as human landscape development and
Speaker 2: landscape changes happened, it allowed whitetail deer and moose from
Speaker 2: logging practices and road building. It allowed whitetail deer and
Speaker 2: moose to move into these areas. And it made it
Speaker 2: that wolves could sustain themselves because in these areas they
Speaker 2: had like very limited number of caribou and there wasn't
Speaker 2: like a wolf predation problem. And it was what you're
Speaker 2: talking about, there's nothing for them to fall back on.
Speaker 2: So as caribou numbers would dwindle, wolf pressure would just
Speaker 2: go away. But now wolves don't move out because they're like,
Speaker 2: they're still picking away on white tailed deer, they're still
Speaker 2: picking away on moose, and any caribou that turns up,
Speaker 2: they're going to hammer it because they're always present.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's super interesting.
Speaker 3: It's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to have
Speaker 3: something to fall back on, yep, right, otherwise you get
Speaker 3: stuck in that predator prey cycle.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I really think you can explain large mammals survival
Speaker 3: across the globe with that one principle. I mean, you
Speaker 3: guys live in a place. When we live in a
Speaker 3: place where large mammal we're famous for large mammals, right,
Speaker 3: We've got bison and elk and moose, prong horn deer.
Speaker 3: Why are these spaces famous for large animals. Well, because
Speaker 3: it's hardly anybody who lives here. That's that's really always
Speaker 3: been the case in this part of the world, the
Speaker 3: Rocky Mountains, because it's high, it's dry, it's a hard
Speaker 3: place for people to make a living, and it's and
Speaker 3: it's those places that these large animals can really thrive
Speaker 3: because the predation pressure from humans is really is really low.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an interesting points you look at like Appalachi
Speaker 2: or whatever. They had bison, they had elk, they had wolves,
Speaker 2: they had cougars, and for a long time they didn't.
Speaker 2: And then you have these like spots, like you know,
Speaker 2: the Northern Rockies, which was able to hang onto like
Speaker 2: a relatively intact ecosystem, and you go up to Alaska
Speaker 2: and they were able to hang on to like their
Speaker 2: their like suite of megafauna survive the initial human Pulse's
Speaker 2: good theory.
Speaker 3: I like that.
Speaker 6: What percentage of people in your field believe in the
Speaker 6: blitzkrieg hypothesis and how has that changed during your career?
Speaker 3: So I'd like to I wish we could answer this independently,
Speaker 3: So I'd love to hear what has to say.
Speaker 6: You can both write down a number.
Speaker 3: The first thing I'll say is that when I was
Speaker 3: in graduate school, Paul Martin, who was the real champion
Speaker 3: of that, was a friend of mine. He was retired.
Speaker 3: He was really nice to me, and I go and
Speaker 3: I'd go up to his office and I'd argue with
Speaker 3: him all the time about this. I didn't believe in
Speaker 3: it at all until I left and did some science,
Speaker 3: and I ultimately decided Paul was right.
Speaker 6: It wasn't because he was nice to you.
Speaker 5: What I wrote a review on that Twilight of the
Speaker 5: Mammoth for Dan's class. I remember, you know, you'd write
Speaker 5: the book reviews and he'd write a couple of sentences
Speaker 5: at the bottom and the first I'll always remember this,
Speaker 5: The first thing he wrote on there was Paul Martin
Speaker 5: was a delightful dinner companion.
Speaker 3: Enough, he was a great guy. I'm going to answer.
Speaker 3: I'm going to say somewhere between one and two percent
Speaker 3: and believe this. Oh wow, what would you say, Spencer?
Speaker 2: No, yeah, I mean that's it.
Speaker 4: You're talking to it in dangerous She's here, Steve right
Speaker 4: in the studio.
Speaker 6: So the numbers going down.
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 3: You know. The point you raised of where's the evidence?
Speaker 3: Like if people drove horse to extinction, why do you
Speaker 3: have two horse kill sites? Is an argument that really
Speaker 3: resonates with a lot of people. Uh huh, they don't really.
Speaker 3: I would say a lot of people haven't thought about
Speaker 3: the nature of the sample and the sample size that
Speaker 3: we have. Yeah, and that maybe that's actually quite a
Speaker 3: bit of evidence for horse hunting.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I'll say, like I mean to start with,
Speaker 4: like very a very low percentage of archaeologists actually study
Speaker 4: this stuff, right, like Paley Indians. There's a very small
Speaker 4: segment of archaeology alongside all the complex of people and
Speaker 4: just the people that do everything else. So like, for instance,
Speaker 4: in my experience, I didn't really think about this stuff
Speaker 4: at all until I went to Colorado State University for
Speaker 4: my master's and my advisor there, Jason Lebel, was invested
Speaker 4: in Paley Indian stuff and kind of trained me up
Speaker 4: on that. But even then I was like, you know,
Speaker 4: that sounds good, like Monte Verde looks solid. All these
Speaker 4: pre Clovists. We need to be going out there and
Speaker 4: digging deeper, I guess, And it really wasn't until Todd
Speaker 4: brainwashed me at Wyoming. But it is true that when
Speaker 4: you actually buckle down and start thinking critically about this
Speaker 4: stuff and really invest your intellectual energy into understanding it,
Speaker 4: it just kind of comes into focus. I mean, it's
Speaker 4: really obvious to me that Clovis was basically the first
Speaker 4: people when they drove the Negafont to extinction. But I
Speaker 4: don't think that that's a very popular view for a
Speaker 4: number of reasons. I mean, one, it's just a small
Speaker 4: percentage of archaeologists that are invested in this stuff. And
Speaker 4: then among those that do. I just got to say, like,
Speaker 4: archaeology prioritizes discovery and newness, right, and we can't really
Speaker 4: escape that.
Speaker 3: I do.
Speaker 4: I love discovering stuff, and so everyone's constantly wanting to
Speaker 4: push it back. And I think there's a little bit
Speaker 4: of wishful thinking there, like did we really find the oldest?
Speaker 4: It's kind of a bummer, right, It's like an existential
Speaker 4: crisis for people that have invested a lot of their
Speaker 4: time and energy into finding the oldest thing to be like,
Speaker 4: well we did it. Now what it's a bit of
Speaker 4: a it's a bit of a bumber to some folks.
Speaker 5: I think, now, if the number is one or two
Speaker 5: percent of that ninety eight ninety nine percent, how divided
Speaker 5: is that block of thinking?
Speaker 3: Like are they in terms of the cause? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Like like are there could you subdivide that quickly into
Speaker 5: a couple of different camps or well, I'm just curious about.
Speaker 3: The I don't think so. I mean, I think Spencer's
Speaker 3: right that, like most people aren't invested in this. Like
Speaker 3: if you if you're a Maya archaeologist studying you know,
Speaker 3: pyramids and things in the Guatemalan jungle, your experience with overkills.
Speaker 3: You know what you learned as a graduate student, then
Speaker 3: what you're teaching your intro archaeology class.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Would guess that most of those people believe there's some
Speaker 3: sort of climatic and ecological explanation. The other contenders, by
Speaker 3: the way, is something called hyper disease. Have you heard
Speaker 3: about this? Yeah?
Speaker 4: What about what about that?
Speaker 7: It was just like a combination of factors that Yeah,
Speaker 7: that's all the time.
Speaker 3: It's a really good point, right, Like these are not
Speaker 3: what we call mutually exclusive. They're all they all could
Speaker 3: be operating simultaneously. And and there's a fourth.
Speaker 2: Who's that dude that's real into those little micro blasts
Speaker 2: or whatever. He's micro glass.
Speaker 3: Richard Firestone was the original guy.
Speaker 2: You know, it's funny. I did a tour of the
Speaker 2: Lindenmeyer site, and the day I was at Lindenmeyer, linden
Speaker 2: Meyer's big, folesome site. I'm just telling the audience here
Speaker 2: it's kind of cool because it's right on there. It's
Speaker 2: it's north it's between Denver Fort Collins nor is it
Speaker 2: North Fork cons And it's a huge they argue a
Speaker 2: huge fulsome winter camp site, and some people argue that
Speaker 2: it's this sounds a little out there because of the
Speaker 2: rock faces on the mountains, it's easy to explain where
Speaker 2: it is, and that you could have had that this
Speaker 2: might have been a place where fullsome hunters from all
Speaker 2: across the Great Plains. You could say, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: just follow you'll know, look for the big white slash
Speaker 2: on the peak and if you've never been there, that's
Speaker 2: where we'll be. Sounds fantastful.
Speaker 4: So the guy that came up with that idea, I
Speaker 4: think is what was my master's advisor, Jason LaBelle. I
Speaker 4: believe him. The big exposure of White River group there,
Speaker 4: it's visible for miles in every direction. And yeah, it's
Speaker 4: right at the margin of the you know the high
Speaker 4: planes in the Colorada Piedmont. It's kind of at this
Speaker 4: eco tone. It makes it all makes sense to me.
Speaker 4: It's like it's the biggest it's the biggest folsome site
Speaker 4: that exists.
Speaker 2: Capital When I was there, there was a dude because
Speaker 2: they've done all this stratigraphy there, so they've done a
Speaker 2: lot of dating on stuff, and there was a guy
Speaker 2: there collecting those little things. He's looking forward to prove
Speaker 2: that it was like that the place to scene extinctions
Speaker 2: were some kind of bombardment of comets. Comets killed them all.
Speaker 3: The list What god, I did a study of that.
Speaker 2: Okay, tell me tell people about that idea.
Speaker 3: Oh, go ahead, well where yeah comments?
Speaker 2: Okay, then we can get into the Brody's idea about
Speaker 2: a bunch of shit was happening all at once.
Speaker 3: I think it was the I think it was two
Speaker 3: thousand and seven. This paper was published in what we
Speaker 3: call pen ASS Proceedings sounds like proceedings in the National
Speaker 3: Academy of Sciences PNASS, where they they had they had
Speaker 3: taken these collected sediments from a bunch of terminal places,
Speaker 3: the end of the ice age sites, and they would
Speaker 3: take these sediment columns. So they just collect sediments, you know,
Speaker 3: in very fine intervals through sort of the place to
Speaker 3: see Holocene transition.
Speaker 2: What year was this going on?
Speaker 3: Was published in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2: See that's when I was there two thousand and six,
Speaker 2: two I was working on I was there around two
Speaker 2: thousand and five, two thousand and six.
Speaker 3: So they found consistently at a certain time point I
Speaker 3: want to say, twelve thousand and seven hundred years before
Speaker 3: present approximately, they claim to find high concentrations of weird things.
Speaker 3: Those things included little tiny metallic spheres. They call them
Speaker 3: titano magnetites. It's like iron oxides with titanium, little tiny
Speaker 3: spheres like the diameter of your hair. They said they
Speaker 3: had high concentrations of magnetic particles, so they would literally
Speaker 3: like put this sediment in water and then run a
Speaker 3: super strong magnet through it, collect the magnetic particles and
Speaker 3: count them up through these sediment columns. They say they'd
Speaker 3: peak right at this this horizon. They did the same
Speaker 3: thing for what are called platinum group elements like iridium
Speaker 3: that's used to identify the extinction of the dinosaurs. When
Speaker 3: that meteorite hit and there's this high iridium concentration, all
Speaker 3: this weird stuff, and all of us, a lot of
Speaker 3: us who have been digging sites like this and digging
Speaker 3: through sediments of this age, were like, Oh my god,
Speaker 3: it's all this weird extraterrestrial stuff that we had never
Speaker 3: seen before. We'd been digging through it our whole life.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to just see it myself. And I
Speaker 3: was working on the site at the time, and I
Speaker 3: had friends who were working on sites where we could
Speaker 3: collect these samples and just replicate do what they did,
Speaker 3: and replicate their analyzes, and we failed to replicate any
Speaker 3: of them. We didn't find high concentrations of microspherreals, magnetic particles,
Speaker 3: or platinum group elements. Completely failed.
Speaker 2: For what that's worth, Where does that idea stand right now?
Speaker 2: Is it fashionable in your community?
Speaker 3: No? No, it's complete. It's funny. You know. We thought
Speaker 3: that their early kind of pushback against it would make
Speaker 3: it go away. It it didn't. They're still publishing papers
Speaker 3: and support of it. And I would say the vast
Speaker 3: majority of people in geology and archaeology don't take it seriously.
Speaker 3: I mean, a massive extraterrestrial impact that drives an extinction
Speaker 3: over two continents doesn't leave like a whisper of dust.
Speaker 3: There ought to be like massive geologic evidence for craters
Speaker 3: and tsunamis and fires, and it's just not there.
Speaker 6: If it's two percent right now, believe in Blitzkreek, what
Speaker 6: was it twenty years ago? What do you think it'll
Speaker 6: be twenty years from now.
Speaker 4: That's a good.
Speaker 3: It's a really good question.
Speaker 4: When I break down these these arguments and you kind
Speaker 4: of look at the timing, I would say that we're
Speaker 4: like in a post a post Clovis first world longer
Speaker 4: than we were ever in a Clovis first world. At
Speaker 4: this point, the Clovis First paradigm was basically like let's
Speaker 4: say nineteen seventy three with Paul Martin's paper that was.
Speaker 3: The height up to, like a pinnacle up to basically.
Speaker 4: Like nineteen ninety seven when Monte Verde became accepted as
Speaker 4: a pre Clovis site, that was kind of like the
Speaker 4: Clovis First era. Ever since monte Verde came out, it's
Speaker 4: basically just been gaining more acceptance that there was stuff
Speaker 4: before Clovis.
Speaker 6: So guys aren't a endangered species.
Speaker 5: You're like the guys at the record store saying there's
Speaker 5: no good music anymore.
Speaker 4: We're are habitat fragmented. There's like a relic population in Kansas,
Speaker 4: some in Alaska.
Speaker 3: I have this of maybe schizophrenic perspective about it, Like
Speaker 3: sometimes I look at the record and I kind of
Speaker 3: feel like Neo in the matrix, like I can see
Speaker 3: something that nobody else can see, like, oh my god,
Speaker 3: it's so obvious that Clovis is first. And then half
Speaker 3: the time I feel like a guy with a tenfoil hat,
Speaker 3: like believing in crazy conspiracies, like why the hell can
Speaker 3: I see what everybody else sees?
Speaker 6: What would need to happen you convince everyone else to
Speaker 6: agree with you.
Speaker 3: Oh no, that'll never happen. I mean archaeology, the record
Speaker 3: is too crappy. We all look at the same evidence
Speaker 3: and interpret it like completely differently. It's pretty amazing. That way,
Speaker 3: we're never gonna get consensus.
Speaker 2: There's a thing that could happen that would work the
Speaker 2: other way for sure.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 2: The thing that could happen work that a way is
Speaker 2: someone finds a bulletproof seventeen thousand year old site. Yeah bulletproof, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: they sure absolutely.
Speaker 4: I would love for that to happen. Honestly, it would
Speaker 4: be great to open up this whole other world and
Speaker 4: we knew nothing about a whole other record to study.
Speaker 4: I just I don't think that's happened yet.
Speaker 2: You know, if I had to crystal ball it now,
Speaker 2: I always put it like this, just to make a graphic,
Speaker 2: like God has a gun to your head and he
Speaker 2: says what happened to the megafauna? And he knows he's ominiscient,
Speaker 2: and you have to guess right or else you die.
Speaker 2: So the So the screws are to you, there's no
Speaker 2: room for playing games. I would say, in that moment,
Speaker 2: my life's on the line, right, I would say, something
Speaker 2: was going on where there was turmoil, numbers were depressed,
Speaker 2: there was some upheaval, and into this upheaval came humans
Speaker 2: and and uh and and tipped it, tipped it to extinction.
Speaker 2: But something was going on where it wasn't like peak. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then but maybe it would be like forsake me, sure,
Speaker 2: you know, but I'm saying if I had to make
Speaker 2: a life or death.
Speaker 3: So vans Haynes made that argument, and he had good
Speaker 3: He worked on these sites in the San Patrio rebellion, Arizona,
Speaker 3: these beautiful Clovi sites, really well preserved surfaces, and he
Speaker 3: thought there's really clear evidence that when people were there
Speaker 3: at Murray Springs and Laner and Blackwater draw that there
Speaker 3: was a drought and that these these mammoth populations were depressed.
Speaker 3: They're kind of stuck to these water holes and people
Speaker 3: were just basically the coupd of gra And it's a
Speaker 3: it's a it's a really good argument for the Southwest.
Speaker 3: But we're talking about the Southwest into massive continents, right,
Speaker 3: So again, if we're going to have some kind of
Speaker 3: ecological upheaval that spans two continents from the Amazon to
Speaker 3: the East Coast, what is it.
Speaker 4: I also feel like we should We haven't talked about
Speaker 4: Alaska yet.
Speaker 2: Oh him, use some Alaska stuff, man.
Speaker 4: So like there are pre Clovia sites in the Western Hemisphere,
Speaker 4: they're in Alaska.
Speaker 2: That's what it makes sense.
Speaker 4: There's clear evidence of human occupations, clear camp sites about
Speaker 4: fourteen years old. They contained mammoth remains, they contained these
Speaker 4: little microblades, seemingly among the first technologies that people brought
Speaker 4: here from Northeast Asia.
Speaker 3: You see the same technology in Northeast Asia.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's exactly what you'd expect for the first people
Speaker 4: in the Western Hemisphere. They're carrying Asian technology and living
Speaker 4: in Alaska.
Speaker 3: And exactly when you'd expect to sam too.
Speaker 4: And that's a good point, man, And it coincides with
Speaker 4: what we did a study back in twenty fifteen looking
Speaker 4: at when megafaunal populations decline between Alaska, United States south
Speaker 4: of the ice sheets in South America, basically slightly before
Speaker 4: we find archaeological evidence for human occupation in Alaska, megafauna
Speaker 4: starts to decline to extinction. And that's important because when
Speaker 4: you look at the archaeological survey in Alaska that's been
Speaker 4: done compared to that that's been done south of the
Speaker 4: ice sheets, it's very slim. There's like two highways and
Speaker 4: a few little patches of archaeological research and lo and behold.
Speaker 4: Everywhere people look in Alaska they find pre club A sites,
Speaker 4: especially in this place called then in a valley and
Speaker 4: outside of Fairbanks, just a lot of pre Clovius evidence there.
Speaker 4: And we haven't really looked that hard in Alaska. It's
Speaker 4: super difficult place to do archaeology, but we found pre
Speaker 4: Clovid sites immediately, despite the one hundred and fifty years
Speaker 4: of research we've done south of the ice sheets very little.
Speaker 3: And they're normal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and they're normal.
Speaker 3: It's not weird shit. It's like chipstone around hearth features,
Speaker 3: butchered animal bones. It's normal stuff. And what we call
Speaker 3: distreet discrete stratigraphic levels, meaning they're just like really clear
Speaker 3: occupations if you're to look through them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So those Do you think those people hit Alaska
Speaker 7: and just stayed or did they, like.
Speaker 2: Some states, get absorbed into Clovis or.
Speaker 3: I would say the ancestors of Clovis, Some stayed and
Speaker 3: some move south.
Speaker 2: Yeah, have you ever been to or looked at the
Speaker 2: stuff from the MASA site?
Speaker 3: I have the book. I've never seen this stuff. That's cool.
Speaker 2: That's not as old though.
Speaker 3: No cool.
Speaker 2: I went to that masa. It's badass, man.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You can just picture people wanting to get up on
Speaker 2: that thing and look around.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: I didn't go on top of my sat and looked
Speaker 2: at it, you know. But that's not old, right.
Speaker 3: It's place to see it. It's it's like maybe twelve.
Speaker 2: Seven sticks in my head or I don't know something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe two thousand years after people arrive in Alaska
Speaker 3: and it's probably you know, the argument is those are
Speaker 3: planes bison hunters coming back back north fist in the
Speaker 3: fact form.
Speaker 2: That's what That's what they had introduced me to, is
Speaker 2: this idea of backfill. Ye like that you get the
Speaker 2: initial waves of people coming through, but then at some
Speaker 2: point in time people move back to their direction.
Speaker 4: Yeah, migrations kind of like quitous clouds up the record.
Speaker 6: What part of the America has moved on from Clovis
Speaker 6: the quickest, in which ones held out the longest.
Speaker 3: Probably the Great Basin was the quickest. It's Spencer. Spencer
Speaker 3: mentioned this some really old stemmed projectile points that that
Speaker 3: some Great Basin archaeologists argue are as old, if not
Speaker 3: older than Clovis. You also have Clovis points in the
Speaker 3: Great Basin, but there's some very old old dates on
Speaker 3: these stemmed projectile points in the Great Basin. I don't
Speaker 3: know that we have really good age control on post
Speaker 3: Clovis projectile point types except in the Rocky Mountains. And
Speaker 3: we you know, I had Laprel. Another really cool thing
Speaker 3: we found is a fulsome point and we have we
Speaker 3: we appear to have a single occupation where people killed
Speaker 3: killed mammos, killed bison. It was buried by a flood
Speaker 3: probably ten years after they killed that mammoth. And on
Speaker 3: the same surface we've got one Clovis point and one
Speaker 3: fulsome point. This would be the oldest case of fulsome
Speaker 3: ever found, so and that would probably be you know,
Speaker 3: that's pretty early. We know Clovis persists after that. So
Speaker 3: this like this long period of overlap where both are
Speaker 3: being made.
Speaker 7: So there was this you know, major extinction event with
Speaker 7: large animals like what happened to the Clovis culture, Like
Speaker 7: when that extinction event happened, did they just what happened
Speaker 7: to them? Did they evolve into other cultures?
Speaker 2: Did they?
Speaker 4: I think it's pretty clear now. I mean it's it's
Speaker 4: Fulsome in the Rocky Mountains at least, and then other
Speaker 4: regions the United States have these other post Clovis fluted
Speaker 4: point traditions.
Speaker 7: Because when you talk, when you give them these different names,
Speaker 7: like Clovis Falsome, it's like there was this people and.
Speaker 4: Then there was this Yeah, we should you know what
Speaker 4: I make that distinction? I mean they weren't Clovis wasn't
Speaker 4: a people. It was a stone tool technology.
Speaker 3: Where did cell phone people come from?
Speaker 4: Yeah? And the way I look at it and like
Speaker 4: this is like getting into the realm of handwaving. But
Speaker 4: fullso points are a lot smaller than Clovis points if
Speaker 4: you put them side by side. You oftentimes don't get
Speaker 4: that when you're just looking at books and illustrations of
Speaker 4: this stuff. But full some points are generally at least
Speaker 4: half the size of Clovis points.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna make it.
Speaker 7: Demanded something smaller than.
Speaker 4: Well, right here, Clovis points have a distinct function from
Speaker 4: Folsome points. Maybe they're a thrusting Spearit not an Atlatal dart.
Speaker 4: You introduce another weaponry system into your toolkit and they're
Speaker 4: used at the same time.
Speaker 7: And that also effect the culture, right Like, so, I.
Speaker 4: Mean Clovis points basically disappear when when the mamos disappeared,
Speaker 4: So they're probably a pretty closely linked thing that Clovis
Speaker 4: points were used to haunt mammas, and then once mammos
Speaker 4: were gone, didn't have much need for him anymore, and
Speaker 4: people started making these little falsome points a lot more often.
Speaker 2: You don't need to hold I was just showing it.
Speaker 4: I want to look at you.
Speaker 3: You very quickly start seeing regional diversification and in the
Speaker 3: way people are making a living right. And one thing,
Speaker 3: I visited this site fiendal Mundo in Mexico, and I
Speaker 3: visited another site where they found some Clovis points in
Speaker 3: the surface. One thing that really struck me there was here,
Speaker 3: you're looking at this Mexican Clovis point. Right. You drop
Speaker 3: that in Wyoming, you wouldn't know it's in Mexico. You
Speaker 3: drop it in South Carolina, you wouldn't know it's from Mexico.
Speaker 3: And they find them right with these gomfit these with
Speaker 3: these elephants. But in this same site, which is this
Speaker 3: really highly eroded surface site, I'm seeing marine shells brought
Speaker 3: in from the Gulf of Sea of Cortes and ceramics.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: You start to see this super regional specialization. But in Clovis,
Speaker 3: everybody's doing the same damn thing everywhere, and it's it's
Speaker 3: really really striking. You go to Missouri at the Kimswick site,
Speaker 3: you've got a dead mast, it on full big Clovis points, Mexico, Wyoming.
Speaker 2: Dudes had it figured out that.
Speaker 3: Was the main way to make a living.
Speaker 7: Apparently what was going on on the west coast, you
Speaker 7: know with the kel you had the Kelp Highway theory,
Speaker 7: Like what archaeology is there at the same time as closed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a really good question. So the first thing
Speaker 3: I should note is, you know, the coastal migration thing
Speaker 3: has been around for a long time. The idea has
Speaker 3: been around since least the nineteen forties that this was
Speaker 3: another way to get around the glaciers. It really became
Speaker 3: in vogue in nineteen ninety seven when mona verity was
Speaker 3: accepted to be pre Clovis and real because the argument
Speaker 3: was in order to get them down there that early.
Speaker 3: The ice ree corder simply wasn't an option to the
Speaker 3: coast had to be the case, right. So Ever since then,
Speaker 3: like everybody has assumed it's the coast, I should say
Speaker 3: that these again aren't mutually exclusive. You could take both roots, right,
Speaker 3: But there's been a huge amount of work now on
Speaker 3: the West coast because of that, because everybody's kind of
Speaker 3: assumed that that's the entry point. And my understanding is
Speaker 3: that there is very little archaeological evidence from the place
Speaker 3: to seen at all, Like.
Speaker 7: You're not seeing different technologies at the same time as
Speaker 7: Clovis was.
Speaker 3: Going on, or we don't really have anything Clovis age
Speaker 3: over there. The closest thing is maybe on the Channel
Speaker 3: Island in California. There's very early humans are getting out
Speaker 3: there pretty early.
Speaker 4: I don't think there's any weaponry associated. Now.
Speaker 3: There's some really funky points out there, but but that
Speaker 3: stuff's kind of hard to date because you're dating off
Speaker 3: in marine shells and there's a lot of old carbon
Speaker 3: in the ocean, so these dates tend to be too old.
Speaker 3: There's there's a very famous human remains.
Speaker 2: From Prince Wales.
Speaker 3: Well not you're thinking about Alaska. No, I'm talking about
Speaker 3: on the Channel Islands. Oh yeah, Arlington Springs woman. But
Speaker 3: she had a lot of marine resources in her diet,
Speaker 3: which means the dates are too old. But it was
Speaker 3: kind of like it was basically a Clovis age date
Speaker 3: before you did the correction for that. But we really
Speaker 3: don't have a good a good sample of dated stuff
Speaker 3: from the Pacific coast. I will say there are Clovis
Speaker 3: points that have been found basically on the beach. There's
Speaker 3: one from an island off the coast of Mexico a
Speaker 3: Clovis point.
Speaker 2: But you're also looking for sites and coastal rainforest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really challenging environment.
Speaker 2: You know, you know it makes me optimistic though. I
Speaker 2: was with the geologist up there who works in Alaska,
Speaker 2: and you know, you always heard when people talk about
Speaker 2: the Kelp Highway theory or the coastal migration theory, everybody's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: but all that stuff's underwater. But he was, he has
Speaker 2: these shoreline maps, tons of it's not because the ice
Speaker 2: a static rebound, that's right. So when you had all
Speaker 2: that ice on top of the I'm not telling you,
Speaker 2: I'm telling folks at home when all that ice was
Speaker 2: on the laying on the earth. It's so heavy to
Speaker 2: push the crust down and sank it. And there's still
Speaker 2: like seismic activity in southeast Alaska from as the ice
Speaker 2: melted off, the land pops back up. So when you
Speaker 2: look at these shorelines, it's this like it's this wave
Speaker 2: like undulating thing where some of that ice age shoreline
Speaker 2: is one hundred feet up the hill.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 2: So it's like there could be stuff there. Well, I
Speaker 2: mean yeah, I mean, like, like what I'm saying is
Speaker 2: you can't just say, well, it's all underwater.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have no doubt that there's some archaeology underwater.
Speaker 4: I think it's true they've.
Speaker 2: Found some underwater, but I'm saying it's not uniformly all
Speaker 2: at the same depth. It's like a real hodgepodge of
Speaker 2: of like you know, the the geological history is a
Speaker 2: real hodgepodge of stuff that's way up in the forest
Speaker 2: or down underwater. So what I'm saying is I might
Speaker 2: find me an old ass site.
Speaker 4: Well, there's that notion, right that some of some of
Speaker 4: the isostatic rebounds kind of kept some of these coastal
Speaker 4: areas above water, but also why would you expect that
Speaker 4: people would never maybe go in inland for a night
Speaker 4: and form a campsite, right, I mean, basically the assumption
Speaker 4: is that people are just living on the beach because, yeah, dude,
Speaker 4: have you been there? The beach is nice. Sometimes Like
Speaker 4: it's not that it's nice, it's.
Speaker 2: It's an overwhelming abundance of food.
Speaker 3: It's not easy to get, not easy to it's in
Speaker 3: the water.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 2: All right, but but dude, listen, I'm telling you, get
Speaker 2: into the shellfish and the salmon. Go talk to anybody
Speaker 2: who lives there now.
Speaker 3: All right, but but picture yourself at the end of
Speaker 3: the ice age, and you know, you come down into Seattle,
Speaker 3: and that's like, we could live on shellfish and ignore
Speaker 3: these mastodons and bison. Ye or after these big animals
Speaker 3: have a shellfish.
Speaker 2: Don't hurt. But they've had coastal No. But but they've
Speaker 2: had coastal cultures there. They've had coastal cultures there continuously.
Speaker 3: I get that's the argument.
Speaker 2: Always more abundant, who were always more abundant than interior peoples,
Speaker 2: and even many of the interior peoples and were going
Speaker 2: to Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, many of the interior peoples
Speaker 2: are still reliant on anadromous fish like marine resources. You
Speaker 2: can't ignore it.
Speaker 3: And that part of the world is a good reason
Speaker 3: why you do that. Now, Yeah, I'm saying in the
Speaker 3: place to see, that's probably not your best option. Also,
Speaker 3: if we're talking about that, look, let's let's look at
Speaker 3: this first argument. Let's look at this idea. People are
Speaker 3: have thousands of years of coastal adaptation. Where's that the
Speaker 3: archaeological record. That's an assumption. Two people are living in
Speaker 3: high population densities. Where are they? Why can't we find them? Three?
Speaker 3: We don't really see intensive use submarine resources. And tell
Speaker 3: let's say four or five thousand years after Clovis in
Speaker 3: that part of the world. Yeah, part of that is
Speaker 3: sea level rise.
Speaker 4: Still hm.
Speaker 3: You know, I think part of the success of the
Speaker 3: Kelp Highway hypothesis is that it's a good marketing campaign.
Speaker 3: And I want to I want to I want to
Speaker 3: rebrand the Ice Free Corridor to the Meat Highway.
Speaker 4: Oh. I was pretty enamored by the Kelp Highway thing too.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's a really elegant theory and I'm not
Speaker 4: I'm really not shitting on it at all. It's it's
Speaker 4: a cool it's cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes a ton of sense when you think
Speaker 2: about I mean, plus, here's the thing. You can like
Speaker 2: the life in kelp beds, and then you can eat
Speaker 2: the kelt.
Speaker 4: I mean it makes sense until you look at the
Speaker 4: until you look at the evidence.
Speaker 7: But meat versus shellfish? But what what what's saying that
Speaker 7: they weren't killing large marine mammals.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in fact that if there's a coastal thing, that's
Speaker 3: what I think they would be doing is focusing their
Speaker 3: effort on large marine mammals mostly you know, seals, maybe
Speaker 3: some whales.
Speaker 4: And being reminded of like Ben Potter's study, that of
Speaker 4: city and sourcing study. You probably know more details about
Speaker 4: it than I do. But basically, an archaeologist in Alaska,
Speaker 4: great archaeologists out of out of Fairbanks named Ben Potter,
Speaker 4: did a big subsidian sourcing study of all the oldest
Speaker 4: sites that they know about in Alaska. The hypothesis was
Speaker 4: basically like, if people were tied to coastal regions, then
Speaker 4: we should have coastal obsidian in these sites because there
Speaker 4: are obsidian sources kind of right on where that corridor
Speaker 4: would be. Okay Lo and behold, every single piece of
Speaker 4: obsidian used in these oldest sites in Alaska. The people
Speaker 4: that are the ancestors of the first Americans, they're from
Speaker 4: interior sources, from mountain sources, and the interior of Alaska,
Speaker 4: and really no evidence that people are utilizing the coastal
Speaker 4: regions of Alaska.
Speaker 2: Oh, I'll settle on this. If I took your ass
Speaker 2: and dropped you off somewhere on like wherever, Okay, some
Speaker 2: remote area in southeast Alaska, I've been there well, and
Speaker 2: you know what, you know where, I wouldn't wind up
Speaker 2: finding you up in the mountains. I would reach down
Speaker 2: on the beach, getting fat off, kept green, laying and clams.
Speaker 3: Until I got enough expertise to effectively hunt bear and caribou.
Speaker 2: Dude, that's a great point. Yeah, No, I got you. No,
Speaker 2: what you're saying is good, but it is. It is
Speaker 2: an enticing idea. And then I don't want to go
Speaker 2: I don't want to go too deep in this. But
Speaker 2: then I don't know, if you know, like Meltzer's whole
Speaker 2: deal with going up and all that, trying to put
Speaker 2: the trying to figure out is there any kind of
Speaker 2: like plant pollen evidence of an ice free corridor, and
Speaker 2: so they go up to these places on the you know,
Speaker 2: where the ice free corridor supposedly existed, and they go
Speaker 2: into these ponds and pull up sediments and try to
Speaker 2: go find sediments that would be at the right time.
Speaker 2: So you go thirteen thousand years ago, and he'd be like, Okay,
Speaker 2: show me evidence at thirteen thousand years ago that there
Speaker 2: were mammoths and vegetation. And he's like, it's a rock garden, right,
Speaker 2: it was water and rock. Yeah, But I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm just saying how he explained it.
Speaker 2: I never read anything in.
Speaker 3: Terms of the availability of both migration roots.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like, was there a green verdant ice free corridor?
Speaker 3: It's a really there is now, right, So at some
Speaker 3: point there had to be. And the question is when
Speaker 3: does that go from being a barrier something that humans
Speaker 3: can actually traverse. That's a question for both migration corridors.
Speaker 3: It's a really challenging thing to answer because you know,
Speaker 3: if we're thinking about a ten mile space, we can
Speaker 3: study that by drilling a core in a lake and
Speaker 3: studying the DNA or the pollen out of it. We're
Speaker 3: talking about something that's twelve hundred miles long? Is that
Speaker 3: what we decided the Ice Free Corridor.
Speaker 4: Nine to twelve hundred is what we looked at.
Speaker 3: That's a length. That's a length of it, right, So like,
Speaker 3: how do you know when that thing is open versus
Speaker 3: closed over a stretch that humans can actually migrate? It's
Speaker 3: incredibly challenging, and if you date different geologic deposits in
Speaker 3: different places, you get different answers, and there's a lot
Speaker 3: of disagreement. The dates that I generally see are anywhere
Speaker 3: from it was open from fourteen thousand, five hundred, or
Speaker 3: some people say it's open around thirteen thousand. What is
Speaker 3: really clear to me is that it's open right around
Speaker 3: the time Clovis explodes across North America.
Speaker 2: Can I bolster your Can I bolster your argument?
Speaker 4: I'd love that.
Speaker 2: Think about this, man. This is the thing I think
Speaker 2: about when I think about the Kelp Highway too, is
Speaker 2: let's say, let's okay, let's say the Ice Free Corridor
Speaker 2: was real shitty and it wasn't great, but you were
Speaker 2: just you were making a moon shot, right. You're dying
Speaker 2: of curiosity, so you start picking into there, and why
Speaker 2: would someone do that? You'd like why would anyone take
Speaker 2: the risk. They wouldn't want to go into marginal habitat.
Speaker 2: But think about this, let's go back to the coastal theory.
Speaker 2: You go to like Glacier Bay, or any number of
Speaker 2: areas in BC, any number of areas in southeast Alaska,
Speaker 2: we're still today, still today, that ocean land interface is
Speaker 2: a wall of ice. So people coming down in the
Speaker 2: boat had to have been okay with the idea that, like,
Speaker 2: it's true, as far as they could see, it was
Speaker 2: a wall of ice.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's fart.
Speaker 2: And they would have had calving, like calving glaciers, and
Speaker 2: it would have been like, let's go in the north,
Speaker 2: let's check it up. Yeah, So someone there has to
Speaker 2: be a thing where someone's like so dying of curiosity
Speaker 2: that they have and they have to have the faith
Speaker 2: to be like, I have a feeling I don't know why,
Speaker 2: I just have a feeling that if you go and
Speaker 2: in thirty miles, maybe we'll find a place where it's
Speaker 2: not a hundred wall foot wall of ice.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Maybe the elephant in the room is also that
Speaker 4: it would have required a pretty sophisticated technology of maritime travel,
Speaker 4: right that we really don't have any evidence that existed
Speaker 4: at that time. We found Australia, though that's a much
Speaker 4: smaller task than circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean, the North Pacific.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Australia. We're talking about maybe fifty kilometers of tropical yeah.
Speaker 2: Chip Shaw swim that.
Speaker 4: The other thing I think about with this with coastal
Speaker 4: versus inland is I've like, I've only watched one season
Speaker 4: of that show alone, but it was a season where
Speaker 4: this dude, it spent some time with some Siberian rangdeer herders.
Speaker 4: He was an excellent outdoorsman, ended up building like a
Speaker 4: drift fence and killing a moose on this show and
Speaker 4: subsisting off this moose, and all the while, there's somebody
Speaker 4: else on the show that is just like meekly checking
Speaker 4: like a little fish trap every day, and they're getting
Speaker 4: out these little graylings or something and just starving to
Speaker 4: death eating these tiny fish, while this dude's sitting high
Speaker 4: on like this fatty moose meat man, and that guy
Speaker 4: devoted his energy towards the correct en deva. I would
Speaker 4: say you won that season, yeah, but you're not.
Speaker 7: If you could string up a net and catch a
Speaker 7: hundred salmon and.
Speaker 2: One you thinking of salmon runs, you're not thinking of
Speaker 2: clam beds. Like it's two different arguments. What people did
Speaker 2: I don't know, but like you're not thinking of clam beds,
Speaker 2: you're not thinking of celt beds, and you're not thinking
Speaker 2: of salmon runs.
Speaker 3: All these things live in the water and really cold.
Speaker 2: What no, No, in that area and that area clam beds. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but there's a twenty foot tide swing.
Speaker 7: You could walk across a mile of some of that
Speaker 7: stuff without hitting water.
Speaker 2: You know, it's nothing but food. It is nothing but
Speaker 2: food on those clam beds.
Speaker 3: I think that people are driven by package size.
Speaker 2: Giant clan beds. I don't think it was. Yeah, there's
Speaker 2: a lot to it. There's a lot to it, like
Speaker 2: the date stuff, But the food abundance thing. I think
Speaker 2: that the food abundance thing, I think is overwhelming amounts
Speaker 2: of food. So I don't think that that was the problem.
Speaker 3: You know what's interesting about this right is we're arguing
Speaker 3: about evidence that doesn't exist in both cases.
Speaker 2: That's what makes it to stop.
Speaker 7: Is there any explanation for what would have kept that
Speaker 7: ice free corridor open.
Speaker 4: Just the end of the ice age, there was Lauren
Speaker 4: Tide and the cordieron sheets just kind of gradually received
Speaker 4: from each other, received completely until six thousand years ago
Speaker 4: or something because they grew out of Hudson Bay and
Speaker 4: eventually the last of it disappear on that time ago.
Speaker 4: But yeah, basically by the time it reached a certain
Speaker 4: point like winter temperatures wouldn't have pushed it together again,
Speaker 4: and then it was open.
Speaker 6: Do we have any Clovis age skeletons of humans?
Speaker 2: Yes, what he's talking about?
Speaker 3: What are they like?
Speaker 2: The Anzi boy from just West My apologies for asking
Speaker 2: two years old, the anti child and they just found
Speaker 2: out he was His mother had a diet that was
Speaker 2: very similar to what they find with large cats. Mm hmm,
Speaker 2: choosing big game.
Speaker 6: So how many Clovis humans do we have?
Speaker 2: One that's it?
Speaker 3: There's there's one from Mexico that's roughly that age from
Speaker 3: a cave in Mexico, Is there, daw Steve? But it's
Speaker 3: not clearly it's not clearly Clovis and Antik is the one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was found in the sixties or seventies and
Speaker 2: Will saw Montana and a bunch of ochre and a
Speaker 2: bunch of projectile points.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so her mother the reconstruction was at least forty
Speaker 3: percent mammoth in her in his mother's diet, which is
Speaker 3: a huge amount.
Speaker 2: And this pisses off met and Aaron and Meltzer because
Speaker 2: people are like, see, they killed all the mammoths, and
Speaker 2: they're like, well, no, I can see that they were
Speaker 2: eating mammoths, but how is this telling me they killed
Speaker 2: them all.
Speaker 4: For the record, we liked both Meton and Meltzer a
Speaker 4: whole lot, And it's good to contextualize, like we're literally
Speaker 4: talking about like a couple thousand years and maybe a
Speaker 4: half dozen sites of disagreement, right, It's just that those, yeah,
Speaker 4: a couple thousand years and half dozen sites have really
Speaker 4: big implications for these two issues about how people got
Speaker 4: here and whether or not they killed off these animals.
Speaker 4: And so that's why we talk about it so much. Right,
Speaker 4: even though like it's like kind of a tempest in
Speaker 4: a teacup, if you know that phrase. Yeah, a couple
Speaker 4: of people arguing about yeah, half dozen sights in a
Speaker 4: couple of thousand years, they do have pretty big implications
Speaker 4: for the people of the Americans.
Speaker 2: Well, I already told you that this is the primary
Speaker 2: thing I think about was that quote. Was that Dan
Speaker 2: Flore's quote. It wasn't his quote, but he told us
Speaker 2: that quote. The reason the reason they're fighting so much
Speaker 2: is there's so.
Speaker 5: Little yeah, exactly talking about academics. The reason that arguments
Speaker 5: are so impassionate because there's so little.
Speaker 3: I've heard that attributed to.
Speaker 2: But there is a lot. But here I want to
Speaker 2: like this should we should have said at the beginning,
Speaker 2: at the very end. But where this becomes political, and
Speaker 2: where it becomes social, and where it becomes cultural, well
Speaker 2: it's a lot of places. But one of the places
Speaker 2: it becomes this is is it innately human that we
Speaker 2: destroy our environment? Right? Is it sort of this lately
Speaker 2: human ancient practice that we drive things to extinction? Is
Speaker 2: it just who we are and we've always done it
Speaker 2: that way? Or did we like become evil later? And
Speaker 2: so people will look and like blitz Creek hypothesis, people
Speaker 2: can look at, let's say, extinctions we're driving now with
Speaker 2: certain human activities. Isn't it nice to be able to
Speaker 2: go like, oh, we've always done that. Where do you
Speaker 2: think happened all to the mambis? This is nothing new?
Speaker 2: It's always how it's.
Speaker 4: Been just because something's human universally human, which I think
Speaker 4: that tendency is, doesn't make it. It doesn't addicate us
Speaker 4: from more responsibility to deal with it.
Speaker 2: No, of course, not like slavery is inherently human.
Speaker 4: It's a universal practice that because we live in a
Speaker 4: liberal democracy that decided it was a bad thing we
Speaker 4: got rid of. I should know, like, how many places
Speaker 4: in the world, for instance, have thriving large game populations
Speaker 4: outside of the American West Many. And the only reason
Speaker 4: we have him here right is because there's state sanctioned
Speaker 4: conservation laws that have allowed that to happen. Otherwise we'd
Speaker 4: be in the same boat we have no big animals left. Yeah,
Speaker 4: So I think that argument that, like, by acknowledging this,
Speaker 4: we're kind of surrendering our moral obligation to do something
Speaker 4: about it. It's not a good argument to make just
Speaker 4: because something has happened forever doesn't mean we need to
Speaker 4: keep doing it. Kay.
Speaker 2: He with one more way, this where the rubber meets
Speaker 2: the road. If you turn around and look above your head,
Speaker 2: you're going to see a war club. That war club
Speaker 2: was given to us by a guest. It didn't sit
Speaker 2: where you're sitting, but he sat in that seat in
Speaker 2: our old studio named Taylor Keene. Okay, and Taylor Kean
Speaker 2: felt that part of this thing of like he would
Speaker 2: argue that human history in the New World goes back
Speaker 2: fifty thousand years, okay, he thinks it's way older. And
Speaker 2: he thinks that this like thirteen thousand year Clovis story
Speaker 2: is a way of is a way of He thinks
Speaker 2: that helped fuel Manifest Destiny to say, well, they haven't
Speaker 2: been here that long, like the people were displacing our
Speaker 2: new arrivals too, We're just another new arrival. I don't
Speaker 2: agree with him because I think that if you had
Speaker 2: gone to sort of like the architects of Manifest Destiny,
Speaker 2: whether you go back to Jackson, you go back to Jefferson,
Speaker 2: and you had said, hey, before you do this, bear
Speaker 2: in mind Native Americans have been on the landscape fifty
Speaker 2: thousand years, not thirteen thousand years. They wouldn't have been like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you're right, you're right, we better all leave and go
Speaker 2: back to Europe. And also they wouldn't have been able
Speaker 2: to comprehend the timeline anyways because they weren't living on
Speaker 2: that timeline. So I think that his argument is false,
Speaker 2: but he feels that this thirteen thousand year arrival thing,
Speaker 2: and I've encountered this perspective from a handful of friends
Speaker 2: of mine are Indigenous friends of mine, that it that
Speaker 2: it's meant to sort of it's meant to kind of
Speaker 2: d it's meant to kind of deflate or call into
Speaker 2: question indigenous ownership of the landscape, to be like your
Speaker 2: people showed up, Our people showed up, Like no one's
Speaker 2: from here. People just showed up, and they've always been
Speaker 2: fighting over it anyways, and we're just the latest of
Speaker 2: another people to come here and fight for it.
Speaker 4: It's an interesting debate. Let me contextualize it a little bit. So,
Speaker 4: until the Fulsome site was discovered, the widespread notion among
Speaker 4: people that studied this stuff was the Native Americans have
Speaker 4: only been here about three or four thousand years. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And when the Fulsome site came out and there's this
Speaker 4: revelatory thing that people have been here since the Ice Age,
Speaker 4: it was of enormous benefit to Native Americans because it
Speaker 4: established that they'd been here a very long time. Thirteen
Speaker 4: thousand years is a really long time.
Speaker 3: Six hundred and fifty human generations approximately.
Speaker 4: So yeah, fast forward almost a century now, Now that
Speaker 4: thirteen thousand years old is no longer old enough, old enough,
Speaker 4: you have to keep pushing it back a little further.
Speaker 4: I just I think thirteen thousand years is a really
Speaker 4: long time, and it's certainly enough time to establish that
Speaker 4: you have some sort of patrimony over the land of
Speaker 4: this country. I don't quite understand the argument that it's
Speaker 4: not quite long enough to establish that. It's a really
Speaker 4: long time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the scientific study of the human past in North
Speaker 3: America has confirmed that the descendant communities today their ancestors
Speaker 3: were these people that they arrived six hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: human generations ago.
Speaker 4: Anzik showed that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Anzick did show that another human remains. You know,
Speaker 3: if we look at if we go back to I
Speaker 3: assume you guys have ancestry in Europe, and we asked
Speaker 3: how long do we have ancestry in Europe? It's almost
Speaker 3: certainly less than that, because there have been multiple populations
Speaker 3: that have run over Europe repeatedly. So thirteen thousand years
Speaker 3: is longer than anybody in Europe. Most people in Europe
Speaker 3: could truly lay claim to some you know, places of homeland.
Speaker 3: It's a long damn time.
Speaker 2: That's an interesting point. Do you know what two percent African?
Speaker 3: I didn't know that? Who told me?
Speaker 2: My wife tells me to keep that down because she's
Speaker 2: guy kind of oversell.
Speaker 4: It's to get away with any linguistic turn the phrase.
Speaker 2: She's like, I keep it under you keep it under
Speaker 2: your head. She doesn't wanted to impact my worldview.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Okay again, join today. I'm going to have you, guys
Speaker 2: tell people. I'm gonna remind everybody who you are. Then
Speaker 2: I'm going to have you tell people how to find
Speaker 2: your work and how to follow what you guys work on.
Speaker 2: So Todd Surrevel, the director of the Georgie C. Frison
Speaker 2: Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming,
Speaker 2: and Spencer Pelton, the Wyoming State Archaeologist and an adjunct
Speaker 2: at University of Wyoming. So, if you find cool stuff
Speaker 2: in Wyoming, if you're like, good lord, it's a man
Speaker 2: of school, the stone point stuck in its forehead.
Speaker 4: I'm going to get so many photos off.
Speaker 2: You know, I gotta tell people's story. So I walk
Speaker 2: into I walk into Spencer's office and the first thing
Speaker 2: that greets me, just laying on the floor is a
Speaker 2: giant the end of a giant dinosaur fever. So I said,
Speaker 2: what's that. He goes, that's a rock, and I said,
Speaker 2: I thought it was a big dinosaur bony. So that's
Speaker 2: what the guy that brought it to me thought was.
Speaker 2: And then he said, I gonna have it if I wanted.
Speaker 2: The guy that brought it just left it there. So
Speaker 2: it was not the dude that brought it.
Speaker 3: But it was a very convincing dinosaur. Not a dinosaur,
Speaker 3: but it was very convincing.
Speaker 2: Sitting there, sitting there on his floor. As it's not
Speaker 2: in the collections.
Speaker 7: He didn't ask you to come out to his truck
Speaker 7: to look at it first.
Speaker 2: I would have been so excited you would this thing.
Speaker 2: I would have been like, holy cow man, No, I
Speaker 2: got it. I'm rich. So how do people find your work?
Speaker 2: What should they check out? I have one of your
Speaker 2: books upstairs. The badger wa just got barker gulch. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I had to buy that sucker.
Speaker 3: I brought one for you.
Speaker 2: You did, Yeah, bought it on him.
Speaker 3: I searched my name. You can find my website. Spell
Speaker 3: your name out, serve L s U r O v
Speaker 3: e LLL Okay, I do want to say that that
Speaker 3: my job is as director of the Prison Institute, is
Speaker 3: raising money to support archaeological research in our department, mostly
Speaker 3: other people, students, faculty, people like Spencer. So if you're
Speaker 3: interested in supporting the last breath of last dying breath
Speaker 3: of Clovis first archaeology, and people who believe in licensing extinctions,
Speaker 3: search of Prison Institute. We're happy to take donations. Every
Speaker 3: dollar goes to research.
Speaker 4: Oh excellent, Yeah, you can just google me too. I've
Speaker 4: got some talks on YouTube. I got a research gate
Speaker 4: page where all my research goes. Also write a newsletter
Speaker 4: on substack called Social Stigma. It's about basically political issues
Speaker 4: and archaeology and anthropology. That's free. You want to subscribe
Speaker 4: to that.
Speaker 3: That's interesting.
Speaker 2: Good, Thanks guys, appreciate you coming on. Man, it's been fascinating.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you, thank you,