Speaker 1: M a guy that introduced me to the Folsome site.
Speaker 1: He couldn't get excited about certain cultures because they used
Speaker 1: a lot of junk stone and their points recruited. In course,
Speaker 1: the guy had been an engineer. He wiped the Folsome point.
Speaker 1: To him, it was like, no, that's a good people.
Speaker 1: His attitude though. This week on the Bargrease podcast, we're
Speaker 1: on our fourth and final episode in our series on
Speaker 1: the Fulsome Archaeological Site, and we're talking about stone points.
Speaker 1: We're in search of understanding the ancient, mysterious and difficult
Speaker 1: process of fluting stone. We'll discuss the radical design and
Speaker 1: the mechanics of these stone points and infer some stuff
Speaker 1: about the culture of these people based on all that
Speaker 1: we have, these beautiful stone points that we call Fulsome points.
Speaker 1: Of all their material possessions, these stones are the only
Speaker 1: thing that have outlasted the erosive nature of time. Well
Speaker 1: be talking with a new guest, anthropologist, Devin Pettigrew, who
Speaker 1: will walk us through the design of these points and
Speaker 1: the history of addle Addles, and one last time will
Speaker 1: tap into the knowledge of Dr David Meltzer and Steve Rinella.
Speaker 1: We dove in and went to the dad gum bottom
Speaker 1: of the river, and we're finally coming up for air
Speaker 1: as we'll discover the answer to our original question of
Speaker 1: why does any of this matter? The flutes on these
Speaker 1: points don't play any music, but they paint an incredible
Speaker 1: picture of who these people were. I really doubt you're
Speaker 1: gonna want to miss this one. If you think about
Speaker 1: like early Germanic flintlock rifles in the Americans, they were
Speaker 1: extremely well made. There was an art to them, and
Speaker 1: they re graved them. They didn't have to do all
Speaker 1: that stuff, but they could with fulsome they're just very
Speaker 1: concerned about, you know, making these points extremely well made.
Speaker 1: Somebody put a lot of extra time and that's and
Speaker 1: they really needed to. My name is Clay Nukelem, and
Speaker 1: this is the Bear Grease Podcast where we'll explore things
Speaker 1: forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and
Speaker 1: where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their
Speaker 1: lives close to the land. Presented by f HF Gear,
Speaker 1: American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed
Speaker 1: to be as rugged as the places we explore. On
Speaker 1: this episode, we're gonna look into the technology and designed
Speaker 1: to the fulsome Stone Point. These points were first discovered
Speaker 1: in the wild Horse arroy oh in fulsome New Mexico,
Speaker 1: scattered amongst the remains of thirty two bison antiquous. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to this series, you know all this stuff.
Speaker 1: These bison were killed some ten thousand years ago by
Speaker 1: ancient human hunters, some of the first Americans. The technology
Speaker 1: at this point was radical in terms of its engineering,
Speaker 1: and the reasoning of the ancient hunters to employ this
Speaker 1: risky style of point is a mystery. All the experts
Speaker 1: agreed the design has utilitarian function, but the reward of
Speaker 1: that function came with great costs, and some believe there
Speaker 1: was more to the point than just in the field performance.
Speaker 1: Was it cultural, was it spiritual? There was it the
Speaker 1: tendency of early man, just like it is today to
Speaker 1: push engineering to the furtherest side of the pendulum before
Speaker 1: the system breaks. Will never know the full answer, but
Speaker 1: we're in search of why they fluted these points. I
Speaker 1: feel pretty good about what we've learned regarding the events
Speaker 1: of this ancient hunt that we've been dissecting. We've covered
Speaker 1: a lot of ground while we've been in pursuit of
Speaker 1: our layman's PhD on Fulsome from George mcjunkan, the former
Speaker 1: slave we found the site, to the speculation on how
Speaker 1: the kill went down to gourmet butchering, to who these
Speaker 1: ancient people were and how they lived along the way
Speaker 1: we've been leaning on the inside of Steve Ronella Meat
Speaker 1: Eater is insight an ability to ask some interesting questions
Speaker 1: have helped open a broader vista on this subject. Here's
Speaker 1: Steve opening up our conversation on the uniqueness of the
Speaker 1: fulsome points and the inferences that can be made about
Speaker 1: these people because of their craftsmanship, the fineness of a
Speaker 1: fulsome point. It's the craftsmanship that goes into making a
Speaker 1: fulesome point where you make this like very perfect point.
Speaker 1: Every one of them kind of falls into a certain
Speaker 1: like dimensional characteristics, certain shape. You do something really hard
Speaker 1: to make like a point, and then you do something
Speaker 1: like knock these channel out of each face running the
Speaker 1: length of the point, which has a very high failure rate.
Speaker 1: So even people now like contemporary naverage to try to
Speaker 1: experience it. It's hard. It's like to make the thing
Speaker 1: and knock the thing out. Most are not gonna work.
Speaker 1: Just a delicate seeming but probably very deadly thing and
Speaker 1: so finely wrought and from such perfect stone that I
Speaker 1: think that adds a lot to the mythology of the
Speaker 1: folsome hunter. And to demonstrate I mean, I used to
Speaker 1: be friends. He passed away, but a guy that introduced
Speaker 1: me to the Folsome site. His name was Tony Baker.
Speaker 1: He come from a long line of anthropologists and arrowhead hunters.
Speaker 1: He would talk about some cultures just the projectile points.
Speaker 1: He didn't seem to like the culture. I don't mean
Speaker 1: a way like judging them. He couldn't get excited about
Speaker 1: certain cultures because they use a lot of junk stone
Speaker 1: and their points where and their points were crude in course,
Speaker 1: and he he was making insinuations about who they were,
Speaker 1: the character they were. They weren't picky about the stone
Speaker 1: they used. They were sloppy. They would leave, you know,
Speaker 1: they would leave like like patentation on that they wouldn't
Speaker 1: clean every face, so sometimes they had like a like
Speaker 1: a patina to it. And he was just like dismissive,
Speaker 1: not like dismissive, like not the religion or the belief system.
Speaker 1: He just couldn't get excited about people that made that
Speaker 1: use cruddy stone to make a rather crude implement The
Speaker 1: guy had been an engineer. He liked the fulsome point
Speaker 1: to him, it was like, no, that's a good people.
Speaker 1: What's kind of his attitude? You know? Think about if
Speaker 1: you use that same idea and projected into the future
Speaker 1: of what people would say about us. It's a judgment
Speaker 1: you make when you want when you're driving down the road, man,
Speaker 1: you see you know, you see a nice house, everything's organized,
Speaker 1: a nice beautiful garden, Like there's a boat, boat looks
Speaker 1: rigged up, ready to go. It looks an industrious person,
Speaker 1: you know. And then you buy a place and everything's
Speaker 1: all fallen down and in disrepair and junk everywhere. You
Speaker 1: most I'm not saying you most people make up old
Speaker 1: passing judgment about what that person's um. They're they're sort
Speaker 1: of like like how they feel about craftsmanship, how they
Speaker 1: feel about organization, how whether they're fastidious and tidy, you know,
Speaker 1: and and in a similar way, I look at that
Speaker 1: point and I'm like, holy cow, man, just a lot
Speaker 1: from that, just a beautiful point. Let's say someone somehow
Speaker 1: anthropological techniques get very so sophisticated that we learned somehow
Speaker 1: that the folesome hunters really yelled at their wives all
Speaker 1: the time, terribly rude to their wives. I'd be like,
Speaker 1: oh man, I didn't. That kind of goes against my impression.
Speaker 1: Never mased on the projectile never never make your hero
Speaker 1: staf you never want to meet your hero based on
Speaker 1: the projectile points. I find that very disappointed. Perhaps they
Speaker 1: were a little bit thuggish with their lives. It's a
Speaker 1: very real idea that how we manage our material things
Speaker 1: reflects some parts of our internal value system. Do you
Speaker 1: think that's fair? Do you think that we're coming to
Speaker 1: accurate conclusions when we infer this much about these people
Speaker 1: from the craftsmanship of their stone points. I figure it's
Speaker 1: pretty accurate and no doubt an interesting thought. Like I
Speaker 1: said before, Dr David Meltzer of s M, you literally
Speaker 1: wrote the book on fulsome and before we get much further,
Speaker 1: we need to understand what a fulsome point looks like
Speaker 1: and how it's made. And it would probably help if
Speaker 1: you took a second and googled fulsome point and looked
Speaker 1: at an image of one. Here's Dr Meltzer describing what
Speaker 1: they look like. So fulsome points are some of the
Speaker 1: really wonderful examples of flint napping you will ever encounter.
Speaker 1: They tend to be about I'm gonna do this in
Speaker 1: centimeters because because I've been doing dr meltzer. Okay, so
Speaker 1: if you were a falsome point, you'd be in an
Speaker 1: inch and a half to two inches long. Okay, there
Speaker 1: we go. Um, we're gonna have to go millimeters though
Speaker 1: here clay, because I can't tell you what two to
Speaker 1: three millimeters in thickness is understood, like an eighth of
Speaker 1: an inch thick, less than a quarter, much less than
Speaker 1: a quarter. We might be we might be talking sixte Uh,
Speaker 1: make them about an inch wide and uh, they have
Speaker 1: this very distinct flute. Think of it as a twentieth
Speaker 1: century bayonet, right a groove up the face. And in fact,
Speaker 1: when they were first discovered, it was thought because when
Speaker 1: they were first discovered it was you know, World War
Speaker 1: One was just a decade less than a decade old,
Speaker 1: it was thought that these were actually blood letting channels.
Speaker 1: But then they realized that for better penetration, well, for
Speaker 1: better penetration, and then you know, the animals bleeding and
Speaker 1: it just goes down that channel and out right. Well,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, these points were hafted by which
Speaker 1: we mean they were attached to spears, and the base
Speaker 1: of the point would have been anchored in the tip
Speaker 1: of a spear, and it would be wrapped and held
Speaker 1: in place and the um. There might be some fore
Speaker 1: shafts or perhaps a notch at the top of the
Speaker 1: spear in which the point would be wrapped up. I've
Speaker 1: got one in my hands. This is uh, this is
Speaker 1: not authentic fulsome and in fact that's a replica of
Speaker 1: falsome point. But the base of the point would have
Speaker 1: been hafted or anchored into the tip of the spear.
Speaker 1: It might have been wrapped by sinews. They might have
Speaker 1: used some sort of mastick to kind of glue it
Speaker 1: in there. But what that means is that the fluid
Speaker 1: itself would have been buried inside the haft area, so
Speaker 1: it couldn't have been a very good blood letting channel. Uh.
Speaker 1: These points were beautifully symmetrical. They were often finely trimmed,
Speaker 1: with what we referred to as gentle sort of pressure
Speaker 1: flaking up and down the edge, quite sharp, and would
Speaker 1: be you used for um hunting. These are not necessarily
Speaker 1: points that often had multi uses, so earlier Clovis points
Speaker 1: we often see that they were used as knives as
Speaker 1: well as projectiles. These things are built to hunt. These
Speaker 1: are really this is a specialized point. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a it's a point that is intended to bring
Speaker 1: down an animal. But a lot of the time because
Speaker 1: it's so thin, it's it's thinness makes it fragile. We
Speaker 1: often see impact damage. You know, when stone meets bone
Speaker 1: and high velocity, it breaks. Dr Meltzer just brought up
Speaker 1: the weakness of the Fulsome technology. It's thin and it
Speaker 1: breaks easily. However, that's also its greatest strength. Thin points
Speaker 1: penetrate well, can be made very sharp and are easily
Speaker 1: resharpened when the tips break. Devin Pettigrew isn't at the
Speaker 1: Apologist and got his PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Speaker 1: His research is in experimental archaeology and he focuses on
Speaker 1: the tools and weapons of early hunter gatherers. He's an
Speaker 1: expert on ad laddles, and we're gonna talk about those,
Speaker 1: but first he's gonna describe Fulsome points. Several times in
Speaker 1: this podcast you'll hear us talk about Clovis points and
Speaker 1: we'll describe them in contrast to the Fulsome point. So
Speaker 1: it would be good if we understood what they were.
Speaker 1: It's handy to think about the different style of points
Speaker 1: as different kinds of broadhead technology, like cut on impact,
Speaker 1: fixed blade heads, or expandable broadheads. The Clovis technology is
Speaker 1: older than Fulsome technology, and it's easy to see that
Speaker 1: Fulsome was the next step past Clovis. Clovis is a
Speaker 1: partially fluted point, and basically about one third of the
Speaker 1: base of the point had the slabs taken off the
Speaker 1: sides of it. The removal of the sides is called fluting.
Speaker 1: Fulsome points are fluted the entire way down the side
Speaker 1: to achieve maximum thinness on the point. You can imagine
Speaker 1: people going, well, if a little fluting is good, I
Speaker 1: bet a lot of fluting would be even better. If
Speaker 1: that doesn't sound like human behavior, I don't know what does.
Speaker 1: Here's Devon describe for me a falsome point, like if
Speaker 1: no one had ever seen it and you just had
Speaker 1: to use words, how would you describe? I would say,
Speaker 1: we're dealing with a Lancelot style point, so you can
Speaker 1: they give like a lance head. It's kind of long
Speaker 1: and narrow, Yeah, long and narrows runs straight up the
Speaker 1: sides and it doesn't have a corner, it doesn't have
Speaker 1: notching in at the base. Um, it's got a slightly
Speaker 1: concave base. They're usually thin and they're made of high
Speaker 1: quality material. They're very carefully flaked, and then they have
Speaker 1: driven up the face on both sides from the base
Speaker 1: a big flute. And what this is it's a flake
Speaker 1: that runs almost the entire length of the point and
Speaker 1: just takes this handle. It takes the side of it.
Speaker 1: So if it's like a three inch imagine a three
Speaker 1: inch point and you just could just take a saw
Speaker 1: and just cut a slab at the side of it all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you if you could just I would say taking
Speaker 1: if you could take your point and take a galuge
Speaker 1: and just gouge out a nice channel out of both sides,
Speaker 1: both sides. Yeah, but you have to do it with
Speaker 1: its one motion. Yes, So I mean they got to
Speaker 1: get right at one time pop hit it. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: probably what they had since they were doing this, I
Speaker 1: mean this was a cultural you know, what we call
Speaker 1: an industry is stone tool industry. They had a specific
Speaker 1: method of doing it that they that everybody knew and
Speaker 1: that worked for them and probably for close or clothes
Speaker 1: points and fulsome points that were fluted. That probably entailed
Speaker 1: some kind of a vice or a way to hold
Speaker 1: the point tightly and then make a very controlled strike,
Speaker 1: probably with what we call indirect percussion, where actually taking
Speaker 1: the tool that's going to do the work of not
Speaker 1: driving off the flake, and you're taking another cool that
Speaker 1: you use as a hammer to it to strike that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you can set like it'd be like you're trying
Speaker 1: to knock a flake off a rock. You put a
Speaker 1: chisel on top of the rock and then clack it
Speaker 1: with your hammer. You can get the indirect, indirect percussion
Speaker 1: and direct if your your chisel analog is right on,
Speaker 1: because you could get the angle of it just right.
Speaker 1: You could put it right where you want it and
Speaker 1: hold it just straight at angle and then whack. That's
Speaker 1: probably how they're driving off those flakes, and you know,
Speaker 1: a very controlled fashion. That was you know, extremely they
Speaker 1: had an art down these things. The craft involved in
Speaker 1: making these points is undeniable, and I want us to
Speaker 1: be immersed into the process of making a fulsome point.
Speaker 1: I want to hear it there's some real world drama
Speaker 1: because of the investment of time and using the valuable
Speaker 1: material that much energy was expended to acquire and the
Speaker 1: risky fluting process right at the end either makes or
Speaker 1: breaks the point. No pun intended. It seems like the
Speaker 1: Burghers podcast. There's a lot of punts. But I want
Speaker 1: you to meet my friend Rick Spicer. He's an experienced
Speaker 1: mountaineer and a bushcraft expert. He's one of the owners
Speaker 1: of a cool outdoor store in Fayetteville, Arkansas, called the
Speaker 1: pack Rat. Aside from climbing big mountains, Rick is a
Speaker 1: primitive bow hunter. He makes his own bows and naps
Speaker 1: his own stone points for hunting. I asked Rick if
Speaker 1: he'd be willing to try to make us a fulsome point,
Speaker 1: which he doesn't do very often, but he agreed to try. Okay,
Speaker 1: So what I've got here are a handful of different
Speaker 1: preforms or by faces is another term that they're often
Speaker 1: referred to as. And a preform is simply kind of
Speaker 1: like a first stage of a stone point that uh,
Speaker 1: you know, an indigenous person. First people would have created
Speaker 1: that would have been lighter weight that they could have
Speaker 1: carried with them, and then from there they could have
Speaker 1: further refined that more into a specific tools. This would
Speaker 1: have been this, This is like a three point This
Speaker 1: would have been like a big rock, so they wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to carry, so they would have gone to you know,
Speaker 1: like in a um you know, alibates or or quarry
Speaker 1: a stone corry. They would have corried this and obviously
Speaker 1: stones heavy, like they don't want to carry any more
Speaker 1: than they have to, so they would have corried this out.
Speaker 1: They would have done what's called spawling. They would have
Speaker 1: cracked off pieces of that, and then from those spalls
Speaker 1: they would have further refined those down into these bifaces
Speaker 1: or preforms, and then they would have hauled those off
Speaker 1: to their hunting sites and then a camp they would
Speaker 1: have further refined those into specific tools. Exactly, so you
Speaker 1: have so you've already built these preforms for us today
Speaker 1: because that would have taken Tell me how you're gonna
Speaker 1: turn that into a falsome. Yeah, so that's you know,
Speaker 1: where the rubber meets the road, right, and so the
Speaker 1: thing right right right, So the thing that's so unique
Speaker 1: about the falsome is the fluting process. And basically what
Speaker 1: you're doing in that process is you're striking it at
Speaker 1: the base of the preform to remove a very large
Speaker 1: flake off of it when you're thinning that point down
Speaker 1: to basically the maximum amount, so that when you fit
Speaker 1: it in the foreshaft, it's very very easy. You're basically
Speaker 1: just splitting a stick and sliding it into the end
Speaker 1: of it and by removing these flutes, and what's really
Speaker 1: unique is the way that there. It's symmetrical there, it's
Speaker 1: on both sides, and to do that on a folsome
Speaker 1: point and not break the thing is really really hard.
Speaker 1: So talk to me about how they think they did
Speaker 1: that with the jigs with Yeah, So there's kind of
Speaker 1: three ways you can go about getting a flake to
Speaker 1: release on one of these types of points. One way
Speaker 1: is through direct percussion um and it's the most simple,
Speaker 1: but it's arguably the most difficult. And basically, you're gonna
Speaker 1: hold the thing in your hand and you're gonna strike
Speaker 1: it with a hammerstone or an antler or something like that,
Speaker 1: and you're just gonna try to knock the flake off.
Speaker 1: But there's so many things that can go wrong trying
Speaker 1: to do that, to get the angle right, to hit
Speaker 1: it in the right spot, all that type of stuff.
Speaker 1: You end up breaking a lot. The second way is
Speaker 1: going to be through indirect percussion, and that's where you
Speaker 1: use what's called a punch. Typically you're gonna put that
Speaker 1: on the side or basically lead on the platform and
Speaker 1: then hit that that tool with another tool with the hammer.
Speaker 1: That allows you a greater degree of control over the
Speaker 1: angle and the striking surface. But it it's still a
Speaker 1: lot too Now you're working with like multiple things and
Speaker 1: trying to hold it all together, which is really hard
Speaker 1: in the final way. And I think a lot of
Speaker 1: you know, anthropologists and certainly nappers would agree that it's
Speaker 1: likely that they were using a jig of some kind. Now,
Speaker 1: modern nappers have man made jigs that they've used out
Speaker 1: a lumber and that sort of thing. But I have
Speaker 1: seen him. I've never done this myself, but I've seen
Speaker 1: demonstrations where basically you're driving a couple of sticks into
Speaker 1: the ground. You're putting the point upside down and bracing
Speaker 1: it up against these two sticks, which provide a stable
Speaker 1: surface to press against. And then they're using a lever
Speaker 1: to sort of gradually apply pressure and basically like pop
Speaker 1: that flute off of the back. Yeah, and it's a
Speaker 1: it's a very like say, I don't have experience to
Speaker 1: doing it. I've not used jigs before. I've always used
Speaker 1: either direct percussion or indirect percussion. But I also break
Speaker 1: a lot of points, you know, in the process. So
Speaker 1: with this though, um, we're using heavy duty tools at
Speaker 1: a late stage point in the process where it's brittle,
Speaker 1: it's thin in the likelihood of doing something wrong and
Speaker 1: busting the thing is really really They say that they
Speaker 1: estimate thirty failure even with the falseome people, Well, let's
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah, let's get get it going. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna basically work away. Rick is working on building a
Speaker 1: platform at the base of the point that will give
Speaker 1: him a specific spot to strike that in theory, will
Speaker 1: cause the entire side of the point to flake off
Speaker 1: with one strike. The likelihood of failures seems really high
Speaker 1: to me. What are the chances this is gonna be
Speaker 1: is gonna work? I'd say there's a fifty percent chance
Speaker 1: I'll get a decent flute on it. There's probably a
Speaker 1: twenty chance that I'll break it, and a ten percent
Speaker 1: chance that we're gonna get a flute that's even remotely
Speaker 1: close to a fulsome style flute. Yeah, yeah, So the
Speaker 1: platform is ready to go again. This is a direct
Speaker 1: percussion method. So I'm gonna take uh, in this case,
Speaker 1: the copper billet, and I'm gonna strike it at a
Speaker 1: steep angle to try to get a flute to release
Speaker 1: down the center of this thing. I did there again,
Speaker 1: that's what happens. But the the yeah, I'll tell you what.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna clean it up just a little bit. And
Speaker 1: what basically what this means now is we're gonna end
Speaker 1: up with a shorter point because I knocked the rear
Speaker 1: one of the ears off. His first hit, broke the base.
Speaker 1: He's gearing up for his second strike. Here we go. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's not yeah, you can see that if I flipped
Speaker 1: it over, there's the flute that's removed. So it was
Speaker 1: in no way I thought that was gonna work. It's nice,
Speaker 1: it really really you you're holding this three inch long point,
Speaker 1: hitting it with a big clubby looking hammer basically right,
Speaker 1: and it takes off this like delicate flute off the side.
Speaker 1: That's when you see this process happen. It almost seems
Speaker 1: miraculous that this long flute just peels off with a
Speaker 1: single strike. But he's just halfway through. He's still got
Speaker 1: to do the other side. But I'll save you the
Speaker 1: stress of drama. Rick was successful at getting a partial
Speaker 1: flute on the other side, but it wouldn't have been
Speaker 1: considered a true fulsome style point. Rick said, it would
Speaker 1: be closer to the partial fluting of the Clovis style point.
Speaker 1: And if you're interested in watching Rick make a point,
Speaker 1: I'll put a short clip on my Instagram and you
Speaker 1: can also follow Rick at pack rat Bushcraft on Instagram.
Speaker 1: The biggest question that remains unanswered is why did they
Speaker 1: take the risk of such extreme fluting. The point would
Speaker 1: have killed animals without the fluting, but they employed this
Speaker 1: technology across vast geographic regions for one thousand years. Think
Speaker 1: about this, what other technologies in human history have been
Speaker 1: used for that long? The wheel, the plow. We've been
Speaker 1: using some form of gunpowder and guns for a little
Speaker 1: over a thousand years at the time. They might have
Speaker 1: thought about the fulsome point like we do gunpowder as
Speaker 1: an essential thing. Here's Steve and I talking about the
Speaker 1: longevity of the technolo bology and entertaining a very interesting idea.
Speaker 1: The consistency that you see that is clearly handed down
Speaker 1: through human communication, that spread across broad geographic distances for
Speaker 1: long periods of time that these people were able to
Speaker 1: pass down values. They yeah, they passed on a technique
Speaker 1: of a way to make a point. But think about
Speaker 1: the like you and I are trying to do with
Speaker 1: our kids right now, Steve is like, we're trying to
Speaker 1: pass down a value system to them, and all that's
Speaker 1: left of the folsome hunters is this piece of stone.
Speaker 1: But there was a bunch of other stuff that came
Speaker 1: with that too. The culture, what they valued, what they worshiped,
Speaker 1: what they saw beauty in was was translated and it
Speaker 1: was taught to that sun, just like it was his
Speaker 1: ability to nap a falsome point, because it wasn't just
Speaker 1: like one generation and it was thousands of years of
Speaker 1: people and they did it the same. And that's why
Speaker 1: that brings up an interest point is why did they
Speaker 1: flute this? And I want I want to hear your
Speaker 1: your thoughts on why they fluted it, because it's clear
Speaker 1: that this was a difficult process. The advantages of it
Speaker 1: killing stuff are because that's the way we would look
Speaker 1: at it as hunters. It's like, what's the advantage of
Speaker 1: this projectile point killing something more efficient so that my
Speaker 1: family eats rather than starves, and so that's a pretty
Speaker 1: heated debate. What I there's an idea that is tossed
Speaker 1: out there, that it was non utilitarian, that the point
Speaker 1: was fluted, that it was you know, and and and
Speaker 1: I'm not saying i'd buy it. I like the idea.
Speaker 1: I used to like the idea too. I used like
Speaker 1: the idea too. And let's let's just be fair and
Speaker 1: acknowledge right now we don't know, we don't know, we're
Speaker 1: gonna find out, but hear me out. I used to
Speaker 1: like that too. Then I realize that there's a joke.
Speaker 1: There's a joke among anthropologists. If you don't understand it,
Speaker 1: what do you do? You say that it must have
Speaker 1: had spiritual significance or religious significance. If you dig a
Speaker 1: site and you find that there's five Bison schools at
Speaker 1: the site, and the Bison schools seemed to have been
Speaker 1: roughly arrayed in a circle, it must have had spiritual significance.
Speaker 1: Not that whatever they were doing that day and how
Speaker 1: those carcasses were scavenged by dire wolves and dragged around
Speaker 1: or whatever happened, it just so happens that that's how
Speaker 1: it ends up, or that you're finishing up and your
Speaker 1: kids are messing around and they put them in a
Speaker 1: little pile. You know, that tendency to look at things
Speaker 1: and be like, huh, must have had spiritual significance. It's
Speaker 1: just there. There's also just a lot of who knows
Speaker 1: a long time past. Now, let you give something on
Speaker 1: the converse side, real quick. I could see the fact
Speaker 1: that they did a certain way, and they did it
Speaker 1: that way for a long time, being a way to
Speaker 1: make you think that it must have had spiritual significance, right,
Speaker 1: But it could also be that these were a people
Speaker 1: who lived in extreme isolation at that time. Not that there,
Speaker 1: I mean there were there were people. There were at
Speaker 1: the time of the Falsome Hunters. There were human beings
Speaker 1: stretched from Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America.
Speaker 1: But these people, these bison hunters out on the plains,
Speaker 1: might have been living in such a sort of cultural
Speaker 1: isolation that they had an idea, They had a thing,
Speaker 1: they hunted in a way, they hunted it, and they
Speaker 1: went thousand years whatever it is without someone coming in
Speaker 1: and being like, no, no no, no, you've alays got it
Speaker 1: all wrong. Here's how you make a good project. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here's how you make a good projectile on. So maybe
Speaker 1: there's this is the way they did it worked for them,
Speaker 1: and they weren't subject to a lot of new ideas.
Speaker 1: And here's this like these people that had this, this
Speaker 1: lifestyle that they lived far longer, far longer than any
Speaker 1: notion of the United States of America has been around.
Speaker 1: They were at it for a long time. Just me
Speaker 1: sitting here in a chair. My valueless interpretation of it
Speaker 1: is that it was just it was a function of
Speaker 1: the equipment they were using. Here we go again with
Speaker 1: Steve trying to completely rationalize the functional argument for the
Speaker 1: fluting to the falsome points. Here he is with his
Speaker 1: final thought on making these things. Another cool thing is
Speaker 1: that at certain sites they'll find where someone's making one
Speaker 1: and they break it. So they're in they're channeling it
Speaker 1: and break it. There are museum specimens of a never
Speaker 1: used falsome point broken in lying next to it and
Speaker 1: matched to it is the channel flake that came out
Speaker 1: of it, knocked the channel out, went to knock the
Speaker 1: air channel out, broke the thing, dropped it all and done.
Speaker 1: At the end of the Ice age, people who was
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't have been unreasonably they would have run into
Speaker 1: a one of the last man and throw them around.
Speaker 1: And then some dude today goes, oh, here's the point.
Speaker 1: Oh here's the channel flake and they matched pairs. But that, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I I just can't. I think it's utilitarian. Man,
Speaker 1: it just doesn't make it just compared to a close point.
Speaker 1: The Clovis hunters who were using that landscape ahead of
Speaker 1: the fulsome hunters probably had were probably after had opportunities
Speaker 1: on much bigger animals because they were you know, this
Speaker 1: is like this is occurring at what we call the
Speaker 1: Pleisscene Hollo scene transition, so the end of the ice ages,
Speaker 1: and you had this all this mega faun and vanishing
Speaker 1: giant ground sloths, mammoths, masodons or vanishing from the landscape.
Speaker 1: The guys before had a very beautiful, finely wrought point
Speaker 1: that was big, and then here's this, like it's just
Speaker 1: it's tidy. These big, huge animals start to vanish, and
Speaker 1: then who lives there next? People that were making a
Speaker 1: smaller point great point on the size of the Clovis
Speaker 1: points as compared to the size of the animals they
Speaker 1: were hunting. But you think a guy like Steve would
Speaker 1: like to entertain a little more romantic thinking in his life. However,
Speaker 1: I think his point about its utilitarian design is well taken,
Speaker 1: but maybe it's not that cut and dry. It's possible
Speaker 1: that it could have been viewed as highly functional but
Speaker 1: also held significance beyond that. Let's see what Dr Meltzer
Speaker 1: has to say. We actually don't know why they flute
Speaker 1: at these points. There's no particular obvious reason. With some
Speaker 1: colleagues we have hypothesized that the way in which these
Speaker 1: things were fluted, and the way in which these things
Speaker 1: were half to two spears, might have actually served kind
Speaker 1: of as a shock absorber in the sense that the
Speaker 1: waves of force would travel through and instead of the
Speaker 1: point banging into the back end the base of the flute,
Speaker 1: where it was thinnest and again, you know, one to
Speaker 1: two millimeters thick, it would just crumble like a bumper
Speaker 1: on a car. Right, the bumper on a car is
Speaker 1: intended to give way. It crumbles so your car doesn't
Speaker 1: break when you when you hit something. The base of
Speaker 1: the flute was so thin that it might have crumbled
Speaker 1: and prevented the entire way. So the wave of force
Speaker 1: travels through, it's going to rebound back. But if the
Speaker 1: base rumbles, all that energy is going to get dissipated,
Speaker 1: and you can you can remake the that portion that
Speaker 1: broke off and use it again. That is the most
Speaker 1: unique thing about these folsom points is the mystery of
Speaker 1: the fluting. I read in your book where it's it's
Speaker 1: been discussed that perhaps it was non utilitarian, which means
Speaker 1: that it served no functional purpose, but was a cultural purpose.
Speaker 1: And I would like to make a comment on that
Speaker 1: Dr Meltzer, as a as a bow hunter and as
Speaker 1: a hunter, when we see this throughout history, that that
Speaker 1: cultures do distinguish themselves and establish identity through the way
Speaker 1: that they hunt. We do it today. I do it
Speaker 1: every day of my life, like that the weapons that
Speaker 1: I used to hunt are part of my tribal identity.
Speaker 1: Of course, I really like this idea that it's kind
Speaker 1: of a romantic idea that these people would have been
Speaker 1: due in something that took an incredible amount of skill
Speaker 1: to do and actually jeopardized. They say that there's a
Speaker 1: high percentage of failure when you get a point to
Speaker 1: the thirty failure rate in manufacturer, so it's totally inefficient.
Speaker 1: But why the humans do all the weird things that
Speaker 1: we do. Think that to think that this this style,
Speaker 1: this technology, this is essentially a technology that would have
Speaker 1: been passed down from generation to generation. And there may
Speaker 1: have come a point when God was like, why are
Speaker 1: you still fluting those silly things? They break every time?
Speaker 1: And you know at some point that shifted away from
Speaker 1: that technology, just like it with today. But man, so
Speaker 1: much mystery inside of a fluted falsome point. Right. But
Speaker 1: you know there's hunting magic too. You're going to go
Speaker 1: out there and you know you want to have your
Speaker 1: best weaponry, but you know you also want to have
Speaker 1: your distinctive points. Uh, you're gonna make your stuff, You're
Speaker 1: gonna be in charge of your gear, and you know
Speaker 1: there may be a bit of ceremony associated with going
Speaker 1: out on a hunt because look, going after an animal
Speaker 1: that was that big and could be that dangerous. Um.
Speaker 1: There's there's two risks in hunting. One is the risk
Speaker 1: you're gonna come home empty handed. The other risk is
Speaker 1: you're not gonna come home at all because you're dead, right,
Speaker 1: And so in some in some projectile points, at some sites,
Speaker 1: you see bits of red ochre. Right, they're putting um
Speaker 1: and it's it may not just be sort of part
Speaker 1: of the mastic that's holding the point on. It may
Speaker 1: be that there were ceremonies in advance of the hunt,
Speaker 1: and everybody's got their own weaponry that they make their
Speaker 1: own particular way. One of the things that was really
Speaker 1: interesting to me at the fulsome site which I could
Speaker 1: never possibly prove, but it's just one of those things
Speaker 1: that you know, I'll bet it's right. I look at
Speaker 1: the assemblage of the projectile points from that site, and
Speaker 1: I am convinced that I can identify at least three
Speaker 1: separate nappers based on the style of the points that
Speaker 1: they make. And how would you ever prove that? You
Speaker 1: can't write? But I look at these things and I say,
Speaker 1: you know what that really looks like the same person.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying the same guy who knows you know,
Speaker 1: maybe the women were making falsome points to UM, I'm
Speaker 1: willing to bet the same person made this point and
Speaker 1: that point, and a different person made those two points. UM.
Speaker 1: And and think about it too, if you want credit.
Speaker 1: I don't know. When you go out hunting with guys,
Speaker 1: do you say it was my shot? I had to
Speaker 1: kill shot? UM? And you can tell because that's my arrow,
Speaker 1: yours is over there stuck in a tree. Uh so
Speaker 1: you would have been able to distinguish. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: That's that is so unique even today amongst flint nappers,
Speaker 1: is that it's a craft, it's an art. It's it's
Speaker 1: almost like a fingerprint. I wanted to ask all these
Speaker 1: experts the same question, so I've asked Devin too, why
Speaker 1: the Folsome hunters fluted their points. You might find some
Speaker 1: overlapping these guys opinions, but they all bring a little
Speaker 1: different perspective. Here. Devon will go into the detail the
Speaker 1: physics behind the design of the Folsome point, and he's
Speaker 1: the guy to know because he's done some real experiments
Speaker 1: using stone points on bison. The question of the age
Speaker 1: is why did they use this style of point? Why
Speaker 1: do you think they did it? Part of it is um.
Speaker 1: You have um a cultural momentum aspect where tools evolved
Speaker 1: out of earlier tools. So before Folsom we have Clovis points,
Speaker 1: and that's when we start seeing fluted bases, but they're
Speaker 1: not closed. Points are generally larger and they're not fluting
Speaker 1: the whole base. So this was an older technology Clovis
Speaker 1: came before. In Clovis, they did not flute the entire
Speaker 1: face of the point, usually face. Yeah, and then you
Speaker 1: see this this technique is kind of perfected. And with Foalsome,
Speaker 1: they're just very concerned about, you know, making these points
Speaker 1: extremely well made. You know, I'd say part of it
Speaker 1: is just you know, you can look at different cultures
Speaker 1: today and look at things that we make, and and
Speaker 1: some of us are some cultures are more concerned with
Speaker 1: something that's functional. It doesn't have to be like, you know, perfect.
Speaker 1: If you think about like early Germanic flintlock rifles in
Speaker 1: the Americans, they were extremely well made. There was an
Speaker 1: art to them, and they engraved them. They didn't have
Speaker 1: to do all that stuff, but they could. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was some cultural value assigned to the esthetic beauty of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a social value to it. And the the key
Speaker 1: there to think of is that they could do it right.
Speaker 1: They had the time and the resources available. It's not
Speaker 1: like it was, you know, because they were engraving rifles
Speaker 1: that put their lives at risk for some reason. So
Speaker 1: they had the resources available and the time available apparently
Speaker 1: to make points that looked that way. I want to
Speaker 1: hear why it was functional for these points to be
Speaker 1: this way, But you're saying that there was some there
Speaker 1: clearly because of the craftsmanship of them, there would have
Speaker 1: been some just aesthetic value. Probably, Yeah, we can suspect
Speaker 1: that was probably the case, you know, So there would
Speaker 1: have been there would have been pride in this point.
Speaker 1: Somebody would have been like, check this thing out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you look at some of those, you're like, wow,
Speaker 1: I mean they really I wonder what they called them, Devin,
Speaker 1: because they sure didn't call them falsome points, because falsome
Speaker 1: New Mexico would name till like you know, sometimes the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds they wou would have called they would have
Speaker 1: had to have. Yeah, Unfortunately that's one of those mysteries
Speaker 1: we'll never know. But yeah, I mean some of those
Speaker 1: you look at him and you're just know, somebody put
Speaker 1: a lot of extra time, and that's and they really
Speaker 1: needed to. So it's an interesting thought to think that
Speaker 1: these people would have had a specific, widespread name for
Speaker 1: this style of point. It would have been a common word,
Speaker 1: but it existed and disappeared before written languages appeared on
Speaker 1: the earth. Will never know, but they sure as heck
Speaker 1: didn't call them falsome points. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: false New Mexico was named after the fiance of the
Speaker 1: American President Grover Cleveland. Her name was Frances folsom Man.
Speaker 1: She got more than she bargained for. And I'm about
Speaker 1: tired of people naming stuff after famous leaders or their
Speaker 1: girlfriends in hosts of gaining political collateral. You guys remember
Speaker 1: the Cumberland Gap, don't you. Naming conventions are weird and
Speaker 1: rarely just though human technology has changed, we know that
Speaker 1: human nature hasn't. And some ancient hunter mayn named the
Speaker 1: dad Gum Point after his girlfriend. We'll never know. But
Speaker 1: we've got more important questions with more definite answers. Back
Speaker 1: to Devon, So why was this point so functional? Because
Speaker 1: it had it had probably had some function to had
Speaker 1: to have. Yeah, to answers that, I have to go
Speaker 1: in a little bit of about my background of my research,
Speaker 1: which big part of it was these what i'd call
Speaker 1: realistic experiment And if you're familiar with at Ashby, you'll
Speaker 1: you know you're probably familiar with this because these are
Speaker 1: the kinds of experiments that he prefers to test hunting
Speaker 1: arrows and what you do is basically have a carcass
Speaker 1: of an animal. It's um. We don't kill them, the
Speaker 1: rangers kill them. They've just died. And then we perform
Speaker 1: a projectile experiment on him where we were throwing replica
Speaker 1: at levels and darts and shooting arrows and tracking the velocity,
Speaker 1: tracking where they've hit, and then butchering him with stone
Speaker 1: tools and then taking the bones and cleaning him and
Speaker 1: we keep all the meat and so that allows you
Speaker 1: to track you know, specific impacts too, specific bones. You
Speaker 1: can look at the performance as they penetrate and all that.
Speaker 1: We've done one on a bison, and included in that
Speaker 1: were big heavy darts, a couple of of a Lettles
Speaker 1: that are big, strong throwers, stronger than myself Donny Dust.
Speaker 1: You may he's a self described modern caveman um. The
Speaker 1: problem we run into with the closed points is that
Speaker 1: at Lettle darts, like I said, they're flexible when you
Speaker 1: throw them that they flex and they compensate for the
Speaker 1: arching motion of the throw, and they actually continue to
Speaker 1: flex down range when they hit with a lot of momentum,
Speaker 1: lot of energy that acts not only on the target
Speaker 1: but back on the projectile. So you have to have
Speaker 1: a really well designed, really robust shaft. If you have
Speaker 1: any bindings, you know where the foreshaft fits in, where
Speaker 1: the point is hafted on. All that has to be
Speaker 1: really well engineered. And if you're hunting big animals, that's
Speaker 1: what you want. You know, Donny was able to throw
Speaker 1: a point that heavy ash s dart and hit a
Speaker 1: bison rib and it fractured the rib and half and
Speaker 1: continue to penetrate into the vitals of the bison. And
Speaker 1: we're getting, you know, penetration through and through that animal
Speaker 1: with these heavy darts, passing all the way through like
Speaker 1: poking out the other side. Yeah. So these weapons are powerful.
Speaker 1: The problem is when they hit with kind of a
Speaker 1: skewed angle, you can have a couple of different things happen.
Speaker 1: That's not good. The halft fails because the notches, the
Speaker 1: wooden notches that are holding the point in snap and
Speaker 1: you like, you don't get any penetration. So if the
Speaker 1: point impacts the animal at an angle, yeah, at a
Speaker 1: slight slightly skewed angle. Um, and if especially if it's
Speaker 1: hitting bone, that's the real problem. Because you have these
Speaker 1: animals needed a broadside. You need to hit them like
Speaker 1: perpendicular to that bone. You you would preferably hit them, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's not always going to happen, just because of
Speaker 1: the nature of the weapon, or you might have it
Speaker 1: that the point is dislodged from the haft and it's
Speaker 1: kind of turned sideways, you know, breaks through, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you get failed penetration. That happened a few times. That
Speaker 1: happened with unfluted Clovis forms. When you flute these things,
Speaker 1: they're fitting kind of down deep into the notches. That
Speaker 1: does a couple of things. First off, it reduces that
Speaker 1: lateral motion so that they're locked in there with those
Speaker 1: those fluting channels. And then the second thing it does
Speaker 1: is that those flutes slim down the half. And if
Speaker 1: you're hunting a big animal, you want an efficient projectile.
Speaker 1: You know, we know that as hunters. This is something
Speaker 1: that I see archaeologist overlooking sometimes is if you're hunting
Speaker 1: big animals, there's a real incentive to make an effective,
Speaker 1: well designed protectile. Point. Part of what's that that's going
Speaker 1: to entail is a slim haft because when the hafting
Speaker 1: part goes in, if it's big and bulky, that's when
Speaker 1: you see a lot of deceleration suddenly. Okay, So a
Speaker 1: thinner point means there's more wood around the base of
Speaker 1: that point the halft, so that it's stronger when it impacts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: would or we find these weird things called the people
Speaker 1: called bone rods, and actually there are. There's at least
Speaker 1: one uh for shaft with the actual haft the notches
Speaker 1: cut for a point to fit in. I know, I
Speaker 1: believe it's from Oregon and that's made out of antler
Speaker 1: or bone, and that's that's ancient. So they were trying
Speaker 1: to compensate for the wooden shaft breaking when it hits.
Speaker 1: There's what they said, Man, we're gonna we gotta do
Speaker 1: something different, and they used it antlin tip. There's a
Speaker 1: possibility that that some of those bone rods, those those
Speaker 1: kind of uh slat like segments are used in as notches.
Speaker 1: It would certainly make a more sturdy half. That's an
Speaker 1: idea that comes out of these these realistic experiments. You know,
Speaker 1: you're you're trying to reverse engineer these things and use
Speaker 1: them in these trial and arry experiments. You get you
Speaker 1: get certain insights like this, the channels lock in the point,
Speaker 1: reduce lateral movement and since you have a long half
Speaker 1: with a case of close points. You have a bit
Speaker 1: of blade sticking out. They have a lot of leverage
Speaker 1: to break those those hafting notches, and you want it
Speaker 1: to be slim and you know, good at penetrating. The
Speaker 1: way I think of clothes and Fulsome points is that
Speaker 1: they're coming out of this this tradition of lanceolate points
Speaker 1: and where you you have things this way, you know
Speaker 1: they fit down deeply into these these four shafts. You
Speaker 1: want them to be good at penetrating. And so one
Speaker 1: way you can you can try and resolve this issue
Speaker 1: is by fluting the base. And so maybe what's going
Speaker 1: on with Fulsome is they're really trying to lock in
Speaker 1: those points. They're trying to make them durable. They're part
Speaker 1: of a composite, durable, heavy shaft that carries a lot
Speaker 1: of energy but is able to breakthrough bones. You know,
Speaker 1: that to me explains it. Yeah, So by having the
Speaker 1: flute go all the way to the tip of the point,
Speaker 1: you can really shove that thing in deep. So that
Speaker 1: would have meant there would have been would way up
Speaker 1: on the point and there would have been blade that
Speaker 1: would be below blade along the margins of the halft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they were One benefit there is that you support
Speaker 1: the stone. It's not very flexible obviously, and uh you
Speaker 1: get these bending fractures. Where would you put the sinew
Speaker 1: to attach the further down the base. They were grinding
Speaker 1: the bases so that they don't you know, when you
Speaker 1: wrap it with sinew, when you do get those those
Speaker 1: uh skewed impacts or any kind of impact that pushes
Speaker 1: the point you know, to the side and the half
Speaker 1: they can it can cut through its own bindings. So
Speaker 1: they ground the bases. So they would have put sin
Speaker 1: you like, on parts of the blade up the up
Speaker 1: the base that was ground, and then you just have
Speaker 1: this transition where they're no longer grinding them and so
Speaker 1: the forward section of the point is un ground. Sharp
Speaker 1: Devin did a great job of explaining the details of
Speaker 1: the functionality of the hafting advantages of the fulsome style
Speaker 1: point using his real world experience. So now we've got
Speaker 1: an understanding of the broad picture of the potential reasons
Speaker 1: why they implemented this radical technology. But here's an interesting question,
Speaker 1: when did they move away from this technology? When did
Speaker 1: they stop doing that? So there was a point when
Speaker 1: we know that they started fluting points, and then when
Speaker 1: did the technology shift after fulsome so Clovis folks develop
Speaker 1: the technology and um, they're fluting points. Uh full some
Speaker 1: take it to really kind of an extreme. I mean
Speaker 1: when you're taking a point that to begin with is
Speaker 1: only four millimeters or so in thickness, and then you're
Speaker 1: driving off a thin flake that maybe just one to
Speaker 1: two millimeters. Um, that's serious skill. So the technology kind
Speaker 1: of the pendulum swung really far. Yeah, that happens all
Speaker 1: the time and everything that absolutely. So eventually they were like, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: this is we've gone too far down that road. Let's
Speaker 1: back up. I guarantee you this happened because this happens
Speaker 1: in my life with my dad. My dad gives me
Speaker 1: a hard time about gear that I use, you know,
Speaker 1: because he used this kind of gear and I use
Speaker 1: this kind of gear. I guarantee you. There was some
Speaker 1: falsome grandpa who was like, Dad, come those young kids.
Speaker 1: They quit flute those points. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. So
Speaker 1: this stuff that comes after falsome is unfluted, but it
Speaker 1: works just as well. Um, which told you that fluting
Speaker 1: wasn't necessary because you could do it, you know, for
Speaker 1: the next town of ten thousand years, nobody was fluting
Speaker 1: points and they were still killing. But those guys that
Speaker 1: started doing stuff different made fun of the old falsome
Speaker 1: fluters or just said, look at all that stone you
Speaker 1: were wasting because of the time, you can't get it right.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, fluting wasn't necessary. What's the whole point
Speaker 1: of this podcast? My romantic stone point dreams are crushed,
Speaker 1: and I'm intrigued by this idea of the shift to
Speaker 1: a new design and how that happened. I wonder how
Speaker 1: long it took. I wonder if it upset people. I
Speaker 1: wonder if it was a fulsome fluters kid that started
Speaker 1: doing something different, or an outside influence from another region.
Speaker 1: We'll never know, but it's probably not much different than
Speaker 1: the reasons you and I changed gear over time. Maybe
Speaker 1: we just got tired of the old stuff and wanted
Speaker 1: to try something new. That seems to be a trend
Speaker 1: in human history. Here's Steve and I talking about the
Speaker 1: technology transition. You know what's wild to think about is
Speaker 1: a falsome hunter would have been walking across the landscape,
Speaker 1: or would have been in a camp a historical camp site,
Speaker 1: and would have picked up a Clovis Point, which pre
Speaker 1: dated him, and he probably would have been having. They
Speaker 1: probably had podcasts back then where the Falsome people talked
Speaker 1: about the Clovis people, like we're talking about Falsome. There
Speaker 1: are sites where post post Colombians, So when we use
Speaker 1: like pre Colombian times, like like pre contact times, there
Speaker 1: are post Colombian Native American sites where in their collections
Speaker 1: of things were folsome points. So they saw them as significant,
Speaker 1: and the old recognized it as something and kept it
Speaker 1: and kept it among their things. They had to have
Speaker 1: talked about the technology too, because they would have seen
Speaker 1: the difference in technology and understood that something changed and
Speaker 1: they did something different than they used to, and they
Speaker 1: had to would have thought that what they're doing now
Speaker 1: is better than what those guys were doing, or they
Speaker 1: would have done it like the guys back then, because
Speaker 1: they were shooting it out of bows. They were probably like, huh,
Speaker 1: that's like a flag. That's not gonna work. It's like
Speaker 1: a flagon out of an arrow, out of a little thin,
Speaker 1: little arrow. You'd have to think they would have looked
Speaker 1: and been like, yeah, I could I could figure that out,
Speaker 1: Like I could, you know, I get what they were
Speaker 1: doing there, but it's not something that I would make
Speaker 1: not how we do it now, but at the time,
Speaker 1: apparently that's a good point. They were like those hillbillies.
Speaker 1: So we've been focusing on the stone projectile point, but
Speaker 1: we haven't talked about what they used to throw them.
Speaker 1: Devon is an expert in addle addles. He's dedicated much
Speaker 1: of his research to them, and he's very good at
Speaker 1: throwing them. For us to finalize our Layman's PhD, we
Speaker 1: need some intel on this primitive tool because they have
Speaker 1: been the primary hunting tool of humans longer than they haven't.
Speaker 1: Here's Devon talking about add addles, So why don't you
Speaker 1: just describe for me what an addle addle is? The
Speaker 1: original word you'd pronounce it something like luck, and that's
Speaker 1: from the Aztec language. Don't want language, so we've we've
Speaker 1: anglicized it at ladle and say it again. How would
Speaker 1: they said it? Wow? Just really short. Yeah, the last
Speaker 1: tl is pronounced like you put the tip of your
Speaker 1: tongue against roof of your mouth and blow around the sides.
Speaker 1: Luck and a lot of language, you know, words in
Speaker 1: their language like kettle quack are pronounced that way. We've
Speaker 1: anglicized it at ladle and all it is really is
Speaker 1: a it's a lever to assist the body, assist your
Speaker 1: you're throwing the length that you're throwing arm, and because
Speaker 1: you're you're lengthening out that throwing arm. And of course
Speaker 1: we don't when we throw things, we don't just like
Speaker 1: push them straight out. We throw with an arching motion.
Speaker 1: Then the dart, the spear which we call it dart
Speaker 1: because that's an archaic English, means just a light usually
Speaker 1: fletched spear, which was precisely what they were. So it
Speaker 1: would be like like what we would call an arrow,
Speaker 1: except longer, yeah, except bigger. It's kind of like it
Speaker 1: would have fletchings on it, and most of them addle
Speaker 1: addle dart would have fletchings, would have feathers that would
Speaker 1: guide the flight of it. Usually yeah, not all of them.
Speaker 1: You know, if you look at what Native Australian people
Speaker 1: were using, they were using unfletched forms, and most of
Speaker 1: them pretty big. So these things range in size from
Speaker 1: you know, pretty small just like five feet tall to
Speaker 1: overt the arrows. The darts could be from five ft yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's a huge range of variability in the weapon
Speaker 1: but the dart has to flex because when you throw it,
Speaker 1: you're making this arching motion, so it basically it's compensating
Speaker 1: for for that arching motion and maintaining a straight trajectory.
Speaker 1: And basically you you start off just as you would
Speaker 1: normally throw something with kind of the big muscles of
Speaker 1: your your shoulder and like putting your torso twists into it,
Speaker 1: stepping forward a little bit, and then as you come
Speaker 1: in to the throw, you turn your wrist over and
Speaker 1: that final wrist snap is what gives a lot of
Speaker 1: the velocity to the dart. The motion that you just
Speaker 1: made look like a picture throwing a baseball, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: or a quarterback throwing a football. Yeah, the wrist snap
Speaker 1: that puts a spiral on a football or puts a
Speaker 1: waist on a baseball. Yeah. You think about a quarterback
Speaker 1: standing back there and then he just steps forward and
Speaker 1: smoothly throws right right to the target. That's what you're doing.
Speaker 1: You're casting this thing. You cast the dart with the
Speaker 1: outlettl and kind of a controlled motion. If you look
Speaker 1: online and like any almost any archaeology museum, you see
Speaker 1: this ridiculous depiction where a guy is holding one of
Speaker 1: these things down by his waist and then he's like
Speaker 1: running in and all this there's all this body motion. Well,
Speaker 1: you can throw him that way for distance. That's not
Speaker 1: what you're gonna be doing when you're hunting. You know,
Speaker 1: You're you're standing there and maybe taking a little step
Speaker 1: forward and just smoothly casting it right where you wanted
Speaker 1: to go. You know, when I think about an adellile
Speaker 1: and someone hunting with it, it's almost hard to fathom
Speaker 1: how you could be proficient enough to, yeah, for your
Speaker 1: food source to be totally depending upon your ability to
Speaker 1: be accurate. But then when I see you making this
Speaker 1: motion right here, it's like, I'm pretty decent at throwing
Speaker 1: a football, right, And it's because I've done it in
Speaker 1: my whole life. Yeah, And it's no different, is it.
Speaker 1: These people? This is just an extension of their their body,
Speaker 1: of their mind. They just yeah, it's you know, javelin's
Speaker 1: one thing, and there are ethnographic cultures that are really
Speaker 1: good with javelins, and they're they're quite proficient hunting with them.
Speaker 1: But when one way we've we've come to think about
Speaker 1: this is it's easier for most people in society. More
Speaker 1: people in society to learn to use this and to
Speaker 1: put power in it without having to be you know,
Speaker 1: big and strong, or without having to throw with some
Speaker 1: you know large or you know big body movements. So
Speaker 1: if you so, if you're hunting deer, you know, elk,
Speaker 1: just imagine sneaking around with one of these things up
Speaker 1: and in the ready, and when you're ready to throw,
Speaker 1: it's just a smooth step forward and cast right to
Speaker 1: the target. Yeah, it is more challenging with a bow,
Speaker 1: you're you're stealthier. You know, you can shoot it from
Speaker 1: a crouching position. There's less body movement. So if you're
Speaker 1: hunting a swift, wary animal like a white tail, it's
Speaker 1: it's just a stealthier weapon. But with an outlettle and dart,
Speaker 1: you know, you can hunt medium sized, small animals like that.
Speaker 1: But after the bow comes in, it seems they continue
Speaker 1: to use it, particularly for large animals like bison in
Speaker 1: open environments, because these these darts, they you can make
Speaker 1: them quite heavy, they carry a lot of energy, a
Speaker 1: lot of momentum, and they're they're very powerful, so it's
Speaker 1: easy to make the weapon powerful, which is hard to
Speaker 1: do with a bow and arrow. Fascinating stuff. The simplicity
Speaker 1: of the addladdle is hard to argue with, but we
Speaker 1: need to clear something up. What is the timeline of
Speaker 1: usage between a laddles and bows? I've always wondered that
Speaker 1: Devon's answers surprised me, and the complexity of that answer
Speaker 1: has to do with what he calls preservation bias. So
Speaker 1: that brings up a great point that we need to
Speaker 1: talk about. Is the timeline of an ad ladle in
Speaker 1: a boat? Just yeah, give us a give us a
Speaker 1: time picture of this technology when it came in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we don't know quite hold. The weapon is the
Speaker 1: earliest definitive examples, which and when I say definitive, we're
Speaker 1: talking about the parts of the actual outlet all themselves,
Speaker 1: not the projectile points. Is usually all we have to
Speaker 1: look at. It's really hard to tell what you're looking
Speaker 1: at just from a projectile point. But the oldest definitive
Speaker 1: examples come from caves in Europe and they date back
Speaker 1: almost twenty thousand years. The weapons probably a lot older
Speaker 1: than that. Well, when when you're talking about archaeology, it's
Speaker 1: so it's always so fascinating because like so they found
Speaker 1: an all they think years old, you know, what's the
Speaker 1: chances that was the first one that a human ever made,
Speaker 1: you know, precisely, probably didn't find that one precisely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have preservation bias. That's that's always the problem with
Speaker 1: the earliest evidence. Preservation bias. Now that's a new word.
Speaker 1: I like it. Yeah, that's that's one of the things arcy'
Speaker 1: all just have to contend with is the fact that
Speaker 1: when you're walking around as a hunter gatherer doing things
Speaker 1: on the landscape, how much of the stuff that you
Speaker 1: do and make and and leave behind, Like, how many
Speaker 1: of the hunts that you've you've undertaken are going to
Speaker 1: stick around? Sarcy all just can find them twenty years later,
Speaker 1: very few of them. So you have to build up
Speaker 1: enough culture on the landscape, enough people doing things that
Speaker 1: eventually you leave, you start to leave signs behind. So
Speaker 1: you're saying that maybe we're building these narratives off of
Speaker 1: stuff these people were doing that maybe wasn't even a
Speaker 1: major part of their life. I mean, that's not what
Speaker 1: we're talking about with the ad Alile. But that's possible
Speaker 1: because we're only finding the things that could be preserved,
Speaker 1: and so maybe that little sector of their life was
Speaker 1: maybe it was important. Maybe it wasn't. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: something they left behind and and we happened to find it.
Speaker 1: But there was other stuff they were doing that was
Speaker 1: not capable of being left but precisely it could have
Speaker 1: been massive. Yeah. I was talking to students the other
Speaker 1: day about those early footprints and Mexico, and I said,
Speaker 1: how many of the you've walked around on the earth,
Speaker 1: how many of the footprints you've you've left behind you
Speaker 1: think would last, you know, over twenty years. They're like none. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just all they did, all these things. You know,
Speaker 1: they made nets out of plant fiber and hide clothing,
Speaker 1: and it's extremely rare that you get that kind of evidence.
Speaker 1: And I mean even the hard artifacts you leave, like
Speaker 1: stone tools, they need to be in places where the
Speaker 1: site gets preserved and it's you know, not too buried,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't get washed away by a river. You know.
Speaker 1: There's all these variables that go into a preservation of
Speaker 1: archeological sites and then allows us to find them. So
Speaker 1: when did the When did the bow come in? So
Speaker 1: Adlile has been around for at least wind wind was
Speaker 1: bow technology. There's pretty good evidence for the earliest bow
Speaker 1: technology about seventy thousand years ago in Southern Africa. So
Speaker 1: the bow is older than the adel able are according
Speaker 1: to our evidence. Really yeah, which is kind of funny.
Speaker 1: The boat didn't spread rapidly. Uh. While we're looking at
Speaker 1: our projectile points that are striking lee similar to historic ethno,
Speaker 1: historic projectile points used with bone arrow technology in Africa,
Speaker 1: and they have all this, all the signs you know
Speaker 1: of of impact damage and residue analysis and all that.
Speaker 1: So we're this totally off the size of the point, well,
Speaker 1: the size of the point, the damage that they have
Speaker 1: incurred striking some hard object. Um, the microscopic where so
Speaker 1: there's macro and microscopic where you know macro being with
Speaker 1: naked eye. Microscopic if you look at inner microscope, you
Speaker 1: can see like impact striations from where they've penetrated something,
Speaker 1: residues left behind from the hafting where they were hafted,
Speaker 1: and definitely the size is very important. But if you
Speaker 1: look at these these points, they're very much like what
Speaker 1: people were using up to uh the historic period in
Speaker 1: Southern Africa. But in North America the boat didn't come
Speaker 1: along for a long time. There are suggestions that it
Speaker 1: was appearing in the Arctic five thousand years ago or more.
Speaker 1: But you know, again, we're just looking at at point
Speaker 1: sizes mostly and point styles, so we're not dealing with
Speaker 1: definitive evidence. By two thousand years ago, though it has
Speaker 1: entered down into and this what what caused it to
Speaker 1: actually start to spread is tricky because clearly people were
Speaker 1: connected for a long time, you know, from the far
Speaker 1: north into the middle of the continent. But it's finally
Speaker 1: started entering into the middle of the continent around two
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, so this is a long time after
Speaker 1: it started back over in Africa. So the technology just
Speaker 1: spread or did it spread? Do we do we know
Speaker 1: that it would have spread from human to human contact
Speaker 1: like sharing technology or was it covergent that two people
Speaker 1: had the same idea at the same time in different places. Yeah,
Speaker 1: was it disseminator or was it independent evolution or independent
Speaker 1: in mention of the technology and evolution of the technology.
Speaker 1: That's a really hard question to answer. Um. So we're
Speaker 1: looking at projectile points mostly, and we do have in
Speaker 1: North America we have out lettle artifacts dating back. The
Speaker 1: oldest complete complete preserved out Lettle is five thousand years old.
Speaker 1: A little bit older than that from Nevada, and we
Speaker 1: have other artifacts from the outletls themselves, going way back
Speaker 1: to the Plice scene. The hooks of the outlets made
Speaker 1: of mammoth tusks. We don't have that for bows. You know,
Speaker 1: you start to the bow is pretty much made out
Speaker 1: of organic matter, the whole thing. So, yeah, it's going
Speaker 1: to rock. And so the only the reason we know
Speaker 1: about ad leles is because they had a part of
Speaker 1: the ad ladle. The hook was made of something that
Speaker 1: was organic matter but harder, Yeah, like a bone, yeah,
Speaker 1: osseous bone or antler. So these were There are some
Speaker 1: mammoth tusks or mammoth ivory hooks that have come out
Speaker 1: of deposits in Florida. And then we have wooden example
Speaker 1: is preserved later on. So occasionally you do get wood preserving.
Speaker 1: That's when you have either extremely dry conditions or you're
Speaker 1: lacking oxygen. You have to have either water or oxygen.
Speaker 1: Devon continues on as we try to understand the transition
Speaker 1: of technology from ad laddles to bows in North America,
Speaker 1: or was the transition even that clear cut around two
Speaker 1: thousand years ago? In some places you have the sudden
Speaker 1: appearance of these really small points look much more to
Speaker 1: us like arrow points. But when we have it on
Speaker 1: an arrow and in some cases they're brand new styles.
Speaker 1: When we see that, we think, okay, this is being
Speaker 1: introduced by another culture and they may be trading the technology,
Speaker 1: or they may be another group that's moving into the area.
Speaker 1: Occasionally you also find that the older dart point styles
Speaker 1: are being now replicated in smaller in the smaller styles,
Speaker 1: and you get these two populations where you have a bimodality,
Speaker 1: we call it bimodality, where you have um to like
Speaker 1: size populations. You have like a big size population that
Speaker 1: that contains the dart category and then a smaller arrow population.
Speaker 1: And a lot of times they continue contemporaneous for you know,
Speaker 1: a thousand years or more. Wow. So they're you know,
Speaker 1: both the addle addle and the archery technology used used
Speaker 1: side by side. Yeah, these together, these people would have
Speaker 1: chosen a different weapon for a different type of hunt perhaps. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really interesting. You know, they're there are sites. There
Speaker 1: was a side I was looking at. It's in the
Speaker 1: Great Basin and this this uh sand dune area where
Speaker 1: they they had driven bison up out of the river
Speaker 1: valley and into this the sandy area where they've gotten
Speaker 1: bogged down, and that's where the hunters ambushed them. And
Speaker 1: they ambushed them both with the bow and arrown and
Speaker 1: the outlet on dart because both at the same time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because both size of the point. I wonder if I
Speaker 1: wonder if the archery guys, the traditional archer guys, were
Speaker 1: given the adele addle guys a hard time or vice versa. Right,
Speaker 1: come on, you're gonna use an ad l addle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what grandpa, That's what great Grandpa used tradition. I
Speaker 1: mean they did, honestly. You know, as I as I
Speaker 1: hear the stories of technology of points and styles of points,
Speaker 1: I look at that today in our archery world or
Speaker 1: are hunting world, where there's their different different technology, different
Speaker 1: ways to hunt, gives identity to different groups. Feel like
Speaker 1: I'm a bow hunter, I'm a traditional bow hunter. I
Speaker 1: use this type of broadhead, and he uses that like
Speaker 1: I've always used weaponry among a thousand other things to
Speaker 1: build personal identity. And so I just can't help but
Speaker 1: think that the archery guys were they weren't just absent
Speaker 1: of thoughts about the guys that were using addleaddles. You know,
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of potential going on there. Maybe they
Speaker 1: had some slightly different tactics going on, but but I
Speaker 1: think it's perfectly you know, a viable to say how
Speaker 1: we do it today. We definitely build identity around these
Speaker 1: different weapons systems. So that's that's really importan and that's
Speaker 1: probably a part of the conservativism of hunting technology. And
Speaker 1: you know, there are multiple times in which in history
Speaker 1: people have conserved older hunting technologies and preferred not to
Speaker 1: to take on a newer technology. One of the prime
Speaker 1: examples is it is Paul and Easy because they used javelins.
Speaker 1: That was their primary projectile weapon, and they had the bow,
Speaker 1: but it was mostly a toy or for hunting like rats.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, but they fought and hunted with javelins and
Speaker 1: they just they just hung onto it. That was that
Speaker 1: wasn't then the rest of the world shifted to archery
Speaker 1: and other things. Yeah, yeah, I mean the bow is
Speaker 1: in Northern Australia as well, but most people in Australia
Speaker 1: used either the out lettle or woomera is one of
Speaker 1: the native words there for it, or javelins. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: kind of we tend to think of things from this
Speaker 1: technological deterministic perspective. When a new technology comes on the scene,
Speaker 1: everyone's gonna adopt it. Yeah, that's not necessarily the case.
Speaker 1: You know, there's there's a number of content x in
Speaker 1: which you would hang on to an older technology. You know,
Speaker 1: I think about adopting new technology in modern times probably
Speaker 1: the biggest deterrent for me. Like if you if there
Speaker 1: was some new, big, major archery technology, I would be like,
Speaker 1: why do I need it? What I'm doing works fine, Yeah, precisely,
Speaker 1: And so it's just like it might go for a
Speaker 1: couple of generations before my ancestors were like, Okay, we're
Speaker 1: gonna do this because they find some reason it's better.
Speaker 1: You're think of it this way, like you know how
Speaker 1: to use a shotgun or a bow really well, a
Speaker 1: new technology comes on the scene. It may have better
Speaker 1: ballistic properties, but it turns out it's a lot harder
Speaker 1: to make it, or it's a lot harder to maintain it.
Speaker 1: For you because you could just buy it, it's a
Speaker 1: lot harder to maintain it, and it's just kind of
Speaker 1: a pain to deal with. You know. Bows and arrows
Speaker 1: are they're great, but they're kind of I think of
Speaker 1: it as being high strung the intended there under yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly there under tension. They break when they break their
Speaker 1: no good, and they're harder to make, their harder to maintain.
Speaker 1: It's harder to make the string. But if you have addle,
Speaker 1: was just you're not gonna break that thing. No, it's
Speaker 1: it's very simple. It's not you're carrying around on the landscape.
Speaker 1: Is not intertention. It's ready to go at a moment's notice,
Speaker 1: but it's not intertention. It's not getting worn down from
Speaker 1: being strung easier to make, easier to maintain. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: if it works for you, why adopt something new? You
Speaker 1: just feel like a bow shows up in your camp
Speaker 1: and then everybody wants it. Six months later, add a
Speaker 1: laddles are in the trash and everybody's got a boat.
Speaker 1: Life moved a little bit slower, didn't that. Well. I
Speaker 1: feel really good about the ground we've covered with the
Speaker 1: fulsome technology and understanding the history of bows and adladdles.
Speaker 1: Don't let your kids forget that they're here today because
Speaker 1: your ancestors use ad laddles to kill critters and feed
Speaker 1: your ancient family. That is a fact. As we come
Speaker 1: to the end to this fulsome series. I want to
Speaker 1: bring it back to the original question that we started with,
Speaker 1: why does any of this stuff matter? You know, it
Speaker 1: blows my mind. Human life is so weird in that
Speaker 1: we live in we drive cars, but we're trapped into
Speaker 1: the present, and it's so hard for us to fathom
Speaker 1: that there were people wandering around this place, that this
Speaker 1: was how they lived by these these tools that we're
Speaker 1: talking about part of your daily life. When I find
Speaker 1: these stone points in my front yard, if if anyone
Speaker 1: in my family is home, I try to get them
Speaker 1: to come outside with me to look at it in
Speaker 1: the ground and and we pick it up, and we say,
Speaker 1: the dude that touched this last was planning to cook
Speaker 1: his dinner over and open fire. Number one, number two
Speaker 1: he made this, and they were they had to provide
Speaker 1: for their families with this stone point. That's a fascinating thought,
Speaker 1: but it's such a healthy exercise. I think, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: past is essential. I mean, this is what our identities
Speaker 1: are constructed of, and our understanding of the world and
Speaker 1: how it works as drives from the past. In fact,
Speaker 1: one of the things I always tell students is the
Speaker 1: past is so potent that and more were two the
Speaker 1: Nazis created a division of their government to to construct
Speaker 1: this view, this history of the Aryan race, and they
Speaker 1: reinterpreted all this archeological evidence they went to prove and
Speaker 1: they reinterpreted the archaeology, and they said, this archaeology is
Speaker 1: the archaeology there in people. Of course, it was all
Speaker 1: completely fabricated, but that's what they you know, that was
Speaker 1: a big part of their ideology and what allowed them
Speaker 1: to do what they did, all the terrible atrocities they
Speaker 1: did to convince people that this is right, so stood
Speaker 1: that history was going to play a major part in
Speaker 1: the modern culture they were building. Yeah, archaeology is extremely
Speaker 1: potent stuff. You know, It's like it's really powerful, and
Speaker 1: you have to get it right in a time when
Speaker 1: it's it's hard for people to even be able to
Speaker 1: track a couple of generations in their family, which is
Speaker 1: kind of bizarre that we can't because we have this
Speaker 1: in the last thousand years, we've had the ability to
Speaker 1: record history. I mean even just the advent of paper
Speaker 1: and printing presses and writing stuff down and written language,
Speaker 1: and we can we can record all this stuff, but
Speaker 1: typically people don't. I mean, people have a hard time
Speaker 1: learning what happened to their families and hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: Well it's there, you know, the history, even if they're
Speaker 1: not looking for it, it's there, and it's what's forming
Speaker 1: who they are. Man. Right at the very end, in
Speaker 1: the last sentence, after hours of conversation, we find the
Speaker 1: answer to the question we started with rafting a cute
Speaker 1: little boat. Why does any of this matter? History is
Speaker 1: forming who we are, regardless of our awareness of it.
Speaker 1: Even if George mcjunkin hadn't found those bones that day
Speaker 1: in that box canyon, would have shaped our identity as
Speaker 1: humans today. Many times I've expressed my interest in identity
Speaker 1: and the factors that influence it. Certainly the fulsome hunters
Speaker 1: would be a part of the puzzle of our macro
Speaker 1: identity as humans. As much as many of us would
Speaker 1: like to think we're independent, freethinking beings, that's kind of
Speaker 1: a facade. There are parts of our past that are
Speaker 1: fundamental and architectural it can't be changed, Like these ancient
Speaker 1: humans being hunters, being meat eaters and procuring their livelihood
Speaker 1: through craft and skill and interacting with the earth in
Speaker 1: a time when the very identity of what it means
Speaker 1: to be human is up in the air. The Fulsome
Speaker 1: Hunters give us an indisputable anchor point and identity that
Speaker 1: might help us put perspective on our own lives in
Speaker 1: modern times. You have to figure out what that means
Speaker 1: to you, But I feel like I know what that
Speaker 1: means for me. It makes me marvel at human life
Speaker 1: in and it puts perspective on my problems and struggles,
Speaker 1: and it makes me want to do all I can
Speaker 1: to keep my life simple. I'm forever grateful that I
Speaker 1: was bored when I was and that I'm alive in
Speaker 1: two I don't want to go back and be a
Speaker 1: fulsome hunter, but I do want to look back at
Speaker 1: those guys and glean some inspiration, some identity, some hope,
Speaker 1: and some just straight up grit from those people. Man
Speaker 1: Fulsome Hunters pretty wild. I can't thank you enough for
Speaker 1: listening to Bear Greece. We've been on this long series
Speaker 1: about Fulsome and we're about to switch it up and
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about ducks in the next podcast, and
Speaker 1: maybe even some squirrels. One was an credible year for
Speaker 1: this podcast, and I personally learn a ton. Thank you
Speaker 1: guys so much for following along and supporting bear grease Hey.
Speaker 1: From all the people of the bear Grease Render Crew
Speaker 1: and all the people at Meat Eater, we wish you
Speaker 1: a very happy and prosperous new Year.