Bear Grease - Ep. 298: The Mystery of Clovis

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, host Clay Newcomb navigates the archaeological journey of the “peopling” of America and the mystery of the Clovis people. Archaeologists Dr. Metin Eren and Dr. David Meltzer discuss the Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis, and how the Clovis First theory crumbled. Author and indigenous historian Taylor Keen explains how the insistence of the archeology establishment in the Clovis First theory was potentially politically motivated. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. It's just such mystery. That's why these are so cool. Yeah, 100%. And the fact that we could find these Clovis points,

this technology that is indicative of this time period, can be found from Alaska to Florida, from Maine to New Mexico. Oh, even Central America. I mean, these people covered the context. Yes. So you could find one of these. in your yard. Oh yeah, definitely 100%.

If you consider yourself a connoisseur of wild places, wild history, and the wild human story on this continent, this episode is for you. We're diving into the mysteries of the Clovis people. And if you don't know who they are, Brent Reeves, no problem, because the experts don't really know either. But modern archaeology is uncovering some incredible new stuff. We're going to learn about the Clovis type site in New Mexico, what a Clovis point is. We're going to dismantle the Clovis First Theory, and we'll get into how archaeology can be used as a political weapon.

The ride will be rocky, but I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. One quick thing before we get started, Brent Reeves, Bear Newcomb and I will be at BHA's Black Bear Bananza. in Bentonville, Arkansas on March 1st. We'll be there all day. This is an event all about black bear hunting, ton of fun. And Bear Nukam and I's Bear Hunt, Spring Bear Hunt in Montana. The film for that will be up on the Meat Eater YouTube channel on February 20th. Don't miss it.

My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight and unlikely place. and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. I'm in Ohio. I'm at Kent State University. I'm here to meet Dr. Meton-Aaron. Meton's going to take me into his lab. He is the expert of the University. the country on Clovis-style stone points and really just the stone age. There he is.

Hey man. How you doing? I'm good. Good to see you bro. You too. Come on in. Heck yeah. Thanks for meeting me on a Saturday. Oh god. This is Henry, by the way. So what Henry let's go. He looks like a cross between a beagle and a bass of a hound. He's a cross between a beagle and a cavalier spaniel. Oh really? So he's called a beagleer. Henry, come. All right. is more personable than you might envision a stuffy archaeologist. He leads me to the fourth floor and we enter through a metal frame door with one of those tall rectangular windows with wire in the glass.

Meton's given off the energy of a second grader taking his parents into his homeroom class for the first time. I've traveled from the Ozarks to Ohio to see his experimental archaeology lab. It's the only one like it in the world. Here, they test ancient weaponry and tools. Yeah, welcome to the Kent State Experiment to Archaeology Lab. It's the whole wing. We're pretty lucky because this used to be storage before I got here.

But then they gave me the whole wing and said, build the lab of your dreams. So everything you see, everything's a replica from either I've made or my students have made or Dr. Michelle Beber's made. Yeah, so it's like part library, part Stone Age hunting. storage shed. I think I'm looking at maybe 50 Adel Ato-Adarts over there. This place is a real nerd hut. Wall-to-wall bookshelves, filing cabinets, five-gallon buckets with flit flakes, maps, and random stone points lying around everywhere. It's just the kind of

place to begin to tell the big story of ancient America. But when you're here, it's kind of weird calling this place America, because the Paleolithic world, New New York. nothing of such a place. Calling this place, America, is like someone getting a new name after they've become an old, old man, because human history here is deep.

And this lab is dedicated to the scant, but telling details we have about this old man we now call America. The main thing I notice that makes this different than just like standard library is the dirt on the floor.

It's like a workshop slash library. There's like boot tracks and flip chips and stuff laying around. That's the whole lab, right? I mean, this is very much like a working archaeology and engineering laboratories. People are always making stuff and breaking stuff. And, you know, we usually do like a big clean once or twice a year. Usually once a year. It looks awesome. I love it. I love it. So yeah, we're real lucky. Where there are no oxen, the stables are clean. And it's clear there's some real science going on here. He's got machines for smashing stuff.

He's got chronographs, life-size animal archery targets, and enormous collections of ancient stone points. And there's a pottery shop in here. So you guys are trying to understand even like a lot of the physics of how people use stone tools to survive, to kill stuff, to butcher animals. Oh, yeah. Like, so we want to understand, like, what makes an optimal spear point. You have to understand that, like, you know, we're dealing with time periods in the Stone Age that are hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

So people had the opportunity to have natural experiments over generations to figure out how stuff works. And they weren't just playing around. This is like life and death. Life and death. So they figured out what worked. What's amazing is it takes, in a lot of cases, 21st century cutting edge engineering technology to figure out what these folks learned just through observation, paying attention, and really just being observant to what's around them.

Stone Age technology is astonishing. You may remember a meat eater video we did with Dr. Aaron and Dr. David Meltzer, where myself along with the crew, butchered an entire bison using stone tools. It's on YouTube. We thought it was going to take all day, but we finished in a couple of hours. It was almost as fast as using modern knives. Dr. Aaron published a paper on it. We're about to dig into this deep history, but I first need a little refresher on what archaeology actually is.

Archaeology is the study of ancient technology. And then we can use what we learn from ancient technology to, make inferences about ancient people's behavior, how they lived. Sometimes in rare cases, maybe what they believed, stuff like that. So this is a real hard-hidden question. What was Indian Jones? He was an archaeologist. Now, how was he studying ancient technology?

I think that word is a little hard for me to understand. Yeah. All of archaeology would be considered studying ancient technology? Yeah, because a pot, a table, a building, the Holy Grail, The Holy Grail, that is technology. The Holy Grail technology was amazing. But archaeology studies human-made stuff that's left behind called artifacts. Future archaeologists will be studying iPhones.

But the iPhone of the Ice Age was a tricked out style of point that we're going to learn about called a Clovis point. Archaeology fits under the bigger umbrella of anthropology, which is the study of humans. Forgive my ignorance. but I need some more clarification on something else. So, okay, where does paleontology fit into the death? So paleontology is the study of ancient animals. But paleontology is the study of essentially bones. Essentially bones.

In the fossil record. That's exactly right. You know, people always, you know, ask, oh, do you study dinosaurs, right? And what I will say is, I wish I did, because that'd be sweet. But the last dinosaur went extinct around 65 million years ago. The first creature that really kind of is a human, human-like, is 6 to 7 million years ago. So 60 million years separates the last dinosaur and the first human-like creature. If we were biting into a chicken leg, we've just been nibbling on the crispy skin, but we're about to get into the meat.

I want to understand the chronology of our understanding of the peopling of America, where they came from and when. This involves a term we're going to come to understand intimately Clovis. There was a huge debate in the late 1800s, early 1900s, as to whether or not there was a Stone Age period in the New World, right? Because the Stone Age is generally defined as the Pleistocene period, which is 10,000 years and earlier. At this point in Europe, they were pretty confident, right? They had started to uncover Neanderthal remains. A Dutch paleontopologist named Eugene Dubois had uncovered Homo erectus in Southeast Asia. You know, America wanted to have as old an antiquity as Europe.

There's kind of some competition there. And so there's this huge debate. And Dave Meltzer's book, The Great Paleolithic War, it's several hundred pages going into that debate. And it's pretty entertaining. It's just like, just gossip and pretty good. I want to stop you right there. Why were people so worked up about that?

Like, why would we want to have as deep a history as Europe? I mean, is it literally just like we just want to think we're as old as them? Or is there something I don't understand, some economic benefit or some cultural benefit? Nope, no benefit other than ego. I mean, we're American, so we got to be first and we got to have the oldest. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker.

I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag and there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the Truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods.

Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. I've been holding out on you.

I didn't just go to Ohio to Metton's Lab, but I also went to Dallas, Texas, to the campus of SMU. Dr. David Meltzer is an OG archaeologist. an author, and he's going to give us a granular walkthrough of the deep story of America. But first, we've got to talk about Folsom, New Mexico. So when we were last talking, Clay, you remember we were in Folsom, New Mexico. And Folsom, New Mexico was a turning point in the story of the peopling of the Americas. Because up to that moment in time, nobody was really confident that we had any evidence whatsoever that people had been and arrived in the Americas in Ice Age times.

Folsom broke that barrier after literally 50 years of controversy. Folsom came along and we had clear-cut evidence for the first time of human artifacts, genuine human artifacts. There was no question about these in direct association with what were known to be now extinct Ice Age bison. I have no doubt that you remember Bear Grays Hall of Famer George McJunkin, who discovered the Folsom site in 1908. It's here where they found the first Folsom points, which were beautifully crafted, lancelot-shaped, thin, sharp, stone points that are fluted on both sides. Fluting means that with a single strike, they flaked off the entire side of a point. They do this on both sides to create a mysteriously thin point. It might be best just to Google it if you want to envision what it looks like.

We did a whole series on Folsom starting with episode 28 of bear grease. And we have a meat eater film on YouTube where I killed a bear with a Folsom point. But after the Folsom discovery, a new, unidentified, slightly different type of fluted points started showing up all over the country. These newly found points had smaller flutes than Folsom, but they were using the same napping technology. It was kind of like a grandson making a variation of his grandfather's design. Well, in the wake of Folsom and those very distinctive fluted points that we've talked about before, suddenly everybody realized these things are all over the continent. And, you know, you can go to Ohio, you can go to Florida, you can go to the state of Washington,

and they've all got these very distinctive fluted points, except they didn't actually quite look like Folsom. And so there was a little bit of confusion. You know, they used terms like generalized fulsome because it didn't quite fit the type, right? Well, what happens after that is, you know, suddenly everybody's looking for these sites. Everybody wants to dig up these sites. About half a dozen years later,

a fellow by name of Edgar B. Howard, who was at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, had been working on these old sites. and he'd gotten wind about a locality outside of Clovis, New Mexico. And he'd been told he'd gotten word that in these dunes along the term is Blackwater Draw, that these dunes along Blackwater Draw were producing large animal bones. E.B. Howard was a real deal, Indiana Jones type, and he was headed to check out these bones near Clovis.

and Blackwater draw. And this guy was a, he hadn't been an archaeologist his whole career. No. He was like an adult onset archaeologist. Yeah. He was like in his 40s or something. Oh yeah. So he had heard that megafaunal remains had been kind of uncovered in this gravel quarry

that was being excavated. So it's thought that the Clovis site is a spring. And there would have been lots of water resources around. It kind of been like a watering hole. So all sorts of animals would have been coming to that spot. And sometimes that would make a really good hunting locale, right? You take advantage of these animals because they need water. But sometimes they would also die just naturally through natural causes at that spot.

And when he went and started to explore and he got teams looking around, they start to find these points that were larger than fulsome points. At the time they thought they were crew. and the flutes, you know, those grooves that extend from the base upwards, rather than Folsom where they go the whole way, these flutes would only go a third of the way up the spearhead, right? Sometimes half, sometimes a little bit less. And what's amazing about Blackwater Draw, this site is they were finding Clovis points underneath Folsom points. And so this was the first time where they actually had really concrete evidence based on the law of superposition that, wow, Folsom isn't the

oldest. There are older cultures than Folsom because when we dig deeper, we're finding different artifacts. And that's what the law of superposition is. It's just basically, generally, the deeper you go, the older things get. It wasn't just these unusual points that made the Clovis site different. There were other types of bones here that really put Clovis on the map. This place would become known as the Clovis type site, which is a term used to describe the original place that something important is found. Did you hear him say that this famous place, this Clovis site as it would become known, was a commercial gravel pit?

Talk about two different types of folks interested in digging, gravel miners and archaeologist. These guys are on like completely different spectrails. Oh, no question. I mean, like, as far apart as you could possibly be. And you know what? The situation, it's actually kind of sad because it gets worse. In the 1950s, they bring in these giant road graders and tracos and everything. And there's photos that you can see of bulldozers in the background

and a bunch of folks in the foreground frantically excavating bones. Wow. I'm just looking now at one of the books on Clovis. And it says the New Mexico Highway Department prospecting for grabs, to use in local road improvements, struck a deposit on the Anderson Carter Ranch not far from where Whitman and Anderson had made their discoveries to other archaeologists. Mammoth bones were dislodged and pulled up by heavy construction machinery. Soon thereafter, some of the fossils were placed on display in nearby Portales.

Other bones were carted away by workers and curious onlookers, so people were taking stuff away, only to show up later on porches, in cupboards, and in garages. One local farmer who made off with a hefty chunk of mammoth bone eventually used it as a doorstop. Luckily, E.B. Howard caught word of these happenings and rushed back to Clovis. But what they discovered, and this is what E.B. Howard realized in November of 1932,

was we've got another instance, kind of like Folsom, except it's not just bison. There's also mammoth at this site. And so he excavates there. in the early 1930s, over a series of about half a dozen years. And they recover in association, Folsom points with bison and what will come to be called clovus points with mammoth. And that's really important because the fulsome site was with these bison antichuists.

Correct. Which were an extinct species of bison. But still there was some question amongst the, people that, but like, well, maybe they weren't really bison antiques. Maybe it was something different, but mammoth, we knew for sure. That's an excellent point because, you know, bison were still wandering around, right? And it was really a question of, are these truly ancient bison or not? And people are reasonably confident in that, but when you've got a projectile point associated with a mammoth, there's no ambiguity. Yeah. Mammoths are not wandering around the

American High Plains. And they're still trying to answer this question of, were there humans here during the Pleistocene? Do you remember where you were in November 1932 when they discovered mammoth bones in association with the Clovis points? Well, most of us weren't alive, but you get the point, pun intended, that this was monumental. And to bring us all up to speed, the Folsom site dates back between 10,200 years and 10,700 years ago. But that site was found first, so it's a little confusing. But it was younger than the Clovis site, which was found in 1932. And the Clovis period is basically the prior 1,000 years,

dating it back to just under 12,000 years old. But we need to know exactly what it means when we say, Clovis Technology. So Clovis technology is comprised of stone and bone artifacts. Now, the iconic Clovis artifact is what we

call the Clovis Fluted Point. And so this is a spear point that could have been used as a projectile for like the Atlattle dart. It could have been used as a spearhead for thrusting spears. It could have been used as a knife in knife handles, right?

It would not have been used in archery because it was way older than archery. Really? Maybe? You tell me. Well, so this is the thing. People assume that the bow and arrow occurs very late in North America. But I don't know.

I mean, we get evidence of the bow and arrow in South Africa. I want to say something like 70,000 years ago. Wow. So it's very possible that, you know, because technologies are like biological species. They can emerge. They can also go extinct. So it's possible. that at some point, as people are moving across Asia and Siberia, they lose bow and arrow technology.

And then when they come to the new world, they have to reinvent it. So a Clovis point, it's within the realm of possibility that it could have been shocked. It could have been used with the Bowen Arrow. I can't wait for Steve Renel to hear this. It's, now, I'm not saying they did. So it is possible. We don't know. I mean, and to be honest, we also don't know that they use the Atlattle.

We've never found a Clovis Atlattle. We've never found a Clovis spear. But that's preservation bias, potentially. Yeah. So like an atlattle thrower would have been made of organic matter, wood, bone, and it just would have rotted. Yeah. I'm not saying the Clovis folks use the bow and arrow. But what I'm saying is we can't say that they didn't use the bone arrow.

Yeah. But so this gets to that really pesky answer. I don't know. Bowes, strings, and aero shafts are also organic. matter. And a man whose name rhymes with Cleves-Tanella once chatted me for shooting a paleo point out of my bow saying it wasn't historically accurate. But that's water under the bridge. Let's get back to these presumed emphasis on presumed Clovis mammoth hunters. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is, do you know how many sites on the entire continent

of North America we have with Clovis points in association with mammoth? 13. 15. You were close. Yeah. 15, right? 15. So let's say, hypothetically. That sounds like a lot to me, but it's probably really not, is it? Well, 15 on the entire continent of North America. 15 is not a large number. Do we not have Clovis points lodged in mammoth bones?

Well, it's funny, that was exactly what I was going to bring up next. We've never found Clovis tips, Clovis Point Stone, lodged in mammoth bones. Now, that's really interesting to think about. Because in Europe, we find stone points, bone points lodged in animals going back hundreds of thousands of years, right? Hundreds of thousands of years. So the question is, why in Europe during the Stone Age? I'm jealous. Are we getting direct evidence of shooting?

We get that over and over again in Europe. Not once in North America. With a mammoth. With a mammoth. Why is it? I don't know. We have something like... We don't know.

of over 90 Clovis points in association with mammoth. Not one stone point is lodged in any of the bones. Could it not just be simple statistics that there were less people here for a shorter period of time? So statistically, us finding that? It could be. I mean, humans have been there longer, most likely. But I think the question, though, is even at the equivalent period, which would be the Magdalenean period in Europe, which is a stone age culture right before the end of the ice age.

You'll get stone points and stuff embedded in bone then. So why not at the equivalent period in North America? So I think when we do find Clovis points in association with mammoth remains, it is very possible that that animal is hunted. But you also have to remember that these animals, mammoths, they were going extinct, right? And 10,000 years ago, we were facing a climate change. that is kind of hard to comprehend. We were going from the Ice Age to the Holocene.

So these animals' environments were kind of collapsing around them. So there may have been more frequent dead mammoths than for people to scavenge. Right. Because it was a population in decline. It was a population in decline, right? They were dying. They were dying. So, again, I think a lot of folks have seen research that myself, from my colleagues of Don,

and they immediately are like, oh, you think Clovis didn't hunt. mammoths. No, not at all. Clovis 100% hunted mammoths. What I don't believe is Clovis did not hunt mammoths to extinction. Yeah. It's funny. It's funny you called it a stereotype that Clovis people hunted mammoths. You could almost see that being used. It's like a like a stereotypical slur back in the day. Oh, those mammoth hunters. And the man and the Clovis people are like, man, man, we're just finding them dead. We're not even killing them that off. We didn't do it. Yeah. Those dirty mammoth hunters. I love a good mystery. Why do you think that we don't find points lodged in mammoth bones in America?

And this is relevant to the story because in modern times, Clovis culture became synonymous with megafauna hunters and even known to only hunt mammoth. And that just isn't true. They were hunting all kinds of stuff. It's just intriguing to think about these people killing giant, ancient, woolly elephants with these Clovis spearpoints. But we really don't have any hard evidence of that.

But that brings up a theory that's becoming less and less relevant. And it has to do with humans causing the extinctions of the Pleistocene megafauna. And in fact, there's a whole body of claims out there that humans were actually fairly voracious hunters to the degree that they were the cause of the extinction of these animals. Because, of course, these animals are no longer here. Yeah. Do they call it Pleistocene overkill? They do indeed. The Blitzkrieg model. Yeah, and that all ties back to that sort of traditional notion. You come down through the ice-free corridor, you look out in front of you, and it's just a landscape teeming with these large animals that have never peered down the shaft of a spear, have no idea how to respond to a human and just stand around while they get, well, shafted.

Okay. Archaeology dad joke. Yeah, exactly. So I don't buy it, and I don't buy it for a number of reasons. Here's the reasons why it's unlikely human hunters caused what's called the quaternary megafaunal extinction, or the Ice Age extinction, that took place between 50,000 to 9,000 years ago. Number one, human hunters lived high on the hog, killing naive animals, and killing the final animals in the population could be difficult. They'd probably just move on when the hunting got hard, leaving some stragglers for seed. Number two, hunting these huge animals was risky.

They're hard to kill. It was a low success rate type hunt, and you might get killed doing it. So it was just risky. The last reason is the most compelling to me. And we only have hard evidence that these Clovis people killed five types of big megafauna. Here's Dr. Meltzer. Mammoth, mastodon, gompathere, horse, and camel. So five genera.

We have reasonably good evidence that people killed the animals at those 16 sites. 38 different genera when extinct. So what about the other 33 genera? We don't have any evidence that people were hunting giant peccaries, giant tapers, giant beavers, giant ground sloths, right? There's all these other animals that went extinct. So why is it that we don't have any evidence if people were responsible for coming into this continent and blasting their way through and hunting in the sort of blood-thirstyles? rage all the way through the hemisphere, where's the evidence? It's just not there. Now, take that

and contrast it with bison. Bison started getting, were hunted as early as Clovis times. We have Clovis age bison kills at the Clovis type site. Bison will then be hunted for literally the next 12,000 years. But they don't go extinct. They're still here today. Absolutely. It seems clear that humans didn't cause the quaternary extinction. I want to ask Dr. Aaron more about this overkill hypothesis. Once again, you're going to need to know something going in. The Anzic child that he's about to talk about was a two-year-old from the Pleistocene found buried on a Montana ranch in 1968.

Is that idea still pretty well received? Oh, it's, yeah. I mean, in fact, there was a paper published recently in Science Advances where they did an isotopic analysis of the Anzic baby skeleton. And they found that the diet was consistent with a plysicine big cat, right? Right, right. Yeah, you might have seen that. Yeah, so where they analyze the DNA, this two-year-old child and decided that the mother was basically eating that diet of mammoths, yeah, of meat, right? and stuff and great, that's fine. But the paper then says, because of that one finding, humans cause the extinction of mammoths on North America. Is that, is that, I mean, do you think some of that is informed about just the modern bias of, like, human intrusion on the landscape? 100%.

So it's like a environmental statement of, like, we're wrecking the planet. They're trying to use that as a signal to point to a very good cause. Preserving the environment and species is so important. important. And showing that the Anzik baby and its mother ate meat, that's a huge leap then to say, well, because they ate meat, well, we cause the extinction of the mammoths in North America. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods.

Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's kind of bewildering to hear about archaeology being used as a political tool.

but we're about to hear a lot more about this. But let's get back into Clovis. This site would become the prominent American discovery of the 20th century. And for the next 40 years, there would be an idea called Clovis First, meaning these people that make these Clovis-style points were the first Americans, Clovis First. So this Clovis First thing answered the big question we'd been asking for a long time about how long people had been here and this ceiling that the Clovis first theory put on this thing was about that 13,000 year mark but there was trouble and so the the argument that sort of emerged in the 1960s was that

clovis groups were first and they came from Asia and they came from absolutely yeah they came from northeast Asia come into the Americas and basically start eating their way from one end of the the continent to the other but what also was happening some simultaneously in the 1960s was that people were saying, are we absolutely certain that Clovis's oldest? Could there be stuff evidence of people here prior to Clovis? And that triggered a huge kerfuffle and debate. A lot of it was because people would make claims about sites of great antiquity, and the claims simply did not pass critical muster. And so archaeologists, I mean, we have long memories. It's an occupation. hazard, right? And so we got really kind of skeptical and even maybe cynical about the idea of

pre-Clovis. My friend Taylor Keene is a Cherokee in Omaha. He's a graduate of Harvard and a professor of business at Crichton University. He's also an indigenous historian and author. He wrote a book called Rediscovering Turtle Island, which is about the peopling of the Americas. He and many others believe that the original persistence of the archaeological community in denying the deep antiquity of humans here was rooted in bias that helped build the justification narrative for America's westward expansion. So if there's anything I learned from writing a book on this topic, to me it started with some very basic human questions of how long have my indigenous ancestors been here? And pretty quickly,

especially in the academic narratives, what you're going to find is some fairly fixed biases around different theories. Primary one of those is around the Bering Strait theory and then the Clovis First theory. And that was embedded in anthropology as a barrier to anything being before those timeframes, for sure. I think that anthropology,

especially the Bureau of American Ethnology, was created at a time when we were experiencing the banishing race of indigenous peoples. And I think it was a hopeful prophecy for the European settlers who had colonized this, because that would have been much easier than having to deal with the people for a long time. So whatever we could do reasonably within science to limit how far indigenous peoples have been here seemed to be the cultural norm. Taylor believes the dogma and persistence of the Clovis First theory, which, remember, helped break this ice age barrier, was politically motivated.

It's complicated, though, because Meltzer is saying the theory was simply based on the evidence that we had at the time. I have a feeling that both of these things could be true at the same time, but I'm still trying to understand why this is political. So much of manifest destiny. There's a famous painting, and I always forget the name of it, but it shows basically Lady Liberty floating as a ghost across the plains, and you see the advancing railroad. You see a handful of indigenous peoples, but it's a God-given right for European colonization to happen here.

And I think the mindset is that, you know, this was the New Jerusalem for some of the Rosicrucian thinkers coming out of the Enlightenment and all this new Atlantis type of theory. And all of a sudden it was viewed that America could become that. And it was the God-given right of the colonizers to take it and to do with it what they were. But to get there, you need a narrative. The land needs to be a wilderness. The people that were there before need to be savages and it was our manifest destiny to take over the West. That's the backdrop. That's the psychology. Within the academy, anything that was before theory was rejected. It's possible that America wanted a narrative that people hadn't been here that long. And on the other side,

many indigenous people wanted to give their ancestors full credit for how long they'd actually been here. Taylor believes it's possible that humans have been here in the Americas for as long as 100,000 years, but that's like the furthest extent, but he thinks for sure 40 or 50. But at this time, there really isn't hard evidence to support that yet. And none may exist, but that thing could still be true. It's possible for something to be true, but there be no evidence. And my mind. And my analysis and personal opinion is that at one time these biases to build this pro-American narrative were probably real. But modern archaeologists like Meltzer and Aaron are humble, realistic, and seem to be open to whatever the real evidence shows. At some point, I'd like to talk about

modern journalist and popular TV host Graham Hancock, who believes the archaeological community is still not wanting the human arrival dates to be too deep in time. We'll get to to that. But to get back to the mission of this podcast, here's Dr. Meltzer talking about when the Clovis first theory began to crumble. But then, starting in the late 70s and early 80s, there were some sites that came online that were actually pretty impressive and that provided pretty compelling evidence that indeed people were here a whole lot earlier. Fast forward to today. we've got a number of sites now that give us reasonably confident evidence and data that make it clear that folks have been here a lot earlier than Clovis. What's a lot earlier?

Minimally, we think that folks are here around 15, 16,000 years ago. Now, that actually has implications for how they got here. Now that would predate Clovis by like 2,000,000 years. Exactly right. Clovis first began to crumble in the 1970s, but it takes decades for theories and sites to gain credibility. And that's exactly why Meltzer didn't mention White Sands, New Mexico, that has footprints dating back over 23,000 years. Many people just don't believe all the questions about those. prints have been answered.

And if this podcast is a fried chicken leg and we've already had one meaty bite, we're now at the meat close to the bone. And if you're opposed to learning some stuff, I'd suggest you just turn this podcast off right now. We're about to talk about the ideas around the ice-free corridor, which for decades people believed the Clovis people traveled through this ice-free corridor to get from Alaska's Bering Land Bridge into the interior. of America. The corridor was created by two abutting glaciers, my beloved Laurentide, and the Corridelian ice sheet.

Here's some hard-hitting knowledge, boys. So what site is the most definitive site today that bumps it back to that 15? Well, there's several. You've got some here in Texas, the Galt site, which is just outside of Austin. we've got sites in the Pacific Northwest like Cooper's Ferry we've got sites in southern South America like Monteverde and so and Monteverde dates 146 147 and if you think about it if they're down there by 146 or 147 they came across the

land bridge a lot earlier and we and oh man we're like moving so fast we know that the people the the peopleing of South America came through the North American continent through genetics Exactly, but let me actually throw a wrinkle into this first. Okay, remember we were talking about the ice-free corridor. And I'm going to bring genetics into it, by the way. So the ice-free corridor, it was traditionally thought, you know, it opened just about the time of Clovis. Well, doing some work, we obtained several cores from the center of the ice-free corridor region.

The ice-free corridor runs from slightly northwest to slightly southeast, and it opened, like, winter coats, where the zipper comes down from the top and up from the bottom. And it's going from Alaska to Montana, basically. Exactly. So if you can imagine then, you're unzipping your winter coat from the top and the bottom, the central portion of that coat is going to stay closed latest. Okay? So we obtained cores from lakes in that central portion.

And we looked at the environmental ancient DNA. there's been a revolution in our ability to understand past environments. We can take a sediment core. So think about drilling a core down into the sediment at the bottom of a lake. You then extrude that tube of sediment, and then you fine slice it, and you look at the DNA fragments that are preserved in that mud. Because a square centimeter of dirt, will contain billions of fragments of DNA.

Billions with a bee. And of animals that urinated, defecated, died? Absolutely. Absolutely. Anything that was hanging around that lake. Wow. And what we discovered that organic life does not come to this lake until around 12,600 years ago.

Okay, so wait a minute. We just said people were in the America 16,000 years ago. If there's nothing growing in the ice freak corridor until 12-6, how the heck did people get through that corridor? They didn't, right? That corridor stayed closed relatively late, and when it did finally open, it was not biologically viable. If you're coming from Alaska down to Montana,

you're not packing a lunch and doing it in a day, okay? You've got to have resources. Those resources weren't available. So what does that tell us? They didn't come down. down the ice free corridor. It would have been like an iced hallway. I mean, there wouldn't have been a bunch of animals there.

Nope, nope. And even vegetation maybe. I mean, it would have been like walking through an ice box. Exactly. And through mud and lakes and just glacial debris. It would not have been a pleasant place. And so this, the ice free corridor was, that's the way that we believed people got into the interior of the continent. Traditionally.

until like 10 years ago. Pretty much. With basically with these mud, these dirt cores and them saying, hey, there was nothing here. Right. Until 12,000 years ago. Yeah, yeah. So what does that mean? Well, that means they got here some other way.

Wow. And the other way is down the Pacific Coast. So the first Americans undoubtedly came by water, period. Interestingly, decades ago, the head honcho leaders said this wasn't a possibility. Here's Taylor. John Wesley Powell, who was the original inaugural director for both the Smithsonian, but more importantly, the Bureau of American Ethnology. The very first paper that was written on the academy, so think like legal case law. If you write the first piece of case law, everyone else has to follow you.

And I'm going to paraphrase the title of it. On the limitations of certain anthropological data is what it was called. and in essence he laid out the Bering Strait theory and a very calculated line. He said something along the lines of, we will entertain no extralimital diffusion, meaning people didn't come from across water or from somewhere else. Now, this is to the people that invented the canoe and seafaring canoes up in the Arctic. Obviously, we've navigated waterways for a very long time. Many in the indigenous communities believe these statements to be politically motivated,

but I think modern archaeologists would just say that we didn't have the data, we didn't have the hard evidence, and I can sympathize with both sides. The field of archaeology is limited to hard evidence, and it just didn't have it. But we've seen, even in modern times, how we've seen, even in modern times, people are politicizing science and the ancient stories of indigenous people just seem to get truer and truer as time goes by as we wind down i've got a clovis point in my hand and i'm mesmerized by it's just it's just such mystery and i that's the that's why these are so cool yeah 100 Such a mystery. And the fact that we could find these Clovis points, this technology that is indicative of this time period, can be found from Alaska to Florida, from Maine to New Mexico.

Oh, even Central America. I mean, these people covered the country. Yes. So you could find one of these in your yard. Oh, yeah, definitely. 100%. The cool thing about the Stone Age is the Stone Age is everyone's history. That is the story of our species and how the modern world looks the way it does today. We've learned so much on this episode.

I hope our brains don't overheat from all this new knowledge, but I think this will give us a good foundation for understanding some of this continent's earliest history. And I find this stuff valuable when I'm in a wild place alone, and the thoughts of humans in the Ice Age chasing mammoths and the great mystery around their lives. is just almost overwhelming. I really love this stuff. Big thanks to my distinguished guests,

Dr. Aaron, Dr. Meltzer, and Taylor Kean. Thank you so much. I can't thank everybody enough for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast. Keep the wild places wild because that's where the bears live. You know, we've been talking about extinctions and hunting and stuff. What I want someone out there to do,

if you're into like movies or TV shows. I want someone out there to combine the Stone Age genre with the zombie apocalypse genre. Okay. And what I want is I want a TV show where the megafauna have been zomified. And that is the reason why they went extinct and like Clovis folks have to defend themselves

against a zombie mammoth or a zombie short-faced bear. but I'm just like, why hasn't anyone combined zombies with Stone Age? If Hollywood somehow ever gets into this lab, they're going to get there. Can we do like an audio trademark? So if someone wants to pick up this idea, we get the royalties? Well, I mean, I'll give it all to you, man. I mean, this is your brain job.

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