Bear Grease - Ep 30: The Folsom Site - Killing Bison with Stone Points (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, Clay Newcomb takes us back to the site of an ancient bison kill, the one found by George McJunkin on part one of this series. After George’s death it would become known as the Folsom site. It was here that stone tools made by humans were found with a relic form of Pleistocene bison, Bison antiquus, and forever planted an indisputable datapoint into the debate of human antiquity in North America. We’re going to talk with Ol Steve Rinella of MeatEater and the nation’s leading expert on the Folsom Site, Dr. David Meltzer of SMU, who literally wrote the book on Folsom. Dr. Meltzer went back, 70 years after its initial excavation, and excavated it again to find more answers. They discuss the archeological processes that verify the site, what Dr. Meltzer found when he went back, and speculate on how the bison kill took place. I really doubt you’re going to want to miss this one. . .Connect with Clay and MeatEaterClay on InstagramMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop Bear Grease Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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. There were so many questions about the site that were unanswered. That's why I went back 70 years later. On this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, we're going to the site of an ancient bison kill,

the one found by George McJunkin on part one of this series. After George's death, it would become known as the Folsom site. It was here that stone tools made by humans were found, with a relic form of Pleistocene Bison and forever planted an indisputable data point into the debate of human antiquity in North America. We're going to talk with old Steve Ronella of Meat Eater and the nation's leading expert on the Folsom site, Dr. David Meltzer. He literally wrote the book on Folsom after he went back there,

70 years after its initial excavation, and excavated it again to find more answers. So on this podcast, we're going back to Folsom. I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one. But first, I have an overarching question I'd like to present to you, and it's this. What is the relevance of this knowledge about these ancient people in their lives? Why do we care? Is it merely entertainment to try to understand them, or is there more? I'm in search of the answer. These things were herded, driven into a box canyon, and then just rained down spears out of and killed them. You can't make them go anywhere they don't want to go. We don't have to drive them in there. All we've got to do is wait until they go up in there on their own. So I think it was an accident.

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 places 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. See, that's the only way that I need to get in here. I'm walking through a grassy meadow headed towards a small drainage. The clicking your head. hearing is Kyle Bell's spurs. That right there is wild horse or royale.

That's it, huh? We're 11 miles west of Folsom, New Mexico on the Crowfoot Ranch. The place we're headed to is where ancient Pleistocene hunters killed a cow-calf herd of 32 bison some 10,300 years ago. Here, they found the bison bone piles buried beneath 10 feet of earth and astonishingly roughly 20 stone points of a design that had never been documented before. They called this place the Folsom Site.

You'd walk right past it if you didn't know what you were looking for. It looks like every other place on this ranch. But something special happened here. This is the voice of the current manager of the Crowfoot Ranch, Seth. They had all those archaeologists come out, you know, from this different schools. And they did a dig 20 years ago, 20 plus, so all this disturbed dirt, they dug right in here. What I thought was ironic that they found was they said that they were being selective of meat. Have you heard that?

Because they didn't have any of their lower jaw bones to them. So they thought they were eating the tongues out of them? Yeah. Really? And they thought that was a delicacy. You're at the site. So when George found it, would it have been like a fresh cut bank after a big flood? Yeah, I mean, you look, you can come up here and look at the erosion from it.

And I assume that this has probably eroded more sense, but you see how steep it was. Okay, yeah. And in that flood, you know, it probably took another two or three foot off the sides, and that's when he found the bone. In part one of this series, we learned that the site was discovered in 1908 by a freed slave named George McJunkin. He was a self-educated, self-made man who became a renowned cowboy and the manager of the Crowfoot Ranch. The site wasn't excavated by professional archaeologists until after George's death, so he never knew the significance of his discovery.

In this podcast series, we're en route to get a layman's Ph.D. on the Folsom site. You've heard Steve Ronella on Bear Grease before. He's a George McJunkin junkie and has been forever fascinated by Ice Age hunters. In fact, he loved the bison hunters at the American Plains so much he wrote a book called American Buffalo. and he's been to the Folsom site. Here's Steve. Of all the different really cool archaeological sites in America,

I think one of the best things about the Folsom site is that the finding of it, like the circumstances of who found it and how with the flash flood and everybody dying and this freed slave trying to convince people to come look, right?

The finding of it's as cool as what happened. Yeah. So it's like a double whammy. Finding it is way. way cooler than just of some, I mean, no disrespect, but if some anthropologist had just found it, whatever, doing aerial mapping, right?

It wouldn't be half as cool as it is the way that it was discovered. Yeah. And the fact that you can go down there, and the guys buried not too far from the site. Like McJunkins, it just drips with history. You know, McJunkan's got a nice tombstone now, but he used to just have this cruddy old tombstone and some people pitched together and made him

a nice tombstone. I was standing there in at McJunkin's grave with an archaeologist. I see all these little bones laying on the ground. I said, and what are all these bones? I picked one up. He said, that's a human finger bone. Because it had been ground squirrels and prey dogs, whatever, badgers over the years that dug that place up.

Yeah. You know, presidents make monuments all the time. If I was president, I would make it the George McJunkin, not the Folsom, the George McJunkin National Monument, which would include the Folsom site. Now, that'd be something if Steve Ronella was president. Hmm. To understand the significance of the Folsom site, we've got to understand the quandary about human antiquity in North America that had been brewing for decades.

Up to this point, most people believed humans had only been here for about 3,000 years. I had mentioned how the Folsom site is doubly cool. It's cool because how was found and who found it, the McJunkin story. It was cool because of what happened there, meaning some dudes during the Ice Age killed 30-some bison in a big pile, with stone tools and hand-thrown weaponry, that's cool. It's triply cool because of what it did to upend conventional thinking about what had gone on in the Western Hemisphere. There have been a handful of occasions where human tools,

like indisputably human creations in the form of projectile points, were found mixed up with, near, in loose association with animals that we knew to be, like extinct Ice Age animals. But the Ice Age was a long time ago. Here with the Folsom site, you got it stuck together. You got a projectile point in the rib laying what they call in C2, laying in the rib of the thing. No rational, reasonable person could come and make any argument that here's an Ice Age relic, an animal that's not here now that was killed and butchered by human beings. And that proved once and for all that human antiquity and the new world went back a long way.

I want to clarify that by, quote, in the rib, Steve means the point was laying in between two ribs. It wasn't stuck in a rib, but it was just as conclusive. We heard briefly from Dr. David Meltzer on part one. He's the national authority on the Folsom site. And how would one know that? Well, he literally wrote a giant book called Folsom. It's basically a textbook on everything known about the place. Dr. Meltzer isn't just a Folsom expert, though.

He's dedicated his academic career to the people of the Pleistocene era, which is a block of time that began a couple million years ago and ended 10,000 years ago. The time period from then until now is called the Holocene. We live in the Holocene. If you know these two words, Pleistocene and Holocene, you'll pretty much be in the loop for talking about the recent history of planet Earth. Dr. Meltzer is the author of multiple books on the Pleistocene, including First Peoples in a New World, the Great Paleolithic War, and Search for the First Americans. I went to the campus of SMU in Dallas, Texas, where he works. We'd hardly greeted each other when he asked me to.

to follow him into his lab. It was full of bones and stone tools, ancient stuff. A skull that's been turned upside down because when we got it in the ground, it was top of the head facing up, right? So we plastered it and then we cut underneath it, lifted it out. And so now what you see is the plaster,

it's resting on its plastered cast, and you can see the teeth in here. Wow, right? And there's the back of the skull. So that is a bison antiquis, from the Folsom site. Yep, and it's a big one. It's pretty wild being in the same room

with the skull of a bison antiques. If you want to see a cell phone video of the skull, you can check out my Instagram at Clay underscore Newcomb. Dr. Meltzer is a unique guy when it comes to Folsom. The site was originally excavated between 1926 and 1928, but 70 years later, there were unanswered questions that he knew our modern techniques and technologically.

could now answer, primarily carbon dating, which we'll talk about more in part three of this series. Like a dramatic movie sequel, in 1997, Dr. Meltzer and his team went back to Folsom. They dug up the place again with new questions about the site's geology, its antiquity, which is the site's age, the paleotopography, which is its former geography, and its depositional history, which basically means the layers, that covered the site. Here's Dr. Meltzer talking about the uniqueness of the Folsom site. For 50 years, there had been this very heated debate

over how long people had been in the Americas, and all manner of contenders were put forward. This is evidence that people have been here since the Pleistocene. This is evidence that people have been here for 300,000 years. Here's evidence that people have been here for 350,000 years. But in each and every instance, those, sites failed to prove what they were claimed to prove, and they failed because of various reasons. The artifacts weren't actually artifacts. The artifacts were not in the geological deposits that were

said to be that old. The artifacts had rolled downhill and ended up next to ancient animal remains, but they were not necessarily in what we call primary context. That is to say, they didn't enter the deposit at the same time as those ancient animals entered the deposit. I see. And so you, had, you know, literally decades of people arguing back and forth over how long people had been in the Americas. When Folsom came along, it was just as advertised. What you had was a spot on the landscape where hunters had confronted and killed a herd of bison. We now know there were about 32 animals that were dispatched that day. And in the process, left behind their artifacts in ways that made it absolutely clear that those animals and those people had been on

that very landscape at the same moment in time because we had spear points, what we now know is fulsome fluted points, in direct association with the bones. And what I mean by that is we had a projectile point in between ribs, right? It had sat there since that animal was killed, right? There was no question that that that was some sort of adventitious association that somehow a projectile point had worked its way down into the dirt into the earth 10 feet below the surface and ended up in between two bison ribs no right right no that animal was stabbed by a human and because that animal was a now extinct form of bison which went extinct at the end of the pleistocene that was the first absolutely definitive proof that people had been in the americas at the end of the pleistocene

The only question remaining after that was how much earlier might they have been. Right. But that's what made Folsom different. It was just as advertised. When you look back at the history of archaeology itself as a study, there was an incredible amount of drama and ego involved in the discussion of human antiquity. It was highly competitive regarding who discovered what and where. So it's hard to overstate how important the find was. because it was so indisputable.

Here's another component of understanding Folsom and archaeology that will help us. This is Steve describing to us what is called a type site. A lot of bygone cultures will have a thing called a type site. A type site is where they were identified. When we talk about Folsom hunters, the Folsom culture was identified at Wild Horse or Royal

near Folsom, New Mexico was when it was first identified. The identifying feature of the Folsom culture. I was calling Folsom hunters. And they took the name Fulsome simply because that was the English name of the town. Sure. That was probably a brand new town. It has nothing to do as a descriptor of these people.

Not at all. And just to keeping in the same state, to the same point in the same state. When we talk about a Clovis hunter, it just so happens that the projectile points, which stand for the whole, hunters that made them were first identified near Clovis, New Mexico. They were there over 10,000 years before anyone even thought to name to make a town there. That place, Clovis. We happen to right now

be doing our conversation about Folsom near Shadron, Nebraska. Were you and I to walk out and find, holy cow, look at this insane projectile point. A diagnostic unfound point. And then we realized it was this whole culture of people and they made this point. They might wind up and calling them the Shadron hunters. I think they'd call it Ronella Newcomb. Okay. But if they were consistent with the days of yore, that's what they would wind up naming them. Folsom hunters were identified near Folsom, New Mexico. And so they just, the name, the nearby town name was applied to the culture.

When we talk about a culture, we're talking about, like, what do you imagine? A culture of people. We know them when we see them based on the point. With our understanding right now, it's the point. The point has to be present. the projectile point that they like to make has to be present. Meaning, if we know that the Folsom culture was active 11,700 years ago, if you went down to South Florida and found a human campsite from 11,700 years ago

that had a different projectile point, you wouldn't call it a Folsom site. Okay. So it's not when. Yeah, it's not when. It's who and when. It describes a culture, just like the culture of a culture of a, us to drive Chevrolet pickups. Sure.

And there's another culture in France that drives some other kind of pickup. The Folsom culture is identified by the type of technology they used when making stone points. But this culture was also associated with something else, much bigger. They were tightly associated with a relics form of bison called bison antiquas, not something that went extinct. A relic form of the animal that lives here now. It was bigger, a different sort of horn configuration.

It was about 25% bigger. They call it like bison antiquists. They had a lot of fidelity to a certain style of point. They had a lot, it seems to have a lot of fidelity to bison. And they lived on what is now, the American Great Plains. That's where they're found. So you can find them in the panhandle of Texas. You can find them in New Mexico.

You can find them in Montana. You can find Folsom points in southern Saskatchewan. You can find them all the way in western Nebraska, but they stayed to the Great Plains. Where most of the plains Buffalo were. Yeah. And at the time, it was probably cooler and wetter, but it was an open grassland. And it was just going by how few Folsom sites there are and how widely dispersed they are and kind of the sort of the imprint of those people.

people. It was probably insanely low population densities. I can't, no one can say this for real, but I've run this by professional anthropologists. It's not unreasonable to think that a band of these hunters, which would be an extended family group, that these bands of people, it makes sense that they were maybe, you know, they maybe didn't exceed 10 or 20 individuals. It's not unreasonable to imagine that they could go a generation without it encountering. individuals that you're not immediately related to. Wow. It seems very few people occupying that landscape at that time. Take a minute and imagine the North American continent 10,300 years ago with human populations that scarce. By the time Europeans arrived here, roughly 10,000 years

after the Folsom Bison Kill, which would be about 600 plus years from the present, backwards from the present. The place was basically like an urban center crawling with people. The civilization of the American Indians was in full swing and highly developed compared to when the Folsom hunters were here. Some American Indians are undoubtedly the descendants of the Folsom hunters. Wildly, though, of all the things these Folsom hunters used in life, there is one thing that has outlasted the rigor of time that we infer an incredible amount of data from. One of the things I like about the projectile point, since it's made a stone and it lasts a long time. So it winds up being, some people that aren't into what we'd call Indian arrowheads,

sometimes don't get the fascination with it. A way to think about it be, it's not so much that it's the arrowhead. It's just a, it's a piece of something that survived sometimes in a perfect state from the time they handled it. Their bones are gone to large measure. Their homes and structures, the things they wore, the wood that they employed, I'd be as excited to find a spear shaft, but they're not laying around. It's like, but here's this saying that, like, that a guy can drop that thing, and it's going to sit there for 12,000 years.

What other thing can you drop on the ground? We talk about how long our stuff lasts, right? How long plastic lasts? You set a plastic bottle on the ground for 12,000 years to come back and look. There might be something, but it ain't going to look like a fold of point. Imagine archaeologist 10,000 years from now. Well, I doubt this place will be around. But them taking just one of your material possessions

and making vast inferences about your entire life from it. I wonder what they'd say. I had some questions about how an archaeological site is verified so its legitimacy is known. I think it's important for us to understand the bigger picture of what's happening here beyond some dudes digging up bones and finding stone points. Cue the Randy Travis song. It's a pretty complex world, and there were many missteps in early archaeology,

and in the original excavation of the Folsom site that almost disqualified it. So from an archaeological process, there's a prescribed way that a site should be excavated and understood. As I understand that, there were other sites in Texas and Nebraska and maybe even in Kansas that potentially had similar type evidence of humans and these older animals that are now extinct, but they were mishandled. And so they have to be, it's like evidence coming into a courtroom that was acquired the wrong way. And the judge goes, I can't use this. That's exactly how it played out. But we also need to put a little bit of historical context here. This is the late 18-19. 1990s, early 1900s, the teens, there weren't clear-cut methods for field excavation.

A lot of these excavations were not conducted by, you know, what we would now recognize as sort of professional scientists, professional archaeologists, professional geologists, and they didn't know what they were doing is really what it came down to. So, you know, we had this site out in Frederick, Oklahoma where it was a gravel quarry. And, you know, the folks who were working the gravel quarry said, oh, yeah, we've got artifacts associated with mammoth bones. Well, you know, it requires a certain amount of expertise to sort of really be able to in an excavation know, okay, these are deposits of a certain age. These are things that are associated with those deposits. We know that they belong in those deposits. And so because there were not agreed upon field techniques and clear-cut field techniques at the time, and because some of these discoveries were made by folks who really didn't understand what they were seeing in the ground. Amateur?

Well, yeah, they weren't even archaeologists. You know, they've got to be. the work of the quarry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're just, you know, their job is just to shovel that stuff out of the way. Yeah. Okay, so you find an artifact in the, in the spoil pile over here and you find some bones in the spoil pile over there. That doesn't mean that, you know, that artifact and that bone were associated back, you know, 20,000 years ago, 15,000 years ago. In retrospect, a couple of those sites, not the one in Frederick, but one out in Colorado City, Texas. In retrospect, we looked at the artifacts and we said, well, you know what? there is a possibility those artifacts could have been associated with that bison. But the problem was in 1924, and this is a few years before Folsom, the bison was being excavated by a fella who was just a local guy. He'd discovered this bison in this creek bed, and he wrote to the museum and said, you guys want it.

So the folks in Denver said, yeah, we'd really like to have that bison skeleton. And they gave him instructions on how to get it out of the ground, plaster it, and put it into crates and ship it up to Denver. He excavates the bison, he plasters it up, he puts it into a crate. And the crate had been, you know, the folks in Denver had said, make a crate, you know, this big, by this big, by this big. And so he had this giant plastered bison, couldn't fit it into a crate. Instead of building a bigger crate, he simply knocked off chunks of the bone and shoved it in there. So this was not done well, right? And even though they found artifacts with the bison, they didn't realize that that was of interest or significance. And so they just ignored them. And it was only after the fact, somebody was visiting Denver and said, hey, you know, I'd watched your guys excavate this thing down in Texas, and did you know they have, you know, points that came out with the bison, and the folks in Denver said, we had no clue. So, you know, you can't base a case for people having been here a very long time ago or hunting bison a very long time ago when you had that kind of excavation.

And so that very well could have been a totally legitimate site. And I think it is, actually. The Folsom site was originally excavated by an amateur archaeologist named Carl Schwaheim. He was a friend of Georges. He was hired by the Denver Museum of Natural History to get them a bison antiquesqueous skeleton. But while he was digging, he found a stone point. He made some sketches and notified the museum and this really perked their ears up. And they told him, if you find another one, Carl, don't dig it up. Leave it in place.

luckily he did find another one and they were able to send down a bona fide archaeologist to verify it in C2 or in place. This then attracted the attention of the world, but I've got more questions. You know, and that brings me to kind of my biggest overarching question inside archaeology that is just, it's so intriguing to think about this, is that how much of planet Earth have we excavated to understand, what is here. I mean, it feels like we're just going off these very, like if you took the volume of the earth and said, how much of that volume has a professional archaeologist in modern times actually excavated? It would be a number so small, it would be unbelievable. And so we're basing so much what we know off these little bitty spots, but who's to say there's not another

incredible spot 50 feet from the Folsom site that's going to redirect history again, you know? But you're absolutely right. A lot of these sites are deeply buried. A lot of these sites will never see the surface again. A lot of these sites disappeared over time. You've got erosion. If you were around on the high plains in the 1930s during the Dust Bowl, it would have been the worst time to live there, but it would have been the best time to do archaeology there because what was happening was that basically the surface is blowing away. And what it did was is exposed a lot of these old ice age, Pleistocene Age, lake beds. And they're all manner of bones and artifacts

that came out of these sites. But, of course, once all that stops blowing, a lot of the archaeological discovery is necessarily based on chance encounters, where you've got ranchers that are putting in a stock tank, you've got farmers that are plowing, you've got a road that's getting cut, and you just get lucky.

Or a guy, a George McJunkin, exactly. A cult, a wild horse a row. You know, George McJunkin is such an interesting character to me. You know, this is a guy who is clearly really intrigued and interested and fascinated and wants to learn about what's around him. So he was the right guy at the right moment in the right spot, and it changed American archaeology. We just can't get away from old George now, can we? I kind of get obsessed with these characters as I learn about him, and I'm considering a McJunkin tattoo.

That's not true. I don't do tats. But I do need some more info on the actual site. From this, I think, will begin to understand how archaeologists think. Let's talk in specifics about the Folsom site and what was found there. Okay. So this flood in 1908 unearthed these bones that George McJunkin found. So we know how they were found in kind of the series, but what?

did they find there? So the initial excavations at Folsom took place in 1926, 1927, in 1928 as well. Unfortunately, the site was excavated by paleontologists. The site was excavated by folks that were interested in bones. And while they did a decent job, they, well, the term is telling. They referred to the Folsom site as the Folsom Bone Quarry. They're quarrying bone out of this thing. So they're not, they're not viewing it is an archaeological site where you're an archaeological site meaning it has human evidence of humans well I mean they saw it as a bone quarry that had evidence of humans but what they weren't doing was paying really close attention to the things that we as archaeologists pay attention to where exactly were those

artifacts found how were the bones distributed this is one of the things that really challenged us when we started excavating there was that there's basically we're no maps of their excavations now we're archaeologists were fairly compulsive about things we're fairly compulsive about a lot of things, because when you're excavating an archaeological site, you're destroying it. So you've got to make very, very careful records all the way through the process. Maps, photographs, detailed measurements, all this stuff. And the folks who were basically quarrying this for bone were doing none of that. So when we started, they had identified on their maps, you know, here's a skeleton

here, here's a skeleton here, here's a skeleton over here. They weren't nice, discrete skeletons of animals. These were bone piles, and they hadn't quite recognized that these were discard piles. They were not, you know, here's an animal stretched out on the ground. And, of course, you know, they weren't paying attention to a lot of the things that we only subsequently started paying attention to. Like, what's the surface condition of the bone? Because that tells you something about how long it was sitting out exposed before it got covered by the sediment. They weren't really paying much attention to the sediment itself. What's the nature of the sediment?

How did it originate? Why is the site in this particular spot? Where did the kill take place? There were so many unanswered questions. The thing that they did in the 1920s was they clearly showed people who've been here since the Placistocene. They did that just fine. But there were so many questions about the site that were unanswered. That's why I went back 70 years later because I said, you know, it's the most famous site in North America,

one of the most famous sites in North America, and we know almost nothing about it in terms of what we hope and expect to know nowadays about an archaeological site. It's funny, in 1928 when they finished up the excavations, Barnum Brown, who had been been in charge said, there's nothing left. Don't bother to come here. We've excavated the whole thing. What I realized, and this was actually before we went out there, I was talking to a vertebra paleontologist here at the university. And he said, oh, Barnum Brown said that about all his sights. And the reason he said that about all his sights is he didn't want anybody coming in after him to go to dig the sites. So he said, you can probably ignore that.

Wow, I bet that was encouraging. How many more bison did you discover when you did the excavations in the late 90s. Well, they... Because we know there were 30... There was a bison kill of 32 animals. We know that now. And so how many did they find

and how many did you find? Well, so this gets back to the issue of, you know, they were just counting a pile of bones as an animal, right? They didn't really have a clear sense of how many animals they were. They had a clear sense of how many animal piles, how many bones piles that there were.

But they did estimate that they were probably at least a couple of dozen. Okay. Okay. What we did... And this is sort of the typical way in which you estimate the number of animals that were once present in a kill is that you take bones that, well, in this case, we were taking basically bison ankles. So bison have two ankles, a left and a right. And so what you do is you count up how many right ankles you have or how many left ankles you have.

And you say, okay, I got 32 right ankles or I got 30 right ankles and 32 left ankles. Well, there wasn't an animal walking around on three legs. You probably had 32 animals. I see. Where did they teach you this kind of reasoning, Dr. Meltzer? This is brilliant. No, well, it's not me. No, but see, this is the kind of thing that you didn't do in the 1920s.

Yeah. This is why we had to go back. And in fact, by literally counting up all of the elements, that gave us insight into what the hunters were eating and what they took off sight. Because you know, okay, so there's 200 plus or minus change of bones in a bison skeleton. There is X number of ribs, there's X number of thoracic vertebrae, and so you've got 32 animals. So if you've got 32 animals and, you know, X number of ribs, 32 times X gives you the total number of ribs, and then you double it because you got a left side and a right side. So then when you go to the site and you say, well, I've only got three ribs here.

You know what you're missing. They took those ribs with them. And we have pretty clear evidence that these folks were literally taking rib racks off of these animals because we have an undercount of what we ought to have in terms of ribs, in terms of thoracic vertebrae. Those are the big sort of structural, high spinae process ribs on a buffalo hump. That's what makes the hump, right? Yeah. Really good meat there. So we're missing a bunch of upper leg bones. And that's where the bulk of the meat would be and the hams of those big bison. Think of them as bison drumsticks. So when we go to the site, we do all the

these detailed counts of all the bones, how many should there be, how many are we missing, and are we missing them because of erosion or the bones fell apart, or are we missing them because the hunters, when they did all the... Took them with them. Exactly right. 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. 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. So Dr. Meltzer never fully got to the answer of my question about how many more bison he found when he reduged fulsome. We need some answers, Doc. How many bison did your team find that were not found in the original excavations? Because, or just an estimate. I mean, did you find five more? Well, whole skeletons or numbers of bones? Well, let me, how many, how many bison skulls did you find that they had not found? Oh, let me think about that. You know, usually the people that I deal with, Dr. Meltzer, kind of can say offhand how many bison and tick with skulls they've found in their life you're the

only one i've talked to that it's like well i don't know you know i talked to a guy on one of my previous berry's podcasts and i asked him how many times he'd been bit by venomous snakes oh and he said he said i don't know i've lost count and he'd been bit by 20 venomous snakes in his life 20 plus you're kind of like that guy well you know i'm I'm talking about Mr. Fred Lally from episode 12. Actually, I have the total numbers. So the Colorado Museum collected 1,600 elements. The American Museum 2000, we collected about 700.

So there's a total of about 4,300 bison elements. So you probably found 20% more roughly. Yeah, mind you, we're not finding, you know, whole bison and complete parts. So we found about 17 cranial parts. We found at least three. Yeah, we have at least three intact crania and many more fragments. That's got to be exciting to dig up a bison skull. Were you there when they were, I mean, were you the one digging when this happened?

Actually, no, I got out of the way. So did your team find any points? No. Was that surprising to you? No. And the reason is, is that they literally had excavated back in the 1920s. most of the site. So if you imagine a kill site with that many animals, I guess there would be kind of a central area and then kind of fringe animals out to the side of it. And you guys

kind of were finding some leftovers. We were finding the leftovers of the excavation rather than the leftovers of the kill because I think we were in an area of the kill where a lot of the processing and butchering was taking place. But because we were where the area of processing and butchering was taking place, there weren't necessarily points there. Okay, so let's think about this in terms of a bison kill. Okay, so we've got a conundrum. We have no way of knowing really what happened that day in the fall some 10,000 years ago. I wanted to get some clarity from Dr. Meltzer about what we 100% know. So we're trying to make sense of how the heck that these ancient human could have killed that many big animals in one spot.

How certain are you your hypothesis? I mean, when you really think about the amount of evidence that we have and the kind of conclusions that we're coming to, it's kind of mind-boggling to me, because we have bones and we have points, and we have the topography, and now you have in-depth researched what the land would have looked like at that time

from the excavations that you've done. How certain are you? I mean, you be in the... chief authority on this. Are you just guessing? Is that a fair question? Well, no, you asked two questions there, Clay. Okay. How it went down, that's inference, right? How they made the kill, the time of the year they made the kill, did they maneuver the animals and killed them in the Arroyo, or did they kill them in the tributary? I have to infer that, right? Okay, so that part, you're just making

educated guesses? Absolutely. And in fact, you know, when we wrote all this up in the Folsom book, I made it clear. Here's one alternative explanation. Here's another. Now, the first part of your question was, am I sure this is a kill of 32 animals? Yes, absolutely. Yes, yes. Yeah, because there's no other way to account for it, right? So one of the things that we do as archaeologists is, okay, you've always got to make sure that things are not there naturally. Before you can conclude that they're there culturally, that is to say, before you can conclude that they're there as a consequence of human action, you've got to illuminate the possibility that nature could have done it. Precisely how they did it and how the thing played out that day in the fall, 10,490 plus or minus

20 years ago, those are educated inferences based on all of the evidence that we've accumulated in terms of what the landscape look like, where we find bones, where we find bone parts, that kind of thing. It's time to get into the meat of this story. Let's talk about the day of the kill. Here's Steve and I talking about it. Talk to me about what you think happened on that day. Yeah. We have one isolated bison kill site, 32 animals, roughly 16 to 20 points that were found in this kill site. We have radial carbon dates that take us back to that time. We know how far it was below the surface. It's like you only have so many data points to begin to make conclusions. What do you think happened that day? These animals,

over a thousand pounds. You didn't drag them around and pile them up, but they're in a big pile. The understanding, based on every way you look at it, including like the proximity of the animals where they were killed, the fact that they were in a high box canyon is that someone didn't come up and surprise them. 30-some animals in a tight little bundle at the head of a box canyon, they weren't in there sleeping. It just goes against everything we understand about how bison act. These are an open country animal. They're not in there like, oh, they're all in there asleep. We're going to sneak in here and get them. It's just not what they were doing.

They got driven up in there. That's like the understanding of everyone that looks at the landscape is these things were herded, driven into a box canyon where there was no escape. They got them up to the head of the box canyon, big high walls. I'll tell you, I've managed to do that on two occasions, almost accidentally and caught deer at the head of box canyons where they had to come back out through me to get out. Herding them into a box canyon and then just rained down spears on them and, him. Very interesting, Steve Ronella, but our old buddy Kyle Bell disagrees with you. Kyle was the cowboy on part one that I said was the guardian of George McJunkins' character

and legacy. We're standing in the wild horse Arroyo at the sight of the kill as he's telling me what he thinks happened. And this is strictly my theory on this. I got one too. And everybody does. The first time I ever came down here and looked around, I saw some things that didn't fit some of the stories that I'd heard.

But I have been a guide for the last 30 years and probably been in on at least 200 buffalo kills. And my theories are based on if Bison Antiquis acted like the bison that we deal with today, And that's what I'm basing my theories on. There was a reason that the bison almost got wiped out in North America. They're not hard to kill. And you can't make them go anywhere they don't want to go.

If there was a migration path through here and the bison came through here in the fall, then the people that followed the bison that lived off of them would know that they're going to be in this valley this time of year. In this particular drainage. cameras. Probably had a couple of drones, you know, and I believe in this drainage that there's a mineral in here that the Buffalo knew about and that we're after. And selenium is a mineral. It doesn't get in the grass. No matter how much grass they eat, they don't get the selenium that they need. So they need to know where there's a lick, a salt lick of some sort. Then the people would know it. too. And they said, we don't have to drive them in there. All we got to do is wait until they

go up in there on their own. And then we'll put hunters in a circle around them. The men back then were proficient with the addle-addle. That's what was used here to kill the buffalo with. Very interesting, Kyle. The old salt lick bushwhack, the oldest trick in the Paleolithic hunter's bag of tricks. They were probably hanging in tree sacks. They were probably hanging in tree, and you're using commercial scent control products too. But let's see what the Dr. Meltzer has to say about it. So I think it was an accident. I think these folks were heading someplace else.

I think they were heading for a pass. That's about eight or so kilometers north of there. I think they spotted a herd. And, you know, with bison, the image that you have is lots of noise, lots of stampedes, animals flying over a cliff. I think a lot of these hunts and these kills were based on very careful maneuvering of the herd. Bison, you know, their eyesight's not so good. They smell good in the sense that they smell well, not that they bathe regularly.

And so you can kind of get behind them and make them a little bit nervous. I mean, you don't want to make them too nervous because, you know, those animals can go at upwards of almost 40 miles an hour. They can turn on a dime. They're dangerous. But if you can get them maneuvered, and if you can get them maneuvered, And if you can get them moving, and if you can move them up in arroyo that has a nick point, a point beyond which they can't go, you got them trapped. The thing about Folsom, it's a very interesting land form because you've got this arroyo, what we now call wild horse arroyo, and it had a tributary coming in. You think that the animals were moved up that arroyo.

They hit that bottleneck. They hit that nick point, and they couldn't go anywhere. And I think the hunters had kind of gone around. So you had hunters maybe behind them, moving the herd, small herd. And then you had hunters who had flanked them, gone around, and were on the uplands above that bottleneck, above that nick point. Some of the bones that we found, or the bulk of the site, was actually in the tributary that's leading down into what was then Wild Horse Arroyo,

10,000 plus years ago. Most of the bones that were found were found up in that tributary. Some of the bones were found down in the arroyo. So either the kill took place in the arroyo, and some of the animals were trying to escape up that ramp of the tributary, or the kill took place in the tributary, and they were fleeing down the tributary and trying to escape out the channel.

Either way, it appears as though a number of the animals were sort of piled up against the walls of the arroyo, and the arroyo walls were, you know, four meters high plus or minus. A bison's not going to be able to jump out of that thing, right? So they were trapped. Yeah. And the bottleneck point is literally about a foot and a half wide. So they wouldn't have been able to squeeze up and get past that bottleneck.

Having dedicated much of his life to this kill, Dr. Meltzer's opinion carries a lot of weight with me. Both he and Steve think the bison were herded into the Box Canyon. Dr. Meltzer continues on with his story. So the kill takes place, and it's a god-awful, bloody, messy affair. You've got 32 animals. It's the fall. You've got calves there. You've got cows there. They're making a ruckus. You make the kill. You start to butcher the animals. You're doing your field processing. Points will have broken off inside the carcass. Points will have broken off when you shove the spear into them and it snapped and you pull out the spear and all you've got is the little butt end of the point that's still attached to the spear. You're doing the butchering. There's blood, there's gore. There's everything all over the place. And you're kind of in a hurry because we know that. they didn't stay there for very long. So you're just getting everything ready to transport.

And so the main area where the kill took place is where you're going to find the busted up points that they couldn't retrieve. Or that they found that they said, you know what, this thing is so busted up. There's no point trying to... Those points would have been found at the point of the kill, where the action took place. Right, right. And then where they may have drugged some of them to butcher would have been. Right, right.

And so, but when you're butchering, you got your hands. on the stone knife. You've got your hand on the scraper. So you're not going to lose that, right? Understood. So, but that's the stuff that you're going to very carefully curate and take with you onto the next place, right? Because that's part of your toolkit. So that explains why your team wouldn't have found any points because you guys were... I think where the main excavations that had taken place in the 1920s pretty much removed the principal kill area, we were excavating, and we know this partly by looking at the bones. What we were finding were discard piles. where carcass parts that were not, nobody's going to transport a bison skull.

They had no use for it. It's too heavy. There's no use for it. And once you chop the tongue out, and we know they did that at the spot, you don't need the jaws either. So you just throw that off to the side. So we were excavating where they were just pushing off the stuff to the side that they were not going to transport. I had some more questions about the kill. Here's Steve. how many people do you think would have been there to have done that? I think it's really,

no one knows. It couldn't have been. Not a hundred. No. I think it was a, it was probably a major kill, man. It's interesting that they were able to do that. Because one of the things you think about,

return to when we were talking about just the very low population density of people and the isolation of it. And the fact that they seemed to wander a lot. These guys in Falls in New Mexico are carrying toolstone from the tech, You could say like, oh, they had this trade route and traded it. Or they went there and got it and he wandered around and they kept on the move. And they hunted animals that experienced no hunting pressure, that they were disperse and moved and they'd find animals where in that group of animals, there's no experience with

humans. Because we know that means a lot in terms of the ability for a human to kill an animal. For them to not have figured out what was going on. It might have been just that these are just animals. with very little exposure to humans and perhaps very easily manipulated by humans. You can get real close to them. You can kind of make a half surround and, you know, nudge them along. They're not immediate like, you see one of those things on two legs.

I don't care what you're doing. You get out of there. Perhaps they're responding to the human predators no differently than they respond than how we see the same species respond to wolves, which is you bunch up. Maybe when approached by a bunch of bipedal predators, these bipedal predators could just mimic the activity of wolves. Kind of get roughly around them. They sort of bunch up.

And then you kind of like gently nudge them along and nudge them into this thing and then nudge them up this canyon. And when they can't get away, you start killing them. Maybe like a walk in the park. But here's the other thing. Maybe that day, because there's not tons of these sites. It's like it's hard to, nothing lasts that long. Or it's 20 feet under sand and gravel.

Whatever, there's not a lot of these sites to compare it to. or as far as we know, those people talked about that day for the rest of their lives. That's the weirdest day that ever happened. They're like, no, man, I'm telling you, dude. Do you remember that one time? They just were up in there. I don't know what they were doing. I never seen anything like it.

My dad never saw anything like it. Or it was just another day, you know, when you get into this, any kind of like, some sort of like statistical thing, if you only find one thing, you have to assume that you're looking at. Something special happened. Well, no, no, I was going to say the, The other point that, let's say that at some point in time, someone was going to, like, freeze an American household. Okay, like, bam, here's an American household frozen in place. What are the odds that, of all the American households at 11 p.m., that you would have frozen place a murder in progress?

Or would it have more likely have been some people in their living room watching TV? It's like, it's just more likely that you'd have catch just this randomized American household at 11 p.m., that you'd catch some sort of thing that seemed normal, that most people are, rather than like, oh my gosh. This one spectacular event. They were always murdering each other at 11 at night because we captured this spectacular event in isolation. So you look at like this one thing.

We don't have to go like, I don't know, man. There's these people who are out there. They were killing stuff all the time. Here's this pretty well-preserved scenario where they killed stuff. I'm just going to have to go on the assumption that this is like indicative of what these people did and not that it was a weird day. We've talked about these stone points,

but we haven't talked about how they were used. to kill the bison. At the time in North America, there were two options for throwing sticks with sharp rocks on the end, bows and addlattles. Here's what Dr. Meltzer had to say. Were these hand-projected spears or were these ad ladles? Well, now, so that's something I cannot answer, right? You need a lot of force. Think about a bison. The side of a bison is basically a picket fence of ribs, and they're fairly wide. You've got hair, you've got high, you've got high, hide, you've got bone, you've got fat, all that stuff has to get penetrated. The thinking is, the suspicion is, and this, you know, this gets to another one of those things that, well, we just

have to infer this because we don't really know, that these were either thrust or thrown at high velocity. And we know that, in fact, there was some velocity involved because we have what are known as impact fractures. Basically, when bone meets stone at high velocity, the front end, you get some serious front end damage. So the points that they found, though, were not diagnostic in terms of atlattle or hand-thrusted spear. No, because, you know, whether it was thrust or thrown, it's the same-sized point. You know, regardless of how it happened, it would have had to have been some pretty bad-to-the-bone people to have killed 32 bison.

It was a cow-calf herd, and the kill took place in the fall. How do we know that? Dental eruption patterns. So bison tend to calf between about mid-April and mid-May. And their teeth, their molars grow at a fairly regular rate. And these molars or these premolars have already, you know, busted over and are on the surface now. You can say, okay, well, it's probably been about four months. So if you go, you know, mid-April.

So it's the age of the calves that made us understand that they would have been born in the spring. Yeah. And you've got a bunch of four-month-old calves that tells you you've got a kill that took place, you know, September plus or minus. We're going to halt the conversation right here. It's so interesting to ponder our ancient history as humans. You'll have to wait for part three to hear the rest of the story. We live in such a weird concoction called time that binds us so tightly to the present that it's hard to imagine any other form of life beyond what we experience with their own life.

That is, unless we strain our brains to think back. But maybe it's not a cognitive exercise as much as it is a spiritual one to try to understand ancient man. But a bigger question is why do we care or even want to understand them? And I cannot fully answer that. But I am convinced that the lives of these people that left these stone points are still relevant in 2021, regardless of the barrier of time that separates us. We're in the process as a culture of redefining my life. modern humanity, who we are, why we're here, why are we so clearly different than the other

beasts of this planet? And how the heck did we go from slinging stone tip spears at Bison to driving Tesla's? Why is there such turmoil in the earth? These are just some of the questions that we have. The Folsom site gives us an indisputable data point, a moment frozen time that shows us what men were doing during a couple day stretch over 10,000 years ago. As rudimentary as this info may seem, this data point anchors part of our identity as humans. It reminds us of a more simple definition of humanity. This was a group of people connected together by a common cause. These hunters were undoubtedly a family group trying to make a living and survive

in a hostile place. The complexity of modern life can be bewildering, but I don't think it has to be. There are a lot of mysterious questions about these people that I'm very interested in, like where the heck did they come from, and what was the construct of their spiritual belief system, which they undoubtedly had? Atheism seems to be a pretty new phenomena in our species. These are questions that stone points and bones can't answer, but it's all we have to go off of.

But isn't this the cool thing about being human? This rare cognition and this awareness that we possess is a gift. And our curiosity about past humans on this planet is also a gift. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. On part three of this podcast, we'll continue in our conversation with Steve Renella and Dr. Meltzer. We've got several interesting topics yet to explore, one of them being how the full Some site upended many people's understanding of the Bible's teaching on the age of men and the earth. I've got a few thoughts on that.

Leave us a review on iTunes and tell some of your friends about this podcast. And tune in next week when myself, along with a whole new render crew, discuss the Folsom site. Sorry, old render regulars. Have a great week. First Lights fieldwear 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 fieldwear gear at firstlight. dot com. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.