Bear Grease - Ep. 32: The Folsom Site - Antiquity of Man and Gourmet Butchering (Part 3)

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

On this episode, we’ll be talking more about the Folsom archeological site with Steve Rinella and Dr. David Melzter. We’re going to learn about gourmet butchering and what ancient hunters did with the meat. We'll discuss how the Folsom hunters likely lived and we’ll learn the science behind carbon dating. We'll bring up the controversy the Folsom site stirred up with those that believe the bible and we’ll even talk a bit about the arrival of man on planet earth. Host Clay Newcomb gives his personal positions on the book of Genesis as it relates to the age of the earth and the antiquity of humans, and we’ll be continuing to hack away at the question of why any of this is important or relevant. The story is robust, the drama is thick, and you could cut the suspense with Folsom stone point.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. Nowadays we have artists, we have writers, we have musicians. In those days, they probably had what we could see as artists, writers, musicians, but they're not writers, they're weaving stories with their voice. And they were probably making music.

Where we do have them staying in place, that's when, you know, we start to see the other kinds of artifacts that are not just used for slaughtering 32 animals. On this episode of the Bear Greece podcast, we'll be talking more about the Folsom Archaeological Site with Steve Ronella and Dr. David Meltzer. We're going to learn what these ancient hunters did with the meat, how they likely lived, and right at the end, we'll talk about the controversy the Folsom site stirred up with those that believe the Bible. We'll even talk a bit about the arrival of man on planet Earth, and we'll be continuing to hack away at the question. of why any of this is important or relevant. The story is robust, the drama is thick, and you could cut the suspense with a fulsome stone point.

You're not going to want to miss this one. Instead of George McJunkin having said, someone's got to come look at this, right? He had just found some stuff and periodically went back and dug around on the shovel and put the point in a coffee can. If that had happened, then we'd still think that humans have been here for 3,000. years. 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. This is Steve Renella talking about the Folsom site. Of the more than a handful of significant anthropological sites that I've visited in my wanderings, that one is one that's just easy to visualize. I went to the Lindenmeyer site and you go there and you can get it, but you don't totally get it. I went to the Clovis type site, which is called Blackwater Draw.

You go look at Blackwater Draw, and you get it, but you don't, you can't really get it. Wild Horse Arroyo and the Folsom site like you go there, man. I don't know, it's just something about it. You can just picture it. You can picture it, everything about it, how they did what they did. It's one of those great locations to visit. This is the third part in our series on the Folsom Archaeological Site. We're going to get another layer of info from Dr. David Meltzer about these ancient people.

After this one, we'll have completed 75% of our journey towards getting a layman's PhD on But for those just jumping in, here's the lowdown. In 1908, a freed slave named George McJunkin found some peculiar bison bones in an arroyo in northeast New Mexico. He tried to get some folks to come check it out, but they didn't come until after his death. In 1928, the leading archaeologist in the country would proclaim the site the most important in North American history at the time. We talked about George McJunkin in part one. In part two, we talked about the nudgem. and bolts of the fulsome site and how they unearthed the remains of 32 bison Antiquis,

a relic form of ice age bison no longer here. But the real kicker was they found around 20 stone projectile points in the bone pile, giving us undisputable evidence that they were killed by humans, thus proving human antiquity in the Americas was much older than we thought. And like icing on a cake, the stone points were of a style that had never been. documented. They were a unique, fluted technology that would become known as Folsom Points. These Folsom hunters weren't cartoon cavemen. These were human beings with the same cognition, desires, and rudimentary needs as us in 2021. These people experienced pain and discomfort,

emotional highs and lows from relationships, disappointment in failed dreams, hope in what the next month might bring for their family. I don't have to tell you to do this, but put yourself in the shoes of the fulsome people. Imagine the cold, wearing clothes made of animal skin. Imagine no knowledge of the world beyond what you can see. Imagine being a Pleistocene human because the life that you live is a very rare human experience. To put the fulsome people and our lives into context, stew on these numbers. It's estimated that 117 billion homo sapiens have lived on planet Earth since the dawn of time. By the year 1,000, there were 300,000 people on the Earth. By 1650, roughly 50 million lived here. By the year 1800, there were 1 billion. In 2021, we have a population of 7.8 billion.

The population of the Earth today represents about 7% of the humans that have ever lived. It's hard to make sense of these numbers, but we can easily say that most humans that have lived have lived much different lives than us. No demographic data exists for 99% of human history. I got all these numbers from an article on PRB.org called How Many People Have Ever Lived on the Earth? It's pretty interesting. But what are the implications of a species doing stuff way different than we've ever done? What are the implications of being trapped in time and thinking that our lives are normal? That's exactly why looking back into the lives of these fulsome hunters has value.

On the last podcast, we heard from Steve Ronella of Meat Eater, and he helped walk us through the bison kill. He and Dr. Meltzer believed that the bisoned. were herded into a box canyon where they were met with a, quote, reign of spears. But Steve has another unanswered question. And hey, I can't say this with enough certainty. If you haven't listened to the first two podcasts, go back and listen to them in order. Here's Steve jumping right in with some more unanswered questions.

Here's some things we know that they were dealing with an animal that they could manipulate. They hauled meat away. They hauled some meat away on the bone. They took the tails somewhere. Probably the tail stayed with the hide, and they took the hides away because the tail bones aren't there. Here's the thing that kills me. They had that many animals on the ground.

It had to have been days worth of work, but they can't find where they slept. Somewhere around there within a couple hundred yards has to be the coolest place on the planet if they had been well preserved was where they slept and butchered all that stuff and cook stuff. Well, let me ask you a question about like finding their campsite. So when I was at the Folsom site, I was struck by how small it was. It's not like they came in there with, you know, big caterpillar cranes and started, you know, just cleared out four or five acres or ground. And I mean, the whole Folsom site that they actually excavated can't be more than 60, 70 feet. Yeah. By 60, 70 feet. So it's just this square. And now granted, they took that square and they dug out every single grain.

of sand and dirt from the surface to like 10 feet down. I mean, essentially. Yep. But you got to remember that there was the two digs. The first guys went in there with a wrecking ball. Yeah, in the 1920s. Yep. Later people went in there. Melzer. Yep. Went in there, let's be honest. He went in there in a way that in a hundred years will probably be regarded as that he went in there like a wrecking ball. Part of the restraint of modern day archaeologists, anthropologist is to leave some of that stuff intact because you just know that through technological progression. Wow. I've never thought that when those guys dug in the 20s, they were looking for, they wanted big bones and they wanted stone tools and they were in there just washing stuff away.

All the seeds and pollen and small flakes and things that may be like little some ability to extract DNA from other contemporaneous creatures that might have been associated. Just gone, right? You could imagine some future in which someone could go in and tell you a lot more. They'd be like, I don't know, they'd be like, it was this temperature that day.

There were fires burning somewhere nearby. There's evidence of a mixture of male and female humans based on dander. Who knows? But in 1920, they weren't going to imagine radiocarbon dating. Yeah. If you just said to a guy in 1920, you know what,

Hang tight on that. Because before long, don't be able to tell you the exact date this happened. He'd have been like, give me a break. I mean, basically, we think we're so technologically advanced in 2021. But we are going off of just hints. I mean, some cowboy back in, you know, 1908, randomly saw a bone sticking out of a bank,

went and pulled a bone, and here we have the Folsom site. Yeah. And now we're banking almost, we're banking so much off this seemingly, coincidental find by this cowboy. Yeah. And that Arroyo's channel moves all the time. When I went there, I went in the new channel, which is over yonder a ways. And now the channel's off in a different direction now, and I was over in the other new channel off yonder that's been cut since McJunkin.

Guess what I found? It killed me. I found a big bone sticking out of the wall. So you're down there at the Folsom site with an archaeologist. I'm at the Folsom site with an archaeologist. This bone is 12 feet from the top of the. ground. I told you this story before, and there was every part of me wanted to pluck that bone out of there. And that guy I was with, the state archaeologists I was with, having none of it. He took some photos of it. This isn't in the Ronella collection. He took some photos of it. He took

a GPS waypoint of it. But I was like, how can you resist? He's a pro. Did they ever go back? I don't know. I don't think so. You know, there's a little bit of restraint in place. You and I both like Arrowhead's lot. The argument about picking up junk on the ground, as hard as it is not to pick it up, is you never know that you might be standing on the next Folsom site, and you just ruined it. That instead of George McJunkin,

having said, someone's got to come look at this, right? He had just found some stuff and periodically went back and dug around on the shovel and hauled it off and put the point in a coffee can and then gave it to his grandkid in Illinois, right?

And it never would have turned into a winter. And they never would have turned into what it turned into. And then we still think, if that had happened, then we'd still think that humans have been here for 3,000 years. Steve brought up two interesting points that we'll talk about later, radiocarbon dating and the cultural effects of blowing up our understanding of human antiquity. How's that for foreshadowing? But first, I want to talk to the Folsom Authority, Dr. David Meltzer of SMU. We're going to jump right in after the kill and ask,

a question of what did they do with the meat? I want to talk about this idea of what we now call gourmet butchering when they essentially took the prime cuts. And I think it's kind of interesting because we have this idea that paleo-indians or even Native Americans would have used every scrap and every possible piece of meat and bone for their subsistence. But these people didn't have refrigeration. They didn't have modern preservation techniques for meat. So talk to me about the evidence that we have and what they used, what they took with them, what they preferred, how they did it. We actually need to clarify this a little bit in the sense that gourmet butchering, it's a term that is used to describe the fact that they're basically taken all the good

cuts and moving on. And that's certainly true of a lot of fulsome sites, but not all sites from this time period. If you're there, if you're hunting in the summer, your point is well taken. There's not a whole lot that you can preserve. You can butcher the meat, hang it out really quickly, hope it dries, and the blowflies don't get into it. Or if you're living on the northern plains, yeah, actually, you can make a kill. And if you're there through the winter, you can actually preserve it. We have some fulsome sites where people overwintered. And in those instances, they are using everything.

Okay. Just because it was cold. Just because it was cold. And if you're snowed in, you don't have a lot of options in terms of games. that's wandering around or your ability to go after them. In fact, you know, what's the old phrase they used to use in Chicago and the meat packing plants? You use everything from the squeak to the tail.

Okay. Right? We have gourmet butchering at the Folsom site proper and at a number of other fulsome sites where we had people on the move in the fall. They were going someplace to hunker down for the winter. And that tells us they were on the move. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Because they're only taking the good cuts. You know, had they stayed in that spot, we probably would have seen a very different record because had they stayed in that spot, had winter set in, and they had these 32 animals, you can be pretty darn sure that by January, they're cracking open the toe bones and sucking out the marrow. Because in fact, we see that at other Folsom period sites where people are hunkered down, so they're using absolutely everything. This idea of gourmet butchering is a polite way of saying they left a bunch of usable meat. Today, this would be illegal. under our modern wanton waste laws.

This is not a slight against these people at all. That would be a form of historical revision, applying today's value system out of context. But it's an interesting thought. If you remember in the Boone series, Old D.B. reported that while he was tracking the Indians that had kidnapped his daughter, Jemima, he found a, quote, writhing snake

that the Indians had killed and not used. Secondly, they killed a buffalo and only took the hump meat. Again, this is not a slight against these people, but it does dismiss the romantic idea that 100% of the time, indigenous people used 100% of the commodities from the animals they killed.

Here's some more from Dr. Meltzer. So what did they take at the Folsom site? They took the good stuff. So they took hump meat, right, from the thoracic vertebrae. Because the vertebrae are gone. Yeah. Yeah, in a lot of cases, and in some cases it looks as though they simply stripped out that big hump meat and left the big thoracic vertebrae there. Okay.

So they would have de-boned it. De-boned it. In some cases, it looks as though they snapped off entire rib racks. We have the ribs broken right at the head where it connects up the spine, and it looks like they would just grab a whole rib rack, snap it off and haul that away. They took long bones, particularly the upper limb bones, bison drumsticks. I like to refer to them, because those would be easy to transport, right? You just kind of sling that on your shoulder and you go for a hike with it. What did they leave behind?

They left behind heads, butts, and feet. We also know that they did eat the tongues out of them, and we know that because of cut marks on the jaws. Yes, where the tongue attachment was. And we know that this is a delicacy. Honestly, it's not for me. I don't do tongue. But certainly in a documented history. historic times, and still today, tongue is considered a delicacy of bison and raw tongue.

Dr. Meltzer has in his lab at SMU the jawbone found at Folsom that has the cut marks from a stone point. Pretty wild. If you've never had tongue, it's nothing more than a fine-grained muscle once you remove the outer tongue skin. It's the most accessible chunk of meat on an animal that doesn't require skinning back hide and hair. It would kind of be like grabbing the fries out of a fast food bag and eating them before you knock down your burger. But let's get into some bigger questions. That's a lot of meat. I mean, I think about what it takes to process a single animal that we would kill in modern times with modern conveniences and modern transportation. We've got side by sides.

We've got mules and horses. We've got trucks. I can't imagine carrying away that much meat. So my next question is like, who were these people and what were they doing? doing? We actually know where they'd been. We think we know where they were headed, and we know the time of years. So we can conjure a story, an inference, a narrative. What we know, what we think we know, is that they'd been on the Texas panhandle. And we think we know that based on the types of stone that was used to manufacture their projectile points. How far would that be? Oh, we're talking hundreds

of kilometers. Is it that far? Oh, yeah. All right. So what we know is that, or what we infer, is that these folks had most recently been in the Texas Panhandle area, in the area around Amarillo, where they obtained what's known as Allibates, Agatized Dolomite, we just call it Cher, and Tocovus Chirt. The distances, just straight-line distances from there to Folsom, are on the order literally of hundreds of kilometers. Amarillo, the Alibate's source is about 260 kilometers away. The source for Tocobus is almost in 375 kilometers away. So that's like 150 miles. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And the reason we think that they were there most recently before they got to Folsom is that that's the dominant material at the site. We have other material that they'd actually collected in far northeastern Colorado. And what you're seeing there is their cycle. Insofar as we can infer it based on the projectile points that we found because we found points that were made out of stone from each of those three areas and some points in between. This is like the home range of a wild animal. There you go.

And if you look at a map, all of those river systems, like the Canadian River and its tributaries, if you're leaving and kind of heading north, northwest out of the panhandle, a lot of those drainage is they won't necessarily take you right to the Folsom site, but they're going to take you into the neighborhood. And there's a number of passes that go through there. The most famous, of course, is Retone Pass, where the Santa Fe Trail came through. but just north of the Folsom site is another pass known as Trencherra Pass. It's not as well known as Retone Pass.

But let's say that you've moved out of the Panhandle of Texas, you've headed sort of northwest out of that area, you end up in the neighborhood, you're going to have to get through this sort of range of high basalt maces and volcanic peaks, and you're heading for Trencera Pass. You're going up, going up, and you spot a small herd of bison, you know, off in the distance. You send scouts kind of around and they come back and they say, you know what, there's a bottleneck, there's a pinch point on this arroyo.

So from Trencherra Pass, you could see the Folsom site. Can't quite see it. But if you were headed there, as it happens, the Folsom site is, what, eight kilometers from the pass. Okay. And that's why I think that's where they were headed. I see. So you make the kill. And because it's September, October, whenever, you know, plus or minus, right?

This is an area that gets a lot of snow. You don't necessarily want to be stuck there in the winter. It's higher elevation. It's like 60. It's 7,000 feet. 7,000 feet. Yeah. I was actually quite wrong about an aspect of this narrative, which I'm going to tell you about in a second.

My original thinking, well, okay, so you make the kill, you butcher the animals, you take all the good stuff, right? You've done your gourmet butchering gig, and then you just continue on through Chinchera Pass. You drop down into southeastern Colorado, and, you know, you find some place to overwinter. Here's the part where I was wrong. It's always good to admit those sorts of things. It keeps you honest. I thought there's no way you're going to want to spend the winter at 7,000 feet elevation. It's just going to be too cold, too much snow.

It's going to be too miserable. You're going to find someplace lower down, protected valley, et cetera, et cetera. Then I got invited by a colleague out in Gunnison, Colorado, who said, hey, I've got a fulsome site here. Well, as it turns out, that fulsome site is at about 8,000 feet. It's in one of the coldest places in North America in the Gunnison Basin, and it was occupied through the winter. So here I'm thinking, okay, these guys are going to go to Florida, right?

Yeah, yeah. I'm exaggerating. But no, as it turns out, these folks were pretty darn adept at dealing with winter, as I wasn't when I was sort of originally sort of thinking about Folsom was that they had to skiddle out of there. No, no. I think what they were doing. So they get there, they make the kill.

We know they'd been in northeastern Colorado before. So I think they used Trencherra Pass to get past that geological formation, drop down into southeastern Colorado. Where they went from there, I don't know. So what I'm envisioning is that these folks were sort of moving up and down the front range. They weren't necessarily going deep into the mountains. They were mostly exploiting the environments that were on the edge of the mountains,

on the edge of the plains. And probably we're making a pretty darn good living doing so. I just can't get past the mystery of who these people were and what their daily lives might have been like. They are absolutely shrouded an uncrackable mystery. I've got more questions. Do we know much about their social groups or do we have any, did these people at this time, did they make art?

Did they have social hierarchy? What do we know about the fulsome people? Yeah, so art definitely. The amount of artistic expression is hard to gauge. And the reason is that in some societies, artistic expression is material. So you've got groups that are in Europe at this time that are painting, spectacular paintings on cave walls.

But artistic expression can also be elaborate stories and things told around the campfire. Nowadays, we have artists. we have writers, we have musicians. In those days, they probably had what we could see as artists, writers, musicians, but they're not writers, they're weaving stories with their voice, right? Yeah, yeah. And they were probably making music.

We haven't found a lot of musical instruments from this time. They were making material culture that was decorative. We didn't find any of that at Folsom. I mean, Folsom is, you know, this is a hunting group, they're just moving. It's just a kill sight. But where we do have them staying in place, that's when, you know, we start to see the other kinds of artifacts that are not just used for slaughtering 32 animals. In terms of their social hierarchy or not, we tend to think that these are egalitarian hunter-gatherers. Tell me what that means.

So, you know, you sort of think about chieftains, where you've got somebody who's in charge. We don't think that the society was necessarily stratified in that manner. We start to see social stratification, haves and have-nobnone. much later in prehistory. Right. And it's often detected in burials, where you have individuals who get buried with lots of grave goods, whereas individuals who get buried maybe with a few tools that they use over their lifetime.

I want to read an excerpt from Ian Tattersall's book, Becoming Human. He's one of the world's leading paleoanthropologist. Here's a passage from his book. Quote, all of this, of course, begs the question. of the origin of modern human behaviors. As we've seen, we find dramatic evidence for art, music, and symbol very early in the upper Paleolithic record in Europe well over 30,000 years ago. And symbolism lies at the very heart of what it means to be human, as I'll emphasize in the next chapter. For if there is one single thing that distinguishes humans from all other forms of life,

living or extinct, it is the capacity for symbolic thought, the ability to generate complex mental symbols and to manipulate them into new combinations. This is the very foundation of imagination and creativity, of the unique ability of humans to create a world in the mind and to recreate it in the real world outside themselves. Other species may exploit the outside world with great efficiency, as we saw in the case of the chimpanzees, but they still remain in essence passive subjects and observers of that world. Even Neanderthals, remarkable as they may have been, were in all likelihood hardly more liberated from this condition. End of quote. We didn't find art or symbolism at the Folsom site. It was just a random kill site, but you don't

have to stretch very far to infer that people sophisticated enough to make Folsom points likely had art and music. When I think about early humans, I can't get away from these early indicators that we weren't just your average terrestrial mammal. The Folsom site is one of these early indicators. Tattersall said, quote, humans in general are and were slow-moving creatures, and modern humans are incomparably successful hunters because they exercise craft, guile, and unparalleled perception of the cues offered by the outside world. Probably hunting by guile as we know it is a peculiar property of our own species. End of quote.

Stacking up these bison was a really human thing to do. In Tattersall's book, he talks about how humans' arrival was unprecedented on the earth. And the major factor of this uniqueness is in our ability for what he calls self-reflective insight. Remember that phrase. He said, quote, the depth, complexity, and biological importance of human interpersonal relationships which far exceed any other animal would be impossible without the capacity for self-reflective insight.

End of quote. I guess my point is this. A bunch of apes couldn't have killed 32 bison with stone points, butchered them, and used the meat for an entire winter. What I'm trying to say is we aren't apes, though from a merely biological. standpoint, our bodies aren't much different, but humans aren't just bodies. A Neanderthal could have told you that humans had something very special. That escalated quickly. To steer the ship in a slightly different direction, I wanted to ask Dr. Meltzer how these fulsome hunters would be related

to more modern tribes of Native Americans. Here's what he said. Okay, it's very, very difficult to take a modern-day tribal unit and trace it back 10,000 years. Because people move, people admix, groups split up, groups come apart, which is not to say that there weren't tribal groups back then. And in fact, there almost certainly were. But remember, too, that these are people who'd been in the Americas or whose ancestors had first arrived in the Americas, you know, maybe a few thousand years earlier. And if we assume that the first people who came into the Americas, let's just say it was a single group speaking a single language. Over time, as the groups would disperse out across the Americas, they would become isolated from one another. Initially, you would get new dialects emerging,

and then you'd get separate languages emerging. But if you're still early in the process, there's certainly going to be far fewer language groups, far fewer tribal groups, than they're would be 10,000 years later, okay? I see. So humans basically, I mean, we're social animals and we socially structure ourselves. So would the groupings have looked like they do today in modern times? Hard to say because it's impossible to draw a nice, clean lines between them. But would they have banded together in groups of, you know, 25 or occasionally get together, you know,

several groups of 25, we'd get together in groups of 100 and, you know, swap stories, marry off their kids to one another, almost certainly, right? They're highly mobile hunter-gatherers, and think about this too. They're on a landscape with not a lot of other people. So it's obviously advantageous to them to be able to maintain contact with these other groups. You know, in those days, it made more sense not to shoot first and ask questions later, because it made more sense for the health and welfare and survival of your group to be able to meet up with another group who maybe you haven't met before, but are probably distantly related. And even if they're not,

you tell stories to each other that create a relationship and create an alliance because if you're out on a landscape with not a lot of other people, it's really helpful. If you encounter another group and they say, you know what, if you go however they measured time, right, if you go this many days or this many weeks in that direction, you will find this. Hunter gatherers is really striking. Mobile people know about a huge landscape. They haven't necessarily been over that entire landscape. They've talked to other people.

And so in the early 20th century, anthropologists working in the high Arctic would talk to native individuals who could put together a map of hundreds of thousands of square miles. And they hadn't actually done all that themselves, but they listened very carefully to the people that they met,

who they had traveled, where did you travel, what did you see? Let me tell you where I've traveled. in what I've seen. I mean, look, this is survival knowledge, right? You want to be able to know, okay, I'm in a place I've never been before, but I've heard about it. And I know that these kinds of things are available. If I keep going in that direction, I see that mountain peak. You know, I was told we met somebody years ago who told us about that mountain peak and that if you go to the other side, there's going to be this really beautiful valley and you're going to find game there.

Or you're in a small group of, you know, there's sort of a magic number, 25, you know, these, these hunter-gatherer groups, you know, plus or minus 25, right? And your kids get to be of marriageable age. Okay. When you encounter another group, they've got kids of marriageable age. Hey, go ahead. This is advantageous. Yeah.

You know, that is such an interesting thing you're bringing up because what it makes me think about, I'm very interested in, I think the intrigue of trying to understand who these people were is comparing them to who we are today. I think about the social structure and the things that they would have queued in on that maybe would have been lost inside of a world where we don't get all our information from life, from talking and looking in the eyes of someone and building a relationship with them. I mean, we get our information from life or from our phones and from books, which is a good thing. These are positive things.

But these people, the data point for their life in so many ways would have been these personal relationships that they had with people. And it would have been wonderful to sort of be a fly on the wall in all those conversations because you would see that's their internet. That's the Pleistocene Social Network. The Pleistocene Social Network wasn't Facebook. It was just face. You'll chuckle later when that hits the bottom. Wonder if the Folsom Hunters had a comedian in the group.

Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right?

That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I want to dive into some serious science. My whole life I've heard the term carbon dating thrown around, and it seems like we base a lot of what we know about ancient timeframes on it.

In the scientific world, it's believed to be rock-solid science. But I've heard a few murmurs of the validity of carbon dating, and I want to end the personal drama. Here's what I asked Dr. Meltzer. And hey, stick around if you get bored on this part. At the end, we're going to talk about the Bible and the age of the earth, and it's going to get wild. man what a booby trap

okay I'm going to take your word 100% for this and I'm going to base the rest of my life off of this answer no pressure how certain are we that carbon dating it's like rock hard science that's a dumb question because I think I know what you're going to say but like

in 50 years are my kids going to be like man they used to radio carbon date stuff boy they were way off oh no it's good It's solid. And it's been proven over and over again for the last, what are we up to now, 1950 to 2020, right? We've had so many independent checks on this that every time, time and again, we've been able to use and demonstrate that radio carbon is both reliable, which is to say, if you do it again, are you going to get the same answer? And valid, which is to say, is it the right answer? Yeah. And mind you, when the technique was first developed, what they did was they took things of known historic age. And they said, okay, here's some wood from an Egyptian tomb that we know from, you know, hieroglyphic records and, you know, the Rosetta Stone and all that stuff is basically 4,000 years old. You get a radiocarbon date. It says it's 3,900 years old plus or minus 100.

So, yeah, so it's just been tests. I mean, this is like gravity. This is like, this is something that we know. is pretty is solid. Okay, so Dr. Meltzer and the scientific community believe this is rock-hard, indisputable science, and I can get behind that. But what is it? Let's ask the doc. I think it's important for us to have an understanding of radiocarbon dating. It's just stuff a brother should know.

Talk to me about carbon dating. So the way we know how old things are is through radiocarbon dating. This is a process that was invented in the very late 1940. earned a Nobel Prize to its inventor in 1960, Willard Libby. And what Willard Libby figured out is that we know, of course, that there's garden variety carbon, and that's carbon 12. Libby's insight was that there are other isotopes of carbon that was known, and isotopes are basically unstable forms of these elements. Carbon 14 is radiocarbon. So what Libby realized was that, in addition to all the carbon that's floating around in the upper atmosphere, you've got nitrogen

and you've got cosmic radiation that produces these neutrons, they hit the nitrogen, drives off a proton, and it chemically becomes carbon. It's got the same chemical structure as carbon, but it weighs more, carbon 14, because it's got the atomic mass of nitrogen. So you've now got carbon 12, which is the garden variety carbon,

forming with oxygen to form CO2, and you've now got this isotope, this slightly heavier form of carbon, carbon 14, joining together with oxygen to form CO2. What do plants use for photosynthesis? They use CO2. They're ingesting CO2 as part of the photosynthesis process. Animals, including us, eat plants.

And so we're absorbing both the standard amount of carbon 12 that's out there, but a tiny, tiny fraction, I mean, you're not radioactive. You've got radio carbon in you, but, you know, you're not going to glow at night or anything like that. You've got this form of carbon 14 in an organ. When the organism dies, the carbon 14 is no longer being replenished, and it starts to decay back to carbon 12. Gives off a little beta emission, changes the structure, and suddenly you've got plain old carbon. That process of decay has what's known as a half-life, which means that every 5,730 years, half of the

radiocarbon that was in a piece of wood, an animal bone, any kind of organic thing, is now gone. Another 5,730 years, half of that is gone. So you measure the amount of decay that's taking place. In a nutshell, if you measure the amount of decay taking place, you know how long ago something was alive. We know with great accuracy how long it takes for carbon 14 to turn into carbon 12 because of this half-life nonsense. And remember, carbon 14 is only in that form when it's active and has interacted with the atmosphere. Okay? Organic matter, which is stuff that was once alive, this will be plants or animals, so a rock isn't organic matter. But plants and animals have carbon in them, and when they're preserved,

like the bison bones at Folsom or seeds in a soil deposit near the bones, their carbon gives us a timestamp telling us when that thing was alive. However, maybe one of the best quality assurances we have on carbon dating comes from us understanding how, the dates can be messed up. Here's what Dr. Meltzer has to say about that. It's remarkably accurate, but it's a statistical inference, and it's a statistical measure. So naturally, you have plus or minus. Plus or minus. Okay. And the plus or minuses can be plus or minus 20 years, plus or minus 50 years. Now, there's a complication in radiocarbon dating in that. The amount of C-14 in the atmosphere over time has varied, and it varies for a variety of reasons. So, for example, change.

changes in the Earth's magnetic field, changes in the amount of cosmic radiation hitting the atmosphere, changes in ocean circulation. Most of the world's CO2 is actually stored in the oceans. And so if ocean circulation changes and it starts belching more CO2 out into the atmosphere, it's going to change the amount of C-14. So at different points in the past, you've had more or less C-14 than at other points in the past. I see. And more importantly, the fact that we know where it's wrong and why it's wrong and how

we calibrate it is further indication that we understand it. So let me give you two more examples of things that screw up radio carbon dates, just to confirm that we actually look for these kinds of things so that we can adjust for these kinds of things. Industrial Revolution, you start burning coal. What are you doing? You're dumping huge amounts of dead carbon into the atmosphere. That's going to change the relationship or the relative amount of C-14 to C-12. So, yeah, if you date something from the Industrial Revolution, the age is are going to be off. I see.

Atomic bomb testing. Okay, so I'm older than you. I remember when they did atmospheric bomb testing. This was actually something that happened in the 1950s when they were still blowing up atomic bombs in the atmosphere. So when they would make the sample to put it into the radiocarbon counter, they'd create this slurry sample and they'd literally walk across the lab and dump it into the counter. Well, what that was doing, what does it atomic bomb do?

It creates all manner of fresh new radio carbon. So unlike the Industrial Revolution, which is dumping old carbon, atomic bombs are basically dumping new stuff. I see. And so some of these dates were coming, you know, 50 years into the future, right? And then they realized, oh, we better make this a closed system where this stuff is not being exposed to the atmosphere. Yeah, that's really interesting because airs, if you know where the air comes from, then it can make your whole system more solid. It makes it much more robust, which is why when people say, well, you know, it's just a radiocarbon date. You can't trust it.

And I said, oh, come now. Context is king. Here's Dr. Meltzer explaining how Folsom fits into the bigger picture of human history in the Americas. Dr. Meltzer, walk me through what we know of human history in the new world in North and South America, the timelines and kind of show us where Folsom fit in. Sure. In the Americas, and we don't actually call it the new world because by golly, people were here long before European showed up. To them, it actually was a new world. So one of the things about Folsom that was absolutely critical was that Folsom established for the first time in 50 years a clear chronological anchor point for the history of people in the Americas, because what Folsom did was it showed that they'd come in the Pleistocene. Within a few years after Folsom, about six years, actually, additional work had shown at a site called Clovis that people had been here slightly earlier than Folsom. We now know the dates on Clovis are about 13,000 or so calibrated years, about 11,500 radio carbon years. And for a long time, it was thought that Clovis were the first Americans, the first people who came into what was then a truly new world.

And that stayed that way for the better part of the 20th century. But there were fines that were being made in the 1960s, in 1970s, 1980s that seemed to hint that there might be a older than Clovis or a pre-Clovis presence in the Americas. But it really wasn't until the late 90s that work that was done by Tom Dillahey at then the University of Kentucky, now at Vanderbilt, in South America at a place called Monta Verde, that showed that people were in fact in the Americas prior to Clovis Times by at least a third. thousand years. So if you think about the prehistory of the Americas, it means that people were probably here by around 14.5,000 years ago, and that's calibrated years. But if you think about it, the oldest site that we have found cannot be the first site in the hemisphere, because these are... It's in the middle portion of the... Well, it's actually in far southern South America. So for one, you've got to assume that people must have come across the land bridge into the Americas a whole lot earlier than they arrived in southern Chile, southern South America.

And the other thing is, is that the odds of us finding the very first site in the Americas are infinitely small. Improbable. Absolutely. So we know people were here before then. Now, we're assuming that they came across the land bridge. And it wasn't water access from somewhere in South America. No, they walked here. We know when people start sailing across the South Pacific, it's about 3,000 years ago.

There was no sort of cross-ocean water route into the Americas in Ice Age times. We also have interesting convergence from genetic evidence, from ancient DNA. And this is work that I do with colleagues in Copenhagen at the Center for Geogenetics, where we have shown that groups in Northeast Asia probably split off into several subgroups, probably around 23,000, 24,000 years ago. They're in the Americas sometime after around 15,500 years ago, possibly earlier. But these are the genetic estimates that we have. So we have this kind of nice convergence of the archaeological and the genetic records, which are telling us that at least by 15.5,000 years ago, we have people dispersing across the Americas. But the thing that you always have

to kind of keep in the back of your mind is, you know, right around the corner, you can find an older site. We may get older evidence from the genetic record, the ancient DNA record of earlier populations that we hadn't detected before. So there's always the possibility that you're going to find or possibly could find still older presences. And so this Monteverde site is currently the oldest site that we know of in the Americas. And let me ask you a question. Are you saying that the human DNA from the indigenous people down there today are connected to Asia? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So that's why you said they walk there. Oh, well, it's more complicated. We now have sites in North America that are as old and possibly older than Monteverde. Monteverde was the first one that said, okay, they're here before Clovis times. That's a long walk from Alaska to South America.

Well, yeah. And actually based on the genetic evidence, we think they did it pretty quickly because we've got, we've got, that's incredible. Yeah, we've got genomes from South America and from North America, you know, areas that are separated by literally thousands of kilometers. And yet genetically speaking, they're really closely related to one another. So there hadn't been that many generations of time lapsed between. I've got a thousand questions that we'll have time for. Why did they go that far? Well, you've just walked into a continent where nobody's home and you're looking around, you haven't seen any smoke on the horizon, you haven't seen any freshly killed animals, you're realizing, wow, I'm all alone here. And, you know, humans are curious. Humans explore. There's an advantage, if you're in an unknown landscape to mobility is insurance. It doesn't matter what's right around you right now. It's what's over the next hill when things go badly where I am, right? So there's a real advantage to moving, and the fact that they were traveling

by what we measure as archaeologically breathtaking speed tells you that they were really fast learners. They made it all the way over from Siberia, for goodness sakes. They knew what they were about? So what are the sites that are older than the Monteverde site that are in North America? So you've got a place in Oregon called Paisley Cave, which has produced a really interesting record, including prehistoric poop.

Human. Human, which dates to pre-Clova's times and has human DNA preserved in it. I did not know this. Yeah. There's sites here in Texas down just north of Austin, known as the Galtz site, and then there's an adjacent one. It's probably the same site called the Freitken site, which have produced ages of 15,000 plus.

So, yeah, there's sites sort of hither and y'all. on across North America that are consistently coming in in that, you know, 15,000 plus or minus range of time. Here's Steve leading us into a very interesting part of how Folsom impacted America. He's always stirring up trouble. Here with the Folsom site, you got a projectile point laying in the rib of the thing. No rational, reasonable person could come and make any argument that here's an ice age relic that was killed by a human being. That proved once and for all that human antiquity in the new world went back a long ways.

And it was problematic for people who had a certain interpretation of human timelines with respect to biblical teachings. And it caused something of a religious crisis. because it forced the idea that human habitation here fit outside of what was then a wide-held understanding of how humans spread around the world based on a biblical chronology. And it was a sort of, you know, it was a spiritual discussion as much as it was about anthropology that you had a deep 10,000 plus year human existence that did not fit into an understanding of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, of a, a certain, very literal interpretation of the human timeline based on Genesis. I'd like to talk about the issue that Steve just brought up, which could be a can of worms for some of us and was for many in the 1920s. And the issue is the antiquity of man as described by science versus what some believe the Bible describes. The real issue has to do with how

portions of the Bible are interpreted. Many believe, and among them most archaeologists at the time that man had only been on the North American continent for 3,000 years, which fit within a literal biblical timeframe. The Folsom site said something different. I personally believe science and the Bible aren't at odds at all. But here's a good question. Why are we talking about this? Because this stuff is beyond important to me and my family, and I know many of you. And let me say, if you aren't interested in the Bible, please don't be threatened by my directness. This section is for the bros that are interested, and I know a lot of you are. Fist bump of agreement. I want to give you the lowdown. The first book of the Bible called Genesis tells the Hebrew seven-day creation

story of the universe, the earth, animals, and man in the first couple of chapters. It also tells the human lineage of man all the way from the first humans, Adam and Eve, up to modern historical figures that we now know exactly when they were here. And this is where the issue is. If you do the math, it puts the creation of the earth in the first humans at about 6,000 years ago, while science says the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and that the first modern humans arrived here long before 6,000 years ago. This is a big problem if you take this portion of the Bible. This is a big problem, if you take this portion of the Bible literally. And as a person that absolutely believes the Bible is tricky business to say that portions of it you take literally and others you don't, but that is not what

I'm saying. We use metaphors all the time to describe very literal things. It doesn't mean it's a fairy tale because a metaphor was used. It's not known, but it's believed the book of Genesis was written about 3,500 years ago. The first written languages started showing up about 5,000 years ago in the Middle East, so the fulsome hunters were stacking up bison in New Mexico 7,500 years before the book of Genesis was written. That's a relevant data point because up until written languages appeared, all history and important stories were passed down by the only means available, which was orally. And this method of generational transfer of information impacts the way that stories are told. Oral storytelling had to be so.

simple enough for people to remember it, all the while carrying the essential architectural principles that were important and would last through time. The author John Lennox, in his book Seven Days That Divide the World, says, quote, the first obvious yet important thing to say about the Bible is that it is literature. In fact, it is a whole library of books, some of them history, some poetry, some in the form of letters, and so on. Very different in content and stuff. In approaching literature in general, the first question to ask is, how does the author who wrote it wish to be understood? For instance, the author of a mathematics textbook does not intend to be understood as poetry. Shakespeare does not intend us to understand his place as exact history and so on.

I would highly recommend John Lennox's book. He's a mathematician at Oxford University in England and has publicly debated Richard Dawkins, a famous atheist, and if any of you hillbillies know John Lennox, I'd love to have him on the podcast. The essential principles that the story in Genesis carries through it could be whittled down to two main things. Number one, an entity of incredible intelligence and power strategically created the universe over a period of time through the natural processes of geology, biology, biology, and science. The creation story as a sequence of seven days could be very very, viewed as multiple periods of time, which at its elementary framework is consistent with the geological

and fossil records. I personally believe the seven days of Genesis weren't seven 24-hour days, but rather they were epics of time. The second principle that the story carries with it strongly was that God made man different than the animals, which science completely agrees with in the sense of cognitive capabilities. The only thing God breathed his breath into, according to Genesis, was man. He gave the animal's life, but not his breath. The most respected modern evolutionary biologists, who typically aren't too keen on the Bible, highlight and marvel at the oddity of human uniqueness.

That breath parallels the self-reflective insight that Ian Tattersall spoke of and the language, art, toolmaking, and symbolic thought that separates the species Homo sapiens so distinctly from every other species. Science attributes our cognitive abilities to natural selection, advantageous gene mutations, and pure mathematical chance. And to say that God did this doesn't negate that he used some of these processes to accomplish what we now see in humans. Man is the one who has pitted science and God against each other, but clearly I don't think they've got any qualms with one another. Genesis also famously tells the story of the fall of man when he ate the forbidden fruit, realized he was naked and became ashamed.

This is oddly similar to this idea of self-reflective insight. So my point is this, that Genesis was never meant to be a scientific textbook, but rather a story carrying principles. that could be understood by primitive man and by modern people in 2021. That's a pretty major feat. It needed to be a story that could last the erosive nature of time, kind of like a stone fulsome point. And it has done just that. Since we're having so much fun, let's go a little bit further. I believe the creation sequence mirrors much of what modern science believes about the formation of the universe and planet. Here's the rough creation sequence

of Genesis. Day one, light was created, the sun. Day two, the atmosphere and ocean. Day three, dry land and vegetation appear. Day four, stars and moon. Day five, sea creatures and birds. Day six, land animals and lastly, humans. And on day seven, God took a break. The sequence begins with the sun and then goes to fish and birds which come before the creation of man, and man arrives at the very end, which this is a pretty consistent story with what we know of the fossil record. And all I'm saying is that it's pretty crazy that some ancient dudes got a wildly complex scientific sequence even remotely right in their oral story. There would have been infinite options for their explanation. To this day, modern science cannot explain the formation of the universe.

And that is not my opinion. That is the consensus of science. We do not know. So actually, all of us that have any thoughts or opinions on the formation of the universe and the reason man is the way he is are writing on some version of faith. Science by its very definition can only understand and describe and measure that which is seen and able to be replicated. It doesn't claim to understand the metaphysical, which means beyond the physical. And it's a ridiculously western and modern idea to think that there is no

metaphysical. Science does a great job of explaining everything in its realm, but at the end, it is saying there are things we can't explain, and we know that this isn't the end of the trail. And this is exactly where faith-based philosophies start. And no, they can't be proven. That is the essence of faith, which I have found is a rewarding and fun way to live your life. This is an incredibly logical and intelligent sequence. And it's not surprising that scientific literature doesn't validate the existence of God. It can't.

However, scientists can have personal opinions, and that's where things can get confused. confusing and ideas go in and out of vogue. We could go on and on because this stuff is fascinating. To get back to human life in our unusual arrival on planet Earth, here we go. Ian Tattersall said that the crow magnins, these were the first people in Europe, showed up quickly, fully formed in the fossil record and full of symbolism and art. At the end of Tattersall's book, Becoming Human, he said, quote, it is frustrating indeed to come to the end of our story and to have to admit that we have little idea as to exactly how, when, where, or why our extraordinary consciousness was acquired. I respect his frankness about what science can explain and about what it can't. Later, he said that this cognitive ability was, quote, comparatively sudden and,

and that it came very late in our evolutionary history. I think the themes in both science and the creation story mirror each other here. Something happened very quickly that made humans what they are. The story of how our cognitive condition came about is shrouded in deep mystery. I'm certain that the Folsom Hunters had an opinion about how humans got here. And if we were playing a game of telephone, the guys closer to the source of the intel were used. usually right. All that to say, I think the primitive humans that wrote the creation story in the

book of Genesis were on to something, and I'm with the cavemen on this one. But I'm also with the real science that we know today. Man, that was like riding a buck and meal. Can you believe that we talked about this for 12 minutes? I absolutely love it. I realize that my little spiel here doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of this topic, and I'm not really interested in a debate. I'm just not geared up for that. I just wanted to give people that care about the Bible some food for thought. Additionally, in scientific and academic literature, the idea of intelligent design and creation has been minimized and even ridiculed, and in some places, they've made it a point to label people who believe the Bible as ignorant, and I've even seen them use the word

primitive as a descriptor for those of us who believe the Bible. And, you know, maybe that's not such a bad label. So I guess my biggest point is for those that believe the Bible to say that this is actually a pretty intelligent way to try to understand the universe. And that there is no reason to fear good science. I want to get back with a closing thought from Dr. Meltzer on how Folsom impacted the archaeological community. He spent a lot of time learning about the history of archaeology and interviewing old archaeologist. Here's what he said. Early on, I was doing some research on it,

and I wrote to a bunch of the folks who'd been around in the 1920s, and I said, well, what was it like? And one of the comments that sort of stuck with me over the years was from Emil Howry at the University of Arizona, and he said, you know what we all felt? Relief, that all of that that argument and bitterness and controversy was finally over. We had now a clear data point. We knew people had been here for at least 10,000 years. And so we could stop arguing about that and start trying to understand, okay, so what happened between 10,000 years ago and 2,000 years ago when we've already known about all this archaeological stuff? You know, suddenly American archaeologists in the 1920s and 1930s had a really interesting challenge. And Folsom triggered that.

It's been a wild ride learning about the Folsom site, but I have to go back to my original question. Why is this important? And I think at least some portion of that answer is pretty simple. Getting a small peek into the lives of ancient humans gives us a data point about normal human behavior. And this helps put our current lives and behavior into context. When I hear the Folsom story, the reverberation of human struggle is, is glaring. Mankind has always struggled,

and technology will never be able to take the struggle of being human away. It just shifts it to different areas. We went from defending our woolly mammoth kill from dire wolves to the American version of struggle would be like stressing out about paying bills or buying our kids decent basketball shoes or how to maintain our social status by what kind of truck we drive. I drive a pretty beat-up truck, y'all. And for the record, so does Warner Glen, James Lawrence, and Roy Clark think about it.

But on the other hand, much of the world's struggle today is still dramatic and life-threatening. People struggle with disease, abject poverty, finding clean water to drink and food to eat. The human story of struggle remains consistent. And I'll wake up that dead horse and whoop on him a little bit and say that the cavemen that wrote the book of Genesis recounted, that God told them that the struggle would always be here. Turns out they were right. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. It's been a pleasure chatting with you.

I would also like to thank Dr. David Meltzer for contributing his knowledge to this series. Be sure to check out all his books, but his contribution isn't over. In the final episode of this series, we're diving in deep to the actual full. point. It's going to be really cool. Hey, please leave us a review on iTunes and tell somebody about this podcast this week. And Merry Christmas, you bear, greas and hillbillies. 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 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. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.