Bear Grease - Ep. 327: The Mystery of America’s Oldest Human Bones

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, Clay Newcomb travels to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas to meet with archaeologist Dr. David Meltzer. Dr. Meltzer discusses what has been learned through recent advancements in research of prehistoric human’s lives, diet, and travel routes in North America through the use of DNA sequencing. These discoveries have led to new theories of how the first people came to North America. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. In 1968 in central Montana, construction workers digging with a backhoe discovered human bones. It was a child buried 12,900 years ago in the Pleistocene, the Ice Age, which is a time period that has remained a mystery for archaeologist until now. Because in 2014, 46 years after the discovery, after the discovery. the new technology emerged that told us who this child was as it became the first and only Clovis-era human DNA to be fully sequenced, giving us insight into the first Americans.

In this episode, Dr. David Meltzer will tell us what we learned from America's oldest bones. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. We've got Anzik in Montana. We've got these individuals in southeastern Brazil. It's a site called Lagoasa. And we can see a tight connection between the two in a genetic sense. But there's also something lurking in those genomes at Lagoa Santa. Geneticists refer to it as a ghost population.

Does this possibly represent a pre-Clovis population? that has simply disappeared, and the only record we have of it was that there was some sort of gene flow or interaction, and why is it only in South America? And hey, don't forget that on June 9th,

there will be a new drop on the bear grease feed to go along with Bear Greece, what you're listening to now, the Bear Grease Render, Brent's This Country Life podcast, but now you'll be able to listen to Lake Pickles Backwoods University, This is our wildlife biology podcast, and it's really good.

We're going to learn a lot. But now we're on to the peopling of America. Roll the intro, Reba. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in 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.

There's a whole sort of new synthesis emerging, a new view emerging about the peopling of the Americas, which is making it clear that the traditional interpretations that we had, people get to Alaska, they come through the ice-free corridor, boom, it's all done, it's Clovis. it just doesn't work anymore. It really hasn't worked for quite some time, right? Because we've had these pre-Clovis age sites now for the better part of 15, 20 years. But what's happening now is that we're getting a much better picture, a more nuanced picture of the process itself and the routes that they may have taken and getting back to the DNA who they were. I want to learn about the peopling of America,

about who were the first people. that came here. This is a conversation that's been heated since the late 1800s. The technology in the last 10 years has changed the conversation. This is Dr. David Meltzer, an archaeologist, author, and professor from SMU in Dallas, Texas. He's a great communicator. It used to be that I had lots of questions as an archaeologist. Who are these folks? Where did they come from. Who are they related to? These are not questions I could answer with archaeological remains, right? I can look at a projectile point over here, and I can look at a projectile point over there, and I can infer that they're made in a similar fashion, they have a similar style.

Maybe they're related, but I'd never know that for sure, right? But with ancient DNA, if I have skeletal material that we can extract the DNA from an ancient individual, which we do very carefully and with considerable respect. There's a lot of ethical issues tied with ancient DNA, as you might imagine. I can identify admixture, ancestry, who these people are, where they came from, who their ancestors were in Northeast Asia, and the like. And it's been an absolute sea change in terms of our understanding of the peopling process. So we know from the ancient genetic record, ancient genomic record,

that we had groups that were living in Eastern Asia, China today, 40,000 years ago. Very distinctive genomically, they'd been isolated for some time. When we say distinctive genomically, we're not talking about them being, you know, superior or inferior, anything like that. What we're actually measuring are genetic traits that have absolutely no bearing on their fitness. These are parts of your genome that actually don't do anything. So you can look at two different populations, there will be a certain amount of genetic distance between them. So we can use DNA as a clock.

This is just wild stuff. Yeah. This would not have been imaginable, you know, 40 years ago. How long have we had this technology? Well, so the first ancient North American genome was 2014, just a shade over 10 years ago. 10 years ago. 10 years ago. Yeah, no, Clay, if we had had this conversation in 2010, it'd be over in about five minutes because I'd have nothing else to say.

Really? Yeah. It's exciting to live in the times of new technology being developed that's solving ancient mysteries. But it can also be a little unnerving as it upends long-held philosophies. And I sometimes wonder if our certainty at some point won't be disrupted again in the future by even more cryptic technology. But we need to understand what we are certain about. We need to talk about bones. So what discovery of human remains was found that opened the key to these places to see people?

Well, so in terms of North America, right, the first ancient genome was the Anzic Child. So the Anzic Child was discovered in the 1960s. And the story, as I understand it, was a rancher was sort of doing some dirt work on his property with some heavy equipment. In Montana. And just outside of Wilsall. Montana. In fact, it was quite close to where we did the bison butchering experiment. And I kept looking off in that distance thinking, I'm close. Wow.

And the Anzic Child was interred with grave goods, some really distinctive Clovis points. So we know that the Anzic Child was a member of that Clovis cultural group. How this came about was that a backhoe operator was digging gravel off a ranch owned by a family named Anzik. He hit an unusual layer of dirt and recognized his stone point. He got off and he discovered human bones there too. What he'd later learn is that he found a formal burial of a one to two-year-old male child buried with 120 stone tools in six non-human bone adalattle foreshafs and some elk antlers dusted with red ochre.

and the human bones appeared to have red ochre on them as well. It makes you wonder if they buried the child with the things they thought it would need for the afterlife, the things they relied on most stone tools. But here is what they learned. Subsequent radiocarbon dating demonstrated that Anzic was around 12,700 years ago, so late Pleistocene, late ice age. and when Eske's group did the sequencing, what they discovered, what we discovered and published in 2014, was that that individual was part of a population movement into the Americas that we subsequently identified as southern Native Americans. Now, we all know that Montana is not in southern portion of the continent, but what Anzic signified was this was one member of a population that,

would spread throughout the hemisphere, whereas the other sort of fork in the road, right? So one fork goes south, the other stays north. Those are northern Native Americans. So Anzik... And they're all connected genetically to this Anzik child. It all sort of gets channeled back through Anzik or through others of that population, right? So Anzik is not sort of the founding population, per se. It's a member of that early population. This discovery of this Anzic child was, is the only Pleistocene human remains that we were able to extract good enough DNA from to really do the type of genetic research and discovery that you're talking about. So far. That's correct.

So all this is based upon one really good specimen. Well, there's actually more to it. Okay. So Anzic is so far the oldest genome that we have in the Americas. However, we have others that come along pretty soon thereafter. and that help fill in the picture of the dispersal of these populations throughout the hemisphere. We have some in southeastern Brazil that date to, so Anzac is 12-7. We've got ones in South America, southeastern Brazil, that are around 10.5.

We've got in Spirit Cave in Nevada, that's about 10-7. What's really striking about the genetic data. So again, you know, we've got data from Montana, we've got Nevada, we've got Nevada, We've got Brazil. We've got various other places in South America. Is how closely linked they are and how similar they are at the genetic level. What that tells us is that this is a population that was actually moving pretty fast because there hasn't been that much change in the time from Anzik down to southeastern Brazil.

Yeah, so it wasn't like 5,000 years or something. No, no, no. No. Yeah. So it's literally just. A couple generations, maybe. A little more than that, but yeah. Yeah.

That's the tendency, right? Is that it happened really fast. We call them quick waivers. It's just a fast-moving radiation throughout the hemisphere. Can you imagine moving on foot from Montana to Brazil? What was pushing these people? Why did they move? These are answers we will never know.

But maybe one day they'll have a technology that can read the thoughts and understand the motivations of people by the DNA extracted from their bones. One of the most interesting things about the Anzic child was recorded in a peer review paper in the Science Advances Journal, in which an isotope analysis was done on the bones, and in that they can determine the type of protein that the mother ate when she nursed the young child. and they found that her diet was more closely related to a scimitar cat, a carnivore, than anything else. They used this study to say that these people were eaten a lot of big mammal meat. That is pretty darn crazy.

But our next question is, what did these bones tell us about where these people came from? So we've got these two populations, one in Eastern Asia and one sort of in the region around Lake Baikal, probably around 25, 23,000 years ago. There's interaction, these groups, or members of these groups, kind of bump into one another, and then split off as a sort of combined entity, a combined population. that's the group that will become ancestral to Native Americans. That's the group that will make their way across the land bridge. They'll do it in at least a couple of different pulses. There'll be the initial one, and those will be the folks that will make it all the way down into the lower 48

throughout South America and so on. Then there'll be a slightly later one, which will come into Alaska and stay and not go any further south, and ultimately disappear. from the genetic and archaeological record. Okay? Wow.

We could never see disappearance in the archaeological record before. We could see artifacts, but we had no idea who made them and whether the people who made them had descendants among modern groups. All modern people have ancestors. There's no question about that, right?

But not all ancient people that we see in the ancient DNA record necessarily had descendants because some populations disappeared, others were replaced either, you know, locally or regionally or whatever, humans move. And humans have been moving for a long time. Yeah, yeah. So we can start to see that kind of thing.

We can see people and populations disappearing. All from basically finding, yeah, bits of DNA in bones. In bones, exactly, right. So when you're doing ancient DNA on skeletal remains, what you're doing is you're getting that individual is genome, but it's more than just that individual, because your genome, my genome, all of these things are a record of all of our ancestors. And the big picture... This would be like sorcery to someone 100 years ago. Oh, no question. Like if you said, I can tell you everything about where you're from, who your people were. I mean, really...

Well, it's a scale thing, though, right? I mean, um, By the way, don't buy any of those things that the genetic ancestry testing companies are telling you about. We can tell you exactly who your ancestors. No, there's a lot of arm waving with a lot of that stuff. Really? Yeah, yeah. No, what we're looking at are population level trends. Right.

Okay. So we're not able to take your DNA and precisely show who your ancestors were. That makes sense. But we can look at it as a population and we do. What if you told a human living in the Pleistocene that? inside their bones were the inscriptions of their ancestors. I think they'd tell you that they already knew that. I find this bizarre and oddly circular.

Author Barry Lopez in his book Arctic Dreams raises the question of how far modern man has actually come. He questions whether all we've accomplished is, quote, a more complicated manipulation of materials, a more astounding display of his grasp of the physical principles of matter. We are dazzled by mere styles of expression, end of quote. I think what he's saying is that modernity has produced a very technical, quote, style of expression, like sequencing DNA,

where previous humans might have been more spiritually acute and expressed life in different ways. I like thinking about this kind of state. 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 backwards. 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 the perfect time to stop for just a second and review some basic stuff that will help all this make sense. The Clovis era

is a term used to describe a group of people that were here in what is now America roughly 13,000 years ago. They span the continent and made uniquely fluted stone points. That's basically the only way that we know who they are is because of their technology. For decades, people thought that these people, the Clovis people, crossed the Bering Land Bridge

out of Asia in the Pleistocene and came through an ice-free corridor between the glaciers into the interior of North America, but through this ice core technology that we learned about on episode 298 of Bear Greece, we're realizing that that ice-free corridor travel path wouldn't be possible. All that information is going to be valuable in just a little bit. But I'm going to throw a wrinkle in here. Anzik is Clovis. We still don't have a pre-Clovis genome. So we don't know whether the earlier population that comes into the Americas, who are they? And how do they relate to Clovis. And were they part of that quick wave? Well, presumably not because that quick wave is Clovis down to, you know, South America. We're looking. So it's just so hard to find human remains that are

over 10,000 years old. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. Like there were hundreds, clearly hundreds, for sure, even thousands of people. Oh, yeah. Across the landscape, across all spread out all across North America and we can't find any of their bones because it's organic matter it deteriorates what what we find is what you specialize in which is stone points and and archaeological like physical evidence that humans were here and so just these real unique situations where something happened where bones were preserved it's like literally searching for a needle in a thousand haystacks that's it's a challenge So throughout the hemisphere, North and South America, there's maybe 25, 30 human remains older than about 8,000 years.

That's a hell of a small population on which to create any sort of inferential basis for what the first people look like. Now, the thing that's really interesting is that at this time in Europe, we've got all sorts of skeletal remains, right? So yeah, it's a preservation issue, but obviously, you know, Europe must have preservation issues there as well. But the difference is is that their base population of individuals that were living at that time is so much larger that if you take 1% of that population and then 1% of the population that's living in the Americas, which is a lot smaller, you know, what are the odds that you're going to get well-preserved human remains? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is the case that throughout most of Eastern North America, bone does not preserve in sediments. Eastern North America being the eastern deciduous forest where a lot of rainfall, a lot of biological activity going on. A lot of acidic soils, all that stuff.

And in the West, it would be better. Better chances, absolutely, absolutely. But, you know, preservation depends on just so many things. You know, was the individual interred? What was the context of the burial? You know, were scavengers able to get to, you know, the remains? Or, you know, these people were highly mobile. They did not have cemeteries, you know, at this period of time.

Actually, the first cemetery we see is probably around 10,000 years ago. But as I mentioned earlier, you know, this is something that is now being done much more in concert with Native American groups because these are the ancestors of these individuals, right? the people today are descended from these first Americans. And so a lot of the, you know, the first decade or so of ancient DNA work, and this is true globally, there was a bone rush, right? Every time you found a bone, somebody wanted to sequence it and say, you know, because you learn something new with each new specimen, we're starting to calm down a little bit because, you know, we're starting to get the picture together. We're filling in, you know, it's much more filling in the details rather than creating the whole canvas. But we're also doing much more collaborative work with the native groups because, you know, they're interested.

They might not necessarily be interested in the same kinds of things we're interested in. But we find that out, right? Yeah. We do what we can to sort of respect the descendants, the descendant communities, and at the same time sort of look into and try and understand their history. And really, this is human history, right? This is the story of people essentially coming out of Africa and making their way around the globe. It's an amazing story because one of the things that's always struck me is the vanity of Europeans. When they started sailing around the globe, you know, they talked about exploring all these places

and going where no man has gone before throwing in a Star Trek reference here. But the reality is, is every place they landed, there was somebody there, right? Yeah. You know, so hunter-gatherer groups, foraging groups, leaving Africa, managed to pretty much populate the entire globe with the exception of Antarctica. And even then, there's some question about whether indigenous groups got to Antarctica before James Cook approached it in the late 1700s. Humans seem to be really good at dividing up based upon really the quite small cosmetic and cultural differences within our species. But Dr. Meltzer makes a good point. This is the story of mankind.

As I learn about archaeology, what is most astonishing to me is how random the data points seem to be. Because, I mean, like we talk about Clovis, this, well, first we talk about Folsom, this incredible archaeological discovery, discovered by George McJunkin, who, you know, is just this cowboy out on his ranch. He finds these bones and he gets people there. And then the Clovis site is basically a commercial gravel pit where they're digging up stuff and they find it. The Anzic Child is discovered when they're doing excavation on just some rancher's random place. And it feels like as a species we would be like globally like,

okay, everyone, we're going to grid off the earth. And we want every man. woman and child to go out and excavate the land that they own and look for evidence of deep human antiquity. Ready, go. Report back to us in a month. And we grid off the whole earth and we find everything. That is not even remotely. I mean, that's a fairy tale. Like, you know, how much has been destroyed? How much is there, is there an archaeological site under my house in Arkansas that would change the world and the whole story, but we're never going to dig it up in my lifetime because my house is there. Funny fact. What do you think about that? Well, I think you should move your

house and we can see what's underneath. Now, I do find stone points in my yard. Okay, well, there you go. Then it really is good reason to move your house. I literally find stone points in my yard. So there's, there's a bunch of things. First off, you're absolutely right in that it's complicated. sites are found randomly. Sites are found owing to construction, erosion, dumb luck. The person happened to be walking along at the moment that something eroded out, and if they'd come 20 minutes later, it would have washed downstream, and they'd never know.

This is why we as archaeologists, when we're out in the field, we're talking to ranchers, we're talking to farmers, we're talking to people who are following your orders and surveying that, you know, one square, mile around their house. And they're the ones whose eyes are on the ground all the time. Okay. But at the same time, we're also thinking.

And we're also using techniques, like remote sensing techniques, like understanding the local geology, like understanding erosional and depositional processes. The best example, wonderful example of this, is a fellow by name of Reed Ferry at the University of North Texas. Reed has two PhDs, one in anthropology, one in geology, and Reed's a pretty savvy guy. And he was looking at the geology in his neighborhood, literally, and he got to thinking, you know, the Ice Age stuff is now buried under about eight to nine meters of sediment. And he got it into his head that, well, they're digging a dam,

and they're cutting an overflow sluice way by that dam. And he just decided, well, that's a really good opportunity to go look eight meters below the surface. He starts walking down that contact between the end of the Pleistocene and the Cretaceous, right? So you've got 12,000-year-old sediments sitting on top of 60 million-year-old rock. And what does he discover? A Clovis point. Right? So, yeah.

Just like walking around? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you take that sort of knowledge and apply it, it's not a... a completely random thing. But, you know, the prepared mind will find things. And Reed certainly was. And that's, it's so-called, it's the Aubrey site. So it's one of the oldest Clovis sites we have. Wow. And it was discovered because he was savvy enough to know where to look. I bet those dam builders wished he hadn't found it. It did not have anything. It did not slow the dam. Okay. It all worked out just fine for all concern.

The bones have answered the question of where Clovis people came from, but now I want to try to understand how they got here. Meltzer is going to bring up something called the Kelp Highway, which is the theory that after crossing the Bering Land Bridge, humans moved down the coast utilizing the rich ecosystems provided by kelp. Well, okay, so we've now established that people came down the coast. and the question is, well, what resources were they using? There is an interesting theory about the so-called kelp highway that would have provided a rich resource base for groups. Certainly there's a lot of kelp out there today. The obvious question is,

what did it look like at the Pleistocene 16,000 years ago when people were coming down that coast? I don't know. I don't know that any of us know, because these are sea plants. where we haven't got a really good geological record of the history of kelp along the coast. They can't do the core. Well, you know what?

We have, we, again, this is. I thought maybe I gave him a new idea. Well, I was going to be like, call it the Clay Newcomb core, because I told you to get a core of the kelp. Well, the problem is, you know what the Pacific Northwest Coast looks like, right? It's constantly getting pounded. The odds are against. you, I would tell you, by the way, that the fellow who found the Titanic, years ago, one of his people contacted me.

And they said, you know, he was thinking, now that he's found the Titanic, that maybe he would do some work on the Bering Land Bridge and look for sights and would I be interested? And I said, sure. That sounds exciting. Yeah, nothing happened. I told them that, you know, the odds were actually not very good. Just because the ocean would have just changed. Yeah, yeah.

It's so volatile down there. You can do bathometric studies, right? You can map the seafloor, and you can see valleys. You can see river drainagees and the like. But are you going to find an archaeological site? I mean, it's hard enough to find stuff on land and doing it in 60 meters of water. I see water. Yeah.

So, yeah, that one never came to pass. It would have been kind of fun, though. Wow. Yeah. So, okay, so you were telling me about what we know about the water route. Yeah, well, don't think of it as a water route. Think of it as a coastal route. Okay. I suspect they were taking small animals and maybe even plant material out of tide pools. They were probably hunting animals that would have been in that same ribbon of dry land along the ice sheet and before you get into the water. Large mammal hunting, large sea mammal hunting is a much later thing and it usually requires boats. And we don't, now, we don't have any evidence of boats.

Does that mean they didn't have boats? No. I mean, we just don't have any. Wooden and skin boats, wouldn't be preserved. Exactly. I mean, what are the odds that you would actually find something like that? Now, so there are archaeological sites along that coast. Nope.

No. No, that's another challenge. So we just have, so what are the data points? Like, Cooper's Ferry is inland off of the, What river is the snake? The snake river like a long way. Think about it. Think about it. You're coming down the coast, right?

So you've got this ribbon of land. You can make your way down the coast. And once you get south of that ice sheet, now mind you, that ice sheet comes into Seattle really late. You had ice in Seattle as recently as 14 and a half, 15,000 years ago before it starts to retreat. But once you get south of that ice sheet, you get to the Columbia. make a left turn. That takes you into the interior. Right.

Go right up the river. There you go. And you're going to find your way to a place like Cooper's Ferry. So you could either continue south. You could make a left turn, go into the interior, go a little further south, make another left turn. Yeah, so once you get south of the ice, it's open season. It's open landscape. And so the data points then become, like we have this Anzic child.

in Montana that we can genetically trace to populations in Northeast Asia. And we know they didn't come down the ice-free corridor because there was a, it was closed up until. It was not biologically viable until after they got here. And so, I mean, the only thing left is they either flew airplanes or they came down the coast. Exactly right. And so there's no Paleolithic archaeological sites like on the coast of Alaska and British Columbia. It would be lovely if there were that we could sort of, you know, if they left behind like Hansel and Gretel, right, a trail of breadcrumbs, a trail of archaeological sites. There is one site that dates to around 13 that's off the coast of British Columbia where they actually have some ancient footprints, literally footprints coming into this continent.

But that's one of the only ones that's, and that's still not old enough, right? Because if people are at Cooper's Ferry at 15 and a half, then a site that's 13, yeah, that's long after. Wow. It's currently believed that the first people arriving in what is now the lower 48 got here using a coastal route. And sites like Cooper's Ferry, which is along the Salmon River near Cottonwood, Idaho, force us to believe in the water route. At Cooper's Ferry, they've found stone points and burned animal bones that radio carbon date back to 15,500 years ago. This is 2,000 years before Clovis, thousands of years before the ice-free corridor

was biologically viable for a 1,300-mile journey. Paleo sites are just hard to come by, so it's difficult to piece it all together. Well, I mean, think about this in terms of numbers. We are not talking about a lot of people. Not only is there not a lot of people in absolute terms, in terms of density. You've got relatively few people on a vast continent

and they're highly mobile. They're moving all the time. Archaeological sites accumulate when people slow down and stop. And especially if you've got a large number of people slowing down and stopping. And these people weren't making impact. I mean, like today, like you think about the impact that a human would leave

on the planet in a week's time period. I'm producing trash. I'm producing tire tracks and mud when I drive my truck to where I hunt. And these people didn't have plastics. They didn't have metal. Oh, God. Yeah, exactly. Everything they had was organic matter that would rot in a period of years at most.

So it just took these really special circumstances for something to be preserved. It's just astonishing to me how just like these little breadcrumbs that we have, but also how much we know off these small data points. Right. No, we specialize in getting large amounts of information from tiny amounts of data. Yeah. Because we have to. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls

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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. It's astonishing to me to think about who these people would have really been. They were humans just like a same mental capacity.

They could have learned to fly an airplane. They could have learned complex math. we just have to assume that they wouldn't have had any sense of their uniqueness in the world. I mean, in terms of, like, we now look back from this place in 2025 where we have this incredible technology, and we have these, like, what we perceive as modern lives right on the cutting edge of time. Well, they were on the cutting edge of time 15,000 years ago. Absolutely. It was, it's hard for me to think about a plasticine man waking up.

getting the fire going and just thinking, man, it's just another Tuesday. And I got to figure out what we're going to eat. And I got to go out and, you know, kill a deer, kill a mammoth. Or I've got to, we're going to head south today and maybe we'll run into some other group of people. I mean, they didn't know they were, they just thought this is what human life was. That's exactly right. And then, and then now 15,000 years later, we have, because of technology, because of history, because of written languages, because of communication at this high level that we have, we're able to see this huge slice of the pie

and go, holy smokes, those guys were just so unique. Yes, I think you're absolutely right. The only point that I would add is that I suspect at some level, at some degree, they must have realized looking around that there's not a lot of people here, right? But wouldn't that have been normal to them? Well, exactly right. Exactly right. But think about it in terms of the first people coming into the Americas, where, you know, they'd seen people in Siberia. They'd interacted with folks along the way. And suddenly they realized, you know, it's been months. It's been a really long time since we've seen smoke on the horizon or a freshly killed animal or bumped into somebody else. This place is uninhabited.

Exactly. They would have recognized it. Right. They may have recognized it or just thought, you know, maybe I just need to keep moving. I'm going to find somebody else, right? What if they thought that was a positive or negative? Well, now that, if you're looking at your kids and they're getting to be a marriageable age, you're thinking, boy, I hope we run into somebody really quick. And that's actually one of the other things that's come out of the genetic record is that there's no evidence whatsoever of incest or, I don't know if we necessarily want to talk about this.

Sure. But with Neanderthals, toward the end of their string by, you know, 50,000. 40,000 years ago, there was a lot of end breeding. Really? With modern humans. The population got. And they basically were running out of mates for their kids. With modern humans, you do not see that.

So these folks, again, this goes back to if you're on an empty landscape, it pays to recognize strangers as friends. Wow, that's fascinating. It's mind-boggling to think of so few humans on such a huge continent, especially as planet Earth now has over 8 billion people. It's tempting to think that it would be nice to go back, but I'm sure all those people from the Pleistocene would like to be in our shoes with excess food, air conditioning, and hospitals.

This next section reveals one of the biggest mysteries of the Americas. Here, Dr. Meltzer is going to introduce us to what they refer to as the ghost population. So one of the really interesting things, as we've talked about, we've got Anzik in Montana. We've got these individuals in southeastern Brazil.

It's a site called Lagoasa. And we can see a tight connection between the two in a genetic sense. But there's also something lurking in those genomes at Lagoa Santa. It's a, well, geneticists refer to it

as a ghost. population. And by that what we mean is that we've got segments of DNA that are clearly unrelated to everything else that are part of the genome of those individuals. And it's a signal that bears a resemblance to Australasian populations. So Australia, New Guinea, that region of the world. So we've got these chunks, these odd chunks of DNA in the populations in southeastern Brazil that are part of the genome, but what's really puzzling about this stuff is that we don't see that austral asian signal in any of the north American individuals that we've sequenced. We don't see it in any of the alaskan individuals that we've

sequenced. We don't see them in the northeast Asian ones. So clearly there's ancestral genetic components and segments that are coming into the Americas. And we don't know, does this possibly represent a pre-Clovis population that has simply disappeared? And the only record we have of it was that there was some sort of gene flow or interaction. And why is it only in South America? If it came across the land bridge and into North America, you would expect to see this signal all the way down into the continent.

Right. So we haven't quite figured out that. Did they not think that it potentially came from the south into South America? Not really. And let me tell you why we don't think that. And again, with the caveat that with archaeology, you know, we're never 100% sure, but I'm going to say 99.99.99 on this one. We know when people start moving out across the Pacific.

And we do know, in fact, that groups that moved out across the Pacific ultimately will, touch down in coastal South America. They won't really spend much time there, right? But that's only about 3,000 years ago, and that's only after folks develop the ocean-going technology, this big outrigger canoes and that sort of thing. To do that, in the Pleistocene, no, I think it's pretty much again, 99. So just to clarify, there's a genetic signal in South America that's not in North America that is from Australia? In that region, yeah. And that's in South America and no place else.

So what do you think? Just complete mystery? It's absolutely, I mean, these are the things that make this fun, right? It's that there's still so many questions to answer, and that's a big one. The ghost population of South America is some wild stuff, but it's worth noting that not all of the scientific community is an agreement that it's real. But that's how all this stuff works. It usually takes a generation or two to sort it all out. Potentially one day we'll understand even more as new information and technology unfolds.

And this exact thing, uncertainty, spurs my last question to Dr. Meltzer. With your career, how do you manage the uncertainty? Because you have to be certain. Like there's I'm sure you've done stuff in your career where you said, like, hey, this is the best information we have, and here's what we believe. And then later that was proven wrong. Yeah, but that's the fun of it, right? I mean, our hypotheses, our theories, our inferences are not like our children. We're more than happy to discover something new that shows us, oh, okay, now we have a much better idea. what I thought before was wrong.

I mean, you don't want it to happen too often. Sure, sure, yeah. But it's really, it's refreshing in a way because you're constantly learning stuff. And by virtue of the sort of dearth of data, I mean, we have a tremendous amount of data. Yeah. But in the grand scheme of things, do we want more?

Do we wish we had more? Absolutely. But there definitely are things that you can say with certainty that will never be, pretty much reversed. I mean, like I'm thinking, like if we'd had this conversation in the year 1900, this would be an entirely different conversation. If we had this conversation in the 1940s, it would be entirely different. We'd say, oh, man, we got Clovis and Folsom, and people have been here for 13,000 years. We also, through the, you know, the latter part of the 1900s would have

thought that people came across the Bury and Land Bridge through the ice-free corridor, and that's they got here. And then now we're saying, well, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, a, a coastal route. Yeah. Like how, 20 years from now, will we still be saying that it was a coastal route? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there are anchor points that we can use. I don't think the ice free corridor is going to open any earlier than we thought. Yeah, that's like pretty, that's like solid. I'm confident on that one. So let's have this conversation in 20 years and find out if I was right or not. Yeah. But I think that's, we're going to book this as a calendar appointment. Let's, let's, let's anchor that one right there. That's good. Was Clovis dating to, you know, around 13,000 plus or minus? Yeah, that's good. Have we found the earliest people in the Americas? No, I don't think so. Is it going to go much before around 50,000 years ago? I also don't think so. Here's what we're doing. This is really what science is all about. We are worrying away our ignorance. So I can say, just having this conversation here today, that,

I think the first people came into the Americas, sometime between about 16 and, say, 25,000 years ago. Okay? Do I think people could have come here 100,000 years ago? No, I don't. Not at all. Just because of the evidence that we have today suggests that's not the case. I don't even think they were here as early as 50 or 40, or maybe even 30. But that's just based on the evidence that we have today.

Am I willing to accept the possibility that I could be wrong? absolutely because as you know sort of alluded to the fact that I've been in this business for a while and it's true I've seen a lot of changes in the time that I've been in this business you know I mean we all used to believe that it was Clovis first and then it wasn't we used to believe the ice-free quarter was the way in and that it wasn't so yeah I've seen those changes yeah and I've also you know and it's it's humbling in the sense that it makes you realize do not

not be too confident about what you know because with archaeology there's always the potential for surprises. We're worrying away our ignorance. Attempting to answer these questions of the deep antiquity of man in North America is a grand intellectual feat. And I think it's important and it adds weight to our modern human story of driving on paved roads and living. living in brick air-conditioned homes. I can't imagine living in modern times and having little curiosity about where people came from. To me, this curiosity is respect. And in this case, it's respect for these people that lived here,

but also respect for the land itself. This is its story. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Greece. Brent's this country life podcast And I know that you're going to enjoy Lakes Backwoods University Please share our podcast feed with a friend this week Keep the wild places wild

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