Bear Grease - Ep. 34: The Folsom Site - The Unsolved Mystery of Fluted Stone (Part 4)

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

On this final episode in our series on the Folsom archeological site, we’ll explore the risky and mysterious process of fluting stone projectile points. For one thousand years these ancient bison hunters employed this process that some believe was entirely utilitarian, while others say it held greater significance. We’ll hear from the experts Dr. David Meltzer, Devin Pettigrew and Steve Rinella as we wrestle through the evidence. We’ll hear Rick Spicer knap out a fluted point and we’ll discuss the history of the atlatl with Devin. At the end, we’ll find our long awaited answer of why any of this ancient stuff is relevant to us in modern times.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.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. A guy that introduced me to the Folsom site. He couldn't get excited about certain cultures because they used a lot of junk stone and their points were crude in course. The guy had been an engineer.

He liked the Folsom point. To him, it was like, no, that's a good people. Man. It was kind of his attitude, you know. This week on the Bear Grease podcast, we're on our fourth and final episode in our series on the Folsom Archaeological Site. and we're talking about stone points. We're in search of understanding the ancient, mysterious, and difficult process of fluting stone.

We'll discuss the radical design and the mechanics of these stone points and infer some stuff about the culture of these people based on all that we have, these beautiful stone points that we call fulsome points. Of all their material possessions, these stones are the own, thing that have outlasted the erosive nature of time. We'll be talking with a new guest, anthropologist Devin Pettigrew, who will walk us through the design of these points and the history of Adel Adels. And one last time we'll tap into the knowledge of Dr. David Meltzer and Steve Ronella. We dove in and went to the dad gum bottom of the river, and we're finally coming up for

air as we'll discover the answer to our original question of why does any of this matter. The flutes on these points don't play any music, but they paint an incredible picture of who these people were. I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one. If you think about early Germanic flintlock rifles in the Americans, they were extremely well made. There was an art to them and they were engraved them. They didn't have to do all that stuff, but they could. With Folsom, they're just very concerned about, you know, making these points extremely. well made. Somebody put a lot of extra time in that than they really needed to. 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. On this episode, we're going to look into the technology and design of the Folsom Stone Point. These points were first discovered in the wild horse Arroyo in Fulsome, New Mexico, scattered amongst the remains of 32 Bison Antiquis. If you've been listening to this series, you know all this stuff. These bison were killed some 10,000 years ago by ancient human hunters, some of the first Americans. The technology of this point was radical in terms of its engineering and the reasoning of the ancient hunters to employ this risky style of point is a mystery.

All the experts agree the design has utilitarian function, but the reward of that function came with great costs, and some believe there was more to the point than just in the field performance. Was it cultural? Was it spiritual? Or was it the tendency of early man, just like it is today, to push engineering to the furthest side of the pendulum before the system breaks. We'll never know the full answer, but we're in search of why they fluted these points. I feel pretty good about what we've learned regarding the events of this ancient hunt that we've been dissecting. We've covered a lot of ground while we've been in pursuit of our layman's Ph.D. on Folsom. From George McJunkin, the former slave who found the site to the speculative.

on how the kill went down, to gourmet butchering, to who these ancient people were and how they lived. Along the way, we've been leaning on the insight of Steve Ronella of Meat Eater. His insight and ability to ask some interesting questions have helped open a broader vista on this subject. Here's Steve opening up our conversation on the uniqueness of the Folsom Points and the inferences that can be made about these people because of their craftsmen. The fineness of a fulsome point, it's the craftsmanship that goes into making a fulsome point, where you make this very perfect point. Every one of them kind of falls into a certain, like, dimensional characteristics, certain shape. You do something really hard to make like a point. And then you do something like knock these, a channel out of each face running the length of the point, which has a very high failure rate.

So even people now, like contemporary nappers to try to experience it, it's hard. It's like to make the thing and knock the thing out, most are not going to work. Just a delicate seeming, but probably very deadly thing. And it's so friendly wrought and from such perfect stone that I think that adds a lot to the mythology of the Folsom hunter.

And to demonstrate, I mean, I used to be friends, he passed away, but a guy that introduced me to the Folsom site, his name was Tony Baker. He come from a long line of anthropologists and arrowhead hunters.

He would talk about some cultures, just the projectile. points. He didn't seem to like the culture. I don't mean in a way like judging them. He couldn't get excited about certain cultures because they used a lot of junk stone and their points were, and their points

were crude in course. And he was making insinuations about who they were, their character. They were, they weren't picky about the stone they used. They were sloppy. They would leave, you know, they would leave like patination they wouldn't clean every face so sometimes it had like a patina

to it. And he was just like dismissive. not like dismissive, like not the religion or their belief system. He just couldn't get excited about a people that made that used Cruddy Stone to make a rather crude implement. The guy had been an engineer. He liked the fulsome point. To him, it was like, no, that's a good people. Man. It was kind of his attitude, you know.

Think about if you use that same idea and projected in the future of what people would say about us. It's a judgment you make when you make when you're. walking you're driving down the road man you see you know you see a nice house everything's organized a nice beautiful garden like there's a boat boat looks rigged up ready to go you go yeah it looks an industrious person you know and then you go by a place and everything's all falling down and and then disrepair and junk everywhere you most i'm not saying you most people make up yeah a sort of subtle passing judgment about what that person's um they're sort of like like how they feel about craftsmanship, how they feel about organization, whether they're fastidious and tidy,

you know, and in a similar way, I look at that point and I'm like, holy cow, man. We're inferring a lot from that one's point. Let's say someone, somehow anthropological techniques get very, so sophisticated that we learn somehow that the Folsom hunters really yelled at their wives all the time, okay? I'm terribly rude to their wives. I'd be like, oh, man, that kind of goes against my impression. Based on the projectile points. Never meet your heroes, Steve.

You never want to meet your heroes. Based on the projectile points, I find that very disappointed. Perhaps they were a little bit thuggish with their lives. It's a very real idea that how we manage our material things reflects some parts of our internal value system. Do you think that's fair? Do you think that we're coming to accurate conclusions when we infer this much about these people

from the craftsmanship of their stone points, I figure it's pretty accurate and no doubt an interesting thought. Like I said before, Dr. David Meltzer of SMU literally wrote the book on Fulsome. And before we get much further, we need to understand what a Fulsome point looks like

and how it's made. And it would probably help if you took a second and Googled Fulsome Point and looked at an image of one. Here's Dr. Meltzer describing what they look like. So Folsom points are some of the really wonderful examples of Flint napping you will ever encounter.

They tend to be about, I'm going to do this in centimeters because I've been doing centimeters. We don't know centimeters, Dr. Meltzer. Okay, so if you were a Folsom point, you'd be an inch and a half to two inches long. Okay, there we go. We're going to have to go millimeters, though, here, Clay, because I can't tell you. you what two to three millimeters in thickness is. I understood. Like an eighth of an inch thick. Less than a quarter. Oh, much less than a quarter. We might be talking 16th. Make them about an inch wide. And they have this very distinct flute. Think of it as a 20th century

bayonet, right? A groove up the face. And in fact, when they were first discovered, it was thought, because when they were first discovered, it was, you know, World War I was just a decade, less than a decade old. it was thought that these were actually bloodletting channels. But then they realized that the... For better penetration. Well, for better penetration, and then, you know, the animal's bleeding and it just goes down that channel and out, right? Well, as it turns out, these points were hafted,

by which we mean they were attached to spears. And the base of the point would have been anchored in the tip of a spear, and it would be wrapped and held in place. And there might be some foreshafs, or perhaps a notch at the top of the spear in which the point would be wrapped up. Oh, he's got one in his hands. I've got one in my hands.

This is not authentic fulsome, and in fact, it's a replica of fulsome point. But the base of the point would have been hafted or anchored into the tip of the spear. It might have been wrapped by sinew. They might have used some sort of mastic to kind of glue it in there. But what that means is that the flute itself

would have been buried inside the haft area. So it couldn't have been a very good bloodletting channel. These points were beautifully symmetrical. They were often finely trimmed with what we referred to as gentle sort of pressure flaking up and down the edge, quite sharp, and would be used for hunting. These are not necessarily points that often had multi-uses. So earlier Clovis points, we often see that they were used as knives as well as projectiles. These things are built to hunt.

These are really, this is a specialized point. Yeah, it's a point that is intended to bring down an animal. But a lot of the time, because it's so thin, its thinness makes it fragile, we often see impact damage. You know, when stone meets bone at high velocity, it breaks. Dr. Meltzer just brought up the weakness of the Folsom technology. It's thin and it breaks easily. However, that's also its greatest strength. Thin points penetrate well can be made very sharp and are easily resharpened when the tips break.

Devin Pettigrew is an anthropologist and got his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research is in experimental archaeology, and he focuses on the tools and weapons of early hunter-gatherers. He's an expert on Adalattles, and we're going to talk about those, but first he's going to describe Folsom points. several times in this podcast you'll hear us talk about Clovis points and will describe them in contrast to the Folsom point so it'd be good if we understood what they were. It's handy to think about the different style of points as different kinds of broadhead technology

like cut-on-impact fixed blade heads or expandable broadheads. The Clovis technology is older than Folsom technology and it's easy to see that Folsom was the next step past Clovis. Clovis is a partially fluted point and basically about one third at the base of the point had the slabs taken off the sides of it. The removal of the sides is called fluting. Folsom points are fluted the entire way down the side to achieve maximum thinness on the point. You can imagine people going, well, if a little fluting is good, I bet a lot of fluting would be even better. If that doesn't sound like human behavior, I don't know what does. Here's Devin.

Describe for me a fulsome point. Like if no one had ever seen it and you decided to use words, how would you describe it? Okay. I would say we're dealing with a lancelot style point. So you can make it of like a lance head. It's kind of long and narrow. Yeah, long and narrow. It runs straight up the sides.

And it doesn't have corner knot. It doesn't have notching in at the base. Okay. It's got a slightly concave base. They're usually thin and they're made. of high quality material. They're very carefully flaked, and then they have driven up the face on both sides from the base,

a big flute. And what this is is it's a flake that runs almost the entire length of the point and just takes this channel out. It takes the side of it. So if it's like a three inch, imagine a three inch point. Yeah. And you could just take a saw and just cut a slab of the side of it off. Yeah, if you could just, I would say take a,

if you could take your point and take a gouge and just gouge out a nice channel. out of both sides. Both sides. Yeah, but you have to do it with a flake. It makes it thin. It makes them very thin. Would it be done with one motion? Yes.

So, I mean, they got to get right one time. Pop, hit it. Yeah. And probably what they had, since they were doing, I mean, this was a cultural, you know, what we call an industry, a stone tool industry, they had a specific method of doing it

that they, that everybody knew and that worked for them. And probably for Clovis points and Folsom points that were fluted, that probably entailed. some kind of a vice or a way to hold the point tightly and then make a very controlled strike, probably with what we'd call indirect percussion, where you're actually taking the tool that's going to do the work of not driving off the flake, and you're taking another tool that you use as a

hammer to strike that. Okay. So you can set everything up. Like it'd be like, if you're trying to knock a flake off a rock, you'd put a chisel on top of the rock and then clack it with a hammer. You can get the indirect. Indirect percussion. Indirect percussion. If your chisel analog is right on because you could get the angle of it just right. You could put it right where you want it and hold it just straight at angle and then whack. That's probably how they're driving off those flakes in a very controlled fashion that was, you know, extremely, they had an art down to make these things. The craft involved in making these points is undeniable and I want us to be immersed into the process of making a fulsome point. I want to hear it. There's some real world drama because of

the investment of time and using the valuable material that much energy was expended to acquire. And the risky fluting process right at the end either makes or breaks the point. No pun intended. Seems like the Bear Grease podcast, there's a lot of puns. But I want you to meet my friend Rick Spicer. He's an experienced mountaineer and a bushcraft expert. He's one of the owners of a cool outdoor store in Fayetteville, Arkansas, called the Packrat. Aside from climbing big mountains, Rick is a primitive bow hunter.

He makes his own bows and naps his own stone points for hunting. I asked Rick if he'd be willing to try to make us a fulsome point, which he doesn't do very often, but he agreed to try. Okay, so what I've got here are a handful of different preforms or by faces, is another term that they're often referred to as. And a preform is simply kind of like a first stage of a stone point that, you know, an indigenous person, first people would have created that would have been lighter weight that they could have carried with them. And then from there, they could have further refined that more into a specific tool. So this would have been, this is like a three inch point.

This would have been like a big rock. Exactly. So they wouldn't have wanted to, you know, like in an alabates or a quarry, a stone core. they would have quarried this and obviously stones heavy like they don't want to carry any more than they have to so they would have quarried this out they would have done what's called spalling they would have cracked off pieces of that and then from those spalls they would have further refined those down into these bifaces or preforms and then they would have hauled those off to their hunting sites and then a camp they would have further refined those into specific tools exactly yep so you have

so you've already built these preforms for us today because that would have taken yeah this was Homes down. Tell me how you're going to turn that into a fulsome point. Yeah, so that's, you know, where the rubber meets the road, right? And so the thing about... See if you're a real fulsome. Right, right, right. So the thing that's so unique about the fulsome is the fluting process. And basically what you're doing in that process is you're striking it at the base of the preform to remove a very large flake off of it. And you're thinning that point down to basically the maximum amount so that when you fit it in the foreshaft, it's very, very easy. You're basically just splitting a stick and sliding it into the end of it. And by removing these flutes, and what's really

unique is the way that it's symmetrical. It's on both sides. And to do that on a fulsome point and not break the thing is really, really hard. So talk to me about how they think they did that with the jigs. Yeah, so there's kind of three ways you can go about getting a flake to lease on one of these types of points. One way is through direct percussion. It's the most simple, but it's arguably the most difficult. And basically, you're going to hold the thing in your hand, and you're going to strike it with a hammerstone or an antler or something like that. And you're just going to try to knock the flake off. But there's so many things that can go wrong, trying to do that, to get the angle right, to hit it in the right spot, all that type of stuff. You end up breaking them a lot.

The second way is going to be through indirect percussion. And that's where you use what's called a punch typically. You're going to put that on the side, or basically lay it on the platform, and then hit that tool with another tool, with the hammer. That allows you a greater degree of control over the angle and the striking surface, but it's still a lot to, now you're working with like multiple things and trying to hold it all together, which is really hard. And the final way, and I think a lot of, you know, anthropologists and certainly nappers would agree that it's likely that they were using a jig of some kind. Now, nappers have man-made jigs that they use out of lumber and that sort of thing.

But I have seen, I've never done this myself, but I've seen demonstrations where basically you're driving a couple of sticks into the ground, you're putting the point upside down and bracing it up against these two sticks, which provide a stable surface to press against. And then they're using a lever to sort of gradually apply pressure and basically like pop that flute off of the back. Yeah. And it's a, it's a very, Like I say, I don't have experience doing it. I've not used jigs before. I've always used either direct percussion or indirect percussion,

but I also break a lot of points, you know, in the process. So with this, though, we're using heavy-duty tools at a late-stage point in the process. That's brutal. Where it's brittle. It's thin, and the likelihood of doing something wrong and busting the thing is really, really high. They say that they estimate 30 to 40% failure even with the fulsome. some people. Well, let's do it.

Yeah, let's get it going. So I'm going to basically work away. Rick is working on building a platform at the base of the point that will give him a specific spot to strike. That, in theory, will cause the entire side of the point to flake off with one strike. The likelihood of failure seems really high to me. What are the chances this is going to be? It's going to work.

I'd say there's a 50% chance. I'll get a decent flute on it. There's probably a 20, 30% chance that I'll break it and a 10% chance that we're going to get a flute that's even remotely close to a Folsom-style flute. So unlike your optimism. Yeah, so the platform is ready to go. Again, this is a direct percussion method.

So I'm going to take, in this case, the copper billet, and I'm going to strike it at a steep angle to try to get a flute to release down the center this thing. That's what happens. I broke the ear off. But the, yeah, I'll tell you what, I'm going to clean it up just a little bit. And what basically what this means now is we're going to end up with a shorter point because I knocked the rear one of the ears off. His first hit broke the base. He's gearing up for his second strike. Okay. That's not bad.

Yeah. You can see that if I flip it over, there's the flip. that's removed. There was no way I thought that was going to work for it. Oh, it's nice. No, it really, really, you, you're holding this three-inch-long point, hitting it with a big, clubby-looking piece of copper. Yeah, a hammer, basically, right? And it takes off this, like, delicate flute off the side.

That's awesome. When you see this process happen, it almost seems miraculous that this long flute just peels off with a single strike. but he's just halfway through. He's still got to do the other side, but I'll save you the stress and drama. Rick was successful at getting a partial flute on the other side, but it wouldn't have been considered a true Folsom-style point.

Rick said it would be closer to the partial fluting of the Clovis style point. And if you're interested in watching Rick make a point, I'll put a short clip on my Instagram, and you can also follow Rick at Packrat Bushcraft on Instagram. The biggest question that remains unanswered is why did they take the risk of such extreme fluting? The point would have killed animals without the fluting, but they employed this technology across vast geographic regions for 1,000 years. Think about this. What other technologies in human history have been used for that long?

The wheel? The plow? We've been using some form of gunpowder and guns for a little over a thousand years. At the time, they might have thought about the fulsome point like we do gunpowder as an essential thing. Here's Steve and I talking about the longevity of the technology and entertaining a very interesting idea. The consistency that you see that is clearly handed down through human communication that spread across broad geographic distances for long periods of time, that these people were able to pass down values. they passed on a technique of a way to make a point.

But think about the, like you and I are trying to do with our kids right now, Steve. It's like we're trying to pass down a value system to them. And all that's left of the Folsom hunters is this piece of stone. Yeah. But there was a bunch of other stuff that came with that too, the culture, what they valued, what they worship, what they saw beauty in, was translated. And it was taught to that son just like it was his ability to nap a Folsom point. because it wasn't just like one generation and it was thousands of years of people and they did it the same and that's why that brings up an interesting point is why did they flute this and i want i want to hear your your thoughts on why they fluted it because it's clear that this was a difficult process the advantages of it killing stuff are because that's the way we would look at it as hunters is like what's the advantage of this projectile point killing something more efficient so that my family eats rather than starves.

And so that's a pretty heated debate. There's an idea that is tossed out there that it was non-utilitarian that the point was fluted, that it was, you know, and I'm not saying I buy it. I'm just saying I like the idea. I used to like that idea too. I used to like the idea too. And let's just be fair and acknowledge right now. We don't know.

We don't know. We ain't going to find it. out, but hear me out. I used to like that too. Then I realized that there's a joke. There's a joke among anthropologists. If you don't understand what do you do? You say that it must have had spiritual significance or religious significance. If you dig a site and you find that there's five bison skulls at the site and the bison skulls seem to have been roughly arrayed in a circle. It must have had spiritual significance. Not that. Whatever they were doing that. day and how those carcasses were scavenged by dire wolves and dragged around or whatever happened

it just so happens that that's how it ended up. Or that you're finishing up and your kids are messing around and they put them in a little pile, you know, that tendency to look at things and be like, huh, must have had spiritual significance. It's just, there's also just a lot of, who knows, a long time past. Now let me give us something on the converse side real quick. I could see the fact that they did it a certain way and they did it that way for a long time being a way to make you think that it must have had spiritual significance.

But it could also be that these were a people who lived in extreme isolation at that time. Not that there were, I mean, there were people, there were at the time of the Folsom hunters, there were human beings stretched from Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America.

But these people, these bison hunters out on the plains, might have been living in such a sort of cultural isolation that they had an idea. They had a thing they hunted and the way they hunted it. And they went a thousand years, whatever it is, without someone coming in and being like, no, no, no, you've always got it all wrong. Here's how you make a good project.

Yeah, here's how you make a good projectile point. So maybe there is just the way they did it, work for them. And they weren't subject to a lot of new ideas. And here's this like these people that had this, this lifestyle that they live far longer, far longer than any notion of the United States of America has been around. They were at it for a long time. Just me sitting here in a chair. My valueless interpretation of it is that it was a function of the equipment they were using.

Here we go again with Steve trying to completely rationalize the functional argument for the fluting of the fulsome points. Here he is with his final thought on making these things. another cool thing is that at certain sites they'll find where someone's making one and they break it so they're in they're channeling it and break it there are museum specimens of a never used fulsome point broken and lying next to it and matched to it is the channel flake that came out of it knocked the channel out went to knock the channel out broke the thing dropped it all and at the end of the ice age people who probably wouldn't have been unreasonable they would have run into one of the last mammoths roaming around. And then some dude today goes, oh, here's a point. Oh, here's a Channelflake. And they matched pairs.

But that's, that's, I just can't, I think it's utilitarian, man. It just doesn't make, it just compare it to a Clovis point. The Clovis hunters who were using that landscape ahead of the Folsom hunters probably had, were probably after had opportunities on much bigger animals. because they were, you know, this is occurring at what we call the Pleistocene-Hollicine transition. So the end of the Ice Ages, and you had this, all this megafaun of vanishing, giant ground sloths, mammoths, mammoths, or vanishing from the landscape. The guys before had a very beautiful, finely-wrought point that was big.

And then here's this, like, it's tidy. These big, huge animals start to vanish. And then who lives there next? people who make a smaller point. Great point on the size of the Clovis points as compared to the size of the animals they were hunting. But you think a guy like Steve would like to entertain a little more romantic thinking in his life.

However, I think his point about its utilitarian design is well taken. But maybe it's not that cut and dry. It's possible that it could have been viewed as highly functional but also held significance beyond that. Let's see what Dr. Meltzer has to say. We actually don't know why they fluted these points. There's no particular obvious reason.

With some colleagues, we have hypothesized that the way in which these things were fluted and the way in which these things were half to despears might have actually served kind of as a shock absorber in the sense that the waves of force would travel through. And instead of the point banging into the back end, the base of the flute where it was thinnest, and again, you know, one to two millimeters thick, it would just crumble. Like a bumper on a car, right? The bumper on a car is intended to give way.

It crumbles so your car doesn't break when you hit something. The base of the flute was so thin that it might have crumbled and prevented the entire way. So the wave of force travels through. It's going to rebound back. But if the base crumbles, all that energy is going to get dissipated. And you can remake the... portion that broke off and used it again.

Exactly. That is the most unique thing about these fulsome points is the mystery of the fluting. I read in your book where it's been discussed that perhaps it was non-utilitarian, which means that it served no functional purpose but was a cultural purpose. And I would like to make a comment on that, Dr. Meltzer, as a bow hunter and as a hunter, and we see this throughout history that cultures do distinguish. themselves and establish identity through the way that they hunt. We do it today. I do it every day of my life. Right. The weapons that I used to hunt are part of my tribal identity. Of course.

I really like this idea that, and it's kind of a romantic idea, that these people would have been doing something that took an incredible amount of skill to do and actually jeopardized. They say there's a high percentage of failure when you get a point to the 30 to 40 percent failure rate in manufacture. So it's totally inefficient to flu the point. Absolutely. But why the hell do the humans do all the weird things that we do that are completely non-functional? To think that this style, this technology, this is essentially a technology that would have been passed down from generation to generation. And there may have come a point when the guy was like, why are you still fluting those silly things. They break every time. And, you know, at some point that's shifted away from that

technology, just like it would today. But man, so much mystery inside of a fluted, fulsome point. Right. But, you know, there's hunting magic, too. You're going to go out there and, you know, you want to have your best weaponry. But, you know, you also want to have your distinctive points. You're going to make your stuff. You're going to be in charge of your gear. And, you know, there may be a bit of ceremony associated with going out on a hunt because, look, going after an animal that was that big and could be that dangerous, there's two risks in hunting. One is the risk you're going to come home empty-handed. And the other risk is you're not going to come home at all because you're dead, right?

And so in some projectile points at some sites, you see bits of red ochre, right? they're putting, and it may not just be sort of part of the mastic that's holding the point on, it may be that there were ceremonies in advance of the hunt. And everybody's got their own weaponry that they make their own particular way. One of the things that was really interesting to me at the Folsom site, which I could never possibly prove, but it's just one of those things that, you know, I'll bet it's right. I look at the assemblage of the projectile points from that site, and I am convinced that I can identify at least three separate,

nappers based on the style of the points that they make. And how would you ever prove that? You can't, right? But I look at these things and I say, you know what? That really looks like the same person. Yes. And I'm not saying same guy. Who knows?

You know, maybe the women were making Folsom points too. I'm willing to bet the same person made this point and that point. And a different person made those two points. Yeah. And think about it, too. If you want credit, I don't know, when you go out hunting, with guys? Do you say it was my shot? I had the kill shot. And you can tell because that's my arrow. Yours is over there stuck in a tree. So you would have been able to distinguish.

Yeah. You know, that's, that is so unique even today amongst Flint mappers is that it's a craft. It's an art. It's almost like a fingerprint. 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. I wanted to ask all these experts the same question, so I've asked Devon, too, why the Folsom hunters flew to their points. You might find some overlap in these guys' opinions, but they all bring a little different perspective. Here, Devin will go into the detail of the physics behind the design of the Folsom point, and he's the guy to know because he's done some real experiments

using stone points on bison. The question of the age is why did they, use this style of point. Why do you think they did it? Part of it is you have a cultural momentum aspect where tools evolve out of earlier tools. So before Folsom, we have Clovis points, and that's when we start seeing fluted bases. But they're not, Clovis points are generally larger and they're not fluting the whole base. So this was an older technology. Clovis came before.

In Clovis, they did not flute the entire face of the point. Yeah, usually not. base. Yeah. And then you see this technique is kind of perfected. And with Folsom, they're just very concerned about, you know, making these points extremely well made. You know, I'd say part of it is just, you know, you can look at different cultures today and look at things that we make. And some of us are, some cultures are more concerned with something that's functional. It doesn't have to be to look, you know, perfect. If you think about like early Germanic flintlock rifles in the Americans, they were extremely well made. There was an art. to them and they engraved them. They didn't have to do all that stuff, but they could. Yeah, yeah. There was some cultural value assigned to the aesthetic beauty of it. Yeah, there's a social value to it. And the key there to think of it is that they could do it, right? They had the time and the resources available. It's not like it was, you know, because they were engraving rifles that put their lives at risk for some reason.

I see. So they had the resources available and the time available, apparently, to make points that looked that way. I want to hear why it was functional for these points to be this way, but you're saying that there was some, they're clearly because of the craftsmanship of them, there would have been some just aesthetic value. Probably. Yeah. We can suspect that was probably the case. Wow. So there would have been, there would have been pride in this point. Somebody would have been like, check this thing out. Yeah. And they would be like, wow. I mean, if you look at some of those, you're like, wow. I mean, they really. I wonder what they called them, Devin, because they sure didn't call them Folsom points. No, they didn't.

Folsom, New Mexico wouldn't name until, like, you know, sometime in the 1800s. They would have called them something, wouldn't they? Yeah. They would have had to have. Yep, unfortunately, that's one of those mysteries. We'll never know. But, yeah, I mean, some of those, you look at them and you just know, somebody put a lot of extra time in that than they really needed to.

It's an interesting thought to think that these people would have had a specific, widespread name for this style of point. It would have been a common word, but it existed and disappeared before written languages appeared on the earth, we'll never know. But they sure as heck didn't call them Fulsome points. As a matter of fact, Fulsom, New Mexico was named after the fiancé of the American President Grover Cleveland.

Her name was Francis Fulsom. Man, she got more than she bargained for, and I'm about tired of people naming stuff after famous leaders or their girlfriends in hopes of gaining political collateral. You guys remember the Cumberland Gap, don't you? Naming conventions are weird and rarely just. Though human technology has changed, we know that human nature hasn't, and some ancient hunter may have named the dadgum point after his girlfriend. We'll never know.

But we've got more important questions with more definite answers. Back to Devon. So why was this point so functional? because it probably had some function too. Had to have. Yeah. To answer to that, I have to go in a little bit about the background of my research, which big part of it was these, what I'd call, realistic experiment.

And if you're familiar with Ed Ashby, you'll, you know, you're probably familiar with this because these are the kinds of experiments that he prefers to test hunting arrows. And what you do is basically you have a carcass of an animal. It's, we don't kill them. The ranchers kill them. They've just died. And then we perform a projectile experiment on him. where we're throwing replica atlottles and darts and shooting arrows and tracking the velocity,

tracking where they've hit, and then butchering them with stone tools, and then taking the bones and cleaning them, and we keep all the meat. And so that allows you to track, you know, specific impacts to specific bones. You can look at the performances they penetrate and all that. We've done one on a bison and included in that were big heavy darts, a couple of atlottles that are big strong throwers stronger than myself. Donnie Dust, he's a self-described modern caveman. The problem we run into with the Clovis points is that atlittle darts, like I said,

they're flexible. When you throw them, they flex, and they compensate for the arcing motion of the throw, and they actually continue to flex down range. When they hit with a lot of momentum, a lot of energy, that acts not only on the target, but back on the projectile. So you have to have a really well-designed, really robust shaft. If you have any bindings, you know, where the foreshaft fits in, where the point is hafted on, all of that has to be really well engineered. And if you're hunting big animals, that's what you want.

You know, Donnie was able to throw a point that heavy ash dart and hit a bison rib, and it fractured the rib in half and continue to penetrate into the vitals of the bison. And we're getting, you know, penetration through and through that animal with these heavy darts. Passing all the way through, like poking out the other side, entry and exit. Yeah. So these weapons are powerful. Yeah. The problem is when they hit with kind of a skewed angle, you can have a couple different things happen that's not good.

The haft fails because the notches, the wooden notches that are holding the point in snap. Okay. And you don't get any penetration. So if the point impacts the animal at an angle. Yeah, at a slightly skewed angle. Gotcha. And especially if it's hitting bone, that's the real problem. Because you have these animals.

So you need a broad side. you need to hit them like perpendicular to that bone. You would preferably hit them, yeah, but that's not always going to happen just because of the nature of the weapon. Or you might have it that the point is dislodged from the haft and it's kind of turned sideways, you know, breaks through its bindings.

It just twists out of the half. Yeah, and you get failed penetration. That happened a few times. That happened with unfluited Clovis forms. Okay. When you flute these things, they're fitting kind of down deep into the notches. Yeah.

That does a couple of things. First off, it reduces that lateral motion. so that they're locked in there with those fluting channels. And then the second thing it does is that those flutes slimmed down the half. If you're hunting a big animal, you want an efficient projectile. We know that as hunters. This is something that I see archaeologists overlooking sometimes is if you're hunting big animals, there's a real incentive to make an effective, well-designed projectile point.

Part of what that's going to entail is a slim haft. Because when the halting part goes in, if it's big and bulky, that's when you see a lot of of deceleration suddenly. Okay, so a thinner point means there's more wood around the base of that point, the haft, so that it's stronger when it impacts. Yeah, wood or we find these weird things that people call bone rods. And actually there are, there's at least one foreshaft with the actual haft. The notch is cut for a point to fit in. I know of it. I believe it's from Oregon, and that's made out of antler or bone. And that's, that's, that's, that's ancient. So they were trying to compensate for the wooden shaft breaking when it hits the.

So they said, man, we're going to, we got to do something different. And they used an antler tip. There's a possibility that some of those bone rods, those kind of slat-like segments were used in as notches. It would certainly make a more sturdy haft. It's an idea that comes out of these realistic experiments. You know, you're trying to reverse engineer these things and use them in these trial-and-air experiments. You get you get certain insights like this. The channels lock in the point,

reduce lateral movement, and since you have a long haft with the case of Clovis points, you have a bit of blade sticking out. They have a lot of leverage to break those those halting notches. And you want it to be slim and, you know, good at penetrating. The way I think of Clovis and Folsom points is that they're coming out of this tradition of lancelot points and where you have things this way. You know, they fit down deeply into these these four shafts, you want them to be good at penetrating. And so one way you can, you can try and resolve this issue is by fluting the base. And so maybe what's going on with Folsom is they're really trying to lock in those points. They're trying to make them durable. They're part of a

composite, durable, a heavy shaft that carries a lot of energy, but is able to break through bones. You know, that to me explains it. Yeah. So, By having the flute go all the way to the tip of the point, you can really shove that thing in deep. So that would have meant there would have been wood way up on the point. And there would have been blade that would be below. Blade along the margins of the haft. Yeah.

So they were one benefit there is that you support the stone. It's not very flexible, obviously. And you get these bending fractures. Where would you put the, sine you to attach the... Further down the base, they were grinding the bases so that they don't... You know, when you wrap it with sinew,

when you do get those skewed impacts or any kind of impact that pushes the point, you know, to the side and the haft, it can cut through its own bindings. So they ground the bases. So they would have put sinew like on parts of the blade? Up the base that was ground. And then you just have this transition

where there are no longer grinding it. And so the forward section of the point is ungrounded, sharp. Devin did a great job of explaining the details of the functionality of the hafting advantages of the Folsom-style point using his real-world experience. So now we've got an understanding of the broad picture of the potential reasons why they implemented this radical technology. But here's an interesting question. When did they move away from this technology? When did they stop doing that? So there was a point when we know that they started fluting points.

And then when did the technology shift? After Folsom. So Clovis folks developed the technology and their fluting points. Folsom take it to really kind of an extreme. I mean, when you're taking a point that to begin with is only four millimeters or so in thickness, and then you're driving off a thin flake that may be just one to two. two millimeters, that's serious skill. So the technology kind of, the pendulum swung really far.

Yeah. That happens all the time. Absolutely. And everything, doesn't it? Absolutely. So eventually they were like, hey, guys, this isn't. We've gone too far down that road. Let's back up.

I guarantee you this happened, because this happens in my life with my dad. My dad gives me a hard time about gear that I use, you know, because he used this kind of gear and I use this kind of gear. I guarantee you there was some Folsom Grandpa who was like, Dad gum those young kids, they quit fluting those points. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the stuff that comes after Folsom is unfluited, but it works just as well, which told you that fluting wasn't necessary because you could do it.

You know, for the next 10,000 years, nobody was fluting points and they were still killing animals. I bet those guys that started doing stuff different made fun of the old Folsom fluters. Or just said, look at all that. stone you were wasting because 40% of the time you can't get it right. Wait a minute, fluting wasn't necessary? What's the whole point of this podcast? My romantic stone point dreams are crushed. And I'm intrigued by this idea of the shift to a new design and how that happened. I wonder how long it took. I wonder if it upset people. I wonder if it was a fulsome flutter's kid that started doing something different or an

outside influence from another region. We'll never know. But it's probably not much different than the reasons you and I changed gear over time. Maybe we just got tired of the old stuff and wanted to try something new. That seems to be a trend in human history. Here's Steve and I talking about the technology transition. You know what's wild to think about is a fulsome hunter would have been walking across the landscape or would have been in a camp, a historical campsite, and would have picked up a Clovis point,

which predated him. And he probably would have been having, they probably had podcasts back then where the Folsom people talked about the Clovis people like we're talking about Folsom. There are sites where post-Columbian, so when we use like pre-Columbian times, like pre-contact times,

there are post-Columbian times, be a Native American sites where in their collections of things were Folsom points. So they saw them as significant and old. Recognized it as something and kept it. Wow. And kept it among their things. They had to have talked about the technology too, because they would have seen the difference in technology and understood that something changed and they did something different than they used to.

And they had to would have thought that what they're doing now was better than what those guys were doing or they would have done it like the guys back then. Because they were shooting it out of bows. they were probably like, huh, that's not going to fly good. That's not going to work. That's not going to fly good out of an arrow. Out of a little thin little arrow. You'd have to think they would have looked and been like, yeah, I could figure that out.

Like I could, you know, I get what they were doing there, but it's not something I would make. Yeah. Not how we do it now, but at a time, apparently, that was a good point. They were like, those hillbillies. So we've been focusing on the stone projectile point, but we haven't talked about what they used to throw them. Devin is an expert in Adel Adels. He's dedicated much of his research to them, and he's very good at throwing them. For us to finalize our layman's Ph.D., we need some intel on this primitive tool

because they have been the primary hunting tool of humans longer than they haven't. Here's Devin talking about Adel Atoll Atoes. So why don't you just describe for me what an Adle Ato is? The original word you'd pronounce it something like Atlat. And that's from the Aztec language, not what language. So we've anglicized it to Atlatl. Say it again? How would they have said it?

Atl. Wow, just really short. Yeah, the last T.L is pronounced, like you put the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth and blow air around the sides. Atlac. And a lot of language, you know, words in their language, like Ketzalquak are pronounced that way. We've anglicized it atlattle. And all it is really is a, it's a lever to assist the body, assist your,

you're throwing the length of your throwing arm. And because you're lengthening out that throwing arm, and of course we don't, when we throw things, we don't just push them straight out. We throw with an arcing motion, then the dart, the spear, which we call a dart, because that's an archaic English means just a light,

usually fletched spear, which is precisely what they were. So it would be like what we would call an arrow except longer. Yeah, except bigger. It's kind of like... So it would have fletched spear. Fletchings on it. Most of them.

Adel-Addle dart would have fletches would have feathers that would guide the flight of it. Usually. Yeah, not all of them. You know, if you look at what Native Australian people were using, they were using unfledged forms, and most of them pretty big. So these things range in size from, you know, pretty small, just like five feet tall to over 13 feet tall in some case. The arrows, the darts.

The darts. It could be from five feet to 13 feet. Yeah, so there's a huge range of variability in the weapon. But the dart has to flex because when you throw it, you're making this arcing motion. So basically it's compensating for that arcing motion and maintaining a straight trajectory. And basically you start off just as you would normally throw something with kind of the big muscles of your shoulder and like putting your torso twist into it, stepping forward a little bit. And then as you come in to the throw, you turn your wrist over and that final wrist snap is what gives a lot of the velocity to the dart.

The motion that you just made look like a pitcher throwing a baseball. Yeah, precisely. I mean, or a quarterback throwing a football. Yeah. The wrist snap that puts a spiral on a football or puts a twist on a baseball. Yeah, you think about a quarterback standing back there

and then he just steps forward and smoothly throws right to the target. That's what you're doing. You're casting this thing. You cast the dart with the outlet on kind of a controlled motion. If you look online in like any, almost any archaeology museum, you see this ridiculous depiction where a guy, is holding one of these things down by his waist and then he's like running in and all this there's

all this body motion well you can throw him that way for distance that's not where you're going to be doing when you're hunting you're you're you're standing there and maybe taking a little step forward and and just smoothly casting it right where you want it to go you know when i think about an adelae and someone hunting with it yeah it's almost hard to fathom how you could be proficient enough to yeah for your food source to be right totally dependent upon your ability to be accurate but then when i you making this motion right here, it's like, I'm pretty decent to throw in a football. Right. And it's because I've done it my whole life.

Yeah. And it's no different, is it? These people, this was just an extension of their body, of their mind. They just... Yeah, it's, you know, javelins, one thing, and there are ethnographic cultures that are really good with javelins, and they're quite proficient hunting with them. But one way we've come to think about this is it's easier for most people in society, more people in society to learn to use this. and to put power in it without having to be, you know, big and strong or without having to throw with some, you know, large or, you know, big body movements.

So if you're hunting deer, you know, elk, just imagine sneaking around with one of these things up and in the ready. And when you're ready to throw, it's just a smooth step forward and cast right to the target. Yeah. It is more challenging with a bow. You're stealthier. You know, you can shoot it from a crouching position. there's less body movement. So if you're hunting a swift, wary animal like a white tail,

it's just a stealthier weapon. But with an outlet and dart, you can hunt medium-sized small animals like that. But after the bow comes in, it seems they continue to use it, particularly for large animals like bison in open environments. Because these darts, you can make them quite heavy. They carry a lot of energy, a lot of momentum,

and they're very powerful. so it's easy to make the weapon powerful, which is hard to do with a bow and arrow. Fascinating stuff. The simplicity of the addalattle is hard to argue with, but we need to clear something up. What is the timeline of usage between atlattles and bows? I've always wondered that.

Devon's answer surprised me, and the complexity of that answer has to do with what he calls preservation bias. So that brings up a great point. that we need to talk about is the timeline of an Adeladal and a boat. Just give us a time picture of this technology when it came in. Yeah, so we don't know quite how old the weapon is. The earliest definitive examples, which, and when I say definitive, we're talking about the parts of the actual Atlattle themselves,

not the projectile points is usually all we have to look at. It's really hard to tell what you're looking at just from a projectile point. But the oldest definitive examples come from caves in Europe, and they date back almost 20,000 years. Wow. The weapons are probably a lot older in that. Well, when you're talking about archaeology, it's always so fascinating because, like, so they found an Adelaide, they think is 20,000 years old.

You know, what's the chances that was the first one that a human ever made, you know? Precisely. Probably didn't find that one. Precisely, yeah, you have preservation bias. That's always a problem with the earliest evidence. Preservation bias. Now, that's a new word. I like it.

Yeah, that's one of the things archaeologists have to contend with is the fact that when you're walking around as a hunter and gather doing things on the landscape, how much of the stuff that you do and make and leave behind, like, how many of the hunts that you've undertaken are going to stick around so archaeologists can find them 20,000 years later? Very few of them. So you have to build up enough culture on the landscape, enough people doing things that eventually you start to leave signs behind. So you're saying that maybe we're building these narratives off of stuff these people were doing that maybe wasn't even a major part of their life. I mean, that's not what we're talking about with the Adlau, but that's possible.

Like, because we're only finding the things that could be preserved. And so maybe that little sector of their life was, maybe it was important. Maybe it wasn't. Yeah, it's just something they left behind and we happened to find it. But there was other stuff they were doing that was not capable of being left behind. Precisely, yeah. That could have been massive. Yeah, I was talking to students the other day about those early footprints in New Mexico.

and I said, how many of the, you've walked around on the earth, how many of the footprints you've left behind you think would last, you know, over 20,000 years? They're like, none. Yeah. So it's just all, they did all these things, you know, they made nets out of plant fiber and hide clothing, and it's extremely rare that you get that kind of evidence.

And, I mean, even the hard artifacts you leave, like stone tools, They need to be in places where the site gets preserved and it's not too buried, but it doesn't get washed away by a river. You know, there's all these variables that go into preservation of archaeological sites and then allows us to find them. So when did the bow come in? So Adelaal's been around for at least 20,000. When was bow technology? There's pretty good evidence for the earliest bow technology about 70,000 years ago in southern Africa. So the bow is older than the adelaal?

According to our evidence. Really? Yeah. Which is kind of funny. The bow didn't spread rapidly. Well, we're looking at our projectile points that are strikingly similar to historic, ethno-historic projectile points used with bow and neurotechnology in Africa. And they have all the signs, you know, of impact damage and residue analysis and all that.

So we're basing this totally off the size of the point? Well, the size of the point, the damage that they have incurred striking some hard object. Wow. The microscopic wear. So there's macro and microscopic where, you know, macro being with naked eye, microscopic. If you look at it in a microscope, you can see like impact striations from where they've penetrated something. Residues left behind from the hafting where they were hafted. And definitely the size is very important.

But if you look at these points, they're very much like what? people were using up to the historic period in southern Africa. But in North America, the bow didn't come along for a long time. There are suggestions that it was appearing in the Arctic 5,000 years ago or more. But again, we're just looking at point sizes mostly and point styles. So we're not dealing with definitive evidence. By 2,000 years ago, though, it has entered down into, and what caused it to actually start to spread is tricky because.

clearly people were connected for a long time, you know, from the far north into the middle of the continent. But it finally started entering into the middle of the continent around 2,000 years ago. So this is a long time after it started back over in Africa. So the technology just spread. Yeah. Did it spread? Do we know that it would have spread from human to human contact, like sharing technology? Or was it convergent?

Did two people have the same idea at the same time in different places? Yeah, was it disseminated or was it independent evolution or independent invention of the technology and evolution of the technology? That's a really hard question to answer. So we're looking at projectile points mostly. And we do have in North America, we have Atletal artifacts dating back. The oldest complete preserved Atletal is 5,000 years old, a little bit older than that from Nevada. And we have other artifacts from the Atlilals themselves going way back. to the plices scene, the hooks of the atlottles made of mammoth tusks.

We don't have that for bows. You know, you start to see... A bow is pretty much made out of organic matter, the whole thing. So, yeah, wood and sinew. So the only reason we know about atlattles is because they had a part of the addalattle, the hook, was made of something that was organic matter, but harder. Yeah. Like a bone.

Yeah, osseous, bone or antler. So these were, there are some mammoth tusks or mammoth ivory. hooks that have come out of deposits in Florida. And then we have wooden examples preserved later on. So occasionally you do get wood preserving. That's when you have either extremely dry conditions or you're lacking oxygen. You have to have either water or oxygen. Devon continues on as we try to understand the transition of technology from Adaladles to Bose in North America. Or was the transition even that clear cut? Around 2,000 years ago, in some places you have the sudden appearance of these really small points to look much more to us like arrow points

what we'd have on an arrow and in some cases they're brand new styles when we see that we think okay this is being introduced by another culture and they may be trading the technology or they it may be another group that's moving into the area occasionally you also find that the older dart point styles are being now replicated in smaller in the smaller styles. And you get these two populations where you have a bimonality, what we call it bimonality, where you have two like size populations. You have like a big size population that contains the dart category

and then a smaller arrow population. And a lot of times they continue contemporaneous for a thousand years or more. Wow. So they're both the Addle Adel and the archery technology used side by side. Yeah. So these people would have chosen a different weapon for a different type of hunt, perhaps?

Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. You know, there are sites. There was a site I was looking at. It's in the Great Basin in this sand dune area where they had driven bison up out of the river valley and into this sandy area where they'd gotten bogged down. And that's where the hunters ambushed them. And they ambushed them both with the bow and arrow and the outlet on dart. At the same time.

Yeah, because both sides of the point. I wonder if the archery guys, the traditional archery guys, were giving the Adelahallah guys a hard time. Yeah, or vice versa. Yeah. Right. Come on. You're going to use an Adelattel? Yeah, it's what great grandpa used.

Tradition. I bet they did. Honestly, as I hear the stories of technology of points and styles of points, I look at that today in our archery world or our hunting world where there's different technology, different technology, different. ways to hunt gives identity to different groups. Yeah, absolutely. You're like, I'm a bow hunter. I'm a traditional bow hunter. I use this type of broadhead and he uses that.

Like, we've always used weaponry among a thousand other things to build personal identity. Yeah. And so I just can't help but think that the archery guys were, they weren't just absent of thoughts about the guys that were using Adaladdles. You know, there's all sorts of potential going on there. Maybe they had some slightly different tactics going on. but I think it's perfectly, you know, viable to say how we do it today, we definitely build identity around these different weapon systems. And that's really important.

And that's probably a part of the conservatism of hunting technology. And, you know, there are multiple times in which in history people have conserved older hunting technologies and preferred not to take on a newer technology. Yeah. One of the prime examples is Paulinezia because they use javelins. That was their primary projectile. weapon and they had the bow, but it was mostly a toy for hunting like rats. Really? Yeah, but they fought and hunted with javelins.

And they just hung on to it. That was what they preferred. Even though the rest of the world shifted to archery and other things. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the bow is in northern Australia as well, but most people in Australia used either the outlawful or Woomera is one of the native words there for it or javelins. Yeah, we kind of, we tend to think of things from this technological detainable.

terministic perspective. When a new technology comes on the scene, everyone's going to adopt it. Yeah. That's not necessarily the case. You know, there's, there's a number of contexts in which you would hang on to an older technology. You know, I think about adopting new technology in modern times, probably the biggest deterrent for me, like if you, if there was some new, big, major archery technology. Yeah. I would be like, why do I need it? What I'm doing works fine. Yeah, precisely. And so it's just like, it might go for a couple of generations before my ancestors were like, okay, we're going to do this because they find some reason it's better.

You think of it this way. Like, you know how to use a shotgun or a bow really well. A new technology comes on the scene. It may have better ballistic properties, but it turns out it's a lot harder to make it or it's a lot harder to maintain it for you because you could just buy it. It's a lot harder to maintain it. And it's just kind of a pain to deal with, you know? Yeah.

Bows and arrows are, they're great, but they're kind of, I think of as being high strung. Unintended. They're under tension. Yeah, exactly. They're under tension. They break. When they break, they're no good. And they're harder to make. They're harder to maintain.

It's harder to make the string. But if you have. And addle, Addle was just, you're not going to break that thing. No. It's very simple. It's not, you're carrying it around on the landscape. It's not under tension. It's ready to go at a moment's notice, but it's not under tension.

It's not getting. worn down from being strung, easier to make, easier to maintain. Yeah. So if it works for you, why adopt something new? You just feel like a bow shows up in your camp and then everybody wants it. Yeah. Six months later, Adeladles are in the trash. Right. And everybody's got a bow. Life moved a little bit slower, didn't it? Well, I feel really good about the ground we've covered with the fulsome technology and understanding the history of bows and Adalattles. Don't let your kids forget that they're here today because your ancestors use Adaladles to kill critters and feed your ancient family. That is a fact. As we come to the end of this Folsom series, I want to bring it back

to the original question that we started with. Why does any of this stuff matter? You know, it blows my mind. Human life is so weird in that we live in 2021. We drive cars. But we're trapped into the present, and it's so hard for us to fathom that there were people wandering around this place that... This was how they lived by these tools that we're talking about, part of your daily life. When I find these stone points in my front yard, if anyone in my family is home, I try to get them to come outside with me to look at it in the ground. And we pick it up and we say, the dude that touched this last was planning to cook his dinner over an open fire, number one. Number two, he made this, and they had to provide for their families with this stone point. That's a fascinating thought, but it's such a healthy exercise, I think.

Yeah, the past is essential. I mean, this is what our identities are constructed of, and our understanding of the world and how it works is drives from the past. In fact, one of the things I always tell students is the past is so potent that in World War II, the Nazis created a division of their government to, to construct this view, this history of the Aryan race. And they reinterpreted all this archaeological evidence. They went to Peru. And they reinterpreted the archaeology. And they said, this archaeology is the archaeology of the Aryan people.

Of course, it was all completely fabricated. But that's what they, you know, that was a big part of their ideology and what allowed them to do what they did, all the terrible atrocities they did, to convince people that this is right. So they understood that history was going to play a major part in the modern culture they were building. Yeah. Archaeology is extremely potent stuff. You know, it's like, it's really powerful and you have to get it right. In a time when it's, it's hard for people to even be able to track back a couple of generations in their family, which is kind of bizarre that we can't, because we have this, you know, the last thousand years, we've had the ability to record history,

I mean, even just the advent of paper and printing presses and writing stuff down and written language and we can record all this stuff, but typically people don't. I mean, people have a hard time learning what happened to our families 100 years ago. Well, it's there, you know, the history, even if they're not looking for it, it's there and it's what's forming who they are. Man right at the very end in the last sentence after hours of conversation, we find the answer to the question we started with wrapped in a cute little bow. Why does any of this matter? history is forming who we are regardless of our awareness of it. Even if George McJunkin hadn't found those bones, that day in that Box Canyon would have shaped our identity as humans today.

Many times I've expressed my interest in identity and the factors that influence it. Certainly the Folsom Hunters would be a part of the puzzle of our macro identity as humans. As much as many of us would like to think were independent, free-thinking beings, that's kind of a facade. There are parts of our past that are fundamental and architectural and can't be changed, like these ancient humans being hunters, being meat eaters, and procuring their livelihood through craft and skill in interacting with the earth. In a time when the very identity of what it means to be human is up in the air, the fulsome hunters give us an indisputable anchor point and identity that might help us put perspective on our own lives in modern times. You have to figure out what that means to you, but I feel like I know

what that means for me. It makes me marvel at human life in 2022, and it puts perspective on my problems and struggles, and it makes me want to do all I can to keep my life simple. I'm forever grateful that I was born when I was and that I'm alive in 2022. I don't want to go back and be a fulsome hunter, but I do want to look back at those guys and glean some inspiration, some identity, some hope, and some just straight up grit from those people. Man, fulsome hunters, pretty wild. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. We've been on this long series about Folsom and we're about to switch it up and we're going to talk about ducks in the next podcast and maybe even some squirrels.

20201 was an incredible year for this podcast and I personally learned a ton. Thank you guys so much for following along and supporting Bear Grease. Hey, from all the people of the Bear Grease Render crew and all the people at Meat Eater, we wish you at a very happy and prosperous new year. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in 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 Phelpsgamecalls.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. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.