The Joe Rogan Experience - #1975 - Dan Flores

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Dan Flores is a writer and historian specializing in the cultural and environmental study of the American West. His most recent book is “Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America.”

the Joe Rogan experience how are you Dan great to see you great to see you too Joe listen man I know I've talked to you since I read Coyote America but god God damn, that's a good book. It's such a good book. So I'm very excited about this. I'm sure this is going to be awesome too. Wild New World, the epic story of animals and people in America.

I've told so many people about coyotes because of you and I seem so smart. Well, I appreciate that. It's such a crazy animal. One of the things that's interesting about coyotes in our area is they don't howl. I think they've learned. Oh yeah. That's happening in LA too. They've learned not to howl.

Really? Yeah. Interesting. Attracts attention to them. Well, I used to hear it a lot where I lived. I lived in Ventura County and we had real problems with them. Like they killed all my chickens. It was like, they were everywhere, but also fucking cool. You know, I, it's such a conflicted thing. Cause I hated them cause they killed my chickens. And, um, I, but, and they

also honeypotted my dog into killing my chickens. Did I tell you that story? No, you didn't tell me that. Oh boy. Listen to this. This is how smart these motherfuckers are. I had this dog, rest in peace. His name was Johnny Cash. He was the best dog. I'll get sad. But, uh, let me catch my breath here because I really loved that dog. Oh, I understand this. I just lost a dog last May.

This dog was just, he was just such a sweetheart. But he was a big dog. He was a Mastiff, a Regency Mastiff. His father was actually on Fear Factor. And his father was this, we put people in these big bite suits and they had to run. And we did it with Belgian Malinois. And the problem was for like really super athletic guys, we had some like real high-end athletes on the show occasionally we got like amateur football players guys are just stacked and strong as hell

and a malinois no matter what it's still only 60 70 pounds and so we brought in these regency mastiffs because they wanted to figure out a dog that could do bite work But was way stronger and this dog was like a buck sixty and built like a brick shithouse His dad my dog's dad was actually in the movie the Hulk if you ever saw the movie the Hulk with Eric Bannon when they're Turned the dogs into Hulk dogs. That was actually that was that dog So my friend Joe shout out to Joe who raised these dogs That was actually- That dog. So my friend Joe, shout out to Joe who raised these dogs. He raised them for intelligence and temperament and he wouldn't let any dog breed that had

any aggression towards other dogs or any aggression towards people. So they were the best dogs. And so this dog was hanging out with all these other dogs that were doing bite work and everything and he was just so chill. Just hanging out, go, how does this dog so chill? And just like, he goes, he's just fucking smart he's smart he's well raised and well trained and loved so anyway i had his son and uh he was the fucking best but he was in the yard during the day um and a coyote would come by the fence and the fence was

six feet high like a wrought iron fence he couldn't get over this fence he didn't even try to get over it was a nice big yard but the coy couldn't get over this fence. He didn't even try to get over the fence. It was a nice big yard. But the coyotes could get over that fence like it didn't even exist. It was wild to watch. I watched one with a chicken in his mouth jump and put his feet at the top of that fence and over like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat. It was amazing. So we had this large coop where the chickens were that the coyotes couldn't figure out a way to get into.

And then have you ever raised chickens before? My dad raised chickens. They do a thing called brooding. And what brooding is chickens lay an egg almost every day. But none of them are going to become chicks because there's no rooster. So these are unfertilized eggs. But they don't understand that. So they decide every now and again that this egg is going to become a chick and they won't let anyone near it.

And they pluck their feathers out and they just sit on this egg and they stop making eggs. And they get real weirded out. And the only way to cure them of this is to put them in a smaller pen with a post So that they have to hold on to the post to stand they can't sit and squat like over an egg So you put a post in there and put a small coop next to the coop It takes a little I forget how many days it takes but they get over it Then you can put them back in with the regular hands. Well that little coop this him back in with the regular hands well that little coop this sneaky ass fucking coyote had figured out that he could get my dog to destroy that little coop because my dog was he was huge

and so somehow or another this coyote became friends with my dog just kept hanging around and my dog's like oh it's another dog because he has a little dog friend like this is my other little dog friend hey what's up buddy what are you doing he's like, oh, it's another dog because he has a little dog friend. Like, this is my other little dog friend. Hey, what's up, buddy? What are you doing? He's like, hey, you want to know where the chickens are? And my pool guy fucked up and left one of the gates open into where the chickens usually are. And I was inside the house with my kids and my wife, and we were playing some sort of a game.

I forget what game it was, but I saw in the background, a coyote run across the backyard and hop the fence with the chicken in his mouth. I'm like, motherfuckers. I thought maybe somebody left the coop open or something happened. So I run outside and there's Johnny standing over this destroyed coop that he was so proud that he busted apart. The coyote tricked him into smashing that coop, and then the coyote grabbed the chicken

and ran off with it. I wish I had known about this story when I was writing. How amazing is that? I want to put it in there. How amazing is that? Like, there's no doubt in my mind that that coyote tricked that dog into doing that, because that dog had never destroyed that coop. And then afterwards, he realized he's so so strong he can go right through the whole

coop so he tore a hole in the mesh the chicken wire he just tore it apart just he was so big and then he went in and killed nine of them and we your dog killed nine killed nine of them I had a 22 of them at one point in time and he killed nine of them in one like in just as much time as it took for him to get out there. He fucked up a couple other ones, too, but they lived. He was just grabbing them and shaking them and grabbing them and shaking them. He was having a party. Unfortunately, he was taught to do that by the fucking coyotes.

Well, I mean, this is an example of what one would call animal culture. I make an argument for it in Wild New World that this is something that happens fairly commonly. Animals, just like us, have culture and they teach one another things. That sounds like a pretty good for instance of it. Well, they're so clever. They're so clever. And it's so interesting, our thoughts intelligence because just until recently we've realized how intelligence Ravens How intelligent Ravens and crows are about they can use tools they? Understand water displacement so if they can't drink out of something they'll drop rocks into it So the water level raises so they can drink out of it. Yeah, it's brilliant stuff

So I wonder because we don't have a way of measuring that with coyotes, I wonder how smart those motherfuckers are. Well, they are, I think, probably among the smartest of the wild animals, certainly in America. I mean, you know, one of the reasons we domesticated wolves and created dogs out of them is because, for one thing, we understood them. They live in the same kind of circumstances we do in social groups. They have to acculturate their pups just the way we have to do with kids. the explanation for why dogs are our oldest domesticate is because of their ability to understand us, to understand human language. I mean, this is one of the theories for early domestication of wolves is that there were some of them that were not only hyper-social and so

amenable to being with humans and hanging out with us, but also because there are some that were gifted word learners. We didn't have to learn their language. They learned our language. And I think that is probably an indication of, you know, coyotes are out of the canid family. All these creatures come out of the same family from 5.3 million years back. And I think coyotes, in some respects, may be the shrewdest and cleverest of all those groups,

because unlike wolves, they're not the big brawny dogs on the block. They're the ones who have to play this game of, man, I can't let this big burly wolf get me. I've got to figure out how to elude it. And that's responsible for a lot of their intelligence and cleverness is they co-evolved alongside wolves for so long. They had to learn how to be the little guy who managed to survive by his wits. Yeah. And also one of the things that I learned from your book that's a good thing to bring up here is that they are not directly related to gray wolves.

So they didn't interbreed with them. That's right. They interbreeded with red wolves. So when the gray wolves were around, the gray wolves just slaughtered them. Yeah. And so they had developed this ability to spread their territory, which is what when humans started killing them, now they're in every single city in the country. And this is, like, when did that happen? It's relatively recent, right? Yeah, the expansion started really out of two things, two things that took place in the early 20th century.

One was the elimination of wolves in the east, which created an open niche for a mid-sized predator. And the other was this campaign that first the states and then the federal government began to launch against coyotes and wolves in the west. And the government hunters were pretty successful in taking out wolves because wolves are so attuned to be pack animals that if you kill one wolf in a pack, you could use the scent from that wolf basically to catch, trap, kill every single wolf in the pack. But coyotes responded to that basically by going, you probably remember our conversation about this, Joe, back in 2017, they would go into what's known as a fishing mode.

They are coyotes like humans are fish and fusion animals. And when they're in fusion, they can exist in a pack. When they're in fishing, they break apart the packs and in singles and pairs, they scatter. And that's what they do when they're pressured. They learned how to do this from wolves. And so when we started trying to take them out with poisons and gunning in the West, they went into this fishing mode and it caused them to start spreading across the country. And that started in the early 20th century. I mean, when I was growing up in Louisiana in the

1960s, coyotes were first beginning to appear in Louisiana, which is how I got fascinated with them. First beginning. Yeah, first beginning in the early 1960s. I started seeing them in about 1962 or something, 61 or 2. Is there a historical record of them ever being on the East Coast previously? No, there is not. So they ever being on the East Coast previously? No, there is not. So they really were just a West Coast animal? Well, there's a couple of archaeological sites dating from the Pleistocene from 10,000 years ago that appear to show coyotes probably fairly randomly appearing in places like Virginia and Pennsylvania.

But in the historical record that we have, they weren't on the East Coast until the middle of the 20th century. And they start showing up in northern New York and upstate New York by about the 1920s or so. by about the 1920s or so, and they start coming down south from that point until, I mean, they're finally, they're reaching Manhattan, for example, in the 1990s. Had this, had they already, had wolves already been extirpated at this point? Yeah, wolves had been taken out. I mean, the great, you know, and I talk about it in Wild New World, the whole wolf campaign in America. But the two guys who put together this classic volume on wolves, the wolves of North America, Stanley Young and E.A. Goldman, published this work in 1944. They're government hunters.

government hunters, and they argue that by 1944, there are no wolves at all left east of the Mississippi River. They are all gone. There are wolves down in Louisiana. In the deep south, there's still some red wolves. There's 1,400 or so gray wolves up in the Great Lakes country. But even in the West, I mean, in their book in 1944, they claim there are only six wolves remaining in the state of Wyoming. Even with all those animals and all that public lands, I mean, the campaign against wolves has been that successful. So yeah, by 1950 or so, there are no wolves in the east. And that opens up this niche for coyotes to come in and fill it. And one of the other things that I learned from you is that coyotes, when they do that roll call, when they scream out and howl, if one of them is missing, the females will make more pups.

Yeah, they are able to, when they howl, one of the things they do with howls, I mean, they're communicating all kinds of things, but one of the things we're pretty certain they do with howls is to take a census of how many coyotes are in the area. Because, of course, howling is infectious, both for coyotes and wolves. Whenever they hear a howl, they'll respond to it. And if during the spring mating period, if howling produces fewer responses in a particular area, it can trigger something not exactly sure in coyotes that will have the effect of producing larger litters. And of course, that will have the effect of producing larger litters. And, of course, with fewer other predators in an area,

one of the things that happens is the food base is larger. So if you have a coyote pack has, say, seven pups, if there are fewer coyotes that have been taken out by trapping or poisoning or whatever, it's possible to get more of the pups up to adulthood because there are more food resources. So it's kind of a loop that functions like that. The coyotes are certainly playing a role in it. But of course, our attempts to take them out are producing this feedback that often causes them to have larger litters, to be more successful in raising their pups. And they will respond by rising to the level of the carrying capacity of the landscape in any case. It's just amazing. And it's amazing how well they adapt to Los

Angeles. They're everywhere. I remember the first time I saw one, it was 1994 and I was, uh, they had these, uh, pre-furnished apartments that I, I got one of those when I first moved to LA. It's the Oakwood apartments. And, uh, it was in Burbank. I mean, you're in the middle of everything. It's sort of the tonight show films. I'm driving down the street and I see these two little wolves. I was like, what the fuck is that? And I'm like, oh my God, it's coyotes. Because I had heard, but I was like, what? You see coyotes, like how often? You know, how often? Like right there, right away. Yeah. I mean, you know, Walt Disney was doing films about coyotes in the Hollywood Hills in the early 1960s. But coyotes had been there all along.

I mean, that was, you know, they were there when L.A. was founded and they basically never left. I mean, there are records back in the 20s and 30s of, you know, the local authorities sending people out to try to take out coyotes way back a hundred years ago. So they've always been there. When I would have talks with friends that lived there that were upset about coyotes, I'd say, but you know what's great? When was the last time you saw a rat? That's right. I mean, like LA, the hills, like where I used to live in Ventura County, should be littered with rats. They should be everywhere. There's garbage cans everywhere.

Where's all the rats? Yeah. They're all getting jacked by coyotes and owls. Well, that's one of the great things about coyotes being in the east. I mean, you know, all the east coast cities have huge problems with rats. They should let them loose in New York City. Yeah. No kidding.

But the rats. They'll take out your rats. I watched a rat trip a mousetrap. A rat trap today. Have you ever seen this? Yes. Watch this. Jamie, you're the best. How'd you do this? Man, he was right on top of it. You're the best. So look at this rat.

This rat goes, he realizes that's a trap. There's a nice piece of cheese on it. So he brings a stick and he trips the fucking trap. I mean, come on, man. How smart are those little motherfuckers? That little tiny-ass brain. How smart is he?

He's using tools. He's using a tool. That's right. I mean, that's incredible. I mean, it's really incredible. And he knows what he's doing. He didn't even freak out. Look.

See how he reacted? No, it didn't startle him at all. At all. Imagine being a wild animal subject to predators, subject to other territorial rats, and you're not even freaked out by a giant spring snapping down on a board. Yeah, that could break your neck very easily. That's supposed to kill you. He's got to know probably. These things killed my friends.

He's got to know probably. These things killed my friends. Yeah. And I mean, that certainly is, you know, it's a trait common to do when people were trying to poison them, and how to spit out bait if they smell strychnine in it. So that kind of thing is a fairly common response of animals that feel as if humans are after them one of the things that I noticed when I rented a house in Encino for a while and we had a problem with rats in the garage and

One of the things I noticed is rats had realized if they get to the garbage in the garage There's no coyotes and owls and so the only time I ever saw rats was in my own house was in my garage yeah and one time the trap went off and i heard it i was in the kitchen and i opened the door and there's a rat like the size of my forearm i mean it's a huge rat i was like look at that sucker jesus christ but it was late at night i was like i'll clean this motherfucker up in the morning i'm going to bed i went to bed i got up in the morning there was nothing left but the tail they had eaten him that's a hard hard world and that world is existing simultaneously with me a fucking young kid who's on a sitcom who's gonna drive a sports car into this studio in Hollywood and at the same time

like this cannibalism fight for survival is going on in my garage but I don't even think that it applies to me no you don't and you know I have an agent yeah I have a manager I have to call and a sports car yeah I have a sports car a toyota supra but it was like watching that seeing that thing take place it was very i'll never forget it because it made me realize oh you coexist with brutality you just you're just not completely aware of it this is real nature it's happening right here. You've just everyone's numbed themselves to with buildings and fast food. But this is happening right

where you are. And that's why coyotes are so fascinating to me. Even when I watched that one kill my chicken and hop over the fence with it, I was like, respect. I gotta respect this game. You gotta respect that kind of athleticism for one thing. The athleticism, but also the cleverness. Figuring out how to trick the big dog, he couldn't break the coop he triggered he figured

out get the he's like hey you big motherfucker go break that thing it's it they're they're amazing animals but you know fuck it sucks if they eat your cat it sucks i've had a bunch of friends and i've you know and family members that have – and recently a very good friend of mine out here lost his dog. It sucks. You know a coyote just tore your fucking little buddy alive. Well, I know it does. I mean, I will admit I've never had anything like that happen with a dog,

in part because I always have really big dogs I have Alaskan Malamutes which you know I mean my the dog I lost as I mentioned last year last May I mean he was 140 pound Alaskan Malamute and so he would sit on the front porch and a pack of coyotes would trot through the yard in New Mexico and the alpha male of the pack would turn and grimace at him, show his teeth. But, you know, Cody, which is my dog's name, would just sit there on the porch and kind of smile. I mean, a coyote, you know, even a good-sized coyote in New Mexico, a good adult male, is barely going to weigh 35 pounds. So Cody outweighs him five times. So I've not had that experience. I've lost cats a couple of times because I've always lived in the country. I mean, my whole adult life, I've bought

places outside town and usually or built places outside town and lived half an hour away from the city where I was working or where I had to commute to. So I always lived around wild animals of all kinds. And I've lost cats two or three times. At least one time, for some reason, I never found. The cat just disappeared. But the other couple of times I lost cats, what I concluded was that it was actually great horned owls that got them. And what I've often told people who've, you know, related to me their stories about coyotes getting their cats or getting small dogs is that one of the questions I always ask is, did you find your pet? Was it lying there? Because if it's lying there, that's probably an indication that it may have been a coyote. Coyotes often will kill small dogs, not because they want to eat them, but because they regard them as inter-guild predators that are invading their territory. But if the dog or the cat completely disappears, is gone, and you don't find it, or you only find it months later, that's usually a great horned owl, because

they will pluck up a small dog or a cat, and they fly away with them to their roosting spot. I mean, there are instances where great horned owl roosts have yielded 75 cat collars with kiki and, you know, mousy and so forth on the names on the collars. But the owls have just snagged them and taken them off and eaten them. And the owners never know what happened. And a lot of people, because they're aware of coyotes being on the scene, they will assume that it's a coyote that's done it. That's fascinating. 75 collars. I love owls. One of the wildest videos that I ever saw was this night vision video of a nest. And there's these hawks in the nest.

And you just see in the distance the eyes of the owl as it swoops in and just snatches a hawk out but the ferocity watch this the way it hits this hawk so that's are those baby hawks bang oh man look at that and the other one's like what the fuck happened yeah no kidding what the fuck what the fuck happened? What the fuck happened? I mean, play that again. Watch. I love the eyes. When you see the eyes in the distance. Look at this. Here it comes.

Bang. Yeah. What an amazing predator, right? That's what happens to a lot of cats. Oh, I'd imagine. Yeah. I'd imagine. Yeah, there was, I mean, there's a story in the little town near where I live in New Mexico of people sitting out on the front porch of the cafe bar one evening as a cat is walking the railing, just like that scene, suddenly out of nowhere, a great horned owl appears, bang, hits the cat. And they're all sitting there open-eyed watching this owl fly away with the cat squirming in its claws, disappearing into the tree cover down on the river. Imagine being a cat and all this, you know, you've been killing birds forever.

Oh yeah. If you're a cat outside, one thing that I found that I actually learned from our good friend Stephen Rinella was the sheer numbers of animals that feral cats and wild cats, just outdoor cats, kill every year. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. It's an animal holocaust. It is billions of animals. It is. And, you know, there are ornithologists who are great

advocates for coyotes appearing on the scene and taking out cats that people, either feral cats that are living outside or cats that people just let sort of roam so they can actually kill birds. Look at this. A recent study by the Smithsonian Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats kill about 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion small mammals each year in the lower 48 states alone. That is incredible. Yeah, that's incredible. How ruthless those little motherfuckers are. Those numbers are hard to wrap your mind around. And so, I mean, it's a, you know, it's an argument for people who have cats.

I mean, don't let your cat do this. Yeah, don't let your cat do this or an owl's going to get them. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the owl problem, we see obviously owls eat birds. The owl probably also thought of as the cat as a predator a fellow predator but also prey yeah also prey yeah isn't it interesting how there's certain animals that we have uh anthropomorphized and put these weird characteristics to and with owls they're like wise and they give advice they'll give a hoot don't pollute like the the owls tricking the

candy people. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a, what is it, a licorice? Tootsie roll? A tootsie roll pop. What's inside? A licorice? It takes three. One? Two? And then he crushes it. And he's playing a game.

They're clever. It's interesting that we always think of them as being very wise. Like owls in cartoons. They wear glasses Which is hilarious because they have the greatest vision of all time like why did why do they need glasses? They've giant fucking eyes at sea crystal clear late at night But we give them glasses no it gives them that studious intellectual look but a bizarre choice And that's stuck with us like if you ask most people about owls, they think of them as, oh, the wise old owl. That's a ruthless monster, a raptor that flies down and just swoops shit up and flies away with it, and it lives amongst people.

They do indeed. And the next time you see one, just sort of make a projection in your head about how many cat collars may be lying at the base of the tree. That owl is rooting. I saw one two nights ago. I saw one swoop across the road. I was like, wow, they're cool, man. They're so big. It's like, it's kind of stunning how big they are. You know, you think of an owl as being a small bird, but you see their wingspan and their body. That's a pretty large, that's why it makes sense. They could snatch up a cat Oh, yeah, right right or the house in particular I mean they have like a you know, three and a half foot wingspan didn't have to four foot wingspan

I mean, they're really big and they sound cool You know when it's nighttime and you're outside and you hear one bird And you know that that's a ruthless killer a ruthless all-seeing killer just perched up on things. They're so good at killing things, you can get a rubber one, and it keeps everybody away. Do you know that? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. I've done it.

Have you done it? Oh, yeah, I have done it. Isn't that crazy? It works for a while. And then they realize. Yeah, and then they realize it's fake. But, yeah, it works for a while. How long does it work for?

Well, it depends on what you're trying to alarm. You know, I mean, some birds are quicker than others. I mean, as you mentioned a few minutes ago, you know, a raven is not going to be tricked by something like that for more than a day or so. You know, a raven will quickly get it. Some birds are not so fast on the uptake. Raven will probably start shitting on it. Oh, yeah. On purpose. Yeah. I actually have a kind of a wild pet raven at the moment. Really? Yeah, and have had since I lost my dog.

And I've just got a new dog. I just got a new puppy here recently. But I had lost my dog. He was sort of my constant companion. I had lost my dog. He was sort of my constant companion. And I realized that, I mean, I spend a lot of time raised with animals from being a little kid. In fact, I'll tell you a story in a minute, sort of how this Wild New World book came to be. It came out of the first animal companion I ever had and what happened to it. But

this particular raven started hanging around where, I mean, in New Mexico and Southwest, we have a lot of rats and mice. And they'll, of course, what rats and mice do, which is the reason the East Coast cities have such a problem with rats is that they're drawn to human inhabitations because we produce excess stuff for them to get into, food in particular. So commonly, I'll have a rat zapper or two out, and every two or three days, I'll catch a mouse or a rat. And so I had this particular spot where I was taking these rats and mice out and dropping them. And I noticed that a raven started flying up on a nearby tree and waiting for me to do this. And so after this happened four or five times and I began to look at this raven and I thought the way that raven is lighting on the same spot, this is the same raven. Keeps coming back to this exact branch. So I started experimenting with what happens if I drop the rat out and just back up 10 feet. The raven would wait a minute or

so and then fly down and pick up the rat. So then I started closing the distance into five feet and then three feet. This raven, over time, came to realize I was no threat. I was providing a free meal. And so since that time, that started happening about six months ago, since that time, I've got this raven that basically, when my new puppy and I go out for walks in the canyon below the house outside Santa Fe. This raven actually flies along with us, lighting from one tree to another, waiting for me, hoping that have a mouse to give him is I'll pull four or five kibbles of dog food out and I can put those things anywhere. And that raven will fly down and pick them up and walk around and talk to me and make these these sounds that I actually haven't quite figured out. I haven't understood. I'm not as smart as wolves were about human language. I haven't figured out raven language yet, but this raven talks to me. And so we

have conversations. I have no idea what he's saying, but he's very vocal and he's very expressive. You know, that's an amazing story. And that was one of John Lilly's things that he was working on with dolphins. And he was trying to use LSD to better communicate with dolphins. And he used sensory deprivation tanks. And, you know, it's his idea was there's got to be some way to crack that code and to at least intuitively understand what these things are saying. And they even tried to get dolphins to speak human language because they could apparently understand what we were saying, but we couldn't understand what they were saying.

So they were trying to get dolphins, but they just don't have lips. They don't have a tongue like ours. It's just like they can't make the same noises. Their noises are so different. But all those people that are studying orcas and dolphins, they've determined that there's dialects, that they sound different in different areas,

but they have no idea what they're saying. No idea, which is amazing. No, but they are communicating with one another. They can't communicate with us. And the conclusion we draw from that, of course, is that other animals, other creatures in the world are not as intelligent as we are. But the truth is, all the recent science about animal culture and about animal consciousness is indicating something that I think we sort of, as early humans living amongst wild animals in Africa, in Europe, in Asia, and ultimately in the Americas, Africa and Europe and Asia and ultimately in the Americas understood is that these are creatures that share with us all the traits that we tend to think make us distinctively human. We think that the ability to talk, the ability to transmit culture is what makes us exceptional among all other creatures. And yet what we're discovering almost day by day from the scientific literature that's been focused on these things

is that animals just like us have culture. As Charles Darwin said, it's just a matter of degree, not kind. They have all the same attributes and all the same abilities. They just don't have things like 8 billion other members of their species to be thinking up ideas and transmit to one another around the world through things like the internet or Twitter or, 5,000 years ago, written languages. I mean, what we've done is we've been able to amplify all those abilities by how many of us there are and our ability to communicate with one another. But so many other creatures, I mean, there was a declaration on consciousness issued by a bunch of biologists in Europe in 2012 that argued that the higher species in particular, some of the ones that we've been talking about here, share the same

level of cultural transmissibility, of the ability to communicate with one another, the ability to communicate with one another, the ability to plot out strategies for new problems that they confront, just like the ravens we were talking about, or about the rat who used a tool to set off that trap. So all these kinds of things that we've thought for so long make us exceptional in the world. And this comes out of a long Western European tradition of thinking that we're exceptional, that we're the only creatures made in the image of God, the only ones with souls and all that. What we're discovering, of course, is that ancient people understood that humans were part of the mix. Charles Darwin gave us scientific evidence that this was true. And the more we study other creatures, the more we realize that all these animals that we've set aside as just things that we regard as expendable, as useful as commodities, domesticated possibilities, they actually have many of the same capabilities we do. So, I mean, it makes sense if you think about ravens.

It makes sense if you think about their ability to use tools and their ability to displace water. They're obviously thinking. And so if they can make noises, of course they would associate those noises with different things. Did you see any patterns when he would, like when you put the food down, did he make specific sounds when you put the food down? Well, what he began to do that probably caught my eye more than anything, when he would first come down, he would take the food and fly off immediately especially when i was closing the distance between us when i was getting to the point where i was only three or four feet away from where i would put down a mouse or a rat or four or five kibbles of dog food he would come down and grab the food and and once he would say go through all six kibbles that I'd put down. He would immediately fly off. But then at some

point when this raven fairly clearly, it seemed to me as I observed him, came to some kind of conscious conclusion that I was not a threat and that the sounds that I was making, my human voice and the inflections that I was making, were something that were not dangerous to him, then he started hanging around. So he would eat the food, eat the kibbles, or eat the mouse, and instead of flying away, he would waddle around on the ground four or five feet away from me or hop up on a limb. And this is when we were having these conversations I was referring to a minute ago where he would actually respond to my voice as I talked. And as I said, the raven is probably better at understanding what I'm saying than I am at understanding what the raven is trying to convey to me. But he very clearly is expressing what I sort of intuit as a kind of comfort and, I mean, maybe even, you know, a thank you.

Thanks for, you know. Friendship. Thanks for the friendship. Thanks for all the fish. Thanks for the food. He's actually somehow come to realize that I'm completely started accompanying me on walks as I would walk around the place and go for hikes. And now doing it with this 16-week-old puppy that I have, the raven comes along. I mean, he spots us going out the back door into the canyon and flies along from tree to tree and just kind of hangs out with us. I mean, it's a really remarkable—I've not ever had another animal do anything like this, but it probably means that I've not had an animal quite as smart as a mature raven to deal with.

Do you miss him when you go on the road? Well, I'm talking about him, obviously. I would imagine I would miss that. Oh, yeah. I would imagine I would want to go back in the woods and bring them some dog food and hang out with them. Oh, man, no kidding. That's so cool. Yeah.

That is so cool. I've taken to putting a few kibbles in my pocket, you know, so that when Kiska, the new young puppy, goes to sleep. Because, of course, as long as the puppy is awake, you know, he's watching the raven, too. Right. I mean, this is kind of an ancient relationship between ravens and wolves. And I think, I mean, I've hiked enough with my Alaskan Malamutes in the mountains in the west to notice how ravens circle around them in the same kind of approach that ravens do with wolves. They'll follow wolves because they know wolves very possibly signal a free meal. So the puppy is watching the raven. He's very aware of

the raven, but as soon as he goes to sleep, I'll pull my kibbles out, drop them out for the raven to get. That's awesome. That's such a cool relationship. It's been very fun. I've never had anything like it before. I mean, that's what a great way to test the intelligence of an animal like that. The fact that it's recognizing that you're a friend and then communicates with you like a thank you, or at least some sort of a gesture of friendship. Yes. And I don't have to put the food in the same spot. I mean, I was starting out by, of course, putting everything in the exact same spot that I'd begun, but now I can sort of put it anywhere and he's watching and he comes and gets his meal. That's pretty cool. How long do ravens live? They live to about 12, 13, 14 years old. And I have no idea how old this raven is. You know,

there's no way of telling. I mean, and ravens kind of tend to all look alike, but this particular bird conveys his, he conveys his presence, his individual presence by, as I mentioned, lighting in exactly the same spot every time. So when he sees me come out of the house in the morning, he goes to a particular spot and lands. And I mean, there are a lot of other ravens in the neighborhood, but I can always tell that it's this particular one because he goes and hits a signal to me. It's me. He goes to a particular spot to land and wait to see what I've got for him on a particular day. That's awesome.

What a great story. That's so cool. So you live in an area that probably has a lot of wildlife. I do live in an area that has a lot of wildlife. And, you know, much of my life I have, man. I lived 22 years in Montana, out in the foothills of a mountain range outside Missoula. I was teaching at the University of Montana and certainly had, I mean, I lived with all the grand animals that still remain from the historic period in the West in that spot. I mean, I was there when we

reintroduced wolves to Montana and Idaho in 1995, and within about three or four years, there was a wolf pack on the slopes right above the house, and they began having litters. So we began having wolves there. Grizzly bears would appear sporadically. Their main range was just to the north of where I was, but they were steadily attempting to repopulate the Bitterroot Valley. years, there would be a grizzly in the area. I had black bears fairly commonly, lions, of course. Never saw a lion, but I saw prints. And tons of elk and deer and all that sort of thing. And in New Mexico, not so many where I live. I don't live in the foothills of a mountain range. I live out in the Pinyon Juniper country, about 10 miles from the Southern Rockies. And in that zone, you have a few mule deer. There are pronghorn antelope in the open prairies, not too far away. But the primary animals that I see all the time, which is why, you know, back seven or eight years ago, I wrote a book about them. Or one of the reasons was it's coyotes.

Like seven or eight years ago, I wrote a book about them, or one of the reasons was it's coyotes. I mean, I'm sort of constantly living with coyotes. Elk have such a distinct language in the way they talk to each other that there's elk calling championships. I'm sure you're aware of these. Oh, yeah. You know, Jason Phelps, who's a guy that is well-known in the elk hunting world, has developed these amazing elk calls to mimic them. And he knows how to, like, get them upset. He knows how to challenge them. Like, it's really interesting when you see a master caller at work

because the elk hunting that I've done, most of it has been ambush, like sneak up on them. And I like that. them and i i like that i like this you know stalking and you know and trying to uh trying to get close and playing the wind but there's a lot of guys that they're so good at getting the elk pissed off that the elk would against their better judgment will come what the fuck is going on over there and whack and they get hit yeah well they they're issuing a challenge you know and uh and at the time when elk are bugling i well, they're issuing a challenge, you know, and at the time when elk are bugling, I mean, what they're bugling for are cows. And so, yeah, if they sense there's a challenge from another bull, then they're coming to vie for access to the females,

and that's how they get lured in. They also learn, too. So when there's heavy pressure areas, they learn that a lot of these calls are bullshit. And so they learn to shut up. And so in a heavily pressured elk area, sometimes there's elk around you. You don't even know where they are because you don't hear anything. One of the best ways to locate elk in the morning, you listen, you hear bugles. have not hunted elk. And I mean, I grew up in Louisiana, a rural kid growing up in the South and went to high school. In fact, I went to high school with the Duck Dynasty guys. I played football with the Duck Dynasty guys. That's awesome. Yeah. The older guy, Phil, guys. That's awesome. Yeah. The older guy, Phil, was the quarterback of the high school football team. And there was one guy in between us, a guy named Johnny Prudhomme, was the next quarterback

after Phil. But I succeeded Johnny Prudhomme as the quarterback of the high school team. And I even wore Phil's number, number 10 in high school. Wow. And I played the younger Robertson, Cy. He and I played when I was a freshman and he was a sophomore. We played in the backfield, or I was a sophomore, he was a junior. We played in the backfield football team. So I went to high school with those kind of guys and grew up in that kind of world and hunted and fish mean, but our paths, I guess, kind of separated at one point. They stayed in Louisiana. Cy went off to Vietnam and returned. And what I did was I went off to college and other places and ended up, you know, getting a PhD and getting university jobs and going to live in places like Montana. So our worlds kind of diverged.

Do you still keep in touch with those guys? No, I haven't kept in touch with them. And I don't know if they're – I'm certainly aware of them because I've watched their show some. But I don't know if they're aware of anything that I've done. I haven't tried to get in touch with them or anything. I loved the success of that show because I knew that there was people – because I did stand-up comedy for 30 years. So I was always on the road. I was always traveling to the south.

I was traveling to the north. I traveled all over the country telling jokes. And you get a way better sense of what the country is actually like than if you only live in these cultural elite cities like Los Angeles. And in Los Angeles, the idea that a show about a bunch of fucking duck hunters who have a dynasty from duck calls, how is that going to be popular? And then it was huge. It was huge. It was gigantic. And people loved it yeah people

in these what they would call the flyover states the disrespectfully most of the country oh yeah they would call the flyover states that's why i love a show like that that succeeds because those people had no idea they were like what the hell is going on like what is you know i i want to watch all the stuff that I want to watch. How do these people even like this? What world do they live in? Well, I will say that those guys, Phil and Cy both, they were not only really accomplished duck hunters, and I never duck hunted with them, but I did go dove hunting with them one time. And of course, they didn't, you know, it was on private property for which they had no permission and halfway through the dove hunt we had maybe shot 10 or 15 rounds and here comes the landowner

in a pickup truck driving about 60 miles an hour across rutted fields after us and so my memory of going hunting with the Robertson boys is running through the Red River Valley trying to get away from an irate landowner. But those guys were funny. They were really funny as hell back in those days. And it kind of didn't surprise me when they were able to translate that into that show. Because, I mean, we all thought that they were and they told so many stories i mean the south of course is storytelling part of the part of the united states and those guys told so many stories that we used to just number them and whenever they

would start on a story we would just say okay it's number 112 guys and so everybody would start laughing because we all knew what 112 was. That's hilarious. Yeah. Didn't even have to listen to the story. It's number 112. Oh, my God. That's hilarious.

Well, maybe we can reunite you guys. Maybe this podcast will reunite you guys. Yeah, maybe so. It might. So this book, this new book that you've written uh wild new world the epic story of animals and people in america um when just when did you start this well it's kind of my pandemic vacation book i mean that's why i asked a lot of people joey diaz wrote this during the pandemic yeah yeah i wrote it during the pandemic. Yeah, I wrote it during the pandemic. I mean, I'll say, you know,

Coyote America and American Serengeti kind of set me up to be able to take a step back, farther back, to look at the bigger story of animals in America. I mean, I'd focused very specifically on coyotes in the one book and wrote about the animals, all these grand animals of the Great Plains, this part of North America that once, up until about 120 years ago, was our version of the Serengeti. And somehow, while East Africa and Southern Africa managed to get these great game parks, preserving their large charismatic animals here in the United States, we ended up privatizing all the Great Plains, turning it into farms and ranches, and losing our ability to do that, at least until the present day,

where we're trying to accomplish something like returning the American Serengeti. to accomplish something like returning the American Serengeti. But those two books kind of set me up for stepping back and looking at the really big picture of this. And so I was inspired, I'll admit, by Yuval Harari's Sapiens, you know, his big history of humans across time. So what I was compelled to do with Wild New World was to write a book that was a big history of North America and the relationship that people and animals have had in North America, starting from, I mean, the book actually starts with the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact. That's the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals. And the reason I started there is because that's the moment at which North

America starts acquiring its bestiary, its creatures. In the aftermath of the dinosaur age, both through continental evolution in North America and through acquiring animals from other parts of the world as they cross the land bridges and enter North America, in that those millions of years after the Chicxulub impact. Chicxulub, by the way, is the name of the little Mayan village on the north coast of the Yucatan near where that asteroid hit 66 million years ago. But in the aftermath of it, that's how we acquire our creatures. That's how we acquire mammoths and mastodons and saber-toothed cats and buffalo and pronghorns and camels and horses. I mean, it happens through continental evolution, as I said,

and also through this migration from other parts of the world. But what I try to create with that and try to set up with that is this bestiary of creatures that when humans finally get here, and I mean, after all, North and South America are the last places on Earth humans find, except for a few islands in the Pacific that we get to later. The last grand continents on Earth that humans get to are north and south america by which time we have had well if you date us back even to neanderthals which goes back about 800,000 to a million years and you assume that we and neanderthals are obviously close enough to one another that we can hybridize i mean mean, have you done 23andMe?

Yeah, I got a lot of it. Yeah, so do I. And my wife has even more. And I think all of us that are from particularly sort of Northwestern European backgrounds have ended up with a lot of Neanderthal, for some people as much as 2.5% of their genes. Yeah. So and it produces, you know, it makes you different than you would be otherwise. I supposedly, according to 23andMe, I have less hair on my back than I would if I didn't have Neanderthal genes. I'm a little taller because of Neanderthal genes. All kinds of things like that. So

if you date the human story even back, and I started our story as wild animals in Africa, and I bring us in one of the early chapters, in the first chapter really, up to the point where we're leaving Africa, going into Europe, going into Asia. And of course, that process, again, if you start with Neanderthals, it goes back 800,000 years out of Africa into the rest of the world. But the Neanderthals never get to the Americas. But when modern humans, we emerged about 315,000 years ago in Africa, and when we spread out of Africa and replace Neanderthals in Europe and De Nocivans in Asia, and finally get to Siberia about 45,000 years ago, as soon as there's a possibility for getting farther east, in other words, into North America, we take advantage of it. And I mean, as I argue in this book,

the reason we do this, this is kind of one of the reasons why all of us love to find spots where it's a beautiful morning. I'm out here on this mountain. There's not another soul in sight. It's just me and the world. That compulsion, I think, is really ancient, and it's what drew us out of Africa to other parts of the world to start with. And what we're looking for are animals that have never encountered us before because they're naive about humans as predators so this compulsion to travel finally to get to the great plum of the americas as the last great spot we get to on Earth drives us to the point where, I don't know if you caught the news out of White Sands National Park about three or four years ago about the footprints that were discovered there, 23,000 years old.

I mean, that's at the height of the glacial maximum, man. That's when the ice is at its greatest extent. And somehow people have gotten out of Asia, we think probably along the coastlines, into what is now the United States. And the place that always seemed to draw them is the country south of the Rocky Mountains in what is New Mexico and Arizona. And these people managed to get 23,000 years ago into what is now New Mexico and left 79 footprints that have been carbon dated based on seeds that their feet crushed as they walked along the marshy shore of this lake. So we know that people probably

coming down the coastlines, maybe in some kind of craft, managed to get here as long ago as 23,000 years. But what really, of course, propels the great human migration into America is when the ice sheets finally open at about 16,000 years ago as the glacial maximum begins to recede. There's an ice-free corridor that opens from Alaska down into Alberta and Montana. And at that point, you get this massive migration, probably not massive to start with, maybe not very many people at all, but they encounter a wild new world, a world that is populated by some creatures they recognize, many ground sloths and so forth humans have never seen before. And so we enter this American paradise of animals some 16,000 years ago in large numbers of humans and spread within about three centuries

all the way to the tip of South America. It's kind of one of the great colonization stories in world history. That's amazing. Now, at this point in time, what weapons do we think that they were using to hunt with? Were they using atlatls? Were they using spears? Were they using, well, a combination of these things? They were definitely using, so the first successful group that sort of spreads coast to coast, I mean, our first American culture that spreads from the Pacific to the Atlantic as a consistent culture of people. And I titled this particular chapter in the book Clovisia the Beautiful because they establish a world that lasts longer than the United States has lasted so far. Their America the Beautiful, Clovisia the Beautiful, lasts well over 300 years.

last well over 300 years. And they're probably using spears, but they have come up with a great new technology, which is the fluted point. They figured out a way, and fluted points aren't found in earlier times, even in Siberia. So this was a purely American invention. They figured out a way to take flint points and flute the bass on either side so that you can solidly and very securely attach a spear to them, and they'll remain in place without flipping off or breaking off. great technological inventions. But the other thing that they bring to the game, Joe, is they come out of a tradition of at least 40,000 generations of hunting big animals. I mean, they know how to do this at literally a professional level. They are extremely good at it. I mean, one of the stories I tell in this early chapter, Clovisia the Beautiful, which is the second chapter of the book, is of an episode that takes place in southern Arizona, what's now southern Arizona, about 13,000 years ago, when a group of Clovis hunters surround a herd of mammoths. And in this herd is a bull, a herd bull, a herd cow, and 13 calves and adolescents. There are three archaeological sites associated with this particular episode. In one site, the most westerly,

all 13 calves and adolescents archaeologists found dead in one spot, each with a single Clovis point in its body. East of there, in two different locations, the herd bull was found. He had run about three or four miles. He had two Clovis points in him, and he finally bled out and died. But they found the cow about eight miles away. She had eight Clovis points in her before she died, indicating to the archaeologists who've studied these sites that the cow in classic elephant fashion had fought to defend those calves and those adolescents.

She had put up a huge fight to try to defend them, and ultimately she hadn't been successful. They had all been killed. She runs away and finally dies with eight Clovis points in her. Wow. But that's one episode out of, I mean, we have no idea how many. There are something like 78 Clovis sites around North America. I mean, we don't actually know when the transition to get to your question happened to ad adults, but when the Clovis period is over, it's basically when the mammoths are done. I mean, these people seem to have been fairly specialized as big game hunters. I mean, they killed other animals, but they really went after mammoths a lot.

But they were succeeded by a group known as the Folsom people, and the Folsom people used ad adults. I mean, I opened the book with the discovery of the first Folsom site. It's in Folsom, New Mexico, discovered in the year 1908. Can we pause this for a second? Because I have to pee, and this is too fascinating for me to hold this in. 1908, Folsom people. Yeah, we'll come back. We'll be right back. Okay. And we're back.

So 1908, they discover Folsom sites. Yeah, the first Folsom site. And I mean, so, you know, and I don't want to spend too much time on this because this is all basically just the first couple of chapters of Wild and New World. The rest of it is about subsequent history down to the present. But the Folsom discovery is really kind of important in the whole American history story because up until this point, you know, and this is the kind of thing that, you know, the Europeans are really good at, of course. They sort of cast dispersions on America because their argument was, you know, America is really marginal to world history. I mean, you guys, we've had, we know that we had people interacting with cave bears and mammoths and, you know, and we have an ancient history going back

to Greece and Rome. And you Americans, you kind of just, you know, you don't have much going on at all. And so what the Folsom site did was to give America an ancient history, a history that made us a major part of this world story that I was kind of alluding to when I was describing people finally discovering the Americas as the last grand continents on earth. And what happened with the Folsom story is that there was a flash flood on a river called the Dry Cimarron River in August of 1908. And in the aftermath of that flash flood, this African-American cowboy named Charles McJunkin is out riding fence for one of the local ranchers, seeing what he's going to have to repair. And as he's riding along, his horse suddenly pitches up and its hooves slide in the mud right to the edge of this freshly cut, about 30-foot chasm in the slope that he's riding. And when he leans out of his saddle and looks down into this cut, what he sees are bones of a gigantic size that he's never seen before. I mean, this is a guy who, he had been on the

buffalo hunting plains back in the 1870s, so he had seen buffalo butchered. He knew what bones from big animals look like, but these were giant bones. And so this guy, McJunkin, started trying to call attention to this site. He never was able to do so and get any archaeologists out or paleontologists out to look at it. He dies in 1922, but about four years after his death, this museum curator from Denver, a guy named Jesse Figgins, comes down and brings a crew down. And what Figgins is interested in, he's sort of an amateur guy himself. He's just interested in some fancy big bones for his museum up in Denver. But his crew starts digging into this site, and they began uncovering these giant bison, what they're finding is a site of bison antiquus, these giant bison that became extinct about 10,000 years ago,

the ones that the Folsom people had particularly specialized in hunting. And as they're excavating this site in the first summer, they come across, just sort of lying in the debris, a couple of points like they've never seen before, which are three or four inches long and have these thin flutes on either side at the base. There's one right there. Yeah, there's one right there, the Folsom Point. So what Figgins' guys realize is that the hurdle for convincing the world, the scientific hurdle for convincing the

world that humans had been present in America, at the time everybody thought Indians had only been in America for maybe a couple of thousand years before Europeans got here, but the hurdle was finding an extinct animal out of the Pleistocene, indicating that it had been killed by human technology while the animal was still alive. And the next summer, I mean, it happened to be a summer when the Smithsonian had just published an article by some fancy archaeologist saying, you know, North America has no antiquity in its history. Indians have only been here for at most 2,000 years, probably less than that. And within about two months of that article coming out, this crew finds the scapula of one of these bison they're excavating with one of these Clovis points embedded three quarters of the way into the bone. And at that point, they stop digging. They call on

all the famous archaeologists in the United States. A guy named Alfred Kidder was the most famous archaeologist in America at the time. And he comes, takes a look, and proclaims this one of the greatest discoveries in American history. So they don't have radiocarbon dating yet, and nobody knows how old this is. All they know is that that particular bison species has been extinct for quite a while. Figgins says this site is 400,000 years old. Figgins says this site is 400,000 years old. But when we finally do get radiocarbon dating about two decades later, it looks as if a band of Folsom hunters using adattles, using spear throwers,

had killed 32 bison antuquus in what had once been a box canyon on the southern plains 12,450 years ago. And so suddenly that discovery in the early 20th century in the 1920s gives America a kind of an antiquity that it had never had before. And within a decade, we discover the Clovis site, which is out on the Texas-New Mexico border. And the Clovis site is of these elephant hunters who are actually even older than the Folsom people. And this pushes, when they're finally radiocarbon dated, that site pushes the dates back to the 13,000-year range. So what these discoveries in the 20s and 30s are finally indicating that contrary to what most Americans of the 20th century think, America is a brand-new place.

History dates to the time Europeans got here in the 1600s. Indian people have only been here a couple thousand years. Suddenly we realize America is this really vastly old place. And that sets up the subsequent story that, I mean, I try to, what I try to do, I mean, I was an English major as an undergraduate. So I'm kind of drawn to narrative storytelling, telling a lot of stories. narrative storytelling, telling a lot of stories. And when you write a book with about 66 million years of history, you obviously have a lot of opportunity to tell stories because there are a lot of stories in a span of time like that.

When you say that the Clovis points and the Folsom points with the fluted part of it so you could attach a stick to it, there's no people in Europe that figured this out? No, this was an American invention. What did they use in Europe? They were just using blade points, sometimes with the ears at the bottom. Ears. Yeah, the ears.

So you have a triangular point, and it has two ears coming out and you attach, you use the ears as a place to attach the rawhide. And so this was metal? No, not metal. What were they using? Flint. They were using flint as well. So when they were making these points, they were just doing it in a different way. They were doing it in a different way. So they'd figured out the same sort of technology, kind of, attaching a stick, but they had different methods that seemed to just be human ingenuity.

When did they figure that out? Well, they certainly figured it out by what's called the Solutrean culture, which is a sort of a contemporary with Clovis. They're hunting big animals. They're hunting mammoths and rhinos and things like that in Europe. So that's in the 16,000, 17,000 year range. Yeah, so this fluted idea is a distinctive North American invention. Is there any difference in the quality of the type of the stone that was accessible to people in North America versus Europe? Well, I mean, both places had outcrops of flint, and flint and obsidian were the two types of stone you went for. But North America had some really great flint and obsidian outcrops. And one of the things that's really pretty fascinating about these Clovis

people, about Clovisia the Beautiful, and they were all over America, by the way. There are more of their points discovered in the southeast and in New England than there are in many places in the west. So this is not just a Western phenomenon. This just happens to be where we discovered them first. But they were all over America. But they went for, they seemed to be making pilgrimages to four or five locations that had the absolute best, sharpest, hardest flint in America. And they would go back to those spots again and again and again, kind of had a, in their minds, a mental geography of where these locations were. Wow. Yeah. So they, one of the great things about the whole Clovis period,

to a little lesser extent Folsom, is that there are these spectacular blades that they did. And sometimes they would do blades that were like eight or nine or ten inches long. And there are some of them, caches of some of these blades of that size, that indicate they were never used. They basically were kind of ceremonial objects. I mean, I kind of argue in the book, I mean, it's pretty much speculation because we don't really know a huge amount about these people. But one of the things I argue is that unlike in Western Europe, they didn't leave ultimate technology, this sublime technology that they would actually create in some form in blaze that they never really used to hunt, just to have as ceremonial objects.

Wow. So it's a really fascinating story. I mean, we've known about the Clovis people, obviously, for a long time. We've been trying to figure out, of course, other explanations for what happened to the animals of the Pleistocene because we lost a lot of them during the Pleistocene, and people have proposed all sorts of other theories. But one of the strange things about this story, I mean, I tried to do a book that's based on all the latest science I could find and all the best people who were doing archaeology and paleontology and genomic science. I mean,

that's one of the possibilities these days. We have genomic science that's able to tell us things now that we've never known, even over the last 15 or 20 years. And one of the fascinating things about it is that it's almost like climate change. We've tried to come up with every other possible explanation to let ourselves off the hook for climate change, but it almost looks like this is an old attribute of human self-interest and human nature. We tend to not want to blame ourselves for very much at all. We tend to look for other excuses for things. And none of the other suggestions about what might have happened, other than humans probably entered a continent with animals that were completely naive about us. And in the time that it took them to smarten up and confront us, we were able to scatter them enough that what we kind of think now is that we may have gotten like populations of mammoths so separated from one another that they couldn't exchange their genes. And they may have succumbed to, I don't know if you've probably heard of what happened to the mammoths on Wrangell Island. There was a group of mammoths out on an island in the sea off the coast of Alaska that were caught by rising waters in the Bering Sea and were isolated and survived down to about 4,000 years ago.

and survived down to about 4,000 years ago. But even though humans never found them, even though the climate changed, the animals were fine until they finally reached a point where they had a small enough genetic diversity that as they interbred with one another over and over again, mistakes began to build into their genome to the point where they finally became unable to reproduce. And 4,000 years ago, without any other effect being present, they died out. Do we have biological remains or skeletal remains of Clovis people and people from that time period? Yeah, we do. There's actually a Clovis burial site in Montana of two infants, a young child and an infant. And they were buried with ceremonial Clovis points, several inches long, covered in sacred, what we think was sacred red ochre. And that particular site in 2014, the local native people in Montana, it's near Bozeman,

and the local native people and archaeologists went out to the Shields River, the nearby Shields River, and after studying these young skeletons, they reburied them in the Shields River. So they returned them to the earth in 2014. So they reburied them in the same site where they found them? Near the same site. Yeah, they were found on the banks of the Shields River. That's interesting that they chose to do that. Because I could understand why they would think to respect the bodies and bury them, but I could also understand, like, for science, like, what an incredible discovery. Yeah, well, they did do science on them.

Was there genetic material? There was not. no physical tissue no marrow or anything not that i'm aware you know and i could be wrong about that but i don't think so do they have an understanding of where these people might have come from originally they seem to have come yeah and again because of we do have some sites, I mean, the Clovis people ended up all the way down into South America. And we do have genomic evidence from some of the sites that have preserved enough DNA to make educated guesses about this, that their origin was probably the Lake Baikal region in Siberia, was probably the Lake Baikal region in Siberia,

and that they probably, when the ice sheets opened, they probably came down in two different migrations, a kind of a northern Native American and a southern Native American migration, they're often called, even though both groups ended up with genetic markers as far south as Colombia and Brazil and places like that. But yeah, so we've got enough genetic material that we are able to do that kind of thing. I don't think that burial site in Montana yielded any, but there were other sites that did. When did archery make its way to North America? Well, that was the next great, obviously the next great innovation.

And the reason these innovations were important, by the way, and to answer your question, it was about 2,000 years ago. And it seemed to come from the late arrival of Inuit people, the ancestors of folks who are sometimes called Eskimo. ancestors of folks who are sometimes called Eskimo. The Inuit people seemed to either adapt or bring archery with them when they got to North America. And the idea for that then diffused, spread through all of North America within about five or six hundred years. So we know that archery absolutely existed 2,000 years ago in Africa and in some other places.

When did archery first, when did they believe archery was first invented? Let's find that out. That's interesting. So just 2,000 years of archery, which is incredible. You know, and what it meant was each didn't have to do what Neanderthals had done, which is engage in sort of hand-to-hand combat with large, strong, and sometimes really resilient creatures like wild horses or mammoths at close range. I mean, some of these Neanderthal sites, for example, I mean, the guys were just beaten to hell, man. I mean, they had their cheeks caved in. They had broken, I mean, thigh bones broken. They had amputated arms, all kinds of really severe

injuries from taking on animals. But Neanderthals, one of the things we know from nitrogen isotope studies of their bones is Neanderthals were more carnivorous than wolves were. I mean, they were eating a higher percentage of meat diet than even gray wolves in Europe. Wow. So each one of these kind of innovations, addles, of course, by extending the human arm, you're able to stand back 30, 40 yards from an animal and throw a dart and kill it. With bows you're able to get back even farther. I mean they rescue you from sort of doing hand-to-hand combat with an animal that can easily kill you or crush you. What were Neanderthals using for weapons?

They were primarily using wooden spears. They didn't have flint points. They were using spears with points that had been hardened in fires. Wow. The oldest arrow is here, like 70,000. 72,000 years ago. The oldest bow is only like 8,000, so they didn't find a bow. Wow. That's insane.

72,000 to 60,000 years ago. Yeah. Some of which poisons may have been used. to 60,000 years ago. Yeah. Some of which poisons may have been used. Likely arrowheads were reported in 2020

by Faheen Cave in Sri Lanka dated to 48,000 years ago. Wow. Bow and arrow hunting in Sri Lankan site likely focused on monkeys and smaller animals such as squirrels.

Remains of these creatures were found in the same sediment as the bone points. All the used bone points. In 2022, arrowheads were reported from the Grotte, how do you say that, Mandarin Cave in France, dating to around 54,000 years ago. Wow. Yeah, so you can get an idea of, and this is important to this whole story, of the isolation of North America.

Once people get there and the glacial maximum recedes and the climate begins to warm enough to break apart the corridor that links Asia and North America, and North America, then North America is completely isolated, except for the South American connection through Panama, is completely isolated from the rest of the world. It's isolated not only from innovations like the use of bows and the old world, but, and this becomes, of course, a major part of the story when Europeans arrive with domesticated animals from which they for eight or nine or 10,000 years have been contracting spillover diseases, creating a European population that, of course, has now been winnowed by things like measles and smallpox and plague and all kinds of diseases that had spread across Eurasia but never got to isolated North and South America. And so when Europeans arrive with domesticated animals and animal diseases, they confront an American population of native people who have never been exposed to any of them. And that results in one of the great, possibly the greatest catastrophe in human history.

It's the term that people have been using these days is the great dying. I mean, we think by the time Europeans got here, and I don't want to, by the way, admit the fact I do a whole chapter called Ravens and Coyotes America that is about the 10,000 years after the Pleistocene. Because native people are here for 10,000 years and managed to preserve almost all the biological diversity, at least what's left after the Pleistocene, for 10,000 years. There's only one extinction that I was able to find during that time. A flightless sea duck became extinct in that 10,000-year period. But, I mean, they managed to preserve almost all of North America's biodiversity across that time span. And then Europeans arrive with all these old world diseases. And in a blink of an eye, what had at one point been,

and to be sure, most of this population is in South America, 56 million people in the two Americas, something like 80 to 85% of that population is taken out in a few decades by old world diseases. Wow. Yeah, it's, as I said, it may be the greatest human catastrophe in history. That's the speculation for what happened to the Mayans and the Aztecs and a lot of these amazing structures that they're now finding in the Amazon jungle.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were taking, I mean, you know, some of these amazing structures that they're now finding in the Amazon jungle. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were taking, I mean, you know, some of these civilizations, like, you know, in North America we had the great Chacoan civilization that was our version of the Mayan or Aztec or Toltec groups down in Central America. I mean, we had this great civilization in the American Southwest, Aztec or Toltec groups down in Central America. I mean, we had this great civilization in the American Southwest centered around what are today the Chaco and National Park ruins. With a civilization that spread over probably 50,000 square miles and included hundreds of small hamlets and a central city, Chaco, that was sort of like the Vatican. I mean, there were priests who lived there most of the year, priests who, through the history of Chaco, shows 14 burials in one room.

Nine of those burials span the entire history, the 300-year history of Chaco. Every one of those nine is related to one another through a female line, the mitochondrial line. And each of the nine, present from the start of Chaco to the end of it, from about 900 to about 1200, has a genetic abnormality, a sixth toe on one foot. Whoa. a sixth toe on one foot. Whoa. So these were the people who were regarded as the priests of the place.

And so a couple of times a year, usually at the solstices, they would have these big celebrations, and 40,000 people would flock into Chaco and observe the solstices and do ceremonies and, you know, no doubt engage in all sorts of epic nightlife, too. But over time, over 300 years of time, drought and a local overuse of resources, and also, I mean, this is kind of the famous story of Chaco. What really sort of happened to Chaco is that the priests were promising all of their followers that they could make it rain in the desert because this was an agricultural, agriculture

had finally come to North America. And we reached a point when droughts began to strike and the priests couldn't make it rain, at which point all their followers basically abandoned their religion. And the archaeologists who have gone in have sort of pointed out that, so it kind of looks as if a disparity in lifestyle must have contributed because the priests and the priestly class, they were the ones that were getting to eat all the protein from the deer and the antelope. As a result, their skeletons are three or four inches taller than all the peasants. They lived longer. Their children got past the age of five much more easily. And so there is speculation about Chaco that the disparity in wealth, followed by the inability of the priests to deliver and make it rain,

is what caused this civilization to collapse when the peasant class basically rose up and overthrew it. Wow. That's so fascinating because that seems like that just happens with humans. When humans get into a position of power, they want to maintain it and tighten up the grips on everybody else. They want rules for them, but not for everyone else. They want to have different privileges. We're dealing with this like literally right now. Well, sure. I mean, you know, it shouldn't surprise us, I guess. It shouldn't surprise us. Human nature has been the same. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably been the same for three million years. But it's just so fascinating when you see it manifesting in

this ancient culture and the people wise up and go, you can't make it rain. Yeah. And then they eventually get sick of giving these people all their deer. Are there images of this particular site that Jamie could find? We could see what it looks like? Yeah, if you just punch up Chaco Canyon Historic National Park, you'll find the major site, and I've got, of course, photographs of all this in the book, but the major site is called Pueblo Bonito, B-O-N-I-T-O. And so how long did their civilization thrive for?

For about 300 years. Just like us. Yeah, just like us. It's a cycle. With a disparity of wealth that produced. Unless you have an authoritarian dictatorship. Yeah, here you go. You can get people to do whatever the fuck you want and you keep things going.

So that's Pueblo Bonito. And so you'll notice the caption there, did women control the bloodline, which speaks to what I was just telling you a minute ago. Out of those burials in this central room, in this structure, they all, nine of the 14 buried there were all related to a single woman who was at Chaco at the founding of this civilization. Wow. Now, is there an artist's rendering

or representation of what it must have? Look at that. That looks incredible. Yeah, there is. The National Park Service, I know, has done one on some of their brochures of what it looked like originally. See if you can find anything like that, Jamie, an artist's rendering of what it looked like. That's wild stuff. And so what years was this again? Basically 900 to 1200. Wow.

Look at that. Yeah. That's incredible. They built 400 miles of roads, by the way. And they built their roads straight arrow across the landscape. I mean, they didn't swerve around mesas or buttes. So yeah, this would have been what Pueblo Benito looked like in, as you see, AD 1100. Look how they have that one tree. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. When they first settled the area, it was covered in a pinyon juniper vegetation. But almost all those trees

disappeared over the life of Chaco because these people were farming the classic Mexican cultivar complex, corn, beans, and squash, all of which require fires to prepare. And so when you have a food dish that requires you to build a fire to prepare it, and you're in an area with a limited resource of possible wood, over time a civilization of that size almost completely obliterated all the surrounding vegetation. Oh, no. The stone axes. Oh, no. The stone axes. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's yet another example of human nature that's always been in place. And, you know, we tend to be so self-centered or living in our own heads that we think all these things,

this just applies to us. But these kind of things, living for status, you know, acting in a way that separates you from the lowly peasants of the world, I mean, this is ancient. And we have always figured out ways to do it, ways to distinguish ourselves. And those kinds of things have often led to, you know, serious problems in human history. Yeah, it's just so fascinating to see that this has always been the case. And people have always been very short-sighted in terms of allocation of resources and preservation of resources. We always have, and we have another instinct, too. We tend to, whenever things start growing short of things, we always blame somebody else. This is the classic way. Bad spirits. Yeah. Enemies. whenever things start growing short of things, we always blame somebody else.

This is the classic way. Bad spirits. Yeah. Enemies. Yeah, enemies. Voodoo. Some other group. Right. Yeah.

I mean, you know. Witchcraft. In subsequent European history. And so I will say what we've been talking about, it's primarily the first three chapters of this book. And the last seven chapters, plus the epilogue, is all about the period from the time Europeans arrive up to the present, up to really last year. But, I mean, all these same things play out in the story. I mean, Europeans, unlike Native people, I mean, and I make an argument for why native people, I think, preserve that biodiversity for so long. I mean, despite examples like Chaco, you still have virtually all the animals, all the birds, all the reptiles that had survived the Pleistocene 10,000 years of human occupation later.

They're all still here when Europeans get here. And I think, I mean, I explain it several ways, one of which is the population of North America, north of the Rio Grande River, never rises above 5 million. These people understand that you've got to keep your population in check or you will use up the world. And so they consciously do it. How do they consciously do that? Do we know? Well, they do it primarily by various techniques of holding birth rates down. And one way of doing it is birth spacing. You nurse children, say, until they're five or six years old. And as long as women are nursing, they don't go through another chance to

get pregnant. So that spaces births out. And the other thing they do is, frankly, they engage in abortion. I mean, they very actively decide in some instances that we don't have the resources to support this infant. Do we know how they did that? Well, they did it by various herbal means. And they also sometimes engaged, I mean, this is pretty draconian, but they sometimes engaged in killing infants after they were born. Infanticide is, I mean, it wasn't hugely common.

And I'll say this also about infanticide. After a woman would carry a baby to term and then have it killed, it created the impulse that probably helped lead to the development of agriculture. I mean, agriculture is the next great economy and innovation in the way humans live. And what it enables you to do, I mean, one of the things that seems to prompt it is that you've lowered the possible animal life around you to the degree that you can't really keep going as hunters and gatherers. So you have to come up with something else. And in North America, native people do this several thousand years. They go to agriculture several thousand years later than Europe does. I mean, Europe has been continuously occupied for 55,000, 60,000 years. So they reach a point where the animal populations have been reduced earlier

by 8,000 or 9,000 or 10,000 years ago and have to go to agriculture and domestication. In North America, we don't really do it until about 4,000 or 5,000 years ago. And in what is now the United States, only really about 1,500, 2,000 years ago do you have the first evidence of going to agriculture. But people are anxious to come up with a new economy that doesn't require you to be so draconian about population suppression. So they just thought of any new baby as a threat to the food source? Well, some new babies, not everyone. Yeah, but some new babies. They just had a number? They had a number. They're very clear. I mean, they had really short feedback loops and they

understood their local ecologies really well. And one of the things you knew is that you couldn't base your population on the best years you experienced. You had to base your population usually on the worst years, because if you went for the best years, whenever the worst ones came along, you were going to end up really hit hard. Starving to death was a real possibility. A real possibility. So you're cautious and you base what you think the carrying capacity of your resource base is on the worst years you're going to face. And this is speculation? Is this educated guess? How do we know this? Well, it's beyond speculation. I mean, we know this is a principle of sort of hunter-gatherer life ways around the world,

even still among some hunter-gatherers that exist today. They still employ those kinds of techniques. They still employ those kinds of techniques. But they're always looking for the opportunity to escape that. And for people in Europe 10,000 years ago and for people in North America, you know, between 5 and 2,000 years ago, the opportunity to escape it somewhat was agriculture because that produced – if you specialized in a few food crops – and by the way, one of the differences in agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution in the old world and the Americas is in the old world, obviously, much of it depends on domesticating animals. The animals that are left after the end of the Pleistocene in Europe, horses, camels, goats, sheep, hogs, cows, wild oryx, are almost all domesticated. I mean, in some cases, in the case of wild horses, that's probably what saved them is that they got domesticated. In North America, though, there were almost no domestications.

Wild turkeys were domesticated. Some groups domesticated ducks. But there weren't any mammals. Nobody domesticated bison or bighorn sheep or pronghorns. bison or bighorn sheep or pronghorns. And one of the things that does when Europeans arrive is that, I mean, Europeans come out of this ancient 8,000-year-old herding culture. They've been herding goats and sheep, and they've developed a religious tradition ultimately the judeo-christian tradition which is probably based on earlier things to be sure that is basically a herder's religion where what that religion teaches you is that not only are humans exceptional, but it teaches you that predators are the enemy.

Any animal that preys on your sheep or your goats has to be eliminated. Meanwhile, in North America, where you don't have domestications of animals, predators are regarded as these prized, sacred creatures who keep the world functioning the way it's supposed to function. And people look for a predator as a totem animal in a vision quest, or they name their clan the Wolf Clan or the Panther Clan. So it produces a whirl when the two groups come together. Here are these native people who still have the ancient human idea that we are part of everything around us.

Other animals are just like us. They have societies. They can actually intermarry with us. I mean, many native ceremonies, and I describe several of them in the book, are about whenever you confront the idea of animals are becoming scarce, in front the idea of animals are becoming scarce, you do ceremonies that are designed to not only make the animals reappear for you, but the way you do that is to convince them that you still regard them as kin. You're still willing to, you're going to do a ceremony where you go through a kind of a faux series of marriages between humans and bison. And so this kind of, we're all part of a kinship

web. I mean, it's what Charles Darwin finally provides the scientific evidence for. And, you know, and on the origin of species in 1859, we're out of the same evolutionary stream. Europeans have, meanwhile, old-worlders have come up with a completely different idea. This herding religion they have is that, posits that, well, I'll tell you the story that sort of launched me writing this book. This is a kind of a good way to say this, I guess. My oldest memory is from when I was four years old. I mean, psychologists say a lot of us, our oldest memory is from the age of four. This is the only one I really remember from the age of four. And I think the reason I remember is because it's, you know, sort of laden in emotional

content. So it's really engraved in my system. And here's what happened. When I was four years old, I had the first little animal companion I ever had, and it was a little chicken, a little, you know, few weeks old chicken, still yellow. And, you know, I'm not very imaginative as a four-year-old, so I name it Chickie. And so Chickie and I, my first great friend and buddy, spend our time dashing through my parents' house in Louisiana in a game of chase. And I'm chasing Chicky underneath the sewing machine, underneath the couch, and underneath the dining table. And one day, you know, as a little clumsy four-year-old, I miscalculate and I step on my little chicken and I kill it. So I'm four years old. I'm confronting mortality and loss for the first time.

My mom and I go out in the backyard. And, I mean, we're both crying and we bury Chickie. And as we're standing there and I've, you know, shoveled dirt over Chickie and sobbing away the whole time. And I turn to my mother and I say, so, Mom, just sort of one last plead, Mom, I get to have Chickie again in heaven, don't I? And my mother, who is this good Southern Methodist and has absorbed the Western worldview in its entirety, and who's also kind of known all her life for giving you the unpainted version of things anyway, even if you're four years old, I guess.

She looks down at me, and although she's crying and feels compassion for me, she says, she's got to tell me the truth. Why no, honey? You're made in the image of God and you have an everlasting soul. So when you die, you get to go to heaven. Chickie is just an animal. Chickies don't get to do anything like that. So I'm afraid Chickie is just dead.

So it was my instruction in the European worldview. Other creatures are something completely different. There in the Judeo-Christian tradition, other animals are made for our use. tradition, other animals are made for our use. They're made, as Genesis puts it, unto your hand are they delivered. You can basically do anything you want with them. And with this idea of humans as exceptional and everything else out there as just sort of for utility purposes to make the lives of humans better. from what native people with their kinship notions have, and also with burgeoning capitalism, the beginnings of the global market economy. And with so many native people dying, North America is undergoing this huge ecological release of wildlife. It's the origin of our Virgin America stories where North America is just teeming with everything under the sun. And we look on animals then as just being like

gold, trees, grass, whatever we want to exploit, we turn them into commodities. And it's sort of the explanation for the global North American fur trade. Beavers as an object of pursuit. White-tailed deer as an object of pursuit for leather. We should tell people that beaver were so in pursuit that at one time the richest man in the world was a beaver furrier. Yes. The richest man in the world sold beaver pelts. John Jacob Astor, yeah.

And the first great American corporation was a fur trading corporation to exploit the beaver populations of North America. How wild is that? Yeah. So this is the story then that starts unfolding. And, you know, and it's amplified by the fact that all these Europeans who have come over,

especially the ones from England and France, they've gone through centuries of the feudal economy where these lords of the manor and kings control access not just to landscapes but to animals. So, I mean, it's the origin of the Robin Hood story. Robin Hood is a deer poacher who represents the peasant population that the king's forest and the sheriff of Nottingham as the game warden won't let him at. So suddenly this population of people who have been resentful about the fact that they can't hunt, that they can't enjoy the bounty of the forests in Europe, arrive in North America. And even though the native people try to convince Europeans the deer are like our cattle, you have to understand, they belong to us. Europeans, of course, don't acknowledge that.

And suddenly here are all these animals, all this wildlife. I mean, in super abundance. And nobody is telling you that you can't go after it. rural and lower class people basically rise to the middle class as you exploit animal populations and sell them. And that gets you into the currency economy. It's so fortunate that they figured this out somewhere early in the 20th century and started instituting wildlife conservation and reintroducing animals and things along those lines. Well, yeah, and of course I track the story all the way through, and I won't elaborate on how it goes. I will say that there have been a couple of reviews like Goodreads and Amazon of this book where people say, well, this is an anti-hunting book. I mean, which is kind of, you know, it caused me a certain amount of chagrin because of how I grew up. I mean, I grew up hunting. I mean, I stopped hunting in my 20s.

But when I was in Montana at least three times in the last decade I was there, I would buy a deer license and shoot a mule deer out in the pasture in order to stock my freezer with venison. And in some ways, I mean, I look at this book as this is probably the most comprehensive story of the human relationship with animals, which obviously involves hunting, that anybody has told, at least about North America. You can't read reviews. which obviously involves hunting, that anybody has told, at least about North America. You can't read reviews. Because there's always going to be someone that has a ridiculous take on things. Then you have to argue that ridiculous take because it doesn't make any sense to you. And then you're wasting time on some fool's ideas. Yeah, you're wasting time.

And, you know, what a lot of people do is if they already think what you're saying, I mean, you get five-star reviews. If you say something that is not part of the package that they bring to the game. Right. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. The anti-hunting notion is an interesting one. I mean, it's just reality, the reality of North America to say that that's anti-hunting. That's ridiculous. That's just reality. It's just the market hunting thing is well documented, particularly in regards to the buffalo. When you see bison skulls stacked on top of each other, anybody that doesn't think that that looks absolutely hideous and horrific, like how did they get so far gone that they thought that was okay? Yeah. I mean, and at the same time

that was happening, I mean, we were taking out, I mean, this is one of the ones that stuns me. Passenger pigeons, the most numerous bird, not just in North America, but in the world. We think there may have been 10 billion of them at one point, had been in North America for 15 million years. Those birds couldn't survive 400 years of our presence. It's amazing. Once we arrive, they can't last. I mean, they actually, they only last about 300 years after we arrive. How did they kill so many of them before they had firearms? Well, passenger pigeons, I mean, it was very much like the industrial hunt for bison. I mean, you had to use firearms, obviously, for that. But for passenger pigeons,

bison. I mean, you had to use firearms, obviously, for that. But for passenger pigeons, the commercial hunt, the market hunt, was basically done with nets. You spread nets across the forest, and they were spring-loaded and were released. And what they would do is they use live passenger pigeon decoys that were placed on the end of a pedestal that rocked back and forth. They were called stools. And so the passenger pigeon decoy was referred to as a stool pigeon. Wow. So that's where that comes from. That's where it comes from.

What did that look like? Can you see if you can find an image of what that looked like? So, you know, we get stool pigeon from, you know, the gangster movies about the 1920s, 1930s. And what they're referring to is stool pigeon is basically a traitor. The stool pigeon rats you out. Wow. And so this was all market hunting as well the pasture pigeon yeah it was market i mean people don't think of pigeons as being a food source but that is uh really what they were

yeah so this this pigeon is secured in place somehow yeah so it is its feet are attached to the stool wow and yeah and the live ones the live birds that you did this with, when you rocked the stool back and forth, it would flap its wings as if it were landing. And that would then bring down these pitted flocks. Wow. And then they would spring load the nets and capture them all. Yeah. And they wiped out the entire population that way.

That's incredible. Capture them all. Yeah. And they wiped out the entire population that way. That's incredible. And one of the reasons they wiped the population out was because, I mean, in the last hunts, which were taking place in the upper Midwest, in Wisconsin in particular, I mean, they went after them while they were on their nests. So why were they surprised?

from while they were on their nests. So why were they surprised? I mean, the whole idea is as when the last passenger pigeon died, for example, in 1914, you know, a famous story, it dies in the Cincinnati Zoo, Martha, it's called, after Martha Washington. Martha dies in 1914. Okay, so that's the beginning of World War I, the Great War. To be sure, lots of newspapers were focused on other things. But I could hardly find any newspapers in America that wrote an obituary about the last passenger pigeon, what had been the most numerous bird, the most charismatic bird, and the emblem bird, our symbol of avian America, I could find one newspaper that wrote an obituary. Wow. And that newspaper said, you know, we guess we should feel bad about the loss of the pasture pigeons. But on the other hand, maybe it's a good thing that they're not going to be like grasshoppers and stick around with us.

So that was kind of the extent. Anyway, I use a lot of this to essentially argue that, you know, I mean, I do this theme of first contact a lot. And I mentioned the first contact between humans and animals that they had never seen. Talk about first contact in the book between Europeans and native people. And the whole idea of first contact theory is that the only way you can really relate to something brand new that you've never seen is through what's already in your head. You already have some notions and that's how you understand the new. And then after you've had some familiarity with it, you can develop new notions. But one of the themes I do in the book is essentially continental first contact.

And what I'm arguing with it is that what we bring out of the old world to America is the conviction that we're going to recreate North America, the United States, in the image or as clones of England, France, Germany. Because that's all we know. That's all we know. And these are places, of course, that in the previous several hundred years before colonization in North America had wiped out all their big animals. I mean, all you've got left in England hasn't had any wolves since the 1400s. They got partridges. And so people come to North America and immediately the idea is whatever is really wild, we really need to get rid of it. Passenger pigeons, bison,

grizzly bears, wolves, those are not the earmarks of a civilized society. England doesn't have those kinds of things. And so, I mean, it kind of takes the heroes of this book, I think,

are probably the ecologists of the 20th century who began to realize, so North America is really old. It's had all these animals for a really long time. And all these ideas out of Europe, actually, they're not based on science. They're based on just old folk traditions out of this herding kind of culture. So we've got a chance to do something new here, and we've created this vast public land system in North America. So we actually are able to get to have all these big charismatic animals if we just wake up in time. I mean,

it's Aldo Leopold, really, who sort of is the advocate for this more than anybody else. By the middle of the 20th century, he's arguing that we need to do an American thing, not just try to make the United States into some version of England. Because as Henry David Thoreau had famously said back in the middle of the 19th century, he was reading the accounts of the first Europeans to get to Massachusetts, seeing all these creatures in huge abundance. 200 years later, 1857, he's sitting there in his study and realizing, I don't get to see any of this, really. And he writes this incredible passage in his journal in March of 1857, where he says, I realize it's like going to a symphony and midway through the first movement,

it suddenly occurs to me, wow, there are no strings. There are no, wow, there are no woodwinds. There's no percussion. That's all gone. And then he goes further and he says, it's like looking up at the stars at night and realizing that some demigod has come before you and plucked all the best of the constellations out of the sky. And you're not getting to see the full night sky and he says you know i realize somebody has come along and emasculated america before i could live

in it quickly and then he has this great line and i use it as the title of one of the chapters in here. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth, he says. I want to know the full thing. I don't want to think that somebody has come before me and selfishly robbed me of all these experiences. It's just so bizarre that human beings repeat these same patterns over and over and over again. And with the invention of firearms, they were able to do it so effectively. And with those traps that they use for the stool pigeons, use it so effectively that they could completely change the landscape in a relatively short amount of time. In a short amount of time, you know, and I mean, it takes until. So this year, 2023, is the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

I mean, this was kind of the Hail Mary. Now, to be sure, back at the beginning of the 20th century when Teddy Roosevelt is president, Now, to be sure, back at the beginning of the 20th century when Teddy Roosevelt was president, I mean, we come up with the game laws for most of the states, which are all aimed, of course, at what we're trying to preserve are the things that people want to hunt. And we have the idea that we're going to get rid of all the predators and we're going to substitute human sport hunters for predation. This is how we're going to, because one of the things they're confronting in the early 20th century is what's called, as they remove predators from various regions, the ungulate populations, deer and elk and moose, start going through eruptions. Their population starts just booming, and then they'll eat all the forage and die. Elder Leopold studied this and said before 1900, he could find mentions of only two eruptions like this that had happened

in America. After 1900, and we started the predator war, he found 42 of them. So the idea was we're going to use human hunters as the substitute for the predators that we're taking out. And of course, that enabled us to preserve a lot of animals that people want to hunt, elk and deer and pronghorns and so forth, even though we've gotten pronghorns from 35 million down to 5,000 by this point. They're the most ancient of the North American animals, right? Yeah, and they're distinctively North American too. It's so weird. Such a strange animal. Strange and beautiful.

When you see them in comparison to everything else. Are they an actual antelope? What are they? Well, they're an antelope goat. And they're an antelope goat. Antelope capridae is the family name, which had to be created for them. And actually, it looks like maybe their closest relatives are giraffes. Whoa, they kind of look like giraffes.

Yeah, their legs in particular. Their eyes, too. Yeah, and the great big eyes that are mounted on the sides of the head. Yeah, look at that guy. What a cool animal that is. Yeah, and one of the great things about them, too, is that, okay, so they can run, the females in particular, can run 60, 65 miles an hour. Which puzzled biologists for a while because the only predators they have possibly are wolves and coyotes, neither of which can run over about 42 or 43 miles an hour.

So the question for a while was, so why the speed overkill? Until we began to realize these guys developed their ability to run back during the Pleistocene when they were being pursued by American cheetahs. when they were being pursued by American cheetahs. And they still, the females still select for the fastest males to breed with in order to preserve this high speed. So the result is pronghorns only have predators when they're fawns. They don't have predators as adults because nothing that's alive now can catch them. At one time, a cheetah could catch them, but nothing can catch them now. And since they are preyed on only as fawns, one of the adaptations that pronghorns have made to

predation is they have two fawns. You have two fawns, a spare and an heir, with the idea that the spare is likely to be taken out as a fawn, but at least you're going to preserve your genetic line. Is it mostly coyotes? Primarily coyotes. Coyotes are able to find them. I mean, we don't have enough wolves out in the prairie country anymore to have any impact on pronghorns, but coyotes certainly look for the fawns.

Yeah, there's some in California still, and they used to have a larger population up until like, I think, 20 or 30 years ago. And then the coyotes started taking them out with such regularity that they're reduced to just a very small number now. Yeah, there's another spot or two where coyotes have had an impact on them. But I mean, this adaptation of two fawns is evidently very old, and obviously it's allowed them to survive. One of the more fascinating things that I learned from you also is the subject of bison and the enormous populations of bison that were witnessed at one point in history, and that it coincided with the European spread of diseases. Yeah, and the spread of bison

out of the Great Plains. Yeah, the bison story, and you know, I obviously, I tell it in several places, sort of the advent of the bison story early in Wild New World and then the sort of, you know, the denouement in a later chapter. But the modern bison is actually a dwarfed animal compared to the bison of the Pleistocene, that succeeded those earlier larger forms about 8,000 years ago and very likely became dwarfed because of anthropogenic selection, human hunting pressure. Because only wolves and humans really are effective predators of bison and what you get by becoming smaller is a quicker emergence as fertile so bison that are smaller can have calves at an earlier age. When the cows are two

years old or three years old, they can begin having calves. The gestation period is not as long for smaller animals, and so you're able to, in other words, these are advantages for reproduction. And this new bison 8,000 years ago essentially inherits the grazing niche on the American Great Plains that had formerly been occupied by all kinds of creatures that are now gone, you know, including things like mammoths that are grazers just like modern African elephants are. African elephants are. And so as a result of inheriting a grazing niche now depopulated with no horses to compete with, with no mammoths to compete with, they become this huge mass. I mean, this is why bison multiply into the millions on the Great Plains. And in fact, they probably become so

numerous, like passenger pigeons. It's one of the arguments for why passenger pigeons survive so long. They're so numerous that they saturate the predator possibilities. Predators just can't take enough of them to ever actually reduce their numbers. And so what happens, I mean, native people hunt bison for, modern bison for 8,000 years. That's the longest economic life way in North American history. But just about the time that Europeans are arriving and very likely contributed to by the arrival of Europeans in the disease epidemics that wipe out so many native people. Bison populations began to expand out of the Great Plains west of the Rocky Mountains. I mean, they get all the way to places like Oregon, Arizona, and east of the Great Plains

when they get to places like Georgia and Florida and Virginia and West Virginia and possibly even Western Pennsylvania. And the argument about this is when Europeans arrive and out of a hemispheric population, And out of a hemispheric population, or I should rephrase that, out of North America and South America having a native population as high as maybe 56, 57 million people, most of which indeed are from Mexico South into South America where agriculture has prevailed. So many people like that taken out, which is more than 10% of the global population when the Great Dying happens, people who have been cutting down forests and building fires and using fires as their primary method of heating and cooking and everything else. When that ends, the recent idea advanced is that that enables a reduction of carbon in the atmosphere, formerly put into the atmosphere by all these burning fires of all these millions of people. And when that happens, it produces an effect called the Little Ice Age. And the Little

Ice Age, which lasts for about 300 years, from about 1450, 1550 or so, somewhere in that range, around 1500 to 1800 or maybe 1830 or so, produces coolerister weather in the northern hemisphere, and that grows more grass, and that expands the bison population over a lot of North America. So when Europeans get here, you know, as a consequence of all these factors, nobody really understands. I mean, nobody knows anything about disease transmission. Nobody suspects that your breath can kill people. I mean, there's an early European who I quote in the book who says, boy, we just experienced the strangest thing. We went ashore for a couple of weeks. And when we came back on board our ship, word came that every village, every Indian village that we went to,

within two or three days of us being there, almost all the people in the village fell sick and they're dying. And it seems to have happened only where we went. Nowhere else is reporting this, but I mean, so it happens like that. I mean, just almost instantaneously. They don't understand why it's happening. The European idea is, well, God, he's killing them to enable us to settle the place. And they certainly don't understand what's causing, you know, the Little Ice Age. But what they're reaping the benefit of is this explosion of animals that even brings buffalo all the way almost to the East Coast. Wow.

Yeah, it's another one of these amazing stories that, I mean, we've only been figuring this kind of stuff out, you know, for the last 20 or 30 years. Some of it even more recently than that. It's got to be so rewarding as a person who studies that, though, that this information is being discovered in new revelations and new understanding. Yeah, it's really fun. I mean, I had a tremendous amount of fun doing this book. I mean, there were parts of it that certainly surprised me. I mean, I kind of knew this story i mean what i was trying to do was to tell in one book this whole north american story of humans and people in under 400 pages i mean i managed to do it it's 398 pages so thicky yeah it's 398 so it's got a lot of information in it but uh i mean it is an audio version version, too. Do you do it?

No, I didn't do it. Damn it. Yeah, the press I was with, W.W. Norton, retained the rights to the audio book. I mean, with Coyote America, my agency, my literary agency, retained the rights, and I got to select who read it for the audio book. But in this case, Norton retained the rights, and I had no say. You would be so good at it. Yeah, well, I've offered myself a couple times. Nobody's ever taken me up on it. Why are they so dumb about that kind of stuff?

They did that with Rinella as well, with his book, The American Bison. I know, and Stephen would be a fantastic reader. Well, he did read it. He eventually gained the rights to it. Oh, he did get the rights to it? And then he went and read it, and it's amazing. Yeah. Well, maybe at some it. He eventually gained the rights to it. Oh, he did get the rights to it? And then he went and read it and it's amazing. Yeah. Well, maybe at some point

I can get the rights to do it, but I've offered myself more than once and I never had anybody take me up on it. Wow. They have their stable of people they want to use, you know.

They're silly. Like, especially a guy like you who's been on this podcast a couple of times. You have such a great voice and such a passion for this stuff that's so tangible when you talk about it. Well, I'd love to be able to do it. Well, hopefully the guy did a great job. One of the things that I'd be amiss if I didn't

talk to you about is I want to get you together with Randall Carlson because Randall Carlson is a big proponent of the Younger Dryas impact theory being a leading factor in the extinction of North American animals. What do you think about that? Have you looked into it? Yeah, I have. And so, I mean, here's my deal, you know. I mean, I'm a historian, as I said, an English major, really, and kind of an environmental writer, a writer about this stuff. So I'm not an archaeologist or a paleontologist. I mean, my approach to doing this kind of an environmental writer, a writer about this stuff. So I'm not an archaeologist or a paleontologist. I mean, my approach to doing this kind of stuff, doing archaeology and paleontology, is I go to what I consider to be the best people and other folks consider the best

people out there. You know, Ross McPhee from the American Museum of Natural History, Donald Grayson, American Museum of Natural History, Donald Grayson, certainly Paul Martin, you know, who is the, he's kind of the Einstein of all this. And what I always look for are the people who are publishing in the peer-reviewed journals who are doing work that, like Paul Martin's, Paul Martin is like Einstein. I mean, his work has survived for decades because nobody has been able to shoot it down. I mean, he's that sort of bulletproof in his arguments. So I'm relying on all of those guys, the people who are spending all their time, you know, using science-based research to study this. you know, using science-based research to study this. And what they, when I look at their work,

Ross McPhee, for example, about the Younger Dryas period, which is, for your listeners, that's a period at about 11,500, 12,000 years ago, when there was a sudden really cold pulse in North America that amounted to essentially kind of a climate change. It didn't last a very long time, but it certainly was a change from what had happened before and after. And there is a corollary argument called the fireball hypothesis that came from an article that was in Science Magazine in about 2005 or 2006 that argued that sort of in the tradition of the Chicxulub asteroid, there may have been a comet or possibly an asteroid or a meteorite that struck, that set off the Younger Dryas period, and that also resulted in a kind of a scorched earth, at least in sort of the northern climes in Alaska. I mean, I know you've had on the John Reeves guy, the Boneyard, Alaska guy. How amazing is his place?

Yeah. Don't you want to go there? Absolutely. It's less. You want to go there. It's less. Less than five his place? Yeah. Don't you want to go there? Oh, absolutely. It's less. You want to go there. It's less. Less than five acres. Two acres.

And then there's another site that's- Have you been there? No, I have not, but I really desperately want to. John's a fascinating guy. Yeah. I mean, the fact that he has complete control over this is so interesting. Yeah, yeah. And I could tell you some more stuff off the air.

Yeah. Okay. But he's just- I mean, you know what's going on in the East River right now. Are you aware of this? I don't know. There's a bone rush in the East River because he talked about in the early 1900s, the museum in New York City had so much property from his, or so many artifacts, so many mammoth tusks and so many step bison jawbones and things that they dumped them in the East River. And he found the exact location. He told people where it is.

And they've already started discovering things. They discovered a step bison jawbone. And then they recently discovered a fragment of a mammoth tusk. So there's these guys, Dirty Water Don. And that's a piece of the mammoth tusk. So there's these guys, Dirty Water Don, and that's a piece of the mammoth tusk they found. See if you can find also the bison skull. The bison skull was maybe even more compelling. But in the area where this guy told them to look,

they've started to find things. He's got so much on his property. It's so incredible. I think it's a little further up, Jamie. These look older. So a bison priscusison priscus huh yeah bison jawbone uh-huh is that it right there that's it right there like right here it's not well we can you can find it if you just google it bison jaw what year we were you looking at how far away is this April April. When was he here? So this is probably, okay, these are pretty recent photos.

This is, we're still in March, I think, was when they discovered it, if I remember correctly. So this is the one you did with John, huh? Yes. This is, and look at that. They found cats and things and cave bears that they didn't think were native to that area. They didn't even think they were in that area. So they're making these significant discoveries in this piece of property that he has that really kind of changes.

There it is right there, right below that. That's the piece. That's the piece where he's pulling it out of the water. Oh, boy. Yeah, isn't that amazing? And then right below that, you can see the actual piece itself. We can see it's 10 inches. Really amazing stuff.

A chunk of a jawbone of a step bison that they found in the East River. And there's a lot more out there, apparently. But, you know, you're dealing with almost 100 years of it sitting there. But just the fact that they could still find some pieces is really encouraging. I mean, that's 100 years of silt, a moving river, who knows how much pollution and garbage, but they're finding things, which is pretty damn cool. Well, it's exciting to do it. I mean, I found at one point when I was living on the Great Plains back in the 1980s, I found a bison skull eroding out of a stream bank. And I have no idea how old it was, but it was of a calf.

It was a fairly small skull, but the horn cores were there. And yeah, it was very exciting to find something like that. One of the things that John has found, one of the things that's very extraordinary is it seemed like these animals all died together. And there's a very distinct layer of scorched earth that coincides with that. I remember seeing that. Yeah, I remember seeing that. The Younger Dryas Impact Theory, what's fascinating about it, it's not one event. It's multiple events that take place over thousands of years. And there's a lot of physical evidence of it. Iridium in particular, which is common in space and rare on earth,

and also nanodiamonds, these impact diamonds, these micro diamonds that get created upon impact of these, whether it's comets or asteroids, whatever it is, they think that there was multiple ones of these. This also coincides with the time period in which, you know, we apparently pass through this every, I think it's every June and every November. Is that correct? This asteroid, this shower that we see, this meteor shower. And that also coincides with the Tunguska explosion, which they believe is an asteroid that blew up right above the surface of the Siberian forest. And to this day is like flattened, like this enormous area.

The photographs are extraordinary of the post-impact discovery of the site, and for a long time, they're trying to figure out when, but this coincides exactly when Earth passes through this meteor shower, which is really, really interesting stuff, and I think the two of you together might be able to, if you have a conversation it would be very fascinating he's incredibly impressive this guy and I know he's heterodox in his sort of ideas and but

brilliantly researched I mean and has had debates with scientists over this even on my podcast they were talking about this evidence and they put it together with Graham Hancock's work and Graham Hancock who has ancient apocalypse, right? Ancient apocalypse on Netflix, which is basically all about that. It's all about the evidence of these sophisticated cultures that existed 11,000, 12,000 years ago that we really didn't know were around until they started discovering Gobekli Tepe and all these things that can carbon date to that time period, where we thought at one point in time,

they were just hunters and gatherers. Now we know they were capable of very sophisticated stonework in Turkey. And there's only to this day, I think less than 10% of them has been uncovered. They use LIDAR and they found more of them in the surrounding hills. But he believes that this coincides with these meteor impacts and that there was probably a huge disruption of human civilization and a restart of it. And it coincides with the end of the Ice Age. And there's some really fascinating erosion data and data of massive amounts of water that happened very quickly. And he believes what happened was something hit the actual ice cap that was over North America. This guy's very well researched in this. It's a really fascinating conversation, I think, with the two of you together.

And I would love to have if you're interested in that. Yeah. I mean, I'm certainly intrigued by it. I'm certainly intrigued by it. I always like to see people, whenever they have some dramatic new argument or claim for something that has other explanations, come up with something like a scientific article that you submit to a peer-reviewed journal and see what the Ross McPhees of the world think of it. I would like to see that, too, but I do think that people do preserve their initial notions, especially if they've been teaching that and writing books on that and they've proclaimed that to be the exact history of how things went down. I would like just to see you have a conversation with this guy because, again, he's very impressive. His ability

to describe these things and his recall of the information is second to none. Well, what I would say to the younger Dryas so far, and certainly the Fireball article published back in 2005 or 2006, had some currency for quite a number of years. Obviously, when I was working on these initial chapters, or particularly on that Clovisia, the beautiful chapter for Wild New Earl, I mean, I looked at what scientific literature I could find in the journals, and they weren't really citing it anymore. as a kind of a test for something that could cause a major extinction is, okay, so the Younger Dryas produced a cold pulse, to be sure, but it's going to be difficult to argue that these animals are going to expire in a cold pulse when they survived the glacial maximum 8,000 years ago. His argument is massive devastation. His argument is instant flooding, the creation of the Great Lakes almost instantaneously.

It's a wild argument. It's a wild conversation. So here are the other two arguments then. The other two arguments are if you have an extinction like the five that we've had before. I mean, I argue that, you know, we're all talking about the sixth extinction when we're in. My argument, sort of following an article that was published in the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, is that the sixth extinction that we think of today has actually, unlike all the previous five, the fifth one being Chicxulub, the sixth one has actually been happening in slow motion for 30,000 years. It's not just started. It's happening as the people in the National Academy of Sciences piece put it, when humans spread out of Africa, took out more than 300 mammal species

as they spread across the earth over the subsequent several thousand years and cost us in what they called in this 2018 article almost a worst-case scenario, cost us like two and a half billion years of specially evolved genetics. So the reason I have been following that argument, and that's kind of the one I do, is that when the younger, driest thing comes up, what people point out is that in all the extinctions before the Pleistocene one, those extinctions took out everything. They took out life in the oceans. They took out small creatures. They took out amphibians, reptiles, birds. But the Pleistocene seems to just be mammals and often just big mammals. And so there's this sort of logical

attempt to try to come up with what would explain an extinction scenario that doesn't take out things in the ocean, that doesn't take out little creatures, but just focuses on big mammals, which is why sort of the consensus is going towards this human spread. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think you probably have both things working in conjunction. And I think the good explanation for why it only kills things that are on earth and not in the ocean is that it impacts the ice shell, impacts these ice sheets, and causes this almost instantaneous melting of the ice caps in a catastrophic way. And not everything is affected by it, only the things that get impacted by the water and get impacted by this melting of the caps. I don't know enough

about it to have this conversation with you, but I'm blown away by this guy, Randall Carlson, and his descriptions of it and his understanding of it. And I just think it would be amazing thing to get together with you. There's no doubt human beings had a massive effect on it. And I think that all these things that you're pointing out are really fascinating and pretty tragic too that human beings did I mean the one things that's interesting is the gestation period of these mammoths, right? Like they had to carry there because they were so big you wanted to this we're talking about the bison Yeah, so if you wiped out a clan of them, you're making a significant impact It's not like like rabbits or like coyotes. No, that's exactly right. Right.

Biologists call those K species, which have these really long gestation periods. So they would make them more vulnerable to human predation. Yeah. Yeah. And they also were ignorant to us until we came here. They evolved for who knows how many years before we got here. Yeah. Well, one of the things I have always loved about you and your podcast is your wonderful openness to people, everybody. I mean, it's, I think it's one of the explanations for why, you know, the Joe Rogan experience is such a global hit, man. I mean, you come across as telling me your shit and I bet I'm going to love it. Well, with your case, it's easy. Your shit is amazing. And one of the big successes is the fact that people like you are willing to come on. So I really appreciate that.

And it was really entertaining. I can't wait to listen to this one again. It was so good. There's so much information and I can't wait to listen to this one again. It was so good. There's so much information. And I can't wait, even though somebody else is reading this book, I'll get it on audio anyway. But it's a wild new world, epic story of animals and people in America. Dan Flores. And I can't recommend enough his other book, Coyote America, that I've read. And then there's the American Serengeti. Dan, you're the man.

I appreciate you very much. You're the man. Let's do this again. We'll do it with Randall. All right, Dan. Thank you very much. Joe, you're the man. Let's do this again. We'll do it with Randall. Okay. All right, dude. Thank you very much. Bye, everybody.