The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 069: Dr. Dan Flores

Episode Date: June 22, 2017

Steven talks with historian and author Dan Flores, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater Crew.Subjects Discussed: Clovis hunters; North America's oldest mine; the religious underpinnings of Chaco Canyon's mysterious road network; Steve as The Inconsiderate Mountain Goat Hiker; macaw feathers, turquoise, and other luxury goods; Steve's wife and the 4-degree human comfort zone; the spread of human hunters around the globe; the eyed needle; boating around glaciers; wanderlust; ice-free corridors; the Blitzkrieg and Solutrean hypotheses; Liebig's principle of ecology; Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade; did the Indians reach equilibrium with the buffalo?, and more.Hunting Fishing Wildlife Wild FoodsConnect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We call it the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, first up, if you're listening to this, before you go do whatever you're going to do while you listen, like drive your car or cook dinner or something um go to on itunes

or on stitcher what have you and give this here podcast a super good review because that's helpful real helpful and it's like testimony to the uh stinginess and cruelty of society that less than 1% of the people who listen to this show have gone and given it a review on iTunes. In other news, we get a lot of people always asking about hats and shirts and stuff. The merch store is like back up and running at themeateater.com. And another thing that comes up is people are always, after they listen to shows, wondering about books, music, ideas that were discussed on the show. But if you go to TheMeteor.com slash podcasts, on the same place there that you can read descriptions of the shows, we have a thing where it's like show notes, right? So you can find links to books, ideas, articles that spring out of that selection is inspired by conversations we have here on the

show. Because we're constantly getting things that people are like, yeah, you guys are talking about some book. I didn't really catch what book it was. I don't want to listen to the whole damn thing all the way over again to figure out what book it was. That's the place to go find out stuff like that. So themeMeatEater.com slash podcast to find that kind of stuff. The merch store to find all kinds of cool stuff. And we got a new Meteor podcast t-shirt out.

And go leave your review, which is real helpful. Now, watch this segue. Get ready, because when you go there, you'll find notes about books and whatnot. And some of those books are written by our guest, Dan Flores, whose house we're in right now. Can I say the road you live on? Yeah.

I don't want to say that. Well, you can. I mean, so we're 17 miles southwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Not in Madrid. No, we're not in Madrid. We're not in Cerritos, but kind of in the vicinity. And within looking distance of what might be the oldest mine, a turquoise mine, the oldest mine in North America. Yeah, very possibly the oldest mine in what is now the United States. I mean, we're sitting here on the couch looking out the screen door, and that mine is in view about four miles away.

It's called Chalchiweedle, which is an Aztec word. Not that the Aztec Indians lived here. This was Pueblo country, but the Pueblos traded turquoise all the way down into Central America. And that turquoise made a really big splash among the Aztecs who have a glyph for this little mountain where the mine is in the Temple of the Sun in Mexico City, or did have it. And so, yeah, this is a pretty major site for ancient North American archaeology. What did the people here call it? Or is that not known? Yeah, I don't think they, I'm not sure what the word was that the Pueblo Indians had for it, but there was a Pueblo here

about five or six miles away that was basically a basically a pueblo of miners responsible for mining the turquoise in the Cerrillos Hills. That pueblo was called San Marcos Pueblo, and it was part of the Chaco Canyon Complex. A thousand years ago, in this part of the world, there was a major civilization that was basically orchestrated by a place we now call chaco which is a national historical park in northwestern new mexico and it had far-flung communities all over this part of the world all the way over into arizona present-day colorado utah new mexico and this was a mining town that was part of that complex. Is it true that Chaco Canyon, I think you told me this before, that at Chaco Canyon in present day we didn't really understand it until you get up above it in aircraft and look down on it to understand how it's configured? Yeah, I think, I mean, I might

have said something like that in some of our conversations from years ago when we were in Missoula. And the reason that's the case is because what archaeologists have learned about Chaco fairly recently in the last 25 or so years is that a lot of the buildings, Pueblo Benito, for example, which was kind of the Indian version of the Vatican, really, in North America a thousand years ago. It was laid out according to solstices and equinoxes, the sun rises over the Chaco Valley at solstice and equinox. And so the lines of the buildings were laid out in that way. And what archaeologists realized when, I mean, I think they knew this for quite a while, but looking down on it from aerial views, they realized that this is a civilization that built an elaborate road network across the southwest. And I mean, you can kind of see those roads when you're on the ground, when you're over there hiking around the cliffs, but

you can really see them, I think, a lot better from the air. And what people realized looking down on the Chaco and complex from the air was that these roads were built probably for religious reasons, just straight as an arrow across the landscape. And so unlike modern road engineers who will take roads around mountains and follow streams up canyons and things. These guys just, for whatever the reason, they shot these roads straight through the countryside. And if a butte got in the way, they just went right over the top of it and maintained that straight line. And these were roads that were used. I mean, people were hauling the vigas, the beams that they used to build all these giant constructions in Chaco from the Chuska Mountainsonderosa pines were having to go up and down the topography because the roads just went straight and there's probably a reason for it i mean it wasn't just done because that's like the practical way to build a road because it's not practical no it's

not really practical i mean what you would you know what animals do and what most road engineers do is you see a butte in front of you you go around yeah uh but so that's what steve you might have a little of that blood in you because that's kind of the way you hike yeah i do most of us tend to sort of go around and with the flow of the landscape and when you see a butte you're like oh just go right up and over it yeah that's why they call me the inconsiderate mountain go higher inconsiderate mountain goat hiker. Inconsiderate mountain goat hiker. And Dan, you were saying that some of that, so some of the turquoise taken out of here,

you're saying that there was awareness of this mine all the way down in the Aztec Empire and that it seems as though, just based on faunal remains, that these guys were getting macaws and things from the jungles they were indeed and they had those materials up here and in turn their rocks their turquoise was down there yeah it was it was a luxury good trade i mean we don't think you know of native people so much in the context of luxury goods. But I mean, they were just like us. They were motivated by the same human nature impulses that we are to express status. And so turquoise, both turquoise and the things that the Pueblo people in the American Southwest traded farther south for turquoise.

We're all luxury goods. And the macaws, I mean, and this is kind of a phenomenon of this part of the world because you can go into Santa Fe. I mean, I've got some scattered around here. There's a pot with macaw feathers in it right there. In most of the shops in Santa Fe still today, you can go in and buy macaw feathers because this is a bird we've known for the last thousand years around here that was a sacred bird to the native people. It doesn't range here, obviously. This is a desert. live up from the jungles of Central America, and the priests kept them in cages and treated them as kind of sacred beings, I think because of the brilliant plumage,

the coloration of them. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and so, yeah, it's a... Not for their beautiful song. Oh, my God. The inconsistency between a macaw, his appearance, and his song, where sounds like like he's the most beautiful bird and he sounds like like a dying what i'd imagine a diseased dying pterodactyl to sound like but we're just down in south america with some makushi guys and they still hunt macaws for the feathers yeah i don't

doubt it and now you're like we're in the world where it's like we have dyes and all these fabrics and you can buy like blaze pink shit on the internet right but they're like still like yeah those feathers are amazing looking and they were saying that macaws are difficult to hunt they hunt with a bow they're difficult to hunt but but there's a particular type of date tree, or I'm sorry, a particular type of palm that has like a date-like fruit on it. And they said that the macaws like those so much that you need to watch for one of those trees to fruit. And that's the only time that a macaw will let down his guard.

And if you wait under the tree, you might that a macaw will let down his guard and if you wait under the tree you might get a macaw with your bow and the rig they use is just a little barbed point that they try to hit the macaw with it and then the tip falls away from the arrow but it's connected to the arrow shaft with a piece of string and the macaw get tangled up and they're able to climb up able to climb up and get it and get their feathers and they still produce they still out of macaws and toucans and stuff they produce ceremonial head dresses yeah well that was um you know even a thousand years ago and quite likely farther back than that because there are macaws on the rock art all around us.

I mean, there's a rock art site about 12 miles away from here that has a whole kind of base relief of macaws painted on it. And at Petroglyph National Monument, which is out west of Albuquerque, on the mesa on the west side of the Rio Grande River, I mean, I've seen macaws painted there too. And some of this rock art is older than the Chacoan civilization. So that indicates to me that there's been a fascination with macaws and obviously a trade going down all the way into Central America from the Southwest for longer than the Chacoan civilization existed in this part of the world. Another interesting connection between New Mexico and maybe further south

is that the first time a European described a buffalo or bison, it was Cortez or one of his chroniclers ran into it in montezuma's personal collection yeah in his zoo that's right maybe five six hundred miles south of maybe more than that south of the furthest southern point that that animal could have ranged that's right because they didn't they clearly didn't cross the chihuahuan desert which is hundreds of miles of pure desert now you know we think that bison did uh range sporadically down in the northern chihuahua state into some of the grasslands there. So definitely in Sonora.

Yeah, Sonora, Chihuahua, but not as far south as, so that would have been an animal that Cortez saw that probably was taken as a calf down to the courts of the Aztec capital and became part of the officials. Was gifted to him or traded to him somehow. Probably, yeah. That's always been my thought about it.

You know, there's another thing I wanted to ask. I want to talk more about that stuff, but there's another thing I wanted to ask you about because you mentioned this one time. You haven't explained it to me yet. You were saying that you were going to tell me or could tell me, or were open to discussing

why people's houses are 72 degrees a thing i often tease my wife about is i'm like i've identified my wife's like general comfort range i'm like there's a four degree window in which you don't you that you don't take steps to like change your clothes to accommodate and she like from 68 to 72 yes when it falls outside of that four degree thing i always find she's doing something to like she's like losing layers or gaining layers to keep up with it you know absolutely yeah well i used to pose this question to uh classes at the university of montana and i would often do it at the end of the first class meeting, sort of for further cogitation after they left the class. So I want you to think about this

question. Why is it that no matter whether you live in Tucson, Arizona, or in Fairbanks, Alaska, you set the thermostat of your house when it can be controlled at 72 degrees. And we do this all around the world. So why do we do this? And I will say that I don't know that anybody ever came back on the second day of class and said, I know the answer to that. But if you think about it, it's a fairly obvious one. We are native as a species to only one part of the world, and we've colonized everywhere else. And so in order for us, in fact, to colonize

out of equatorial Africa, I mean, we had to invent sewn clothing. We basically had to harness fire in order to keep ourselves warm. We had to build structures to keep ourselves either warm or cool. And once we had those things, once we had clothing and structures and fire, we were able then to spread around the world, to go into northern Europe, to go into Scandinavia, to spread into Polynesia, to end up crossing Siberia into North America. But everywhere we went, that migration hasn't been long enough. It's only taken place in the last 45,000 years. We haven't gone anywhere long enough to actually change who we originally are as a species.

And so what we've had to do is to take our original habitat with us everywhere we've gone. And, of course, what it's meant is that if you live in Canada or you live in Scandinavia, we have to consume an enormous amount of energy in order to keep ourselves warm to live in places like that. Or if you live in Phoenix, Arizona, we have to consume an enormous amount of energy to cool ourselves. Because what we're doing everywhere we go, and we're going to have to do this when we go to Mars, too, in another couple of decades, we've got to set the thermostat at 72 degrees because that's the ambient temperature under which we evolved as a species and that's why we are only comfortable in your wife's four degree range from 68 to 72 so we've got to recreate that everywhere we go

i read somewhere, it was talking about the human migrations around the world, and it was like to come, at least the current understanding, to come into what's now the Western Hemisphere, to come into the new world, the scholarly consensus is still that the first Americans passed across the Bering Land Bridge. And to get to that point,

you needed to be able to live in the Arctic. Okay? So you're passing through the Arctic. People didn't get here until, and the number could change through time, but it's sort of generally, it's considered to be that people's first step foot here 14, 15,000 years ago. That could change by a handful of years um as more sites emerge but that the limiting factor what kept us out of here was that our our movement up into siberia which allowed us to come across into alaska was sort of stalled out until the invention of the eyed needle yeah that's sewn clothing. Yeah, sewn clothing.

Once the archaeological record in Eurasia starts to turn up sewn clothing with the eyed needle, and then people were ready to shoot up and cross over. And that very likely was a female invention. I mean, you know, we pride ourselves as men on, okay, we invented at-attles and things to be able to hunt more effectively. But the eyed needle was probably an invention of women sitting there working hides and figuring out how to attach them one to the other and make, in effect, fitted clothing. Because what you need is clothing that's going to fit tightly enough around you that it maintains your body heat.

And so we had to create sewn clothing before we could ever basically not even just live in these northern latitudes or extremely far southerly latitudes in the southern hemisphere but even to travel through them because we suffered from frostbite so easily i mean we're basically semi-equatorial apes and we have a hard time functioning in these really cold situations i was just reading uh i'm reading a book about de-extinctions and it's written by a geneticist it's about the possibility of like de-extinction bringing back through yeah people hear the word cloning it's just like not at all like what they would do to to recreate a passenger pigeon or recreate a mammoth is not at all has nothing to do with shit you saw in jurassic park it's way more nuanced and complex but um in it she was explaining that uh the author

is explaining that the woolly mammoth is about as far removed from the asian elephant as we are from chimps yeah meaning about we're about like genetically about 98% the same. But there's still that critical 2%. Is that 2% pretty major, man? Yeah, that 2% gets you Mozart and Einstein. Yeah. So another thing, and this is going to lead to a question

I wanted to ask you about. But when I read about the peopling of the new world, I've read the books of the anthropologist, the paleo the anthropologist, the paleoanthropologist, David Meltzer. Yeah. And, and David Meltzer talks about that passageway that humans,

when humans went through the Arctic and passed through Siberia and into Alaska, first, it's like important to realize that they weren't like thinking like, Hey, let's go to America. There was no, there was no like end goal. I mean,

they weren't like, you weren't like you were kind of, you were going somewhere on a, maybe a daily basis, but there was no like end goal well it's i mean they weren't like you weren't like you were kind of you were going somewhere on a maybe a daily basis but there was no like hey let's go colonize like on the bearing what's now the bearing what we think of when we look at like beringia or what's now the bearing land bridge it's reasonable to think that generations might have been born and died on that land chunk with no concept of them being coming from somewhere and going somewhere. Absolutely. I mean, for one thing, it's 600 miles wide. I mean, we call it a bridge.

And so that makes you think of it as this narrow passageway from one continent to another. But at the time when the oceans were at their lowest ebb, Beringia was 600 miles wide. So, I mean, it was as wide as present-day Texas. you wouldn't be crossing through Austin and San Antonio and think that Texarkana and El Paso were the edges of a bridge. I mean, I think probably you're exactly right. There would have been whole generations of people who would have just thought of that as a homeland. But I think what would have motivated them to go in the direction that carried them into North America is that, I mean, I think this is one of the reasons we left Africa and began moving around the world is that we were endlessly looking for places that other people hadn't been yet. Because that meant the resources were rich. The animals were stupid.

They hadn't been hunted yet. because that meant the resources were rich. The animals were stupid. They hadn't been hunted yet. And so what you're looking for is a place where, wow, I haven't seen any other human camps for the last several days. I don't see smoke from campfires up ahead. And so you go in the direction where there appears to be an absence of prior human activity. And that's what naturally led them finally into North America. That's kind of what I wanted to get at to ask you about is sort of your feelings on that. Because you just can't discount the idea that at some point there was like some element of curiosity because population levels like like for instance there's

this there's this idea that the reason that native americans were so susceptible to european diseases when when europeans arrived much later was because they had passed through this like big disease free corridor where you didn't have like in the arctic it was cold enough and it wasn't densely populated yeah so communicable diseases like people lost contact with communicable diseases and lost their ability to tolerate them so you can't be like oh like the arctic was so filled up with people that there was warfare right it probably wasn't like that it's probably just people moving i think it was people moving i mean you know around lake bakal and and uh russia there did seem to be where we think some of the siberian populations that ended up in north america and

became the ancestors of native people that i mean, there is some evidence of possible conflict that might have sent some groups on the move. Like over-resources? Probably over-resources. I mean, I think that's probably the ultimate motivation for these migrations that carried us around the world is that, as I said a few minutes ago, I think human populations were sort of endlessly looking for places where the resources were going

to be available solely to them, and they weren't going to have to compete with other people for them. And so that would have drawn people in these grand migrations northward, for example, out of Africa through Turkey, around the Black Sea, all the way up into northern Europe. Originally, because, I mean, anatomically modern humans, us, Homo sapiens, we realized when we got there, the first people who arrived there found only Neanderthals there. Only these, you know, I mean, related hominins, but at least not us. And I think that's what fueled the migration into North America, too. I will say, though, I mean, I'm completely with you on this impulse that we have to see what's down the river and around the next mountain range. And I mean, I think that's why,

you know, we're that kind of species. We've been doing this kind of spread out of our homeland and around the planet for so long, I mean, and not just our species, but prior hominin species like Neanderthals have done it, that it's part of our genetic legacy to go and see what's there. I think that's why we're going to end up going to Mars and probably in other places in the solar system as well. But I think that's why everybody is so excited about Mars at the moment. I mean, this is just one of those genetic pulls that we've had as a species.

And I think it's a tribute to us in a lot of ways. It's one of maybe the most noble things that we have about us. It's that we are curious enough that we want to go see what it's like somewhere else. Even though we know in the case of Mars, we're going to have to wear helmets and suits, and we've got to live inside polyurethane structures. But I think people crossing Siberia and the Beringia and into North America said, okay, we're going to have to bundle up like you've never worn clothing before. And we've got to invent tight-fitted clothing with, you know, with eyed needles.

But if we need the technology to enable us to go there, damn it, we're going to invent it because this is who we are. To me, it's one of our great tributes or attributes as a species the guy that i'm interested in historically is the guy that's coming down the coastline like people used to be big on this idea that there was the ice-free corridor that would have dumped the like the first the the first Americans to hit what is now the lower 48. There used to be this idea, and maybe you can speak to whether this idea is dead, dead, or kind of dead, is that they would have emerged on the Great Plains south of Edmonton, Alberta, through this idea that there's this ice-free corridor where everything to the east was glaciated and the coastline was glaciated and the rockies were glaciated but you had this

this dry chunk of land that would have just eventually funneled human traffic down to this little belt and spilled them out onto the primo hunting grounds of the lower 48 and from there wreaked havoc on woolly mammoths and mastodons and now it seems that there's a lot more thinking or that it's a more fashionable idea that people were coming down the coasts and probably had basic boat technology but i'm interested in the feller and there was a first like like if you had a time machine you could go see if you're standing in any place any place and you're standing in california on the beach there's a time you could have gone back in time and seen the first dude or more likely a family group coming down the shore right it would have happened it would have happened and i'm

interested in the guy coming down the shore that hits like a calving glacier so here he is never been here before he's on this coastline and all he can see ahead of him is here's an ice field right which still they still exist today around you know Southeast Alaska. And there's a calving glacier and he's like, kids, here's what we're going to do. We're going to trust that this ends and we're going to paddle out and around and see. What's on the other side. Because that was a leap. Yeah, that was a leap. And shit like that had to have been happening.

I think that's probably, in a way, that's the, you know, in Christian and Jewish theology, that's the Adam myth. I mean, it's the first man, the first woman to see the world. And, you know, in that myth, Adam gets to name all the animals, even. And so you can extrapolate, you know, in that myth, Adam gets to name all the animals even. And so you can extrapolate, you know, from the Bible and the book of Genesis to your, you know, captain of his boat with his family going around this calving glacier and hoping there's something on the other side and landing on the other side

and finding some land and seeing animals that they've never seen before and getting to name the animals yeah and so be like like be like hunting yellowstone park that's right that's with no park rangers with no park park rangers and all these new beasts. Because, I mean, that's one of the things that as we went around the world, we confronted. Not everything was the same. on a planet that was billions of years old where life had evolved as a result of shifting and continents breaking apart so that we ended up with everywhere you went, there were different life forms. You saw birds that you had never seen before.

You saw animals you had never seen before. And I think that's probably one of the things, especially people who are as closely tuned to nature and observing nature as these folks would have been because they lived off the natural world. I think that would have been an ultimate fascination to land on the other side of a calving glacier and see a whole host of creatures you had never seen before yeah like with the first guy idea after people had after people had passed through the arctic and started coming south they were probably hundreds of generations removed from snakes alaska has no snakes so you can imagine that there was a there again there was like a guy that's the thing i always return to is you get like you get when you think about history you always think of it becomes faceless right but there was like a person who had no idea that a

rattlesnake right was like bad shit and he would have had to been like the guy who made it and to the point where there is one and saw that first one yeah that's right what you're and and there was no thing there was no cultural no they did have cultural awareness but their cultural awareness is probably more um confined to like a set of experiences by just a handful of past generations. You weren't always reading about wildlife on other continents. You're experiencing it in some real-time way. Yeah, and I think that would have been tremendously exciting. It excites me to think about it, to step into a brand new world.

I've read enough, for example, just from in a sort of a minor key version of this, people passing in the 19th century from the woodlands of the East onto the Great Plains and encountering for the first time pronghorn antelope, for example, or coyotes, or huge herds of bison. They may have seen bison in small numbers in the woodlands in 1800, but getting 200 miles farther west out into the grasslands and seeing herds that spread to the limits of the horizon. I mean, and those people, of course, left us a written account.

And so you can read how exciting they found that. I mean, you know, John James Audubon, who spent his entire life studying nature, hunting animals, shooting birds, painting birds, gets to a new setting on the Missouri River on the Great Plains in 1843. And, I mean, I've always loved this passage. He wrote his wife that summer about all these animals he was seeing that he had never seen before

and finally closed one of his letters with the line, I've got to stop writing. I'm too excited to write anymore. I can't say anything else. I mean, so there was, that excitement is palpable through the written word of what people left us, you know, in the last 150 or 200 years. So it must have been the same thing when someone emerged into North America and saw, you know, giant herds of camels for the first time. Or, I mean, they would have seen wild horses, no doubt, Pleistocene horses in Beringia. And they would have seen mammoths and mastodons in Beringia, but they probably wouldn't have seen giant ground

sloths or hyenas or camels and so they emerged into settings where they they saw creatures like that must have been exciting as hell some people have i think a hard time with the camel thing like that we had like camelids on the great plains but it's really like you kind of take for granted like in the andes that you have llamas alpacas yeah and then some and then those are like domestic versions of some wild things but yeah so when you think about that it's like not as surprising that we did have a number of camel species on the great plains and dudes were hunting for them and dudes were hunting them yeah we had one humped camels not thehumped camels, not the double-humped camels of Africa, but the camelids from South America had migrated up the Andes chain,

crossed into North America, and basically spread across the plains as far probably as the Canadian border, at least Montana. I mean, they were animals that could exist at fairly high latitudes as the Canadian border, at least Montana. I mean, they were animals that could exist at fairly high latitudes in the Andes, and so they could take fairly cold weather. So coming out of, I mean, if these early inhabitants, these early arrivals in North America either came from the coast inland or emerged from an ice-free corridor. And I don't think the ice-free corridor is totally dead. I think they're- Like that idea is not totally dead.

No, I don't think it's dead. I think there are plenty of people who still believe that's the case. But I think they would have encountered, as soon as they emerged from that corridor, a suite of animals that they had never seen before. And I love the description I read fairly recently about who these people might have been. I mean, we don't know, for example, if the dates go back to 15,000, 16,000 years. I mean, we haven't really assigned a name to maybe the first 3,000 or 4,000 years of arrivals because they didn't seem to leave a technology like the later Clovis people led. But the Clovis people left us 13,000 years ago and down to about 11,000 years ago. I mean, they left us a technology that seems to make it apparent that, in the words of a recent scholar who described them,

he described them as northern hemisphere wild people, kind of like Vikings, but coming out of Siberia. And these were people who would, it was probably a very male-dominated society, maybe dominated by warriors or hunters. And they were people who would have thrown themselves into this new setting. And, you know, if Paul Martin is right with his Pleistocene – The Blitzkrieg hypothesis. Blitzkrieg hypothesis? Blitzkrieg hypothesis. I mean, it would have only taken them three or four hundred years to go all the way from the vicinity of Edmonton down to the tip of South America, the Tierra del Fuego, and wipe out millions of animals along the way. That's the thing that's so puzzling about – there's two things you just brought up that maybe you can speak to a little bit is uh one the way clovis the clovis culture they have this like diagnostic spear point okay so when you when you excavate an old site and you

find this spear point the spear point is so peculiar it's called a fluted spear point where they would knock a channel out of each face of the projectile point um it's it's so peculiar that it's regarded as diagnostic and there are many projectile points that are this way where people made it for a long time they made it the same way every time and then they moved on and started making different points that they were probably using in different ways and stopped making them that way so when you find a cloak what how you know a clovis site is kind of like what did their spear point technology look like whoever arrived from there's nothing like trying to think of how to put this there's nothing like the clovis technology in asia so people think that it either is an american invention that the people that first came down and colonized the new world

colonized what we now think of as the lower 48 and elsewhere that they sort of coalesced into or developed into the clovis culture and developed this projectile point suitable to the type of hunting they found here or like an anthropological conspiracy theory is that the paleolithic people of europe who who some would argue it's coincidence, some would argue it's not coincidence, who had a point kind of like the Clovis point. Much earlier, 30,000, 40,000 years ago,

they were making a point and hunting the same suite of megafauna in Europe with a projectile point that's kind of similar. So there's this idea that these fellers hopped in some skin boats and came over it's i think it's called the salutary and hypothesis or the salute came over showed the people here what's up the europeans came showed the people here what's up? The Europeans came, showed the people here what's up, how to do this deal. They died out.

And then what we regard as Native Americans came down afterward. Or had picked up their tricks of the trade from these European seafarers. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers.

You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet.

Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. What do you think of that? I mean, based on your career-long exposure to this stuff. Well, I mean, it is in a way. I mean, it's kind of a conspiracy theory, but it's a conspiracy theory that actually got into National Geographic. And so you've got to have some bona fides, some credentials to make it into a magazine of that ilk.

You know, I... Some people call it racist. Well, I mean, if you make the argument that, you know, it's the Europeans who kind of invent everything important and the native people just glom on to the critical technological elements, then it does have sort of overtones of at least a kind of an ethnocentrism. That's a good word. Yeah.

You know, so I realize that we've not yet found a kind of a precursor to Clovis technology in Siberia. And frankly, I wonder if that's just because there hasn't been great archaeology done yet in Siberia and that we're going to find it. Yeah. I tend to think myself that this is somewhat coincidental in part because of the difference in time frames. The salutary end point, as you mentioned, is like a 30,000-year-old point. It's one of the points that anatomically modern humans had in Europe within 10,000 years or 15,000 years of coming out of Africa. And the Clovis point, of course, occurs in time almost 20,000 years later.

So it's the kind of thing that the timeframe connections make me think it would be hard to come up with a linkage. Although, you know, you could, I suppose, it's in the realm of possibility to argue that some Clovis, that maybe these Europeans got into North America, left some sites, and people who became Clovis found those sites and attempted to emulate this kind of technology and did so very successfully.

I don't know right now what the explanation for this particular mystery is, but one of the things I really love about science in all its forms is that we endlessly have mysteries. And, you know, the mysteries, I mean, in my career, quite a number of mysteries have been solved, but there are plenty of them out there that in all the time I've been doing this, we never have figured out what the answer is. And so that's kind of the great thing about all this is that there are things still to be resolved in the future that other generations maybe can come up with a really fine explanation for. This is one that I have to say, you know, I can't come up with a plausible explanation for why the salutary and culture and point, which is a big game hunting culture, resembles the Clovis culture of 20,000 years later in terms of some not just superficial but fairly close similarities of the technology. One thing I will say about the two groups is that even though they're separated in time by almost 20,000 years, they kind of seem to have the same effect on the fauna of the places they inhabit. I mean, it looks to me as if we finally invented agriculture in Europe because essentially people ultimately killed

off all the major animals. And I think at a chronology that occurs at a later point in time in North America, because we humans entered North America later in time, the same pattern follows. The big animals, once our presence is fully established in a location, are going to go away. They disappear. And we begin in what's called the archaic phase to sort of spread into smaller microhabitants and hunt smaller animals like deer and elk and so forth. But eventually, everywhere we go, we're kind of forced in the direction ultimately of adopting agriculture because we tend to overhunt animals. we tend to ultimately take them out so it's simply not as easy to live as a hunter anymore and uh we end up becoming farmers you know i want to get back to that and and press

you on a part of that but uh before i do i want to bring out like you're talking about the mysteries kind of like the greatest mystery to me about the peopling of the new world probably the greatest mystery to everyone is that we have we've most people have settled on this idea of the the bearing land bridge as the entry point but the oldest rock solid site we have okay the oldest site that like archaeologists and anthropologists just universally agree on as being the oldest human settlement site in the new world is in patagonia yeah it is and uh how much shit is missing between right like it really you know and if you talk to anthropologists about making more fines they're not always like super optimistic about that we're going to make more finds. We've done so much road building and so much excavating and stuff that stuff that's going to get found has maybe kind of been found.

You don't feel like people are... In the Arctic, like in Siberia right now, there's a lot of enthusiasm about what's the next thing that's going to thaw out of the permafrost you know exactly like we don't even know like mysteries are going to continue to like we're going to be excited about what's to come but most people are like not real excited about the prospect of finding really good intact ironclad paleo sites but the oldest one we have is thousands and thousands of miles from the point of entry so between beringia and chile it's like where were those people hanging out well i think that that site in patagonia which you know the latest dates i've read for it uh you know seem to place it between 14 and 16 000 years ago that it very likely is good

evidence that people were working their way down the coastlines and i think the reason we don't have intervening sites along the coastlines is that as a result of the end of the Wisconsin Ice Age and the rise of the oceans but there probably were campsites fairly regular campsites along the coast leading down to that that particular point and we've just we've lost them as a result of mastodon hide yeah which is a nice detail i know it's wonderful isn't it um but so so to get away to jump into what you got to do why is it like you mentioned that we could have hunter gatherer cultures that went 10 000 years without over hunting. Yeah.

Like, what is it that happened? Like if we accept that some species were driven to extinction with the arrival of humans, right. And we like, and that's debatable. Well,

let's just say that that was like, it's almost certainly was a contributing cause, right. That, that a lot of these big animals, mammoths, mastodons, like their demise is contemporary at least contemporaneous with the arrival of people suspiciously so suspiciously so

but then what why did how did we then go 10 000 years without losing a continuous stream of creatures well i think you know so again this is kind of a the plasmasin extinctions are are one of our big mysteries and they're a big mystery in part because this is our most profound ecological disturbance since humans arrived in north america mean, we talk all the time these days about the effect that modern society has on wildlife, on habitat destruction. But, I mean, we lost 32 genera of large animals in the Pleistocene.

I mean, charismatic, big species, Africa-type analog animals, and hundreds of smaller ones. And so it was a kind of a sea change for North America. And suspiciously, we arrived at just the time that this was happening. We humans did. But the other thing that happened, of course, is that this was the end of the Wisconsin Ice Age. And so the climate was changing. And that's one of the great debates, is whether or not climate was the primary cause,

whether or not humans entering a landscape that humans had not evolved in, had not been in before, where the animals had not evolved any kind of ability to resist us as hunters. I mean, that kind of thing is a debate that has been going on now for more than a century. And it's very likely that nobody is ever going to definitively resolve it. Some people argue that, okay, it's partly climate and it's partly the human influence. The best example we've got for the human influence is probably with the mammoths.

Paul Martin, in his great book, really the last book he wrote and the book that if people want to read about this, I think I would encourage them to read, is called The Twilight of the Mammoths. And Martin was the major advocate of pleistocene overkill but he did concede that the best evidence we have is for this single species for some species we don't have very much evidence of human overkill at all because it doesn't turn out it doesn't turn up in campsites it doesn't turn up at campsites we don't find archaeological sites where people were processing horses for example And horses during the Pleistocene seemed to have comprised in some places

like 20 to 25% of the biomass of large animals. They became extinct. And yet we barely found any kind of archaeological sites at all that indicate that in contrast to the Seleutian people in Europe... Who were running them over cliffs. Who were running them over cliffs and corralling them. Mostly what they were doing was corralling them and killing them. And they nearly wiped out Europe's horses.

In fact, some people believe that it was only the domestication of the last few horses that enabled Europe's horses to survive extinction. But unlike those salutary hunters in Europe, I mean, the North American hunters don't seem to have produced the kind of archaeological sites that show, at least so far, a large-scale destruction of horses. And yet horses became extinct here. So, I mean, we're still puzzling this out as to exactly what happened. But we somehow lost all these animals. Probably humans were involved in some significant way for at least some of them. And once they were

gone, what we essentially had to do was to reinvent ourselves, to make the step from being paleolithic big game hunters to the step of beginning to hunt smaller animals, beginning to rely more on gathering fruits and foodstuffs from the plant world, and sort of instead of doing probably what the Clovis and Folsom people did, which was to migrate widely across the landscape in search of animal herds, we had to start settling down into local habitats. And I think… And probably learning plant life, too. And I think to answer the question you posed to sort of launch this, why we don't just keep causing extinctions is because once we settle down and start living locally, we start learning landscapes at a more intimate level. the classic law of ecology, Liebig's Law, which argues that you have to base your population for sheer survival on the worst years that you experience in your landscape

rather than the best years. If you calibrate your population based on the best years, then when the worst years come along, you're going to be devastated. And so these archaic people who survived for 7,000 or 8,000 years without wiping animals out and with a very effective functioning kind of economy seem to do it because they become consciously aware of what a local habitat is capable of providing, not that they don't trade with people from other settings, but they understand what it's like to live locally, and that gives them these kind of packets of cultural information about what the local habitat is capable of producing and what the limits are in both directions, the best years and the good years.

And what they seem to have done, frankly, was to have deliberately controlled their populations, mostly by engaging in infanticide, by killing excess babies when they were born, a form of abortion, really, kind of a draconian form of abortion that enabled them to keep their population small enough that they weren't wiped out whenever bad years or a sequence

of bad years came along. But starvation was still almost certainly a factor in these societies. Oh, I think people certainly suffered from starvation. I mean, I think we've got genetic evidence today of people with, you know, some of the groups in the Southwest, native people in the Southwest, have what's called a starvation gene, where basically in contemporary times, eating modern foods, they tend to become quite obese because they had been in their past, their population selected for a type, a kind of a genetic type that was capable of storing food to enable them to get past these starving and lean times. And today, when they've got abundant food, they tend to, if they're not careful, they become pretty obese.

You know, this brings up something that we touched on this a little bit before, but I'd like you to explain it more. Because that balance, you argue in one of your papers, I know the paper's been cited many, many, many times, that balance that people achieved, that 10,000-year balance that people achieved between humans and animals that they were hunting was disturbed or interrupted by the introduction of the horse yeah maybe unsustainably so can you sketch that

out for people yeah i think uh and this is what i i argue in this long, duré story of Native people in North America. I think the coming of Europeans, bringing with them, I mean, and I think it's a suite of things. I think it's not just the horse. I think it's the arrival of the market economy, which, as the Europeans introduce it, it essentially compels people who had sort of lived off a diversity of resources in a landscape to specialize in the resources, let's say, bison robes, that the market economy wanted. The market economy might not have been interested in all the things they produced. It was interested in one or two things. And the market economy, as Europeans introduced it into North America 500 years ago, was very interested in the skins of animals. And so it tended to, as European traders approach native people, they brought with them not only a desire to have these native people specialize in a particular product out of

their resource base, but the Europeans also brought with them the goods of the Industrial Revolution because Europe had gone through this progression of reaching a point where you couldn't live by hunting animals alone and therefore having to become hunter-gatherers and then eventually farmers, Europe, having been occupied by humans out of Africa 45,000 years ago, had reached that sequence earlier in time than people in the Americas had, having been occupied by a migration out of Africa only 15,000 years ago. And so the whole chronology of Europeans had carried their pattern through these various kinds of economies farther along to the point where they had begun to produce an industrial revolution. Metal goods, they produced iron, for example.

And native peoples all over the world who had not yet reached the Iron Age, when they were first exposed to iron implements, knives, hatchets, axes, metal arrow points, spear points, they were absolutely captivated by those goods. I mean, one of the stories I've often told is how when Captain Cook appeared off the coast of the island of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands in the 1780s, the natives who had been exposed to nails as a result of driftwood coming ashore, when they went out to meet Cook's ships, they clambered aboard. And Cook's men reported that the Polynesians immediately started pulling the nails out of every plank on the ships. And they finally had to push them overboard and make them go back ashore because they were afraid they were going to dismantle the damn vessels. They were so eager to get metal. Another story I told, I think I told this to Joe Rogan when I did the podcast with him, is about, I was once an editor for a journal called Ethno History, and we received a manuscript that was basically the

edited journal of an early trader who was in the Amazonian basin. And this fellow had said that he had replaced a trader who had been working among the native people for two or three decades. And when he asked the question of his predecessor, how do I get people who have never been exposed to the European trade to trade with us? This guy said, it's as simple as anything. You just go into an area where Europeans haven't been before and tie an axe to a tree. And a month later, go back. And he wrote in his journal that he did this several times and when he would go back there would be throngs of people gathered around hoping for another example

of this kind of miraculous metal that they had found hanging from a tree it's in some way it's still happening right now, though, because if you read about groups, first contact groups, coming out of the jungle in Peru, in Brazil, it's like oftentimes they're coming out to the rivers, machetes and pots. Yes, that's it. It's metalware.

It's metalware. I agree. That stuff is nice. It's it. It's metalware. It's metalware. I agree. That stuff is nice. It's nice. And so, I mean, here in the Southwest, among these Puebloan people who made these gorgeous pots, I mean, and they made them hundreds of years before the Spaniards ever arrived here. And, of course, now sell them. I mean, I've got pots from the various Pueblosaniards ever arrived here. And of course now sell them. I mean, I've got pots from the various Pueblos all over the house here.

They sell them in Santa Fe to people who want to take home some beautiful object from the cultures of the Southwest. But when the Spaniards arrived with metal, these Pueblo people almost completely lost the art, some of them at least, of making pots because, hell, here's a metal pan. I don't really need a pot anymore. Here is an object made of metal that these Europeans will trade to me, and I don't have to engage in the painstaking work of making a ceramic pot.

I mean, I was just telling the story to a group of people a few days ago about how Adolph Bandelier, the archaeologist who came out to what is now Bandelier National Monument in the 1880s, hired Indians to help him dig up some of the sites, and they were unearthing pot shards there. And those people took them back to Pueblos like San Ildefonso Pueblo and showed these pot shards to people like Maria Martinez, who became the first of the great modern celebrated pottery makers again in Pueblo and New Mexico. So it was like fixing up an old car.

It's like fixing up an old car and learning how to do it again. Basically, reacquiring the skill to be able to do it, but having the availability of metal. They had lost it. So when native people confronted these kinds of things, this market impulse to specialize in particular resources, plus the availability of goods that were made of metal. I mean, and those included things, of course, like the implements of war, like firearms. So if you trade someone a firearm, I mean, the first few firearms that are traded to

native people are usually status goods, kind of like the turquoise we were talking about a minute ago. Only the head men end up with guns. But once you get them a gun, I mean, think of it. They can't produce powder. They can't produce flints or percussion caps later on. They don't have moles to make lead bullets, and they don't have gunsmiths to work on the gun if it breaks. And so suddenly they're snagged by the market economy. They've become dependent on it. From the point at which they start using guns, they now have to have someone supply them with gunpowder, with percussion caps, with lead balls and from that point on basically tell us what you want us to

harvest for the market economy and we'll do it i mean in the way another factor had to have been like when you talk about that reliance to what it would have meant to neighboring groups that you were in warfare with well i mean i was just gonna say that would add your that would like add to your incentive to acquire this stuff it does and it means that the people who don't acquire it who and there were some groups for example who who sort of saw okay this is a this is kind of a zero-sum game because if we get caught in this we're never going to get out of it we're always going to have to have these these goods, we're never going to get out of it. We're always going to have to have these goods, and we're just going to go further and further and further into this kind of

economy, and we're going to forever be pulled out of our ancient traditions. And so occasionally, you would have a band or a tribe led by someone who would sort of see the consequences and say, okay, I'm not going to do it. But the people in the next valley, if they did it and they armed themselves with guns and they had the resources that the European traders gave them as opposed to the group that was resisting entering the trade, I mean, it became an unequal struggle. And the group that resisted ended up being overpowered and overcome by those who cooperated with the market economy.

You know, things you're saying keep resonating to me with this article I've been bringing up a lot lately by the journalist John Lee Anderson, who wrote this piece in the New Yorker about this group, this Amerindian group who's in the process right now of coming into contact with the wider world. And they're living in the borderlands between Peru and Brazil. And the young ones will come out and are interacting. And the young ones even explain, because through various translators,

they're able to communicate. And the young ones explain, when we get clothes, when we go back, the old people burn the clothes. There's that resistance built in where they're talking about people, other generations being like, don't get tangled up with these people.

But it's irresistible. It's irresistible. Because they're coming out of the jungle naked. Yeah, it's irresistible. with it if we just understand that everybody is motivated by the same human nature regardless of the cultural overlays that we have. These people that you've just described from South America and that I was describing basically sort of using North American examples from the 18th and 19th century. They're just like us. And so we can, if we think about it, we can find ourselves in exactly that kind of situation.

I mean, I think we probably do, you know, in our modern lives on almost a daily basis. It's hard to resist a damn cell phone. I mean, I know a handful of people who say okay i'm not gonna have one of those things but i mean you're kind of disadvantaging yourself in a way if you resist the march of modern technology yeah like if all your buddies are out drinking nowadays you can't find them without a phone you can't it used to be you'd agree on a bar and everyone went there and stayed there but now you'd never catch up with them that's right you got to

text them and find them and so you know i mean it it's the same principle at work and i think it's been at work among us for 200 000 years and maybe you know i mean that then that's as far back as we know right now that our own species has existed you know if we knew more about the neanderthals it probably was at work among them as well these same principles so do you feel that like like and i know you focus a lot of your scholarly attention um not exclusively but a lot of it on bison do you feel that let's say just the market had been introduced would they have wound up at in the same place that we did eventually where we had effectively ecologically speaking we had exterminated the animal. Well, I think – Would it have been possible?

Yeah. So, I mean, native people, obviously, they have an economy. They have an exchange economy before Europeans ever arrived. I mean, we know that there were trading networks, just like I was describing for this turquoise, going from the mountain out the door here all the way down into Central America and the Caribbean, there were trade networks that stretched all over the Americas so that people that were producing goods, sometimes utilitarian, sometimes status goods, were able to trade for things their local area didn't produce and that they wanted, that they desired. And so that had been going on for thousands and thousands of years in the Americans.

And that's probably, I mean, I'm not an economist, but I don't doubt that that may not be the first step toward what ultimately becomes kind of a global market economy where everybody specializes in something and you have trade networks that span the world. I think in some ways what native people and the Americans were engaging in was kind of a prototypical version of that. But – and of course they also had what the market is characterized by in our own time where some people accumulate lots of things for purposes of status. And so, again, to make these native people who were here for thousands of years kind of more humanly understandable to us now. I mean, over in Chaco Canyon, when they were doing excavations over there, they discovered that the difference between the elites and the peasant population in Chaco Canyon, and the elites were probably priests and their families, was so dramatic that

in some instances, the elites had such better food, such better nutrition, that they were living twice as long as peasants who were working the fields only a few hundred yards away. And there are instances where, well, there was one vault where evidently the wife or the wives of one particular priest in Chaco at one stage of the high development of that civilization, this room was found with 60,000 pieces of turquoise jewelry. I mean, so this is a woman who was the Chacoan version of Imelda Marcos with all of her hundreds of shoes. I mean, no individual needs 60,000 pieces of turquoise jewelry, but that was kind of a status statement on the part of Native people. So, in other words, I'm saying that they also had that. It's not that they were trying to make everybody somehow democratically equal. There were status divisions. But they hadn't reached the point that the

capitalist market had where so much of the natural world has been converted into kind of soulless commodities. When native people confronted the capitalist market economy, for the Europeans, the animals whose hides they were trading for had no real relevance in Christian religion. Those animals lacked souls. They didn't have a plan in God's larger scheme of things. The native people, though, still accorded kind of sacred rights to a lot of those animal species that Europeans saw as just kind of a congress of resources. So one of the places where you have a kind of a jarring difference is there, where the European point of view is that these are just resources. These things are a kind of inert matter.

Some of these animals are alive, but they're just dumb brutes, and their lives don't really matter. And native people, on the other hand, they sometimes struggle with this trade exchange because they still did regard these animals as being sacred, soul-filled kin, really, to them. So that's part of the psychic kind of disaster that I think Native people go through in the 18th and 19th centuries. And this happens all over the world. And it'll be happening among these groups that New Yorker journalists were describing

in South America, too. It induces a kind of a psychological crisis that undermines your worldview. And I think it's one of the reasons that native people in the Americas, and I mean they had almost no choice but to participate in the market economy. But it really kind of rendered a catastrophic effect on them ultimately, from which I think some people have yet to recover. Are you familiar with the book Keepers of the Game? Oh, yeah. He does a good job in there with the impacts of the beaver trade

on native populations where here you have an ant like like like the the bison or buffalo looms so large in the mythology of the tribes i mean on the plains if you just look at like artwork and belief systems and oral traditions but he talks about these groups in the northeast that didn't really pay that much attention to the beaver you know it was it was like a reliable resource when you needed it but wasn't like this defining thing and in keepers of the game he gets into some of their uh some of the people's like just kind of puzzlement about why is it that they're so interested in this animal and kind of the awakening to the idea that you could get a lot of money and get a lot of goods from this thing

that we hadn't really paid that much attention to before yeah that's uh i think the guy who says the guy who's like been stomping on morels down in his cottonwood grove his whole life and never thought about them one day some guy knocks on his door he's like dying yeah you know he's just like really shit man yeah they're everywhere they're everywhere but people really want these things yeah i think uh you know i mean that's a very interesting book calvin martin was the guy who wrote it that's the name yeah i was trying to think of that yeah and uh you know and his his argument was a really intriguing one because he kind of argued against some of the things I was just explaining, that the fur trade had an economic basis. He argued that it was based on – it was Indians participated in it for spiritual or religious reasons rather than economic reasons. And what he came up with was this very interesting idea that on the eve of the arrival of the

Europeans in the Northeast, Indians began contracting disease. And they were diseases they had never encountered before. And what Calvin Martin argued was that from itinerant European fishermen, they were being exposed. These native people were being exposed for the first time to European diseases against which they had no immunity. Influenza, smallpox, measles. And they're dying of these diseases that their shamans can't cure, that they've never encountered before. And in their religious traditions, they had some of these Algonquin-speaking people of that region had this tradition that they had a sacred pact with the animals, and the animals were supposed to keep humans healthy. And so Martin argued in that book that the circumstances of when these people were getting these diseases, without ever having seen Europeans necessarily before, these are diseases that had worked inland, with no explanation other than

their own cultural beliefs, that they blamed the animals for those diseases and therefore engaged in. He found one Jesuit priest who said the Indians are engaging in a war against the animals in retaliation for making them sick. And they discover that these Europeans want the skins of those same animals. So it was kind of a blockbuster idea when it came out, which was in about 1980. But I have to say – Was that how old that book is? Yeah. I knew it was older.

It came out in 1980. Was it lampooned? Well, it won a bunch of prizes when it came out as being this very imaginative and new interpretation of why Indians participated in the fur trade. But what happened very interestingly is that another very famous anthropologist named Shepard Crick came along three or four years later and called on a bunch of his anthropologist friends to see if they could find some evidence anywhere else in North America that something similar had happened. And they couldn't find any evidence anywhere that there had been another incident like this. And so Kreck published a book consisting of all the studies of himself and his anthropologist friends trying to extrapolate Calvin Martin's argument elsewhere and finding no reason that it seemed to work anywhere else. And he basically said, I think Calvin Martin took one document and he basically leveraged

it into this argument without having additional supporting evidence for it. And it looks like he leveraged it too much. Yeah. When you've put out your ideas and publish them previously in journals and now in popular books, some of them are kind of controversial like what sort of negative feedback or criticisms do you get when you call into question something such as you know the the relationship between native americans and buffalo when you call into question that it was maybe a little more complex than we are taught in elementary school. Yeah. You must get attacked. I will say it kind of worked like this.

And, yeah, not necessarily attacked, but I've had some interesting experiences, particularly, I mean, I first published that bison ecology article in the Journal of American History in 1991. And so, sort of in the aftermath of that, some big news outlets, you know, found out about it, and the New York Times did a story about my interpretation of what had happened to the bison. And so this was in the early 90s. I had just gone to the University of Montana to teach the history of the West there. And one day I was at home in my apartment. I hadn't moved out in the Bitterroot Valley yet. I was still living in Missoula in a little apartment. And I was screwing around with

something and the phone rang. And so I picked up the phone. And I mean, I say it that way because the truth is with a cell phone, I mean, I don't keep the ringer on on my phone. So a phone ringing is an unusual thing for me. This was back in the 90s before I had a cell phone. So I actually had a landline and still didn't ring very much. I don't talk on the phone a whole lot. But the phone rang and I picked up the phone and this sonorous, deep voice says, is this Dan Flores? And I said, yes, it is.

And the voice on the other end said, well, this is Vine Deloria. I have just read your article on bison ecology. And what I thought he was going to say next is that, you know, you son of a bitch, how in the world could you ever argue that Indians were involved in the destruction of the bison? Because Vindaloria, I mean, for the members of your audience who don't know who Vindaloria is, he was… I'm guilty of this. I'm waiting to hear it. Okay, so let me tell you who he was uh i'm guilty of this i'm waiting to hear okay so let me tell you who he was he's was one of the most outspoken native writers in the period from probably the 1970s through vine vine died about oh just a few years ago so he was still alive into the 21st century, but especially from about the 1970s. He wrote books like God is Red and Custer Died for Your Sins.

I know that book. Yes. And he was teaching in the law school at the University of Colorado in Boulder when he called me. And what he said was, I would like for you to come to Boulder as my guest, because every year I have a gathering of people from the tribes, and we discuss the relationship between native people and animals. And I want you to come to the next one as my personal guest, the next one I'm having. It was just a couple of months away. But what I expected him to say was, I want you to speak to the assemble group. He said, I want to tell you, I don't want you to say a word when you come. I want you to come as my guest.

You can sit right beside me. I'll introduce you to everybody there, but I don I want you to come as my guest. You can sit right beside me. I'll introduce you to everybody there, but I don't want you to say a word. I want you to listen to what people say. And I said, I would be very happy to do that. And so I went to Boulder and sat up beside Vine Deloria. Out of the group of about 35 people, there was one other white guy in the audience. Did you know his, sorry to interrupt, his motive? Or did you think his motive at that point? Well, I thought what his motive was, and I was right about it.

He just wanted me to hear what native people said about their relationship with animals right um but not in the adversarial way not an adversary like i'll show you buddy you know and what he actually said to me when i was there is uh he said that piece you did is the most interesting piece i've read that anybody has ever done on bison. He said interesting. He didn't say the most accurate, the best. He said he found it interesting. Now, Deloria went on over the next few years

as friends of mine in the profession began to adopt my argument about what happened to bison. And for the sake of your readers, I'll just say that the bison ecology article from 1991 was basically a recasting of what happened to bison in the West. And it argued that in opposition to our simplistic view that we had had for a long time, that after the Civil War, white hide hunters had gone out and slaughtered these animals, slaughtered 40 million of them or 60 million of them in the space of about 25 years. And that was what had happened to them. I argued that, in fact, the decline of bison had begun much earlier than

that, that it was caused by multiple reasons, in part, a changing climate in the 19th century that produced the end of the Little Ice Age and, therefore, less conducive conditions to having large herds of bison on the grasslands of the Great Plains because the grasslands weren't as productive anymore. I argued that competition from horses for grass and water as horse numbers had grown, wild horses and Indian horse herds had competed with bison and that had drawn the numbers of bisonown that introduced European livestock diseases like anthrax, for example, and bovine tuberculosis had gotten among the herds as a result of the Overland Trails taking oxen across the West and spreading these diseases, that that had reduced the numbers. And that there was, in effect, a whole host of reasons, but that one of the reasons was also that native people had gotten involved in the market economy and had begun hunting bison not just for subsistence, but in order to produce bison robes for the market economy.

And so among these various causes, the role of Indians in the hunt was one of them. And other scholars in the field of Western history within the next five or six years, people like Eliot West at the University of Arkansas and Drew Eisenberg, who at the University of Arkansas, and Drew Eisenberg, who at the time was at Princeton. Yeah, I read one of his books. Yeah, began writing books and articles basically using this same interpretation. And so during the 1990s, I would say by probably 2005, about 15 years after I published that article, essentially just about everybody in the field had adopted that argument. And so it's become the standard argument for what happened to Bison in the 19th century now has replaced this earlier, more simplistic view that we had for a long time. And so as that's happened, one of the things I've

noticed is that I haven't, it's been a long time actually since anyone from the Native community has, you know, sort of stopped me in an elevator or at a conference or something and wanted to express some concern that I was dissing how Indians had interacted with bison. So I think the native people over time, and there have been some of them I've talked to who, I mean, they were very perceptive about all this, and they understood that this very likely was absolutely what happened because they had gotten enough evidence from their own traditions that people had hunted buffalo, in fact, for the market. So I think that even the native people, I mean, there are no doubt a few, you know,

there are always, as I've learned from writing Coyote America, I mean, there are people who are going to troll you whenever they don't agree with your particular interpretation. So there are probably some trollers still out there on this particular line of argument. But it's become the primary explanation for what happened to bison. And it's not entirely isolated

because there's this idea that europeans wiped out muskox in alaska without ever stepping foot on the land just by saying hey if you get a minute we'd like meat and hides that's exactly it yeah and that was all that it took yeah well so i mean i'll give you another example that's directly related i mean it's a part of the bison story i mean we had argued that it was the hide hunt white hide hunters after the civil war that had wiped out bison in the united states there never was a white hide hunt in Canada. Canadian bison were French from their European backgrounds and several different tribes, Assiniboines and Siouan-speaking peoples

from the Indian background, and they had become kind of a third culture in Canada. But they had an almost industrial precision to their hunts. They did. And they had the same, I mean, when you read their traditions, from the Indian side of the mix, they had inherited many of the same explanations of the sacredness of the animal and the use of all the parts of it and everything that you find among the Lakotas or the Cheyennes or whichever group farther south you want to study. All of that was

intact, but indeed they did have a kind of an industrial approach. They went out in carts, the famous Red River carts, out onto the plains and hunted bison and hauled the products back to places like Ottawa, for example, and sold them. But there was never a white hide hunt in Canada, and yet the exact same thing happened to bison there as happened in the States. Interesting thing about those guys that I read about was they went on the northern plains in the winter when things started to freeze up. They would dig these giant pits and fill them full of quarters, like bison quarters. Yeah.

Wait until it all froze good and then bury that stuff. And they'd be eating frozen meat into July. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Digging it out of those holes in the ground. I mean, if you think about it, in the 19th century and earlier, I mean, all the way back to the time of head smashed in in Alberta, where bison jumps go back 10,000 years,

I mean, the great problem with killing large numbers of animals like bison is how do you preserve them? Because if you drive 400 bison off a cliff in Alberta in August, I mean, you can only dry and salt a small percentage of the animals. If you don't have a way to refrigerate those carcasses, and obviously 10,000 years ago or even 200 years ago, they didn't. And so you had to be very circumspect about trying to drive a small enough group of animals off a cliff that you didn't end up wasting an enormous quantity of that kill

simply because you lack the ability to preserve enough of the meat. But there seems to be cases where it's spun out of control. Like the southernmost jump, I believe it's the southernmost jump, Bonfire Shelter. Yeah. It was used a couple times, and one time it worked real well and it got its name because all those rotting carcasses combusted yeah burst into spontaneous combustion yeah it was hundreds of animals in some small number were as they say in the in archaeological parlance

disarticulated i think is the word they use. Disarticulated, that's right. For butchering. But even then, it was like there was probably so few people and such strong resources that there was no need to even consider finiteness. No, and there were even arguments among people who did bison jumps that you can't really let any of them get away because if one of them gets away they're going to go tell the other bison what your stratagem was yeah and so when you jump them you've got to make sure that you kill every one of them that goes off the jump That makes sense because look at the power of the lead cow in a herd of elk who carries institutional knowledge about where to go. And we know that there are damn sure a lot of cow elk running around that are 20 years old who've done big migrations that many times they put together where it's okay to be where it's not okay to be and how to respond to certain stimuli yeah and yeah they are creatures that figure out

what to do and what not to do so i could totally see that you have a population in a valley that would get to be like, uh-uh. Yeah, we're not going on that. You're not pushing us off that edge. We're not going to do that. And I think that that harkens back to what is best called native science. I mean, it's an observation that native people made probably from real-life examples.

We let that cow get away, and damn it, the next time we tried to drive a herd off that cliff, some cow looked like the same one, swerved them away, and took them off in a different direction. And so I think it's kind of an observational kind of effect, which is a version of science where you observe an effect and you relate it to a cause and you say, okay, that's why that happened. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps. com slash meet on x maps dot com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all so coyote america so that made the best seller that that was the new york times best seller yeah the paperback is about to come out and as one one of my friends has put it, I sent him the dust jacket of it, and it's got New York Times bestseller across the top, and it also was a finalist for the E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Prize from Pan America.

And so they put a big badge on the front, and my buddy wrote me back when I sent it to him. He said, man, that coyote is wearing an awful lot of bling this time around. Who trolled you on that? Who didn't like the ideas in there? What sort of person was upset by the ideas in there? Well, it's been kind of, and I'm basing this on the reviews on Amazon. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Dude, please. Yeah, but. You've been reading those? Well, I mean, yeah, I do look at them because I'm interested in that. Yeah, but that could be just like, okay, never mind. Go ahead. Yeah, it's right. It's somebody who's having a bad day.

I mean, I had somebody write a review the other day that went something like, there was a review of American Serengeti, and this guy says, or this person says, I think it was a guy, says, this is on Amazon, says, this book is flawlessly written. It's a quick read. It's just, it's marvelous from start to end. Three stars out of five. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know why?

He was probably pissed because it took an extra day. Okay. Are you familiar with Paco pads yes okay yeah so paco pads this guy with jack's weld jack's plastic welding makes a wall like a a sleeping pad okay a very heavy duty sealed welded welded raft yeah you can use it to as a bench cover um heavy as shit not a backpack raft but an indestructible sleeping pad that when you get it wet you just dry it off the towel so i was looking at it i was at the super like there's a the biggest one there and i see it like and you know everybody knows these are great pads but it's got a it's got like a two and a half star review okay so um i mean that's weird how i had because it's only been reviewed a couple times and i read them and it's like five stars five stars and some guy

who's mad at amazon about some delivery problem he had had in the past and had given Amazon a one-star review but gave it to Jack's Plastic Welding who hasn't sold many of these pads and therefore gave the illusion of this being a shitty pad. That's an example, but I don't think that when you read the reviews,

I don't think you're capturing the general conversation around something. Well, yeah, I would agree with you absolutely on that. I mean, the reviews are, you know, they're a slice, but they do give you, I mean, one of the things that, you know, Amazon reviews, I think, do give you as a author is a little bit of an impression of how something is getting received. And so, to me, for something like Coyote America, what I kind of see is that there are camps of takes on a book like that. And I relate that to the fact that coyotes themselves are extremely political. Oh, dude, yeah. Yeah, they are extremely political. They're almost as political as being gluten intolerant.

Yeah. And so the fact that this is an astonishingly political animal means that there are people who have picked that book up or ordered it from Amazon and didn't really look too closely at what was going to be in it and opened it up and said, well, and this is what some people have said. I was expecting a bunch of animal stories like Ernest Thompson's Seton used to write 100 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And instead, I had to read about how,

I mean, and I just, I was forced into reading this. This author forced me to read how coyotes have been poisoned relentlessly for decades. And I just, I didn't want to read that, but he forced me to read it. One star out of five. So if listeners want to go, we interviewed Dan on, I believe,

episode 34 or 36. Yanni, do you have a way, can i was gonna say 33 but um yeah when you scroll through it'll say seattle washington it'll say dan flores but it's 30 somewhere right now i might come back and tell you what it was in a second here and we talked at length about both the dance books that were coming at the time yeah coyote america i call them coyotes we talk about that yeah dan tells me um during that interview why i call them coyotes why he calls them coyotes and you said something that i have i have referred to quite a number of times since which was that anybody who shoots one never calls it a coyote no yeah yes anyone who's killed one calls him a coyote which

i'm sure there's some deviations, just like there are political conservatives who are gluten intolerant, but generally it's a left-wing disease. So there's some variation there. So go listen to that if you want to hear about the two books. You had two books come out at the same time, American Serengeti and Coyote America.

Coyote America. Yeah. And Coyote America. Coyote America. Yeah. And Coyote America is now coming out in paperback. Yeah. And American Serengeti is already in paperback. And they're both also in audio CD form too. So check those out and check out the interview that we did. Did you find the number?

33. Oh. You've been awful quiet, yes? Just listening. Just listening. Go back and listen to episode 33, which really was a very popular episode for us. People loved it.

And demanded more. Yeah, that was really the first interview I did for either one of those books. Because they hadn't come out yet. Yeah, they hadn't come out yet. I mean, I ended up getting an interview on Morning America, or Good Morning, Morning Edition, I'm sorry, on NPR with David Green for the Coyote book and quite a number of other things on various regional NPR stations and so forth. And another podcast or two, but that was the one that you did was the first one. Do you mind, real quick, just sketching out each of those books just so people understand? Yeah, Coyote America is a biography of the animal,

in effect is what it is. It's an attempt to write a biography of the coyote from its evolution in North America, which goes back to the beginnings of the canid family 5.3 million years ago, through its long rollercoaster-like history in America, including about 10,000 years of time when it was revered as a principal deity by the native people of the American West, everywhere that coyotes were found.

And I do a chapter called Old Man America in the book, which takes on that story and relates in my own prose four different what I think are sort of representative old man coyote stories, which are, if one stops to think about it, this is the oldest literature in North America. This is our oldest body of literary stories. They were handed down orally and then finally set down in print at the beginning of the 20th century. So that story, the coyote's biography continues from that through its first encounters with

Europeans in the 19th century, people like Lewis and Clark, Mark Twain, John Charles. We didn't quite know what to call it. Yeah, they don't. In fact, the coyote is called for most of the 19th century, the prairie wolf. That's the name that Lewis and Clark gave it. And so for most Americans through about the 1870s or 1880s, that's what the coyote was called. But by the middle of the century,

as American settlement had begun to get out to the southwest, to places like here, Santa Fe, New Mexico, they encountered people who were using the old Aztec word for the animal that had been Hispanicized into coyote. And so by the time Mark Twain writes Roughing It in 1873, coyote has become, at least among people who read his books, kind of the accepted form of pronunciation. Although a two-syllable form had survived in much of the rural parts of the country as a result of the mountain men who were in the Southwest and who encountered that same sort of transition from prairie wolf to a new form. And they called it, I think they thought coyote was a little bit too fancy.

They called it a coyote. If you're from Arkansas, maybe coyote sounds a little fancy. So anyway, we ended up with two different pronunciations, one sort of in the rural middle part of the country and then around the coast, coyote. And, of course, when the Wile E. Coyote cartoons come along, they began to convert a lot of people who hadn't thought about how they were going to pronounce the animal's name into coyote pronouncers. But anyway, the story goes on through our attempts in the 20th century.

I mean, this is an animal that we actually, in the United States, attempted to exterminate through a federal agency known as the Bureau of Biological Survey. It's still around now. It's called Wildlife Services. And this agency poisoned and invented poisons for the purpose, millions and millions of coyotes in the 20th century, only to have us discover, this is the rare environmental story that goes in this kind of direction, that no matter what we did, we not only couldn't get rid of coyotes, we not only couldn't exterminate them, but in fact, our efforts to do so ended up spreading

them out of the West across all of the rest of the United States. And so they've now ended up in every single state except for Hawaii and are in every large and small city in the United States. They've even moved into urban areas. So it's the story of, I argue in the book, kind of really America's, other than us probably, the most interesting mammal in North American history. No other creature has a biography that even approaches something like the coyote has. I kind of end it with talking about Wile E. Coyote and what effect Wile E. has had on American culture more than you would think. And even Walt Disney, who helped sort of change attitudes toward coyotes in the 60s, 70s, and those decades by doing six different pro-coyote Disney films in those years. So that's what that book is about.

American Serengeti is a book that's about the region of the United States, the American Great Plains, that once was the analog of East Africa, the Maasai Mara, and the Serengeti. I mean, it was one of the ecological wonders of the world up until about 1900 or so with this marvelous aggregate of large grazing animals, the bison that we've been talking about a lot tonight that you, of course, have written about in a very successful book, and I've written about some too, and along with bison, wild horses that were reintroduced, having evolved on the Great Plains, reintroduced by Europeans back to America thousands of years after they had become extinct, and that just spread in an instant across this old ecological homeland of theirs.

Pronghorn antelope, gray wolves, grizzly bears, which we think of them as mountain animals now, but they originally were Great Plains animals. Yeah, didn't Custer kill one in South Dakota? Custer killed one in South Dakota. And one of the stories I tell people when I talk about this book is everybody has seen The Revenant with Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, yeah, with that. Oh, my God.

You're ruining my night. Well, I mean, the story. Setting that story up in the dank-ass B.C. forest. That's exactly right. Instead of where it belongs rightfully on the willow-lined riparian zones of the American West was just like. On the Great Plains. People should be hung for that. Yeah, on the Great story was a real story it happened to you glass but it happened out on the plains rather than in the mouth you glass had no child yeah he had not

not exact revenge he had no indian child that's and did not take revenge. Yeah. Confronted the people that left him and was satisfied knowing that they had to live the rest of their lives. That he was still alive and they had left him. Yeah, with the guilt of having left him. But it happened out on the plains because that's where the grizzly bears were. So anyway, this is a book about all these creatures of the Great Plains in primarily the 18th and 19th centuries. And I sort of take them one at a time. I do pronghorns in a chapter, wild horses in a chapter,

gray wolves in a chapter, grizzly bears in a chapter, bison in a chapter, and I do a chapter on coyotes, which were the jackals of the plains too. And then the book finally ends up going to our possibilities in the 21st century, primarily through what's known as the American Prairie Reserve Project in Montana of trying to recreate and rewild an American Serengeti that will ultimately have all those animals in place again in a wildlife park that will be, we hope, something like twice the size of Yellowstone.

It's a long-term project, but it's been underway for about 15 years. Speaking of controversy, not without controversy itself. Plenty of controversy surrounding it to be sure which weirdly seems to be like the main story that is picked up in the media is the controversy yeah yeah which i imagine a lot of ideas probably go through that phase i always like to remind people when i'm talking when i when i do when i give public lectures i'm talking about the conservation history of this country i always like to remind people how pissed everyone was at theodore roosevelt for laying out the national forest system pissed they were and then a couple years go by and they carve his face in a big giant mountain oh yeah but at the time live it yeah live it i mean and live it for i mean when he set aside the grand canyon as a national

monument i mean you know so we've got a review of the national monuments going on now all the way back to uh the escal grand staircase in 1922 years and three uh reviewing george w bush's monuments reviewing clinton's monuments as well on obama's monuments yeah well when teddy roosevelt decided that the grand canyon he was going to set aside as a national monument i mean there were people who were absolutely furious at the idea. And of course, it's basically a world-class site, became a national park 14 years later, and is a world-class site. So, I mean, what I really would love to see, I think is this American Prairie Reserve Project is the great conservation project of the 21st

century. It's going to take decades, but I would love to see it as our version of Yellowstone National Park. I mean, we're the first country that ever creates a national park system, the United States is, but we passed over the Great Plains in doing it. And I think now is our opportunity to circle back and take this area that once was one of the great spectacles of the world in terms of wild animals and do like Africa has done and acquire for ourselves this marvelous, historic, Great Plains animal park. Yeah, I should touch on it because I brought up the idea of its controversial nature. And I should, rather than leaving that hanging, I just want to explain a couple points about it.

You already have some large, federally managed landscapes up there. So you have the Charles M. Russellsell refuge along the missouri breaks and and you have some some monument some some a national monument national monument that was designated under the clinton administration the missouri breaks national monument yeah and what what the prayer reserve is doing is taking money and and critics of it always like to point out that it's generally outside money it's money that's very important for people to express for whatever reason that they're taking money from people donated around the country to buy land that just comes up for sale so we're talking about willing seller willing buyer this is

not it's not no one's like getting land for free it's not the government giving anyone land it's just they're starting out with existing parcels of public land and when properties come up for sale in the vicinity in the vicinity they go and say what you asking for the place the person names the price they're asking and it goes to auction or however else that happens, and the American Prairie Reserve buys the land so the seller got exactly what they're after. They got market value for the land. Oftentimes, the land, you'll also attain grazing rights on adjoining pieces of of land and so they will take over grazing rights and and opt to not opt to not always exercise them through the grazing of cattle though they do have a program out there that deals with grazing cattle on land the criticism comes from people who look and they

say that and they and it's understandable and yeah and i think you need to be sympathetic to it where someone's like so my great-grandfather my grandfather my father invested very heavily in this idea and sacrificed a tremendous amount um of work and effort to make the desert bloom right that we came in and raised cattle and helped feed the nation and established an economy that would allow there to be schools and towns. And we built this out of nothing. And to now have someone say, thanks but no thanks, is insulting to people um the american prairie reserve at one time used to

it has this long line of ideas that are kind of strung out at one time there's this idea the buffalo commons which is similar i remember the writer bill kittredge in his book hole in the sky um pointed out that going to jordan montana and mentioning the Buffalo Commons was a surefire way to get your ass kicked. So that, when I say that, that's the controversial part, is it's controversial in spirit only. It's not that someone's like stealing someone's land, it's just someone saying like, how can you come and act like what we've done here

isn't the best thing for the country? How can you say that you want to tear up our roads, raise our buildings, rip out our fences, because what was here before us is more precious to you than what we created? That's the idea and i don't even really need to articulate the other side because the other side has to do with you know more honest like some fairly unassailable notions of of wildlife habitat and and in this case free market economies but that kind of sketches out for you why it pisses people off. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a good expression of it. And like you, I think we can all be sympathetic to that. I mean, I come from Louisiana where my grandfather and my father and my brother were all in the oil business. But that is a business in Louisiana that doesn't have a continuing application into the future. It's not – I mean primarily the oil resources are depleted. And so in my generation, there's no possibility to continue to do that. I mean, it might be possible, I suppose, at some point to go in and frack or horizontal drill and manage to extract those resources. But what I'm saying is I'm from a generation that can't do what my father, my grandfather ended up doing for their livelihood.

I think in Montana, on these ranches, there is a sense that they can continue to do this. And so that's, I think, as you said, Stephen, that's kind of why there's a sort of a spiritual resistance among some people to it. I would say, you know, on the other hand, that it's a good thing to remember that this is not a federal project. This is not the federal government coming in and creating a new national park or a national monument. This is private enterprise doing what it's always done in America, taking private land and then doing what they want to do with it. So it can be, in a way, the American Prairie Reserve can be defended as part of this traditional kind of private enterprise capitalist approach it's just that what they want to do with it is not what private uh developers have often attempted to do and so it seems fishy to people yeah it seems

if you just quietly bought a ranch and then over time people realized you didn't run cattle on it and that you tore up the fences um it might go unnoticed but articulating a grand vision yeah makes people uneasy um and you but anyways you probably explain a lot of this in your book i do i mean i and i try to place this whole story in the context of how in the 20th century we tried on numerous occasions realizing that the great plains had been passed over for a kind of an african or yellowstone like wildlife, we tried on several occasions to make it happen. And in every instance, up and down the plains from West Texas to Montana, we've failed so far. And so this attempt by the American Prairie Reserve is probably the most promising attempt that we've had in a long time. And it's taking the possibility on in a whole new

way by doing this kind of private enterprise buying up ranches when they come up for sale with the idea of ultimately cooperating with the managers of the federal lands that are in the vicinity along the Missouri River and somehow managing this as a whole in order to reintroduce all these classic animals that we sort of thoughtlessly, heedlessly a century ago obliterated from the landscape. I mean, we did it almost without a second thought 100 years ago. And now we're rethinking what we did and hoping that we can somehow restore this. And so, as I said, to me and those of us who are conservation thinking kind of people, this is one of the most exciting things that's happening in the West these days. You know, when you talk about doing without thinking about it,

I recently had occasion to speak with a conservation leader, Jim Poswitz, and he spells out that time of us realizing what we were doing through the story of Theodore Roosevelt, the first buffalo he killed and the second buffalo he killed and sort of how he that's a good way how he interpreted those two actions one being near but is it medina madora madora north dakota and one around henry's lake yeah um the second time and sort of the first one he does a war dance around dance around it that around it, that's right. And the second one, and by this time, there are none left.

And the second trip, he has a conservation epiphany. And that's one of the many things that makes that guy's life interesting, that ties into the things we're talking about, is being this trans, like one of these guys who was alive at this very transitional moment where he was in some ways engaged with the end or kind of aware of the end and then was one of

the people who said like whoa at just the right moment i mean just the right moment yeah and it became the seed when he became president for those national bison refuges that he set up. And the first one in southwestern Oklahoma, the Wichita Mountain ones, and then the next one in Montana. When they did that one, they were trucking animals from the Bronx Zoo. Yeah. That's how bad things got when they were trying to set up some buffalo parks in the west they were they were getting animals from the bronx zoo and shipping them by rail back out west yeah well william t hornaday who was the director of the bronx zoo had

had the foresight i mean he had written the first great book about what had happened to bison the extermination of the extermination of the american bison yeah and he had had the foresight to start through people like buffalo jones in kansas charles buffalo jones who had been a former buffalo hunter and then was stricken by guilt and said as a result of my wickedness and killing so many, now I'm going to try to do everything I can to save the last few that are there. Went out and roped them and fed them on cow's milk. He did. And provided Hornaday with some of these animals that went to the Bronx Zoo.

So one of the reasons, as you know well and have written about, they were trading them around, of course, is they were trying to make sure, I mean, the animal population of bison had gotten so small that they were afraid of genetic bottlenecking. And so they were trying to spread the few animals that they had left widely to get as dispersed a number of genes from the original population in these particular little groups of animals they were trying to build herds up from there was a there was a hunter during the the big slaughter in the southern plains there was a hunter that was who grew sickened by it like what buffalo jones later clan he grew sickened by it and swore to call it off but then in the morning he explained how he was hearing all the gunfire it was like fuck man they, man, they're going to do it

whether I'm there or not, and jump back in. Not too many of those buffalo hunters ever seemed to express much remorse. And some of them actually became pretty combative about what they had done. You know, that's the interesting thing. When Hornaday was out trying to get something, he was trying to collect specimens. So at something, he was trying to collect specimens.

So at first he was trying to collect dead ones. And he took the Northern Pacific, had just recently made its way to Miles City, Montana. And Hornaday took it out and then struck off with a wagon and cart and a guide he was traveling with. And they went up into the Pumpkin Creek area to see if he could shoot a handful as zoo specimens and he's riding through the bone fields yeah trying to find one and in his book he points

out that there were still guys there were still hide hunters in mile city convinced and that was like that was i should put that was the last of them that was the last big congregation and i think it was killed they started killing it in the winter of 81 82 the summer of 82 i think a bunch were killed uh on one of the reservations some of the sioux got their where they gave them some of their guns back and let them leave the reservation to go on one last hunt and they killed a thousand yeah and then that was it to the point where hornady was out scrounging around hoping to find a couple he points out that many of the people in mile city were hide hunters who just were waiting for the next big push to come down out of Canada. Yeah, well, some of them had seen a herd cross the medicine line into Canada,

and they were convinced that that herd was coming back soon. And I think, as Hornady says, he already knew when they were telling him that what had happened to that herd because the Métis had wiped out that herd. They'd gotten onto it. Yeah, that herd was already gone. But these hunters, I mean, and he met one guy sitting around a campfire one night, Doc something or other, who wandered into his campfire and sat down. And this guy was firmly convinced that all he had to do was sit around and wait for a few weeks or a few months or maybe until next year. And there was a gigantic herd of bison that was going to come down from Canada, and it would all resume. Yep.

And instead, as he explains, these guys kind of fell into shopkeepers, ranchers. They had to retrain. Eventually, they never did come back come back well when they did come back they came from the east by rail that's right yeah yeah all those guys had to retrain i mean so this is a yet another one of those instances in american history where the resource is finally gone and you just have you have to face it you got to retrain and do something else. There's another one that you might know about too, another little remnant herd.

Are you familiar with the story of the guy Sam Walking Coyote? Oh, yeah. Sam Walking Coyote, perhaps? Yeah. Had gotten in a fight with his wife or divorce from his wife and gone out to the Milk river and hunted and somehow came back home with a couple calves calves that followed him and that became the source animals for what is still the national bison refuge or national bison the reserve or refuge it's uh i think it's

properly a refuge it's there they're supposed to be administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service as a national wildlife refuge. Yeah. So that became Sam walking coyotes, animals from the milk, became that source herd. And then later, that herd in the Flathead Valley became the source herd for the original Alaskaaska introductions not reintroductions but introductions as those animals spun off and the canadian herds too right i mean i think the canadian government ended up buying that for that wild hablo allard yeah her and that and that was the um i can't remember the name of that what what that herd, when that sprang off, what that herd became. All right, so check out Dan's books.

You'll learn about all kinds of stuff. And Dan was hugely influential in fostering my interest in these subjects. Yanni, you haven't said shit. Nada. Are you built up with pent-up thoughts? I had those nice thoughts when we took our pee break there earlier, which were that Dan was talking about the trade goods that the market brought across the Atlantic.

And we were just down in Guyana and how the parallels were so similar. Like they're still using their native bows, arrows. They like making a lot of that stuff and they're, they're big on, like they know the importance I think now of sort of keeping that culture around because people like us are interested in that, and there's value to that. But the one thing that has changed is the metal, right? They like files and machetes,

and when the machete wears out, they turn that into an arrow point. I think you were saying, right? You talked to Rovan about how he made, did he ever learn how to make the points out of wood? No, but he remembers people using um where their bow and arrow gear was all native material now the only non-native material is the tip which is steel but he remembers the people using the basically a point made from

cut from bamboo. And we saw those in Bolivia, those bamboo tips. So in one generation, that entire progression he's experienced then. Yeah, well, check this out. So I was there five or six years ago, and they hunt for fish with bows. That's one of the main ways they fish is bow fishing. I was down there five or six years ago trying to sell them on polarized sunglasses okay and i'd have everybody put them on but check this shit out put these sunglasses you can see those fish huh well they didn't like the feel okay and also shoes

didn't want shoes five or six later five or six years later i'm not i'm not i'm not even kind of joking everybody polarized sunglasses all day long and in five or six years shoes so you single-handedly replicated many other people me and many other people like me but it was just like it was they were you know what it is and janice brought up earlier. It was ecotourism. Where just a constant, steady exposure to well-heeled outsiders who are coming down. And a lot of them, because it was still a cutting-edge location, a lot of them industry folks. Who come down with tons of shit and and just like hey man i brought a bunch of sunglasses down when i got back when i went down the first time the first thing i did when i got home was sent down i'm not kidding you i sent down

a shitload of files because they were talking about what a bitch it was to get a file. And that's how they made their fish points and shit. And files were the dope, right? But it was very expensive to get a file and hard to find a file. And I sent down files. Now, I'll also point out that my main friend on there, he has an email address. So it's all very confused there he has an email address so it's all very confused where he has an email address but makes his own bows and arrows from native jungle material and if he wants to catch a fish he goes to a to a palm and finds a fruit on the ground and cuts the fruit out open

and pulls out a larva and takes the larva and puts it on a hook and catches a fish and uses that fish to catch another fish and that fish catches the big fish that he eats and he hunts and fishes. He hunts, fishes he hunts fishes and farms year round except for on occasion when dudes like us go down and want to go out and see how they do shit and them taking guys like me out to show

how they do shit corrupts how they do shit uh-huh yeah absolutely or from their perspective it doesn't corrupt it at all it's just great stuff to know it's great same way if someone came to me and they're like hey man um uh you know you guys wash your dishes by hand every night why not uh when you buy a new house fit that son of a bitch out with a dishwasher and i'm like hey that's a great idea these dishwashers are sweet so from like it's like a kind of colonialism not colonialism but it's like a colonial perspective to sort of be like i hold the power to decide that you will or will not be exposed to these new materials exposed to it when in fact

they're down there like hey you know it turns out uh i got these polarized sunglasses and they're great because i can see fish and shoot them better it's pretty innocent it's it's what it is i think is i would just say two things i think what you're describing is a perfect description of probably what happened in the 17th 18th and 19thth centuries when Europeans went around the world and contacted indigenous peoples in the way we were talking about with how the market transformed the buffalo hunt in the 18th and 19th centuries. I think this is just a kind of a microcosm description of it. And the other thing I think I would say is that, you know, we're all in the same boat because technology is proceeding so rapidly all around us that we're all getting introduced, not on a daily basis necessarily, but maybe on a monthly basis to new technologies that we can either accept or reject but if we reject them a lot of times we end up kind of disadvantaging ourselves yeah because compared to everybody else without you yeah it shifts without you and it leaves you behind and so i think the truth is we're all in this same boat. The world is going at hyperspeed. Technology can easily leave somebody behind

in their lifetime or either maybe in a decade or in a couple of years. And so we're finding ourselves sort of living that same experience that you've just been describing then and that i was describing earlier from centuries ago um and it's happening all around us yeah i feel like i hijacked your concluding thought no you never do that what are you talking about yeah no uh yeah it is like it's a perfect parallel except now instead of like other the other tribes saying no i don't want the tools or the metal you know the machetes they're sort of like rovin's group is like very much adopted the eco-tourism and that's giving them wealth and like helping his village prosper it's like the school there i mean it took us actually didn't take that long to get there we got there from new york in 24 hours to the village

itself um and that included a couple hour boat ride you know but inside the village when you go by the school the school it's like you look in the window and you're like oh well that looks like every other school i've seen recently. Kids dressed well. They were in uniform, weren't they? A high teacher to pupil ratio. But he was telling us that the other camps along the river hadn't really gotten into that yet, and it's created some jealousy. Their village is actually growing.

Yeah. some jealousy. Their village is actually growing. Yeah, well. Not just jealousy, but even inspired a curse from a nearby shaman. Oh, yeah. Well, I think it's

happening at differential rates for everybody, but I think we're all kind of caught in it. And maybe it's useful to see indigenous peoples confronting it because that kind of is a mirror back on how all the rest of us are having to grapple with the speed of technological change. My handful of experiences down there has changed in a remarkable way how I view parts of our, portions of our own nation's history that I'm interested in. All the parallels,

someone could very easily come in and point out that they're false comparisons, false analogies, because it's not perfect, right? The timelines aren't perfect, but it's just fascinating, particularly the evolving relationships of people and animals and the market influence and to see people going through a very speedy version of what we went through of within a single generation being engaged and being introduced to market hunting engaging in market hunting realizing where market hunting's going and looking for a sustainable model to have that play out in a person's lifetime wow you're seeing like like in some way you're seeing a hundred years of

american history compressed down really tightly in part because of the technology you're talking about where ideas can cycle in so quickly yeah it's both ideas and uh you know the goods the technological uh possibilities all at the same time and i think you're exactly right we're seeing it in a sort of a hyperdrive microcosm replicating the last 500 years of world history but happening in the space of a few years yeah i don't know if that's good or bad any other final things janice that's intense That's my final thought. Dan, anything you'd like to add? Thanks for having me on, Steve. Thanks for coming.

Thanks to both you guys for being here. This makes it easy to do a podcast when we're sitting here on my couch. Yeah, again, I want to thank you. And I really want to implore, I really hope people do go check out your books, especially if you've always, you know, if you tend to only, and I'm guilty of this too, if you tend to only view wildlife from the perspective of hunting, right, and through that kind of media, I think it's helpful to step into a historian,

like a trained historian's shoes and look at wildlife a little bit because it, it adds a layer to it that you don't get in the kind of normal conversations about wildlife and wildlife management that we engage in where we're talking about like what we're doing now, what's going on now, threats that wildlife habitat now, to step back and go like, oh, so that's how we arrived at where we're at. Those are the things that shaped our understandings, the mistakes we've made, the successes we've had.

I think it's really enlightening. So, yeah, hopefully you go check out Dan's, not just his books, but if you want to dig into the deep web, you'll find some of your academic pieces from your past life as a peer-reviewed historian. So, again, Dan, thank you very much for joining. Thank you, man. And also, man, I just want to remind everyone, please go and give a big-ass five-star review. Meteor Podcast. Thank you very much. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.

On-X Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips. You Canadians, the great features that you love and on X are available for your hunts this season. Now the hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones, aerial imagery,

24 K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.