The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 178: Hunting Mammoths

Episode Date: July 22, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with David J. Meltzer and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: Understanding radio carbon dates; crossing the Bering Land Bridge; who were the first Americans?; the early human aversion to incest; ecotones, or where a bunch of good shit comes together; glyptodons and 3-ton ground sloths; a big extinction on one fine Tuesday; Rambo; the tidy appeal of the blitzkreig hypothesis; Clovis points; cross examining conventionalisms; snacking on bison tongue; and more. Connect 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.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. David J. Meltzer. You notice a writer named David Meltzer? That's got to be disappointing. There's a poet named David Meltzer. There's a medical doctor named David Meltzer. There's a physicist. If someone goes to, if you go into Google and you write David Meltzer A, it auto-fills David Meltzer Anthropologist. Oh, okay. Not David Meltzer the wrestling writer? google and you write david melzer a it auto fills david melzer anthropologist oh okay so not david melzer the wrestling writer no a victory for me uh this is gonna this is gonna break some people's

some dear friends of mine's hearts but you're the favorite yeah we haven't even started yet you're the favorite guest that i've ever had on this show we can stop right now i'm good you haven't started i uh um i'm gonna flatter you a little bit you know how people will have in a home you'll have a coffee table right in your center of your living room and people will position books there, which are a combination of what the person likes and how the person likes to be perceived. Okay. I keep, I rotate. Well, there's a couple that aren't yours. I'm a little sorry to hear that, but go ahead.

Well, it's the photographer, Huffman. Okay, fine. So I rotate Huffman's book of photography with Ice Age Peoples in a New World with your Folsom book. I rotate them and I put them there and it's meant to be like, this is like my expression of myself is that I value David J. Meltzer's books.

All I can say is you've just earned yourself the next two books. Really? Sure. Like I get them on the house now? If they're going to be, if they're going to be on the table, you got them.

I almost brought them to have you sign them, but they're, but they're big sons of bitching books. Yeah. I do tend to overwrite, don't I? No, just they're,

they're, they're full of maps and color imagery, everything you could want from a book. Everything I know. When I finished with a book, I know nothing. It's all just poured out onto the page nothing left no they're they're amazing and you do um we'll get into what your work we have

we're telling people all this love them know what you do but a wonderful job of of explaining really complicated things in a way that don't they don't feel remotely dumbed down but they're still accessible and you still feel like you have like you're getting a very scholarly understanding of something that would be easy to trivialize all of us in the business have an obligation to speak to the public that both pays for people like me and is interested in the kinds of things that I'm lucky enough to do. And so I really feel that obligation strongly to write in good American that people can understand, which actually is a hell of a lot harder than writing for my colleagues. It's a whole lot easier just to use jargon

because I know everybody knows what that is. Yeah, I got it. And then when I have to explain something, especially in regard to some of the high-tech stuff that we're involved in now, it's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. I hope you keep at it.

Now I want to tell people, let's say you're at one of your faculty parties. We're here at Southern Methodist University, you're at a, one of your faculty parties. We're here at Southern Methodist universe. You're at a faculty party. You meet like an English professor and you meet an English professor's husband and he says, so what do you do? You say. So I work on ice age hunter gatherers.

That's the sort of boring tagline. No, dude, that's's that's titillating to me okay so what follows is i work on the people who are the first to come into the americas imagine what it must have been like to look around one day and see no smoke on the horizon no freshly killed animals no sign of any other human being and realize, oh, we're all alone here. And this place is kind of looking different than where we came from. And what's over the next hill and what's over the hill next to that. Imagine what it must have been like to be that person, to be in that group, to see a landscape teeming with animals that,

some of which you've never seen before. Yeah. And you don't know which ones are going to feed you, which ones are going to cure you, the plants. I think you raise in one of your books. Which ones are going to hurt you and which ones are going to try and kill you. Exactly. You have a hypothetical scenario in one of your books where you point out something that's

interesting is that people are coming from the north and had been were thousands of years perhaps separated from tropical climates and you're coming from the north and there's a guy we don't know a woman a man whoever it was that was like the first one to encounter a rattlesnake you know no awareness no even ancestral awareness of what that was you kind of wonder though um i mean you guys surely have encountered rattlesnakes in your travels and there is something that that that hits your reptilian brain that says oh it's kind of an interesting noise but oh dear yeah that looks like that could be that could be trouble. But yeah, imagine that. And imagine all of these trees, these plants that, you know, you kind of recognize them. I mean, you know what a tree looks

like for crying out loud, but what can that do for you? And that's one of the really amazing things about the peopling process is that after getting onto the continent and being here for 10,000 years, there's virtually not a single plant that Native Americans hadn't figured out. It's medicinal properties, it's food properties, it's use as tools. I mean, it's really quite remarkable how folks learned about this new land. And I suspect they had to learn on the go and they had to learn fairly quickly because they were moving with remarkable speed, archaeologically breathtaking speed across the continent.

And they were able to figure things out. Can you explain that? Well, you know, let me ask you this. What's the best way, if we're going to get in, if we want to do a good flyover of the peopling of the new world what where's the best way to begin because i have in in thinking about talking to you there's all these things i wanted you to explain i want to explain like clovis pre-clovis sort of the moving like our best guess of well here's another thing why don't you explain

how for a while the oldest accepted site in the new world correct me if i'm wrong for a while the oldest one we knew about rock solid was down monteverde right in chile chile still is so what happened between if they're coming from siberia what happened between beringia in chile okay so where's all their stuff fair question absolutely so these are all questions i want to ask you so you tell me like what's the best place to begin what we used to think was the beginning or what we now think is the beginning well so it used to be tough because with archaeological material you're getting what's preserved and it's a crapshoot because we are talking about a relatively small population on a vast continent they're going to be flying below archaeological radar for centuries, if not millennia. There's simply not enough of them producing enough sites that the odds are that you'll find them, right?

So we always knew that the archaeological record, the oldest site you find, is never going to be the oldest site in America. I mean, the odds are simply infinitesimally small. But now we've got genetics and genomics. And what genetics and genomics can tell us is the point at which ancestral Native Americans separated from Northeast Asian populations and started to make their way here. Now, the moment they split from their Asian cousins is not necessarily the moment they headed to the Americas, but it gives us a maximum age. And we now know, based on ancient DNA and genomics, and this is work that's been done by quite a number of folks, but most especially my colleague Eski Willerslev at the Geogenetic

Center in Copenhagen. And our work has shown that around 23,000 years ago, 23, you know, plus or minus a thousand, we're archae, you know, plus or minus a thousand, we're archaeologists, right? Plus or minus a thousand years is nothing to us. Around 23,000 years ago, we have that initial split. So we know that at some point after that, they're coming this way.

And there was no longer exchange. Correct. Yeah. We also know that, as you just said, we've got Monteverde and the dates there around 14,700 calibrated years. So we now have a window within which we can say— Can you real quick explain to people what that means?

Ah, okay. So radiocarbon years. Radiocarbon dating, basically you're looking at the amount of C14 that still resides in a sample after a certain period of time. And we know the half-life. We know how long it takes to disintegrate in a sample. Yeah'm gonna annoy you here okay go even deeper yeah the sun like no just tell people real quick because people yeah this is stuff people hear their whole lives they never know like what it means so the sun comes down it hits our atmosphere yeah right okay so basically nitrogen gets blasted turns into a stable isotope of carbon. Normal garden variety carbon is carbon-12, right?

And then you've got this isotope carbon-14. Carbon-14 behaves just like carbon-12 in that it joins up with oxygen, forms CO2, gets absorbed into living matter. When it's no longer being absorbed, when that organism dies, the amount of CO2 begins to decay back to, basically, it zeroes out, okay? And it decays at a known rate. It's called a half-life. And the half-life of radiocarbon is about 5,730 years.

So, if you've got half of the amount of carbon- This guy's not even looking at notes. No, I'm just making it up. If you've got half, half the radiocarbon is gone, 5,730 years has elapsed, right? Okay, so, and it just halves, halves, halves, halves, halves. Okay, here's the problem. The very mechanism that creates the C14 in the atmosphere in the first place, which is the sun bombarding the upper atmosphere

and creating all the C14, it's varying. So at certain points in the past, more C14 is being produced. At other points in the past, less C14 is being produced. What that means is that when you get a radiocarbon date, you've got to say to yourself, okay, if this was a period when excess carbon was being produced in the atmosphere, it's going to give me a funky date yeah i've got to calibrate it and how do you calibrate it tree rings tree rings when a tree grows i mean you guys have cut down trees right um you see all the growth rings those growth rings come on one year at a time yeah okay if you date an individual growth ring on a tree that you've counted back,

and we now have a tree ring sequence that goes back 13,000 years and change. I don't know the exact number. If I were to look it up, I could tell you. You date those individual rings. You know that that ring should be 11,348 years old, but your radiocarbon date tells you something else. That's how you know how much it's off, right? And so, we have these really elaborate calibration curves. There's a difference. So, a radiocarbon date of 10,000 years is actually equivalent to a real

year date of about 11,700 okay and when you and today we're speaking in Cal we let's let's begin basically like we're you're arranging it into years as we understand them exactly right I'm gonna give you real years and the reason I'm doing that is bit because the the estimates that we get from genetics and genomics are in essentially real years. I see. Right. Okay. Okay. So we've got the genetic estimates at 23. Monteverde has a date of 14,700 real years.

It's radiocarbon years, just to kind of finish up with the example, is 12,500. Okay. So you can see what the discrepancy is between a radiocarbon and a real year. Okay. So you can see what the discrepancy is between a radiocarbon and a real year. Yeah. Okay. So in that window between 23 and 14.7, we know people showed up. Now there's an issue there because that window is downtown last glacial maximum, right? The coldest period of the last 100,000 years was between about 23,000 and 19,000 years ago. That's when we had these massive ice sheets covering basically Canada. Two big ice sheets, one that goes from Newfoundland and laps up against the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains, Laurentide Ice Sheet. It goes as far south as Ohio,

central Ohio and Pennsylvania. It goes as far north as, well, it actually connects up with an ice sheet that makes it over to Greenland. Is there a point when a glacier turns into an ice sheet? Absolutely. It all starts with snow, and it all starts with summer temperatures. And this was figured out

actually by a guy sitting in a prisoner of war camp in World War I. He was a mathematician and he understood that if you play around with the amount of sunlight and heat hitting the earth, you can either grow a glacier or make one go away and the reason this happens is that and it has to do with a whole bunch of sort of astronomical physics where basically all the planets are constantly getting jostled we like to sort of think of our earth as is orbiting in a particular way and it's always been that way and it's never going to change and that's just not right, right, because we've got all these other planets out there.

So we've got the gravitational effects of the sun, but then there's Jupiter parked a few orbits out there and it's also affecting us. So at times in the past, the Northern hemisphere has been closer or further away from the sun, which meant there's been more or less solar radiation hitting the surface. When you reduce the amount of solar radiation

hitting the surface in the summer, last year's winter snow doesn't melt. The next year's snow piles up. And if it doesn't melt again, well, you pile that up to a certain depth, 15, 18 meters or so. It compresses, it packs, it turns to ice, and it starts to flow. Okay? that there was about a three-week window in the far north between the last of the spring freezing temperatures and the first of the fall freeze.

If you close that two- to three-week window, you could start another ice age. I mean, you have to close it sort of consistently for many, many years. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm with you. But that's how it works. And so we had this period between 23 000 19 000 years ago where you had these massive ice sheets that had built up uh starting probably around 29 30 000 years ago and reached their maximum extent between

that 23 and 19 000 covering up ground upon which now lives millions and millions of americans there's a reason minnesota's the land of ten thousand lakes those are all glacial puddles right uh seattle had um an ice sheet basically in downtown seattle that's why it's a great port right the ice basically created these fjords. Yeah. Chesapeake Bay. Why is Chesapeake Bay a bay? Well the Susquehanna River had to, because when you grow that much ice on land, and we are talking about an ice sheet that again, east coast to the Rocky Mountains, and then

from the Rocky Mountains to the coast range, there was a second major ice sheet, the Cordilleran ice sheet. You put that much ice on land, where's all the water coming from? The ocean, right? So all of that precipitation, oceans evaporate, precipitation clouds move over land, falls its snow, and then it freezes.

It doesn't get back to the ocean. So when that happens, you're basically locking up about 5% of the world's water. When that happens, sea levels drop. And we know that sea levels dropped, and this becomes part of the peopling in America story, right? Sea levels drop about 130 meters. So, you know, put it into feet, several hundred feet. In depth. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So you could walk from Asia to America, and you would have no idea that you were walking from one hemisphere to another. And the reason you would have no idea is that don't think of the Bering Land Bridge as this sort of skinny rope bridge over the Amazon River somewhere.

No, it's a thousand miles. And, you know, you look look around and it's just a continent to you that's that was one of the things that really started to interest me in this world a little bit was when i started to get that because in every every like american school child's imagination the bering land bridge is this thing where you like it's like moses going through right the part of red sea like you pack your shit up yeah and it's this narrow little thing everybody's like okay ready yeah and then you run across it yeah you know it's like you're you're sort of impression of it and then to go up at what's now the what

would be the foot of it now and just you're you're northwest alaska and you stand there and be like you don't have any you don't understand where the oceans sit you're just out in this massive thing it's a scale and that's what life on the bearing the bearing lambridge wasn't any more than when you're in michigan you're very aware of that you're on a peninsula you're just somewhere exactly you look at a map and you also put it together right no that's a great analogy because it's a scale issue you know humans are small and the bearing lambridge was really large and you would have had no idea and in fact you know there's small and the bering land bridge was really large and you would have had no idea and in fact you know there's no reason to think that people were only coming in

one direction either you know they could go east they could go west and we're starting to see some of that evidence genetically that these populations are moving back and forth across the land bridge it was trafficking in humans plants animals for thousands of years yeah but you're right but there's a point you bring up in one year but i think it's ice age people's in the new world you bring up a thing and i i mentioned i quote you on this a lot and i hope i'm not over emphasizing it but you bring up a thing where you said the movement of people as people are moving around they're moving quickly and i can't remember if you say that sort of i added it to it but they're not like running from warfare necessarily like they're they're leaving

they're leaving places that are sparsely populated for places that are sparsely or not populated at all and i and you i do know this part you get to this point where like you can't rule out some amount of curiosity absolutely like some like they're maybe they weren't like saying hey we're headed to america we're headed to what will become america but they are saying they're thinking something or else you can't account for that they would have gone as far as they went well let's put it this way when when europeans started sailing around the globe did they find a single habitable landmass that wasn't already inhabited no everywhere they got to there was already somebody living there humans have been moving

for millions of years but humans modern humans anatomically there. Humans have been moving for millions of years. But humans, modern humans, anatomically modern humans, they've been moving all over the globe for the last 50, 100,000 years. Do we know the exact motives? Not really. But I think curiosity had to have something to do with it, right? I mean, in any group, somebody's going to say, let's go over there. But let's go over there also has a good, my now deceased colleague Lou Binford always used to say, for hunter gatherers, insurance is not knowing what you have right in front of you.

It's knowing where you go next when things go bad right in front of you. There's an incentive to look over that next hill because... Even when things are okay. Especially when things are okay because that's when you have the time and the resources and the teenage sons who are just driving you insane and you say, why don't you go do a walkabout and come back in a month and tell us what you found. I mean, one of the really interesting things about where we do have oral history records, like in the colonization of the Pacific, on these remote islands in the Pacific, inevitably it's younger brother. It's like, get him out of the house.

He's not going to inherit anything anyway. Let's let him get in a boat and go someplace and find new things. And so, you know, there's an advantage to that. Humans are also very good at surviving. Let them get in a boat and go someplace and find new things. And so, you know, there's an advantage to that. Humans are also very good at surviving. And that was part of that, buying that insurance policy. Did you bring up, like, do you address this or did I hear this somewhere else? There's the idea of expansion. And you could say that, you know, every hill I come over, there's more game, right? And the wood are down by the rivers, and no one's burned it yet, and it's just good living.

But when you look at the landscape and the ice sheets you're talking about, people had to have come up against what would be perceived as a hostile environment, perhaps, and then jumped it. Without question. And in fact, one of the things that's really striking about the earliest archeological record that we have is that we've got stuff all over the place in a very short period of time. So we know people are moving and they're tracking great distances,

but their distribution was broad. It was not deep. We are not seeing every single spot being filled in. What we're seeing is that these people were probably leapfrogging, right? Because they are paying attention to what's over the next hill. And if it looks bad that way, well, go someplace else. Go in another direction. So, in fact, they are moving, not necessarily in a nice wave, out washing out across the continent um they're looking for sweet spots they're looking for the places that the hunting's good the gathering's

good um it's a decent place to spend the winter those kinds of places i mean they're all like us they want to have comfort they want to have food they want to have security if you knowing what you now know um i don't know why i would ask you to any other way but knowing you now know if you imagine a colonizing group wherever whether it's in northwest alaska whether it's you know here in texas further south a colonizing group a group that's not likely to be bumping up against people who are already inhabiting lands ahead of them how big are the groups so um this is one of the things that we've actually been spending a lot of time trying to get a better handle on we actually now have again because of the genetics record we're getting a

sense of how large these populations are and uh, uh, well, let me answer it in a couple of ways. First off the direct answer to your question, you're probably going to disperse. If a hundred of you come into the new world, you're not going to stay together as a group of a hundred and move all around. Why, why, why do you assume that? Because it's, well, a couple of things. One, if disaster strikes, that's it. End of story. But two, one of the most important things for hunter-gatherers is information. By dispersing your group, by sending out, I don't want to say pods, right?

But by sending out smaller units of, say, 19, 25, kind of an extended family group, why don't you folks go that way? You go that way. We'll go this way. Never see each other again. No, no, no. That's one of the really important things. It's not just, when you're coming into a new world, as one of my colleagues says, it's not just what to eat, it's who to meet. At a certain point, your kids are going to be of marriageable age, and you're going to need to find mates for them. So one of the things that we've been looking for for a very long time,

which must be out there, but we really haven't found a lot of them, are rendezvous sites where folks half a dozen years down the road, 10 years down the road, they get together to exchange information, to exchange mates, to talk to one another. I mean, we're fundamentally social beings, right? Are you going to weave into talking about the Lyndon Meyer site? Well, we could get there. Or something along those lines. Lyndon Meyer is one of the very- You don't need to.

I just know the idea of that when you say goodbye, you're not always just saying goodbye for forever. Oh, never, never, never, never. But again, this gets back to you're on a landscape that nobody else is around. And one of the things that, and again, I keep harping on the genomics because it's been so amazing in terms of telling us about population history. At the end of their string, Neanderthals were becoming fairly incestuous and inbreeding a lot. Okay. And they were doing that because their populations were shrinking and they were scattered over a wide area. We now have this latest genome that Esky's group published, that we published just a few weeks back.

One of the sites is in remote northern Siberia, literally right on the Arctic Ocean. These guys are out in, literally, it's the end of the world. These are early modern humans. These are not Neanderthals. And yet we see absolutely no sign of inbreeding or anything like that. They are going long distance to find mates. They are ensuring that they're keeping a healthy gene pool. So yeah, that's very important for humans on an empty landscape is that you maintain these connections. With no understanding of a gene pool. Absolutely not.

But humans have a tendency to. They get that. They get that. A tendency to not. Cultures tend to not want to be incestuous. Unless they're the royal family of England. Yeah. We'll strike that from the record. No, no.

Keeping it in. So, the group size. Right. Or the rendezvous site. Right. Whatever you want to get to. Okay. So you want a rendezvous site that these are mobile hunter-gatherers. They can only carry so much.

Right? So this is not like a potluck dinner where everybody brings a roast or something. So you want to have a site that is easily located. You want to have a site that's on an ecotone, where you've got several different ecological units that are sort of coming together. What's the word again? Ecotone. And it's basically where ecological biomes, ecological zones overlap. And when you have overlapping zones, you've got greater richness because you've got all the animals and plants from this area and all the animals and plants from that area, and they're all in the same spot.

In our vernacularacular we would say like we're a bunch of good shit comes together something like that you said so because that way you've got because everybody's gonna be showing up and they're gonna hang out there for what three weeks a month who knows right but that way there's a food source. You want to have springs nearby. You want to have water. Stone, handy thing to have nearby as well because when you get together, you know, you're sitting around, you're making stone tools, you're teaching the young. Oh, hey, you know, we've learned this new technique of manufacturing these particular tools.

Here's how you do it. And you brought up the Lindenmeier site. It's a really important site because it might be one of the few instances that we have of a genuine bona fide rendezvous site. Aggregation site is the fancy jargon term that we use, but rendezvous is a lot better. it's sitting in a spot, a geological spot, where you've got this very nice exposure of a wall that has white rock and it's got red rock. It looks like a barber pole. And you can see it from 20 miles away. We should point out this site sits between Denver and Fort Collins. Actually, just north of Fort Collins.

Is it north of Fort Collins? Yeah, about 16 miles north of Fort Collins. And it's now a, what's the Colorado program of parks? Anyway. CPW? Colorado Parks and Wildlife? Yeah. Or it's the fun.

It's not a private ranch anymore? No. No, no, no. You can visit it. Yeah, I visited it, but I visited it as a private ranch. Ah, no, you can now visit it. There's a little guest area there that you can kind of stand and look out over the site. It's very cool. I didn't know that. Two years, right? And it's at that ecotone where there's a whole bunch of springs.

There's a lot of animals. There's good stone sources. And the archaeology there, this is Folsom Age. So we're now going to go back to our radiocarbon dates. The radiocarbon dates are about 10,004. The calibrated ages are about 12,000, 12,300. We've got projectile points made out of raw material that are coming from different points on the map. So clearly it looks like people...

As far away as the Texas Panhandle, right? It looks as though people are converging on that spot from great distances. Absolutely. Carrying with them tool stone. Yeah, because one of the things that you're going to do when you meet up with people that you haven't seen in six years um one of the currencies and i don't want to use that term in any literal sense but you say hey you know i made i made these really lovely points out of this really nice material that i have access to down in you know 100 miles away i'd like you to have it right um it's it it's, it's a bond. It's a gift. Now, obviously all sorts of other things are being exchanged that we're never going to

pick up archeologically. Um, but certainly stone, uh, because the amount of effort that these folks put in to making their stone was well beyond the necessities of the weaponry for the hunt. Yeah. We're so, here's had a problem i'm so stacked up with things i want you to tell people about we haven't got to i want to get to that you can write it down we haven't got to what the world looked like then the critters running around okay what was happening to those critters extinction Extinction. Yeah. Okay. And the diagnostic qualities of their spear points, projectile points. All right.

You got it? Got it. Okay. Quick question about the Lindemeyer site, though. Does it fit the bill of the perfect, like, ecotone? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You go there, and you're like, man, year-round, this place would be i could i could see your back planes to your front oh yeah no you you just it's a great place

with the exception of the rattlesnakes all over the place there and they were they were they used they ate turtles and rattlesnakes and stuff at the site didn't they um and a camel yeah isn't there a camel well there's camel bones there but their their archaeological association is questionable i see it was there was a bison kill there there were at least nine bison that were killed there um and turtles i would i would be surprised if they didn't i remember yeah i think that this is what'm, that you have whatever's happening in the years that they're not camping there, meaning that a rabbit dies, whatever, you turn up with bones and it's probably hard to, unless you see knife marks, it's hard to know. That's actually one of the challenges when you're excavating a site is that all sorts of extraneous things end up in a site. And sometimes those extraneous things are rodents.

And you've got to decide, okay, I've got a bunch of dead bison here so when we excavated the Folsom site we had a bunch of dead bison but we also had small mammal remains and the question is were they also eating the small mammals well you look to see is there evidence that they've been butchered you know you can you see cut marks on the bone is there evidence that they've been butchered? Can you see cut marks on the bone? Is there evidence that they were burned? Well, if the bones were burned, were they burned because the rodent got too close to the fire? Or was it actually cooked? So sometimes it's difficult to decide whether species in an archaeological site were prey or just background noise yeah and in the case of Folsom it was

pretty obvious that those bison were prey because well we've got the cut marks on the inside of the jaws where the tongues were cut out probably right at the moment of kill tongue being a delicacy not to me what are the cut marks what are the cut marks Oh from the stone tools that sliced the attachment of the tongue. And you can actually see on the inside of the mandible slices. We can go off to my lab after this and I'll show them to you. I've got them in the lab. Oh, really?

I've seen the photos of them. Oh, yeah. No, I got the real thing. Did they do it the same way every time? Like they were good at it? Oh, I assume so. I mean, people, when you look at plains bison hunters, certainly in the more recent groups, tongue is a delicacy. And that was one of the first things that went at a bison kill.

We eat it. Eat it raw. We eat like elk tongue, moose tongue. Yeah, like I say, not for me. You don't dig it? No. Yeah, I understand. I don't like lungs.

I don't like brains. But I like tongues. Yeah. Okay. So, what did it look like brains. But I like tongues. Yeah. Okay. So what did it look like? All right. Imagine this. You've made your way over from Siberia into Alaska.

You don't actually know that, but you're there. And you're looking, and what you notice is there's all these birds, and they're flying off in a different, they're flying off in a direction. And you're thinking to yourself well all i see is ice and maybe there's a little bit of margin along that pacific coast those birds are heading in that direction that tells me that there must be something down there and this gets to the question you were asking about earlier are there places that people don't want to go well getting from from Alaska down to the lower 48 in those days would have been a challenge, right? Because

you've got two options. One is that you come down the Pacific coast and there you're dealing with ice that is calving off into the sea. It's going to have outlet channels coming off of these ice fields that are going to be choked with sediment. You've got to cross these things, you've got to work your way around these ice sheets, and there may not be a whole lot of food resources. But that route south actually opens pretty early. That route south is open by around 16,000 years ago. So you remember now, let's go back to, we've got that window between 23,000 and 14,700.

Yeah. If that route south from Alaska opens at 16, that's pretty good timing. Opens meaning ice-free. Absolutely. Relatively ice-free. Relatively ice-free. You're going to have to wait another,

probably several thousand years before that interior. So there's another route south, and that route south opens when the ice sheets that basically met at the crest of the Rockies start to melt back. They start to retreat. So the one that sort of spread out from around Hudson Bay heads back east. The other one starts to work its way down the west slope of the Rockies, and now you've got what's called the ice-free corridor opening between them. We now know, however, that that ice-free corridor, and this was environmental ancient DNA. This is DNA pulled out of sediment in a lake, in a lake that was at a pinch point, right in the dead center of this ice-free corridor. And let me see if I can create a mental picture for everybody. You've got two massive ice sheets budding one another. As they

start to pull back, they open at the northern end and at the southern end like a coat that has a zipper that goes both ways. Okay? And so, if you raise your lower zipper and you lower your upper zipper, they're going to meet in the middle. And that's going to be the last place that opens up. Where approximately was that pinch point on the continent? So, we're in at about 56 degrees north in alberta it's in the peace river drainage for those of the folks that have google maps want to kind of check it out and those lakes we cored the sediment at the base of the lake and you can recover dna from all the animals and plants that were around that area. And right at about 12,000.

In a dust-like sediment form. It's mud, yeah. You're not tapping into bones and stuff. No. Okay. No, no, it's amazing. You can find out, and actually this is really going to revolutionize our understanding of these extinct fauna,

which I'm going to get to in a moment, because you can see them even if their bones aren't there. It's just wild. And what we found in this particular core was right around 12,600, boom, you've got mammoth, you've got bison, you've got moose, you've got some species of fish. There's a seahawk that ends up, its DNA ends up in this lake. Now, all that's happening right at about 12-6. So what that tells you, if you- And prior to that, not much is going on.

Exactly. So that corridor actually physically opens probably several thousand years earlier, but because you've still got two ice sheets parked nearby nothing's growing there and it takes a while for it to get you know you've got to get the grass there you've got to get the plants growing then the animals are going to follow and that was a study that we did but a study that beth shapiro's group did we had her on the show she's fantastic and and her study showed that bison that were separated by these ice sheets during the Ice Age, so you had a northern herd and a southern herd, they get together around 13,000 years ago. Oh, is that right?

So her dates are 13,000. Ours are about 12,600. So that's pretty consistent. That's pretty consistently telling you that that passageway opens around 13,000 plus or minus. Meanwhile, you already have people down in South America. Exactly. Exactly. So that tells you people might have been using that corridor, but they weren't the first ones there.

And in fact, the really interesting story is, is that that corridor was used, but it wasn't by groups going southbound. It was by groups going northbound. They were heading back up to Alaska. We have archaeological evidence that, and it's based on these kind of distinctive kinds of projectile points that we see in the record. It's on our list of things to talk about. It's indeed on that list that is telling us that, you know,

the movement in that corridor is principally on the northbound lane, not on the southbound. And again, perhaps not like, man, let's go back up north. Because these are probably people that had been for hundreds of years to the south. Exactly. But this gets back to those bison, right? At the end of the Ice Age, you've got a Dale Guthrie, well-known, remarkable University of Alaska scientist, paleoecologist. Dale called it the Great Bison Belt. At the end of the Ice Age, you could walk from Texas to, well, Mike Kunz's site on the north slope of Alaska and you'd be on grass the entire time. Now if you're living in Montana 10,000 11,000 years ago I'm sorry I'm in radiocarbon old-school. Do you think in radiocarbon? I think in radiocarbon I always have to pause and get it into calibrated. Really?

You're like someone from Europe who's talking to Americans, and they're like, let me think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. X feet, 10 feet. Well, and here's the issue for me on that, and that is that calibrations have changed over the years. So the first calibration, okay, it gave us one answer. And then when the next calibration set came out five years later 10 000 wasn't 11 7 anymore it was 11 5 i got you and so i'm thinking okay when you guys get that settled i'll start using calibrated all the time but until then radiocarbon doesn't change over

the years those dates don't change do you talk to your colleagues in radiocarbon it depends who i'm talking to if i'm talking to a geneticist i've I'm talking to. If I'm talking to a geneticist, I've got to go calibrated. If I'm talking to a geologist, depends what kind of geologist, I'll go calibrated if I have to. How do you guys identify each other? Oh, it's a signal. Yeah, no, you tug on your ear. So you don't ask. You just pick it up.

Yeah, yeah. You don't want to embarrass somebody by asking them that. You just sense it. You just sense it. That's right, yeah. My C-14 radar goes off. 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.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. What were we talking about? So what does the world look like?

Okay, so you get into northern North America and it looks a whole lot different than it does today. You've got this vast landscape opening up before you. You've got aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom wandering past, right? You've seen mammoth before, but these mammoths don't quite look like the ones that you've been seeing in Alaska. They're slightly different. You've got large predators on the landscape. You've got Smilodon fatalis, which is the best scientific name ever devised. It's the deadly claw. It's the saber-toothed cat. You've got Arctodus Simus, the giant short-faced bear. And I had a TV role once where I starred with an animated Arctodus Simus. My kids, I lost all credibility with them.

Even with them? Even with them. Look, that's on TV with a cartoon bear. Not my best moment. And 38 genera altogether that are on their way to extinction. Now, some of them were extinct. But keep going with the list because like multiple species of camelids. Camels, horses, tapirs, peccaries.

A hundred pound beaver. Oh, yeah. Kind of like a beaver. Kind of like a beaver. With a muskrat tail. Yeah. And then you had, my favorite was the glyptodont, which was basically, think submersible Volkswagen with an armored tail and you've got a glyptodont.

It's about that big. You've got giant ground sloths, four genera of them that weigh three, four tons. And of course, you've got multiple species of elephant. It's a spectacular thing. And the thing that had always struck people was it looked as though they all went extinct at the same moment in time. Now, if you're going to have 38 different genera of animals going extinct. Can you explain genera to people? Ah, so that goes back to the Linnaean hierarchy that you may have remembered from high school biology. Species, genus, family, all that. And genus uh phyla whatever yeah yeah um it's it's a word there's a word that you use as an there's a mnemonic yeah about king philip uh yeah it's on

yeah yeah that's good uh and so genera is simply uh the plural of genus okay so you've got 38 genera they all appear to have gone extinct simultaneously and you think as many people did define simultaneously well i mean like that's that's i mean like one tuesday right i mean well no that's the issue is that people thought that they all just died at the same geological moment now a geological moment you know plus or minus 100 years okay but that's really fast oh they thought it was plus or minus 100 years um well actually 300 300 years i was exaggerating but still that's still oh no question no yeah that's that's that's a that's a lot of narrow mighty narrow chunk of time well and especially if you're talking anywhere from 100 to 200 million animals yeah okay so can climate do that can climate wipe out an entire well literally a hemisphere because you

had 38 genera in north america and 52 in south america that go extinct could climate have done all that simultaneously given that you were dealing with animals that live in arid and semi-arid environments animals that live in the forest animals that live as herd animals animals that have basically live isolated lives in the woods very fine sea level absolutely very different physiology adaptation habitats can climate a single climate change wipe them all out and the answer is well it's kind of hard to imagine but here's the thing this is like this is a where the logic a little bit falls apart is it didn't wipe them all out chipmunks were here there's chipmunks you know it's like an annoyance to me when people say

an ice age relic so like we're ice age relics raccoons are ice age relics mice are ice age relics and and actually a number of those uh small rodents are still responding to uh recent climate changes from the last ice age yeah uh no but see this is this is where this needs to go everything died down to the size of a bison yeah no except for the spruce tree that also went extinct and the snakes that went extinct and the turtles oh yeah no i shouldn't say down to like and then then it ended there but i mean there were many animals that were bigger than that well see this is this is where we're going because all of these animals thought to have gone extinct simultaneously it couldn't have been climate therefore it had to be people it had to be fast moving hunters blasting out across the continent

the blitzkrieg the overkill hypothesis all that nuttiness right you got a bunch of people you're hypothesis, all that nuttiness, right? You got a bunch of people. Hold on, you're going to call that nuttiness now? Oh, absolutely. Tell me more. A bunch of people with sharp sticks and pointy rocks at the end are going to wipe out 100 million animals in the space of several hundred years. They're kicking ass. Oh, yeah.

Well, what we've realized now. It's like the end of a Rambo movie. Yeah, Adrian. Sorry, wrong movie. What we've now realized is that those 38 genera didn't all go extinct simultaneously. So immediately that takes the pressure off of finding a single cause. I got you. Okay.

So now we can say, well, what's happening at the end of the Ice Age? See, there's always been this confluence of potential causes the end of the ice age brings people into the Americas and animals go extinct and so the assumption always was well okay people come in animals go extinct they had to be related well no maybe they're both related to that larger trigger which is the end of the ice age that's a good That's an interesting point. Okay. That rather than one being a symptom of the other,

they're symptoms of the same thing. Right. And what we now know is that some of these animals were probably gone 20,000 years ago, long before people show up. And in fact, the majority of those 38 genera, we don't have any evidence that they were around when people got here so they've all

disappeared so there's no association so we do have evidence that people hunted some of these animals there are a grand total of 15 15 sites in which we have reasonably secure evidence that people preyed on mammoth there's about a dozen of those sites mastodon it's something that's pretty ironclad like projectile points stuck in its skull still no question yeah yeah uh mammoth mastodon horse and camel mammoth mastodon horse camel and gompothere so we've got five it's it's another elephant it's a it's a sort of um more southern elephant that is related to mammoth mastodon they're all in the propocidian family okay so so tell me the ones again mammoth mastodon gompothere horse camel five now no kill site

of a saber-toothed cat no no hemiakina kills no camel kills no horse kills no giant ground sloth no yeah no glyptodont kills yeah but that's the thing is that right none of that stuff none i mean i never read about it i never thought about it i never thought about the omissions if you're gonna yeah that and that's the key thing is that people always point to mammoth kills well yeah okay so somebody an elephant, but you've still got another 100 million animals you've got to get rid of. And you've got another 37 genera that you've got to kill off.

But here's the other thing. When you look at the extinctions process in isolation, you've got 38 large animals that go extinct. Well, there's nine large animals that are still around today. Moose, caribou, musk ox, you know, things that you guys have probably hunted over the years. Those are megafauna in that definition. But more importantly, not only do we have these nine genera that survive, we've also got other genera that go

extinct that are not megafauna. And in fact, even one of the megafauna is the Astellan rabbit. The Astellan rabbit was the size of a bunny. There's no way that's a megafauna is the Aztlan rabbit. The Aztlan rabbit was the size of a bunny. There's no way that's a megafauna, but it went extinct, right? So how do you explain that? They hunted every last one of them. Absolutely. How do you explain why bison didn't go extinct? So here we have 38 genera that go extinct. That's interesting because they damn sure ate those.

Oh, no question, right? And we've got 38 genera for which we have virtually no evidence of human hunting and predation. There's snakes that vanished. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. And bison get hunted for 11, 12, 13,000 years and in mass kills, right? I mean, there are single kills of 200 animals. And bison, I mean, you can still order them at Ted Turner's, you know, Montana restaurant.

Montana Grill. Montana Grill. And it's really good stuff, right? So here we have intensive hunting of an animal for 11, 12,000 years and they don't go extinct. Virtually no evidence of any hunting of any of these 38 genera and they do go extinct. Why do we think humans were responsible for that?

Okay, but when you were a younger man, not that you're an old man now, when you were a younger man, were you an, what's the word I'm trying to look for? An apostle. Were you a believer in, were you a Blitzkrieg hypothesis man? No. Really?

It made no sense to me. So your history isn't tarnished by Blitzkrieg hypothesis. No. I liked it because of how tidy it was. Oh, well, that's why a lot of people liked it. And in fact- You're like, ah, okay, cool. Now let's move on to the next question.

No, because I've, no, I mean, I do archeology and I know how many sites, kill sites there are. fact you're like ah okay cool now let's move on to the next question no because i no i mean i do archaeology and i know how many sites kill sites there are and i just i i never bought it because the evidence wasn't there and people love people love the idea and another thing they liked about the idea and this is going to take us way astray and you don't need to even pursue this thought i think one of the reasons people liked about it is because when you look at other when you look at examples of human cause environmental destruction it's nice to get it's nice to you look at all these horrible things are going on now it's nice to be like this is nothing those those people the ancestors of the native americans they were horrible they killed everything off

therefore we should really give ourselves a pat on the back for not being so destructive um i think there's a little bit of that at play there's a lot of that and i know this is probably way outside of your no no no no no in 2003 don grayson and i wrote a paper in which we said one of the things that made the overkill hypothesis attractive was in the 1960s it came out really in a big way in the 1960s when everybody was all about Earth Day and important things like that. And they used it as a homily, as a lesson of look at all the horrible things humans have done. Well, wait a minute. This is one thing humans didn't do, right?

They are not guilty of murder in the Pleistocene, right? So, you're absolutely right. I mean, this is something that people were using for ends that the evidence didn't warrant being used in that way. No. And the tidiness. And the tidiness. Because it's so baffling.

It's nice, like, you know when you're trying to comprehend infinity, like in space? It's comforting if someone would say like, oh no, it does end. That ends, there's a wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. And then you'd be like, well, what's past the wall? But it'd be nice to just have to be able to stop thinking about it yeah no i've seen men in black i know you know in the end where the lockers open and everything there's a wall there yeah no absolutely it was a tidy explanation but a wrong one and a badly wrong one so how broad was for how many okay is there a is there sort of i know that species begin and end all

the time like there's things right we're creating them not we evolution is happening yeah the earth is whatever you're producing things and things are dying if you were going to sort of put some brackets around this mass extinction where do the brackets sit well it does knowing that there's that it's not hard edged right the edges aren't yeah yeah yeah yeah no i mean the process was probably starting um as the last glacial maximum was beginning okay so some of them are disappearing really early on and some of them are in fact making it up until 12,000 years ago, 11,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. It's smeared over time.

It's smeared over time. And why wasn't it happening during the other cycles? Well, now that's the gotcha question that I always get. So I give a talk on- I wasn't trying to do a gotcha. No, but I'm glad you did.

Yeah. In fact, you can phrase it as a gotcha question. Okay. I give a talk about Pleistocene extinctions and I give all the evidence as to why humans weren't to blame. And inevitably, somebody raises their hand at the end and says, well, what about previous? So I make the point

that there's all sorts of climate changes that are happening at different levels that would have impacted different animals in different ways at different times and so on and so forth so we really need to get a better understanding of how climate change affected individual species rather than treat everything as a block it was alive it went extinct let's try and figure out what was it about glyptodonts that they couldn't handle at the end of the pleistocene so i do all this well and then here's the gotcha can you come around i know you got a list going yeah what was it about those or take something else like a mammoth don't know don't know okay they're extinct animals and because we don't know

their physiology their adaptation we know something about their habitats but here's where we're going to get past the impasse we're going to get past the impasse with ancient DNA because now we're sequencing their genomes. And we know now, well, for some species, we know now that their genetic diversity was collapsing toward the end of the Pleistocene. We know now that their populations were collapsing toward the end of the Pleistocene. We're still not entirely sure why this is happening, but it has nothing to do with people because it's happening pre-people. Okay. So we are going to start to get those answers. This is a 150 year old question that people have been struggling with. I mean, Charles Lyell, the British geologist who was here in the 1840s wrote about this saying, you know, why do all these big animals go extinct we're gonna have an answer

in the next couple of decades uh i would predict can i man i don't want to do this it's not a gotcha it's a gotcha ask me the gotcha question it's a gotcha but it's not it's not meant to be like a bad gotcha sure what about what about this what about right what about this is a what about ism what about uh i don't want to get too sidetracked here. Who was the guy that laid out the famous... He published the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis. Paul Martin. Wonderful guy.

Terrific guy. So you don't have animosity. Oh, no, no. I liked Paul. When it was laid out, there were examples. Like Wrangel Island. Wrangel Island and the Bering Sea. Held on to them until 4,000 years ago.

And it just so happens that mugs hadn't showed up. They still went extinct. They went extinct before people ever made it there. Oh, they did? Oh, yeah. I thought it was contemporaneous with when people eventually did go there. No, no, no. In fact, there's some really interesting research that, well, Beth Shapiro and Russ Graham were just involved in on St. Paul's Island,

where basically they showed that these mammoths were surviving past the end of the Ice Age. They were shrinking because basically they had... Shrinking in body size. Yeah, there simply wasn't enough to support them. Sea levels were coming up. The island was getting smaller. They were running out of fresh water.

There were all sorts of things. And basically, they ultimately vanished. And I think it's around 4,500, 5,000. Well ahead of people. Okay, here's part two of the gotcha. Okay, good. Then I'm going to leave it to rest. Then they point out that humans have always been in africa and humans co-evolved with what makes

you think animals didn't go extinct in africa as well i'm just i'm talking we're talking about we're talking about elephants okay i am okay for sure that's a great point that's a great point that's but that's the thing people say i'm not arguing this to you i'm just telling you i'm relating to you like an argument you're very familiar with yeah oh yeah this always like okay so elephants vanish virtually everywhere um that they exist except these elephant species in alaska or i'm sorry in africa hang on it must be because they were used to people and the people couldn't kill them all because they co-evolved yeah that's a thing folks say yeah okay i'm not quite sure that it really has much meaning but in any case um you don't even like the yeah well can

you do a better job of saying what i'm trying to say um well let me put it this way my my colleague jim o'connell uh who uh worked with the hadza okay uh in af. The Hadza don't describe elephants as animals. They describe them as enemies. They don't mess with elephants. Go back and read Teddy Roosevelt's encounter with a bull elephant. When he got out of the White House, he went on a murderous spree in Africa,

collecting animals. That's a big word, but sure, go ahead. You're my favorite guest. You're my favorite guest ahead he didn't he wasn't he wasn't eating he wasn't eating that food he was stuffing it and sending it to new york to put on display um and read his encounter with a bull elephant and he he darn near died uh in the encounter yeah okay uh these are nasty animals and whether people were hunting them or not, it's pretty doubtful. Okay? But let's get to the sort of larger question about the climate.

If you put the extinctions in context, what you see is that all sorts of things are happening at the end of the Pleistocene in North America. But hold on real quick. You almost started saying something. You didn't. Did a bunch of stuff go extinct in Africa? Some did, yeah yeah not as not as massive and as constrained geologically in geological time as in the Americas okay okay but it sure happened in Europe in parts of Europe yeah in parts of Eurasia

absolutely yeah no we lose mammoths in Eurasia. Yeah. You have massive range changes. Caribou don't live in the Southeast US anymore. Musk ox don't live in Tennessee anymore. And they did once upon a time. Oh, yeah. So you've got these ecological changes that are taking place. Biota are dissolving. Plants and animals are moving all over the landscape.

That's an interesting point about muskox i never thought about that i mean if you okay if they found muskox remains in tennessee you're saying and you look at the fringe that they inhabited at the time of european contact you were it's like you had 10 fingers they were down to a pinky you know what i'm saying it's interesting like they were probably close yeah could have been close to being gone or something you know uh well or they just found their niche uh-huh uh and it's a very good niche and in fact they would have been highly vulnerable human hunting and they're still around i mean what's their what's their defensive strategies they all get heads out heads out butts in right it's like a faculty and and it works with wolves but if a bunch of hunters show up and they want to kill off all the musk ox, they're just standing targets, right?

Okay, but let's get back to the larger picture. Massive range changes, massive ecological changes, lots of extinctions. Birds go extinct. You've got snakes going extinct. You've got reptiles going extinct. You've got snakes going extinct. You've got reptiles going extinct. You've got, uh, turtles going extinct. You've got a spruce tree going extinct. There's, and Paul Martin actually tried to come up with an explanation as to why humans would have overkilled a spruce tree.

They chopped them all down? No. Um, it had something to do with forest burning or something. It didn't work. I never heard about this tree. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Um, and, and so all of these things are happening. forest burning or something okay it didn't work i never heard about this tree oh yeah oh yeah um

and and so all of these things are happening so extinctions if you rip it out of its context it looks oh my god this is horrible humans showed up they must be the cause well did humans also cause all these other kinds of things going on no it was the end of the pleistocene now let's get to the gotcha question that i wanted you to ask me yeah the real guy i'm just going to ask the one you respect so why is it that they didn't go extinct during the previous interglacial okay we've been cycling through ice ages for the last two plus million years okay so why is it that all these animals didn't go extinct 125 000 years ago the last time we had a warming event, why did they only wait until 10,000 plus years ago to go extinct? And the answer is, is that, well, some of them did disappear. A lot of those species weren't around during the previous interglacial.

We actually don't know that much about the previous interglacial in terms of what we know about the last previous interglacial is from deep sea cores. We have no idea what's going on in the landscape. We don't have good records of changes in the vegetation, changes in the ecosystem, changes in the environment. Because it was all demolished by the ice sheets? Well, because we just don't have good samples of it. I mean, this is stuff that's 125,000 years old. You can probably count on one hand the number of pollen cores, vegetation records that we have from 125,000 years ago. There's just no data, right?

So you can't say, well, they should have all gone extinct in the previous interglacial if it was climate. We don't know what that looked like right we still don't know what this interglacial this transition from the ice age to the not ice age we're still not fully aware of this and we won't be aware of its effects on these animals until we do each of these animals individually because we've got to figure out what is it about a glyptodont that it couldn't handle what is it about the giant beaver that it couldn't handle? What might be an example, like any example? Okay. And then we'll move on to our checklist.

But what might be any example of when you say that it couldn't handle it? So one of the things that happens at the end of the ice age is that obviously it gets warmer and there's a change in the composition of the plains grassland. Grass is grass, right? When you look at it, when it's on your lawn or whatever. But in fact, there's very distinctive kinds of grass species that occupy, that create that landscape of the Great Plains. And they're designated by particular carbon pathways. There's C3 grasses, C4 grasses. These are grasses that grow predominantly in the summer, and then there's winter grasses. Well, at the end of the Pleistocene, C4 grasses, and this is a hypothesis that I've sort of kicked around for a few years,

and I'm still not convinced it's correct, and definitely needs testing, but you wanted a for instance. At the end of the Pleistocene, the plains grassland becomes dominantly C4. Now, C4 grasses have anti-herbivory toxins. They taste terrible. And they are not easily digested unless, well, one of the principal C4 grasses is buffalo grass. Buffalo love this stuff.

Okay. Mammoth, they don't have the same kind of gut systems that bison do. And so they're on a landscape where the resources to them, the food forage to them is shrinking, right? And it's becoming more toxic to them. Well, the expanding grasses are becoming more toxic to them. And suddenly they're getting out-competed by bison. Bison populations are expanding. Mammoth, horse, camel, they can't cope. One other possibility that people have suggested, which, again, it's going to be hard to tell and test until we get that really high resolution data, but imagine this. You're in the middle of an ice age, and for a variety of reasons,

ice age climates were more equitable. And by that, what we mean is that you had cooler summers, warmer winters. Nowadays, out on the central part of North America, we have really hot summers and really cold winters. Okay? During the Pleistocene, it actually wasn't so bad for a variety of reasons. Not least that you had this massive ice sheet parked over Canada blocking cold Arctic air from coming south yeah when you say the extremes I mean you could live in a northern tier state and you live in a you live in something that can very consistently swing 120 degree temperature swings absolutely negative like it's not unusual to get a negative 20 winter day

and it's not unusual to get over 100 summer day you've been in North Dakota yeah so now what that means is that if get over 100 summer day you've been in north dakota yeah so now what that means is that if if you're an elephant and you've been producing calves and it takes you 22 months to grow another elephant and and have that elephant child um you've been used to having that elephant in say march well during the Pleistocene March wasn't so bad but what happens when that climate shifts from a more equitable to a more continental big swing in temperature suddenly March instead of being you know it's kind of almost spring is the word you're saying when you say equitable

equitable EQ you a be a waiter Exactly. I thought you were saying equitable, meaning equal. Yeah. And then continental. Continental is really strong swings in temperature. Okay, cool, I got you. So San Francisco versus North Dakota. Right. Okay.

So you've been birthing baby mammoths all this time in March, and suddenly March, it's damn cold, freezing, there's nothing to eat and the baby dies well it takes you another 22 months to make another one you can't respond that quickly and then how many ever years to bring it for it to achieve sexual maturity right well exactly right and how many are you gonna have over the course of a reproductive lifetime four five you know you you sort of knock them knock the knees out from under them in terms of their reproductive cycle And yeah, you can drive them extinct pretty quickly, but these are just you know, sort of arm wavy things

Well, no, I understand that you're doing. Yeah, we don't know upon request you're taking shots at what absolutely what sorts of things absolutely Yeah, no, I'm the first to admit, you know people say well, you've got to have a climate alternative if you're gonna say it's not overkill Well, no no i don't because we don't have the evidence we know the kinds of things that we need but we don't have any of that evidences yet and we need to get it so there's pressure to to cleanly replace the blitzkrieg or the overkill hypothesis someone would want to be like okay if not that then prove oh yeah no i'd love to have an answer for him uh but this is this is the thing i think in in 10 years down the road 20 years down the road we are going to have those answers and it's going to come at the molecular level it's going to come out of the dna yeah that's the cool thing not hunting arrowheads no no we're still going to

be doing it but that's not where the answer is going to be. Can we jump to projectile points? Mm-hmm. Okay. Lay it out. The obsession with them in the early years of your discipline, it was like this diagnostic tool. Yeah. And talk about that a little bit.

Whatever's the best way to approach yeah no that's a really good way to describe it to use the term diagnostic because um these are artifacts i mean these folks had all sorts of tools right we have fixated on that class of projectile points their weaponry because they invested a lot of effort in it. They invested a lot of effort in the manufacture. They invested a lot of effort in finding the right stone, in hafting it, attaching it to the end of a spear. And they were doing, as I mentioned earlier, they spent more effort on it than was warranted by the task at hand.

You feel that's true? they spent more effort on it than was warranted by the task at hand. Okay? You feel that's true? You know... Like it was fancier than it needed to be. You can't help but look at some of the stonework and some of the ways in which they flake their artifacts to match up with lines in the stone or bands or anything like that. And you can't help but think, that's a human on the other side of that.

Somebody was looking at that and had, I mean, look, when you guys go out hunting, you have particular weapons, you take care of them. You might, I don't know, what do you do to sort of dress up your guns or your bows? Well, you'd accessorize it but nothing well i'm probably not looking at it right someone else might look at it and think that there are aesthetic modifications but off top my head i don't think of yeah okay but if you're if you're living on a landscape where you have relatively little material culture around you yeah right and one of the things that's emblematic of your group is to make these projectile points in a particular way. You're going to invest in those things

because you want people to see you're a member of the group, you're a good flintknapper, you've been places, you've collected this really cool stone. And because you're investing in that, you as an ancient hunter-gatherer we as archaeologists can use that because the style and the stylistic attributes that they are adding to their weaponry the stuff that goes beyond what's necessary to kill that animal is diagnostic of time and of group and of space. Yeah, like if someone's listening

and you grab your phone and look, type up Folsom Point, go to images, and it's... It's distinctive. It's, yeah. The minute you look, you'd be like, oh, I get it. Yep.

There's nothing that looks like that. Nothing at all. And so it's helpful to us. So the reason we have this fixation and it's it's not always a healthy fixation but the reason we have this fixation on their projectile points is that they tell us so much okay and especially in the absence of radiocarbon dating you know you've got a fulsome site if you've got these points unless you know you were just darn unlucky and somebody happened to have found a Folsom Point and brought it into a Pueblo,

in which case you're going to have to say, well, that probably doesn't belong there. The downside of that is that we've been neglectful of all the other tools in the toolkit, which are doing most of the work, the scrapers, the knives, the gravers, the drills, the awls. How many tools might someone have had? Like an Ice Age family, you know the scrapers the knives the gravers the drills the walls how many

tools might someone have had like like like an Ice Age family what they what might they have had golly you know the answer is probably in some of the burial caches that we have where individuals had died and somebody basically left their toolkit with them and there's a well-known site Crowfield in Ontario and off the top of my head I'm thinking several dozen and I could be quite mistaken about the number by faces and scrapers and points were found with the no no actual physical human remains were found but there was a kind of a burned area so it looked as though it was a a cremation burial and the only thing that survives is the stone and of course the stone got put in the cremation so

it it popped and crazed and and broke um but could probably, I mean, stone may actually have been the least of the things that you had to deal with this year as you're schlepping across the landscape. Uh, you know, are you bringing material for building structures? Uh, are you carrying children? Uh, all that stuff. Yeah. Cordage clothing. Yeah. Bone, bone products. And I'm glad you mentioned cordage because in fact, um, we may be missing the vast majority of their tools. There are sites that, where preservation is really, really good and the number of non-stone artifacts, wood artifacts in particular, by a factor of six, six times more of that stuff than there is of stone tools. We get fixated on stone tools because that's all we got.

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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. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. One of the things you you get at uh in your book folsom is you talk about the folsom type site and what the people who first dug it were looking for they wanted big bones and big stone tools

well first they just everything else went into a pile right yeah because it wasn't of interest and then then you later became like really, like all the stuff that they weren't paying attention to that was so instructive. This was the 1920s. And what they really wanted first off was just a bison to put on display. So these were museum folks out of Denver

and they just wanted to find a bison that they could re-articulate and put on display. And up until about 10 years ago. Because it doesn't look like the ones we have now. Much bigger, much bigger. And up until about 10 years ago, you could see it at what was then the Colorado Museum of Natural History, which is now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And then when they realized artifacts were there, the site became especially important to a broader audience because those bison were extinct. And in those pre-radiocarbon days when you had no way

of determining how old something was, if you found an artifact wedged between the ribs of a now extinct animal, you knew that somebody had been around at the time that animal was alive. And so Folsom became terribly important in 1927 because it was the very first site where you could definitively say, there was a hunter, there was an Ice Age animal, and that hunter killed that Ice Age animal. And then they just, you know, that's it, we're done. And 70 years later, when know, that's it, we're done.

And 70 years later, when we went back to the site, there were so many fundamental questions that hadn't been answered in the 1920s because, well, they just wanted to find out how old it was. I wanted to find out what was the environment like? What was the site like? What were the activities that took place there? How many animals were killed what was the season of the year did they camp there did they spend a winter there and ultimately we spent three

years excavating there and got a lot out of the site the site's very famous not because of what we did there but because of its role in the history of archaeology uh but we were really pleased to be able to go back there and learn a lot more about it we're off we're way off projectile points but you tell the story but in your book you tell the story of george mcjunkin yes the guy that that found it he was a am i right he was he was a freed slave or the son of a freed slave george mcjunkin was born a slave in pre-civil war Texas and he took the name McJunkin from his owner and after the Civil War he made his way into northeastern New Mexico and George George must have been a remarkable man because after the great flood

of Folsom which cut this Arroyo incised it deeply and exposed the bones, George was doing what every good cowboy does after a storm. He went out and he was checking his fence lines. And he looked down in what was probably about a 12-foot deep cut and saw bones. Now, I think a lot of cowboys looking down, seeing bones would have just said, oh, bones and kept going. George got off his horse and he went down into the arroyo and he looked at the bones and he said to himself, we assume, these are not cow bones. These are buffalo bones and they're really big. And we know he thought something about them

because he told people about them. George was an amateur naturalist. When you see pictures of George, there's very few of them, but in one of them, he's on his horse, and in the scabbard where you keep your rifle, he had a telescope. He wasn't interested in shooting coyotes. He was interested in seeing what he could see

with his telescope. So he made frequent trips over to Raton. And there was a sort of a kindred spirit there, a fellow by the name of Carl Schwaheim, who was the blacksmith in the village of Raton. And Carl had a wonderful fountain outside his house where two male bull elks had gotten into mortal combat. Their antlers had locked, and they died. And Carl thought that was pretty cool, so he made a fountain out of it, out of the racks. And George would stop by and talk to Carl, and he told Carl, he said, you know, on this ranch, on the Crowfoot Ranch where I've been working,

where I'm the ranch foreman i've i found these old bones and it took years but carl finally got up there uh sadly after um mcjunkin died yeah i i uh went to this site and wrote a piece about mcjunkin and did you really oh yeah it was kind of thing that happened is that he so desperately wanted someone to come look and then he dies and they finally go look yeah Yeah. And they're like, holy shit, this guy found something really interesting. Well, so they took the bones up to Denver and they said, you know, hey, there's a bunch of bison bones. And so that's when Denver got interested, the museum, to say, oh, sure, we could use one for display. And so they subsequently went down there. But again, a few years later and started excavating and then realized, uh-oh, this isn't just a bunch of bones.

There's actually stone tools down here. What's going on? That's when they started. In fact, Carl Schwaheim, our village blacksmith, was hired to do the excavations. So he spent the summer of 1926 working largely by himself. And I can tell you from having dug that site that it was hard work. He spent the summer of 1926 working largely by himself. And I can tell you from having dug that site that it was hard work. He had to dig through about nine or ten feet of lake clays,

which if you've ever tried to shovel that stuff, it's hard, hard work. But he got down to the bone bed. He exposed it. Unfortunately, that first summer, the artifact that he found popped out of the ground before he had a chance to see where it came from but everybody got all excited and they said next year go back excavate again but be more careful and and that was the year that uh he he exposed something realized it was in place realized it was literally between two ribs, and stopped the presses or stopped all activity, alert the press, get everybody out here. And folks came and witnessed it in place. It was literally one of those things where you sort of lay your hands on it and say, okay, this is real.

And one of the people that came to see it was a fellow by the name of A.V. Kidder, who was at the time a god in the discipline he was one of the most famous archaeologists in north america he came he saw he blessed it and and it's a comment about the way science works when somebody of that status looks at that site and says i'm a believer what are you going to say what you say is I'm with him yeah I agree and so from that moment on Folsom became sort of the anchor point of the first people into the Americas with their very distinctive Folsom Paul you know what you stole it because I was gonna do I was gonna do a remarkable bit of hosting where I brought

us back to projectile points but point by by pointing out that that name the town of folsom new mexico was then bestowed upon that's right the projectile point that was found there the very diagnostic folsom point exactly right well done on as a host yeah well i was gonna do that and you did it yeah sorry um so folsom Point, in the projectile point conversation, people used to, there was Folsom Point and everyone agreed that Folsom came after Clovis. They didn't know that yet. They didn't know that.

Okay, so Clovis gets discovered about half a dozen years later. And at first, they weren't sure what to do with it because they looked at Clovis points. Now, Folsom points are really nice and thin. They're very sharp. They're very well made. You look at Clovis points and they're kind of larger and clunkier and thicker, and you think to yourself.

It's like an F-150 and a Porsche. Exactly. So you think, okay, well, the clunkier ones, they must have, maybe they came later. Everybody sort of forgot what they were doing. No. They didn't know the relative age of these things. Yeah. And it wasn't until about five years into the excavations at the Clovis site, which

took place between 1933 and about 1938, that they finally realized that Clovis points were being found below the levels in which Folulsome points were being found and so therefore home but where are they both found ah at the clovis gravel pit what were people doing there hanging out killing animals did someone dropped a fulsome point and then thousands of years later a guy drops a clovis point no first they drop the Clovis Point I'm sorry then several thousand years later yeah yeah yeah okay so you're out on the high plains you've been out on the high plains right it's not a lot of water the Clovis site is one of those wonderful spring-fed oases in the middle of a vast semi-arid environment every animal animal, you know, within a certain radius

is going to come out there for a drink. Hunters were using that spot for thousands and thousands of years. And so. They would just be drawn to it. They were drawn to it. And the first folks that were drawn to it were Clovis people and then 500.

And they killed some mammoths in there. Uh, they scavenged some mammoths and some of them they killed one of the things that's really interesting people make a big deal about folks hunting elephants and you know you get this romantic image in your head of a bunch of brave guys with sharp pointy sticks killing this trumpeting and oh it's burned in my mind oh there you go burned in my mind well several, there you go. It's burned in my mind. Well, several of the mammoths at the Clovis site had already died. And we know this because they were literally prying apart their feet

after the rigor mortis had set in. They were scavenging the carcasses. They weren't killing these things. Now, some of them were genuinely killed, right? We have absolutely unequivocal evidence that people did kill these elephants yeah because there was there was a skull with a projectile point but then that was questioned right a skull with a projectile isn't it like a thing that's stuck in its eye socket but then later people thought that it was just

that someone just did it after the fact they They came out of the Blackwater draw site? I mean, you know better than me. Yeah, I know. You're going to have to hum a few more bars before I get that one. I'm not sure I've heard that. Okay, what I had heard, there was somehow in the history of this site,

someone had produced a skull that has a Clovis point stuck in the eye socket. And then someone later felt I think that that projectile point was added to that skull nowadays. Yeah that would be a pretty stupid place if you could get to reach the the elephant's eye you're probably

in bigger trouble than that. So someone drew the story I heard was it was questionable it was a questionable in situ is that the word you guys use? In situ? In situ. Associated, yeah.

No, these guys were literally prying apart already dead elephants, and they're only partially butchered because they're in a pond, right? If you're going to drop a big animal, are you going to drop a big animal in the mud? And if you do, how are you getting it out of the mud? Yeah. That's a problem. Well, this kind of the mud? You know. That's a problem. Well, this kind of thing happens, but sure. It's not ideal. It's definitely not ideal.

And especially if the animal weighs four tons. And, you know, so what are you going to do? Well, parts of it are kind of sticking out above the mud. You slice off some stakes and you're done. Or you come on to a recently dead animal and you think, yeah, it doesn't smell that bad. And you kind of get some meat out of it now again i emphasize that there are a few sites where it's absolutely clear that that people were that were preying on live animals but then there's also sites where some of these animals got away they got. There's a very famous mammoth site in Southern Arizona, the Naco site.

It's got eight Clovis points stuck in it. It's like a pin cushion, but it wasn't butchered. It must have escaped some carnage somewhere and went off to die. Had eight points in it. Yeah. Who's got those points? The Arizona State Museum. Man, I'd pay a late night visit.

Really? I never heard that story. Oh yeah. Yeah. But they never got it. Or they never butchered it. They never butchered it. Yeah.

There's several others that are like that. So people were losing stuff to. Yeah. Well, you know, the animal, I mean, these are highly mobile. These animals can travel. These animals can book it. And, you know, if you're not uh well one of the things that we think about the naco site is that it was an escapee from another

kill so that they were busy chowing down on the animals that they had killed and say yeah that one sure yeah fine let it go he ran off over he ran off yeah forget him got him eight times yeah uh i realize now we're gonna have to have a part two but i want to um because one of the things i want to talk about was and it's another thing you talk about in your books is the don't even answer because this is part two sometime we will bother you we'll wait a year and then bother you again um that the love affair with these guys being these like big hunters and missing and i was kind of alluding to when i got to what what they were interested in at the folsom site and your argument of that they probably had any like an enormously varied diet

shellfish plant matter small mammals that just isn't. Not visible. We don't see it. And then when people would find sites, they weren't looking for it. Yeah, I mean, there's. They didn't know what to think like, well, yeah, they're like eating little turtles. Right. They're cracking clams open, you know, whatever.

I'll answer you now, but we'll save it for part two. That's fine. Because I do have one more question I'm going to ask you about. For part one? For part one, it has to do with the projectile points fair enough okay so the anticipation of the question in part two is that you know we've got so many of these mammoth kills well those are really easy to find archaeologically um i i spent quite a number of years working on the uh the high plains of west texas and i can tell you how many times I climbed a windmill to look out across the landscape, and I could see an old pluvial lake basin

a quarter of a mile away, and I could see an elephant tusk eroding out on the surface. It just gleamed white. Hold on, this has happened to you? Oh, yeah. And so I would just get down off the windmill, and I'd go hike over there through the dunes to look at the lake basin.

And sure enough, oh, there's an elephant here. And then I'd look around for artifacts. Well, that's how most of these sites were found. There's a reason these guys were big game hunters. It's because archaeologists were only looking for the big bones. But it's excusable because what the hell else are you supposed to go by? Well, it's hard to- George McJunkin, I mean, you're just saying George McJunkin saw a bunch of big bones.

Yeah. No, I'm not going to climb up that windmill tower and see, oh, look, there were a bunch of mice that were killed over there. Yeah, exactly. It's not going to be visible to you. So it creates this little bit of- It's a bias. It's a bias in a way. It creates a false narrative.

Absolutely. When I was looking into this and writing about some of this stuff, I encountered, I can't remember who it was. I do remember who it was, but I don't want to say who it was because she didn't say it in the nicest possible way. It was a woman who spoke somewhat negatively of the bison boys and she had it in her head as she explained to me that it was like this these big macho western guys cowboys who love this story of the big bison hunters the mammoth hunters yeah yeah yeah and it that's and they all like to hunt oh yeah and oh yeah yeah and it was like they're they're sort of like their dream of these like hunters and it caused just in this mindset caused to miss all these other things that maybe weren't as romantic to think about which

people like traveling down the coast eating clams right no she's not wrong. She's not wrong at all. There's a, I mean, we all bring our own particular baggage to our science and we try and subvert the subjectiveness in our inquiries, right? We wanna go where the evidence will take us. In my case, so I started doing archeology when I was 15 and I was working on a clovosite in Virginia. And I remember how desperate we were to find mammoth bones because, well, if it's a legitimate clovosite, there's got to be a dead elephant here somewhere.

Yeah, because they were never more than 10 feet from a dead elephant, right? Of course not, right? And it was a spectacular site because it was sitting literally right on a church source. And they were making all these fabulous stone tools. And we had detailed records of literally individuals sitting there cross-legged, napping a stone tool, standing up and walking away. And you could still see the artifacts that had rained down on either side of their crossed legs.

You're kidding me. And they got covered up almost immediately and it's still preserved 10,000 plus years later. And I thought, well, this is really cool, but no elephants. And I remember this was 19, so this was the second season I was there. 1972, Hurricane Agnes is bearing down on the East Coast. And we are down in a pit 10, 12 feet below the surface. And we found what-

That's how deep this stuff is. Oh, yeah. Well, in that particular site, yeah. We found what we thought was a mammoth vertebrae. And I remember how excited everybody was and how anxious everybody was because, you know, the hurricane's coming. We're literally right on the edge of the Shenandoah River. River's rising fast. And everybody works late into the night to get this thing out of the ground.

We get it back to the lab. And in the sort of smoky glow of these lanterns, it gets cleaned up and we discover it's a piece of quartzite doing a really good imitation of a mammoth vertebrae. And I remember how just busted everybody was. Oh, really? Yeah, and all the older kids got to go off and get stoned and drink, and I'm just 16, what am I doing? And it really, it was a memory for me that I thought to myself,

why were we so disappointed? What was it about it, and what was it that made this site somehow inadequate that we didn't have a dead elephant in it? Yeah, I got you. And so, I mean, you asked earlier, was I ever an overkiller? Well, no. I mean, that was part of my growing up experience as an archaeologist was I thought to myself, you know, maybe we've been letting our expectations drive the way we do our field work or the kinds of anticipations that we have for what we're going to find at an archaeological site.

Maybe we need to sort of clear all that clutter out of our heads and try and think, you know, what does the record actually tell us and to what degree is that record biased by what we're looking for as opposed to seeing what's in front of us before i get to my last question uh a thing i like to think about is that our thinking is still riddled with them and you know in in in in your 50 years from now people will be laughing i don't mean this in any i don't mean this as an insult 50 years now people be laughing at some of your assumptions i i will be disappointed if they don't uh i will be disappointed if they got lazy yeah it's like come on people work hard there There's mistakes in here. You just got to find them. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. No, I mean, you want science to improve. You want our understanding of the past to get better. And the only way to do that is to question your assumptions. Historical inertia is a very powerful force. You think what your teachers told you to think. You go with what the conventional wisdom is and you don't cross-examine

it enough you've got to cross-examine that conventional wisdom a thing i've found with the people who are remarkable in this space and i'll put you and and i feel beth shapir i mean you you guys probably don't think of yourself in the same space but you know, interested in old stuff. That's a good space. They're not, you're not, she's not that in love with their ideas. You can't be. The ideas are like, it's like a thing I'm holding.

I'm checking it out. I'm curious about it, but I'm not cradling it close to my, you know, chest so no one can come near it. That's probably a hard position to hold. Well, that was the thing that was so wonderful and frustrating about Paul Martin,

who again, wonderful character. He was so good at rope-a-dope that when you'd pin him down on Pleistocene overkill, he'd very quickly move away. And he'd give you another counter argument. He says, oh, damn it. Okay, so wait a minute, I can counter your counter. And he was so great at defending his argument um that in in some ways it was kind of a caricature

uh because it wasn't he's dead yeah he passed away uh gosh a while ago okay um but again a lovely man and and very clever and he was so fixated on defending his theory that he didn't say okay well what is the alternative i'm right you should never be in the position of defending your theory you should always be in the position of trying to kill it yeah that's good advice see it kind of messes up the flow but i can't resist asking the last question that'd be a great place to end you know i was talking about remarkable hosting a remarkable host would just be like we just end i'm not uh because there's one last thing i want to i want you want to go back i want to get a better understanding and i want to explain to people that uh

we just we make some different things we we have a shirt we just came out with um and it's it's like a very rough it's it's a very rough like history of north american projectile points oh okay all the way up to like a modern mechanical sure modern elk hunting point it's really rough right okay and i knew that when we put the shirt out um that all the know-it-alls would be like oh you forgot this and you're so stupid you forgot that and so i in in unveiling the design um which i did on a platform i'm guessing you don't spend a ton of time on called instagram and unveiling the design i have an account have an account. Oh, you do? I have four followers. Oh, man. I'm going to blow you up. We're going to blow you up.

So in unveiling the design, I headed the naysayers off by saying, this is an approximation. There were many false starts. Oh, go ahead. Can you pull it up? Oh, you want to see it? Yeah, you bet. You're easy to find. We're going to find the wrestling writer.

So I say like the shirts in approximation, some of these technologies, some of these technologies, even like modern ones, like they kind of started and didn't catch on. And so this shirt just kind of shows like a rough outline of how these things came about. And I said,

for instance, you could make a week's worth of t-shirts showing what happened from pre Clovis to like the Woodland or whatever point I made. And a lot of guys on there were like, so glad you would not acknowledge pre Clovis, which is funny because I'm sure you guys are way beyond that. But there was a debate when i was like when i was getting curious about this and i met a mutual a guy that you were friends with and i

became friends with him tony baker yeah um when we met i like it he are you reviewing the shirt like sure yeah but it's it's not in stratigraphic order you have to have the oldest at the bottom youngest at the top oh really yeah well yeah when you dig into a site you don't have the oldest at the bottom, youngest at the top. Oh, really? Well, yeah. When you dig into a site, you don't get the oldest stuff at the top, so you got your Clovis point right there on top. I'm not going to complain about anything else about that shirt. It's your shirt.

You do whatever you want with it. Well, I'm going to send you one. So when I was dabbling in this stuff, there was this sort of debate where there was people who who argued right clovis first did this idea that that clovis hunters were the ones that found the clovis hunters were the ones that the first americans found over the first americans and then the counter argument which i think won which won right is that clovis emerged as this distinctly American culture.

That's absolutely true. From some other group or some people who had some other technology. That's the part we don't know. From some other technology. That's the part we don't know. So you're absolutely right. The Clovis point is the very first American invention, right? There's nothing in Siberia like this.

There's nothing in Asia like this, okay? So that was made here, made in America. Who made it? Do you think they stamped it made in America? Well, they should have. We're not gonna go political, but it was made by immigrants, damn it. So you've got this Clovis Point, but you've also got pre-clovis people here

making stuff and the real question is in terms of populations what's the relationship between the clovis folks and the people who were here before clovis are they ancestor descendant are they two different groups um and here's where, once again. No, that's interesting, man. That there were groups that coexisted. But we actually don't know that to be sure because, you know, pre-Clovis stuff, we've got back now to 14,700.

Let's just say 15,000, round it off. And they didn't make that point. Nope. And Clovis folks are making this point. Was their point cooler or less cool um it just varied depending on where you were was it what is it was it as crafty um well the ones at monteverde are pretty crafty they are yeah you look at it points at a place like Monteverde and say, okay, well, that doesn't look at all like Clovis, but could they be

historically related? We have no way of telling, right? Just a couple of different kinds of rocks and they're separated by 2000 years and several thousand miles. If we could get a genome of a pre-Clovis person, we would know for sure what the relationship was between pre-Clovis and Clovis. Because at the moment, we have a Clovis genome, and we know we've got lots of genomes. Came out of Montana. Exactly right.

And we've got lots of genomes that are younger than Clovis. And we know basically everybody in the Americas at the genomic level is related. Now, they can be more or less distantly related, but they're all related. So the real, you know, the $64,000 question that's still lingering out there is what about earlier than Clovis? We actually tried, Esky's group tried to get DNA out of some of the material from Monteverde and was unsuccessful so we're still looking I'm gonna ask you what the odds are that we'll find someone and if we do what are the odds that it's gonna melt out of the

permafrost in Alaska or Siberia and i'll point out by another person we both know mike kunz oh sure i was describing him like what would be the coolest thing that you could find and he says i remember him painting a picture of i'm flying along you know in my helicopter in his helicopter absolutely and they're sticking out of a glacier is a damn hand. You know, that actually sounded like Mike. Yeah, that would actually be pretty cool. Do you think we'll find something? You know, you never say never in archaeology.

But we've got, I guess the problem is, right? There's one, you got one good Clovis one? Yeah. But here's the thing about DNA. When you're looking at a single genome you're actually seeing lots of different populations that have contributed to the DNA of that individual so we actually now we just published last fall a paper which had some genomes from South America which have a signal, which we think is real, of a distant Australasian ancestor.

So we know that there are other folks that are out there that are contributing to the DNA of Native Americans. What we don't have at the moment is a full genome of somebody who is not on that direct, that is pre-Clovis in age, right? And that may or may not be on that same Native American chain of ancestry back to Asia. Yeah. My gut feeling is, my gut is I don't know. Actually, I'm not going to make any predictions.

You know, the archaeology of pre-Clovis versus Clovis is so different. You think to yourself, oh, there's got to be different people. But one of the things that we found out is that you can have very distinctive archaeological records, and yet genomically, these populations are closely related. So yeah, people do different things. Some people drive one car. Some people drive another style of car.

Same thing. How much time has to go by before I email you, come back on, and you'd be like really receptive to do it? A year? Sure, we can talk in a year. I can call you in a year. I'll email you in a year um sure we can talk in a year i can call you in here i'll email you in a year in a year when i in a year and whatever in a year and three months when i get you on june 19th 2020 and when you come on here some things i'm going to ask you about okay i want to ask you about uh

some of the discredited theories that have come up about who the first americans were okay i want to ask you about the idea of successional waves that it wasn't like one group that showed up and then yep all native americans but there could have been groups that showed up and they petered out they got killed off they starved to death and then other groups came in and replaced them the thing about that ancient peoples were interested in what they regarded as ancient peoples and moved their stuff around a little bit meaning they're like oh that's a cool looking projectile point and they bring it home and yeah to their teepee and lay it with their special shit they like um this is a handful of things i want to talk about next time we have you on all

right here's a here's a deal that we can cut. I'm just now finished the new edition of First Peoples in a New World. You told me mine's obsolete now. Oh, it's horribly obsolete. Yeah, no, don't even read it.

Well, it's too late now. I told you, it's sitting on my coffee table. Well, forget everything you knew about it. Block it out of your mind. When it comes out, let's have a conversation. How's that?

Yeah. That's a good time. That's a good idea. And I'll be prompted too. Because I'll see it and I'll be like, that's right, that guy. That's right. That's right. I got a coffee table that needs a book.

Thank you. Seriously, this, and I'm still going to stand by my earlier statement. My favorite guest we've ever had on, Dr. David J. Meltzer, SMU. SMU. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, everyone, thanks for listening again. And if I said it once, I said it a thousand times.

Please go check out our feature-length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars in the Sky. You can find it at starsintheskyfilm.com. It is available for streaming and download. Again, do yourself a good turn. Do us a good turn. Stars in the Sky. Find it at starsintheskyfilm.com.

You can stream it. You can download it. And you can watch it again and again. Thank you. 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.

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